Hiding

"Sara's gone again."

I tie the lace of my running shoe slowly, not speeding up because of what I've just heard. It's important to do one thing at a time; I learned early on.

It always starts like this.

I straighten up, my leg still outstretched on the bench. "When?" I ask, looking down to where my best friend Kyle is tying his own shoes. They are baseball cleats; white with red stripes, metal cleats on the bottom, cutting like knives into the turf. "And why?"

Kyle tucks his straight black hair underneath his headband, and shrugs. "Why does Sara do anything?"

It is the question we all want to know the answer to, of course.

As it is, we are late for practice. Kyle stands up, doing some back bends. I reach down and touch my toes, in an attempt to limber up for the cross-country run that I'm about to set off on. "She'll be back," I say partly to myself, so I don't have to look at Kyle and wonder, again, if I'm lying. "When did she leave, yesterday?"

Kyle pauses slightly. "Yea," he mutters, "last night." He has his back turned to me now. "We'd better get going." He double-knots his cleats, and moves towards the door.

"Yea," I say, because there is nothing else to say. Sara didn't leave last night. Maybe it was the night before. Maybe even before that. My trainers squeak as I head out of the wet locker-room. "She'll be back," I call out, even though Kyle has already disappeared through the adjoining door and out onto the baseball field, "you'll see."

Sometimes I think he doesn't want to believe me.

I thud along the dirt path, my trainers hitting the hard forest earth in fast, sharp movements. Brushwood breaks underneath my feet, the May sun shines through the trees. The well-worn path pushes me forward and I don't think about anything.

The woods in Ticonderoga are beautiful at this time of year. Dark moss grows on trees, and wildflowers sneak up from between the patches of dirt that marks my path. I run along the path, snapping sumac leaves as I go. Memories come into my head as I make the uneven bends of the trail: the old broken down car that Kyle, Sara and I would play in, before we knew that real cars were much more fun. The hunting shack where Sara would hide while Kyle and I would search for her. All of these thoughts torment me.

Don't think about Sara.

Now, I can't help it. I make disturbed deals with myself. If I make it up the big hill in thirteen seconds, Sara will be ok. Done. If I take my next right, over the rocks and roots, she will be in school tomorrow. Done. If I beat my best time for the next mile, she won't leave again.

I was six years old, sitting on the front porch of my house on Montcalm Avenue, Ticonderoga, listening to my mother blast Meatloaf from her car stereo in the late summer. I was watching the new people next door unpack their whole lives from a U-Haul truck. There was a frustrated looking Mother who lugged boxes out of the truck and into her house. From what I could see, she had one son. This boy stood in the middle of the road, watching his mother struggle with the boxes. I looked at the boy a while longer, and came to the conclusion that he looked about my age, and was tall and skinny with huge brown eyes. I didn't notice the boy again until he was right in front of me. "I'm Kyle," he said, and I looked up, startled at such a straightforward greeting.

"Is that your mommy?" I asked, pointing to the house, even though the woman had gone into the depths of the truck.

Kyle nodded, and I thought he was done talking, but then he said "Her name is Cindy. I've got a sister named Sara too. She's only five."

I hadn't seen any girl arrive with them. I thought she must have been inside, but something in the way he spoke made me ask the question anyway. "Where is she now?"

Kyle looked at me tiredly, his face contorted, before he decided it was ok to tell me, "She's lost."

My best time for this stretch is one minute and forty seconds; I do it in one thirty seven. There are no guarantees, of course. I can only be sure of the easy things: I can be sure that I will take the left fork after the apple tree, and that I will do this in less than fifteen seconds time, and that Kyle will, at this second, be at batting practice. There are no guarantees with Sara, as I have learned. As I make my way out of the woods towards school, I know that there never will be.

When I get home, I throw my gym bag on the floor in my bedroom, and lay down on my bed. "Mark, is that you?" I head into the kitchen to find my mother, smoking a cigarette. I pull it from her lips, and run it under the water in the sink. I wonder if she knows yet. "Sara's gone again," I say. There is nothing else that I need to say. "When?"

I shrug. "Kyle didn't really know. Not very long."

My mother rises, "I'm going to see Cindy," she says, even though I already know she would go over to Kyle's house. It's always the same. After my mother has left, I open the fridge to find some left over pizza. I eat about three pieces, before wondering how long I should wait before I follow my mother next door.

Next door, I know that my Mother, Kyle and Cindy are sitting in the living room. They are watching the news, and hear threats of terrorism, and news of the war in Iraq. Cindy looks at my Mother and tells her that she really doesn't need to be here. The truth is, Cindy was as grateful as ever. I try not to think about this as I leave the kitchen through the back door.

Like I said, it's always the same.

I am outside Kyle's front door, my hand in front of the door bell, when I realize I don't need to be here. It's wrong to think this, I know. Kyle probably needs a guy in the house, just as his mom needs a woman. Me joining them would only complicate things, so I turn away from the house and walk quickly down the road with my head down.

Montcalm Avenue is a quiet neighborhood, with only about a half dozen houses. My whole life I have lived in this house, but for some reason, the forest behind my home still scares me. I turn right sharply at the end of the pavement, leading me directly through the trees, off the path that I run along nearly every day. I need to find a route I know.

I don't know why I'm in the forest, but maybe it's because I need to be scared. Or maybe it's because I just can't face Sara's distraught, white faced mother tonight. Maybe it's because the forest is just one of many places that Sara could be hiding. Where would I go if I was her? Seventeen years old, expelled from three schools, always running away from home. People think that she must go to the same place every time. But where is that, and who is she with, and, most of all, why?

Questions, but never any answers.

I don't think about it, but I suddenly find myself standing on the edge of a clearing. But not just any clearing. The old broken down car sits in the middle of it, covered by a few small honeysuckle bushes. I wonder if Sara remembers our walks in the woods with Kyle. Maybe she does. On Kyle's tenth birthday, she decided she no longer liked our beloved car. I think it was because she was now younger than us. "I'm never coming back here again, and you can't make me." I didn't know what to say to her, so I just stared at her for a few minutes.

"Don't be silly. You love this car as much as we do." Sara glared at me silently, and then ran all the way home. Kyle, slightly disheveled, looked at me, and then followed his little sister home.

Now I walk straight towards this car, which now is beginning to become part of the ground it sits on. Strangely, like Sara all those years ago, I no longer like this car. I'm not really sure why, but I keep on remembering our childhood.

Sara knew that the police wouldn't have come out this time. They hadn't the last time, or the time before that, or maybe even the time before that. She knew that they had gotten used to her by now, and had stopped treating her as a normal Missing Person. They take a statement from Cindy, of course: Sara was last seen going into her bedroom on Wednesday night, wearing her penguin sweat pants and her sports bra. On Thursday morning she didn't appear for breakfast, and it was Kyle who went upstairs to find no one in her bedroom. There was no obvious reason for her disappearance, no trace of conflict whatsoever.

Is there ever?

These are the things that Sara took with her: her pink sleeping bag, the one she has had forever. Her favorite fluffy pillow from her bedroom, a bottle of blue Gatorade from the pantry. Saltine Crackers, and a jar of strawberry jam. Two pairs of jeans and her baby blue fleece. One pair of trainers. $50 dollars from Cindy's purse, and a knife from the kitchen sink.

I went to Kyle's house on Saturday morning to apologize for not being there the night before. When he opens the door, and he looks angry. He glares at me accordingly, and snaps "What?" when I don't say anything. "You turn up now?"

"I was out looking for Sara," I say shortly.

At this, he looks apologetic. "Sorry," he mutters. He doesn't stop me when I push him inside, kicking the door closed on the way. There is the sound of a car pulling up outside just as I make my way into the house.

"Hi, Mark." Kyle's mother is exhausted when she enters the kitchen, shrugging taking off her coat and gloves. "You really shouldn't be here Mark," she says. "I'm sure you've got a lot of studying to do with all of your exams coming up." The exams. Of course. I'd almost forgotten about them. Only Spanish left to go now. I'm hoping that it won't be too difficult.

"Kyle, are you going to be alright?" The words leave my mouth before I have a chance to catch myself.

"Of course, I'm fine."

"Spanish," I say, knowing that I need to do some studying on the preterite tense before tomorrow's exam. "I need to get an A." Then I leave the two alone, in silence.

I guess its impossible to ever know why some people run. Why does a sprinter run away from everyone else, desperately trying to reach the end of the track first? What makes a distance runner want to keep running, long after he is fatigued? Why does Sara feel the need to run away from home?

When I was seven years old, in the same summer that Kyle and Sara moved in next door, I was entered for -and won- every race in the school's field day. Congratulating me from the sidelines, a 7^th grade teacher whose name I have forgotten insisted that I had a special talent for running. By the end of that day, I had joined the track team for my school. Kyle was already a baseball player when he moved in. I found out that Kyle had tried out for and made the all-regional baseball team for our school. The very first game he was to play in-Cindy got a call saying the body of a young girl had been pulled out of a river about five miles away. She grabbed Kyle without thinking, and headed up the highway. It was someone else's daughter that was dragged out of the river that day, and Sara returned later on that night.

Feeling horrible about my Spanish Exam, I read through my list of verbs all of Saturday afternoon. Then, when all I can think about is hablar and comprender, I decide to go running to clear my head. Ten miles, even though I'm not training for anything, feels wonderful. I run on the same path I do nearly everyday. My feet tell a story as they hit the ground, every step sounding different. By the time I get home night has fallen, and I am in a terrible mood. My mom, worried about me, asks where I have been for the past hour and a half. I don't answer, but instead continue straight into my room. She sees that I am upset, and does not push the issue.

Sara had started out small, running away from Cindy as she walked Kyle to school. Things soon escalated. By the time Sara was six, it wasn't unusual for her to hide in cupboards or under beds for hours at a time. Then they moved to Montcalm Avenue, and apart from hiding in the woods on their first day, Sara stopped running away. She didn't run away again for two years, but after that it was much, much worse. It was me that found her, wrapped in her old pink sleeping bag by the edge of the woods, on one frigid April morning. She was shivering, lying on top of leaves and dirt, and I remember first seeing her face peeking out of the top of the dirty sleeping bag. It was the way she reacted to being found that scared me the most. When I got closer to the bundle and realized it was her, the first thing I saw, even before the rest of her face, was her eyes. They looked so different-- strange, luminous, irrational. I don't know how to explain it. 'Why do you run away?' I had asked when I saw her, because it seemed like an obvious question. Sara had sat up slowly, as if considering the question. Then she shrugged, that strange glint in her eye still there. "I love running," she said simply, "don't you?"

We have our last exam on the twenty first of June, after Sara has been gone exactly a week. I sit in our unventilated school gym, where I will never have to sit again after this day. Then the final bell rings, and, just like that, it's over. We file out of the double front doors and down the field, not really believing that we've actually finished. At the corner of Montcalm Avenue, Kyle and I say our goodbyes to everyone else, and make unclear plans to meet up during the next week. "So," I say as we walk along the pavement past the trees, "that wasn't too bad." Kyle is drinking some Gatorade and nearly chokes on it. "Not bad? It sucked. It was the worst exam out my life."

I go over to Kyle's late that evening, and we order pizza and watch rented Swarchenegger films all night. The rest of the summer carries on in this manner: We wander pointlessly around town on sunny afternoons, we meet up with people from school for no reason and go to a few parties with the same people afterwards. Kyle and I spend a whole day lying on the grass in the park and watching the girls that go past. A couple of times we just run, in and out of the forest, sometimes talking and sometimes just wondering without speaking about where Sara is now.

Cindy and Kyle seem to be coping, which is understandable; because it's happened so many times there is nothing else they can do. Kyle gets his acceptance letter to UNC to play baseball, on the same day that Sara breaks her record for her longest stay away. Every time Sara comes to my mind I manage to push her away, until mid-August, when everyone is nervous because our exam results are a week away from being sent home. I pick up the newspaper that has just been put into our mailbox, and see the picture first, followed by the headline: the image of a teenager lying faced down in a ditch, with the words "MISSING GIRL FOUND DEAD IN DITCH." My first thought is that it can't be Sara. And why are they saying that it even could be, when the picture is only of the back of the girl's head and it is so blurred that I can't even tell if it's her? I read the article as fast as I can: Local Police believe the Ticonderoga native girl was abducted sometime within the last week. Her body was found in a ditch on the side of the road in Whitehall, NY, along with her school Id, and evidence of sexual assault. An Official Police Investigation is still pending. The words sting my very soul, and I force myself not to be sick. "She didn't come back because I told her not to," I hear Kyle say from the kitchen doorway. 'When she was -I mean, before she left the last time, I told her that I wished she'd go away and never come back." I turn around, and see that his face is completely white.

"Kyle," I say quietly, "I don't think that's why she didn't come home this time." I hand him the paper, and I watch him read the article about his sister. He finishes reading and looks up at me with pain in his eyes, expecting some sort of explanation.

"No, that's not her!" he exclaimed defiantly. "She's just hiding somewhere, like she used to do when we were kids. Remember Mark?!?"

"I remember," I said, knowing that she was no longer hiding. "She's just hiding Kyle. Hiding like she used to."