17 & Gone(18)
But were they?
The shift in Fiona Burke’s personality came fast, it felt to me. It altered the look in her eyes, and it chilled the tone in her voice. It changed everything. She liked to tease me about something that year, telling me she could evict me and my mom anytime. All she had to do was make up a good, steaming lie about us to tell her parents, and my mom and I would be out on the street. We’d have to live in a cardboard box and beg for handouts at the train station, she said.
And maybe my mom would decide I was too much for her to take care of, and she’d sell me off to some passing businessman on an Amtrak train bound for Penn Station, and who knew what would become of me then.
I cried the first time she said this, which made her enjoy repeating it. Of course I know now she didn’t have the power to evict us, not by her word alone, but I used to believe she did.
But my sometimes-babysitter and longtime next-door neighbor Fiona Burke appeared as innocent as she ever would in the photograph her parents selected for her Missing poster. In it, she had straight teeth and straighter hair, not yet dyed. Her shirt buttons were done all the way up to her neck and there were two pearl earrings fastened in her ears.
She wore a blameless smile and sat there on a stool with her hands folded.
Her favorite necklace was tight around her throat, and the flash of the studio camera happened to catch it at the exact right angle to make it look lovely and not like a ghastly, dirty thing hanging over her shirt.
She was who they wanted her to be, in that picture. That was before she turned 17. After, a whole other side to her emerged, one that was out in full the night I saw her last.
Fiona Burke’s parents saw one thing, and the world saw another.
When she disappeared, I remember seeing her picture in the news, being aware that people were looking for her.
But, as the years went on and she didn’t come back, as her Missing posters came down from bulletin boards and other announcements for yard sales and ride-shares and rooms for rent went up in their place, people forgot about her and stopped asking.
She’d lost herself to that place where the missing kids go, the kids no one finds, even when lakes are dredged and woods combed. The ones computer-aged into adulthood who never make it home.
She didn’t call. She didn’t write.
She was just gone.
And I guess I’d forgotten about her like everyone else in town had, until she showed up in the dream and tried to give me that stone, the one that looked a lot like the broken piece of jewelry I’d recovered from the gully on the side of Dorsett Road. I was sure it meant something, and it wasn’t until I was alone again later that night, after the frozen pizza with my mom and trying to deflect her questions about Jamie, that I closed myself in my room and dug it out from where, the second I got home, I’d stowed it inside a sock that was wrapped in a sweater and buried in the bottom drawer of my dresser. It wasn’t until then that I really let myself remember.
— 12 — IT was a chilly night in November, the night Fiona Burke disappeared. Her parents were down in Maryland for the weekend, so she had the house to herself, and it was clear she’d wanted— planned—to keep it that way. Until my mom asked her parents if she could watch me, and they said yes without confirming it with Fiona first. I’m guessing that my usual babysitter must have flaked like she did sometimes, and my sudden appearance at my landlords’
house was a last-minute surprise—to both Fiona and me. Because with her parents out of state, this was the night Fiona Burke had planned to run away from home, and all of a sudden I was there, in the way.
My mom wasn’t in school then. She didn’t have the job at the state university or even the certificate to get that job, so this must have been when she worked nights, when she was still dancing at the club across the river.
I want to say I could pinpoint exactly what Fiona Burke looked like on that night she gave my mom the finger behind her back and then said she’d take great care of me. I should have an image of her cleaning out her mother’s jewelry box and her father’s suit jackets, dredging for pawnable brooches and misplaced gold cards.
But she was a fiery blur. Her hair was livid, dyed the red of a sugar drink. Her mouth was a deep, dark streak slathered in gloss that was manufactured to look wet long after it dried.
I remembered this:
Fiona Burke on the landing of her parents’ circular staircase, leaning over and looking down to the floor far below.
Her scraggly flame-red hair with the pitch-black roots hung upside down in the air like living thorns, and through the thorns she was yelling at me to come help her.
I realized she was really doing it and not just saying she would. Leaving. She was actually running away. She’d packed up her things; the few bulging bags up above were the possessions she’d decided to take with her. Before I was ready, she began to fling the bags one by one over the banister.
Dropping her bags down from that height made each one land with the sickening smack of a suicide on the tiled foyer floor. I dragged them off to the side as soon as it was safe to grab them.
When she leaned over to drop the last bag, the odd, murky pendant she always wore got caught on the banister. She pulled herself free and flung the bag, and I guess at that point the black cord that kept the necklace choker-tight against her throat snapped, and the pendant itself slipped off and fell, too.
It sailed through the air over me, and though it must have dropped fast, because it was an actual stone and not made of something lighter, my memory holds a picture of it still falling. I’m standing below, in the middle of the foyer beneath the glittering chandelier, gathering her bags in a pile as instructed, and I look up. I should have moved, but there I am with my face turned upward and the dark object hurtling straight for me.