“It’s been ten years. You think we should have just ignored that? Why’d you even come if you were so violently opposed to the idea of a ten-year memorial?”
“I’m not ‘violently opposed.’ I’m tired I guess. I’m just really, really tired.”
“Well, then I’d suggest you go home and get some rest, Mads. Get some beauty sleep.”
I couldn’t remember when or why things had got so bad between me and Nate. One day he was the person I called when I couldn’t call anyone else, and the next—well, I couldn’t even tell you. He’d simply stopped returning my calls and eventually I’d stopped making them. But he’d never spoken to me like that, with such open hostility I could feel it pounding off him, such shortness that his words threw me so much I literally stepped backwards and onto Leo’s foot.
But Nate didn’t stick around to hear my response, even if I’d been able to somehow stumble across one; he simply slipped past me and into the crowd, joining his mother in the kitchen.
It could have been a concerned comment, I suppose, something sincere and almost loving, “go home, get some sleep.” But it wasn’t and the sudden realization of how little he thought of me then roared in my ears, drowning out everything else.
It took me a while to realize Leo was talking to me, saying something soothing but ultimately meaningless: How difficult this was for Nate, how he’d been having a hard time, how difficult today was for everyone. I didn’t need Leo to tell me any of that; I knew it all already, implicitly. It was in evidence everywhere you looked in that room, and it lived inside me that day just as it did every day, but casual cruelty had never been a part of my relationship with Nate, had never formed an integral part of our language. If our silences had no give to them anymore, then neither did our words. They were brittle, ready to break at the slightest of touches.
I tried to think back to when Nate was the person I rang in the middle of the night, to when his voice was the only thing I could bear to listen to. Just like everything else then it felt so long ago, a lifetime ago. It had been years since I’d seen his name flash across the screen of my phone and, just as with Nora, my relationship to him had gradually been reduced to snowy memorials, stuffy rooms, and stilted small talk.
I took a sip of coffee, while Leo talked at me, and balked at its temperature. Depositing the mug on the coffee table I made my excuses to Leo and headed towards Ange, who was standing on the edge of a conversation between a variety of parents, not joining in. Her eyes were glazed as she drank her coffee and she failed to notice me as I approached.
“Hey,” I said, shaking her out of her reverie, “when are you heading off?”
Ange looked at me and shrugged. “Probably in twenty minutes or so, I guess?”
“No, I mean when are you heading back home to Madison?”
“Oh, not till tomorrow morning. I’m meant to be having dinner with my parents tonight.”
“I can still drive back with you, right?”
“Yeah, of course. So, have you talked to Nate yet? How’s he doing?”
“He told me I should go home to catch up on my beauty sleep,” I said while reaching for Ange’s coffee cup and taking a sip.
“Wow. How caring of him. When did you guys last speak?”
“Last year’s memorial, I guess? Definitely haven’t heard from him since then. I’m trying to work out what I did to offend him so badly, but I think it might just be my very presence.” I tried to make my voice sound light, indifferent, but failed. The truth was, I really was trying to figure out what I’d done, where it had all gone so horribly wrong.
Ange made a face at me, grabbing back her coffee. “You know that’s not it.”
“Do I? We’re not exactly friends anymore. If we ever were.”
“You’re friends. Don’t overanalyze this, it’s just a weird day.”
“Yeah, I know. I’d say something trite, like ‘can you believe it’s been ten years?’ but mostly I just feel old. And tired.”
“You know what I keep doing? I keep looking at Noah and thinking that he was a baby when she went missing. That’s what I can’t believe. That his entire life has been the same length of time as Nora being gone.”
I looked around for Noah, unable to find him, and wondered if he’d gone upstairs to join his sister. He’d been almost a year old when Nora disappeared. He had no memory of her except the one we’d built for him in her absence, and I wondered what that looked like. What that could possibly look like. We’d spent the past ten years of our lives at events like this, memorializing someone we loved, someone we missed, but for Noah this had effectively become his life. He had no memories that weren’t connected to, and hijacked by, Nora’s disappearance. At the very least I could look back to when she wasn’t gone, but for Noah, it was all he’d ever known. I thought back to the day he was born, and realized his birthday was coming up. February 14th.
***
Nora’s pissed because the birth of her baby brother is ruining her Valentine’s Day plans, so we’re lying on the couch in her parents’ living room, illegally eating marshmallows. “I don’t know what they think they’re doing,” she says, widening her eyes at me, “having a baby at their age. It’s gross. Plus, you just know this is a save-the-marriage baby. It’s so obvious.”
“That’s not fair, your parents always seem pretty happy to me. And your mom’s not that old,” I say, but Nora’s eyes just get wider.
“Oh, really? You know the doctor said Mom had a geriatric womb?”
Nora starts laughing, and I can’t help joining her, throwing a marshmallow at her head at the same time. But she catches it easily, popping it in her mouth and starting to chew while saying: “She said she almost stabbed him with a scalpel or whatever.”
“That sounds about right.”
“Yeah, as soon as I reach, like, fifty, I’m gonna start carrying a knife around to threaten people who call me ‘old’ with. No one will be able to arrest me though. I’ll just be the eccentric, kinda scary old lady.”
“It’s the perfect plan.”
“Right? I’ll get away with so much.”
Elle comes into the room then, complaining about being hungry, and Nora holds out her arms to her, beckoning her to the couch. She hops up to join us, snuggling up in between us, and Nora starts to feed her marshmallows, daring Elle to keep her mouth open while she attempts to toss them in there. “You excited to meet your baby brother, smelly head?” she asks, and Elle scowls, her face a picture of cartoonish displeasure. She is not excited to meet her younger brother. Nora pulls her onto her lap, squeezing tight and says: “You know I wasn’t excited to meet you either,” which makes Elle turn her head towards her older sister in shock. “Yeah, I thought you were going to ruin everything for me because I loved being the baby and I loved being the center of attention. But then I met you, and you were just the coolest, even though you cried, like, all the time, plus you thought I was awesome, which made me feel awesome, and now you’re my best friend.”
“I thought Maddie was your best friend,” Elle says, looking over at me suspiciously.
“Well, sure. But you’re my other best friend.”
Elle doesn’t look all that convinced, but I smile at her and she slowly takes another marshmallow from the bag and begins to chew thoughtfully on it.
Their parents hadn’t arrived back with Noah until much later, and Katherine had wanted to let Elle stay sleeping, but Nora had crept into her room and woken her. I could still see the look of sleepy awe she had on her face when she gazed down at the baby. I wondered if Elle remembered that day at all; she’d been six, so it was plausible that she did, but I knew that I’d had to fight so hard to remember Nora any other way than being gone that sometimes those memories of her being here felt too far out of reach even for me.
“Have you spoken to Louden yet?” Ange asked, cutting through my memories.
I shook my head. Louden Winters was Nora’s ex and the brother of one of our high school friends, Hale, who hadn’t made it to the memorial but had sent a vast bunch of lilies in her place. We’d all been friends at one point, more than friends really. A group of mismatched friends and siblings who’d grown up together from scraped knees and training wheels right through to tequila shots and heads hanging over the toilet bowl. I’d once been as close to Hale as I was to Ange; but then Louden had been named as a suspect in Nora’s disappearance and for some reason Hale hadn’t taken too well to me accusing him of killing our friend. I’d been trying to ignore Louden’s presence altogether, pretending he wasn’t there, but he was six foot three, taller than most everyone else there and it had been getting harder and harder to ignore the fact that I hadn’t even said hello.
“When did you last see him?” Ange asked.
“A couple of years ago at Christmas I think. At the bar. You were there.”
Ange nodded. “Right, yeah. You really haven’t seen him since?”
“No. Have you?” I asked, unable to keep the trace of suspicion that licked through me then out of my voice.
Ange swallowed a mouthful of coffee and nodded. “Yeah, I was in Chicago for a couple of days last year, remember? I went for a drink with him and Hale.”
I raised my eyebrows, looking between Ange and Louden. “Why?”
Ange shrugged. “Why not?”
I stayed staring at Louden for longer than I meant to, trying to arrange my thoughts in a way that made sense, jigsaw pieces scrambling to find their mate and failing. I knew what I wanted to say: because he might have killed our best friend, and it was almost there, rising higher and higher in my chest until I pushed it down, away, saving it for myself. I wasn’t allowed to say such things anymore.
It had been okay for a while, at least, the wild accusations and rampant theories. Louden’s arrest had come just days after Nora went missing, one of the main suspects, but he’d provided an alibi and been released without charge. It hadn’t stopped my own suspicions of course, and neither had it stalled the small-town gossip, but all these years later there was something childish about those words, an intense naiveté that I wasn’t allowed to indulge in anymore. They were words from another life, another lifetime, the one right after she went missing. Nevertheless, cold sweat pricked at my skin all of a sudden, the airless room stuffy with bodies, my own body still cold from the world outside as Louden turned towards me, feeling my stare, liquid brown eyes catching light. He lifted his chin in my direction and I let out a heavy breath before turning back to Ange.
“What did he have to say for himself?” I asked, my attempt at small talk still managing to sound like an accusation.
“The usual. He’d just started seeing someone, but I don’t know if it stuck.”
“Lucky her.”
“Mads,” Ange said, warning lacing her voice.
“What? All I’m saying is he’s a bad boyfriend, that’s all.”
“That was over ten years ago. People change.”
It was something I wanted to believe, desperately, that people change. And maybe I did believe it, just with certain caveats; that change was glacial, imperceptible, and when it did come it didn’t necessarily mean anyone had changed for the better. It seemed to me as though it was the world that kept changing, often with a loud, deafening crack as life tore itself apart, and we were all left struggling to keep up. Not all of us managed to. I was testament to that; I was still struggling to keep up with the thundercrack that had torn through our lives ten years earlier and led us all there, to that room on a snowy day.
As I stood there, just waiting for the day to end, waiting for that heavy, empty feeling to lessen just slightly, even though I knew it wouldn’t, that it probably never would, I couldn’t possibly have known that another crack was coming, waiting to tear us all apart yet again. That less than twenty-four hours later, Noelle would be dead, and I would be left once again, breathless, desperate, trying to make sense of a world that seemed determined to leave me behind, too broken and battered to even try and catch up.
CHAPTER THREE
I woke the next morning to the same shattering glass and a feeling in my chest like I couldn’t breathe, the same way I’d woken up the day before, the same way I’d been waking up for the past ten years. The weight of the memorial the day before still hadn’t lifted on top of which I had a slight hangover. I wished it felt different, I wished I felt different, but whatever I did, whatever I tried, nothing ever seemed to change. Or maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough; there were definitely people out there who would prescribe to that theory. As if she knew I was thinking of her, my phone began to buzz insistently on my bedside table, the illuminated screen telling me Serena was calling.
“Hey,” I said, pushing myself to sit up in bed as I spoke.
“Hey,” she said, her voice sounding a little breathless down the line. She was on her way to work. “How are you? How did yesterday go? Are you doing okay?” The questions came short and sharp; rat-a-tat-tat, like incredibly efficient gunfire.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to keep my voice steady. “It was fine, I guess. It was … the same as it ever is. Hard. Cold. Strange.”
“I can’t believe it’s been ten years, Mads. It’s insane. I really wish I could have been there for you. For Nora too.” Serena had modulated her voice, gentle, gentle, but there was wind whipping around her as she walked down the street, traffic noise practically drowning her out, so I had to strain to hear her.
“I know, it’s fine. It was all fine. Ange was there, we stuck together.”
“Mom said you guys went out for a drink after?”
I rolled my eyes up towards the ceiling. My mom and sister sharing notes about me wasn’t breaking news however, so I let it slide.
“Was Nate there?” Serena continued.
“At the memorial, yeah; he didn’t come for a drink.”
There was a little beat, the briefest of pauses before: “How was he? How was that?”
I held my breath before answering, one, two, three, four, before remembering that what you were actually meant to do was count to ten while breathing to calm yourself down, not cut off the supply of oxygen for ten seconds. When I finally let the breath out, the sigh that emanated from me seemed to fill my entire bedroom.
“It was about as awkward as I thought it would be,” I said at last, “actually, you know what, it was worse than I thought it would be. He seems to actively dislike me now. I don’t know what it is I’m meant to have done, but there it is.”
Serena made a sound I had a little difficulty translating and then said: “He needs to get over himself. You’d think after everything that’s happened he could at least be nice to you.”
“It was the tenth anniversary of his sister going missing, Serena. I think we could cut him some slack,” I said, allowing Nate more sympathy than I’d given him the day before, always on the defensive when it came to him.
“Yeah, and it was the tenth anniversary of your best friend going missing! He could cut you some slack.”
I couldn’t argue with her there and she soon arrived at her L stop, so we hung up, Serena promising to call me later, and getting me to promise to call our younger sister, Cordy, even though we both knew I wouldn’t. The room felt colder, and I felt older the moment her voice left it. As I started to think about what the day actually meant—about Nora having been gone for ten years, about ten years of limbo, living in purgatory, not knowing where she was or whether she was alive—I also felt the old familiar weight begin to grow. It started in my chest, always, a boulder I couldn’t budge, a wall I couldn’t climb over or knock down. Trying to ignore it, and my phone still in my hand, I did what I did most mornings and began trawling through Instagram, anaesthetizing myself with photos of coffee, home décor tips and puppies. Should I have been doing something more profound on the morning of the official anniversary of my best friend going missing? Maybe.
It wasn’t enough though, not nearly a big enough distraction, and so I started to wonder what Nora’s family were doing, whether they would mark the day in some way, or if they felt the day before had been enough. There was no grave to visit, not for Nora. Without a body Nora had never been buried but she still left her mark. She was their mark and she was my mark. Maybe we all have them, I don’t know. Maybe I just got mine a little earlier in life than usual. But she was. She was my mark. Indelible. Permanent. Ineradicable. In some ways I was thankful for the constancy of it; I knew she’d never be fully gone as long as I was still here. Maybe that was why the pane of glass I dreamt of every night and could feel slipping from my hands almost every morning kept haunting me; because, in some ways, I didn’t want to wake up to anything else because the moment I did I’d know she was truly gone.
So, I lay in bed and imagined the Altmans slowly waking up, getting dressed and gathering for breakfast. I could see them walking down the staircase that was still gazed down upon by dozens of photos of Nora; I could see them settling down at the large table in the kitchen, coffee smells trailing through the house, snow falling outside the window just as it was falling outside mine. More likely, Noelle and Noah were getting themselves ready for school while Nate packed up to head home to Texas. Jonathan had probably already left for work, and Katherine would still be in bed, staring as blankly up at her ceiling as I had when I first woke up.
I couldn’t have known that Noelle wasn’t there, that Nate was the first to realize, that he tapped gently at his mother’s bedroom door, had to shake her to get her attention and ask where his younger sister was. That when he rang Elle’s phone it went straight to voicemail and a bubble of panic began to build somewhere near his duodenum, and Noah looked on, his wide brown eyes taking everything in. That Nate rang his dad next who was on his way to his law practice in Madison, where he spent most of the week, and that Jonathan couldn’t pick up because he hadn’t set up his hands free that morning because he didn’t want to speak to anyone that day at least not yet. That eventually Nate rang Elle’s girlfriend, Jenna, who said she hadn’t seen her since Saturday, and then finally he rang his buddy, Leo, who was already at the scene and suddenly that bubble of panic popped except it turned into a tidal wave rather than disappearing into air and he had to struggle to keep up with what Leo was saying because it couldn’t possibly be true.
It might have been around that time that my own phone rang again, Ange’s name popping up on my screen. She told me she’d be over to pick me up in an hour to take me back to Madison, and I pushed my covers off, body aching, limbs too heavy, preparing myself for a shower.
I suddenly couldn’t wait to get back to Madison, not because there was anything waiting for me there, but because waking up in that house, in the exact same spot I’d woken up ten years before, only to hear the news that Nora was missing, had too much poetic symmetry for me to handle at any one moment. My teenage bedroom rang with her memory, every inch of that room simply sang with her presence, low and clear, piercing; there was nowhere I could look that didn’t bear some trace of her. Perhaps I should have relished that. Especially on that morning. But really all I wanted was to get away from it all. I didn’t need to have the memory of Nora screaming at me from every wall and every corner to remember her any better, to miss her anymore than I already did. I wanted to hide somewhere deep and dark where Nora had never been, and do my very best to leapfrog over that day. But that was never going to be a possibility. Not that day.
I showered and dressed in the same clothes I’d been wearing the day before for no reason other than when I’d packed to go home I hadn’t been able to think beyond the memorial. Mom had already left for work by the time I made it down to the kitchen, and my dad, who was a retired school principal—my high school principal, in fact—was sat in the breakfast nook drinking coffee. The familiarity of my family home, the sight of Dad reading the newspaper, the muffled light of the kitchen as snow crowded the window pane, crouched over me as it always did when I was back there: Here was my home, a reluctant sanctuary, and yet I did not feel safe. I never did.
“Morning, Mads,” Dad said, glancing up from the paper as I wandered past to help myself to coffee and maybe even a bowl of cereal.
“Morning.”
“When are you heading back?”
“Soon. Ange will be over to pick me up in an hour or so.”
Dad nodded, sipping at his coffee as I leaned back against the kitchen counter and took a long drag from my mug.
“When are you planning to take your car in to get fixed?”
“I can’t afford it,” I said shrugging, “not right now anyway.”
“We can lend you the money.”
“It’s fine, Dad. I just need to save a little money and I’ll get it done.”
“But how will you get around until then?”
“I can just get the bus, it’s not the end of the world.”
Dad looked out the window at the snow and then back at me, an eyebrow raised in skepticism. “You can borrow the Explorer if you want? I don’t use it so much anymore anyway.”
I shook my head. “Dad, if I left you without a car you’d basically be stranded whenever Mom left the house. It’s fine, don’t worry about it.”
“But the bus—”
“Is a perfectly legitimate form of public transportation.”
“Okay, okay, I get it. I’ll back off.”
“Thank you.”
There was a slight pause while Dad weighed out his words and said: “You know your mom and I are always happy to—” his voice trailed off but his words still managed to fill the room, unspoken yet heard loud and clear.
I’d lost count of the number of times we’d had this conversation. It wasn’t always that exact conversation, of course; it wasn’t always about my broken-down, practically worthless VW. Sometimes it was about rent or my meds, occasionally about the cost of therapy and health insurance. It was always there, the helping hand, perennially extended out towards me along with the tendrils of guilt that inevitably accompanied it whenever I took it. But guilt pounded its way through my life, relentless and as all-encompassing as rain in a summer storm, regardless of whether I accepted the help that was offered me.
“I know, Dad.” I said at last.
“Okay, I just thought it needed to be said. Because you’ve been doing really well recently, but if you need a little help with money, then that’s okay. And I know yesterday must have been hard for you, not to mention today, but we just want you to stay on the right track.” He said it all in a slight rush, even though he normally spoke slowly, thoughtfully. He’d obviously worked up to this a bit, not wanting to spook me, as if I was a highly strung racehorse. I wondered if he and Mom had discussed it before she left for work that morning, or maybe even the previous night when I stumbled in through the front door, a little worse for wear.
I thought about every bitten back word I’d never spoken to my parents, and every catapult line I’d thrown out at them and wished I’d pulled back on. It had been a long ten years, and I couldn’t help feeling that I’d made it even longer. The guilt I felt over losing Nora had seeped out, into, and over everything, and eventually evolved into a guilt about feeling guilty; hell, it might even have been guilt over having any feelings at all. There’s no manual for grief, and there certainly isn’t one for being someone a missing person leaves behind; but however you were meant to act in the face of the impossible, I was pretty sure that I’d failed. Everything I did was filtered through that failure, grimy with that guilt, and as much as I hated asking for help, I seemed to be in need of it, all the time. I wanted, desperately, to get to a place where that helping hand didn’t immediately feel like a punch to the gut, but I had no idea how to get there, no idea if I ever would.
