Girl Missing, #1

by Kate Gable

  Somewhere behind me I find the bed. He lowers his body on top of me, pushing me down, and then… It becomes too much. I push against him. When he doesn't stop, I push him harder.

  “No, no, no." Each word gets louder and louder.

  “What's wrong?" he asks, his eyes big like saucers, surprise painted on his face.

  "I can’t." I sit up and fold myself in half, burying my face in my knees.

  I hate the darkness that engulfs me. I hate the anger that's boiling within me. I hate the fact that the only thing that I can think of is Thomas and what he did.

  "Are you okay?" Luke reaches over and puts his hand softly on my shoulder. He barely touches me, but I shrug him off.

  “I'm sorry. I thought that I could do this,” I say, standing up on my feet, realizing how shaky I am on them.

  “What's going on?"

  I swallow hard. Our eyes meet. Men in law enforcement tend to keep their hair cropped short at first. Very short. As the years go by, sometimes that changes. Not for all, but for some. Luke's hairstyle has a bit of arrogance to it or is it just confidence?

  "I can't do this,” I say. “I'm going through something right now and I'm sorry that I wasted your time.”

  I start to walk away and he flips on the light. It blinds me for a moment and then makes me see stars. I continue to walk away and he grabs my hand. I look at it and he lets me go.

  "We don't have to do anything," Luke says, turning on the lights in the hallway while walking over to the teardrop lamp in the living room and flipping on that one as well.

  “I know. That's why I’m leaving."

  "No, that’s not what I meant. There’s no pressure to do anything. I just want to spend time with you.”

  "Listen, you didn't do anything wrong. I'm just going through some stuff. A bad breakup and a whole lot of other things. I like you and I wanted this to happen, but I just can't. I'm not ready.”

  That's as simple as I can put it and if he asks me again, I'm not going to be as nice. I wait, but he doesn't.

  "Can I please give you my number?" Luke asks, but I reach for the door handle.

  I turn around. The living room has a midcentury modern couch, charcoal with silver legs. It's a sleek design, just like the rest of the room. There’s a large fiddle-leaf fig with wide green leaves in the far corner of the room. The place looks like it has been staged by a West Elm decorator.

  “Your apartment is really nice,” I say.

  He nods thank you and I add, “I don't say that often.”

  We share a moment of silence. It’s quiet and comfortable, yet another surprising thing about being with him.

  “Want to stay for coffee?” Luke asks.

  I narrow my eyes. I'm sure that having coffee with a girl who just pushed him off of her is the last thing that he wants to do, but everything about his demeanor and the expression on his face tells me the opposite.

  I'm about to say no, but the word, “Sure,” escapes my lips instead.

  He smiles at the corner of his lips and waves me over to follow him to the kitchen. It's small and located to one side of the living room with a big corner view of the street below.

  Unlike the rest of the place, it's not modern and it's not updated. The cabinets look like they’re from the seventies, flat and without any personal touches. They have small round knobs in the corner of each and a few are splattered with the same matte white paint as the rest of the kitchen. The stove is clean but dated and matches the black of the microwave.

  "How long have you lived here?” I ask when he makes a pot of coffee.

  “A few years. Why?”

  “Just wondering.”

  "I'm thinking of repainting this kitchen, but my landlord is an ass and won't let me take the cost out of the rent. I should move, but I work too many hours and I don't have the time or the energy.”

  “For what?"

  “For everything. For anything. The time to look for a place, the time to pack up this one, the time to move. So, I just keep putting it off.”

  “I get it.” I nod, thinking back to all of the clothes in the closet that I've been meaning to go through to donate to the Salvation Army. It's a project that I’ve had hanging over my head for months that I haven’t gotten around to starting.

  “It looks like this place is pretty affordable though,” I say, trying to be delicate in my wording.

  “Cheap, you mean? You'd be surprised. It's two grand a month, so not as affordable as one might think.”

  I nod in solidarity and say, “I have a one bedroom as well and I pay $1600, but the rent has been creeping up. I started out at $1400.”

  “I know that I should buy something, but with any decent condo or house going for half a million, I’d have to save at least seventy-five percent for the down payment.”

  "Yeah, I know what you mean.” I nod.

  “Besides, there's that whole other thing, you know.”

  I tilt my head and narrow my eyebrow.

  "No, what do you mean?”

  “I keep thinking that I might meet someone and then it would be nice to buy a place together. Have you ever lived with anyone?” he asks, pouring our coffees into two big mugs. His is from San Francisco and mine is from Wichita.

  “Kansas?” I ask, lifting mine up.

  “My family is from there. My mom sent it to me when I moved here.”

  "To answer your question,” I say, inhaling the aroma and letting it seep into every part of me, “I was close to buying a condo with my ex, but things didn't exactly work out.”

  Suddenly, I start to feel very self-conscious. I run my finger over the rim of the mug and move my jaw from one side to the other.

  “Aren’t we supposed to be on our third or fifth or maybe thirtieth date before we start talking about our exes?”

  “Yeah, something like that.” He smiles and I laugh.

  Luke shows me to the living room and I sit down next to him on the couch. There are enormous built-in bookshelves all across the opposite wall, engulfing the television.

  “These are gorgeous,” I say, resisting the urge to stand up and run my fingers over the books.

  “Built them myself.”

  “You did? Where? How?”

  “I like doing woodworking. It's relaxing. You need space though so I’m taking classes at this studio in Silver Lake. I should really get a house so that I can have a garage.”

  “That’s awesome,” I say.

  “It would have been cheaper to buy them, but I liked making them."

  “Crafted things are always more expensive in time and money.”

  Suddenly, the mood seems to shift. I look at the way the light falls on his face and the way his eyes twinkle when he talks. Then something comes over me. It has something to do with what he said, but I don't know exactly what. I lean a little bit closer to him and before he has the chance to move away, I kiss him.

  He freezes for a moment and doesn’t respond, but then he kisses me back, hard. He pulls away, only to take the cup out of my hand and place it on the coffee table before pushing me back against the couch. I feel the hardness of his body as he presses himself against me. We stay this way for a while, with our lips locked and our bodies intertwined.

  Just as his hand starts to make its way up my shirt, my phone vibrates. When I pull it out of my back pocket to put it aside, I glance at the screen. I sit up to make sure that my eyes aren’t deceiving me.

  “I have to take this,” I say.

  Why is she calling at this hour? She never calls this late. She hardly ever calls after five p.m.

  “Mom?"

  "She's missing,” she says. Her voice is frantic and out-of-control. I can hear her stumbling around her house, turning things over, as if she's looking for something small, easy to lose.

  "Who? Who's missing?”

  Something falls to the floor and makes a loud banging sound.

  “Mom?” I hold the phone closer to my ear to make it easier to hear. "What's going on?” />
  “She's missing! Your sister is missing!”

  4

  My mom has a tendency to catastrophize. That’s what the therapist at the department told me. She calls me once and if I’m busy and I don't respond then she calls again ten minutes later. When she calls for the third time, twenty minutes later, her energy level is through the stratosphere thinking that I must be injured or dead.

  This didn’t just start when I went to the academy. This has been going on my whole life. Everything is always a big deal. Everything is an emergency. Everything is an over-the-top catastrophe.

  That’s what makes me hesitate when she calls about Violet.

  “Mom, she’s probably just with a friend.”

  “No, no, no,” Mom insists. I hate to admit it, but her worries feel different. Odd.

  She’s scared, frantic, out-of-control just like always, but there's something else.

  “Tell me what is going on. Calmly. Please.”

  She takes a deep breath. I can almost hear her counting back from five, just like she told me she’d learned to do on a recent meditation app that she’d installed on her phone.

  “Violet went out with friends. She was supposed to be back by nine. It's a school night. Her friend’s mom dropped her off at nine.”

  “How do you know this?” I ask.

  “I talked to her. Nancy said she dropped her off right in front of the house, but she never came in. She isn’t here. How can that be? How can she not be here?”

  "I don't know," I say, muttering to myself. "She was dropped off, you know this for sure?”

  “She went over to Kaylee’s house after school to work on a social studies project. They made the poster, whatever, hung out, and had dinner. Nancy made pasta and then that was it. She said she dropped her off right in front of the house.”

  “Did she see her walk in?” I ask.

  "I don't know,” Mom says after a long pause. “I guess not.”

  My mom is quiet now, thinking. Her usual anxious energy starts to dissipate, almost as if it’s being sucked out of her.

  I try to think of all the possible things that could've happened. Violet is thirteen-years-old. She doesn't even have a bad relationship with my mom like I did at that age. She's a good girl. She follows the rules. She doesn't stay up late. Mom is always talking about what a great kid she is, silently comparing her to me at that age.

  I try to think of what to do. This could be a mistake. Maybe she made plans to go out with someone else and will be back in a few hours. Maybe it's nothing. There's always that first time, right? That first time when a teenager does something out of character?

  I also know that when my sister says she’ll be somewhere, she's always there, on time. She's punctual to a fault.

  I don't know what to do. I pace around the room holding the phone and asking my mom the same questions over and over again. She has few answers. She's getting frantic again and even though I tell her to calm down, I feel myself getting more and more upset with every passing minute.

  Violet doesn't run away. That's completely out of the question. Violet goes to the library on Friday afternoons instead of going to parties. She stays there until closing when Mom picks her up. She's the complete opposite of who I was at her age and that's what's so scary. If this were me, I’d tell her to call my friends and then ask them for the names of the kids who she didn't know I was friends with.

  What about my sister?

  I wasn't a particularly outgoing kid, but I had a small group of acquaintances and I liked boys. I liked flirting with them and I liked the way that they looked at me. I liked kissing them.

  I know that Violet likes boys, too, but if she wanted to meet up with one, why not tell Mom? She’s particularly strict. She can't stay out all night, of course, but if she told her that she was going to stay at a friend’s house, that would be okay, as long as she knew who the parents were.

  “Did you have a fight?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Please tell me the truth. I need to know everything.”

  “No, we didn’t.”

  “What about that art school she wanted to go to?”

  There’s a pause on the other line.

  “Mom?” I ask. “Remember how you were arguing about it and she stayed with me? Any chance she ran away?”

  “No, absolutely not. We haven’t talked about that for months. She was trying to prove to me that she’s going to follow the rules. She was doing everything right. Do you think I should call the police?”

  The word police reverberates in my mind. It’s actually the Sheriff’s department, but I know what she means. I moved out at eighteen and I don’t know anyone there, professionally.

  “Yes, of course,” I say.

  “Really?” She gasps. It hits me that a part of her must’ve thought that she was blowing this out of proportion as much as I did. That is until I confirmed her worries.

  "Maybe you should call?” Mom asks, her voice cracking.

  “No, I don't live there. It's all secondhand information. They are going to want to talk to you anyway. You call and make a report. I'll be there as soon as I can.”

  “You're coming up?”

  “Of course.”

  "Oh my God! This is serious. This is serious, right?" If I thought that my mom's voice was out of control before, I hadn’t seen anything yet.

  “Mom, it's going to be fine. I'm just coming up as a precaution,” I say as an avalanche of sobs thunders through the phone.

  "She's gone. She's gone!” she screeches, ignoring me.

  I wish that there were something I could do to make her feel better. I have never been very good at consoling her. I have always found my mom difficult to deal with. She's highly emotional and, given the fact that I’m prone to anxiety, she’s not exactly the most relaxing person to be around, but right now we have a problem to solve. I have a missing sister and I'm going to do everything in my power to find her.

  “Mom, you have to calm down,” I say sternly, lowering my voice an octave, just like I often do at work when I want to be taken seriously.

  I’d noticed that a while back. Men tend to take it more seriously. Law enforcement officers from other departments tend to listen to me more intently. I don't make it comically low, just enough to exude authority to play to the unconscious biases of my listener.

  “We're going to find Violet, I promise you. Everything's going to be fine,” I say confidently.

  She’s immediately put at ease by my sternness and control of the situation. I'm glad that I can do that for her; now who's going to do that for me?

  When I hang up, I look up at Luke.

  “It’s going to be okay, you’ll find her,” he promises me and pulls me into his arms. “Get in touch if you need anything,” he says after we exchange numbers. "Now go and find her.”

  I drive to my apartment and throw some clothes into an overnight bag. I pack a few toiletries along with my chargers, my computer, and my iPad. Half an hour later, I'm driving down the empty freeway ten miles above the speed limit with my jaw clenched tight.

  I put on one song after another, but nothing holds my attention. One is too upbeat, another is too depressing. Some are too popular, and others are just simply annoying. After a few more tries, I turn off the sound altogether and just listen to the steady lull of wheels grinding against asphalt.

  I was so confident on the phone with my mom, but as the minutes tick by, my worries multiply. The truth is that I'm terrified. In my line of work, I see the worst of humanity. People can be cruel, mean, and petty, but I also see the worst of what can happen even if there is no ill intent. Accidents happen all the time. Terrible tragedies that happen for no reason whatsoever.

  I hold my breath and I hope that Violet isn’t lost at all, but rather just not found. Maybe she went out with a friend, got drunk, and is now just sleeping it off. Teenagers do that all the time. It's stupid, inconsiderate, and selfish, but at least she will be fine in the morning, besides t
he hangover.

  Maybe she is just hanging out with a guy she likes. Maybe she stayed out too late and is now afraid to come home. There’re so many possibilities of what could have happened. The problem is that the more time that passes, the narrower those possibilities become.

  If she comes back in the middle of the night, she just did something that teenagers do. What if she doesn’t come back in the morning? She wouldn’t stay out with a friend that late. She would never let Mom worry for so long. What could have happened then?

  When I take the exit for 338, the highway that goes up to the mountain communities hovering above San Bernardino, I remember how frustrated I used to feel by my mom's worst-case scenario thinking.

  I remember how if I were half an hour late getting back from my friend’s house, she’d be pacing around the living room, anxious and on the verge of tears. In a time before text messaging, if I didn't answer my cell phone and tell her that I couldn’t talk, she would keep calling me over and over again leaving messages. She’d make me so angry and once in a while, I wouldn’t reply on purpose.

  What if this is what Violet is doing?

  What if this is why she disappeared?

  I grip the steering wheel tighter.

  Given my line of work, my mom’s fears and the worst-case scenarios are very real outcomes for all of the victims and the families that I come in contact with. Growing up, I kept telling her how unlikely all of her thoughts of doom and gloom were, but now I deal with people who find themselves in these situations all the time.

  It's January and though that doesn't mean much in Los Angeles or anywhere in Southern California because the days are still mostly sunny and the temperature stays at a cool 65°, here in the mountains, snow has settled in for the cold winter.

  The drive usually takes around two and a half hours, but it just started snowing and the road is slick. The snow that fell about a week ago still lays thickly on the ponderosa pines.

  The temperature is well below 30°. This has always been a special, unusual little ecosystem, hidden right below the clouds. The Hollywood Hills near Los Angeles aren't tall enough to stop the weather, but the San Bernardino Mountains are tall and jagged and the winters are harsh.