Chapter Text
"Dad…! Dad, grab the wheel, come on…!"
Abby almost had to hold back a sob, scrambling with her seatbelt as if she could somehow reach the front from the backseat, as if her arms were long enough, as if any of it would matter. Her father's head kept drooping. Her mother sat limp in the passenger seat, head lolling against the window at an angle that didn't look right. Neither of them looked right. They hadn't looked right in a long time, but tonight was different. Tonight was the kind of different that didn't have a morning after, she feared.
Both had had too much to drink. Both had taken other things too, things Abby was yet to fully comprehend, being barely twelve herself. She knew the basics. She'd learned them the way she'd learned most things, quietly and on her own: by watching, by listening, by understanding that some doors in the apartment were better left un-knocked-on. She knew what their eyes looked like when they were somewhere else. She knew the sounds. She knew, most importantly, when to make herself very small and very invisible.
But she couldn't do that now. Now the car was on a road she didn't recognise, at almost four in the morning, and her father's hands had slipped off the wheel entirely.
"Mom…? Mom, grab the wheel!"
The car lurched left, hard, crossing into oncoming traffic for a half-second before her father's body jerked and he overcorrected. A horn blared, long and furious, the sound of someone who'd just had their life flash before their eyes. Abby pressed herself against the back door, heart hammering so loudly she could feel it in her teeth, against her sternum. She was almost sure she'd vomit it up eventually.
She had been asleep, earlier. She'd been asleep in the back seat of this same car, with her jacket balled up under her cheek, while her parents had been inside whichever bar this had been. She'd done it before. It was one of the things she'd learned to do, to fold herself small into the backseat, find a position that was almost comfortable, sleep lightly enough that she'd hear the door. She'd gotten quite good at it.
She had not anticipated waking up to this.
"Dad! Dad, we're gonna crash! Please, please, grab the wheel!"
Her voice cracked on the last word. She hated that. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth for a moment and breathed, sharp and deliberate, the way she did when she needed to not fall apart. Think. Think. She couldn't reach the wheel. She couldn't open the door, since they were moving too fast, even she knew that much. She couldn't make either of them coherent by talking at them, she'd been trying that for blocks and all it had done was make her throat hurt.
Then she heard the sirens.
Faint at first, maybe just a suggestion of sound, threading through the noise of the engine and the wind. Then clearer. Then suddenly everywhere, bouncing off buildings, filling up the whole dark road with blue-red light strobing off every surface. She looked back through the rear window and counted two police cars, maybe three, she couldn't tell, they were gaining fast.
"Dad, the police! You have to pull over! Dad, please—!"
The car sped up.
Her father made a sound, low and wordless, and the engine growled as his foot found the accelerator. Abby stared at the back of his head and for a horrible moment she felt something she didn't have a name for yet. Not anger, exactly, and not just fear. Something that sat in the middle of her chest like a stone and didn't move.
She turned and knocked on the window. Both fists, hard as she could, over and over. I'm in here. Someone, I'm in here. Please.
Her mother turned around.
Her eyes were open, which was almost worse, both open and distant, like she was watching something happen from very far away.
"Quit that," she said. Her voice was soft and faraway too. "All that noise."
"Mom." Abby's voice came out very small. "Mom, we're going to die. You have to grab the wheel. Please—"
Her mother looked at her for another moment, the way you might look at a television programme that wasn't interesting enough to watch properly, and then turned back around.
Abby turned back to the window.
She saw the truck before any of them did.
It was enormous and very bright and for one strange stretched-out second she could see the driver in the cab, could see his face, could see the exact moment he understood what was about to happen and there was nothing either of them could do about it.
She grabbed her seatbelt with both hands. She didn't scream. She squeezed her eyes shut and she thought, with complete and detached clarity, I really should have stayed asleep, and then the world turned sideways and became noise.
Ringing.
That was all, for a while. Not sirens, not the road, not her own voice. Just a high, hollow ringing, as if someone had struck a bell directly inside her ear and left the room.
She became aware of things in pieces. The smell of oil and something burnt. A cold surface under her cheek... Asphalt, she realised, which meant she was outside the car, which meant someone had gotten her out of the car, which she had no memory of at all. Her hands were in front of her face. Her hands looked strange. She stared at them for what felt like a long time.
Someone was talking to her. She could see their mouth moving but the ringing swallowed the words. Someone else put their hands on her shoulders, gloved hands, heavy coat, the crinkle of some kind of reflective gear, and she found she couldn't push back, couldn't do anything, really. She felt entirely boneless. She felt like a thing that had stopped working.
The car, she thought. My jacket's still in the car.
She was so, so tired.
She passed out before any of them could stop it.
She came around in the hospital.
She knew it was a hospital because of the lights, that particular quality of fluorescent, too bright and slightly blue, that had no equivalent anywhere else on earth. Not that she'd been on hospitals too frequently, but the few memories she had stuck. She was lying on something that crinkled when she moved. There was a thing clipped to her finger and a curtain around her on three sides and somewhere beyond it, the steady busy sound of people who had things to do.
Her neck hurt. Her shoulder hurt. Her knees, she discovered when she tried to move them, also hurt. Everything else was a kind of vast general ache, the way she felt after a fever, wrung out and slightly distant from herself.
She lay still and looked at the ceiling and tried to think.
The truck. The car. The ringing.
Where were her parents?
She knew the answer before she finished asking herself the question. She knew it the way you know things sometimes, not from information but from a feeling, from a particular quality of silence. Of absence. The way the air around a thing changes when the thing is no longer in it.
She lay there looking at the ceiling and didn't cry. She wasn't sure she could have, even if she'd tried. Everything felt very far away and very still.
A nurse came in eventually and seemed startled to find her awake. She called for someone, and then there was a doctor, and then there were questions, soft, careful questions, the kind wrapped in gentleness because the person asking them already knew the answers would be hard. She answered them steadily. Her voice barely shook. She was a little proud of that.
Your name? Your age? Do you know what day it is? Does this hurt? And what about here?
The seatbelt had saved her. Deep bruising across her chest and collarbone from the belt itself, a gash on her forehead that had needed stitches, her knees banged up from where they'd hit the back of the front seat. Nothing broken. She was very lucky, the doctor said, in the tone of voice that meant something more complicated than lucky.
Neither of her parents had been wearing their seatbelts.
She found she couldn't think about that directly, so she didn't. She put it somewhere at the back of her head, behind everything else, and closed the door.
The questioning came later, once she'd been given something for the pain and someone had brought her a packet of biscuits from somewhere, which she ate mechanically without tasting. A police officer came in and pulled up a chair, and a woman Abby didn't know sat in the corner, a social worker, she introduced herself as, but Abby's brain was slow and she immediately forgot the name.
The officer was a man in his forties with a tired face who looked like he'd had this particular conversation many times before, which was almost comforting. He wasn't pretending this was unusual. He wasn't pretending to be shocked. He just had his notepad, and he had his questions, and he went through them steadily.
"Your parents took you with them to bars?"
"Sometimes," Abby said. "Not every time. I'd usually stay in the car."
"Would you say that happened often?"
She thought about it. "It depended. More on weekends."
"And while they were inside, was there anyone with you?"
"No."
He wrote something down. "Did you ever drink anything your parents gave you? Or take anything?"
"No." She wasn't letting her mind wander anymore. "They didn't give me anything..."
"Did you know what they were taking? Tonight, or other times?"
She hesitated. "Some of it. I knew there was alcohol, obviously. There were... Other things. I don't always know what. There were bags sometimes. A pipe. I stayed out of it."
They'd made her stay out of it. The first time she had grabbed one of those bags had also been the first time her mother had struck her, sharp and across the face. She'd never tried again.
He nodded, like she'd confirmed something he'd expected. "Was there ever anyone else in the house? Family, friends, anyone who looked after you?"
"Not really. My grandmother, my mum's mum, but I haven't seen her since I was maybe seven or eight." She picked at the edge of the biscuit wrapper. "I don't think they were in contact."
"Your parents had any other family you know of?"
"No."
He asked more questions. He was thorough but not unkind, and at some point the social worker said something in a low voice to a nurse, and they both looked at Abby in that particular way adults looked at her sometimes, the way that meant they were talking about her rather than to her. She didn't mind. She was used to it.
Later, she wasn't sure how much later, the social worker sat beside her bed and explained what was going to happen next. The tone was careful, the way you'd speak to someone standing on uncertain ground.
The words care system came up. Foster placement. And then, after a pause, a place called Sacred Heart of Our Lord Jesus, which the social worker described as a stable environment for children in her situation, while longer term options were assessed.
Abby nodded throughout. She asked no questions, which she could tell made the woman slightly uncomfortable. She supposed she was meant to cry, or protest, or feel something demonstrable. She felt the same flat grey nothing she'd felt since waking up.
"Before any of that," the social worker said, more carefully, "we would like to take you for a quick screening. Just routine, nothing to worry about, given the circumstances, with what was found in the car, they'd just like to confirm that you haven't been exposed to—"
"You want to test me," Abby said flatly. "To see if I've taken anything."
The woman paused. "It's just a precaution—"
"That's fine," Abby said. "I haven't. But that's fine."
She hadn't. It came back clean, which surprised no one, and afterward the social worker brought her a juice carton with a straw and said she'd done really well, which Abby found a strange thing to say about giving a blood sample. But she said thank you anyway, because that was polite.
They took her to the apartment the following morning.
She'd expected... She wasn't sure what she'd expected. Police tape, maybe, or a locked door, or some sign that whatever had happened had been marked and sealed. Instead there was a man in a white protective suit waiting outside the door, with another one of them visible inside through the doorway, both moving carefully through the rooms she'd grown up in.
Abby stood in the hallway and watched them.
She'd walked this hallway barefoot every day of her life. She knew exactly which board near the bathroom door creaked if you stepped on it wrong, and she'd learned to step around it on the nights when she needed to move quietly. She knew the particular way the kitchen cupboard stuck if the weather had been damp, the way the living room curtain never quite closed all the way on the left side, the cold particular to the bathroom tiles in winter that you just had to brace yourself for.
And now there were men in white suits and gloves moving through it with labelled bags, touching things with their covered hands, speaking to each other in quiet professional voices, cataloguing her home like it was a scene.
Which it was, she supposed. It was a crime scene now.
The social worker kept a hand hovering near her shoulder without quite touching it. "You'll just be able to collect some of your things. They'll need to stay in this area here—" she gestured to a spot near the door "—and they'll have a look through before we take them, that's just procedure. Okay?"
"Okay," Abby said.
She had to put plastic bags over her shoes to go inside. They gave her a pair of disposable gloves. The man nearest the door looked at her and then away, the way adults did when they wanted to be respectful and weren't quite sure how.
She almost found it weird. She'd walked across the house more times than she could count, barefoot or in socks, only to end like this. Almost feeling like a stranger in it.
Her bedroom was through the kitchen, past the bathroom, second door on the left. It had been the storage room once, she knew this because there was still a latch on the outside of the door, the kind you'd use to keep a cupboard closed. No one had ever explained this to her or seemed to notice it. She'd stopped noticing it herself, mostly.
It was undisturbed. The men in white suits hadn't needed to go in there. She stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at it: the mattress on the floor, the one shelf with her books on it, the string of paper stars she'd made when she was eight hanging across the wall. They were lopsided, because she'd made them herself and she'd been eight, but she'd been proud of them. She'd used a library book to learn the folds.
She had her school bag. She started with clothes, a week's worth, maybe more, stuffed in tight. Her toothbrush. The worn paperback with the spine coming off that she'd read four times. The library book she'd technically never returned and was fairly certain she never would. A photograph that had lived face-down on the shelf for most of the past year, of her and her parents at the seaside, when she was maybe five, everyone squinting into the sun. She didn't know why she'd kept it. She packed it anyway.
She took the paper stars down from the wall, carefully, and wrapped them in a sock so they wouldn't get crushed.
She took one last look around the room. She'd never had a word for what this room had been to her, just hers, that was all. Her corner of something that had never been entirely safe. She'd read her books here and done her homework here and slept here and made the stars here on a winter afternoon when there had been nothing else to do and the apartment had been very quiet and cold.
She turned off the light out of habit, and closed the door quietly, like she was trying not to wake someone.
Outside, in the hallway, a man in a white suit was placing something in a labelled evidence bag. He didn't look up. She walked past him with her school bag on her back and her plastic shoe covers rustling with every step, and she thought: I won't come back here. Not as a prediction, just as a fact. A thing she already knew.
She was right. She never did.
Sacred Heart of Our Lord Jesus sat at the edge of a poor neighbourhood like something that had always been there and always would be, a wide, squat building in faded brick, with a courtyard that smelled of damp soil and a gate that stuck in the rain. It was, by all accounts, healthily full of children. Most of them had ended up there for the same reason Abby had.
Substances. That was the word the social worker had used, in that careful and tired voice adults used when they were trying to say something terrible in as few syllables as possible. As if it were a weather condition. As if it were nobody's fault in particular.
The nun who met her at the door was tall, impossibly tall, the kind of tall that made Abby feel even more compact than usual, which was already saying something. She wore her habit like armour and walked like she had somewhere important to be, which meant Abby had to half-jog to keep up, dragging her school bag along. Her shoulder was still bruised from the seatbelt and the bag strap dug into it with every step.
The hallways smelled like floor wax and old stone and, faintly, like whatever had been cooked for dinner. The ceilings were high. The light came in through long, narrow windows and fell in pale strips across the floor. It was not a cruel place, Abby thought. It was just a serious one.
"Girl dormitories are this way," the nun said, voice flat and efficient. "You'll be with your age group. Lights out at nine, morning prayer at six-thirty, breakfast at seven, evening prayer at—" she paused, glancing back. "Are you listening, child?"
Abby blinked back into focus. "Yes," she said. "Sorry."
She hadn't been.
"Evening prayer at seven. There is a schedule posted in every room. I expect you to follow it to the letter. There will be consequences otherwise."
Consequences. She turned the word over as they walked. She'd never really had those, not in the way they meant here, structured and reliable and proportionate. At home, things had been more like weather. Unpredictable fronts and sudden storms and long still stretches of grey where nothing good or bad happened and you just waited. You learned to read the signs and make yourself small, or you didn't, and then you dealt with that.
She'd always been good at small.
Structured consequences, she thought, might actually be easier.
The dormitory was one long room with eight beds in it, four to each side, with a narrow gap between them and a window at the far end. Someone had taped drawings to the wall beside one of the beds. She couldn't make out what they were from here, but they were bright. Another bed had a small cloth rabbit propped against the pillow, very much loved-looking and slightly bald in patches. The bed she was pointed to was near the door. Bare mattress, folded blanket, flat pillow. Nothing on the wall beside it.
She put her bag down and sat on the edge and listened to the building breathe around her.
She hadn't cried at the funeral. She'd stood very still in a black dress that itched at the collar and stared at the two coffins and thought: I should feel something. She'd thought it very hard, the way you might try to remember a word that keeps slipping away. When the priest had asked if she'd like to say a few words she had walked to the front and opened her mouth and something had happened that she still couldn't properly account for. She remembered her knees on the cold floor. A woman's hand on her back, someone from the parish, she thought, someone who didn't know her. She hadn't known whose hand it was.
Since then, nothing. Not nothing bad. Just a sort of even grey static where feelings were supposed to be. She was living slightly to the left of herself, watching everything happen from a comfortable distance.
She figured that was probably fine.
Barely half an hour later, she was sitting in an office on the ground floor, in a chair that was slightly too big for her, facing a man she'd been told was a psychologist. She had no particular idea what a psychologist was. The word sounded official and slightly medical, so she sat straight and kept her hands folded in her lap.
He was, she guessed, somewhere in his mid-fifties, with the kind of face that had settled comfortably into its wrinkles, the kind that would look kind even if it wasn't trying. He wore a purple sweater that looked very soft. His desk was unremarkably tidy except for a small cluster of things near the pencil pot: a half-finished coffee, a sticky note in someone else's handwriting, and a keychain with a little carved chess piece on it that she didn't recognise. She found herself staring at it for a moment longer than she meant to.
"My daughters made it," he said, gently, noticing. He picked it up and turned it slightly so she could see. "It's a king. My wife has a matching queen, she keeps hers on her car keys. They gave them to us last Christmas." He smiled, just slightly, more to himself than at her. "I keep threatening to finally learn chess properly, but I suspect that will never happen."
Abby nodded. She didn't really know what to say to that. She hadn't really known what to say to most things, lately.
He set the keychain back down and folded his hands on the desk.
"I'm Dr. Grant Best. I come in once a month to check in with the children here, just to talk, mostly. Nothing too formal, nothing you need to prepare for." He paused. "Your file says your name is Abigail?"
"Abby," she said. The word came out slightly rougher than she'd intended. She cleared her throat. "I go by Abby."
"Abby, then." He wrote something down, brief. "How are you feeling today, Abby? And I do mean that as genuinely as it's possible to ask it, you don't need to say fine if you don't mean it."
She considered this seriously.
"Fine," she conceded.
He looked at her for a moment. He didn't seem annoyed, or disbelieving, or like he wanted to move on. Just... Patient. Like he'd heard that answer a thousand times and had decided long ago that it deserved the same amount of space every time.
"Okay," he said, and made a small note. "Can you tell me a bit about home? Before all this."
Abby looked at the far corner of the room. There was a small potted plant there, slightly wilted, doing its level best.
"It was fine," she repeated, almost as if she were trying to make a point across.
"What did a normal day look like for you?"
She thought about it. Getting herself up in the morning, because the alarm on her phone was reliable and her parents were not. Making her own breakfast, toast usually, or cereal when there was any, which was most of the time, she was good at buying cereal when she needed to. Getting herself to school. Coming home, letting herself in with her key. Doing homework with the door shut. Making dinner if she was hungry enough to bother. Going to sleep before her parents came home, if she could manage it. Pretending to be asleep if she couldn't.
"Normal," she said. "Regular. I don't know." She was almost getting frustrated with all of it.
Dr. Best nodded slowly. "Did you have friends at school?"
"Sure."
"Anyone you were close to?"
A beat. "Not really."
He didn't push. That was the thing she was noticing about him, he left pauses in the conversation, but he didn't seem to need her to fill them. He just let them sit there, open and unthreatening, like they were a normal part of things rather than a failing.
"Were you ever hurt at home?" he asked. His voice was careful, but not hushed. Not dramatic. "By either of your parents."
Abby looked at the plant again. "No," she replied, before he could see the hesitation in her voice. "They mostly just—" she searched for the right word. "Forgot I was there. I was pretty self-sufficient. I didn't need a lot of—" she paused. "They weren't really—" another pause. She frowned slightly, which was the most expression she'd managed in days. "It was fine. It wasn't dangerous or anything. They weren't that bad."
Dr. Best looked at her steadily. "It doesn't sound like it was good, either."
Damn it, how had he picked up on that?
She didn't have anything to say to that, so she didn't say anything.
He sat back slightly and looked at her with an expression she couldn't quite name. Not pity, she'd been half-braced for pity, for the particular indignity of being looked at the way people looked at sad things. It wasn't that. It was something closer to attentiveness. Like she was a problem he found genuinely interesting, rather than one he wanted to be done with.
"Abby," he said, after a moment. "I want to explain why we're talking, if that's alright. Do you know what a psychologist does?"
She shook her head. At least she could be honest on that.
"I'm here to help the children in this home work through difficult things," he said simply. "Not to fix anything, or report anything back, well, with a few specific exceptions, but nothing that would surprise you. Mostly I'm just here to make sure there's a space for talking, if talking feels useful. A lot of the children who come here have been through things that are—" he paused, choosing his words "—a lot. And sometimes it helps to have someone in your corner who's actually paid to sit still and listen."
Abby thought about this. "So it's your job," she thought, out loud.
"It is. But that doesn't mean I don't mean it." He tilted his head slightly. "Does that make sense?"
"I think so," she said. And she sort of did.
He asked her a few more things after that. Whether she was sleeping. Whether she'd managed to eat today, which she had, the nurses had kept appearing with things. Whether there was anything she needed that she didn't have. She answered absently: fine, yes, no; and he wrote things down in small neat handwriting and didn't seem bothered by any of it.
"The other children here," he said, after a pause. "Have you met any of them yet?"
"I just arrived."
"Of course." He tapped his pen against his notepad once, lightly. "Well. They're a—" he seemed to search for the right word, and smiled slightly when he found it, "— a varied group. But there are good kids here. I think you'll find your feet."
She nodded, mostly out of being polite than anything else. She had never really managed to make proper friends, but she didn't feel like laying it on him. At least, not yet.
He looked at her for a moment more, then capped his pen.
"I'll be back in a month," he said. "We can talk more then, if you'd like. Or we don't have to talk at all, there's no obligation either way." He paused, and something flickered at the edge of his expression, something almost rueful. "Though I'll confess I do hope you'll have at least one friend by the time I'm back. Someone who knows your name."
Abby looked down at her hands.
"Maybe..." No way, have you seen me? Who would want to be my friend, are you blind or just stupid?
He exhaled, not quite a sigh, not quite a laugh. Somewhere comfortably between the two. "Well." He pushed his chair back and stood, and offered his hand across the desk, which she found unexpectedly formal for someone in a soft purple sweater. She shook it anyway. His handshake was firm and brief. "Take care of yourself, Abby. I mean that sincerely."
She almost said fine again, purely out of reflex. She caught herself.
"Okay," she said. "Thank you."
She was almost to the door when his voice came after her, quiet and without any particular fuss about it.
"And... It is alright, you know. To not be fine. No one in this building is grading you on it."
Abby stood in the doorway for a moment with her hand on the frame. The corridor beyond was pale and long and smelled of floor wax.
"Thanks," and wasn't entirely sure for what.
She stepped out. The door clicked softly behind her. The hallway stretched in both directions, identical in both, and for a moment she just stood there and let herself not know which way to go.
Then, from somewhere down to the left, she heard voices. Children, several of them, overlapping, argumentative, alive. She couldn't make out words, just the shape of an argument, the particular energy of people who were comfortable enough somewhere to disagree loudly.
She stood there another second, her school bag strap cutting into her bruised shoulder, the paper stars wrapped in a sock at the bottom of it so they wouldn't crumple.
Then she turned left, toward the noise, and walked.