17 & Gone(17)
With the drapes open, Fiona Burke stepped out into the room because there was nowhere to hide. There was glass all over the floor from a window that must have been shattered—and as she walked closer to me she stepped right on the shards. Pain didn’t reach her face, if she felt any at all. I realized, now that I’d grown up and she’d stopped growing, we were about the same height.
She spoke then. She recognized me.
Happy now? You little brat.
I could have asked her how she knew it was me, after all these years, because I dyed my hair black now, blue-black from a bottle, and didn’t I look any different from when I was a kid?
Before I could utter a word, she grabbed my hand and shoved something into it that was hotter even than her skin, sizzling like a coal burning from a fire, and hard, like a knob of bone. My sole reaction was to get it away from me as quickly as possible. My hand opened and let go.
What dropped to the ground was a pendant made from a smoke-gray stone.
That’s when I remembered I’d seen something very much like it before.
Fiona Burke used to wear a choker with a similar stone around her long, thin neck.
My dream-self didn’t have the wherewithal to make the connection, but my waking self, the self bursting out of sleep on the couch before the flickering TV at the sound of Mom saying the pizza was ready—my waking self needed only an instant to connect the dots and connect the girl.
There was me. There was Abby Sinclair. And now there was a girl I last saw when I was eight years old. Fiona Burke used to be my next-door neighbor, but she ran away from home when she was 17 years old.
MISSING
FIONA BURKE
CASE TYPE: Endangered Runaway DOB: June 17, 1987
MISSING: November 13, 2004
AGE NOW: 25
SEX: Female RACE: Asian HAIR: Black EYES: Brown HEIGHT: 5’3” (160 cm) WEIGHT: 125 lbs (57 kg) MISSING
FROM: Pinecliff, NY, United States
CIRCUMSTANCES: The photo on the right is a composite image to show how Fiona may look at twenty-five years old. She was last seen on November 13, 2004. When she was last seen her hair was dyed red. Her hair is naturally black.
ANYONE HAVING INFORMATION
SHOULD CONTACT
Pinecliff Police Department (New York) 1-845-555-1100
— 11 — WHEN I look back, I can see the hints. The hints that were there all along —like the time I was eight years old and my mom left me in the care of the girl who lived next door. The girl who told me to stand very still with my face squashed
up
against
the
yellow
wallpaper and to not turn around and to not dare look. To stand against the wall in my My Little Pony pajamas while she made plans to ditch town for good.
That was the first time I came in contact with someone who went missing.
Fiona Burke was the daughter of the couple in the big house next door.
They’d adopted her when she was a baby, from an orphanage in China. I don’t know what her name had been before the Burkes rechristened her and brought her back to the Hudson River Valley, to where they lived in the small town of Pinecliff, New York. Even today, the Asian population in Pinecliff is only 1.34 percent. Fiona Burke was likely one of only a handful of Asian kids in school, and she was the only person I knew who’d been adopted.
I don’t know what the Burkes were like all those years before Fiona, when they were childless and tucked away behind their lace curtains, shopping for someone else’s offspring to bring home.
They were an older couple, older than anyone would expect to be raising a teenage daughter, and the only reason we knew them is because we rented our house from them. It was small and separated from their much grander house by a pruned hedge. They called it the “carriage house” and wouldn’t let my mom and me paint it a color because they wanted it white, to match theirs.
Apparently, a long time ago, it used to be the garage.
This meant the Burkes were our landlords; my mom used to send me over to their palatial front porch on the third or fourth of the month—never the first, never on time—to ring their bell and hand-deliver an envelope containing the rent check.
Only, the Burkes never came to the door. I’d ring the bell and Fiona would answer before the chime even stopped sounding, like she kept herself pressed up behind it, waiting for any excuse to let in some air.
She’d open the door, see it was only me, and her face would fall. She’d hold out her hand so I could give her the envelope, and she’d say, “This from Tamara?”
And I’d say, “Yeah, that’s from my mom.”
Fiona Burke wasn’t particularly friendly—she never invited me in; she never said thank you. But, in the beginning at least, she wasn’t mean.
She’d
simply
put
the
envelope
containing our rent check on the sideboard, and the whole time she’d be looking up over my head, past me at the road, a visual ache showing in her face.
Then she’d close the door.
She was nine years older than me, so it seemed she’d always lived there in that house with the Burkes. She belonged in Pinecliff, our small town set upon the steep hill, with the railroad station down at the bottom and the mountain ridge hovering above. To my mind, she belonged there more than I did.
When we spent any amount of time alone, like when she’d do my mom a favor and babysit me for a few hours, she was quiet, perched on the edge of the couch near the television, making surreptitious calls on the phone. But something changed the last year I knew her, around the time she turned 17. I know because my mom said, “Don’t take it personally, honey, she’s 17—that’s just how girls are at that age.”