“It’s uncanny,” Mr. Leighton says. But it’s not and he knows it. There’s nothing uncanny about it. It’s like tumblers in a lock falling into place. Everything clicks.
brutal… beating… attempted murder… Emilia… Piano Girl
He pauses the TV on a split-screen of a picture of the girl I have been looking at across my garage for months. Younger. No make-up. No black clothes. Smiling. Even with the dark hair and dark eyes, there is nothing dark about her. She’s all light. Like sunshine.
“I remember seeing that on the news when it happened. It was a terrible story. It looks just like her,” Mrs. Leighton says, and I wonder if she can’t make herself believe it, or if she honestly doesn’t.
“It is her.”
We all turn, and standing in the entrance to the room is Sunshine’s brother.
“I knocked, but no one answered the door,” he says, but he’s not really talking to us. He’s staring at the TV. “Where is she?”
The Leightons look at him like he’s a crazy person who just barged into their house. Their faces are carved in disbelief, but there’s already so much shock in the room right now that it’s hard to figure out the source of it.
“Asher, Nastya’s brother,” I say, answering a question no one asked and hearing how wrong that name sounds coming out of my mouth.
“Emilia’s brother,” he corrects. “Where is she? I need to bring her home.” I know the home he’s talking about isn’t Margot’s. He’s taking her home to Brighton. He doesn’t sound angry. Just tired. Like he’s been living under all of this for such a long time and he just wants it to be over.
“She isn’t here.”
“Margot said she would be here. She said to try your house first,” he looks at me, “and if she wasn’t there she’d be here for dinner.” There’s an uneasiness in his voice that matches his expression.
“She didn’t come tonight,” Mrs. Leighton says gently, and then turns her eyes, full of sympathy and questions, on me.
“Why don’t you just track her phone?” I ask bitterly. Mostly because I can tell he’s edgy and nervous and worried and he’s making me all of those things, too.
“She left her phone on her bed,” he answers, like he’s starting to understand that she didn’t just forget it. She doesn’t want to be found.
Asher tells us what’s happened since this afternoon in Brighton. As soon as her parents got the call from the police, he got in the car to pick her up so she wouldn’t have to drive alone. In the meantime, they kept calling, trying to get hold of her, figuring they could get to her before it hit the news here. But no one’s been able to reach her.
Within minutes we’re all on our phones as if we actually believe it will do any good. There really isn’t anybody to call, but it makes us feel like we’re doing something, even if it is useless. If she left, and she didn’t bring her phone, she did it for a reason, and that reason is that she doesn’t want us knowing where she is.
The story on the news has changed, but we all keep looking at the television like there’s something there. Like suddenly it’s going to give us an answer. Maybe we just don’t want to look at each other and see our own confusion reflected on someone else’s face. I’m not confused. I actually feel like I understand something for the first time in months. Maybe I understand everything.
Asher walks out of the room to make a phone call and once he does, Drew looks at me. I can tell it’s been killing him to wait. “Did she tell you?” he asks.
I should be able to say yes to that question. I should have made sure of that. I should have cared enough to make her tell me. Her secrets were an open secret between us and I allowed it. There was never a question that she wasn’t telling me things. Things. How f**ked up is that? Things. All things. Everything. But I knew that once she told me, I could never unhear it, and I was happier being ignorant.
I shake my head and everyone’s eyes are on me.
“How could she tell him? She doesn’t talk,” Sarah says.
Drew and I look at each other; and I don’t know what’s secret and what isn’t anymore.
My phone rings and I grab it without looking at the caller ID, hoping it’s her.
“Did you know this?” Clay asks, without even saying hello.
“No, I didn’t,” I say, but I don’t have the energy to snap at him. Everyone assumes I should have known about this. I should have. But I didn’t know anything.
“It is her, isn’t it?” he asks, waiting for confirmation he doesn’t need.
“It’s her.”
“I saw her with him yesterday.”
“With who?”
“Aidan Richter. On the news. The kid who confessed.”
“You saw her with him?” How is that possible?
“At the art competition. He was one of the finalists. When I got out of my interview, she was in the room with him.”
“What were they doing?”
“I don’t know. Standing there staring at each other. It was weird, but I just thought maybe he tried to talk to her and she didn’t answer and it freaked him out.”
“Is she okay?” The concern in his voice is genuine.
“I don’t know. No one knows where she is.” I don’t even know how I get the words out without my voice breaking.
Asher walks back in while I’m still on the phone. “My parents called the credit card company.”
I tell Clay to get over here and I hang up so I can hear what Asher is saying.
He tells us she used the card at a gas station on the northbound side of the turnpike just outside of Brighton earlier today. He’s going over to pick up some things from Margot’s and then he’s heading back there. It’s beyond me what’s so important that he has to pick it up before he goes looking for his sister but I’m not in a position to put down people who love her. I said I loved her and look what I’ve done.
I haven’t been able to interrupt him, because I’m trying to formulate my own thoughts before I dropkick her brother with them.
“She was with him yesterday.” My stomach twists when I say it. I’m afraid there are answers there I don’t want to think about yet.
“What?” I don’t know who says it. Maybe everybody.
“Aidan Richter. The kid who confessed. Clay said he saw them together at the art gallery. He was there.” I force it out in one pained breath.
“Who the hell is Clay?” That wouldn’t have been my first question if I was Asher, but I answer it, just now realizing how little her family really knows about her life here.
“He draws pictures of her. She went with him to a state competition yesterday. He said he found them in a room together, and when he saw the news today, he remembered him.”
“Does he know anything else?” Asher asks, anxiously.
“I don’t know. I told him to get over here.”
Clay pulls up and he’s barely in the door before we bombard him with questions. He tells us what he knows, which isn’t much. He was meeting with the judges while she looked around at the exhibits. When he found her after his interview, she was in a room with the Richter kid and they were staring at each other. He didn’t hear anything so he has no idea if they were speaking or not. Then Richter got called in for his interview and they didn’t see him again. Clay drove her home at the end of the day and that was it.
“She was fine on the way home. She seemed fine. Not like she talks. She was upset in the morning on the way there, but in the afternoon, nothing unusual.”
“Why was she upset? I ask, because it’s the first time he’s mentioned it.
“I don’t know. She looked out the window the whole time and when we got there she was crying. She’s been a mess ever since whatever happened between you two.” He looks at me but it’s almost apologetic, like he didn’t want to call either of us out, but he had to. “I wouldn’t have said anything if this didn’t happen.”
“She was crying?” Asher looks like he doesn’t understand. I guess she doesn’t cry in front of him, either.
“Not like sobbing,” Clay clarifies. “Just tears. I didn’t even know until I looked at her. I wasn’t going to call her on it. Who knows what goes on in her head?”
“Nobody,” Asher says, and if it’s possible, he looks more devastated than before.
“I thought you knew your sister.” I say, throwing his words back at him because now I’m getting scared and it’s making me a dick.
“Nobody knows my sister,” he says. And there isn’t any argument for that.
We work out what we do and don’t know at this point. We know a lot of things, just not the one thing we want to know. Where she is.
Basically what it comes down to is that no one has seen her since nine o’clock this morning and there’s been no trace of her since she used her credit card at a gas station just after eleven right outside Brighton. There’s nothing after that. But she’s eighteen and she hasn’t even been missing for twelve hours so no one’s going to look for her except us.
Asher has his parents on the phone the second we’ve sorted out Clay’s story. While Asher talks to his mother, his father is calling the police station to let them know what happened between Sunshine and Aidan Richter yesterday. We’re all wondering the same thing. The thing that no one is saying. If she went to Brighton, she went looking for him before he ever confessed. And if she was in Brighton at eleven o’clock and he turned himself in at three-thirty—what happened in between?
Asher leaves, planning to stop at Margot’s to pick up whatever it was he promised to bring his parents from his sister’s room. Then he’s heading straight back to Brighton. Margot’s staying at her place on the off chance that Sunshine heads back this way.
Everyone knows I’m going, and Drew says he is, too. Asher gives us the address and the phone number to his parents’ house and tells us he’ll let them know we’re coming. We decide to take our own cars in case we need to separate when we get there.
A few minutes later, I climb into my truck alone and head to Brighton. I spend the entire drive bargaining with everything I will ever have. I don’t know how many times I say please. Please give her back to me. Please not again. Just please. My phone doesn’t ring. It’s the longest two hours of my life.
The room is full of controlled chaos. It reminds me of the day my mother and sister died. Phones ringing off the hook. Frantic calm. Poorly concealed fear. They’re like zombie people. Empty. Haunted and endlessly waiting for something. I know what it looks like. These people were probably normal once. I think about how easily this could be the Leightons if it had been Sarah. How every normal family is one tragedy away from complete implosion.
There are photographs all over the room of a girl I should know, but don’t. A girl in pastel dresses, with ribbons in her hair, smiling and playing the piano in more pictures than I can count. I feel like I’m mourning all over again, but this time it’s for a girl I’ve never met.
Her parents are both on cell phones. The land line keeps ringing, but nobody answers it because the reporters keep calling. Finally, her father rips the cord out of the wall and then it’s quiet. But not really.
Drew and I sit on the far side of the room. Separated physically and emotionally from the rest of the family. The rest of the family. Whether or not they acknowledge me, I am in that category, also. She made sure of it, no matter how much I’d like to say otherwise. She’s gone now, too. It fits.
Asher walks in not long after we arrive. He’s carrying a stack of black and white composition books; the kind Ms. McAllister makes us use for creative writing. He puts them on the coffee table in the middle of the room. It’s a hideous coffee table. I could make a better one. I think about offering.