PROLOGUE
Five Years Ago
Veronica
I would give anything to go back to that day. My right arm. Anything. I would do everything differently. Starting with the fit I threw when I was told my little sister Ariel would have to tag along if I wanted to borrow my mom’s car.
Or maybe I’d have thrown an even bigger fit.
That would have been one way to prevent what happened. As good a way as any. As lost in the weave of time and place and past as all the others.
That fight scene between my mom and me plays in my mind almost as often as the other one. The one that severed my sister’s life in two—into a before and after—into two parts that will never be a whole again.
It was just a Friday afternoon in spring. Not too hot, not too cold. I was meeting my friends for pizza and a drink. Ariel had cheer practice.
I wanted to make a night of it and didn’t want my little sister in tow. I was twenty, she was fifteen. I was supposed to look out for her, keep her safe; instead I spent the last hour of her normal life arguing with her.
We bickered the whole drive from the driveway of our home to the supermarket in Pleasantville where I just had to stop for a green juice and a bottle of water. I didn’t need either. I could’ve kept driving.
But Ariel kept turning the radio up while we argued, so we were shouting at each and I was getting a headache.
“Stay in the car,” I told her right before slamming the door shut.
She asked me to bring her a candy bar, but I ignored her.
I did buy it for her though. And her own green juice and an extra bottle of water. I hold onto that good deed as though it does something to absolve the rest. It doesn’t.
The line was long as it usually is in the evenings, even at the self-check-out registers.
When I went in, the sky was dusky pink. When I came back out it was just dusky.
I will never forget the sight of my little sister’s long wheat-blonde and perfectly straight hair was streaming around her as she fought the two big men forcing her into the back of a black van. Her bright blue eyes were glowed in the twilight, the light in them bright and powerful. Her pretty face a grimace of fear and anger. She never heard me as I screamed her name, never heard me as I dropped everything I was carrying, the cold green juice splashing all over my legs, and ran towards her. To save her. To stop it. To get her back.
I still wake up screaming her name every time I dream this memory.
Why did I have to park all the way at the edge of the parking lot?
Why did I have to stop?
Why did she get out of the car?
Why did I take so long in the store?
All questions I’ve asked myself a million times.
The answers mean nothing. They’re pointless. Immaterial.
The van with my sister in the back was already speeding out of the parking lot and down the main road towards the highway by the time I reached my mom’s SUV.
It had no plates. The windows weren’t just tinted, they were black.
I raced after it. But never caught it.
All I remember of the two men that grabbed her were their leather vests and bulky, hairy, tattooed arms as they wrestled my little sister into the darkness of the back of the van.
It wasn’t enough to catch them.
It wasn’t enough to save her.