We finished the living room without saying much. It was quiet, just the rustle of our work and the wind lisping through the window screen. I wished we had a radio. Or a fan. Or gas masks. Or that Daniel and I could have a normal conversation. I couldn’t glance at him without reliving our kiss, and I was starting to think maybe we should acknowledge it and move on. Laugh it off. Start over and get to know each other. Surely he was thinking about it, too. Unless the encounter hadn’t been as memorable for him as it was for me. In that case, it was better not to bring it up, to let my insecurity fester in silence.
“You hungry yet?” Daniel asked.
My watch showed just after eleven. I didn’t feel like eating, but I was ready to get out of the trailer for a while. “Sure,” I said.
The air outside was fresh and cedar-scented. We carried our lunches over to the foundation of the main house and sat in the shade. I watched him eat his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in four bites.
“So this was your grandparents’ place?” he asked, wiping his mouth with his hand.
“They were the last ones to live out here before my grandpa built the house we live in now.”
“Such a lonely feeling out here,” he said. “Something about abandoned places, I guess. I’d hate to live in that trailer, looking out at these empty buildings every day.”
“I don’t think they spent much time looking out the window. Not with the curtains nailed shut.”
“True. I’ve never seen anything like that.”
He tore open the mini bag of Doritos I’d packed in his lunch sack and bit a huge chunk out of his apple. I watched him eat in silence as long as I could stand it.
“You said you remembered me.”
“Yeah,” he said, taking a moment to chew and swallow. “From school. I used to see you on my way to first period. You were always helping that friend of yours with her locker.”
A lump rose in my throat. Few people referred to Cheri as my friend. It was always “that ______ girl.” Fill in the blank: poor, retarded, dead.
“I’m sorry about what happened. She seemed like a nice kid.”
“She was,” I said.
Daniel stood up, observing my uneaten lunch without comment. “I guess we should get back to work.” We made our way back to the trailer, grasshoppers zinging through the weeds in front of us. I should’ve been relieved that he didn’t remember the night at the bonfire, but I wasn’t. I tried to think of an explanation that had nothing to do with me. Maybe he had kissed so many girls that their faces blurred together after a while. I didn’t really believe that, though. I’d never seen him with a girl at school.
“Hey,” he said. “Let’s rock-paper-scissors to see who gets to clean the fridge.” I lost, with the fleeting consolation of his hand closing over my fist. Paper covers rock.
I was in no hurry to get to the kitchen, so I started on the empty back room instead. It was dark, but I didn’t want to bother asking Daniel to help with the curtains if I wouldn’t be in there long. The carpet had been torn out, and the exposed plywood floor was blotched with stains. There wasn’t much trash to pick up, just a few candy wrappers and cigarette butts, and then I moved on to the closet. It looked like it had already been cleared, but when I swept my hand across the top shelf, I felt something crammed into the corner. I pulled down a wad of twisted bedding and heard the clink of metal against the bare floor. I knelt to find a thin silver chain with a charm attached. My spine prickled as I held up the necklace for a better look. A blue butterfly dangled from the chain, a familiar chip missing from its left wing. I recognized the necklace because it was mine. I’d given it to Cheri a couple years back when I cleaned out my jewelry box. It was nothing special, a trinket I’d won at the school carnival, but Cheri had loved it. She wore it every day, up until she disappeared.
I clutched the necklace in my palm and sank to the floor, my heart thudding. Had she been here, in this trailer, in this room? Or was it merely a coincidence? She could have lost the necklace or given it away. Maybe I was wrong and the necklace wasn’t even mine. Surely there were others; the butterfly charm was cheap—maybe they all had chipped wings. “Tell me,” I whispered to the dark room. I knew Cheri’s bones lay sealed in the earth, that weeds covered her grave, but I was quiet, and I listened. Tell me what happened to you. If she persisted somehow, in some form, within the membrane of this world or the next, she gave no sign. My head throbbed, pressure building inside my skull. I waited until I could no longer stare at the stains on the floor, and I retreated to the bathroom, shutting the door behind me.
“Hey,” Daniel said, tapping on the bathroom door. “You’ve been in there a while. You do know that’s not a working bathroom, right?”
He was trying to be funny. “I’m fine,” I lied, rubbing my eyes and sliding down from the counter. “Just finishing up.”
He pushed the door open a crack. “Need some help? I’m about done out here. Except for the kitchen, I mean. Still saving that for you.”
“I’m good,” I said, turning my back to the door and shoving it closed with my foot. I pulled out the vanity drawers and dumped their meager contents—Band-Aid wrappers, cotton swabs, crumpled toothpaste tubes. Things Cheri might or might not have used. I peeled a stiff towel from the tub, a pair of socks. Had she showered in here? Changed clothes? In the year she was missing, she’d been living somewhere, doing those everyday things. An entire year, hundreds of days, and on any one of those days I could have found her alive and brought her home. I hadn’t looked hard enough. No one had.
I didn’t want to talk to Daniel, but I couldn’t hide out in the bathroom all day, so I dragged my trash bag past him to the kitchen and started clearing the cabinets.
“Whoa,” he said. “You okay? You get something in your eyes?”
I looked away from him. “I’m allergic to mold.”
“Maybe you should go outside for a minute, take a break.”
I ignored him, brushing mouse droppings from the shelves. I couldn’t take a break. If I left the trailer, I wouldn’t want to come back. It would be better to finish early and start walking, meet Judd partway. After a minute, Daniel gave up on waiting for a response and unscrewed the lid from a bottle of bleach. He doused the sink and counters and started to scrub.
Dad called after dinner to ask how work was going, and I kept my answers as vague as possible. I’d promised to tell him if anything at my new job made me uncomfortable, but I couldn’t tell him about the necklace any more than I could tell him I’d spent the day alone with Daniel. I didn’t want him to get worried and make me quit.
I spent the rest of the evening on the phone, letting Bess distract me with questions. She was irritated that I didn’t sound more excited about working with Daniel, but any thoughts of him had been pushed to the back of my mind. I wanted to tell her about the necklace, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. She’d never fully understood my friendship with Cheri and barely tolerated my continued interest in her. I tried to go to bed, but no amount of singing frogs could lull me to sleep with the necklace hiding under my mattress, so I started a new list on the reverse side of “What Happened to Cheri.”
1. Coincidence. Someone else had the exact same necklace. With the exact same chip.
2. Cheri lost the necklace or gave it to someone else. No connection to the trailer.
3. She stayed in the trailer sometime during the year she was missing. For how long? Alone? If not, who was she with?