“I drove down to New Jersey, and then I drove back up.”
“New Jersey?” she said, more to herself than to me. “Who do we know in New Jersey?”
I could have said no one, or I could have said someone, but my mouth didn’t want to keep opening, and my body wanted to move instead. Before I knew it, I was grasping the bike’s handlebars and wheeling it out to the center of the garage.
“You just got home, where’re you going?”
She didn’t say I couldn’t go. She’s never told me I couldn’t do something.
She didn’t ground me or give me curfews. She covered for me when the school called and said I’d cut class. She trusted me—or she wanted me to think she did.
If there was any mother in existence who I should be able to let in and know all, it would be this woman. This woman, here.
“I want to try the bike,” I said. “I’ll just ride it along the train tracks to the bridge, then I’ll turn back.”
“It’s too cold.”
I shrugged and pulled down on my wool hat so my ears were covered.
“Besides, when’s the last time you rode a bike? You were maybe ten and you skidded off the embankment outside and skinned both knees.”
“I guess you never forget how to ride.
That’s what I heard.”
“They say that.” She was floundering here. She didn’t know how to discipline me because she never had to before.
I straddled the bike and tried out the brakes, testing the bounce of the tire. It seemed as good as new. The snow had been cleared off the road and I could coast down it without sliding on ice. Not two miles away, down the hill, the train tracks ran north and south, following the river. I could follow those tracks for days. The line headed straight up to Montreal.
What could my mom do if I told her the truth? Tie me by the wrists to my bedposts each night, lock me in our basement and lower food through the vents so I didn’t starve? Could she save me and could she save Abby? Could she save Fiona Burke years after the fact?
Once you were tagged to disappear and join the others, I don’t think you could be saved at all.
My mom said my name, softly. She reached out, as if to touch my hair, and when I flinched, she lowered her arm.
“We’re going to talk when you get back,” she said, as if prophesizing our future. “You’re going to tell me what’s been going on and why you went down to New Jersey.”
Very quietly, maybe to keep Fiona Burke from hearing, I said, “Okay.”
“I just want you to know you can talk to me if you want to talk to me,” she said, keeping it going and coming close to ruining it. “I’m always here, if you want to talk. I can see there’s something, Lauren. I just don’t know what it is yet.”
For a moment I wondered if mothers can see. Maybe once you’ve made a person, you can see through the skin you shaped to what’s in there hurting without anyone having to tell you, Look here.
I stood up straight with the bike in my hands. I stood in my mom’s direct line of sight. There I was: Girl, 17. Girl, hair not so long anymore, but long legs, my mom’s same long nose. Girl wearing black boots and black jeans. Wearing the pendant I found on the side of the road, a pendant like the one I thought I saw on Abby in that photograph, like the one Fiona Burke had on the night she ran away. I actually never took it off.
Wearing also a flashing sign that said I was in trouble. Wearing it on high for heavy traffic so it could be seen far out in the lanes in the distance. Letting it blink and beep. Letting it shout out what I wanted it to say because maybe someone would know how to make it stop.
Girl, not yet missing.
Easy target of a girl, standing out in the open right here.
But all my mom said was, “When you get back? We’ll talk.” All those psych classes weren’t teaching her when to keep pushing and when to let go. She’d come so close, and too fast she’d let go.
“Don’t you have homework?” I said.
“We can talk tomorrow—it’s not urgent.”