as heard on News Center Maine at 6.
Even a year later, Eleanor would only think she knew what happened to Nessa McKinsey. She’d look out her window at night and see lightning over the distant peak of Old Speck and whisper to herself that Nessa McKinsey was there; that whenever a storm struck a pine, that was where Nessa McKinsey was just waiting to be found, deep in the woods, sleeping like Beauty on moss.
Eleanor told her mother once long after the reporters had left and the search had dried up and the ski season had started that Nessa McKinsey might not want to be found, might be hiding out in the mountains on purpose; that the seventeen-year-old theater kid found something good out there and wanted it all to herself like Snow White and her dwarves, and her mother had sent her to bed with a red cheek and an earful of guilt for saying something so horrible about a girl so nice as Nessa McKinsey.
The national news got a hold of the story late, so late that the local schools had already reopened, rolling up in their big fancy trucks like a traveling circus with satellites and microphones and child psychologists. They set up camp there in Newry, over in Bethel and Andover too because by then everyone was pretty sure the cops wouldn’t find anything further than that. She’d gone camping, they said. She’d planned for two days. A girl in the woods. Was she alone? You never knew what kind of trouble––sad though it may have been, could anyone really be surprised?
The local force liked the coverage at first, liked the attention of primetime CNN and MSNBC and Fox for their little town even if they weren’t quite looking for Nessa McKinsey any more. There wasn’t much more they could do, the chief repeated in interview after interview. Their officers had scoured the county as far as the resort, had called in reserves to dredge the river and sweep the whole of Grafton Notch, had doubled, tripled surveillance on routes two, five, and twenty-six in and out of New Hampshire… This was all old news, and people stopped listening.
It wasn’t like the first reports, the ones from the local stations. It wasn’t WCSH-6’s pleas for assistance on the eleven-o’clock, the twelve-o’clock, the early morning news for days after Simone McKinsey filed the missing persons’ and appeared red-eyed and desperate for anything, for anyone to come forward and know something––just know something about her daughter. It wasn’t the picture of Nessa McKinsey (dolled up for the Junior Prom in a powder-blue Cinderella gown, her boyfriend’s face blurred like an apparition beside her) that Eleanor had stared at while the meteorologist played with his radar and told her she better bring an umbrella if she went out, though all the schools were shut down because Nessa McKinsey was missing and Eleanor wouldn’t be going anywhere with a killer or a kidnapper or a crazy on the loose, no ma’am.
So Eleanor sat, and waited, and listened to all the things that could have happened to Nessa McKinsey that day in the forest.
Psychos.
Moose.
Rockslides.
Spinning wheels.
Hypothermia.
Poisoned apples.
Aliens.
The park rangers had told everyone visiting to be careful around the lookout. There was washout on the trail, they said. Maybe Nessa McKinsey didn’t hear them, or maybe she didn’t care. Maybe, like Eleanor, she’d thought her worn-out hikers would be okay, and then, unlike Eleanor, continued on anyway when it became clear that they wouldn’t be. But Eleanor hadn’t paid much attention to Nessa McKinsey’s shoes when they crossed paths on the trailhead, strangers, earlier that same morning, and it was only later that she knew the name Nessa McKinsey at all, and couldn’t look away.
______________________
Prompt: Tell it Backward
“In order to fully understand and appreciate characters in conflict, sometimes we have to push rewind. Write a story that begins at the end of the action and moves backward. What was the flashpoint that initiated the event? What insights or observations did the characters initially have? How might their lives have changed if they went in another direction? One thousand words or less.”
