The Burning Girl

by Claire Messud

  Cassie walked out the door and he shut it firmly behind her. She heard him slip the deadbolt too. It did not start to rain and she didn’t start to cry until she’d walked all the way back into town, and she told Peter that every time a car slid alongside and passed her, she wondered if it was him, Arthur Clarke Burnes, driving his other children into the new day.

  THERE AREN’T WORDS for that, for how that felt. I know that, even from afar. She didn’t need to say it to Peter—he too could imagine. Cassie was filled with knowledge and uncertainty both, and there was no way back to unknowing. She was certain, in her heart, that this man was her father. She had, all her life, counted on and trusted in her imaginary version of this man. And here he was in the flesh, on this Earth, she said to Peter (or was he? Peter said to me, because neither Peter nor I could muster even a fraction of Cassie’s certainty: why would Arthur Clarke Burnes of Bangor, Maine, be her father? Why would her father even be alive, without proof, when he’d been dead all her life?), here he was at last, her guardian angel—except he wasn’t, was he, after all? She’d been in love all her life with the doting protector of her dreams. But when she most needed him, when Anders Shute had stolen her mother’s love and attention, her father turned out to be real, a man of flesh and blood; and this man had denied her. It was like Peter denying Christ in the Bible, she told Peter. He had looked at her and refused to see her, to acknowledge her existence, even. He had turned his eyes away and closed his door in her face. And when her own mother didn’t want her! (Or, Peter said to me, Cassie might well have been inventing it all. Why? I said. And then I answered, for myself, for Cassie, because suddenly I knew: because it seemed to her she had no other choice, no story that both made sense and gave her the possibility of hope.)

  Cassie had willed her father into life, and then the man she went to claim, the man she so believed in that she had given him her love long before she stood on his doorstep—that man, not imaginary but real, rejected her utterly. And then nobody wanted her, nobody wanted even to claim her; she had nowhere to go.

  But she had, above all, no reason to stay in Bangor, and so she came home. She slept that Tuesday night rough in Boston, having missed the last bus back to Royston; and she showed up at Peter’s—at his window, to be precise, after climbing onto the garage roof—on Wednesday afternoon, filthy, frightened, exhausted, and half off her head. Peter thought that was the end, the dénouement; but he was wrong.

  Where to go? What next? Who will open the door, and their arms, to me? I know her so well that these thoughts are my own, I can step into her skin, see the world from behind her eyes—our blue eyes that always made us sisters—and I’m grateful, and relieved, that she had the wisdom to choose Peter. Peter is who I would have chosen, if for some reason I felt I couldn’t choose me. I wish she’d chosen me. But Peter, he knew what to do, and even though they didn’t hang out anymore, he still loved her. He was a protector. She knew better than to head to the Evil Morsel in Portland, which says plenty.

  Even so, on Thursday morning when finally she stirred, in a patch of April sunlight, in Peter’s room, she found herself alone there with a note from him—“Pre-cal test, gotta go; can skip Spanish & History; back by 11”—she knew she couldn’t stay. His parents, never especially fond of her—she was not the girlfriend high-key Amy Oundle envisaged for her son, “destined” as he was—wouldn’t take well to her presence in his bed. They wouldn’t be the ones to accompany her to her door and to stand at her shoulder as she confronted Bev and Anders Shute. My parents would have done that, or they might have. I would have done that, if she’d asked me.

  Instead, she went alone, hopped on the bike she’d retrieved from behind the Dunkin’ Donuts, had chained to a lamppost around the corner from Peter’s. How she crossed town unnoticed that morning, not once but twice, she of the flaxen hair that shone so brightly in the daylight—I don’t get it. The whole town knew she was missing—or at least half the town did—but this is what I think: you only see what you expect to see. Your brain lets the rest go. Because life’s tumult, with its infinite sounds and smells and signs, rushes around you like a river in flood: you can only take in, you can only grasp, so much. And if you’ve already consigned Cassie to the ranks of the disappeared—all those girls and women snatched by loners or neighbors, battered by fathers, dismembered by jilted lovers, raptured from the bike path or the shopping mall or the late-night bus stop to an invisible and unimagined and nonexistent hereafter—well, if she was already gone, you wouldn’t see her, would you? That’s what I think.

  The house—the cul-de-sac—stood empty in the late morning: Bev’s hospice work, the work of Death, waited for no man; and Anders, mercifully for Cassie, was up at the hospital. The Aucoins’ bitch barely stirred in the yard as Cassie, a familiar sight, a familiar scent, slipped past. She took a shower; she changed her clothes; she fixed a box of mac and cheese and downed a couple of slices of toast with peanut butter. She left the dirty pot on the stove.

  She didn’t turn her phone on, not then or later, maybe because the phone had come to seem like an evil portal, the wormhole through which anyone could reach her, when she didn’t want to be reached. Aside from Peter—and, I’d like to think, from me, but she wasn’t thinking of me—she didn’t want to be in contact with anyone just then.

  In the two hours before Bev came home, what was Cassie doing? What was she thinking? I say I can slip inside her skin and yes, it’s true; I say I knew her better than she knew herself, and yes, it’s true; but when I try to go there, in those moments, all I get is a deafening, meaningless blur of sound. She didn’t know for sure that Bev would come home first, even if she knew it was likely. She didn’t know how Bev would react to finding her runaway daughter returned; but first off, she didn’t know how she, Cassie, would react. Don’t plan it, don’t overthink it, just let it happen, you’ve got to find a way to bridge the chasm from here to there, from this unthinkable present to some unthinkable future . . . But no, I don’t believe there was any thought for the future, not a bit. Betrayed by her mother, denied by her father, she didn’t even know what she felt—raw, alone, heartsick, broken, raw—so how could she think? I don’t believe there was any thought at all, just sound, the roar, the deafening white noise.

  At around two, Bev came home. I only have her version. She didn’t plan to stay; she’d forgotten some paperwork pertaining to her 4:30 p.m. home visit, something about the meds. Because it came up again later. I remember that she used the word “pertaining,” and how weird that was to me. I picture her bustling, her long skirts swirling and her stethoscope draped around her neck, rising and falling on her always breathless bosom—but maybe there’s just time for a quick snack?—and suddenly, around the corner, there’s Cassie, tiny in her puffy parka (she didn’t have her parka when she ran away, did she? Bev thinks), her wet hair hanging limp, perched on a high stool at the kitchen island, cool as you please.

  That’s not my daughter, Bev said she thought—just for a second she thought it was an imposter, from the look in Cassie’s eye. I almost dropped dead, she said, I think I clutched at my heart, it scared the living daylights, her so quiet, like a thief, in the kitchen. Like a thief or a ghost.

  Bev, she said, her voice quiet still, and almost menacing, like she was amused: Bev, you’re home.

  Yes, I am, and so are you, Bev said back. I think I had tears, but it’s true, I didn’t step around the island and give my girl a hug. I can’t explain it. In the moment, I was scared of her, it was like she was an imposter. A changeling. Like they’d given me back a different girl.

  Is it, she said. What did that mean? I mean, really?

  Is it my home? she said then, low and cold. Bev was angry. Sure I was. What she’d put us through, Anders and me. I’d hardly slept. For days. All over a curfew, can you imagine. Well you might ask, I said, after all your shenanigans. (How well I, Julia, remember that: the word “shenanigans” pulled from another country, another century—who says shenanigans?) But Cassie
wasn’t fazed.

  I want to ask you about a few things, Bev, she said, with an emphasis on Bev that was, Bev later said, frankly sinister. And then, as Bev told it, they weren’t questions at all, they were accusations: Bev was a liar, she’d kept Cassie from her father, she’d made up a fake story just so she wouldn’t have to confront the terrible truth: she’d been impregnated by a man who’d never loved Bev and didn’t want to have a child with her, Cassie was a mistake, she wasn’t wanted . . . well, Bev said, you can imagine what it felt like, such wounds inflicted by my own child, the baby girl for whom I’ve sacrificed everything, and then she repeated it for effect: everything.

  Did I, Julia, did any of us, know whom to believe or what was true? None of us was there, there were no witnesses. So that when Bev then explained that Cassie, in her blue parka already before Bev came in the door, as if she was on the verge, already, of leaving—when Bev explained that Cassie had thwacked the counter and called her mother a fucking lying bitch and then had taken off out the door at a run into the chill spring afternoon (a weak sun pushing through the gray, the forsythia neon in the yard), slinging her backpack onto her shoulders, slamming the front door behind her and leaving not a trace, that was the expression Bev used, like something out of a TV show or a detective novel, as in “vanished without a trace,” a rubric for all the armies of vanished girls and women, inevitably traceless—well, it was tough, in that time, to know what Bev meant, or to know how the scene had really unfolded. It just didn’t seem quite right.

  Peter and I weren’t the only ones to wonder. Even on Thursday there were rumors that the police were suspicious. They spent a long time interviewing not only Bev but also Anders Shute, even though he had an alibi; I mean, he was at work.

  My parents, on the face of it, remained reticent and sober. They were trying to be adult, to be calm, trying not to give in to the hysteria that had gripped Royston, already, just a day after Cassie had gone for the second time. They were trying to make me feel there was a precedent for this—one that didn’t end with a corpse on a beach or a rattle of bones among the embers of a fire, or a girl with a needle in her arm in a squat down an alley in Boston. My mother said, “The police are doing their job, is all. They need to know all the people Cassie knows, all the places she might have gone.” And then, “Are you sure, sweetie, she didn’t send you a text? Nothing? To your friend Peter, even?”

  “She closed it all down, Mom. She turned it all off, days ago. She doesn’t want to be found.”

  Peter told the police what he knew. Someone said they’d seen a girl in a blue parka getting into a car on Route 29, on the shoulder, about half a mile north of the Burneses’ place, at about the right time. The car, white or silver they thought, a sedan.

  By Friday morning, Cassie’s photo was up on the LED billboard near the Lotus Garden, smirking down at every driver and every passenger on Route 29, and the police as far as Boston were on the lookout for a near-albino runaway, 5'3" and 104 pounds (she wouldn’t want her weight out there, I knew), wearing a sky-blue puffer, the thin-tube kind, skinny jeans, and a pair of black Nikes on her feet. The official description said nothing about the gap between her teeth, or the lopsidedness of her smile, and I couldn’t help but think that she’d have changed her coat and dyed her hair by the time they issued the description—it was pretty basic, wasn’t it? Even I would know to do that.

  Had Bev really let her daughter, her one and only precious, beautiful daughter, run out the front door when only just retrieved from the abyss, almost returned from the dead, without trying, at least, to stop her? Why hadn’t she pursued her, driven up the road even a few minutes later? There had to have been a considerable lag between the moment Cassie bolted and when she climbed into the front passenger seat of the light-colored sedan, not three minutes but more like ten or fifteen, and how could it be that her mother, in those minutes, did absolutely nothing to save her?

  By Friday we heard of sightings reported everywhere—in Haverhill, of course, in Newburyport, but in Portsmouth too, at Faneuil Hall in Boston, even in Provincetown, although nobody I knew believed in that one. At school, everyone had their own ideas. I kept expecting someone to ask me what I knew, because I knew Cassie better than anybody; but Peter was the only one. It didn’t occur to people that I’d have anything to say, because our friendship had been “over” since the beginning of middle school. Two years—two and a half, maybe—but it wasn’t like we didn’t speak at all. Never mind that we’d been conjoined all our lives, Siamese twins until the Evil Morsel. Never mind that we were sisters under the skin. But Peter understood. He sought me out and told me all he knew, and all he’d told the detective. He told me what her friends were saying—they thought she’d made a beeline to New York, that was so obvious. They said she’d talked about being a model there—this was Mason, Cassie’s friend for all of six months, dumb but gorgeous, in a rotating collection of Lululemon from the outlet mall up in Kittery—and that Brianna’s cousin Jae might have heard from her, even: he’d had calls from a Massachusetts cell number that he’d thought at first were random, but it might have been her, right? Another of her friends, Alma, the girl she’d got in trouble for, thought she might be on her way to Florida—spring break still down there, if she’d hitched all the way, and then if you just hooked up with the right guy, you could be set for a long time.

  Luckily I didn’t have to hear these girls spout this idiotic stuff. They told Peter, ever-patient ally or frank double-agent, and Peter repeated it to me, and that Thursday afternoon we walked out of school and sat on the climbing structure in the playground down the road—the playground they’d been rebuilding that long-ago summer when Cassie hurt her hand at the animal shelter. A raw breeze insinuated itself under our jackets, the kind that makes you turn your collar up, and the metal platform froze my butt through my cords. Peter wasn’t wearing a proper jacket, just a sweatshirt—COLBY on it in big white letters—and he bunched his fists underneath it against his belly for warmth, so he looked pregnant. Another time, I might have made a joke about it.

  “You don’t think she’s in Florida or New York City,” I said.

  He shook his head. We pushed our backs against the bright metal poles of the structure, up high, our legs tucked up in front of us. We could see out through the trees—branches, mostly, their imminent leaves still tight buds—to the road, where occasional cars swished mournfully by. I felt as though we were in a story about ourselves, the story that was, at last, adult life; and I didn’t want to be there. We sat in silence for a minute; I pulled on a thread at my knee, the edge of the hole in my professionally holey jeans, the ones I’d promised my mother I wouldn’t wear to school.

  “You don’t think—” I said.

  And then I stopped. I couldn’t say what I thought we were both thinking.

  “A lot of shit can go wrong in this world,” Peter said. “But we don’t have any evidence that anything has. Right?”

  “I guess.”

  “No, that’s the truth. All we know is that we don’t know.”

  “That doesn’t help much.”

  “You’ve gotta start somewhere,” he said. I looked at his hands, his long fingers with their clean, square nails. Sometimes I still couldn’t believe he didn’t desire me back. Even then, there, I could anticipate his every movement, as if he were surrounded by a force-field, so compelling it almost repelled. Surely he was aware of it? But was he not saying: all we know is that we don’t know; and if this was true about Cassie, was it not also true about everything, every uncertain action to which we attribute such certainty?

  “Look,” he said, the tip of his bony nose and the rims of his nostrils reddening in the cold, “until she showed up in my room—literally in my room—on Tuesday, we thought she might be dead, right? Until she just appeared, it seemed like she’d fallen off the planet.”

  “True.”

  “We didn’t know whether to believe what Bev and Shute were saying had happened. You can’t say we didn�
��t wonder if she was under a pile of leaves in the woods behind their house.”

  “In the Encroaching Forest,” I said, though only Cassie would have understood. I tore at the skin on my lip with my front teeth until I tasted blood. How important it had been in those few days not to allow that thought—that image—not to articulate it to Peter or my parents, and not to myself. But it was true: you couldn’t say we hadn’t wondered, looking at Shute’s eyes and thin lips, at the grimace of supposed anguish that could easily have been a smirk; and at Bev, whose abundant flesh had always made her seem jolly but who now seemed potentially dark.

  “She wasn’t in danger then,” Peter said, “so why should she be in danger now?”

  “Because before, she left a note, and took her bike.”

  “But this time she took her coat.” We lapsed again into silence.

  “Do you think she knew where she was going?”

  Peter shook his head slightly, looking out through the trees. “She’s not in a good way,” he said. “This whole Clarke Burnes thing has messed with her head.”

  “This whole Anders Shute thing,” I said, “or Bev thing.”

  “This whole life thing.”

  I closed my eyes. You could hear, muffled, the gentle cars, and far off the shouts and laughter of the kids in the yard at the high school. There was nobody in the kiddie playground but us, teenagers way too big for it, and the air smelled of wet earth and cold metal. For a second I thought that maybe when I opened my eyes, she’d be there, rocking on the springed purple pony down below, knees to her chin, smiling wide. But I realized that Cassie in my mind’s eye wasn’t the girl of now but the girl of then, pure figment, gone.

  Just then, Nancy, our egret, that unlikely vision that Cassie and I had named the summer before everything changed—or maybe it was Nancy’s cousin—came to remind me of the quarry. There wasn’t any logic to it, not when Cassie had last been seen getting into a car on the highway. If she was looking to fly, it wouldn’t be a flight away but a flight back, almost time travel. But it was the strangest thing, in April, in Massachusetts, in the barely relieved damp of early spring, to see behind Peter’s shoulder, in the distance, the slow, prehistoric ascent of an egret from the half-empty, leaf-sodden ornamental pond at the park’s far end. The waving of those thin, dark, vast wings bothered my peripheral vision and I turned, at speed—was it a ghost? I wondered fleetingly—to see her deliberate, inexorable rise, that S-bend neck tucked, the webby feet retracting like an airplane’s wheels. And I thought, It’s April—I can’t be seeing this: Nancy, in Royston, now, and I reached without thinking to grab Peter’s arm—I could tell he was surprised; he flinched a little, or his forearm did, beneath my hand; because we didn’t touch much, Peter and I, by which I mean, we never touched, an awkwardness I could interpret in various ways, both flattering and unflattering, and which I had chosen for a long while simply not to think about. “Look,” I whispered. “Nancy.”