“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Vanessa reminds me. “Do you?”
I pick at the crust of my sandwich. I want to say no, but it isn’t exactly true anymore. I have reasons to believe. Because of Becca, and because—
It’s just not a simple answer anymore.
She tucks her hands under her thighs on either side. “I want to t-try. The g-game and the road and everything.”
“Why?” I ask. “If you don’t believe in any of it?”
“I want to know for sure.”
“Are you asking me if I’ll be your partner?” I ask, half hoping she is.
“N-no. I already have one. Sorry,” she says, cheeks beet red now. “Thanks for your help.”
“Yeah,” I say as she hurriedly stands up. “No problem.”
She’s already disappearing back inside.
I take my phone out of my backpack and unlock it. The text message is already on the screen, waiting for me. A road, a partner, a key. And two days to find them, if you want to play.
Do I?
I remember that door slamming shut, Becca’s unreadable expression. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t say anything. Not for days. Not until it was obvious that she wasn’t coming home.
The casual answer I gave Vanessa was true—there isn’t a road at that spot in the forest. What I didn’t say was that I went there a dozen times in the months after Becca disappeared. I’ve wandered through the woods and called her name. Lucy’s, too. No one has ever answered.
But what if I just had the wrong day? Becca went missing in April. It’s April again now.
I don’t believe in ghosts, not exactly. But I don’t believe Becca is dead, either. Which means she’s out there, and no one is looking for her but me.
3
SOME PARENTS, WHEN their child is missing, keep their room as a shrine, exactly the same as when they left it. As if by some sympathetic magic it will summon them back from wherever they’ve wandered to.
My parents aren’t like that. Three days after Becca went missing, my mother went into her room and tidied it up. She did all of Becca’s laundry, wiped down her desk, changed the linens on her bed, decluttered everything. Closed the door. Didn’t go back in for eight months.
When she did, it was to box everything up. Thirteen boxes. Ten went to thrift shops or the dump. Three went to the attic, tucked next to the boxes of elementary-school projects and macaroni art: artifacts of things long gone. The bed and the desk went out to the thrift shop, too. It would have somehow been less painful if she’d gotten rid of all the furniture, purged the house of Becca’s presence, but she kept the bookshelf and the chair, moving them into the living room. It was as if Becca was so thoroughly forgotten they didn’t even provoke painful memories.
I didn’t argue. My parents didn’t blame me for Becca’s disappearance, but they resented me for my part in what followed. The strange rumors, the ridicule. My refusal to admit that my sister abandoned us for a boy she’d only known for three months.
I didn’t argue, but I sneaked in while my mother was in the bathroom and took the box from under my sister’s bed where she kept her most treasured possessions. A few early photos, too embarrassingly amateurish to show anyone else, but full of the promise of talent to come; her journal—not diary—in which she jotted scattered thoughts and philosophical musings; a handful of trinkets from our infrequent travels; and our grandmother’s wedding ring, saved for when Becca got married.
It was inside the cover of the journal that I found the inscription.
FIND THE ROAD. FIND THE GATES. FIND THE GIRL.
I’m sitting on my bed now with the journal open in my lap, turning the pages. Most of it is notes on photos she’s taken, critiquing her own work or recording ideas for shots. In between are scraps of poetry, meandering bits of song lyrics. She wrote a few songs with Zachary, and his handwriting is scrawled next to hers, crowding it in. I resent every letter, every word.
But the last bit of poetry, or song lyrics, or whatever—they stop me dead every time.
I saw it again / Out of the corner of my eye. / Doesn’t matter where I am. / Doesn’t matter how hard I try / To get away.
It’s waiting / Waiting for me.
And so is she.
After that, the journal changes. In big, blocky letters, traced over and over again until they blurred and grayed, it says THE ROAD. And under that, Becca had written:
Don’t leave the road.
When it’s dark, don’t let go.
There are other roads. Don’t follow them.
The pages after are dense with notes about Lucy Gallows and the game—about the keys, the forest, and a city Becca never names. In between the pages, she’s tucked photos of the forest. Zachary is in some of them. There’s even a photo of Lucy’s tombstone— not that there’s a body in that grave.
Eventually the neat, bulleted notes devolve. They turn into odd nonsense. Scraps of phrases, unsettling drawings of eyes and hands and a figure that seems stretched, legs and arms too long—a man’s body, but with the head of another beast, triangular, antlers branching out and out, sometimes filling the whole page. I’ve read every word.
the birds come after the dark
seven gates
follow the rules
keep moving
And on and on. Many of the phrases read like instructions, but there are others that don’t have any clear imperative, like the one written in a spiral bursting across a page. In the house in the town in the woods on the road are the halls that breathe. The singing will lure you the smoke will infest you the words will unmake you the woman will hate you.
I’ve spent hours paging through that notebook again and again, but no secrets have unlocked themselves for me. I’ve gone to the place in the forest where Lucy Callow disappeared, in daylight and in the dark, on the full moon, in a white dress, whatever any legend says.
Because I don’t believe in ghosts, but I want to. I know Becca didn’t run away. That leaves one possibility and one impossibility, and I long for the impossible. Because if she isn’t dead, if she’s only been taken, she can be brought back.
The front door opens, and I hear the familiar sequence of sounds that mark my mother’s arrival home: keys clattering in the dish inside the door, shoes thumping haphazardly into the corner, quick steps to the kitchen and the poik of a cork popped from a half-full bottle. She must know about the text by now. She must have heard. It’s a small town.
I shut the journal back in the box and shove it under my bed. I pull my feet up and tuck them under me on the bed, a thousand versions of the coming conversation playing through my head, a thousand versions of how I’ll convince my mother not to worry about anything.
My mother’s footsteps come up the stairs, and she knocks lightly on my door before swinging it open. “How was school?” she asks.
So she wants to build up to it. “Fine,” I say.
She pauses. She seems to search my face, as if looking for an answer—but to what question? Does she want to know if the text upset me? Does she want to know if I was the one that sent it out?
“Good,” she says. I blink. “I’m thinking of ordering out for dinner. Pizza okay?” Apparently we aren’t going to talk about it at all.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Or Chinese.”
“Uh-huh,” I say. Briar Glen’s only Chinese restaurant is owned by an Italian man named Aurelio, so it isn’t exactly authentic cuisine, but it’s tasty. Henry Lin’s parents run the pizzeria in a bit of gastronomical symmetry, and we order from one or the other most nights—and most of the rest, we subsist on the leftovers.
My parents aren’t divorced, officially. But even before Becca, things were strained between them. Dad stuck around for three months after. Took a job in New York, and while he says he isn’t seeing anyone, one of his coworkers keeps tagg
ing him in joint selfies at “work events” with a borderline psychotic number of emojis. He still pays a private detective to look for Becca, gets updates every couple weeks—always another promising lead, never anything solid. Even if he’s given up, he isn’t willing to stop looking. Not yet.
Unlike Mom. She isn’t going to ask about the text, because it would mean, inevitably, talking about Becca. And that is one thing we can never do. Silence is the only way she knows how to deal with pain. As if by pretending she’s moved on, she can stop hurting. All it really means is that we’re forced to endure the pain alone, without each other to lean on.
When I lost my sister, I lost my whole family. I don’t know if I can ever get them back. But I can find Becca.
Or at least I can try.
* * *
—
I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep, but it seems like the moment I shut my eyes, I’m dreaming. I stand on a road—a normal road, white line down the median, asphalt shimmering with heat. I’m walking down the median line, and another girl is walking with me. I’ve never seen her before. She’s my age, with long, dark hair and a tattoo of a feather on the inside of her left wrist. Five crows wheel overhead, calling.
“Is this it?” I ask.
“The road?” she guesses, and smiles. She has a dimple in just one cheek. “No. Just a road. A safe one, for now.”
“I need to find the other one,” I say.
“Less safe,” she observes. I nod, the whole situation perfectly normal in the way that dreams are. “It’ll find you. As long as you’re all together and you’re looking for it, it’ll be there.”
“You’re sure?” I ask.
“I try not to be sure of too much,” she says. Then she nods ahead. The horizon is growing dark—no, a darkness is growing, swelling, surging over the distant hills, the trees, rushing toward us like a tsunami. She reaches out her hand and I start to reach back.
And then I wake. I stare at the ceiling for a few minutes, waiting for my frantic heartbeat to slow down, and then I sit up. I check the time. Barely past ten, but if that’s what’s waiting for me, I’m not going to try to get back to sleep.
I take Becca’s notebook and her old camera and sneak out the back door. It doesn’t take much sneaking—Mom takes sleeping pills most nights. Since Becca.
I’m not sure where I’m going until I’m already walking that direction. There’s a park on Galveston and Grand. A creek runs through the center of it, trees growing along the banks. It’s as far from the wilderness as you can get and keep the green, but to the Wildcats, it has been Narnia and Middle-earth and the Amazon jungle.
We would always meet at the bridge. It’s five feet across, with dull wood planks and handrails that would drive splinters into your palms if you tried to run your hands down them. Becca and I were almost always the first ones to arrive, and we’d sit chucking sticks into the water and watching them rush away from us. I lean on the railing, trying to feel her presence next to me. The way she always stood, elbows on the rail, spinning the ring around her thumb.
I thought that when you lost someone, you lost the details first, but details are what I still have—the crinkle at the corners of her eyes when she made fun of me, the way she’d chew on her thumbnail when she was really focused. It’s the big things that are slipping away. Her face. Her voice. The way it felt to be around her.
Becca was—is—six months older than me. Our parents tried to have a child for five years with no luck, so they went through the long, arduous process of adoption. They had one birth mother change her mind in the delivery room before they adopted Becca, tiny and perfect and theirs.
It was less than a month later that they found out about me. They’d always wanted two kids. They shrugged and laughed and told themselves they wouldn’t treat us any differently. Mostly, they managed it—but you could always sense how hard they were working at it: second-guessing themselves, overcompensating for any hint that they might not be treating Becca the same as me by lavishing her with just a little too much attention and praise to be genuine. Maybe that’s why her relationship with them fell apart so much when she hit high school. Or maybe something else was at the root of her silences, her strange moods, the way she avoided home whenever she could.
Long before high school, though, I was always chasing after Becca. The week she stood on her own, I started trying to pull myself upright. I walked within a month of her. Anything she touched, I had to have. My first word was my sister’s name, and I’d shriek it at night until my parents put me in her crib to sleep.
I always thought the two of us were the center of gravity around which the rest of the group orbited, but I was wrong. Becca was. She kept us together. She was the one who pulled away from the group first. And after she vanished, we fractured for good.
I lift her camera and snap a photo. The flash goes off. I look at the screen. The water is a confusion of reflected light, the trees indistinct shadows. I’m not nearly the photographer my sister was. Is.
Was.
“Sara?” I’m not completely surprised to hear Anthony’s voice, but I’m not sure I’m happy, either. His footsteps crunch closer, then turn hollow as he steps onto the bridge.
“Hey,” he says. He leans against the guardrail next to me, looking down at the water. The park lights lend just enough illumination to glimmer on the water’s surface, the delicate folds where it runs over the rocks. “I kind of thought you’d be here. Or in the woods.”
“No point going out there yet,” I say. “It won’t be tonight.”
“You’re sure?”
“It’s on the anniversary. Wednesday. Two days from the time the messages were sent is just past midnight, Wednesday morning.”
His hands tighten on the handrail, and the hinge of his jaw flares out as he clenches his teeth. “Yeah. I know.” He glances at me quickly.
“You think I did it,” I say. My voice is flat, but the betrayal slices through me. “You think I sent the message.”
“I don’t think that. Maybe I did for a moment. But only a moment,” he says.
“Everyone else thinks it was me,” I say. I scuff my foot against the bridge, knocking a pebble off into the water with a barely audible plink. Anthony nudges my shoulder with his, startling me with a moment of friendly intimacy I thought was long behind us.
“Only the idiots,” he assures me.
“You said you thought I’d done it, for a moment.”
“And I was momentarily an idiot,” Anthony says, grinning that grin that is impossible not to echo, for a fleeting second. “Trina doesn’t think so.”
“You talked to her about it?”
He shrugs. “She’s worried about you.”
“So you mean you talked to each other about me,” I say.
Anthony makes a frustrated sound. He turns to face me, but I stay stubbornly put, looking straight out at the water. “Come on, Sara. We’d have talked to you if you’d say more than three words to any of us.”
“What, it’s all my fault?” I ask, turning my head to glare at him.
“We all loved Becca,” he says. Some of us more than others, I don’t tell him, because I’m not supposed to know.
“It doesn’t matter,” I whisper. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“No. It doesn’t,” Anthony says. “Because whatever happened then, I’m here for you now. I don’t know if this is a prank or a trap or if there’s really something hiding out in the woods, but I’m not letting you go alone.”
I stare at him. I feel off balance, like I’ve lurched forward and haven’t gotten my feet under me. For a moment, my body pulses with gratitude and relief—he’s doing this for me, he’s still my friend, he still cares. And then I draw back, feral anger scrabbling up my spine.
“You’re not letting me?” I repeat.
“I mean I’m going with you,” he say
s. “I’ll be your partner, like the thing said.”
“I didn’t ask you to go with me,” I say.
“But you are going.”
“Of course.”
He nods, like this settles things. “Then I’m going with you.”
“You’re just assuming that I don’t have anyone else? That I want you to come with me?”
“Why wouldn’t you?”
“Really? Let’s look.” I pull my phone out of my pocket, open up the messages. Scroll back and back and back, until I find the thread with Anthony’s name on it.
The most recent message is months old. It’s a birthday cake emoji. The one before that is nearly a year old. You ok? it reads.
I hold it out to him. “Two messages in a year. My sister vanishes and you don’t even bother to text.”
He grabs my phone from my hand. I squawk, but he turns his shoulder to keep me from grabbing it back and taps the screen a few times. Pulls up Trina’s messages.
All of Trina’s messages. Once a month or so now, links to interesting news stories, funny pictures. Before that, a sparse series of texts telling me that she was around, when I was ready. And around the time that Becca disappeared? Dozens of messages. Maybe hundreds. Telling me she was worried about me. Sending me stupid memes to distract me. Asking me to come hang out. Complaining about her jackass stepfather, our homework, the weather. I answered maybe a half dozen times. Never more than a few words.
He switches to Mel’s messages. Mel didn’t say as much. She gave up earlier. But they’re there. I’d never answered Trina because her kindness hurt too much. I’d never answered Mel because she wanted to be there as my friend, and I’d stopped being able to pretend that was all I wanted, too. And so I’d let both of them—all of them—slip into absence and disconnection.
Anthony hands my phone back to me. I cradle it, thumbing the screen off, and look away from him. “You never answered their texts. So I figured there wasn’t any point trying. Which is why I came over. Your mom always told me you were sick.”
Rules for Vanishing Page 3