The Vow by Jessica Martinez Read Free Book Online

to give Dad updates long before that night. According to conversations not meant for my ears, they’d interviewed half the population of Hardin County and still had nothing. It happened this way with runaways, they said.
    For Mom, finding nothing meant hope, a reason to brush her teeth and remulch her flower beds.
    But for Dad, it was unacceptable, evidence of half-assed police work in a backwoods hole of a community that needed to catapult itself into this century before he sued every last law enforcement officer in the county. I’d heard it more than once. It was usually shouted into the phone, though I remember hearing it delivered to an unfortunate detective who stopped by the house to deliver the latest batch of nothing.
    That night while he interrogated everyone in Mr. Twister—probably standing right where I’m standing now—Mom and I sat silently, me still wearing my stiff pilgrim’s bonnet that smelled like glue, Mom gripping a cornucopia of plastic vegetables.
    When he came out twenty minutes later, Dad wasn’t shouting anymore. I guess he was done. He was silent all the way home, but from my spot at the top of the stairs, with my face pressed between the banisters, I heard him telling Mom what he’d learned: no secret boyfriends, no wild behavior, no motives, no runaway plans. Nothing.
    I was too young to be told what nothing really meant and too stupid to guess. Mo calls it naive, but he wasn’t there. It was trickier than that. It was wanting to know, being on the edge of understanding, then backing away intentionally.
    Ten should have been old enough—I’d been taught not to talk to strangers because there were bad people in the world who kidnapped children and did bad things to them. Bad things. Those words made my stomach twist and my skin tingle, even though I didn’t know what they meant.
    But that didn’t have anything to do with Lena. Those warnings were strange and thrilling, like ghost stories and the psychopath-on-the-loose tales told at sleepovers, but I knew those weren’t real. The gaping hole where Lena used to be—that was real. The color and smell of her that was only a smudge now, the roar of silence in our house where she used to be, the tragic stares that followed me around—that was all real.
    Once the investigation was over, the police stopped coming by, which meant the steady flow of curious neighbors with their cashew chicken casseroles and their gentle, probing questions dried up. Understanding came in tissue-thin layer over layer: whispers, sad smiles, shoulder squeezes from teachers I barely knew. People reached for their children like they couldn’t help it when my family shuffled into our church pew. Girls at school got quiet when I joined them.
    The shame was chilling. Lena was missing, and even if I didn’t know how it was my fault, the rest of the world did.
    Eventually, TV dragged from the shadows what I was refusing to see. There was that CSI episode I watched at a friend’s house, then a story on the evening news before Mom could scramble for the remote. And then that Amber Alert for a thirteen-year-old girl in Louisville screamed over every channel and radio station in Kentucky and seemed to ring in my ears for days. That one ended with a naked, broken body found on the banks of the Ohio River, my mother locking herself in her room and sobbing loud enough that I couldn’t sleep, and my father going on a week-long hunting trip to Tennessee.
    But that was somebody else’s sister. Not mine. Wasn’t it?
    And finally. It clicked, like machinery sliding into place, an old-fashioned key with notches and grooves. Lena was the first half of one of those stories. Half an episode, half a thirty-second news report, half a tragedy. Nothing didn’t mean nothing at all. There was something horrific waiting at the end of this story, just like all those others. Nothing just meant we didn’t know which grotesque ending was hers. Ours. Yet.
    Striking a deal with God seemed