Authors: Nova Ren Suma
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Social Issues, #Runaways, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Visionary & Metaphysical
happened to them. But the part about you
knowing the girls, talking to them . . .
Lauren, sweetie, you know that’s
not . . .”
“Real,”
I said for her, so she
wouldn’t have to use such a dangerous
word. “Mom, I’m sorry. I know that
now.”
It hurts to know. It mortifies me. But
all of what my mom says is true; the
doctors have made me face it and say it
out loud and admit to everything.
Since that night, I have a court date
coming up because of the fires, and
Jamie does, too, which isn’t fair, but my
lawyer says I can explain everything
when I plead guilty. He expects
community service, since he’ll be
arguing that I was mentally impaired.
And Abby has gone back home to
New Jersey. I’ve watched what I could
about her on the news, as much as they’d
let me, and I recall being hung up on the
fact that she didn’t look the way she did
in my mind. Her face was mostly the
same as the one on the Missing poster,
but her body was different. She was
shorter than I thought, from those visions
of her gliding away on the Schwinn, and
her hands didn’t look the way I
remember her hands looking, and her
hair was curlier and, from the side, there
was an unrecognizable slope to her nose.
Also, when she spoke for the cameras in
an interview my mom saved for me to
watch, I was struck by how her voice
wasn’t the voice I heard in my head. It
was the voice of a stranger.
But she was found, and she was alive.
And the man—whose name wasn’t even
Heaney—was arrested, charged with a
list of crimes my mom wouldn’t read
aloud to me from the newspaper. His
trial is coming up soon.
This is not a part of the story I
invented. Not pieces of my mind come
loose. Not flashes from dreams. People
keep assuring me that Abby was found,
and they have the same response every
time I ask, so I’m choosing to believe
them. It’s not like the rock that still
hasn’t turned back into the pendant, even
when I look at it from all angles, upside
down, sideways, with lights on and
lights off. It’s still a rock I found on the
side of the road.
Also, I have the letter now. It was
waiting for me when I was released. I
think my mom held on to it for a long
time, not sure if she should show me. I’m
glad she did, even though it shoves me
right back into everything whenever I
read it.
Her handwriting slants forward, and
her round letters bubble, making me
think she was a cheerful person, or is
trying to be. She used green pen and a
piece of ruled paper from a notebook
instead of stationery. I’ve let my fingers
run over the ridges on the back of the
paper, feeling where her pen pressed
down, feeling for the words that were
heaviest to write, the worst ones. I like
that she wrote it all down. She could
have e-mailed, and this is so much
better.
Dear Lauren,
she starts.
I keep trying
to write you this, but it’s hard because
I don’t know what to say. The police
told me what you did. My grandma told
me you visited. I know we never met or
anything and this feels really weird,
but I need to say thank you.
She goes on, telling me how hard life
has been since she’s come home, fitting
back in with friends who don’t
understand, who look at her differently
now, and how she tries to forget things,
but she can’t and wonders if she ever
can. I’m not sure how much she knows
about me—she doesn’t say explicitly—
but she seems to be aware that I’ve been
sick and that I was sent away. There’s a
line in her letter about hoping I get to
come home soon and that I feel better.
She signs the letter Abby, not Abigail,
like we’re friends.
I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to
write her back.
I fold up the letter again and slip it
into the drawer of my nightstand. I’m
looking out the window and I’m thinking
how happy I am she’s alive and then I’m
thinking how I’m still alive myself. Still
intact and in this body and breathing
through these lungs. Still here. Two
twists I wasn’t expecting.
It’s a Thursday now maybe, or it
could be a Friday. I don’t have to go
back to school until next week. My mom
has taken a semester leave, saying she
can’t juggle classes on top of her job and
wanting to be home to take care of me
right now. I joke with her about how she
could have asked for extra credit, since
she can do a home-study of a mental
disorder under her own roof and
hopefully I’m enough to fill a thesis
paper, but she barely cracks a smile.
I shouldn’t be joking about it. She
doesn’t even want me to say the word in
front of her (schizophrenia), though
doesn’t she know how an unsaid word
(schizophrenia) holds more power the
longer it’s kept from touching your
tongue? The fact that it’s unsaid, and that
it could be years before I get an official
diagnosis, makes me wonder about it all
the more. In the night, I tiptoed
downstairs to pore through her college
psychology textbooks, seeing what the
“positive” and “negative” symptoms are
and ticking off how many I’ve had. I also
read about how it doesn’t go away, how
there’s no cure. People who have this
spend their whole lives on antipsychotic
medications to keep the delusions and
the voices away. And even then, the
meds don’t always work. The cocktail
can change often—it’s never the same
mix for everyone. There’s no way to
know.
It’s realizing all this that scares me
more than anything supernatural ever
could. The concept of a ghost, I can
understand; the misfiring synapses of my
brain, I can’t. One is outside and apart
from me and something I could run from,
but the other
is
me. The other is what I
am. So I’ve been thinking on it for all
these months, and I’ve decided.
I just have to play along whenever my
mom’s around.
Now she’s fluffing my pillows. She’s
asking me what I think of couscous for
dinner tonight. I’m not sure if that’s what
we want to eat, but I say it’s fine.
After my mom watches me swallow
today’s dose of meds, she says she’ll go
make dinner in the kitchen now. But she
lingers, at the doorway, blinking her
eyes so they don’t water. She does this
more and more, this staring, like she
can’t believe I exist. It’s how I used to
look at the girls, before I got used to
them.
“You can go,” I tell her. “I’ll just be
in here, reading.” I hold up a novel I’ve
barely started because I can’t pay
attention to books right now beyond page
one. I use my bad arm to lift it, and she
flinches, even though it’s just a few
Band-Aids now, only to keep the scars
covered.
I’ve been wanting to tell her so many
things about how lucky I am to have her,
but I can’t seem to get out the words, so I
haven’t said any of that yet. I only hope
she already knows.
She’s gotten a new tattoo, to
commemorate this, which is a strange
thing to do, but she says it’s a healthy
way to handle trauma. It’s not on her
chest. That’s still clean—I keep
checking. It’s on her arm. So when I see
her walk out of the room, I also catch my
own face staring back at me, like a
stunted anthropomorphic owl perched on
her shoulder. I also always check to
make sure the beauty mark is on the
correct side of her face, so I’m sure the
person wearing my image is really her. It
says something to me, that she’s done
this, tattooed me on her body. It says
she’ll be here for me no matter what, and
I know for a fact that some of the girls
can’t say that about their mothers. Not
all girls can.
If I’d been one of the missing, my
mom would have never given up on me.
Never.
Once she’s gone, I don’t touch the
book. I watch the window for some time.
She’s closed the window again, when
she came up here, but I go over and push
it open once more. I have to leave it
open. The tree I don’t remember, the one
right outside my window, rustles with
the lightest touch of wind. It’s an oak, I
think. It’s older than I am and will still
be here long after me.
There’s a knock on my bedroom door,
even though the door is open. I startle,
thinking thoughts I shouldn’t. When I
look, I see it’s a girl, just a different kind
altogether from what I expected.
She steps in the room, the freshman,
Rain Patel, who lives nearby and has
somehow finagled herself into bringing
me packets of homework for next week,
even though we barely spoke in school.
“Your mom sent me up,” she says.
She gives me a stack of papers and a
new book for AP English, though I’m so
far behind I’m probably not in advanced
placement anymore, and then she bursts
out with some random updates, like how
Deena Douglas got mono and the
wrestling team won some trophy at state.
Then she weaves awkwardly around
my room, not wanting to leave yet, lifting
things off my dresser and setting them
back down. I don’t stop her. But I do
flinch when she finds it and holds it in
her hand, playing with its smooth, round
surface. “What’s this?” she asks.
“Oh, just something. Something I
found.”
“Like on the beach? When my mom
and my dad and my brother and I went to
the shore, I swear I collected, like,
hundreds
of stones like this. Okay,
maybe not hundreds, but you know. I
liked ones in prettier colors, though . . .
white, blue with speckles, pinkish pink.
This one’s just gray.”
In the mirror, for an instant, what
she’s holding in the palm of her hand
goes bright, like it’s no rock. It dances
with a smoky, sultry light. Then it’s dark
again.
“Put that down,” I say.
“It’s special,” Rain says, setting it
back on the dresser. “I can tell. Where’d
you get it?”
It’s so special, I can’t seem to get rid
of it. Maybe I’m supposed to keep it,
give it a permanent place in my life to
commemorate my trauma, like my mom
has hers. Or maybe I’m meant to wear it
until I know for sure it’s over. Then I
can bury it in the yard. Or throw it on the
tracks when a freight train goes past,
though even the wheels of a train
couldn’t crush it. Maybe sometime this
weekend I should drive over to the
bridge and throw it in the Hudson. No
one could get to it then.
“It’s from here,” I say. “From right
here in Pinecliff.”
“Oh,” she says, seeming disappointed.
She glances in the mirror because that’s
where I’ve been staring, and then she
comes closer, sitting on the edge of the
bed.
She whispers it: “Are you seeing them
right now
? Your mom told my mom, so I
know about the,
you
know
.” Her dark
eyes are very wide, the long lashes
creating a dusting of spiderwebs on her
cheeks. I can tell by the way she’s edged
forward, inching along the end of my
bed, that she wants me to say I’m seeing
them. The lost girls.
I shake my head.
“Oh,” Rain says. “Okay.”
Her face falls. I think she’s the only
person who believes that I’ve seen
ghosts. She must think I’m psychic, a
medium for the undead or something,
like the blue woman on the elevator all
those months ago might say we are. For
this, I like Rain a tiny bit more. I look at
her carefully. She’s so young, so open.