17 & Gone(19)

I must have covered my head and ducked at some point, because the broken pendant did reach bottom, where it hit me in the shoulder, leaving a searing pink whop of impact. From there, it dropped to the floor, glossy face up.

I seem to remember, if I peer back through the years of carefully buried distance, that the stone was as gray as a trail of exhaust smoke, and it had a surface that shone and bounced the light to trick you into thinking it was beautiful.

I also seem to remember that I didn’t get such a good look at it before Fiona Burke descended the stairs and snatched it out of my hands, shoving it in the slim pocket of her jeans to take with her.

That’s how I know she had the pendant with her when she went. And yet somehow, impossibly, there I was, more than eight years after she’d gone, holding her signature piece in the palm of my now much larger hand.

— 13 — AFTER seeing Fiona Burke so distinctly in my dream, I cornered my mom. I wanted to ask about Fiona in a way that didn’t seem rehearsed, to know if my mom had ever heard anything about the girl, after all these years. For all I knew, Fiona Burke had safely made it into her twenties and was living in a perfectly nice house somewhere far from here, like North Dakota, studying to be something admirable, like a veterinarian.

My mom looked up from her psych textbook. “Did you say Fiona Burke?”

she asked absently, yawning and marking her place with her highlighter. “I haven’t heard her name in years.” She pulled her hair off her neck and stretched, and as she did the flock of birds tattooed near her ear lifted their wings for the ceiling.

The green vines encircling her arms came alive with her movement, and I admired their twists and turns and flowering details until she lowered her arms and her sleeves dropped closed and hid the pictures from me.

Our cat, Billie—for Billie Holiday— leaped up on the back of the couch. Her long gray hair made her appear even larger than she actually was, and her green eyes held on me warily. We’d had her almost as long as Fiona Burke had been missing.

“Yeah,” I told my mom. “I hadn’t thought of her in a long time, either.”

She asked a simple question next. She asked why.

This is how it’s been between me and my mom since I was a kid: I’d tell her anything. I’d tell her things before she asked. I told her the first time I tried a cigarette, at thirteen, and never again.

And as soon as Jamie and I were getting close to taking it to the next level, I confided in my mom and she made me an appointment at Planned Parenthood.

That’s what happens when it’s only you and your mom and no one else.

There’s a trust you share that no one can get close to. My mom had a tattoo on her left arm of two blackbirds in a knotted tree; that was the piece she got for her and me, after I was born. We were in this tree, together, she liked to say.

Something breathed in the living room with us, and I was the only one aware.

Was it Abby, whispering through the hollow spaces in the walls? Was it the rising voices of the other girls, who I didn’t know were coming yet, so I didn’t know to listen for them? Was it Fiona Burke herself, haunting this property and reminding me she could still have us evicted from this house?

All I knew was something—someone?

—didn’t want me to tell my mom why right now. I felt sure of that, almost as if I could hear a voice breathing these commands into my open ear:

Don’t tell her. Don’t tell her about the dream.

I knew I shouldn’t tell her about Abby’s Missing poster rescued from the telephone pole, or about the summer camp where she’d gone missing. Not about Luke Castro, either, who I’d now tracked down and would go visit. And not about Abby’s grandparents’ address in Orange Terrace, New Jersey, and how I’d mapped my path there from our front door. Not about the pendant I was now wearing on a long string that hung under two layers of shirts and felt warm, oddly warm, against my bare skin.

I was not supposed to tell my mom any of these things.

I spoke carefully, as if there were someone keeping tabs on me from the shadows, making sure.

“I don’t know why,” I said. “I . . . I just thought of her. Like randomly. For no reason. And I wondered if Mr. and Mrs. Burke ever got any word about what happened. Did they?”

My mom had gotten to her feet by this point and stood there worrying the tattoos at her wrists, winding her fingers around and around them, as if she could rub off the vines and start over with fresh skin. This was a nervous habit she had, when she was finding words for something difficult.

She drifted to the window, the one facing the hedge that separated our house from the Burkes’ next door. The night was glistening white and as silent as an unsprung trap. Billie wove herself through my mom’s legs and tried to look up and out the window herself, though she was far too short to reach and a little too fat lately to go leaping.

Obviously I assumed my mom was going to tell me that Fiona Burke was dead. But she only confirmed what I already knew: Fiona Burke had run away, and no one had ever heard from her again.

The Burkes’ house was dark, as if they were away—and maybe they were, like the night their daughter took off— but my mom studied its windows as if expecting a light in one of them.

“It’s so sad,” she said, turning back to me. “I still don’t know what to say to Mr. and Mrs. Burke, now, after all these years.”