I CAN FEEL THE SLIGHT WEIGHT OF WILLIAM ON MY HIP LIKE A phantom limb. I’ve written everything I can remember from her journal. I’ve written everything I can remember about her. It still falls hopelessly short. You don’t ever stop missing someone, not really—or that version of someone you once knew, that little part of their existence. The missing just changes, it moves around inside your body, affecting different spaces at different times. It strikes me how much like death this leaving is. I have a notebook full of lists—the only thing concrete from that summer—but what do they mean? They’re just facts, like the dates and names of those ghosts in the Adirondacks. What do they really add up to in terms of knowledge, in terms of meaning?

Sam thinks I need to find a new job or finally go to school. She thinks I should take my health, my security, and use it for something. I think I’m just going to see how far this money takes me. “Why must we do things?” I tell her. She doesn’t know that I’ve been writing this. She doesn’t know that Lonnie ever existed. Sometimes it all seems illusory to me as well—some other life I’d accidentally slipped into in a dream.

I’ve been holding on to it all this time, slipping it from one pocket to the next. In Oregon I might have buried it in the dirt among the pines. In the city, I move my mattress aside, then take my pocketknife and carve a little hole in the wall; paint chips, probably lead, float to the floor. The choir down the street starts singing—high and clear. I think of the way that choir used to sing at odd times to cover the sound of women’s screams. No one missed most of those women when they disappeared.

I slip Lonnie’s tooth into the crack in the wall. The white enamel vanishes into the shadow and I push my mattress back into place.

I’ve started walking past the LeRoi residence again, every day. Sometimes there are men on the porch or in the windows who say hello. I never respond, but I try to get a good look at them, try to figure out which one is the oldest son, which one I talked to that night as I smoked. I maintain the belief that somewhere Lonnie’s bones are still together; however, if she had been born someone else that’s where she might have gone. That’s where the city’s lost girls went.