Tessa followed me through the front hallway into the kitchen. I dumped the brochures in the trash. It was pointless. Who was I kidding? I wasn’t getting out of this town. I wasn’t going anywhere as long as Abby was missing.
We went into the family room, and even though the pictures were strewn all over the room, Tessa didn’t say a word. Instead, we sat on opposite sides of the couch, our feet touching in the middle. The TV played in the background, some commercial about a sale at a furniture store.
“Have you heard anything else?” she asked.
“The cops think Tommy is a suspect,” I said and hated the words on my tongue.
“Everyone at school is talking about it.”
“He didn’t do anything to Abby,” I said, and wished I had the courage to tell her the real story about what happened.
“I never for a second thought he did,” she said with a certainty that reminded me of how much I loved Tessa.
“Thank you,” I told her.
When she spoke next, her voice was almost too soft to be heard over the television. “I’m worried about Abby.”
“So am I.”
“Where do you think she is?”
“I have to believe she’s somewhere safe.”
“We all do,” she agreed. The mood in the room had shifted. The two of us focused on the television because what more could you say after that?
The afternoon news came back from commercials and Abby’s face filled the screen. It was her school photo from last year. She wore a mint green shirt that made the blues of her eyes even more brilliant. Her hair was down and I remembered her braiding it the night before so the curls would be perfect. My sister smiled back at me from the television as a news anchor talked.
“Efforts are being made to help find a missing teen who disappeared this weekend. Abby Towers, a high school junior at Coffinberry High School, was last seen at a bonfire with classmates. A community-wide search is in effect, as everyone helps to locate her.”
The woman went on to give a phone number for the police if anyone had tips or information, but I wasn’t paying attention. Instead, I focused on the images that were on the screen.
It was Black Willow Lake, which was where the river flowed. The lake that was usually full of Coffinberry kids trying to find a place to cool off in the summer heat. Only in the images on the news, it wasn’t full of my classmates but divers in black suits, sleek as seals.
I hit the mute button. I didn’t want to hear what the newswoman had to say. I’d seen enough crime shows and movies to understand why someone would be diving in a lake.
They were searching for my sister.
Or more specifically, her body.
I jumped up from the couch, ran into the bathroom, and threw up. My hands gripped the sides of the toilet, unable to find absolution for what I’d done.
17
Officer Donovan showed up that evening as we sat around the dinner table. My parents had picked up a pizza on their way home, but Collin was the only one eating any of it. The poor kid pretty much subsisted on pizza or peanut butter and jelly these days. Next to him sat a stack of my collages that I’d made him.
“Can you make me another?” he asked me.
“I don’t know, Collin . . . ,” I said and trailed off, not quite sure how to tell him that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
“Please? Something with Abby in it too. It’s okay if she wants to share one of my pictures. The two of us could be doing something together. Like when she was here.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I told him, and the hope in his eyes made me feel even worse. It was as if someone had closed their fist around my heart.
Our doorbell rang, and Collin ran to the door.
“It’s the police,” he called to us. The police meant Abby, and we needed to be there for whatever it was they came here to tell us.
“Good evening, Mr. Towers,” Officer Donovan said to Dad after he opened the door.
“Please, call me Will. Do you want me to make some coffee for you?” he asked. Never mind the fact that Dad didn’t even drink coffee. He said even the smell of it made him sick.
“No, I think it’s best that we go into the living room to talk.” He gestured at Collin.
“Hey, buddy,” Dad said to my brother. “I’m going to turn on some cartoons and you can stay in the kitchen. Does that sound okay?”
Collin nodded and I wished I could be like him, so easily swayed and made happy by having his favorite show turned on.
Mom, on the other hand, was the opposite. She shook her head like she was the one having a tantrum.
“I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t hear what you have to say.”
Dad placed his hand on her shoulder, but she shook it off.
“What wrong, Mom?” Collin asked, now concerned with the conversation a second ago he couldn’t care less about.
“Everything is okay,” Dad said, and looked pointedly at Mom. “Rhylee, why don’t you stay here with your brother?”
He gestured at me to take him upstairs.
“I’m coming with you,” I said. “Abby is my sister; I need to hear what they have to say.”
Dad looked from me to Collin, back and forth. I crossed my hands over my chest. I wasn’t going to be left out of this conversation. He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “Fine. Collin, stay in the kitchen and watch your show.”
Collin nodded, so we took the opportunity to move into the living room. Once we were all there, Officer Donovan spoke again.
“As you’re aware, we had divers searching the lake today,” he said, and I fought back a swell of bile that rose up from my stomach at the mention of the water. “We looked as much as we could, but the current was rough from the storms and visibility was near zero. The recent rains stirred everything up and debris and logs made it dangerous to search. However, the team found an item that belongs to your daughter.”
“What is it?” Mom said in a voice louder than I’d heard her use in days.
Officer Donovan closed his eyes for a moment, as if what he had to say next was hard to get out.
“They found one of Abby’s tennis shoes at the bottom of the lake. It was tangled in a bunch of weeds about halfway from shore.”
“Are you sure it belongs to her?” Dad asked.
Officer Donovan eyes remained fixed on a spot beyond Dad’s shoulder when he talked to us next. “It had her road ID on it.”
I could picture the tag he was talking about in my mind. It was metal and had Velcro so you could put it around the bottom of your laces. Her name and phone number were stamped on it in case something happened to her when she was out running. I’d made fun of her for wearing a tag like Hound Dog did. Now, it seemed, the tag had done exactly what it was supposed to do. Identify my sister.
“The footprints we found on the shore match the tennis shoe in the lake. It places Abby at the edge of the river,” he continued. “Does she swim? Is there any reason she would’ve been in the lake?”
“No,” Dad said. “Abby isn’t the strongest swimmer. She stays away from the river. We’ve told her to since she was young.”
Dad was right. Abby may have been the best runner our school had ever seen, but her athletic ability only existed on land. She was a terrible swimmer, usually opting to sit in the grass and tan while everyone else swam.
“She could have lost a shoe when she was in the woods,” Mom said, her voice flat and hollow.
But that wasn’t true.
People fool themselves into believing what they want to be real. They had found the proof. No amount of lies we told ourselves could undo the evidence the police had.
I had to get away. I couldn’t hear Officer Donovan tell Mom she was wrong. That a person doesn’t lose their shoe and then it ends up tangled at the bottom of a lake.
I slipped out of the room and went outside before he destroyed Mom’s hopes.
I ran, even though I hated to run. I moved down the same stre
tch of earth that my sister’s feet had followed so many times. I pushed myself even when my lungs ached for air. I went farther and farther and crossed the field into the entrance of the woods. The sun was nearly gone. The trees cast shadows everywhere, but still I raced forward until I was once again at the river’s edge.
“I did this,” I cried into the water, my words getting lost in the rush of the current. I yelled my guilt over and over again and prayed that wherever Abby was, she could hear me. I yelled until my voice became hoarse and raw, and it hurt to swallow.
I collapsed on the grass and crossed my hands over my chest. I tried to catch my breath, but it was thick and labored. My mind was tangled up with sins, about Tommy and me and how destructive love is.
This was it.
The end.
It had to be.
I could never, ever be with him again.
I made a promise to the universe.
“Tommy and I are nothing, just bring Abby home! Please!” I begged, my voice choked with sobs.
The river continued to rage. It taunted me for my foolishness, thinking that one could wish everything okay.
I closed my eyes and created a different ending to the story Officer Donovan just told us. In my version, when Abby fell into the water, she kicked off her shoes and striped off the clothes that were heavy and pulling her down. She swam to the surface and climbed out, running barefoot all the way back home to us, and I was there waiting. And Tommy never came between us again. There was only my sister and me, and everything was the way it used to be.
18
The police assumed the worst. They concentrated their efforts on the river, and even though nothing was said, there was a heavy feeling in the air that my sister’s disappearance was now a recovery effort. Cadaver dogs were brought in to scour the woods, their noses kept low to the ground as they tried to catch a scent of Abby. The police would deny it if you asked them, and wanted to keep what they’d found in the water a secret, but I knew they were no longer looking for a missing person, but for a body.
The town wouldn’t accept that my sister was gone from our lives forever. How does one come to terms with something like that? It was asking the impossible. So as day faded into night and night faded into day, we clung to the idea that she was still out there and would walk through our door at any moment.
A news conference was set up in front of our house, and my parents pled with everyone watching to come forward if they had any information to share. It interrupted the morning talk shows broadcast on every channel. I watched from the little TV in the kitchen, because there was no way I could hold it together enough to stand beside them on live TV. The news crew had put makeup on Mom, but it wasn’t enough to hide the black circles under her eyes and the hollowness that sank deep into her cheeks. Everyone could see how broken she’d become as she and Dad spoke straight to the camera and begged Abby to come home.
I didn’t go back to school that week. I stayed home and looked for my sister. How could I not? Abby was missing, and I needed to find her. No one said I couldn’t, even on those mornings my parents were still in the house when I woke up. It was as if there was an unspoken rule that our lives would stay suspended until Abby returned.
I ignored Tommy’s text messages. It was awful of me, but I was afraid if I read them, I’d answer them, and that could never, ever happen again. Tommy and I could never, ever happen again.
The thing about guilt is that it bites its teeth deep within you and doesn’t let go. And why should it? Instead of getting easier, the days got heavier and heavier, weighing on my shoulders until I thought I’d explode. The moments when Mom would stare off into space and her eyes would gloss over, the lines on Dad’s face that I don’t remember existing a week ago, and Collin, who slept with the light on in his bedroom now and often woke up crying from nightmares he refused to tell us about.
I wanted to tell the truth, but at what cost? I practiced what I’d say to my parents, testing out words, but there was no right way.
I covered one wall in my room with Abby’s missing person flyers. The picture had been taken at a picnic last summer. Abby was laughing at the camera, holding up a pinwheel. She and Collin had held them out of the car window on the way home, letting the breeze turn them around and around.
I hung each so it was perfectly aligned with the one next to it; her face smiled back at me over and over again. I hung up picture after picture of Abby, but no matter how many I added, they couldn’t fill the space that she had left behind.
19
Dad opened my bedroom door Sunday morning and sat on the end of my bed. I was awake, but not ready to start another week without my sister.
“How are you doing, honey?” His voice was gentle, and it made me feel worse, because I didn’t deserve it. Dad was doing his best to hold us together, to be the strong one, but it couldn’t be easy not to fall apart in front of everyone.
“About as well as the rest of you are.”
“Not good, then,” Dad said, and I nodded.
“Not at all.”
“This is hard for everyone.” He nodded at the flyers I’d hung on the wall, but didn’t say anything about them.
“It’s pretty much impossible,” I told him.
Dad took a deep breath and let it out. He looked exhausted. He never stopped moving. If he wasn’t home trying to coordinate search efforts with others on the phone, then he was out himself with the groups trying to find Abby. I didn’t know when he slept, but then again, maybe he didn’t want to sleep. Nightmares clouded my dreams, and I wasn’t sure what was better: what haunted me in my sleep or my reality.
He picked up a picture that was face-down on my desk, one of Tommy and me, and examined it. I’d gotten rid of everything else that reminded me of him, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw away this image.
The picture was the two of us at the carnival that came to the nearby city every summer. We were standing in front of one of those rides that spins you around and around until you get sick. The two of us had huge grins on our faces, proud that we’d gone on it three times in a row.
“You know Tommy wouldn’t hurt Abby, don’t you?” I asked. “Mom thinks he did something to her.”
He lowered the picture and walked over to my bed. “Your mom is trying to make sense of this.”
“But how can she blame Tommy? Where’s the sense in that?”
“No one is blaming Tommy. We’re just trying to find answers so we can bring your sister home.”
“Tommy isn’t a part of this,” I told Dad, and I needed him to believe me. “He’d never hurt her.”
“I know that, honey.” He pulled open my window shade and let the morning light flow in. “What do you think about going back to school tomorrow? You’ve already missed a week.”
“I need to look for Abby.”
“The FBI are bringing in a search team from out of state. They’ll look during the day, and we need to let them do their job. You can help when you get home, but I think it would be a good idea if you went back,” he said in a way that told me this was an idea I couldn’t turn down.
“I’m not sure I can handle being at school when she isn’t.”
“We need to keep moving,” Dad said. “Try it for one day, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll talk again.”
I nodded, but returning to school was the last thing I wanted to do. It didn’t seem fair. It made me feel as if I were giving up on Abby; like I was going back to my normal life when she couldn’t.
Dad placed his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “Thanks for being so strong,” he said, and I flinched.
I was anything but strong. I was weak and afraid I’d fall apart at any moment.
20
The next morning I got ready as if it were a regular school day. I showered, dried my hair, picked out an outfit, and even put a little lip gloss on. I had the radio on to the station I always listened to and had my usual breakfast of a piece of toast and a banana. I grabbed my bag and waited
for the bus, and when it came, I climbed on and took a seat just like I always did. I forced myself to follow my usual routine, but it felt so very wrong. I shouldn’t be allowed to do any of this, not after what I’d done.
I kept my eye on Tommy’s house and wondered what he was doing. If it had been any other morning, Tommy would pull up, beep twice, and Abby would run out. He’d point to the middle seat if I was around and let me know I could squeeze in, but I never did. Life hurt a lot less when I didn’t have to watch the two of them together.
Today, I stared at the screen on my phone to avoid the stares of everyone around me. I searched “missing teens” on the Internet and read reports about others who had disappeared like Abby. There seemed to be hundreds of accounts about people who had vanished. I clicked on the image button at the top of the search engine and face after face appeared. I scrolled through and wondered what their stories were. Where did they go and had they returned?
The bus pulled up in front of the school and stopped with a giant lurch. I expected school to look different. I expected everything to be different now, because I was different. But everything was the way it always was, which made it even harder for me.
The chain-link fence that ringed the stadium had become a tribute to my sister. Styrofoam cups were stuck in between the links and spelled out ABBY COME HOME. My classmates used the fence to cheer on our sports teams or convince one another of who should be class president, but now it was a plea for my sister to come home to the place I’d once so desperately wanted to get away from.
A Void the Size of the World Page 7