by Abi Maxwell
I did.
* * *
—
“Did Jack bring you home?” my father asked when I walked in. “I didn’t see his headlights. Where’s Henrietta?” He stopped then, and looked at me. “Jane,” he said. “Jane, you’re freezing.”
“She’s outside,” I said. “We walked. She wanted to walk.”
“Jane,” he demanded.
“It’s fine,” I said, my anger at her suddenly somehow larger than my fear. “We’re fine.”
“Jane,” he said again, but I just told him I was going to warm up, and then I stomped my way to my room. I heard him open the door below and go out on the porch, where he must have looked around quickly for my sister. A moment later he came upstairs. Despite changing into sweatpants and a sweatshirt and crawling beneath my blanket, my body still shook. My father noticed and asked me what was going on. I sat up and shrugged and he asked me again where my sister was.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she has a new boyfriend.”
“Stop it,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, and I lay back down. I’m not sure what my father did at that point. He left my room, but from there did he wake my mother up to get her advice? Did he go back outside? Did he call the Hennesseys? I covered myself up entirely, even my face, and I closed my eyes, and very quickly I vanished into a heavy sleep. The howl of a coyote woke me up. I know that seems impossible, and yet there that howl remains, climbing steeply as the steepest of mountains. I read once that a coyote’s howl looks on paper like the shape of its own upturned, yearning mouth. It is true. Over and over again I hear that sound, I draw that sound. I know that sound on that night better than any other, and yet how could it have possibly been there? Why have I never asked my father if he heard it, too?
I sat up and realized that the rain had begun, its sound reverberating against our roof. Right away, I thought of Henrietta out there in the cold, wet night. I ran to her room and saw her door opened, her bed empty. Downstairs, I found my father pacing the kitchen, the floor creaking beneath his weight. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning—more than two hours since I’d come home. I don’t know why he hadn’t woken me earlier to demand more information. Now he didn’t need to ask any questions. I simply told him what I knew—part of what I knew. That she had been in The Den, that she liked to sit out there and have a fire.
“For Christ’s sake,” he said, and he pulled his boots on. “What does she think she’s doing?” he asked. He took the flashlight that we kept plugged in to the kitchen wall. I followed him to the door. He said, “Don’t wake your mother.” I turned the back porch light on and watched my father run across the field toward the woods, his head tucked downward beneath his hood. When he disappeared I kept watching, imagining all possible horrible outcomes. What if my sister really was gone? I asked myself. What would I do? Where would I go? It was a kind of game, a cruel one that, in just a moment, when my father reemerged from the woods with no Henrietta, would come to life and grab my heart between its hands and press it flat.
“Sylvia!” my father called the moment he came in the door. He pulled his boots off as he ran toward the stairs. I followed.
My mother was already sitting up. She wore a white flannel nightgown with red reindeer embroidered across the chest. When she saw us she flung the covers off her legs and she said, “Where is she?”
* * *
—
Eventually, I drifted off on the couch. My parents had already called the Hennesseys and then the police. I think that when I lay there in the dark, I still expected my sister to walk in. But when dawn arrived through the window and I opened my eyes the room looked somehow different. Sisterless.
I got up. It was six a.m. My parents were in the kitchen, my mother standing before the woodstove and my father pacing back and forth in front of the low bureau that we used for a kitchen island. The world had begun to mourn with us; the temperature kept dropping and the cold rain turned to sleet and ice that fell so hard and so steadily that its sound became a reliable lament. In my mind I rehearsed the ways in which I could speak up, the outcomes it could lead to, and over and over again I decided to follow my sister’s instructions: Mind your own damn business, Jane. She would return, I told myself. Or the police would find her. But if I spoke up, she would never again return to me.
* * *
—
By nightfall of that first full day of her absence, the temperature had dropped, the rain had frozen, and the wind had picked up. Still, our father shepherded us out to the car and drove the ghostly streets into town, to the police station, where he demanded help.
“These things happen all the time, sir,” they told us.
“When?” my father asked. “When exactly do they happen?”
The officers responded that they were up against a wall, and indicated the storm.
“She’s fifteen years old,” my father told them slowly, in a near-growl, his lips tight and his teeth barely opening for the words. “Aren’t you required to search for a fifteen-year-old?”
Apparently not. It turned out that though there were state laws to dictate the search for a missing person, local police departments had no obligation to follow such laws. Meaning that the search for my sister was left entirely to the discretion of the town’s police chief. And why, exactly, would he go into the cold, icy November storm to waste his time searching for Henrietta? Henrietta Olson, who just months ago had been sleeping with the teenage drug dealer who burned down her family’s barn?
“She’s not exactly a rule-follower, if I remember right,” the police officer said before we left. “She’s probably just off with a friend.”
My father stood up and kicked the chair he had been sitting in. He held the door open for us to leave the station, and then he slammed it shut. Back home, he tore through the phone book, calling the parents of every student he could find in our entire school, asking after his daughter. He went to that little red house and found Kaus’s grandmother, who shook her head and asked him to leave. He didn’t go to work, and instead drove up and down the frozen, treacherous streets of our town, searching for his daughter. Our mother, during this time, sat at the kitchen table wrapped in a blanket, the fire in the woodstove roaring behind her. She held the portable telephone in her hand and an empty expression in her eyes that struck me as hauntingly similar to what Henrietta’s had been since summer.
“My god, I’m sorry,” the doctor came to our door to say.
“No,” our father said. “It’s not your fault.”
“If there’s anything I can do,” he began. I stood on the threshold to the kitchen as he spoke. He caught my eye, and I felt that he was passing something to me in his look. He said, “Maybe she’s all right. Maybe she knows exactly what she’s doing.”
I almost spoke just then. I definitely said my sentence in my mind, and I think I began to say it aloud. So you know she has your money. But my mother cut in. She said, “I just don’t understand it, Jack. I don’t understand what the hell you were thinking.” Meaning, of course, that the doctor was supposed to have seen us safely home.
* * *
—
Finally, the police showed up to inform us that they would search our property. But it was already Monday. Henrietta had disappeared on Friday. The wind and freezing rain had not stopped since then, and a few power lines in town had even fallen. School had been canceled. I stood in the window and watched as those officers slid their way out across the frozen field, over the stone wall, and into the woods. There, branches cocooned with ice bowed down to block their path and eclipse all possibility of a quick search. But would they have done a better job had the weather been sunny and warm? They lasted, halfheartedly and tentatively, for two short, cold mornings, surely thinking as they walked of their own warm homes.
While they searched, they also finally ran her most recent schoo
l picture—tenth grade, taken just weeks before she disappeared—in all the state’s papers. Yet on the very day the photo was published, Henrietta’s letter turned up. It was I who found it. I’d been in that old foundation, and it occurred to me to do what, shockingly, I had not yet thought to do: reach inside the chimney, just as Henrietta had done, to an interior gap in the brick. Her box. And inside, her letter.
I’m gone, I will be back, I am safe.
With that, the police were done.
IV
IN THE early days after Henrietta was gone, I was able to fool my mind into imagining her in some new, shiny life. It didn’t make me happy, but at least it kept the image of a lifeless body at bay. Yet as the weeks passed and my sadness deepened, I could not imagine a new life for her, because I could scarcely call her form to mind. I could not even conjure her voice. At night I would beg some nameless god to send me dreams about her, but the rare times that they did arrive I would wake up drenched in a cold sweat, and as I came to my confusion would return to hopelessness.
I didn’t go to the Hennesseys’, did not even pass through the woods to spy on them from the far side of the road. I did not dare. Even if I had misinterpreted Dr. Hennessey’s look, and his strange remark that maybe Henrietta knew just what she was doing, still they had to have known that my sister had stolen their briefcase, and their silence had the effect of silencing me. I kept my distance, terrified that one day they would come to me, demanding information that I did not have.
Though my parents failed to speak with me about Henrietta’s absence, my father would come to my room now and then with one book or another—all an attempt, I understood, to put some life back into me. None of it worked. I didn’t read a thing, not until my father entered my room one dreary day with an old book of his that he must have bought at an antiques store. My father loved history, particularly local history, and the built-in shelves that lined the walls of our living room were filled with his beautifully bound yet disintegrating books. The one he now carried was bound in old, flaking leather. The History of Middlewood, Volume I. He sat down on my bed with it in his lap and carefully opened to the table of contents and then flipped forward about a quarter of the way into the book, handed the volume to me, and left the room.
I looked down. Chapter twelve: “Incidences and Odd Occurrences.” It took only a moment to see why he had given it to me. My father had called the story “The Den,” but in this book it was called “Cold Friday,” and it was no story. I ran my finger over their names as though to test my vision: Thomas and Elspeth Ross, Colin, Evan, and Jeremiah. There was the story my father had given us our entire lives, real, true, in print. There was my father’s exact language: Mercury had begun to plunge. Violence of the day. I read it all aloud like an incantation. Five wild, hungry dogs, their backs hunched, their mouths dripping, their eyes at once cold and bloodshot. And this: No trace of the Ross family remains.
The story itself was only two paragraphs. I read it again and again, and then I read the others in that chapter. There’s one of wolves sucking the blood from the neck of seven sheep; another of a witch casting a spell upon oxen; one of a body rising from the nearby lake at the boom of celebratory fireworks. I read it all and then I closed the book, ran my hand over the disintegrating cover, and saw the author’s name: Josiah T. Bartlett. The very same man I had just read about. The one who had lived in our house, the one who had gone to rescue that family in the storm only to find coyotes in their place.
I stood up, looked out the window toward the woods. It didn’t matter that science claimed coyotes couldn’t have existed out here back then. With that history book, I felt I had the proof. Now a family that had existed purely for the sake of disappearing had become real in the most terrible of ways; but also, the possibility that a person could morph out of their own form and into another suddenly became indisputable to me.
I pulled back my curtain to look out the window to the woods. Immediately my sister appeared in a rewrite of that story. It was like a miracle. I looked out and I knew that Henrietta roamed somewhere deep in our woods, unrecognizable yet eternal.
Night after night, I pored over the words in that thick book. When pages began to fall out I taped them back against their binding. I had a desk in my room, and I kept the book and nothing else on it. I always kept it open to that story, believing, in some small, impossible way that this would invite more details to come in. I searched that story as though I was ravenous and that was my only food. I had decided that it held all the clues. It did not escape me that like that family, Henrietta had also disappeared on a Friday. I thought of that night with my sister and I willed it to have been colder. Had my fingers been frozen? Had I gotten frostbite but not recognized it? Mercury sank to 31 below, the book said, so as winter descended I looked up to the sky and prayed for a temperature so low to fall upon us on a Friday night. That, I believed, could offer some portal into the world my sister had entered.
* * *
—
At a certain point, my parents began to fight. Surely, beneath their words lay the loss of my sister. But as winter fell heavily upon us and it became clear that our house needed a new roof, their fights, ostensibly, were about money. My father said my mother ought to work; my mother said my father ought to not try to destroy what remained of her spirit. Soon the fight became over what my mother called my father’s romantic attachment to our ruined farm.
“A ranch house in town would practically cost less than a new roof,” my mother said.
And my father: “Oh, practically. For Christ’s sake, Sylvia.”
And one time—only once, so far as I know—“What about when she comes back, Sylvia? Just how, exactly, will our daughter find us?”
The arguments went on and my desire to eavesdrop waned. Noise in our house traveled easily through the poorly insulated walls and the floor vents, so I spent more and more time in the woods, in The Den. There I lay upon the frozen, snow-covered ground that had last held my sister, and I watched the branches of the trees overhead. I listened for any movement, for the hammer of a woodpecker or the scurry of a rabbit. “Henrietta?” I would ask tentatively. “Henrietta, is it you?” Sometimes, when I closed my eyes out there in the cold, I could watch my sister move back out of her new, alternately ghostly or animal form, and appear before me. Yet even then she would never linger. In this vision she would look sharply at me, then reach for some seam in our universe, tear it open, and slip right back through.
* * *
—
It was early January when I finally heard a voice out there. “Go.” Soft, windlike. I rose quickly and spun around to see who was behind me. Darkness was draped like a black but transparent sheet. Snow dusted the jagged pines and the long, soft arms of the maples above me. Something skittered and ran over the snow. I followed, calling her name as I went.
And so began my focused search. “Henrietta?” I said as I stalked through the woods. “Henrietta?” as I fell knee-deep in the snow, freezing, tired, and hungry.
A small creek ran at the base of a gully in our woods and then cut across the lower section of our field. Above the creek stood our old well house. There were many times, after that first evening, that I lay out there in The Den and heard a voice and saw a quick, fleeting being and then ran breathlessly through the woods, chasing it. Soon all chases ended up at that well. This, I decided, held some significance. I scoured all books I could find for any mention of wells. Eventually I felt I understood: That well was a portal through which I could find my sister—not the solid, blood-circulating version I had lost, but my sister all the same. I began to hang my head inside the well’s rotting frame. I had become unafraid of darkness, of spiders, of gravity, of anything. I needed only to discover a way to travel down to the base of that well, at which point I was sure I would lose my body and drift upward, into the arms of Henrietta. With this end in mind I filled that deep chamber with my voic
e and its echo, and I kept an eye out for signs that my calls had worked, that some being from the other side had heard me.
Of course there was never any sign. My search ended before dawn one morning when I woke in my bed with my parents at my side. They told me that the night before, I’d been found in the snow on the side of the road, just at the edge of the woods, passed out, freezing. A young man driving a snowplow had spotted me. I’d been wearing sneakers rather than boots, and this, they said, is what saved me; in his headlights he’d seen the glow of their reflective strips.
“You could have died,” my father said. I understood. I stopped going to the woods. I stopped reading our town’s history. At the library I checked out cookbooks. I read my father’s books about building. I read my math textbook. I listened to the drip overhead, in my mother’s studio—the roof had yet to be replaced, or even patched—and I kept a tight hold on my mind. I did not think of what could be; I did not think of what my sister might have become, or whether or not she would come back. I allowed myself no imagination. I passed nearly four years in this way.
Once, two years after she had vanished, the French teacher from school showed up at our door saying she’d seen a girl out in Montana who looked just like Henrietta. “She knew that town,” the teacher said. “I told her all about it.” She wiped at her nose with a crumpled tissue as she spoke. “I always told her how wonderful it was out there,” she said. This teacher had a son who lived there, who’d gone to college and stayed. She said she’d been visiting him. That this particular sighting had occurred at the county fair.