At the end of every shift I’ve dragged myself home and curled up in bed with a romance novel. Mo, of course, makes fun of them, calls them Novocaine for the estrogen-hampered soul, but I don’t care. I love them anyway, and not for the sex, either. It’s the stories. They’re full of perfect people and chivalry, and at the end, the right thing always happens.
The crowd thins until it’s the usual weekday evening trickle. Flora leaves for Lucky Lil’s an hour before closing, rubbing the Mr. Twister mustache on her way out. “For good luck,” she calls over her shoulder.
I nod. I kind of envy her for the superstition. That takes optimism.
I’ve spent the week imagining talking to Flora about Lena. She must remember her. She’s the only employee still around from seven years ago. But each time I work up the nerve, something happens. She takes a smoke break. Or the place fills up and we’re too swamped to see straight. Or Reed’s there, and I definitely don’t want him to know. Or it doesn’t feel right. I haven’t actually said Lena’s name in . . . I don’t know. Years.
Why would I? Nobody wants to be reminded of Lena. She’s a symbol of horrific truths—that unthinkable things can happen in our quiet town, that a beautiful girl can disappear and be gone forever. People don’t want to think about that. It’s easier to pretend she just never existed and that there isn’t a gaping hole where she used to be, so big an entire family could fall into it.
I’ll talk to Flora another time. Maybe tomorrow.
Closing time comes, Reed flips the sign, and I start wiping things down.
“How long is swim camp?” I ask, pushing my rag over the countertop in big, circular sweeps.
Reed holds up a finger. He’s cashing out the register, counting change.
“Oh, sorry.”
“It’s okay. If it’s like last summer, it’ll be three weeks of insanity.”
I nod and keep wiping. I don’t think I came to Mr. Twister once last summer. Or the summer before. Actually, I know I didn’t. Mo hates it, and who else would I go with?
Not my parents.
They used to take us to Mr. Twister when there was an
Over the years, my memories of Lena have gone from razor-sharp to blurred to nearly vapor, but I do remember her here. In the corner booth. Me sitting next to her, and Mom and Dad sitting across, and all four of us devouring a mound of custard like lions over a kill. Lena let me have the cherry, but I don’t know if it was because she didn’t like them or if she knew I loved them. Seems like I should know that.
There’s a lot I don’t know. Mom would have answers, but I can’t ask. Was that family trip to Mr. Twister after one of her flute recitals? Or was it a good-report-card event? I can’t remember.
And her face. I can barely remember that, either. Waves of dark-blond hair, brown eyes, freckles—but the correct elements don’t always add up the right way. It makes me nervous to try, so I don’t let myself unless I’m at home and can stare at the silver-framed picture I keep on my desk. It’s her last school picture. Junior class.
To my knowledge, Mom and Dad haven’t been to Mr. Twister in eight years, since the night Dad swerved into the parking lot, tires squealing. We were on our way home from my fifth-grade Thanksgiving production. I’d been the perfect pilgrim, but I knew we weren’t stopping for banana splits.
Dad went inside “to get some bloody answers.” Mom and I waited in the car, as instructed, watching our breath fog up the windows. We didn’t talk. We were like zombies or whatever paranormal creatures have brains and lungs but no hearts.
It’d been three months already, but nothing had been added to the case since the first day. She was last seen walking on the shoulder of Highway 22, the stretch between Mr. Twister and the library. She’d been going from work to her SAT prep class. It wasn’t too far—fifteen minutes, maybe—but the trees on both sides made it dark. And that was it. The end that we knew.
The police had stopped coming by the house to give Dad updates long before that night. According to conversations not meant for my ears, they’d interviewed half the population of Hardin County and still had nothing. It happened this way with runaways, they said.
For Mom, finding nothing meant hope, a reason to brush her teeth and remulch her flower beds.
But for Dad, it was unacceptable, evidence of half-assed police work in a backwoods hole of a community that needed to catapult itself into this century before he sued every last law enforcement officer in the county. I’d heard it more than once. It was usually shouted into the phone, though I remember hearing it delivered to an unfortunate detective who stopped by the house to deliver the latest batch of nothing.
That night while he interrogated everyone in Mr. Twister—probably standing right where I’m standing now —Mom and I sat silently, me still wearing my stiff pilgrim’s bonnet that smelled like glue, Mom gripping a cornucopia of plastic vegetables.
When he came out twenty minutes later, Dad wasn’t shouting anymore. I guess he was done. He was silent all the way home, but from my spot at the top of the stairs, with my face pressed between the banisters, I heard him telling Mom what he’d learned: no secret boyfriends, no wild behavior, no motives, no runaway plans. Nothing.
I was too young to be told what nothing really meant and too stupid to guess. Mo calls it naive, but he wasn’t there. It was trickier than that. It was wanting to know, being on the edge of understanding, then backing away intentionally.
Ten should have been old enough—I’d been taught not to talk to strangers because there were bad people in the world who kidnapped children and did bad things to them.
But that didn’t have anything to do with Lena. Those warnings were strange and thrilling, like ghost stories and the psychopath-on-the-loose tales told at sleepovers, but I knew those weren’t real. The gaping hole where Lena used to be—that was real. The color and smell of her that was only a smudge now, the roar of silence in our house where she used to be, the tragic stares that followed me around—that was all real.
Once the investigation was over, the police stopped coming by, which meant the steady flow of curious neighbors with their cashew chicken casseroles and their gentle, probing questions dried up. Understanding came in tissue-thin layer over layer: whispers, sad smiles, shoulder squeezes from teachers I barely knew. People reached for their children like they couldn’t help it when my family shuffled into our church pew. Girls at school got quiet when I joined them.
The shame was chilling. Lena was missing, and even if I didn’t know how it was my fault, the rest of the world did.
Eventually, TV dragged from the shadows what I was refusing to see. There was that
But that was somebody else’s sister. Not mine. Wasn’t it?
And finally. It clicked, like machinery sliding into place, an old-fashioned key with notches and grooves. Lena was the first half of one of those stories. Half an episode, half a thirty-second news report, half a tragedy. Nothing didn’t mean nothing at all. There was something horrific waiting at the end of this story, just like all those others.
Striking a deal with God seemed like my only hope. So I stopped eating. I told Him I’d start again when He brought Lena back. Back then he was still worth a capital letter at the beginning of his name.
I didn’t know then that already-skinny nine-year-olds aren’t allowed to go on hunger strikes. Four weeks and twenty-three pounds later, my parents yanked me out of fourth grade and checked me into the psychiatric ward of Hardin Children’s Hospital. A nurse put a tube into my neck, and I had to watch the calories pour into my vein all day long, wondering whether God considered the tube a deal breaker or not.
The child psychiatrist tried to get me to confess to hating my body, then pursed her lips and gave me soft, sad eyes when I wouldn’t.
But why would I hate my body?
Her attention-seeking-behavior theory made even less sense. It was the opposite. I wanted to disappear,
