Page 78 of Forget Me Not
CHAPTER 51
The car is stuffed with a smothered silence, my mom staring out the passenger window as a blur of small towns breeze sleepily past.
“It’s just up there,” she says at last, pointing to a stream up ahead.
I flip on the turn signal, a courtesy for no one as we curve down a narrow roadway. Gravel dust erupting like smoke from the tires as a decrepit old barn slumps in the distance, four wooden walls stripped down to the bones.
“Welcome to the Farm.”
I look at my mother, her voice wilted into a whisper as we come to a stop before the structure, field grass scratching the glass like nails. Then I turn off the car, staring silently at the barn up ahead. Four decades of desertion has made it appear as though it’s one wind gust away from crumbling completely but I force myself to slide out, my mother still sitting in the seat beside me as I slam the door shut and make my way closer, coming to stop at the mouth of the entrance.
I peer inside, the barn’s hot breath musky and damp as I imagine Lily meeting Marcia in this very same spot, a cigarette balanced between her two fingers as she walked her around on some strange tour. I step inside slowly, taking it in. There are relics of squatters scattered around: an old sleeping bag slouched in the corner and a smashed vodka bottle glinting on the floor. Then a ripple of movement catches my attention and I twist to the side, a strip of pink fabric quivering in the breeze. It’s nailed to the wall, just above a window with the glass punched out, and I squint as I turn in a slow circle, eyeing the remnants of a paperback bloated with water. A rogue table leg snapped clean like a femur and the edge of a picture frame, a dull, dirty gold.
I let my hands trail the walls as I walk the perimeter, reading all the words written in paint, graffiti carved with the sharp tip of a knife—and then I come across an etching so old it’s barely visible, though my fingers recognize the sentence from all the times they’d felt it before.
Lily was here.
“It looks different,” my mom says, and I whip around at the sound of her voice, her silhouette standing still in the entrance. “But at the same time, exactly the same.”
I stay rigid before her, taking in the faint whispers of a life lived in this place before I turn back around, my gaze trained on those words still preserved in the wood.
“She never belonged here,” my mom continues. “Katherine, I mean.”
I feel her come to a stop beside me as my mind starts to sort through everything I’ve learned about Katherine, a freshman from Berkeley who just disappeared.
“She was smart,” she continues. “Had a real future. And it was an escape for her, too, I think—from the pressures of school, a few months of distraction—but unlike the rest of us, she had something to go back to.”
I drop my hand, thinking of her picture I found in the paper. Lean body resting against the edge of the camper before meeting a man the same way as the others, a man who said all the things she had wanted to hear. Who persuaded her to bring him along for the summer, the two of them weaving their way across the country before settling down on the opposite coast.
“But Mitchell wouldn’t let her,” I say, surprised to find my mother shaking her head.
“Lilywouldn’t let her.”
I stare down at her name again, thinking about Lily growing up in the system. The dozens of families she must have known and all of them abandoning her the moment she started to settle. Going about their lives, forgetting her completely. Shuttling her around from place to place until she finally arrived at the Farm and desperately tried to make it feel like a home.
“The summer was over,” my mom says. “Katherine needed to get back to school but Lily kept talking about how worried she was that Mitchell would go with her.”
I find myself nodding, that familiar fear of being forgotten rearing up its hideous head.
“Though, honestly, I don’t think he actually would have left,” she adds. “Katherine’s camper, it was the only way we had of getting around. He didn’t want to lose that, so he was just saying what he knew Lily needed to hear. She was nothing more than a tool in his hands.”
“So, what happened?” I ask. “What did she do?”
My mom sighs, the movement so strong her body seems to deflate.
“The night before Katherine was supposed to leave, we were all together, around the fire, and Lily brought her something to drink.” Her voice takes on some faraway tone, a placid detachment as she stares straight ahead. “She didn’t even ask what it was becausewe did that all the time out here. Mitchell used to grow things, sell things.”
I twist around, staring out at the field behind us as I imagine that steady stream of cars coming and going, Mitchell easing his way onto each seat and walking back out with crumpled bills in his hand.
Lily picking those flowers, tiny and toxic. Rolling the stems between her fingers like needles loaded with a lethal dose.
“And Katherine trusted her,” I say, thinking about how Lily had persuaded Natalie to drink something, too, all because they were threatening to break the fragile life she’d created. The home Lily had finally built for herself.
“She got so pale.” My mom nods, her voice barely audible as she relives it all. “She couldn’t move. Then she tried to start talking but she wasn’t making any sense.”
She takes a deep, shuddering breath, the tears streaming out faster than she can wipe them away.
“I remember saying we needed to get her to a hospital but Mitchell said she’d be fine, that she just needed to sleep it off. When I woke up the next morning, Katherine was gone, but her car was still there.”
