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You live with the Turners for three weeks and four days, and on the morning of the fifth, Mrs. Turner calls you into the kitchen while Tai’s still asleep.
“Vanessa,” she says kindly, and you grip the granite countertop until your knuckles turn white. “We’ve loved having you, we really have but …” she trails off, looks to her husband.
“We just think Taissa needs time to recover. And she’s not going to while you’re still here,” he finishes.
“You need that too,” Mrs. Turner adds, an afterthought. She’s holding an envelope in her hands as tightly as you’re holding the countertop, and she hands it to you. There’s a couple of twenties, and a check for three thousand dollars inside. Blood money, hush money, you don’t know which.
“Just to get you started,” Mrs. Turner says. “We can drive you to the train station, or the bus station or … anywhere really. Anywhere you want.”
You don’t think you can want anything anymore, so you let Mrs. Turner drive you to the train station. She gives you a hug before you get out of the car, and you think you’re probably suffocating, that no one except Tai has touched you since you were rescued.
“You can tell her it was my choice,” you say, as you open the passenger door. “That I needed to leave, that it wasn’t anything she did. That Shauna knows how to reach me,” and you know the last part of your message won’t ever get passed on, but you need to say it. You need to know you tried.
Mrs. Turner just nods, and awkwardly waves at you as you walk up towards the tracks. You don’t remember until it’s too late that you don’t have a bank account anymore, that your mother closed and drained it fifteen hours after you were formally declared dead, that you don’t have a social security card, or a driver’s license, or anything to prove you were the same girl who left on a weekend trip to never return.
What you do have is a cell phone, one given to you by the social worker reluctantly charged with maintaining your well being until you could have a formal, psychological exam. It’s got only a handful of numbers in it: Shauna’s mom’s house, the therapist who looks at you like you’re about to break, Natalie.
You call Nat fourteen times before she picks up, and her voice is loose and very far away.
“I told you to lose this number,” she slurs. You’re silent on the other end until she sighs, and reels off an address, somewhere in Brooklyn.
“One night, Van,” she says. “One night, and you have to promise to never call me again.”
/
You’re drunk by the time you get to Nat’s apartment, a handle of vodka purchased from some corner store clerk who couldn’t bring himself to card one of the plane crash girls. You’ll probably never be able to escape that. No hair dye can hide the scars carved into your face or the fucked up way your bad eye jumps like a stuck tape.
Natalie opens the door to an apartment that looks like it’s been furnished exclusively from shit other people left behind. She’s got purple smudges under her eyes, and looks like she would like nothing more than to slam the door in your face.
“Taissa finally remember what you did?” she asks, voice hard. By the time you were rescued, by the time things had gotten so, so much worse than you could have ever imagined, Tai was gone more often than she was there, almost entirely replaced by whoever she became when she was sleepwalking. She’d wake up sometimes, eyes wild, and Lottie would stroke her hair until she fell back asleep. You’d lie awake next to her most nights, whisper happier things in her ear, hope that wherever she was, she could hear you. That maybe at least one of you could leave this all behind, that maybe Tai could escape.
“We would have died, Nat,” and it’s the same voice you use to try to convince yourself.
“And is this any better?” she snaps, gesturing at her empty apartment, the row of empty bottles lined up on the kitchen counter. “You know how I pay the rent, Van? With my fucking life insurance money, until whatever agent assigned to Natalie Scatorccio wises up to the fact that I’m somehow still fucking alive.”
“You did it too,” you say quietly. “You believe in her too.”
Natalie looks at you with something like pity, takes your half-drunk bottle of vodka, and slams shut the door to the bedroom. You fall asleep on the kitchen floor, wake up before the sun rises. You leave the check from Mrs. Turner on Natalie’s counter, under a pack of cigarettes and a note you scrawl on the back of the envelope.
It’s yours if you can cash it, you write. I don’t need it anymore.
/
You lose yourself after that. There’s desperate weeks of trying to find Lottie, before her parents file a restraining order against you; there’s six months in a compound in California, with a woman who is so, so gentle with you until she’s not; two weeks when your stepbrother finds you and lets you sleep in his guest bedroom. It’s his daughter’s birthday, and you buy her a book about woodland animals, before stealing his wallet and class ring and leaving in the middle of the night.
None of the other girls contact you. You weren’t expecting them to, but you wake up alone most mornings and for a moment you always forget where you are. You’d do probably anything to talk to Nat again, or Shauna, or fuck, even Travis. You know Shauna has your number, because she texted you the day after you snuck out of Nat’s apartment.
Nat thinks you killed yourself. She’s been banned for life from New York Presbyterian. You still alive? You’re already on a bus, halfway to Chicago for no good reason other than Tai had mentioned a childhood visit there once, and you’ll be able to close your eyes and picture her running along the lake.
so far, you reply.
Shauna doesn’t answer for three days, and when she does, all she says is Ok, keep it up. You stay in Chicago for seven weeks, sleeping in something that can barely be called a house. You’re drunk, or high most of the time, and you see Tai on every corner, in every girl you sleep with. I’m sorry, you tell them, and they look at you with her eyes, her voice, and touch you in all the ways you don’t want.
You think logically and distantly most days that you probably should kill yourself. That the girl you were is, for all intents and purposes, dead already, and you’d be doing her a favor. You don’t think she would want to live like this—you don’t think you want to live like this. You stumble on the edge of it over and over and over, and the only thing that ever stops you is the night you died the first time. Lottie had fervently asked you what you remembered, what you saw , and you tell her everything except this: when you died, before you fell back into yourself, half on fire and bleeding out, you were nowhere. It was blank, and cold, and it scared you more than anything. Once you were conscious and mostly put back together, you had sworn to yourself you would do anything to avoid that place.
And you had.
/
When you’re twenty-three, you’re part of a commune somewhere in Oregon or Washington or possibly western Idaho. You don’t know where you are anymore, but you haven’t since you were seventeen.
But here, wherever here is, you feel like you can breathe for the first time in years, and if you have to drive minivans full of god-knows-what across state lines and force yourself out of your body every time someone touches you, then it’s worth it.
It’s worth it, you tell yourself. It is.
Sometimes, you sneak out at night, drive thirteen miles to the nearest town with a pay phone, and call Tai’s parents’ house. You don’t ever say anything, just listen to the voicemail. Once she picks up, and her voice sounds so normal, so familiar, you almost break in two.
You hang up.
/
The commune’s raided, and you follow a woman whose name you don’t know to upstate New York. There, you find something close to the new age bullshit the woman joined the commune preaching, and Lottie Matthews.
She looks the same, and is utterly unrecognizable. Her hair is longer, and she’s dressed in some kind of floaty white dress that wouldn’t have lasted a day in the last place you saw her. Her scar is faded, almost completely disappeared, and you bite down hard on the scar tissue in your mouth. You want to fall to your knees. You want to run as far as you can in the other direction.
You want to kiss her until she destroys you.
“Van,” she says softly.
She offers you her hand, and you follow.
/
“Where have you been?” you ask as soon as she shuts the door to her bedroom behind you. “Your parents they—”
“They want you to have nothing to do with me,” she finishes. “Technically there’s still a restraining order,” and you blush.
She ghosts a kiss across your knuckles.
“You need to go, Van.”
Some part of you was expecting it, but it still hurts, still strikes you like an arrow through your lungs.
“I can’t have you here. What we’re doing here it’s … we’re creating something new. Something real.”
Your mouth tastes bitter.
“What we did was real,” you say quietly.
She runs her thumb across your eyelid, across the scar that hooks around your cheek, across your lips.
“Not anymore, Van. Not to me.”
/
You think maybe you’re the only one left who remembers the way the woods would breathe around you. The way you could tell what it needed by the end. The way it swallowed you all whole.
That if you forget, it will all be for absolutely nothing.
Every night, when you close your eyes, you’re there, surrounded by things you understand and people you know better than you know yourself.
And every morning, when you wake up, you feel absolutely, completely hollow.