Blink

by Sasha Dawn

  She tells the police everything, answers every question.

  I fill them in on what happened at the Churchill, about Damien watching Chatham climb in bed with me. I tell them about old shit, too, about how I got the scar on my forearm.

  They question Chatham, too, in my bedroom, and for the first time ever, Rosie and I have a third party to confirm things happened just the way we said they did.

  When they ask for it, Rosie gives the police the photograph Caroline found at Damien’s place.

  Chatham obviously filled them in about it.

  The cops are there for an hour, at least, before Rosie agrees to medical attention, which I turn down. Someone has to stay and watch the girls.

  This—when the cops have gotten the last of their statements, the last of their pictures, and when Rosie is on her way to the hospital in a squad car—is when I let loose.

  I can’t help it. It’s like a decade of suppressed frustration and hurt and anger comes pouring out of me all at once. Like the floodgate opened, and I can’t close it again.

  Chatham emerges from my bedroom, wearing my spare jersey and a pair of my sweats.

  I let her watch me fall to pieces. I’m like the tiles on the Scrabble board. Fragments. Impermanent pieces of indeterminate wholes, which could easily dissect and scatter. But somehow I know she’s going to scrape it all up and rearrange the letters so they make sense.

  Or at least I hope that’s what’s going to happen.

  She’s on my lap now, holding my face in her cold hands. “It’s over now. Everyone’s safe.”

  It’s true. We’re safe.

  “But we’re also changed,” I say. “I can’t undo what he did to them tonight.”

  “Is that what you think you’re here to do? Sweetheart, no one can do that.” Her lips meet mine. “No one expects you to rewind time.”

  I wrap my arms around her, hold her close, and trace the letters on the back of the jersey.

  “This isn’t who you are,” she whispers between kisses. “It’s only where you’ve been.”

  Next, I feel her fingers working the buttons on my shirt.

  “And we’ve all been there from time to time. Locked in a closet, scared we’re never getting out. But we come out. Stronger.”

  I nod, and hiccup over tears when I try to verbally agree.

  Her hands splay against my chest. “I love you,” she whispers against my lips.

  I love you, too. I try to form the words, but I can’t make it happen. I dip a few fingers into the waistband of the sweats she’s wearing and trail my fingertips over the scar on her hip.

  P a i n t I t B l a c k

  “Josh.”

  I hear my mother’s voice through a cloud of static.

  She jostles me, and the static breaks for a second.

  “I’m home.”

  I flinch when she speaks this time and bolt upright, and overly aware of the fact that I’m not wearing anything, grip the covers at my waist.

  Chatham.

  I sense the empty space beside me. She’s gone.

  I focus on the Rosie-shaped shadow standing over me. “Everything okay?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  “What time is it?”

  “About five. Just wanted to tell you I’m back from the ER.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ll talk later.” She’s closing the door.

  “Mom?”

  She pauses at the door.

  “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “Me, too. Go back to sleep.”

  I lay back down, but only until I hear her footsteps up the stairs and down the hall. When I hear the click of her bedroom door closing, I get up and shove my legs into boxer shorts.

  Did Chatham hear my mother coming and hide? Or did she sneak out of my bed last night to sleep on the couch to ward off an awkward situation? Or is she even here?

  God, if my mother had come in and found us together . . .

  “Chatham?” I whisper.

  I check everywhere I might hide, if the situation were reversed—my closet, the shower, the cubby under the stairs where we store all the Christmas junk—but to no avail. She’s nowhere.

  Her backpack is gone, too.

  She must have walked home.

  I’m not crazy about the idea of her trekking across town in the middle of the night, especially after what happened with Damien tonight, even if she is perfectly capable of traveling incognito cross-country to—

  Wait.

  Incognito.

  All the nonsense of last night, with her hair, comes flooding back.

  She did dye her hair to blend in. And even though she insisted the photograph of the little girl in the purple shorts wasn’t her, the shade of blonde is so similar. Maybe she didn’t want me to notice. Or maybe she didn’t even want to admit it to herself: it’s a coincidence we can’t overlook.

  Is that why she was so upset when I mentioned it?

  The girl at the rave with the shamrock tattoo . . . the girl she kissed but insisted she didn’t know.

  The mural at the Churchill. The things she drew on that wall . . . She knows things about this town, even if she swears she doesn’t remember being here, beyond a vague familiarity about the caboose.

  The backpack she never unpacked. The clothes, always shoved into it, as if she’d planned to take off at a moment’s notice.

  I grab my phone and text her: Where are you?

  I stare at the screen, waiting for her reply.

  When it doesn’t come minutes later, I call her.

  It rings for an eternity, then bottoms out in some generic, panned, computerized indication that the user has not yet set up her voicemail.

  My body breaks into a sweat.

  I don’t feel good about this.

  I mean, if she left, that’s one thing. But what if someone found her?

  Wayne and Loretta, her foster parents.

  She called the cops with a tip about her foster father and a girl under the floorboards and her sister’s memories of being in Sugar Creek, and she was afraid enough to leave home immediately after, even though she originally declined to take the trip when Savannah wanted to bring her along.

  She called the cops to tell them she was all right because I insisted on it. Suppose someone found out where she was and came looking for her?

  I kick aside last night’s khakis to get to the sweats beneath them—the sweats she wore last night—and a key clunks out of my khakis pocket in the process.

  The key to the Churchill.

  The key to her place.

  It’s on my bedroom floor.

  So she didn’t go home.

  I tear through my room, looking for a note, a clue. Anything.

  She left me nothing.

  And after everything that happened last night—and I mean everything happened last night—if she’d just leave . . .

  I shove my hands through my hair.

  It doesn’t make sense.

  Calm down.

  She could’ve gone back to the Churchill. Maybe she had another key. I shouldn’t panic. Not yet.

  I grab my keys—and the key on my bedroom floor—and decide to go look for her before I draw conclusions.

  On my way out of the bedroom, I catch sight of the Scrabble board.

  I scramble toward it.

  Who knows? She left a message for me there once before.

  I hold my breath as I approach.

  But there’s nothing written with tiles beyond what’s left of our game and her name:

  CHATHAM CLAIBORNE

  I slowly walk upstairs.

  Normally, I’d just take off, but considering what happened last night, I think I owe it to my mom to at least tell her I’m leaving.

  So I quietly go up the second half of the stairs, and knock on her door.

  After a second, I turn the knob and peek inside to find my mother already asleep. I’ll leave her a note.

  I look in on Maggie Lee and Miss Lina, who are still
asleep, cuddled up together on the twin bed. I let out a slow, deep breath. I hope it’s over—all the fear and nervousness and violence. I hope, by the time they’re my age, they don’t remember living this way.

  I go to leave, but at the last second, I spot a piece of paper on the floor, near where Chatham was sitting while reciting The Sneetches. She was drawing.

  This may be the last piece she’ll ever create in my company—a cavern sinks in my chest when I consider it—so I pick it up.

  The rendering, in pencil, is of a door. Just a door, with a shadow of a tree cast over it . . . but, no. The shadow of branches, yes, I see that. But really, it’s a swing . . . one of those thick boards with coarse, itchy ropes knotted beneath and tethered to a tree branch. And in the midst of the tangles of branches, a closer look reveals the outline of a girl. And she’s bound to the swing.

  Her arms, like long fingers of branches’ offshoots, are tethered, and bent, and limp.

  Her hair, tangles of sharp edges, hangs forward over her face.

  The tree casts the shadow, but the girl is transparent, as if light is shining through her.

  God, the things that must go through her head, the things that might have happened to her, if she’s creating things like this!

  I don’t know if she meant this sketch to terrify whoever saw it, or maybe it was a teaser, one of those optical illusion types to see what the human eye goes to. Do you see a tree? Or a girl? I fold the sketch and pocket it.

  I scribble a note on a napkin and leave it on the table for my mother, and hightail it toward the Churchill.

  Sugar Creek seems peaceful this morning. I’m the only one on the road, for one thing, but it’s more than the sparse population lending to the sleepy atmosphere. It’s that I know Damien Wick is getting what’s coming to him. He’ll be in jail by now. At long last, justice will be served.

  I pull up to the room-and-board and don’t bother with the buzzer. If Chatham is home and asleep, I don’t want to wake her. I use the key to gain entry at the front, climb the stairs to #2E, and use the key to enter her room.

  It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust to the darkness.

  But as soon as I manage to make out shapes, I see the door to the bathroom on the far side of the room hangs askew on its hinges, as if someone barreled into it to break it down. “Chatham?” I flip the light switch.

  She’s not here.

  The place is trashed.

  With trembling fingers, I dial the police.

  While it’s ringing, I take in the sight of the place: the mattress is thrown from the rusting bedframe, and clothes are everywhere—my clothes, that is, the ones I brought yesterday when I assumed I’d never go back to Carpenter Street. They’re no longer in my duffel bag, but strewn over the floor.

  Whoever did this was looking for something.

  There’s nothing of hers in this place, save the hanger from which her incredible Homecoming dress used to hang, and the artistic creation on the wall.

  “I’d like to report a break-in,” I say to the dispatcher when he answers. “And my girlfriend . . . she’s not here. She’s gone. Missing.”

  Whoever came in did so through the bathroom. Damien was in there; he had access through his girlfriend’s place.

  Is Chatham gone of her own volition? Or has someone—Damien?—taken her against her will? Numb, I sink to the floor opposite the mural.

  “Sir?” The dispatcher.

  A guttural noise escapes me, but I can’t talk.

  My eyes trip from one image to the next. The train. The twins huddled in the corner. The swing alongside the creek.

  Wait.

  The swing.

  It’s the same one she drew just last night.

  “Sir, I need the name of your girlfriend—”

  “Chatham.”

  “—and her age.”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Last name? Her parents?”

  He’s still talking to me, but I move closer to the mural and study the twins.

  Their blonde hair.

  Chatham has blonde roots.

  The flash of Chatham at the rave, kissing that girl with the tattoo, the blonde girl with the dark blue wig, practically defibrillates me.

  And then the images come, one after another, like on a screen in my mind, playing at fast-forward.

  The train.

  The shamrock she drew in the sand.

  The money. God, the money. No one travels with that much money unless she’s planning to keep on running.

  The mysterious blonde toddler in a Polaroid picture, tucked into Savannah’s journal, and the picture Caroline found in Damien’s closet of the same girl.

  The X on Chatham’s hip.

  The ID she got from Aiden, and the way she’d lied about the reason she needed it.

  She said her license was in a box lost in the move.

  But there were no boxes.

  There was no move.

  She came here with only a backpack. To find her sister, she’d said. But I think we found her at the rave, and Chatham pretended not to know her—even after she kissed her.

  Dispatch alerts me: “Sir?”

  “I’m at the Churchill Room and Board. On the second floor.”

  “Your girlfriend’s last name?”

  “Claiborne.” I hang up.

  She’d dropped clues in my lap all along, even from the very first day I saw her.

  The sand castle she’d built . . .

  I flip through pictures on my phone until I find one of Margaret and Caroline in front of the very first creation Chatham shared with me. I look from the picture to the mural until I find the same shapes hidden in the swirls and curves she’d sketched on the wall.

  It’s all there, I’m convinced.

  She’s hiding in the shadows of a truth she never told me. She said she didn’t remember this place, that she didn’t remember being here. But she’s been remembering. She’s been putting pieces of this puzzle together. Maybe she’s been recording it in this mural, but she’s been keeping it from me.

  And Damien’s in there somewhere. Always on her heels. Always watching.

  I zero in on a creek winding its way through the expanse of pencil and paint on the wall. Written in the stream, disguised in the waves: Rachel Bachton was here.

  The way Chatham gripped my arm when we got to Damien’s place . . .

  The swing she’d later sketched with the girl wound up in it . . . it’s like the one hanging from Damien’s tree, the one the dog got tangled up in. Only as much as I’ve ever told her, I can’t remember telling her about the dog, so why is the swing here on her wall in her room, before we went to Damien’s?

  The words she said earlier echo in my brain: And we’ve all been there from time to time. Locked in a closet, scared we’re never getting out. But we come out. Stronger.

  Is she the girl in the photograph Caroline found in Damien’s closet? She said it wasn’t her, but what if it was? Had she been to Damien’s place before?

  “It was Damien.”

  I look up when I hear the voice, and see Damien’s too-thin girl-on-the-side standing just beyond the broken bathroom door. Her left eye doesn’t look much better than my mother’s.

  “He was looking for something?”

  She nods, but before she can say anything, I probe further.

  “What was he looking for? Did he find it?”

  Her left shoulder twitches upward, and her fingers move to her temple in a massage. “I guess I asked too many times.”

  “He did that to you?”

  “Guess I was a poor substitute for the one he really wanted.”

  I’m about to tell her that’s how he treats everyone unfortunate enough to cross his path, that my mother could be her twin right now.

  “Sweet young thing like her . . .” she says. “Don’t know how I didn’t see it sooner.”

  My gaze snaps back to her. “Chatham?”

  “Is that her name? He looks for her wherever we go.
”

  It hits me, what Chatham said the first night she opened up to me:

  It’s not like he’s following me, but it’s weird.

  What if Damien hadn’t been only following me this past month?

  What if he’d also been following my girlfriend?

  T o a d

  The owner of the Churchill is pissed about the wall.

  “They’re not supposed to alter the appearance of the rooms,” she says.

  The woman in #2F, Damien’s extracurricular girlfriend, lingers on the fringes. I volunteer to paint over Chatham’s artwork. I figure it’s the least I can do. And it’ll give me time alone with what she left behind.

  “This is a crime scene,” a cop says. “No one’s changing anything.”

  I’m not allowed to bring my things back home, either, until the police have determined my clothes aren’t evidence.

  Now, hours later, back at home, I look at her name, scrawled in Sharpie on my forearm. Proof she was here, like the mural on the walls of the Churchill Room and Board.

  The marking is still fresh because I haven’t showered yet, but I know eventually, this marker will wear away. It’s just another sand castle, waiting to be washed away when the waves roll up on the shore.

  The realization needles me like ice-cold rain on the back of my neck.

  I don’t want to think Chatham just up and left me, although maybe she was hinting at the possibility last night when she flipped out in the car after the dance. This was a mistake. I don’t even know how long I’m going to be here, and . . . I don’t know what we were thinking, getting attached like this. And if I’m honest, it’s preferable to her being stolen away in the still moments of early morning.

  If it was Damien who tossed her room at the Churchill, and Damien’s in custody at the cop shop, isn’t it unlikely anyone else would have access to her while she slept next to me?

  So I tell myself she left because she knows I’m safe. She knows my life is about to get better. Like maybe she thinks I don’t need her anymore.

  Except I’ll always need her.

  I wonder if she went to find the girl with the tattoo, the girl who may be Savannah. I wonder if she’s invented a whole new persona by now, if Savannah has, too, and they’re continuing their escape of the turmoil of life at the Goudy farm.