by A. M. Taylor
That house was as deeply entrenched in my memories, as much a part of my childhood and adolescence as my own home, but ever since Nora went missing I hadn’t spent much time there other than for memorials. Then, just like my memories of Nora herself, my memories of the house were warped and tainted by time, and filled with all the spaces that she should have been in and instead was missing from. There were plenty of vigils held in her name when she first went missing, but it wasn’t until she’d been gone for a year that her family held their first memorial.
***
Nobody knows what to say but everybody’s talking. It’s like a white noise machine, the sound turned way up, and then suddenly on mute as I drift in and out of conversations, as the crowd teems and seethes around me, and then suddenly I’m all alone in an aching well of silence. Every time I walk through the hall I see Nora’s face, and either I can’t help but stare even though all I want to do is look away, to forget, or I turn away, unable to take it anymore and feel guilt coil through me, even though all I want is to see her face.
It’s been a year. A whole year.
I’ve never seen the Altmans’ house so full of people, and I’ve spent half my life here, at the kind of parties where balloons are attached to the gate and you’re sent home with a party bag, and at the kind of parties where only the adults are really having any fun and you sit around in too-formal dresses, drinking luridly colored fizzy drinks and watching boys playing video games, and then at the kind of parties where vodka and rum are sneaked out of parents’ liquor cabinets and into empty water bottles, and used to spike cups full of diet Coke as you sit on the edge of the kitchen countertop and wonder how it is everyone seems to be having more fun than you.
I push through the crowd even though all I want to do is go home, or at the very least go up to the bathroom on the top floor of the house, where no one else would dare go, and sit on the closed lid of the toilet and sit and wait until I’m allowed to leave. I don’t though, because I know what people would think, what people already think, and because Serena has already warned me against this, and because, really, I couldn’t do that to Nora’s parents, or to Nate and Noelle and Noah who all must be trying even harder than I am just to get through this day.
I spot Ange sitting on one of the living room couches, her hands resting primly on the black wool of her skirt, the hot pink of her nail polish flashing against the deep brown of her fingers. She’s looking straight ahead, dead-eyed, her mouth pulled taut, eyes rimmed red, but as soon as Leo starts speaking to her, his head tilted down towards her on the couch so that she can hear, she lifts her chin, manages to smile, and even her eyes seem to enliven, although she can’t do anything about how bloodshot they are. I wonder how she can do it: how she can flick the switch from genuine grief to inane small talk. She sees me watching her and pushes herself up from the couch, making her excuses to Leo, and comes towards me.
“You okay?” she asks, and I nod. She looks around, taking it all in, her gaze resting on one of the photos of Nora that line the downstairs hallway. “She’d hate this,” she says finally.
“Of course she’d hate this, Ange. It’s her fucking memorial. It’s basically a funeral.”
“I know, I know. I just can’t help thinking—do you think she’d want us to give up like this? To stop looking? This feels so final.”
I close my eyes for what feels like forever, and when I open them all I can think to say is: “It’s been a year, Ange.”
She shakes her head, leaning back against the wall. “I just always thought we’d know something by now. Anything.”
A burning feeling starts up behind my eyes, and I want to close them again, to close them against all this, and to lie down and to be in bed, and not be surrounded by people who want so much. Who want to know where Nora is, and what happened to her. Who want to not hurt so much anymore, and not think about her anymore. Who want, more than anything, to lay this all to rest and to finally move on. I can’t figure out if they just haven’t figured it out yet, or if I’m the slow one, if I’m the one playing catch-up, because there is no moving on. There is no closure. Nora’s disappearance will hurt us and haunt us for the rest of our lives, and there is no funeral, or memorial, or vigil that will make that better. I just shake my head and whisper through the thickness in my throat and mouth which is building up as I try not to cry.
“Maybe we’ll never know.”
The hallway and staircase wall were still full of photos of Nora even then. Nora staring out moodily from wooden frames, her blue eyes the color of summer’s late-evening sky … in another, Elle grinned up from an ice cream cone, her nose freckled and sunburned, gap-toothed and happy. I squeezed my eyes shut for a second before climbing the stairs, suddenly desperate to ignore the clamor and the clang of memories.
I knocked on Noah’s door and pushed it open quietly. “Noah?” The bed appeared to be empty, so I pushed the door open further and walked into the room. “Noah? It’s Maddie.”
He was standing at the window, looking out over the snowed-in backyard. He made no move to greet me, so I went over to stand next to him by the window. He was tall for a tenyearold, I guess.
I knocked his shoulder with my elbow and said: “Hey, bud. You okay?”
He looked right up at me, his eyes hard but clear and answered simply: “No.”
I blinked, taken aback for a second by the bluntness of his answer and then just nodded. “Me either.”
Noah seemed to deflate at that. Maybe he was relieved that I offered him no platitude of condolence. He slumped forward and leaned his forehead against the cold glass of the window.
“Hey, have you eaten? You want some lunch?” I asked.
He shrugged noncommittally but led the way downstairs nonetheless. The kitchen still smelt of coffee, and as I moved around, opening cupboards and searching the fridge for something to eat, I tried to make as much noise as possible. To fill that empty house with something other than ghosts. I ended up making us grilled cheese, and canned tomato soup.
“They won’t tell me what’s going on.” His eyes remained focused on the velvety orange liquid that filled his bowl.
“Oh,” I said, almost choking on my own spoonful of soup.
“I know she’s dead. Elle. But they won’t tell me why.”
There were so many dead spaces in that house that no one knew how to fill them up again. What did he even know of Nora? How did they explain her pictures on the wall? Who even spoke her name on a regular basis anymore? I placed my spoon back in the bowl and carefully pushed it towards the center of the table.
“They think she was murdered, Noah.”
He looked up, his brown eyes meeting mine and then flicking back towards the tabletop. “Like on television.”
I let myself think for a second that I wished Nate or either of his parents was still here to deal with this and then said: “Yes.”
“Was it the same person who took Nora?”
“I don’t know, Noah. I wish I had more answers for you.”
And then he said with a grim determination, his face fierce and angry, his eyes lit up with a kind of righteous clarity that only children can carry off with conviction: “I just want to know. No one lets me know anything.”
I nodded and answered quietly: “I want to know too, Noah.”
“Will you tell me? If you find out? Will you tell me?”
“I’ll tell you.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“And will you promise you’ll find out? I want to know, Maddie.”
“I promise, Noah. I promise I’ll find out.”
It probably wasn’t even my promise to make. I certainly wasn’t sure I could keep it, and presumably his parents had their reasons for keeping things from him. For trying to protect him from the pain that the world had already inflicted on him at such a young age. But I had to. For some inexplicable reason Noah trusted me enough to do it, and even though I didn’t have the same level of trust in m
yself as he did, I knew that I needed it as desperately as he did. That I needed to find out who had killed Elle, and to finally find out what had happened to Nora, and that I wasn’t leaving Forest View until I did.
The doorbell rang then, and Noah and I looked at each other, he just shrugging at me before picking up his spoon and continuing to plough away at his soup; it was my job to deal with a ringing doorbell, not his. It rang again, too soon after the first ring for it to be described as anything other than insistent. I checked my phone quickly to see if maybe Ange had texted to say she was coming over, but there was nothing. The doorbell rang again.
Pushing back my chair I told Noah I’d only be a minute and for him to stay where he was. By now I was pretty sure I knew who, or what, was at the door.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said when I finally pulled the door open to reveal who was standing there. I would have recognized Gloria Lewis immediately, even if she hadn’t made the transition from print to TV journalism. She had been first on the scene when Nora had disappeared, the first reporter to break the story at a regional rather than local level and hadn’t dropped the subject even when all the other media outlets sloped off home. A few steps behind her stood a tall man wearing a grey fleece and navy puffy vest with a backwards ball cap on even though it was snowing. He also had a large video camera stretched across his left shoulder.
“Maddie … Madeline Fielder. I wasn’t expecting to find you here,” Gloria proclaimed. It had been ten years but she still recognized me. I shuddered a little.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded.
“I was looking for the Altmans. They haven’t released a statement yet and I was hoping they might want to do so to me. Talking to someone with a recognizable face might make it easier for them.”
I actually laughed, the situation was so preposterous. Gloria raised an eyebrow and took one very slight step back from the doorway as I did so.
“Are you fucking kidding me, Gloria? Why on earth would anyone in their right mind think that the Altmans would want to talk about any of this to you of all people? You almost destroyed them.”
“The world’s a different place than it was ten years ago, Maddie. It’s not just rolling news now. It’s Twitter and Reddit and podcasts and a million armchair detectives. The Altmans need to get their official narrative out there as quickly as possible. I can help them do that. I want to help them do that.”
“‘Official narrative’? Will you just listen to yourself? This is their life. Their daughter just died. Please just give them some space and some peace.”
“What about you then? You seem a little more willing to talk than you were ten years ago. You’ve certainly become more strident. Care to share what you know? Or some memories of Noelle? When did you last see her? Were you close at all after Nora’s disappearance? And what about the rumors about the Altmans’ divorce? I hear they’re having some issues; do you think that might have played a part here?”
I shook my head, nausea rolling through me, unable to believe the gall of it, her audacity, her confidence in showing up there, but my venom surprised even me when I said: “Go fuck yourself, Gloria,” my voice scratched and ropey, about to break.
I slammed the door shut, the bang reverberating through me, echoing the heavy thud of my heart. I stood there with my back against the front door for a while, my skin like static, my teeth on edge. I could feel every single vein inside my body desperately pumping blood to and from my heart. There was this feeling right underneath my skin like a razor’s edge; like any minute it was all going to be peeled off from my bones. I heard Noah’s chair scrape and the soft pad of his feet on the tiled floor before he appeared in the kitchen doorway.
“Are you okay?” he said, watching me. I think he probably heard every single thing Gloria Lewis and I had said to each other.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m okay. Just give me a second.” My voice was a pant. I could barely even breathe.
“Do you want some water?” he asked and before I could answer he turned back into the kitchen to retrieve my glass of water while I, for some godforsaken reason, burst into tears. Taking the glass of water Noah proffered me, I let the familiar slip of it running down my throat refresh me. One thing at a time, I thought. One goddamn thing at a time.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It took me a long time to build up the courage to go up to the top floor of the house. Gloria Lewis’s visit had shaken me more than I would have liked it to, and Noah and I sat in the living room watching TV to recover from it before I made the excuse of needing the bathroom and left him down there alone. Nora and Elle had shared the top floor of the house, their rooms divided by a bathroom, and I wasn’t sure what I’d find once I got up there. I didn’t know if Katherine and Jonathan had emptied Nora’s room of her touch, if they’d redecorated and transformed it into a guest room, but I had a feeling they probably hadn’t.
The door was ajar and when I pushed, it opened silently, stealthy. The day had dimmed, light leaking from the sky, and I turned on the overhead light, illuminating Nora’s bedroom, a room I hadn’t stepped foot in for over ten years. It reverberated with her: from every wall, on every surface, there she was, bellowing her name at me. It was appropriate really; Nora had always been shouting at me about something, why not now? There was a musty smell though, and dust lined the bookshelves where her favorite books still sat. When I opened her wardrobe I was surprised to find it mostly empty; evidently Katherine had donated a lot of her clothes to charity, even while she couldn’t bear to part with Nora’s other possessions.
Nora had been a prolific photo collage maker and my own face looked out at me from the walls, pressed up against photos of Ange and Louden, Leo, Hale, and whoever else. I ran my finger along the spines of her books, stopping when I found a comic I’d made her for her sixteenth birthday. I drew it out carefully, the paper crisp with age, the whole thing bound together amateurishly with string. It was from a series I’d once drawn called “the Forest View Furies” that featured animal versions of me, Ange, Hale, and Nora. I used to draw stuff like that all the time. Nora was a wolf known as Wolfora; I was a fox called Foxeline; Hale a doe called Haloe; and Ange was Squirange, the squirrel. It was a way to pass time at school, and I managed to involve all of us in it by intentionally leaving the speech bubbles blank so that either one of the other three could fill them in. I had difficulty getting words out even then. Sometimes it had just been an extremely elaborate way to pass notes, but other times there was a theme or a narrative running through them.
I hadn’t drawn anything since graduating high school. I hadn’t ever been good or anything, just enthusiastic. Or to put it another way; I could have been good if I tried, but I stopped trying. This was one of the few comics I’d actually drawn outside of school. Nora had loved “the Forest View Furies,” or at least she’d loved the superpowered, hyperactive, wolf version of her I’d created, so for her sixteenth birthday I’d drawn a whole comic centered on Wolfora coming of age and receiving her final superpower; a super-strength howl that allowed her to destroy her enemies with her voice.
I flicked through the comic, that strange teenage relic, and listened as the shouts of remembrance got louder and louder. So loud I couldn’t drown them out any longer. I hadn’t been surrounded by so much Nora-ness for years. Normally she was a whisper rather than a shout. A persistent, permanent, very, very present whisper, but a whisper nonetheless.
I didn’t miss Nora then any less than I had done when she first went missing. If anything, it was worse. The conviction that she was more than simply gone had embedded itself firmly within me but that wasn’t the worst of it. It was the way in which her being gone—her being, as I believed, dead—had become an accepted part of my daily life that I hated.
The normalcy of it was what I railed and raved over; the fact that this person whom I loved could be gone, and that could be normal, routine, everyday. It nauseated me. I missed her face, and her hair and her teeth, her mouth and her s
mile, her body and her fingers, her long, wide legs, and her surprisingly small feet, and the second toe that was longer than her big toe. I missed all of it. Her brain and her heart, and her words. I missed her words. All those words she had said to me, but most of all the ones we missed out on. So many fucking words. The phone calls and the Skype calls, the texts and the emails, the flick of a grin as she teased me, the downturn of her eyes as I said something overly curt. Too far, Mads. Too far. The accumulation of words and a post-adolescent college life. A life lived apart and yet still together. So many words she’d never say to me, and I’d never get to hear.
How was it even possible to miss something I never had? And now there she was, shouting at me from every wall, every corner, every crack of her ancient bedroom and I had no idea what she was trying to tell me.
***
“What are you doing out here?” I ask, closing the door to the lake house quietly behind me and joining her down on the grass. Her face is looking straight up into the clear sky which pulses and streams with starlight.
“I’m just trying to find all those constellations you pointed out to me that time, but I can’t remember a single one.” She turns to me suddenly, her face deadly serious in the milky moonlight. “What’s your favorite thing about life?”
“About life?”
“Yeah.”
“You mean what’s my favorite thing in the world?”
“Sure, if you wanna put it like that.”
“A cold night and a sky full of stars,” I say without even stopping to think for once.
“That’s a good one,” Nora says. She raises an eyebrow. “Very apposite.”
I laugh. “What’s yours?”
“Something sweet on my tongue. A good tune on the radio. The sound of a friend laughing.” She pokes me in the arm then but I don’t laugh this time; she seems far too solemn to laugh. “The smell of grass and earth and the lake.”