A Void the Size of the World

by Rachele Alpine

  Two girls in my history class were whispering about them a little bit too loud when a student aide came in with a note. It was during the last class of the day, ten minutes before the bell rang, and all I wanted to do was get out of there.

  “Rhylee, you need to go to the office,” Mr. Scott said after he had read the piece of paper in his hand. “You can take your stuff, since class will probably be over before you get back.”

  I stood slowly. I was afraid. The office never called for me, and I hadn’t done anything to earn a trip to see our principal. What if they had news about Abby?

  What if it was bad news? Confirming what we were all afraid to say out loud.

  My head spun with worries and fears as I made my way to the office. I wanted to walk past the door that led inside. I could keep going, right out of the building. I could go somewhere else, stay away from my house and live in perfect oblivion for a few more hours. But I couldn’t do that. I had to face things no matter what the cost.

  I relaxed a little when the secretary, Mrs. Hastings, smiled at me. I figured you couldn’t tell someone bad news if you looked happy. At least I hoped that was the case.

  Our principal, Mr. Ralston, walked out of the meeting room.

  “Everything is okay, right?” I blurted out.

  “Yes, yes, sorry about that, I didn’t mean to make you nervous. Thanks for coming down.” He shifted from the front of his feet to the back and looked uncomfortable.

  “No problem,” I mumbled, and prepared myself for a lecture. If this didn’t have to do with Abby, I had a feeling it was about my grades and how bad they were. I wasn’t a fool. I understood that I had to do well in school if I wanted any chance of going to college, especially since I wouldn’t be able to pull it off without some sort of financial aid. But sitting down and studying wasn’t exactly at the top of my list of things to do right now.

  “Listen, I talked to your mother and we have some . . .” He paused for a moment and then spoke the last words quickly, “. . . possessions of your sister’s. We gathered the stuff the police didn’t take out of her locker, and when I talked to your mother, she said you could bring it home.” He walked into a small room, and I stood there stunned. This was not what I’d expected when I got called down here. Was I supposed to follow him? I didn’t want to. And I didn’t want him to come out. I didn’t want a bunch of Abby’s stuff. Was Mom so clueless as to think I wouldn’t mind bringing it home?

  I couldn’t believe they’d cleared out her locker as if to make way for someone else. It had only been three weeks. Something bitter bubbled up, and when I tried to push it back down, a sound that was half laugh and half cough popped out my mouth.

  Mr. Ralston came back with a cardboard box. It had been used to ship something; the address blackened out with a thick marker. Pieces of masking tape stretched across the top to keep it closed, but you could still see inside if you wanted to look. I didn’t.

  I took the box as if it held a dead animal. It was surprisingly light, but too big to hide.

  “Thanks,” I muttered, and turned to leave.

  “Of course. It’s the least I can do to help.” Mr. Ralston put his hand on my shoulder. “I heard about the circles. I was thinking of stopping by one of these nights.”

  I wanted to jam the box back into his hands and tell him that he could take the damn thing to my house then, but I simply nodded.

  I left without saying a thing, the weight of Abby’s items in my hands growing heavier with each step.

  37

  I stuffed the box into my book bag. The corners cut into my back and just knowing it was there made it feel as if it weighed a million pounds.

  Instead of getting on the bus and having to give its contents to my parents, I went to the grocery store, since no one in my family remembered to buy food anymore. We grazed on the scraps around the kitchen: odds and ends, peanut butter and jelly or tomato soup for dinner, dry cereal for breakfast. We never seemed to run out of food, but we also never had the right food for a complete meal. Poor Collin had dined on a gourmet dinner of instant mashed potatoes and breakfast sausages last night.

  I grabbed a basket and filled it with milk, fresh veggies, fruit, bread, some lunch meat, and two chocolate bars I planned to share with Collin.

  On my way out, the bulletin board near the automatic doors caught my eye. It had one of my sister’s missing person flyers stuck on it.

  Men in business suits rushed out with small bags of food and mothers walked in with sleepy babies in one hand and lists in the other. They moved past me without looking at the flyer, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from it.

  I touched Abby’s face. There were tabs at the bottom of the flyer with the police department’s number to call if you had anything to report. Three of the tabs were ripped off. It reminded me of my collages, the images torn apart and pieced back together to create the reality I wanted. What if these tabs could do the same?

  There was a slight twinge of excitement in my stomach. Usually when I saw these, they were intact, whole, but someone had touched this one. The numbers at the bottom were in someone’s fist, pocket, purse, or sitting on top of a dresser. My mind spun. Did someone have knowledge about Abby? Could we be wrong about the river? The thought made me giddy with hope.

  I pulled the flyer with the missing tabs off the board and stuffed it in my purse. This sheet of paper represented something to me. Maybe Abby was still out there and I needed to find her. If I could make sense of anything I’d done, it was that I shouldn’t give up. I had to make things right.

  38

  Mom was at the living room table in front of the computer clicking away on Abby’s tribute page when I got home. I waved the carton of milk at her as I tried to rush past, hoping she wasn’t thinking about the box in my book bag. “Have no fear; we won’t die of calcium depletion this week.”

  She looked up, “I didn’t know we were out.”

  Of course not, I wanted to say. You don’t notice anything these days.

  I could create a whole list of things Mom didn’t see these days, starting with the pile of unopened mail in our front hallway, the dust and dirt that collected on our floors, which hadn’t been swept or mopped in weeks, and the fact that Collin got away with not taking a bath for almost a week before I noticed. My grades were falling so fast that I wasn’t even sure if I could salvage them and Collin was practically a walking zombie from exhaustion, since Mom didn’t enforce his bedtime anymore.

  When I glanced back, she was already bent over her stupid notebook full of Abby sightings again, and frustration built inside of me. Her obsession with the messages on Abby’s tribute page, Collin’s obsession with aliens, the town’s obsession with the circles—they were nothing. Nothing that would help.

  But the flyer, I told myself, that was something. That could mean something. And the idea calmed me.

  I put the groceries away and headed upstairs with the candy bars. I planned to unload the box of Abby’s stuff and see if I could find some kind of connection to her. The box promised new ways to remember my sister.

  I hesitated for only a second and considered handing it over to Mom or Dad. It would be the right thing to do, but this might be my only chance to see what was inside. If there was something in the box I could hold on to, I wanted to pull it out before one of my parents found it. Mom would probably set it on Abby’s desk, another shrine to gather dust.

  I locked the door to my room and dug my nails under the packing tape, not even bothering with scissors. The tape cut into my hands and twisted into tight ropes, so I broke it with my teeth. I yanked open the flaps at the top of the box and stuck my hand in.

  The first thing I pulled out was a pair of her running shoes, held together with knots joining the bright purple shoelaces she loved to use. All of her shoes had purple laces; it was her trademark. I pictured her running ovals on the high school track during the school day. If you played a sport, you didn’t have to take gym, so the period when Abby would’ve
chased a volleyball around or done enough jumping jacks to keep your heart rate up, she instead went out and ran. I could see her from the upstairs bathroom window of the school. Abby had a hypnotic effect on people. There were times when I’d let ten or fifteen minutes go by as I watched my sister, and then the bell would ring and break me out of my trance.

  I tried her shoes on and they were the perfect fit. I stretched my legs in front of me, and it was as if Abby was sitting there. I pulled them off, because it didn’t feel right. I stretched my own feet in front of me. The pink polish she had painted on my nails was chipped and almost all gone.

  I dug back into the box and pulled out a half-empty bottle of the lemon-scented body spray she always doused herself with. I pumped the top of the bottle and caught the scent in the air, letting it settle around me.

  There was a bunch of papers stacked on top of one another. I shifted through them and wished for a note, something personal, but they were all school papers, her slanted handwriting crowded together on each line, one word almost running into the next.

  I found a pair of sunglasses that was missing one of its lenses and a hair tie, which I used to gather my hair into a ponytail. I pulled out her school-issued agenda that everyone was given the first day of school. I paged through it, but it was empty. I grabbed a pen from my desk and put a number one on the date she went missing. I numbered each day after it until I got to today. Day fourteen. I paged through the rest of the book and wondered how many other days would be empty of my sister. I couldn’t think about it; she had to come home. I pushed the agenda aside and went back to the box.

  There was a worn-out T-shirt folded neatly on the bottom. I recognized it immediately. I knew about the hole in the left corner and the blue stain on the backside without even looking. It was the shirt Abby had worn when she ran her first marathon on her sixteenth birthday. Most normal people would go for their driver’s license, but not Abby. She’d wanted something more, so she’d set out to train months before, ignoring Dad’s pestering that she should be practicing her driving skills. He’d made it more than obvious that he was counting the days until Abby got her license and could take over the job of chauffeuring Collin and me around.

  “Why would I need wheels when I can run everywhere?” she’d asked, and it was true. Abby did run everywhere: to the store, friends’ houses, and even school, which I didn’t understand. I’d be a big sweaty mess if that was my means of transportation, but somehow Abby always managed to look as if she had taken a leisurely stroll.

  “It’s a goal, something to work toward,” she’d told us when we teased her about the race.

  “Nothing says celebration like a twenty-six-mile race,” I’d joked, because even the idea of running that far made my legs ache.

  “Twenty-six point two,” she’d corrected me with a grin.

  My family got up on the morning of her birthday not to watch her eat cake and open presents, but to watch her cross the finish line before coffee and cold air had fully woken us up. She’d ended the race with her hands held high in the air, and we’d wrapped our arms around her sweaty body, her T-shirt covered in messages we’d scrawled before the race.

  I read the words on her shirt now and remembered when Abby had proclaimed, after running twenty-six point two miles, that she could now take on the world.

  The last item in the box was a notebook with math problems written on the first few pages. I turned to the next page and a photograph fell out. It was of the two of us, hands slung around each other’s shoulders with our heads tilted back as we were caught in mid-laugh. I couldn’t remember when it was taken, but the happiness on both our faces was impossible to look at.

  “I’m so sorry, Abby.” I traced the outline of her face. “Please come home.”

  I flipped through the rest of the notebook and stopped when I found a page of her writing. It looked like the draft of a note, the words scratched out and written again.

  A note written to Tommy.

  I closed the notebook. It was private, not meant for me.

  But what if I held a clue? I found the page again and read the words.

  Tommy,

  I don’t know what I’d do without you. You saved me. You have no idea.

  The note stopped there, and I imagined her writing it in class and having to turn the page when her teacher walked by or the bell rang.

  You saved me. Saved her from what? What did he have no idea about? And if Tommy had saved my sister, what had I done to her?

  “Destroyed her,” I said out loud. “That’s what you did.”

  I picked up the picture of the two of us and ripped it in half. I removed myself from the image because I didn’t deserve to be with her. Not after what I’d done.

  I hid the picture in my desk drawer. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. I placed everything else back in the box.

  I carried it to my parents’ room and left it on their dresser. The scent of her perfume clung to my clothes, and if I closed my eyes, I could pretend that I wasn’t standing here all alone.

  39

  I added the flyer I’d taken from the grocery store to the wall in my room.

  Three missing tags.

  Three chances to bring home Abby.

  The paper was jagged where the tags had been ripped off, and I had to believe that they meant something.

  If people were pulling off our number, then I was going to continue to plaster it all over town. I wouldn’t be like Mom; I’d do something—something useful. I’d make sure the flyers were everywhere so no one could miss them.

  “We need to hang more posters of Abby,” I told Dad the next morning at breakfast.

  “I think everyone did a pretty good job putting them around town, but I can talk with the police and see what they can do,” Dad said, always the practical one, even when practicality was useless.

  “No, that’s not enough,” I argued. “I want to go out and distribute them myself so we can make sure we have them everywhere.”

  It was probably pointless. I’m sure Dad was right about the town being blanketed in flyers, but what if more tabs were taken from some of them? What if all the tabs were taken from one and someone needed to take one? And I needed to get a new flyer up at the grocery store to replace the one I took. If I helped pass out the flyers, I’d know exactly where they were going, and I could keep track of them. If there was a chance Abby was still out there, I had to help.

  “Please. We need to make sure the town is flooded with these posters,” I insisted.

  Dad must have realized how important this was to me, because he didn’t even hesitate. “Sure, we can go this afternoon. I’ll pick you up at school,” he said.

  “You can come too,” I told Mom.

  “I’d like that,” she said, and I hoped she’d still be willing to go when the time came. It seemed as if her mornings were better than her afternoons. She got up, made us breakfast, and watched Collin leave for school. It was in the hours after that she seemed to forget about us. Something happened during the hours in between the morning and afternoon, so the Mom I said good-bye to in the morning was often different than the one I saw when I got home. She’d be sitting in front of the computer screen filling her notebook with name after name. The pins on the wall continued to multiply until it seemed as if Abby was everywhere.

  “We need to keep her in everyone’s mind,” I said, as if anyone could think of anything but Abby. Her disappearance was a heavy weight, draped over us, dragging us down.

  “What about me? I want to do something,” Collin said.

  “You can take care of Hound Dog for Abby. He misses her,” I told him.

  “Okay, the two of us will watch the circles,” he said, and tried to coax the dog to the window.

  Collin’s obsession with the circles was getting worse.

  Despite all of our conversations with him that there was nothing out of this world happening in our backyard, he wouldn’t stop talking about it. If my parents were smart, they’
d put blackout curtains on the windows so he couldn’t stake out the field.

  “The circles don’t need anyone to watch over them,” Dad said firmly.

  “They mean something. These things don’t appear without a reason,” Collin insisted. He pulled sheets of paper out of his pockets. He laid images of circles all over our table. “The signs are here. The circles are from somewhere far away.”

  He talked fast, in an excited voice, as if someone might stop him. His finger traced one of the circles, moving around and around the intricate pattern. “This one was found in Michigan. That’s not too far from here. And this field has a whole bunch just like our house. Maybe they’re connected.”

  Dad shook his head and gathered the plates. “Collin, believe me, it’s an awful joke. Nothing more. Don’t get yourself worked up about something that doesn’t mean a thing.”

  I nodded my agreement, but when I turned to Mom for her affirmation, she was bent over one of the pictures, studying it intently.

  Collin saw the same thing and turned to her, speaking as if she were his singular audience. “This field had circles found it in it three times. They kept showing up.” He continued to talk about the different pictures and Mom listened. She stared at the sheets that were spread out in front of her as if she was lost and was studying some map that would lead her back home.

  40

  “Where are we heading?” Dad asked when he picked me up after school with a backseat full of flyers for my sister. It was only the two of us. Dad apologized for Mom not “feeling up to joining us.”

  “The town square. I figure we can hit the stores on both sides of the street, and after, we can grab dinner.”

  “Now you’re talking,” Dad said. “I’ve been craving Deagan’s.”