We weren’t there. We weren’t anywhere. It was like the cobblestones had opened up and swallowed us.
My father, Gabe, when he was alive, filled in the rest of the story. How he called the police less than five minutes after we disappeared. How he banged on the doors of every house on the street, but no one had seen us. How you could hear people calling our names—Iris! Vivi! Grey!—from one end of Old Town to the other, until the sun rose and the searchers went home to rest their throats and hug their sleeping children.
I remembered none of this. Like a language I’d once been fluent in but had long stopped speaking, the memories of what truly happened had faded to threadbare fragments over time and then to nothing at all.
I was grateful for this. I knew what usually happened to kidnapped children. It was better not to know what had been done to us.
My memories began a month later, when a woman found us huddled together at midnight, shivering on the sidewalk of the same street we had disappeared from. Our coats were gone and we were naked in the cold, but apart from that, we were unharmed. Our skin was clean. There were leaves and white flowers in our hair. We smelled of mildew and woodsmoke and milk and death. The police came and took the knife from Grey’s shaking hand and wrapped us in foil blankets and offered us hot chocolate and cake made from dark treacle and spices. I was starving. We all were. We gorged ourselves.
After our medical examinations, we were released to our parents. Cate swept me into her arms and collapsed to the hospital floor in a sobbing heap. Her face was wet with tears and her hair was a greasy nest twisted into a bun at the nape of her neck. She couldn’t speak, could only rock back and forth on the floor, keening into my ear.
It is the first true memory I have of my mother.
Of course I remember.
I remember everything.
You just wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
It had to be a lie. Grey didn’t remember. None of us did. It was a central tenet of our story. We were taken. We came back. None of us knew what happened, and none of us ever would. We were the miracle that parents of all missing children dreamed of. Spat back from the abyss, unharmed and whole.
“I can’t feel her, Iris,” Vivi said. “I can’t feel her.”
“What does that mean?”
“Last night, you talked about the strange things we can do. That’s one of them. I’d forgotten—I haven’t tried to do it for years—but when I woke up this morning and you weren’t there . . . I could still feel you. I followed your footsteps down the stairs to the front door. We’re . . . tethered, or something. We’ve always been able to find each other. In the dark, across town, even over oceans. My feet bring me to you if I want them to.”
I knew what she was talking about. I always knew if Grey or Vivi was calling me without looking at the caller ID. I always knew where I’d find my sisters if I went looking for them—but I assumed the memories of being able to feel them, to find them if I needed to, were things I’d half dreamed as a kid, like breathing underwater or being able to fly.
“But I can’t feel her,” Vivi continued. “Grey is gone—what if whatever happened to us before is happening again? We might be the only ones who can help her.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t even think that, okay? Nothing has happened to her.” I could hear in the pitch of my voice how desperately I wanted that to be true. “We’re not kids anymore. Besides, you heard Tyler last night. She disappears all the time.”
“We have to look for her, Iris.”
“No, I have to go back to school. I have classes, I have tutoring. There’s a titration competition coming up in a month that I haven’t practiced for even once and my Python skills need some—”
“Tell me you think she’s okay, and I’ll drop you at school myself.”
“Vivi . . . this is crazy.”
“Say she’s okay, then. Listen to your gut and tell me you think Grey is okay. Do the thing we can do. Find her.”
“I haven’t tried that for a long time.”
“Do it.”
I let out a long breath and did what Vivi asked me to do. I reached out and tried to find Grey, to feel her, the way I’d been able to as a child, but all that came back was an empty sense of nothingness.
I bit my lip. Was that proof of anything?
“That’s what I thought,” Vivi said. She tapped the Vogue cover. “Grey’s always kept secrets. When we were kids, she used to hide stuff from us. Her diary, money, booze. She’d squirrel everything away under loose floorboards or behind bookshelves. So where would she keep her secrets now?”
I looked around the room. “How did you get in here? Did you pick the lock?”
Vivi shrugged. “The door was open.”
“The only person who has a key to this room is Grey.” I knew that because I’d tried to get in many times since she left, without success. I thought of the open front door yesterday, of the wet footprints that tracked inside, of Sasha outside on the mat.
“What if . . . ,” I started. It was a crazy theory, but we were already talking about crazy things. “What if Grey unlocked the door? What if she was here yesterday? What if she left something for us, something only we would know how to find?”
Vivi snapped her fingers at me. “Now you’re thinking like a Hollow.”
* * *
We spent the afternoon combing Grey’s bedroom, excavating for signs of our sister. Vivi found the first: a collection of runes hand-embroidered in emerald thread on the underside of her mattress. I found the second—an annotated page torn from a book of Emily Dickinson poetry rolled up tight inside a curtain rod—and the third.
I was on my hands and knees under Grey’s bed, trailing my fingertips over the baseboard, when my skin caught on a splinter in the wood. A prick of blood welled on my fingertip. I wiped it away on my uniform skirt, then crouched to inspect the offending panel.
“There’s something here,” I told Vivi. A crack in the skirting board. I slipped my fingernails under the wood and lifted. It gave, but not enough. “Get me a knife from the kitchen.”
Vivi was standing over me now. “Why don’t you get it yourself?” she said.
I sighed and turned to give her a seriously? look.
“Sorry. Old sibling habits die hard.”
When Vivi returned with a butter knife, I slipped it into the crack, eased it open.
“You’re going to break it,” Vivi said as she tried to shoulder me out of the way. “Let me do it.”
I stopped and glared at her. “Would you quit it?”