By my final morning in the hospital, the last of my bruises had paled to a sickly yellow. They faded from the inside out, leaving dark rings that made me feel dirty, like my skin was covered in stains I couldn’t erase. Each bruise still ached if I pressed it hard enough, which I did, several times, during the special last-day breakfast I shared with the other girls. We sat in the programming room and watched without joy as an orderly served us waffles on paper plates. The waffles were lukewarm and rubbery, but there was coffee, plus a plate of succulent red grapes. I popped a few grapes into my mouth, only to discover too late that they were full of seeds, a swarm of daggers piercing my cheeks.
After breakfast drew to a merciful conclusion, we headed back to our rooms. A new girl arrived just then, so we paused in the hallway to watch her roll past. She was strapped on her back on a gurney, and although her eyes were open, I got the sense that she was not awake. Her parents trailed behind stiffly.
Next to me, Glory watched this scene with intensity.
“Are you all right?” I asked her.
She kept her eyes fixed on the gurney, which the staff was maneuvering into an empty room.
“Something is wrong with that girl,” she said.
“Of course something’s wrong. She was abducted.”
Glory shook her head. “I think maybe she tried to hurt herself.”
I took a step back, like what that girl had was catching.
“When I was a kid, I knew a girl who tried to end it after she was returned,” Glory said. “She managed to get her hands on a bottle of pills while she was still in the hospital. The staff must have been so lazy to let that happen. It’s not a surprise, though, is it. That they don’t care.”
Her eyes had a shine to them, a greedy look, like she delighted in the possibilities of destruction. I knew nothing about her—not what kind of life she had before she was taken, or what she had to return to. I didn’t even know her real name.
“That girl’s the lucky one, if you ask me,” she added, nodding to the end of the hallway, where the new girl had disappeared from sight. “She’s not awake to face all this.”
Without waiting for my reply, Glory offered a vicious half smile and retreated to her room. For a few moments I stood there, stunned, until my shock solidified into a desire for control—for the power to stop at least one of the disasters careening toward me.
I went to the nurses’ station. My legs were shaking, and I had to steady myself by leaning on the counter. I explained to the nurse that I was worried Glory was thinking of harming herself. The nurse narrowed her eyes as I spoke, then called two more nurses to the station. They huddled together, whispering. I would learn later they were making plans to ensure Glory wouldn’t be left alone for the rest of her stay in the hospital. But I didn’t need to know the details—it was clear that they intended to protect her, and that was all that mattered to me.
I watched the nurses work and told myself that order was being restored. Maybe, I dared to imagine, my actions had shifted a tiny bit of fate. I thought of Julia’s metaphor with the tree and imagined roots deepening, branches growing, leaves unfurling. By ensuring Glory received help, perhaps I’d directed her toward a brighter path. The mere prospect was intoxicating. I felt dazzled, like I’d just pulled off a magic trick.
Maybe I could do it again.
In the hours to come, we were meant to gather our things and wait for our families to arrive for our final therapy session. Back in my room, I found one of the battered suitcases from home on my bed. Inside was a set of clothes: jeans, a pink V-neck T-shirt, canvas sneakers, socks, and a bra and underwear. My mother had delivered the suitcase to the front desk the night before in preparation for my last day.
I dressed. I combed my hair one last time with the plastic comb, and then I threw the comb away. After a moment of hesitation, I bunched up my pajamas and shoved them in the trash can, too. Maybe the staff planned to wash those pajamas and give them to another girl later, but I hoped not. Every girl in that place deserved something new and untouched.
Following an interminable wait, a nurse knocked on the door and peered inside. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, fully dressed and packed, waiting for all this to come to an end.
“It’s time,” the nurse told me. She smiled a little.
I stood up and trailed her down the hallway toward one of the small meeting rooms. When we arrived, she paused with one hand on the door.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
Before I could respond, she pushed the door open.
I took it all in: the overhead lights, blazing fluorescents that made everyone’s skin burn. The plastic chairs arranged in a semicircle. My family in those chairs, alien, sickly.
Miles wore a shirt I didn’t recognize, which was disorienting; I wondered if he’d gone shopping while I was missing. He sat with his right ankle crossed over his left knee, and I tried to puzzle out his expression: distant, aloof, maybe angry. His black eye was nearly gone, but because I knew where to look, I could still see the faint ring of it.
Next to Miles, our parents waited stiffly. My father sat forward on the very edge of the chair. My mother was in her professional clothes, with her hair arranged into a bun at the nape of her neck. She appeared polished, everything neat and tucked away. I realized she must have needed time off from her job to be at the hospital for visitation hours.
The nurse stood behind me and placed her hands on my shoulders.
“Sir?” she said to my father. He was the only person not looking at me. “Sir, you should greet your daughter.”
My father raised his head but did not speak. His hair was trimmed and damp, and I could smell his aftershave. I leaned slightly into the nurse’s hands so she could support me.
“You should say something,” the nurse suggested. I didn’t know whether she was talking to me or to my father, but either way, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I sat across from my father and leaned toward him.
“Dad,” I said. “You need to talk to me.”
He brought his hands to the lower half of his face, as if he couldn’t bear for me to look at him full on.
“I’m so ashamed,” he said at last. “Miles told us, Celeste. About those men in the alley, and how you went off with them.”
“They took me, Dad. I didn’t want to go.” As I spoke, I wasn’t so sure. Hadn’t I pushed Miles away? I remembered what the police had said, about how I’d gone willingly. Maybe that was how the world would see it.
“We know about that party you went to with your friends, how everyone was drinking rose sherry.” My father waved his hand through the air, like he was conjuring a vision of that night. “So maybe you went out, had a little something to drink, and two handsome men come your way, start giving you attention. Or maybe they gave Cassandra more attention than you, and you felt you had something to prove. It’s natural for a young girl just coming into her own to want to feel special.”
“That’s not what happened.” I glanced at the nurse, hoping she might defend me, but she only gave me a tight smile.
“Your mother and I should have known not to trust you,” he went on. “Girls run off all the time after passing to adult markings. They lose control. I should have kept that in mind and done more to protect you. Instead, I let myself get distracted by work.”
“What about Miles?” I asked. “He led me into an alley. If he’d taken me straight back to Julia’s, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Miles looked stricken, but my father frowned.
“You were responsible for yourself,” he said. “You have free will, just like everyone else. You made your own choices that night.”
There was no way for me to win—I could see that now. The hospital was the first place where I glimpsed the truth of how things worked, not just within my family but on a far larger scale. The world was a sharp place for girls and women.
“Celeste, your father loves you,” my mother said. She put a hand on his forearm, as if he were the one who needed comforting. “He was so distraught when you disappeared.”
“She’s right.” My father’s voice cracked. “I regret so much, all the ways I could have done better by you. I was too wrapped up in my own problems. If I hadn’t been demoted, your mother wouldn’t have had to return to work, and we could have paid more attention to you. But you also should have been more careful, Celeste.”
He took my hand and pulled me toward him. I let him hug me. I let him cry against my neck and hold me like I was something precious and vulnerable. But I did not feel breakable. I was stone.
“It’s always the most difficult for fathers,” the nurse said. “They tend to experience great anger and great shame after abductions.” She stood up and drew a stick-figure family on the chalkboard, making the father oversized and placing him in the center. “Sometimes it might seem that rage is directed at the daughter, but that’s not the case. Their reactions are always, always based in love. Please remember that, Celeste. Let your father feel what he needs to, and stay strong. Things will get better with time, I promise.”
My father pulled back and wiped his eyes. The session carried on, a stumbling, halting endeavor. Most of it washed over me in an amnesic tide. Finally, from the corner of the room near the door, a timer dinged. We all turned to look at it. It was a little brass timer sitting on a table behind the nurse. I hadn’t noticed it when I came in.
The nurse reached behind her and turned off the alarm. “Unless there’s anything more you’d like to discuss, you’re free to go.”
No one said anything. I supposed there was good reason for the thirty-minute limit. The staff in the Reintegration Wing saw hundreds of families a year; they’d probably given up trying to resolve anything a long time ago.
We stood and marched from the room: my father first, then Miles, and then my mother, who held my hand but let me drift back a bit. We followed the nurse down the hall to the checkout desk. I looked for the other girls along the way, but they had vanished. Maybe their family sessions weren’t so disastrous and they were already on their way home, back to normal lives. Or maybe not.
At the checkout desk, the nurse handed me some paperwork and a pen.
“You’re almost free,” she said brightly. The form she gave me to sign was insultingly simple. It stated the date and the time and that I would be leaving of my own will.
“Does this mean I could have left earlier, if I’d asked?” I was embarrassed that I’d never thought of it. Adults had placed me in this hospital, had told me I was injured and had to stay. It didn’t occur to me that I might have refused.
“Well,” the nurse said. She seemed as staggered by my question as by my realization that I could ask it. “We’ve never had a girl leave before her four days are up. It’s a federally sponsored program, you know. We’re here to make sure girls recover.”
I stopped asking questions. I signed the form.
During the drive home, I sat in the back seat, next to Miles, and leaned my face against the window. I watched the world pass by: the trees changing color, the houses still standing. The hospital was located on the opposite side of town, so we had a long drive.
We were about halfway home and passing through a part of the city I didn’t recognize when I saw it: a flyer dangling from a telephone pole. One of its staples had come loose and it flapped desperately in the wind, but I could still make out the photocopied image it bore.
It was my face, a picture I didn’t recognize. I was not smiling. And above my head, the single word printed in all caps in a thick, choking font: LOST.