— 45 — WHEN I opened my eyes, I was across the room, on the couch, with our cat, Billie, before me on the coffee table.
The cat stared intently at a spot just behind my head, and my mom hovered over me, in crisis mode. She had my two hands by the wrists and there was a sore spot on the side of my skull from where I’d been pounding it, I guess with a fist.
She was making a soothing sound in her throat, and hearing it calmed something in me. Calmed the noise and lessened the panic. The girls responded, too, and soon we were all still, listening to my mom’s tuneless humming.
When she saw this, she let go of my arms and took a seat beside me. “Tell me,” she said simply. She said it with the look she used to give me when I was little, when I was the only person in her world and she in mine. I focused on one of her tattoos, the flock of soaring birds on her neck. I counted them for comfort, the way I used to when I was younger: nine. Nine birds. Or was it ten? Ten. I’d forgotten the tenth bird on the back of her neck, hidden now behind her ear.
Ten birds, like always. Ten birds, as I’d remembered.
This was all it took for me to begin telling her.
“There’s this girl,” I started. “I found her Missing poster and then I read more about her online. She’s not from here, but she went missing from somewhere close by. They say she ran away, but she didn’t. Something’s happened, she needs help, I know she does. But no one’s looking for her. No one cares.”
My mom kept all expression from her face, but, twitching beneath her skin, there was something. The birds fluttered as the tendons in her neck tightened, and I kept my eyes on them and kept talking.
I spilled everything about Abby, except how I’d talked to her myself; I’d seen her and I’d heard her and I’d been close enough to her I could’ve reached out and touched her, but I didn’t say that.
I didn’t say how I hadn’t touched her because I’d assumed she was a ghost.
But I started to wonder if maybe there was a way—when you’re in trouble, when you’re caught somewhere and you can’t get out—that you can reach out to someone. Maybe it happens when you’re sleeping, that you project a vision of yourself to anyone who can see, and I can see. I didn’t have the rational, scientific explanation for seeing the apparition of a lost but maybe-still-alive girl in my van and in my bedroom, and without it I didn’t know how to explain that piece to my mom. So I skipped that part.
But I gave her other pieces:
I admitted that I’d talked to the boy Abby had been hanging out with. That I went in to talk to the Pinecliff police, not that they helped. And that I’d even been to talk to a counselor from the camp and to Abby’s grandparents, and that was the real reason I drove down to New Jersey.
I had Abby’s bicycle, the one she left behind, the one I was storing in the garage. (I had her pendant, too, but this I couldn’t say.)
When I stopped talking at last, my mom had her eyes down, considering all of what I’d told her. Billie didn’t blink.
Her bright gaze bored into me, as if she’d been trying to decide how to respond, too. She sat poised on the coffee table, a slight tremor in her fuzzy tail.
My mom chose her words carefully.
“You say you know? How do you know?”
“I just . . . know.”
“How, Lauren? Explain.”
“I have a feeling.” The expression on her face didn’t change, though the birds on her neck jittered. “I had a dream.”
“You had a dream or you had a feeling? Do you know something you’re not telling me?”
“No.” Yes. “Both. I had a dream and a feeling. She’s not okay. Something happened. I know.”
“Do you want to call the police again?
Do you want me to call for you?” She believed me. My mom believed I was telling the truth.