Blink

by Sasha Dawn

  But either way, it’s like one minute she was here, rearranging the letters in her Scrabble tiles . . . and in a blink, she disappeared.

  It fucking hurts.

  Will I ever stop worrying about her? Will I be forever changed, like Rachel Bachton’s parents, and see her face in places she’s never been?

  I turn on the television, crash onto the sofa, and let it sink in: Chatham Claiborne is gone.

  My head hurts, probably from the beating I took yesterday at the Churchill and, later, the blows I took at Damien’s place.

  “. . . And while the bones buried at the confluence of two rivers in rural Savannah—”

  I sit up straighter and focus on the television screen for the breaking news.

  “—were a negative match to Rachel Bachton’s DNA, police officials are not ruling out a connection between the case of the remains known as Baby A, and that of the Bachton kidnapping . . . or between the events in Chatham County and Chicago’s far-north suburb Northgate, where sources say recent information has come in that may help to solve the long-cold case of the missing girl.”

  The anchor cuts to video footage of a policeman, in full regalia, at a podium. “An anonymous tip tied the Bachton case to the Goudy tract in rural Catoosa County, Georgia, some three hundred fifty miles northwest of where Baby A’s remains were discovered.”

  Chatham’s tip.

  He continues: “Wayne Goudy is currently in custody. At this time, he’s being held for questioning. I have no affirmative details to report other than the dogs alerted for human remains at the site in question.”

  I wonder if “the site” is the stables.

  And I wonder if Chatham left Sugar Creek just as this news is breaking because she’s afraid of the dominoes she just set in motion.

  The police talked to her separately. She was in my bedroom. Mom and I were out by the fireplace. Suppose she told the police about more than what had happened with Damien. Suppose she was afraid. Suppose Damien had been following her . . .

  And Miss Lina came out of the house with that picture . . .

  And then Chatham drew that picture of the swing . . .

  What if she was afraid because she suddenly remembered something about what she might have seen as a four-year-old kid the day Rachel Bachton disappeared?

  “Yes,” the cop on television is saying, “it’s true a photograph of a young girl recently turned up, but the family of the missing child denies resemblance.”

  So the picture at Damien’s place, and the picture in Savannah’s journal, aren’t likely Rachel Bachton. Who else could that photograph resemble?

  Considering she’s really blonde—as blonde as the girl in the photograph—could it be Chatham?

  I try to conjure her smile, try to remember the feeling of her body against mine, and fresh as it is, the sensation is already fading.

  It’s not fair. Why do I remember so accurately the way Damien’s knife felt the moment it sliced into my skin? But I can’t remember what it felt like to kiss her?

  This fear I feel—the fear of never seeing her again—has been with me, I now realize, since the first second I saw her. Like an omen of what eventually was going to happen.

  I have to make her stay.

  Have to make her permanent.

  I know only one way to do that.

  I grab my keys.

  A few minutes later, I’m at the Temple Tattoo Shop on Hauser Street, sitting in a black pleather chair across from some guy who looks like he once belonged on the cover of ’80s-metal-band vinyl. Slight build, wiry. Like everything and everyone in this place, he’s clad in black. He wears his long, scraggly hair loosely pulled back and secured at the back of his neck.

  Imagine this guy, Toad, scratching at a mostly gray beard he maybe hadn’t intended to grow, so much as he’d passively allowed it to appear, millimeter by millimeter, through neglect. Too many late nights. Too much bourbon and not enough razor blades.

  “So. Josh. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-two.” So I lied. It’s the age on the fake ID Aiden made for me, so I suppose it’s true from a certain point of view—the point of view of the illusion. And that’s all life’s been since Chatham Claiborne arrived. Illusion. I realize I don’t know anything about her.

  “You drunk?”

  “No, sir. Just . . . got a lot on my mind.”

  “Never”—Toad points an inking tool at me—“ever put a chick’s name on your body unless you’re ready to explain it for the rest of your life.”

  He’s prepping his tools with focused attention, as if he’s threading a needle fit to sew all the continents on the globe back together.

  “You ready to do that? To explain it to every other girl that crosses your path?”

  “It’s not her name.” I roll up my sleeve and reveal Chatham’s drawing in Sharpie. “It’s her signature.”

  A clue is more like it. Someone she was for a brief moment in time. Just a page in her history book.

  “All right. Give me two good reasons to put her name on your body.”

  “It’s the way she wrote it.” I glance at her signature—all artsy, with a pronounced scroll on the C, the loop in her Hs, the upstroke on the M. “She’s an artist.” Pointing out the obvious seems to be a talent of mine lately. I wonder, and not for the first time since I walked into the Temple, if Toad remembers seeing her. She said she’d dropped into this place looking for Savannah. Maybe she would’ve shown some of her work to this guy/amphibian (if you look him in the eyes, you’ll see that he has traits of both). Or maybe she would’ve just felt at home here, among people who see things the rest of us don’t see: the colors reflecting off the lighthouse at the brink of twilight, the splash of red veins in a fallen yellow leaf, the crack in the pavement on Second Street, which oddly resembles the coastal border of Texas. She’d pointed out all those things to me. I don’t look at the world the way I used to . . . before.

  “And the second reason?”

  I don’t want to say it. Saying it might make it true. I swallow hard, like forcing down a mouthful of mushy, canned peas. Always overcooked. “She’s dead.”

  And I suppose it is true, one way or another. Dead to me, or dead to the world, is still dead.

  “That, my friend, is maybe the best reason I can think of.” Latex gloves slap against his wrists as he yanks them over his talented hands. He looks at me over the rectangular spectacles he must’ve slipped on while I was pondering Texas-on-Second-Street. “I’m sorry to say it,” Toad says, although I don’t think he’s sorry to say anything. “But it’s a damn fine reason to put her name on your body.”

  He explains he has to recreate the signature, has to clean the Sharpie from my skin and prep it to ward off infection, but it’ll look the same when it’s done. Only it’ll be permanent.

  “Last chance to change your mind,” he says.

  “Not gonna happen, brother.”

  It’s not really about her name, just like the number on my chest isn’t really about football. It’s about a turning point in my life.

  I was fourteen when Damien’s knife pierced my left arm. Fourteen when I realized it was time to be a man. I had that number inked into my skin, and I wear that number on my back, to remind myself of victory, of survival.

  And that’s the same reason I’m sitting at the Temple now.

  This, too, will strengthen and harden me. This hurt, too, will pass. But that doesn’t mean I ever want to forget her.

  I watch as his needle drags through my skin on one of the places her lips often landed, over the scars Damien left there. Bubbles of blood boil up in the wake of Toad’s instrument, reminding me of the day it happened: my mother’s glass-shattering shriek, my sisters huddled behind the sofa, their tiny arms fixed around each other as if the world was about to implode.

  “Your body’s a temple, man.” Toad periodically wipes my flesh clean of blood, demonstrating the ink remains. Proof that what he’s doing is permanent, sure, though not as permanent
as death by knife would’ve been. “I’m just here to paint the walls.”

  The buzz of his tools makes my teeth vibrate. I watch the outline of her signature appear, letter by letter: C, H, A . . .

  It’s what you do when you don’t want to forget. You make things permanent.

  “Why didn’t you just write her name in Sharpie?” Aiden says later, when I peel away the tape and wrap.

  “Funny you should say that,” I say. “That’s why it’s here now. She wrote it in Sharpie first.”

  He hits his pipe, and because my world is empty now without the girl I fell hard for, I might partake, too.

  “You want?” Aiden offers me the pipe.

  There’s a certain poetic symmetry in the prospect of getting absolutely blotto tonight, the first night without Chatham Claiborne, as I was undeniably inebriated my first night with her, too. I could handle sinking into the comfortable numbness of an organic high tonight, if only to stop the emptiness stabbing at my soul every waking second of the day.

  Except that my sisters are asleep upstairs, and my mother, with her black eye fading already to purplish blue, is working at the hospital, and I can’t imagine how it might go if Margaret or Caroline happens to wake up and I’m semi-high.

  My sisters are another problem altogether. How do you explain to four-year-old girls that Chatham’s not coming back? That you don’t know where she went? That you don’t know why?

  Aiden’s phone chirps, and he offers his pipe and a lighter.

  Just one hit won’t impale me, but I responsibly wave it off. Can’t handle the paranoia of the random drug tests in the locker room so close to playoffs anyway.

  He’s dealing with his phone, shrugs, and places the still-smoldering bowl on the table. “So where’d she go?”

  “Don’t know.”

  I wish the cops would say what’s up with Damien and the photograph. I wish they’d tell me if there’s any connection between the swing in Damien’s yard and the swing Chatham repeatedly drew. I mean, I can’t ignore the coincidence of her leaving the same night all this bullshit with Damien comes to light.

  “One thing I know about girls,” Aiden says.

  “You don’t know anything about girls.”

  His phone chirps again, and instantly he’s texting back. “I know one thing. They say shit like ‘don’t follow me,’ but they want to be followed. They want you to ask what’s wrong, even after they tell you nothing is wrong.”

  “Not this time. Not her. She’s just . . . gone.”

  “And what do you do, when you can’t find something?”

  I follow, with my gaze, the letters scrolled over the scar marring my arm. “There’s nothing to do.”

  “You retrace your steps. You stumble over things you maybe overlooked before.”

  Easy for Aiden to say. What’s he lost? A dollar bill, here and there? A bag of pretzel M&M’s? “The problem is that she didn’t leave anything behind.”

  “She’ll turn up,” he says.

  That’s what everyone said about Rachel Bachton. And it’s been twelve years since anyone saw her.

  Chirp, chirp. “Girls don’t just let you have your way with them and take off.”

  I think it was just the opposite, actually. I think she had it all planned. I think she had her way with me. And I think she did it because she knew she was leaving. I’m already regretting telling Aiden about what happened last night, and I didn’t tell him because I think it’s his business. I told him because it confuses the hell out of me. I mean, why close the gap between us, why bring us as close as two people can ever be, if you’re only going to take off a few hours later?

  “Before you know it, she’ll be back in the palm of your hand.”

  She already slipped through my fingers.

  Chirp, chirp. “Fucking Kai. I’m starting to remember why we broke up in the first place.”

  While he’s dead-on right on the Kai front—she’s too clingy, he’s too aloof—Aiden doesn’t get my dilemma. He doesn’t know about Chatham’s backpack, or the things she kept in it. He doesn’t know about the scar on her hip, or the horror she endured in that barn with the cattle brand when she was a kid—or even before, in that hot car, surviving while her baby brother slowly drifted off to a sleep from which he never awoke.

  He doesn’t know what I know: that she and her runaway sister may have witnessed Rachel Bachton’s kidnapping. Why would Wayne disappear when bones turned up at the rivers, if he had nothing to do with their being there? And why wouldn’t there be a report for two runaway girls from Georgia unless the parents don’t want the girls to be found?

  Posting them missing would mean police interaction. And that might equal enlightening the cops to family secrets.

  Aiden never saw the girl at the rave draw her lips over my girlfriend’s in a way that was more familiar than sexy, now that I think about it. Was it a sisterly kiss, more than a prelude to two hot chicks making out? Which, of course, Chatham didn’t let happen.

  But if so, why didn’t Chatham own it? Why did she lie to me?

  Did she lie to me?

  I don’t kiss girls, or strangers.

  Yes, she said specifically that it wasn’t Savannah.

  And why can’t I find any reference to Chatham Claiborne online? No Facebook, no Instagram. I wonder if her Snapchat is even receiving the messages I’m still sending.

  She had to get a phone hooked up when she got here. Why? Wouldn’t her old phone work just as well here as it did in Georgia?

  Unless she didn’t want anyone to track her by the calls she was making, it doesn’t make sense.

  And if she’s a ward of the state of Georgia, in the foster care system, even if she wasn’t adopted like her sister Savannah, wouldn’t the officials there be checking up on the family? Wouldn’t they report her missing?

  I wonder again if Chatham Claiborne is even her real name.

  “She’ll turn up, man.”

  Aiden’s clueless.

  He’s never lost something that can’t afford to be found. If I can find her, Wayne can find her. Damien can find her. And so can anyone else. Aiden doesn’t get that she doesn’t want to be found.

  But maybe he can help me.

  “Do you still have the pictures of Chatham? The ones you took for her ID?”

  P l a t i n u m

  If Sugar Creek High officials knew their netbooks could be used for such devious deeds, I wonder if they’d force us to purchase them.

  Aiden’s got his school-issued hardware up and running, connected to an online program the school sponsors for the graphic design classes.

  Between texts to Kai, he flips through logos for Motor Oil Hum and Mindjam, the two strains of weed he hopes to market legally someday. At least the guy’s got ambition.

  Finally, he stops at a picture of Chatham, and my breath catches in my throat when I lock my gaze on her. Even in a two-dimensional image, nestled neatly into an Illinois state driver’s license, she draws me in with her eyes.

  “Can you make her blonde?”

  Aiden looks at me. “Dude. You aren’t going to ask me to hook up a Barbie doll at the end of this. ’Cause I gotta be honest with you, man. I don’t think it’ll be quite the same as the real thing.”

  He’s referencing the mid-’80s John Hughes movie where two schmucks make a girl on a computer.

  “Really? I had my heart set on the Veterinarian Barbie.” That’s me on sarcasm. “I just want to see what she looks like blonde.”

  “Whatever,” he mutters, but he gets to work on it. “How blonde?”

  “I don’t know. Fucking blonde.”

  “Golden blonde? Dirty blonde?”

  “Lighter than that.”

  “Platinum?”

  “It’s a place to start.”

  My laptop is open, too, and I’m searching everything I can think of—even outlandish possibilities that never crossed my mind before. If Savannah came here because she was present at the Northgate farmers’ market when Ra
chel was taken, it makes sense to come here and revisit the facts of Rachel Bachton’s kidnapping, in hopes of gleaning some sort of information about the child witness who’s never been named. Especially if Chatham happens to be that witness.

  For the hundredth time, I go back to Savannah’s Instagram—I remember her username, Farmgirl1004, from the night Chatham and I went to the rave—and look through the photos allowed to the public.

  I compare the few to the picture in my mind of the girl with the shamrock tattoo.

  I wonder if tattoo girl is still around, if she’d mind answering my questions.

  I arrive at a picture of the tattoo itself. Is this the same tat I saw on that girl’s ankle? I stare at it, willing myself to remember, as if I can conjure the image of something I know is lost. I stare at it—its scrolls and loops—until it goes blurry.

  It’s familiar, as if I’ve seen it before.

  But that makes sense because I have seen it. Chatham drew it in the sand, and I got a good look at the girl at the rave’s tattoo.

  I flip through other pictures on my phone. She incorporated those rolls and curls into the mural on the wall at the Churchill, into the clay relief hanging in the showcase at Sugar Creek High.

  Wait.

  I blink away from the picture on the screen and look at the signature Toad inked onto my arm.

  The flourish before the Cs on my arm . . . the same scroll-like loops . . . so similar to the leaves on the shamrock.

  “Aiden . . .”

  “Huh?”

  “Look at this.” I point to a detail on my newest tattoo.

  “Yeah, I’ve seen it, numb-nuts.” He clips me upside the head.

  “No, this.” I zero in on the identical scroll on Savannah’s tattoo. “And this.” I point out the same details in the Churchill mural, in the clay relief.

  I can tell by the way he looks at me: he sees the similarities, too. “What’s it mean?”

  I’m pretty much convinced: if there are similar elements in all of Chatham’s works, and the tattoo on the girl at the rave shares those attributes, Chatham could have designed that girl’s tattoo. Which is more proof that she lied to me. The girl who kissed her must have been Savannah.