Burn by Monica Hesse Read Free Book Online Page A

sure you want to watch it alone? I can come back and—” Her face wrinkled in concern, but she cut herself off when she saw Lona’s expression. Lona was sure. All of this felt too uncertain and too raw. The footage might make her cry and she didn’t want to do that with company.
    She waited until the door of Gabriel’s bedroom closed above her and leaned in close to the television, until she could almost feel the heat coming off it. Her finger hovered over the play button, quivering.
This was your wish,
she reminded herself.
This is why you blew out the candles.
    There was static on the screen. And then there was blackness. As her eyes adjusted, she could make out more than blackness – the outline of a brick building, ghostly in streetlights. This was the building she’d grown up in, as it looked on the night of her birth. She’d grown up watching someone else’s life on a screen. Now she was watching her own.
    In front of the entrance, a car pulled up, the passenger’s side facing the camera. It was a light-colored sedan, gray or beige. There was no audio to accompany the footage, so the car drove into the frame silently and pulled to a stop.
    Her fingers hurt. She looked down and she was clutching the sides of the coffee table so forcefully her fingernails were bending.
    She waited for someone to get out of the car. Would it just be her mother? Or had someone come along to help? Would her mother look sad? Would she stop to give her a last kiss?
    The car pulled away.
No
, Lona thought. It couldn’t pull away. She hadn’t seen anything. The person inside hadn’t done anything.
She hadn’t even glimpsed her mother’s face
.
    But the driver
had
done something. Because the car was gone, and in its place, directly in front of the Path center, a tiny bassinet sat in the doorway. Herself. Lona, asleep and impossibly small, barely a smudge on the grainy screen. If she squinted her eyes, she thought she could see the baby on the screen raise a tiny fist in a wail.
    She rewound the video and watched it again for clues. And then again, and again. But she could never see the driver open the door, or remove the bassinet. She could never see anyone ring the buzzer that must have been next to the door. She couldn’t even see the license plate.
    Talia had been right. This was a dead end.
    â€œMy hair was amazing, right?” Lona hadn’t heard Talia come back down the stairs, and she jumped at the sound of her voice.
    â€œYour hair?”
    â€œYou didn’t wait for me to come on the screen with my hideous bangs?” Talia joked. “Nobody ever told me your hair wasn’t supposed to grow horizontally.” Her voice grew quieter as she placed a careful hand on Lona’s shoulder. “You weren’t outside alone for very long. I promise, Lona. Whoever left you rang the buzzer – I hoped you’d keep watching because I came down and got you less than two minutes after they drove away.”
    â€œYou already watched it. You watched it without me.”
    Talia shrugged in apology. “I know I shouldn’t have. I just – if something bad had happened on that screen, I didn’t want you to be the first one to see it.” Lona softened at the concern in Talia’s voice. “I’m really sorry, Lona. I’m sorry there wasn’t anything useful.”
    â€œYou tried. And you warned me. You said there probably wouldn’t be anything.” But she felt deflated. And annoyed. Not at the Talia now, who had watched the video after all, but at the one seventeen years ago, who came downstairs two minutes after the car that left baby Lona had driven away. Why couldn’t that Talia have come down earlier? Why couldn’t that Talia have seen something?
    â€œCan I make you something?” Talia offered. “Hot chocolate or coffee? With animal crackers? Watch, as I try to solve the world’s problems with