“A rock,” she repeats. “A rock from the ground, which looks to be tied with a string.”
I lower my eyes to the pendant, and there’s the swirl and the gleam and the shimmer, and then a flatness and a stillness that wasn’t there before, and a darkening that wasn’t there before, and a rock. There’s a rock. The pendant has turned into a rock.
I flash back to the side of Dorsett Road, the gully filled with snow where I found the pendant that night. I see my hand reaching out to pluck it from the ground and I see my fingers wrapping around a dirty rock from the side of the road and lifting this putrid thing into the palm of my hand like it’s something beautiful. I see it clear, and my throat chokes up, and my eyes burn, and I’m not so sure anymore about anything.
“What did you do?” I shriek.
I have it now, in my hand, and it’s still a rock. No matter how many times I turn it over, rubbing it in my fingers, it doesn’t change back. It’s as gone as the girls are, as gone as I should be soon, if the shadows gathering by my feet under the table are any indication. Gone, and this dirty, lumpy rock is all that’s left.
“I didn’t do anything to it,” she says in a quiet voice. “You know that.”
I put my head down, which is why I don’t see the next thing she’s trying to show me. There’s the sound of shuffling papers and some movement on the table before me, and then she says, as if this is a portfolio showing at the end of art class and she wants to know my artistic influences regarding my still life of grapes: “Now tell me about these, Lauren.”
I won’t look.
“Your mother found them in your room, in your dresser, she told me, and under your bed. Your mother said there were a lot more than what we have here, but she brought in a few to show me.
Can you tell me about these posters, Lauren? These ‘Missing’ notices? It looks like you’ve printed yourself up quite a collection.”
On the top is Shyann Johnston, gone missing from Newark, New Jersey, at age 17. Beside her is Yoon-mi Hyun, gone
missing
from
Milford,
Pennsylvania, at age 17, but I don’t see Maura Morris’s flyer, which bothers me, because I always like to keep them together. And then poking out from beneath Shyann is a girl I haven’t found in the dream yet, and edging out from beneath Yoon-mi is a girl I looked for and didn’t ever see and there are so many, all age 17, and these aren’t even all of them.
I wonder what Fiona will have to say about this—or, more, what she’ll tell me to say in my own defense. She stands far across the room, beside the potted plant the doctor accused her of being, and the look on her face is something terrible.
I’ve seen that look only once before, years ago, when she wanted to get me away from that little man and did the only thing she could think when his back was turned, which was hide me, fast. In the moment before she shoved me in the coat closet, I remember how she looked this sickened, this afraid.
I turn back to the doctor. Fiona has given me no words, so I have nothing to say.
It doesn’t matter. The doctor has glanced at the clock. She gathers my girls off the table and holds them in her arms. This is enough, she says, for today.
We’ll talk some more next time. We’ll have time to go through all of this— we’ll have lots and lots of time to talk in the coming weeks.
“Weeks?” I say. “I thought I was getting out on Monday.”
She won’t confirm if I am or not, only that we’ll talk more soon. Then she tells me I can go now. I can go out with the others and line up now, because it’s time for lunch.
— 56 —