The Burning Girl

by Claire Messud

  “Who’s Nancy?” I could hear in his voice that he was smiling, but I didn’t look at him, because I couldn’t look away from the bird, black and graceful and awkward against the ominous sky. I pointed, and could hear Peter’s intake of breath. “What’s she doing here?” he asked. “Wrong season, right?”

  “It’s like she isn’t even real,” I said, by which time she was gone into the tree shadows beyond the park.

  “Who’s Nancy then?” Peter asked after a minute, standing and swinging himself down the pole to the ground. “My butt is freezing.”

  “Yeah. It’s still cold.” I slid down the slide instead. When I put my hands on my rear end I could feel the refrigerated flesh through my jeans. I explained to Peter about Nancy, about the inside joke she’d been between Cassie and me in our last twinned summer, when we could never have imagined coming unstuck, and expected to be friends always.

  “I haven’t seen a Nancy bird in a long time. Like, maybe she sent her.”

  “Never say never, I guess. Which leads you to what, exactly? What’s the message, if there is one?”

  I said that we should go to the quarry.

  “You’re kidding, right?” he pointed at the sky. “This weather? And it’s five o’clock already. What are you hoping to find? Why in God’s name would she go there? Like, she’s made a Girl Scout tent out of broken fir branches and is building a fire to roast fiddleheads?”

  “Like, maybe,” I said. Ordinarily, I might have worried that Peter would laugh at me, but finding Cassie was the most important thing. “Trust me,” I said, and all but involuntarily I touched his arm again. It wasn’t flirting, it was urgency, and he understood this. He didn’t flinch that time.

  The walk took longer than I remembered. Neither of us spoke much. The late sun tried without success to break through the woolly gray, the soft gravel shoulder beneath our feet was still sodden, and, once we passed the Barkers’ house, the endless wall of evergreens pressed mournful and darkly moist alongside us. The turn-off to the quarry was overgrown after the winter months’ disuse, and the undergrowth seemed to hover between last winter’s death and spring’s coming life, a combination of slimy leaf piles and tightly nubbed boughs, on their surfaces juicy green buttons ready to burst. The rutted dirt path dissolved in places into puddles, but the way ahead was clear. The parking lot lay empty, of course. Just the occasional scurrying squirrel; an early bird or two, rustling and chirruping. The quarry was silent, its surface black and glassy.

  “You’re joking, J, right?” Peter’s chin tucked into the neck of his sweatshirt. His red nostrils glistened.

  “It’s just a feeling. Let’s walk the perimeter, okay? Just in case?”

  “The roaring fiddlehead fire, right?”

  “Or something.”

  “A bird is not a sign, you know.”

  “How can we be sure?”

  Peter, irritated, rolled mucus in his throat; but he didn’t walk away. We couldn’t afford not to look. We set off together around the quarry. The path proved more treacherous than I expected. There was no straightforward circuit around the water’s edge; the glinting rocks were slick underfoot and the bushes wild, their thorny fingers clawing at our necks and wrists.

  “What are we looking for exactly?” Peter asked, arms akimbo on a high outcrop over the still water, as far from the parking lot as we could be. His breath made smoky whorls in the chill. “Because this feels as futile as anything I’ve ever done.”

  I couldn’t contradict him. “I thought there’d be some trace of her. I thought she might have come here.”

  “Because?”

  I shrugged. I couldn’t say because it was a place that mattered to us, to her and me; because when we were here, we were happy, and happy together, and had homes and parents and believed we always would. That wasn’t a reason for anything.

  “Julia,” Peter touched me this time, his hand on my shoulder. His voice was low and almost harsh. “You think she might be here because this is where you lost her. But it’s a long time ago.” Then he let go of me, and turned away.

  Even so, as we picked our way back to the start, I kept my eyes open for the first flutter of a ribbon, or the glimmer of an earring on the forest floor. I peered for footprints in the squelchy mud—little feet; recent prints—or a cell phone, or a house key, or a shiny dime. Hansel and Gretel; Scooby-Doo; Tintin in Tibet; Picnic at Hanging Rock; always, always, there was a sign. Of Cassie, at the quarry, there was no sign.

  Peter walked me home—it was past dusk by then, and I was late for supper—and he then called his mother to come pick him up. With my parents, he was strained—both super-polite and awkward—and although the obvious reason was that he was holding up our meal, I figured he didn’t want them to get the wrong idea, to think that there was anything between us. He stayed standing in the front hall—“My mom’s just on her way”—and made stilted, bright conversation about the track team and how he dreamed of going to UPenn one day, if he could get in. His mother had gone there. We didn’t mention Cassie, but she stood in the front hall with us. When his mother pulled up, she honked from the street and he darted out the door. “Sorry to have kept you from your dinner,” he said to my parents. “We shouldn’t have lost track of time.” And to me, without looking back, “See you in school.”

  I raised a hand, a sort of wave, but he wouldn’t have seen.

  Over dinner, my mother asked if there’d been any announcements about Cassie at school. My father said that one of his patients, Rose Bremner, said she’d heard on the police scanner that they had some leads up near Newburyport. I nodded and shifted my mashed potatoes around on the plate, flattening them with my fork. A lot of time had gone by now; she could be anywhere. She could even be back in Bangor, although I assumed the police had already thought to look there. We didn’t talk about it, about her, very long. There wasn’t much to say. My mother asked about speech team, what I was preparing for the next tournament. I sensed she wanted to ask me about Peter—she knew I still liked him—but she didn’t.

  After dinner, when the dishes were done and I was heading upstairs, she came and put her arms around me and held me to her. Then she pulled back and stroked my cheek, tucked my hair behind my ear. Her eyes were sad. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.

  I WOKE before dawn. Although the air in my bedroom was cold, I was sweating under the covers. Saturday morning: no call to get up. But my heart was on alert, my dream still with me in the room. Cassie: of course. As she was, yes, but not with the sense that this was the past. It was now. We were playing a game, the kind of pretend game that we’d played for years: You be the monster, I’ll be the knight. You be the pilot, I’ll be the Resistance fighter. You be the fugitive, and I’ll find you. You be the dark wizard, and I’ll be the centurion of light. You be the returned soldier, I’ll be your wife. In the dream, Cassie, with her white-blond hair, put on a black feathered cloak—a bird cloak, a Nancy cloak—that promised to hide her, fugitive, wizard, teenage girl, and to enable her to fly. Only, within seconds, it burned into her skin, grafted itself, became exquisitely, agonizingly, irremovable. Hers was poisoned, a poisoned cloak. She shrieked in pain, her eyes white-edged, bulging, her arms reaching for me. And there was nothing I could do but stand there and watch, a reluctant but unwavering witness. Her shrieks woke me into the frigid dark, but I couldn’t figure out to what waking sound they might correspond—a bat? A cat in heat? And even with my eyes open, I could still see her, my Cassie, enveloped in the fronded, feathery blackness, all but her white head and hands, withering under the dark mantle.

  Where was she? Where were we playing? What was our ill-fated game? I knew it, I could smell it, the site hovered on the cusp of my consciousness, just out of reach. I closed my eyes again, listened to the way her voice echoed, reverberating off the walls. In the darkness behind my lids, I saw the glimmering fragments of stained glass, and felt the smooth heft of the banister under my hand. I looked up. And then I realized what I had
to do, in the early spring predawn darkness. Worried, of course, I was suddenly certain too, precisely because this wasn’t a kids’ game or an imaginary scenario, because with every minute the cloak burned further into Cassie’s flesh, and if I didn’t hurry, she would never fly, she wouldn’t even survive. There would be no way ever to get it off.

  I only fleetingly considered waking my parents. They wouldn’t have understood: like Peter, they would have thought I was making things up. “You have an overactive imagination,” my mother liked to say. I needed an ally who believed the way I did in premonitions and auguries, in instincts rather than logic. Like a kid, or a prophet—or like a Hagrid. It took me only a minute to recall Bessie and the derecho; and that too came to me not as a thought but like something I knew in my deepest self, like in a dream. I looked up the number I still had in my contacts from when I did my speech team monologue in seventh grade, and even though I could see all too clearly that the clock’s green light read 4:43 a.m., I called Rudy Molinaro.

  Did I waken him? Hard to say. Was he surprised? I’d guess so, extremely even; but he’s not a man of many words, nor one to show emotion. Flat affect, my mother would call it.

  I told him it was about the little blond girl. The angel, I reminded him. Her name is Cassie, I said. She needs me, I said. She needs our help. As I spoke to him, I could picture those jelly-bean eyes shining dully in their pouchy sockets. It was still night, early on a Saturday morning. I was a kid calling him—less than half his age. But he listened to me, and reacted as if I were the mayor of Royston, as if it were perfectly understood that if I asked him to do something so unusual, it was only because it simply needed to be done. Because it was essential.

  Would my parents, would Peter, have accused Rudy of being a stupid guy (not the brightest light, not the sharpest knife)? Sure. But that morning I was grateful, because I needed someone who could help me, who wouldn’t tell me I was just a kid, or irrational, or wrong before we even set out. He knew how important feelings were, having a sense or an intuition for something. He was the guy who trusted his dog Bessie over everyone else.

  Was he drunk? I would have said, when speaking to him, probably. Once I got into his truck, I could have told you with absolute certainty, yes. Even with Bessie panting her hot dog breath between us in the front seat, I was bathed in the reek of him, cigarettes and booze fumes, like he sweated it out through his pores. I didn’t mind. That probably helped me out a bit, that he was drunk that way; it made our dreamlike journey seem even less real, like he was dreaming it too.

  I wasn’t afraid, to get into Rudy Molinaro’s truck at 5:20 on a Saturday morning in April, still in the dark, nobody knowing what we were doing or where we were going. I wasn’t one bit afraid. All I can say is that I trusted him, drunk and lonely as he was. Because of Bessie, I trusted him; because of all the time and love he’d given to his sick mother. Because he was the opposite of cruel, and he didn’t really know how to think of what he wanted. It didn’t occur to me until much later, after it was all in the past, that in those hours I could have been—in some other circumstance, I could well have been—terrified.

  We didn’t say much, in the fug of the cabin, on the ride over to the asylum, vents blaring hot air, Bessie’s panting our version of dialogue. Rudy was kind of panting too, or at least breathing noisily, as though every airway that could be stuffed up, was. His face shone in the reflected dashboard lights, almost clay-colored. I too breathed through my mouth, on account of the smells.

  “It’s a good idea to look, I figure,” he said eventually, after chewing a while on his cheek. Bessie licked her lips as if in agreement and yawned, making a squeak in her throat like an unoiled hinge. Her teeth loomed close to my ear.

  “Just seems that way,” I agreed. My hands were clasped in my lap, as if I were in church. And then, except for the vents and the breathing and the sound of Bessie maneuvering her saliva, we fell quiet again.

  Rudy got down from the truck to unlock the giant padlock on the main gate at the road. I don’t know what I’d thought—that we would bushwhack in from the quarry in the twilight?—but I hadn’t pictured us arriving along the central driveway. The truck bucked and rolled, even at ten miles an hour, branches scraping and snapping at our sides. No vehicle had traveled this way in a long while. The headlamps jounced crazily, illuminating now a hummock of dirt, now the broken path ahead, now a tangle of trees. The Bonnybrook rose suddenly before us, around a bend in the track, its haggard hulk black against the bruise-blue, just-leavening sky.

  From outside, it didn’t appear that anything had changed in the years since Cassie and I had been there—the much-debated construction projects had apparently never broken ground, had remained imaginary. But that didn’t mean that nobody had set foot there, or that time hadn’t further ravaged the ruins. From a distance, it looked as though more windows were broken, more shutters missing or dangling. More graffiti spread along the walls. When Rudy turned off the truck, his headlights stayed on, blaring at the chained main entrance that Cassie and I had bypassed long ago. Rudy reached across in front of me and took a large silver flashlight out of the glove compartment. I could almost feel its weight in his hand. He grunted as he hopped down to the ground. Bessie flew over him, landed weightlessly. She sniffed the air, ears pricked; and decided not to bark. Whatever rustled in the bushes was beneath her notice. I wished I knew her well enough to embrace her rusty scruff, to throw myself at her mercy.

  Rudy waved the torchlight around the Bonnybrook’s face, the effect that of a spotlight in a disco. “Where’d you say you went in?”

  “I’m not sure that I said.” I led him toward the dining-room windows.

  “It’s trespassing, you know.” He said this without apparent judgment, a simple observation. “It’s against the law.”

  “We were just kids,” I said.

  He grunted, and paused to rub an eye. “But you knew that,” he insisted.

  “I guess we did.”

  THE FRENCH WINDOW we’d gone through, more decrepit than it had been, was barely there at all; just a frame. Rain had destroyed the parquet floor inside, and it buckled like waves in a small harbor. Broken glass glinted everywhere underfoot. The room felt different, somehow: I realized, as Rudy shone his light from side to side, that everything that could be removed—anything moveable—was gone. There was nothing in the room but itself. Even the wagon-wheel light fixtures had been yanked from the ceiling, leaving behind broken plaster and dangling wires.

  “Where to?” Rudy knocked his head from side to side as if it was a pointer. “Which way?”

  “I think upstairs. I’m sorry.”

  The Bonnybrook made its own songs, creaks and pops and a series of high-pitched whines as the wind passed through it. Outside, the day’s light began to bleed over the horizon, but in the asylum’s front hall you wouldn’t have known: without Rudy’s flashlight, we would have been in blackness. He shone it jerkily around us: dust motes drifted in the air; the rutted floor had been stripped of its boards by salvagers; the balustrade itself, the flowered stained-glass window—all had vanished. There were no longer any glamorous ghosts; even the ghosts had fled. All that was left was the cold smell of damp, as of the earth reclaiming its territory. The stairs rose skeletal before us into the darkness.

  Bessie, apparently unruffled, whined slightly and started climbing.

  “All right, girl. If you say so.” The air around us hung as thick as matter. I was so grateful for Rudy’s presence, in his minor cloud of booze and tobacco stink, that I put my fingertips to the back of his down coat, just lightly, so we were connected as we climbed.

  I HAD KNOWN in my marrow that she would be there. I had known from the moment I woke up. Maybe I had known from the moment I saw Nancy. Cassie was my best friend; we made each other. Bessie found her within a couple of minutes—Bessie, who took off at a trot as soon as we reached the second story, not waiting for us trepidatious humans, not looking back. We could hear her toenails clatter al
ong the floor, and the rhythmic thud of her too. We could sense her digressions, into one room, a circuit, into the next, the hollow jangling of her tags. We followed slowly, Rudy waving his torch in the gloom, though he didn’t need it by then.

  “She’ll be here, Rudy,” I said. “You’ll see.”

  His grunt was noncommittal. The day was dawning, gray-blue, seeping now even into the dark inner hallway, cold shafts of low light. This seemed suddenly less surreal, and less real too. In what childish fit of insanity had I orchestrated this? As if it were all a game or a story, as if she would do as I imagined her—as I willed her—to have done?

  But then Bessie barked, down in the darkest subcorridor of what Cassie and I had named the Isolation Ward. Rudy broke into what was, for him I guess, a run, a sort of lumbering wheezy haste, and I ran on ahead of him, able now at least to see dark spots in the flooring and avoid twisting my ankle.