For three nights after Nina vanished, I didn’t sleep. I just lay in my bed, my head inches from the open window, the thick, humid late June air blowing against my skin like hot breath. Waiting.
When I would hear the sound of a car in the distance, approaching the house, my heart would start thumping so hard I could feel it throughout my entire body. I would imagine my sister inside this car, and that at any moment I would hear the sounds of her coming home: the faint click of a car door opening and the sudden rush of all the noises from the inside of the car coming out, laughing, whispering, the thump of music with a heavy bass line, loud for a split second before someone turns it down, a pause, car door slam, the quick slap, slap, slap of flip-flops against driveway, the crunch of a key in the front door, and the slow creak of the door opening. And then the almost soundless padding of my sister tiptoeing up the carpeted stairs. I would bite my lip and squeeze my hands into fists, hoping, hoping, hoping to hear this, but every single time the car would drive past without even slowing down, and I would feel the weight of disappointment, so heavy I’d almost stop breathing. The adrenalized high of hope, the crush of losing it, over and over thirty times a night. Exhausting, sure, but never enough to let me sleep.
During those three days, I wandered around in a haze. Time stopped meaning anything, faces all blurred together. I forgot words. A serious lack of sleep can feel a lot like a drug but a bad drug that no one would ever do on purpose.
Finally, on the fourth night, all that adrenaline was trumped by the feeling of wet cement coating my eyelids and filling the inside of my skull. As soon as I lay down, I was sucked through my bed into the center of the earth where my brain finally released the thoughts I could not allow it to have during the day. At first it seemed like I hadn’t fallen asleep at all, because my dream started off with me awake in my bed. I got up, to use the bathroom, and saw a clump of Nina’s hair, the bright ocean blue she’d dyed it a week before she vanished, wet and matted at the bottom of the tub. I felt a flood of relief so huge it almost knocked me over, because this meant Nina was here, had been here all along, and, silly me, I just hadn’t noticed her. I laughed. And then leaned down, picked up the hair—it felt heavy, like wet rope in my hand. I held it up, but only then did I notice the ragged chunk of skin clinging to the end of it, like raw meat. And I didn’t have to wonder, I knew exactly what this meant.
Then everything went black and I heard only a high-pitched animal scream until I woke up, the sound ringing in my ears, unsure whether it came from inside me or from outside.
Four
Here are the facts, just the facts, everything I know, which is barely anything at all: Two years ago, on the afternoon of June 24, Nina Melissa Wrigley disappeared. She’d gone out in the late afternoon, and then, she just never came back.
When she was gone, she was gone. She didn’t have a MySpace page or a Facebook account or a cell phone. All her stuff remained in her room exactly as it always had been—clothes in piles on the floor, tubes of hair dye on the nightstand, sketch pads and drawing pencils and pastels and pots of ink scattered everywhere. The only thing in her room that was in any way notable was the graduation gown hanging in her closet—Nina had graduated from high school a week before. She’d turned eighteen two months before that.