Never Missing, Never Found

by Amanda Panitch

  “Don’t worry, Cade,” Katharina says. She’s still looking at me, and now her eyes are burning. “You know what they say: it’s better to be missing than dead.”

  —

  After a month in the basement, I began to think of the woman as Stepmother. And I was Cinderella.

  She woke me every morning with a yell as the sun’s watery rays were just beginning to stream in through the basement’s one small, high window. She made me brush my teeth every morning, and take a shower every other day so I wouldn’t smell up her clean, clean house. I scrubbed floors and scoured tile and cleaned up after the girls. The girls weren’t really girls; that’s just what Stepmother called them. Really they were women, women who wore lots of makeup and lacy underwear and who sometimes cried in the bathroom when they thought nobody could hear, and nobody could, because by then I was nobody.

  She was always watching me. Three times during that first week I tried to run out the door. One of the girls caught me, then one of the men who came to visit the girls, then Stepmother herself. She stripped half the skin off my back as I cried, and she beat me more for crying. “You will learn from this, Jane,” she said over my yelps. “And you will be better for it. Stronger.”

  After the first few weeks I stopped trying, both because I didn’t want to get beaten again and because nobody was waiting for me. That’s what she told me, that my parents had given me to her because I’d been bad and they didn’t want me anymore. That sounds ridiculous to me now, but back then I absorbed her words the way my hair absorbed the smell of the girls’ cigarette smoke.

  The girls were mostly nice to me. Not nice where they’d help me leave or answer my questions about what they were all doing here too. But sometimes they’d give me pieces of hard candy or ask me how I was doing or spritz me with their flowery perfume. None of them ever hit me.

  I was good. I was a good girl, always a good girl, and finally Stepmother noticed. A month in and I hadn’t spoken to anyone, not for real, nothing besides “Yes, ma’am” or “Excuse me, sir,” and the words were clawing their way out of my eye sockets, pushing my eyeballs out so they goggled. “You’ve been good this month,” Stepmother said. “I want you to continue to be good. How do you feel now, Jane?”

  By then I’d realized that Jane was a good, solid, sensible name. And good, solid, sensible girls deserved company. Jane missed Melody. “I miss my sister, ma’am,” Jane said honestly, because she did. She wasn’t thinking about what that might mean for her. Or for another girl. It was just how she felt.

  Stepmother gave me an appraising look. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Pixie showed up a week later, while I was sleeping; I went to sleep in the basement, curled up tight as a cat on my mattress, and woke to see a strange girl staring at me from across the room, her back up against the wall, her arms crossed tight over her chest. I blinked at her. She blinked back, slowly. She must have been drugged too.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m Scarlett. But here my name is Jane.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “I’m Pixie. Where am I?”

  I got up and stretched. My back cracked, and Pixie jumped. “It’s okay,” I said. “You’re safe.”

  She began to shake. “I don’t want to be here.”

  “Shhh. Shhh.” I made my way over to her, slowly, carefully, like I was trying not to spook a rabbit, and laid a hand on her shoulder. It seems absurd now that I wouldn’t realize that I was the one who had put her there, but I didn’t. In my mind she’d appeared out of nowhere, a gift from the universe. “It’ll all be okay. Take a deep breath.”

  She took a deep breath, and it shuddered. She took another, and it shuddered less. “How did I get here?”

  “It’s okay,” I told her, and squeezed her shoulder comfortingly. “You can be Cinderella too.”

  “Are you a missing girl too?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, and spared a sad, fleeting thought for my parents, who didn’t miss me. Melody missed me, though. I knew she did. “I went missing more than a month ago.” Every morning, I made sure to glance at the calendar Stepmother had hanging in the kitchen, the one covered in pictures of doe-eyed kittens. “From near Chicago.”

  She took another deep breath, and it didn’t shudder at all. “Okay. Okay.” And then she laid a hand on my shoulder, like it was her turn to comfort me. “At least we’re not dead. You know what they say: it’s better to be missing than dead.”

  —

  Everybody is staring at me. Connor and Cady have separated, at least.

  “Scarlett, are you okay?” Connor asks, his brow creased in concern.

  I’m not okay, I’m not.

  “Yeah, Scarlett.” Is it my imagination, or does Katharina stress my name? “Are you okay? You look like you’re going to pass out.”

  My heart has stopped. My entire core has frozen solid into a block of ice, and if I say even one word, I will shatter into a million pieces. So I nod.

  Katharina isn’t the girl from the basement. Katharina can’t be the girl from the basement. Because she’s dead. Because I killed her.

  I don’t speak for the rest of the day, a strategy I used at Stepmother’s when I was afraid to say anything lest I throw up. Connor gives me a quick goodbye, his smile a ghost of its former self. Cady rushes out after him, and I bid her goodbye with a limp wave. Katharina doesn’t speak to me either; it’s like she knows what she did with that phrase. Like she knows how she undid me. I catch her watching me from the corner of her eye every so often, though, or at least I think I do. I might be imagining things. I might be going crazy. I might already be crazy.

  Fortunately, my job doesn’t really require me to speak. I greet guests with the same weak smile I gave Cady, and answer questions with nods or headshakes. I am a million miles away from Adventure World right now. I am a million miles above the ground, above even the peak of the Dragon King, the tallest, fastest roller coaster in the world.

  Katharina leaves for lunch and doesn’t come back. I don’t know where she goes. They replace her with an androgynous young person named Marley, who has short buzzed hair and a nose stud, who seems perfectly content to spend the shift playing with the plush toys and the occasional game of catch with me.

  It isn’t until I leave for the day and go to clock out at the employment office by the entrance that I come crashing back down to earth. “Have a good night,” the girl at the desk tells me flatly, clicking her nails against her desk. Those nails. I remember those nails. I assured that girl my first morning that it was better to be missing than dead, and I said the same thing later to Connor and Rob. Katharina must have heard somehow. Or maybe it was a coincidence. There are always these stories popping up about how a woman loses her engagement ring on the beach during her honeymoon and then, twenty years later, fillets a salmon for dinner and finds her old ring inside. Or twin brothers in Finland who die in separate motorcycle crashes on the same road on the same day, one in the morning and one at night. Coincidences are crazy things.

  My stomach is still swimming when I get home, though; if you cut me open right now, you might find an engagement ring bouncing around in my guts. I worked a longer shift today than yesterday, so it’s after eight o’clock, which means Melody is off at one of her many friends’ houses. I can’t remember the last time she spent a night at home. She’s always with her field hockey teammates or student council buddies or one of the French exchange students, doing bonding activities like braiding each other’s hair or painting each other’s nails or whatever friends do when they get together. I wouldn’t know. Anytime I’ve gotten too close to someone, I’ve run away. What if someone found out what happened to my last friend?

  “Scarlett,” Melody calls from the living room. “Is that you?”

  Huh. She’s home. Maybe she’s sick.

  No. Melody doesn’t ever get sick. Flawless people never get sick.

  “Yeah,” I say. “It’s me.” I go to the living room, expecting to see Melody finishing up one of her
workouts or something, but she’s perched on the edge of the couch, hands folded in her lap, dressed in a fluffy orange-patterned skirt and a tight tee. I ask, “Are you getting ready to go out?”

  She dazzles me with a wide smile. “I was waiting for you,” she says. “I thought you might want to go to the vigil with me.” She says this like she’s handing me a gift wrapped with a glittery bow.

  I unwrap the gift. It’s empty. “What vigil?”

  “They’re having a vigil for the missing girl tonight out at Riverside,” Melody says, her smile wilting a little. “It was in the paper. I was thinking we should go.”

  “We?” There’s never been a “we” with me and Melody. “Why?”

  “Because you’re my sister,” she says, like it was silly of me even to ask. “To support this girl and say how much we hope she’s found.”

  This girl. I bet Melody doesn’t even know Monica’s name.

  I don’t ask her, though.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” I say, and flee. I need a second to think. Going somewhere with Melody, especially somewhere as emotionally loaded as a vigil, can’t possibly be so simple as just going somewhere with Melody. She must want something, and that something isn’t spending time with me.

  I don’t go to the bathroom. Well, technically I go to the bathroom—I clomp toward the bathroom and open and shut the door, but I don’t go inside the bathroom. Once I’ve shut the door loudly enough that I know Melody can hear it, I tiptoe back down the hall and into the kitchen, where today’s paper is still scattered across the kitchen table. I unstick it from the coffee rings adorning the wood like the Olympics rings and flip quickly through the pages until I find the article about Monica Jackson.

  The article doesn’t tell me much I don’t already know. It reiterates her full name, which I already knew: Monica Rose Jackson. It contains a black-and-white picture of her—her senior portrait, complete with a tense, hesitant smile and rings of eyeliner so dark it looks almost like she has two black eyes. I already know what she looks like, or what she looked like, anyway, before she went missing. Right now she could be buried in the dirt, gray bone flashing through tattered purple remnants of skin, or locked in a basement somewhere, reduced to skin and bone and enormous pits for eyes.

  The article reminds me that Monica went missing after her night shift several days ago, leaving her register drawers uncounted. It doesn’t tell me whether someone finished counting the drawers for her or if they were left there, gaping open to the night in some sort of monument.

  Probably the former.

  There are pleas from her family: a single mother, two little sisters, and an older brother who swears he’s going to kill the son of a bitch who took his sister. A brief résumé of her life: cheerleader, student council member, and the secretary of Model UN. She wanted to go to The College of New Jersey and double-major in physical therapy and special education. The vigil will be tonight at nine outside Riverside High School; candles will be provided.

  I wonder if there’s a guidebook somewhere about how to write an article about a missing kid. My dad didn’t save any of the articles or MISSING posters or record any of the TV broadcasts from after I went missing, but it wasn’t like it was hard to type my name into Google and see what popped up. My life, too, had been reduced to a series of sound bites: four nine, seventy pounds, black hair, brown eyes. Loves comics. Allergic to shellfish.

  “Scarlett?”

  I jump, and the pages of the newspaper whisper to the floor. “Dad.”

  “I was just putting Matthew to bed,” he says. “What are you up to?”

  I kneel and gather the pages back into a loose packet. “Reading the news.”

  “About the missing girl?”

  “She has a name, you know,” I say, a bit more frostily than I intend.

  “I know,” my dad says. “Monica Rose Jackson. I know her name. I’m sorry.”

  I shake my head. “I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

  “It’s okay.” He glances at the paper in my hands. I drop it on the table, where it falls apart again. Everything I touch falls apart. “Are you going to go to the vigil? I’ll go with you, if you want.”

  “It’s okay,” I say, and then, seized with an uncharacteristic recklessness, I add, “I’m going to go with Melody.”

  “Really?” He sounds skeptical. “You and Melody?”

  I raise my imaginary shield. “She offered.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “Okay.”

  The first choice I made in the basement, and the second choice I made in the Five Banners employment office. This is the third choice. Not just to go to the vigil with Melody, though that’s a choice in itself. No. I choose to continue trying, to continue hoping, to continue swimming against the current in the hope that Melody will change. That she’ll realize she’s been wrong about me all along, that she’s my sister and she loves me.

  I’m wondering if I’ve made a mistake, if I should actually run up to my room and hide, when Melody comes in, her hands clasped together in midclap. “So we’re going?” she says. “You’ll drive?”

  So much for hiding. “I can drive,” I say.

  My dad looks from me to Melody, from Melody to me. “Are any of your friends going, Melly?”

  Melody shakes her head. Her ponytail sways side to side. “Nope, just me and my sister!”

  It kills me how skeptical he looks. “We’ll be fine,” I tell him. How hard would it be for him even to consider that this is a new start? I know as well as he does that Melody plans to use my proximity to the Five Banners folks to learn as much as she can about the missing girl—Monica—and then probably toss me away afterward, like a used tissue. It’s just that, maybe, as she’s doing all that, she’ll discover that she likes me after all, which would lead to braiding each other’s hair and painting each other’s nails. Not that I would want to put my hands on anyone else’s gross feet, but still.

  “Okay,” my dad says. “Just be smart.” He’s looking sternly at Melody. “Be safe.”

  I interject what I hope sounds like a carefree laugh. “We will,” I say. “How ironic would it be to go missing at a missing girl’s vigil?”

  He doesn’t laugh, or even smile. “Melly.”

  She rolls her eyes and crosses her arms. Her own imaginary shield. “I’m not an idiot. I’m not going to do anything stupid.”

  “No one said you were,” my dad says.

  I should link arms with her. No, that would be too much. “We should go,” I say.

  She sweeps from the room without a backward glance. “Let me just pee.”

  “Scarlett, really.” My dad, again. “Be careful.”

  “I promise.”

  —

  I began to say it over and over, every time Pixie complained, every time she cried. “It’s better to be missing than dead.” “It’s better to be missing than dead.” “Pixie, it’s better to be a missing girl than a dead girl.”

  Pixie was not a quick learner the way I was. She ran for it the first time we got upstairs, and Stepmother caught her and beat her with a belt. She ran again that afternoon, and Stepmother caught her and beat her again. She ran again that night, limping a little this time, and Stepmother caught her and beat her yet again.

  That night Stepmother gave me some gauze and medicinal cream, telling me quickly what to do with them, and I cleaned Pixie’s back as she whimpered, telling her to keep quiet, because Stepmother didn’t like when we were loud. She didn’t like the men to hear us down there. I talked to her as I cleaned. It was to distract me as much as it was to distract her; the blood and strips of flesh painting her back made bile burn my throat. “You know the League of the Righteous, right? I read all the comic books and watched all the shows.” She nodded. “Who’s your favorite?”

  “Skywoman,” she said faintly, the word breaking in the middle as I skated over a particularly deep cut.

  “Me too,” I said. “She’s amazing. I wonder what’s been happening since I’ve been
in here.” Pixie didn’t answer, so I forged on. “The last one I read, she’d just cornered the Blade in the sewers. They left it on a cliff-hanger. I mean, of course the Blade’s going to get away, but I want to know how. Maybe she’ll suddenly learn to fly.”

  Still no response. “She’s the coolest. My parents think comic books are for little kids, though. But they didn’t want me anymore. What about yours?”

  Pixie shifted under my careful hand. “I don’t have parents.”

  “Everybody has parents,” I said. “Humans don’t reproduce asexually.” Thank you, third-grade science unit.

  “Of course I had parents once,” Pixie said scornfully, like I was the one who was being stupid. “But I went into foster care when I was four. I don’t even remember them.”

  “Oh,” I said. I wasn’t really sure what foster care was, but I didn’t want her to think I actually was stupid. “Sorry.”

  “It’s—” She sucked air through her teeth. “Sorry. That just really hurt.”

  “These ones here are deeper than the others,” I said. I had to distract her somehow. “Tell me a story. About foster care.” Maybe that way I could figure out what exactly it was.

  “Okay,” she said. “At my old foster mom’s house, I used to have rabbits. I kept them outside, in a hutch in the backyard. My baby foster brother named them, so their names were pretty stupid, but I loved them.”

  “What were their names?”

  She rolled her eyes and sighed. “Bugs Bunny and Baby Bunny,” she said. “No making fun.”

  “I won’t,” I said obediently.

  “Anyway, it turns out Bugs Bunny was a girl and Baby Bunny was a boy,” she said. “Because Bugs Bunny got pregnant and had lots of cute little rabbit babies.”

  “Aw,” I said. She didn’t “aw” back or agree. I should have taken that as a sign. “That must have been so cute.”

  I couldn’t see her face, but her voice lowered, and I imagined her smiling. “They were supercute,” she said. “Their eyes weren’t open at first, so they would squirm around, bumping into each other and Bugs Bunny’s belly.”