I can only see the front of the book on the top of the pile. Chemistry is written in red marker on the cover. It’s Sunshine’s handwriting and seeing it breaks me a little.
Her mother steps toward the stack of books like it’s a bomb. “Is this them?”
Asher nods. He’s pale and looks older than he did the first time I met him. Everyone here looks older than they should. Like they’ve seen too many horrible things and now they’re just tired. I wonder if I look like that, too.
Nastya/Emilia/Sunshine. I don’t know what to call her. Her mother picks up the book on top and opens it, flipping through the first few pages. “It’s just chemistry notes,” she says, relieved, but confused.
“Keep going, Mom.” Asher sounds like he’s delivering a death blow.
A moment later her face contorts in the most wretched expression and her hand goes to her mouth and I look away because just seeing it feels like an invasion. She looks exactly like Sunshine. Drew doesn’t look away. He just stares at her. He looks older, too. I think it might have happened, just now, when he saw the look on this woman’s face.
“It took her all of these to write this?” she asks to no one in particular. Her husband, Sunshine’s father, the man who’s been standing behind her the whole time takes the book out of her hands and she shakes her head at him. Not like she doesn’t understand something, but like she’s telling him no. She doesn’t want him to look. It’s like someone telling you not to look at a dead body, because if you look at it, you won’t ever be able to not see it again. It will always be in your head and you won’t ever close your eyes without the image being there. That’s how she looks when she shakes her head at him. Like she’s seen the body and she doesn’t want him seeing it, too.
“No,” Asher says. “It’s all the same thing. In all of them. It just repeats like it’s on a loop. Over and over and over again.” His voice breaks on the third over and he starts to cry but no one consoles him. They don’t have any comfort to offer.
There’s a knock at the door and a girl walks in. She doesn’t say anything. She just walks straight over to Asher who doesn’t move until she reaches him. Then he wraps his arms around her and folds her up until she’s almost gone and I miss Sunshine.
The mood in this room is so familiar. No one feels anything but everyone keeps moving because there are so many things to do. But right now no one seems to know what they are.
The police said Aidan Richter is admitting to seeing her yesterday, but continues to deny having any contact with her today. No one knows whether or not it’s true. There’s nothing to go on. No place to even begin.
Finally they decide that Asher and Addison and Mr. Ward will take separate cars and go looking for her, even though they have no idea where to start. Asher was right. Nobody knows his sister, at least not the sister he has now.
Her mother is staying here to man the phone. They don’t know what to tell Drew and me to do. We don’t really know the area and we have no idea where she would go. We’re just useless and waiting.
“You can wait in Emilia’s room if you want,” her mother offers. Everyone in this house calls her Emilia and it sounds more right than Nastya ever did.
Her room is insane and I feel like I’ve walked into her mind. There are no walls. You can’t see them. Every inch of space is covered with newspaper clippings, computer printouts, and handwritten notes on scraps of paper. They almost seem to move, to shimmer; swimming in and out of my vision like an optical illusion. Like her. I want to close my eyes but I can’t. I just turn in a circle waiting for it to stop, but it goes on forever. I think I might run from the room but now this is in my head, too. Like whatever dead body is hiding downstairs in those books.
We step in and get closer because you can’t read any of it unless you’re almost on top of them. Names. They’re all names and origins and meanings. Some of them are from the newspaper, like the ones I’ve seen her cutting out at my house. Some were obviously printed off of the internet. Others she’s written herself.
I don’t know how long we stare at the walls before Drew speaks. “Where’s Nastya?”
I look at him. I don’t know. How would I know? But he’s looking at the walls, not me. He’s searching for her name. I start looking, too, but it’s impossible.
“Your name means salvation,” he says at one point, looking at a handwritten scrap of paper taped up next to the window.
Salvation. Such a load of shit.
“Did she tell you that?” he asks.
“No.” I never asked. I never asked a lot of things. “This is pointless. We could look it up faster,” I say, needing to look away.
Drew pulls out his phone and finds a baby name site on the internet. He types Nastya in, and a second later, we have our answer.
“Rebirth,” he says. “Resurrection. Russian origin.”
“I think that’s why she picked it. The resurrection part. I guess the Russian, too.” Her mother is standing in the doorway. She’s pulled her hair back and it makes the dark circles under her eyes more noticeable.
“Why resurrection?” Drew asks.
“Because she died,” her mother says, looking so much like Sunshine that it unnerves me. “And she came back.”
Her mother tells us what happened that day. I don’t know if we want to hear it, but she needs to tell it, so we listen. She talks about the things we didn’t hear on the news and the little they know of Aidan Richter. She tells us about the part that came after. The not remembering. Then, later, the not talking. The surgeries and the physical therapy. Wanting to go back to school where no one would know who she was. The Russian name her mother didn’t understand until now.
Then she talks about before. We hear story after story about a girl and a piano and a whole community who took ownership of her. Her eyes light up at the memory of it. But that’s what it is—a memory. Like Sunshine said. I know what she’s seeing. A dead girl.
And as I listen to these stories, in this shrine of a house, I start to understand why she left.
I feel like I learn more in one evening about the girl who has practically lived at my house for months than I have since the moment I met her. And I don’t want to know any of it.
Her mother thanks us but I don’t know why and then she leaves to make more phone calls. I think she just needs something to do.
Drew lies back in Sunshine’s bed, staring at the ceiling. I sit on the floor and lean against the wall. Every time I move I can hear paper crinkling against my back.
“I don’t understand,” he says, eventually.
“Don’t understand what?” I ask. There are so many possible answers to that question.
“I don’t get why he didn’t rape her.”
“What the f**k kind of a question is that?” I practically growl at him.
“I’m not trying to be a dick. I’m serious,” he says, and I can tell he is being serious and it’s uncomfortable for him. All of this is uncomfortable for him. In the last few weeks, Drew has had to handle more emotionally-charged, disturbing situations than he has in his whole life and he’s not equipped for it.
“Sorry,” I apologize to him, because I am, for more than just biting his head off. He was going to have to start growing up at some point, but I feel bad that it had to be like this.
“I just don’t get it. Gorgeous girl, alone, why doesn’t he rape her? Why does he just beat the shit out of her and leave her there. It just doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Would it make sense if he had raped her?” I ask, because nothing about what happened to her makes sense.
“No. I guess I just want to understand why he did it. I want there to be a reason.”
“Too much pain, rage, grief. Too much reality.” There are so many things that can break you if there’s nothing to hold you together.
“That’s not an excuse,” he says.
“No, it’s not an excuse,” I reply. “You asked for a reason. It’s a reason. Just not a good one.”
I can tell he’s still struggling to understand, to make this fit into his view of the world; but it never will. And it shouldn’t. It has no place in the world, no matter how often it happens.
I feel the clock cursing me with every minute that passes and I force myself not to look at it because I don’t want to count them. I don’t even know how long the silence persists before I have to say what’s in my head because I don’t want it in there anymore.
“I wasn’t supposed to have to do this again… I can’t do this again. It was done. It was everybody. All of them… gone… and then her. Why? What did I do that was so wrong? Why even give her to me, just to take her away?” I know Drew wants to tell me not to let my mind go there, but he can’t even make himself say the words. It’s the only place left for my mind to go. “It’s my fault. I never should have thought it was okay to love her.”
He sighs, staring up at the ceiling. “It is okay, Josh. She’s okay.” He wants to believe it, but he doesn’t, and it’s worse than if he’d said nothing.
“No one is ever okay.”
It’s well after midnight, but no one is sleeping. We’re on our third pot of coffee. I’ve made the last two, which is only right, since I’ve been the one drinking most of it.
Asher and Addison and Mr. Ward got back an hour ago. None of them said a word, but they didn’t need to. If they had found anything, it would have spoken for itself. The quiet in this room is like a vise that just keeps tightening on us, little by little, until we’re all suffocating from it. The piano hovers in the corner like a ghost and I can’t look at it, because now I know what it means, and it’s haunting me, too.
Drew and I are at the dining room table. Mr. and Mrs. Ward are on one couch far enough away from each other that there’s no danger of them touching. Addison is stretched out on the other couch with her head resting on Asher’s lap, his hand mindlessly running through her hair.
The back door opens and it’s a bomb detonating into the room. Everyone turns at once. And she’s there.
No one moves. No one jumps up and runs to her or shrieks with joy. Everyone just stares, like we’re all trying to make sure she’s really here. She looks at all of us, her eyes passing over every battered face in the room, until she reaches mine. And then there’s nothing else. I can’t move, but she does. And then she’s right in front of me and all at once her mother says Emilia and Asher says Em and her father says Milly and Drew says Nastya and I say Sunshine and then she shatters.
All the pieces of all the girls go flying and I’m holding the one who’s left.
My arms are wrapped around her, but I don’t say anything. I don’t think anything. I don’t even know if I breathe. I’m so afraid that I am not going to be able to hold her together. I’ve seen her cry once before but it was nothing like this. She is gone, disappeared into some otherworldly oblivion of pain. The sound. It’s raw and primal and horrifying and I don’t want to hear it. Her hand is pressed between my chest and her mouth, trying to stifle it, but it’s not working. She won’t stop shaking, always the shaking, and I’m begging in my head for her to stop. I can feel everyone in the room watching, but I can’t think about them right now.
She’s still standing, but she’s not. All of her weight is on me. All of it. The weight of her body and her secrets and her tears and her pain and her regret and her loss and I feel like I’m going to break, too, because it’s too much. I don’t want to know any of this. Now I understand why she spent so much time running. I want to run away, too. I want to drop her and fling the door open and not look back, because I can’t do this. I’m not strong enough, not brave enough, not comforting enough. I’m not enough. I’m no one’s salvation. Not even my own.