I hang up the phone and let the adrenaline move for me: I need to find a flight out of San Francisco, call the local police station out in Providence, and shove as many clothes as possible in my carry on — I’m not too concerned about how many outfits to bring. Juniper and I are the same size. I can always borrow her clothes if needed. Thankfully, job perks means I have miles I can use for a last minute, very expensive flight. I call the police station in Providence and report my sister missing, but the conversation is frustrating at best. As soon as they know she's been missing less than 48 hours they refuse to do much. I'm persistent though, and manage to snag the number of a Private Investigator they promise will "look into it."
I don't believe them for a second.
I'll call him as soon as I get there tonight.
I send a haphazard email to my team at work letting them know I’m making an emergency trip and will be out of pocket for a few days. Immediately, Jack responds.
Really? I find out via email?
I roll my eyes. I can deal with him later.
.::.
When I land in Providence, I'm shocked by the chill coming off of the coast. I wrap my scarf closer to my skin and put my head down to avoid the way the wind cuts into me. I take an Uber to her house out in Newport, feeling the apprehension settle in my throat as we turn on her street. The entire ride, it's been silent and now suddenly the driver wants to try and have a conversation.
"Visiting family?"
When I don't answer, he just nods to himself and turns up the music — a tired country song that sounds like a mixture of Clint Black and Montgomery Gentry. I roll my eyes and stifle a groan.
When we reach her house, I notice the lights are off. I pay for the drive and close the car door behind me, standing on the sidewalk for a beat before moving up the steps of the porch. I blow out a series of short breaths, hoping to gain control of my emotions. What happens if she doesn’t answer? What happens if I find her inside? I swallow those thoughts, shoving them as deep as I can, and try the doorbell.
Nothing.
I look around me, noticing the lack of other houses nearby — it’s a quaint neighborhood on the edge of the coast. I can see the waves crashing over each other from here. I try knocking, and when I don’t hear any footsteps, I try the doorknob.
It’s locked.
I bite my lip, trying to remember where she put the key for drop in visits, attempting to encourage me to come and stay for a bit. It isn’t something obvious like underneath her door mat. She doesn’t even have one. I look around her porch, trying to determine where I would hide a key if I were Juniper.
Oh.
I reach over and feel the underside of a nearby sconce. My fingers brush up against the familiar shape of a key and I manage a smile.
The key goes into the lock and within seconds I’m in the entryway of her home. I glance around, trying to ignore the overwhelming scent of my sister that permeates every surface.
“Juniper?”
My voice sounds scratchy and foreign. I clear my throat and take a few steps into her living room, noticing her bedroom door ajar. I walk toward the kitchen counter, my head tilted in the direction of her room. There’s no response.
Nothing.
I spend a few moments walking through every room and checking every closet, making sure that I know with everything left in me that she is not here. I glance out her bedroom window and notice the path winding up the cliff and hugging the coast. It’s her walking path. I almost walk outside and straight onto the loose gravel, mimicking her movements and wanting desperately to retrace her steps. But I’m not familiar with this area, and it’s the dead of night. I may want to find her, but I don’t have a death wish. I decide to pull out my phone and call the detective the police said would help me with a missing person’s case. I glance at the clock at the wall after dialing and only after I recognize the time do I hesitate — 11:00pm. I shrug.
They did say to call any time because he keeps weird hours.
The phone rings twice before he picks up, groggy.
“This is Dan.”
I wrinkle my nose without thinking. First, because it sounds as if I woke him up. Second, his name. Dan. Such an ordinary name.
My mother's voice echoes in my memory and I remember Juniper and I sitting on either side of her on the bed eating ice cream out of the carton one Friday night. I can’t remember what happened, but I remember being in middle school and devastated by a boy who played Juniper and I against each other. His name was Matthew.
"Don't ever trust a man with an ordinary name, girls. He'll be so bored by the ordinary he'll purposefully shake up his life and create chaos on a whim.”
It probably doesn’t bode well for my relationship with this man that I already have a suspicion of how he’ll handle the case because his name rhymes with van.
“Hi, Detective. It’s me. Lavender.”
“Ah yes. The spice girls. Someone told me you might be calling.”
I roll my eyes. It was bad enough that Juniper and I were identical twins right down to the part in our crystal blonde hair and the freckle on our left cheek. Names meant so much to my mother that she chose Lavender and Juniper: intuition and healing, respectively.
Despite this, Detective Dan is not the first to call us the spice girls. As if both Lavender and Juniper are spices. As if there is nothing else to be pulled from our names other than it being some type of decoration. I think of the first time we came home fuming because of the nickname. We didn’t even know there was a girl group attached to the name first — all we knew was that being dubbed spice girls felt wrong and misplaced.
“You are not a decoration, girls,” mom said. “You have all the sass you need, but you are not regulated to the spice on a dish. You are more than that — so much more. You hear me? Your names come from here.” She’d patted her chest, signaling her heart and soul. “Don’t ever let anyone take that away from you.”
And then she looked into our eyes and spoke the meaning we knew then by heart.
Her hand on my cheek, “intuition,” she whispered.
Her lips on Juniper’s head, “healing,” she echoed.
I sigh.
Mama, I sure wish you were here.
I sniff and Detective Dan takes my silence as approval to continue.
“It’s late,” he says.
“I know.” I rub at my face, anxiety already starting to settle in and make a home with dry patches and mini-breakouts. “They told me to call you any time — said you kept weird hours.” He gives a noncommittal grunt and I take that as a cue to keep going.
“I wanted to let you know I’m here in town. I flew in tonight and am at Juniper’s place now.”
“Is she there?”
I blink at his question. Is she…what?
“Would I be calling you if she was had magically appeared?” I hear another slight grunt on the other end.
“Just checking. Sometimes family just likes to…you know…disappear for a while.”
Something in his voice makes me pause. I pull at my ear, feeling the weight of my earrings stretch the skin.
“Not Juniper.”
He hums for a moment as if he’s thinking and I swear I want to reach through this phone and punch him where it hurts the most. Instead, I close my eyes and reach for patience and ask a question.
“Have you….” I pause to give my voice a minute to strengthen. “Have you looked into this at all? I know this is the first time you’ve heard from me, but you knew about her missing from the station when they called you. Have you checked in with any of her coworkers yet?”
“Well, you reported her missing today and it is almost midnight so…no. I haven’t. I was working on other cases.”
I breathe in quickly and he jumps in, “your sister is an adult. It’s very possible she needed to get the heck out of dodge, if you know what I’m saying. We can’t force her to come home. If I had a dime for every time someone told me it wasn’t like so and so to j
ust up and leave, I would be a rich man. Sometimes, we just don’t know our people like we think we do.”
“I know what you’re saying,” I whisper, the words tight in my throat. I fall into Juniper’s leather couch and pull a pillow into my lap. “But I know my sister. And what I am telling you is that Juniper just doesn’t disappear. Something isn’t right and I’m just asking for y’all to help me find her.”
“Okay. I’ll take a look at the school tomorrow. See if we can’t get a feeling for where she might have wandered off. But for now, Ms. Reese, I suggest you try and get some rest.”
I laugh under my breath because like that is going to happen. We hang up and I twirl my cell phone around in my hand, trying to determine how nosy I want to be with my sister’s belongings. Her space is immaculate: nothing out of place. It wouldn’t be hard to find anything that feels as if it doesn’t fit. I start in the drawers on her nightstand.
“Alright, J.” I whisper to the air around me, “show me where you are….”
2
Her drawers are filled with innocuous things: receipts, magazine subscription cards, pens and other plethora. But the difference is that Juniper’s drawers are organized. Like, she has partitions and dedicated boxes and a receipt holder labeled 2018 Taxes. I spend hours pilfering through her documents and belongings, opening up mail and cracking her windows so I can hear the waves crash in the distance. She organizes with precision. It doesn’t take me long to understand her process. Bills go in the mail holder by the door. Magazines pile up on the shelf below her nightstand. Books are alphabetical. She’d probably have a fit at my books currently organized by the color of their spine. I smile, remembering the moment she tried to show me her undoing by organizing her books in a chaotic fashion.
I wipe at my cheeks.
That was the week Mom died.
I run my finger along the titles and realize I am familiar with absolutely none of these authors. In a different world, Juniper would chastise me for my lack of memoirs or creative nonfiction. I purse my lips and grab one that looks enticing and throw it on her bed to read.
Maybe, just maybe, it will be a proper distraction. I wrinkle my nose.
Probably not, though.
After hours of searching, I still feel lost. I have no idea where else to look and part of me feels crazy for expecting her to turn up at any moment. The other part anticipates it like my next breath. Her presence is so heavy in these rooms I keep thinking I’m going to hear her voice bounce across the hallway.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
I wait, and I search, and I glance at the door, willing her to return.
She never does. I never hear her.
She didn’t leave anything important behind: cell phone, computer, purse, keys — none of them are here. I bang my forehead against the wall in frustration. It’s not that I expected to find out where she was based on something she left behind, but I was hoping for some sort of clue — something that would let me know she was okay. Something like a plane ticket or travel plans.
At least then I would know she just didn’t want to be here anymore.
But again: I know better.
Our entire life, Juniper has been the practical one. She would often complain that I got all of the creativity and sass and she got all of the logic. Nothing is happenstance with her. Even down to where she lived, she intentionally created a life that existed from her goals. It’s why she chose to teach in Providence and live in Newport — enough distance between us to live our own lives without any overlap. Even more important: enough distance between her work life and students and the space she made her home.
“I need to find my own identity,” she said.
So she left California and moved across the country, from one coast to another. She chose Providence because of it’s big-little-city vibe and Newport because she could still live by the ocean. I remember her balking when I mentioned the name — how it felt like providence that everything was falling into place.
“Please. That’s not a thing.”
And now she was gone.
Something grates at me though about her nightstand, like I missed something. Or maybe I saw something but it didn’t register. I return to the drawer, opening to find the same receipts and mail outs and pens. I stare at it for a few seconds before sighing out of frustration.
Nothing.
I’m just about to slam the drawer shut again when I see something strange: a tiny latch in the side corner. I push in and something gives, releasing a secret area where you can hide valuables. Instead of valuables, there’s a solitary piece of paper. I pull it out and unfold it, noticing the rudimentary way it’s haphazardly creased. I smile, thinking of the many ways Juniper would fold our notes in middle school and high school — before cell phones were an expected accessory and text messaging the preferred method of communication. It’s obvious Juniper had nothing to do with the folding of this note.
The handwriting is also a giveaway. Large and splotchy, the letters fall over each other in their attempt to form a word. It’s a simple message: five words. I get a dryness in the back of my throat when I read it, even though the contents are relatively innocent.
WHY DO YOU IGNORE ME?
I frown. Who would write this? And why would Juniper save it? I stuff the note in the pocket of my bag. I plan on heading to the school tomorrow morning anyway and I can show Dan. It might mean nothing. It could have something to do with her and Simon recently breaking up for good. But I saw nothing of his when I was searching the place — no signs of a relationship, either. No keepsake boxes, no pictures, no memories stashed behind the clothes in her closet for when she’s feeling lonely.
Not that I know anything about that.
I walk to her bed and collapse into the covers, exhaustion taking over. My thoughts aren’t even making sense anymore, so I know I should probably call it a day, despite the way my insides are colliding against each other. The fear I have for her is palpable, like a taste on the edge of my tongue — bitter and sharp. I still feel her, still know she is somewhere waiting for us to find her– I just have no idea where. The note I found feels weighty and important. I look out the window and try to decipher the horizon from the sea and there’s no discernible difference: it’s all black expanse. I try not to find the metaphor in that, but it’s already there, lodged in my mind.
There is no difference. It doesn’t matter. You can’t save her.
I grab a pillow and throw it over my head, groaning. For the first time since I realized she was missing, I let myself cry. The tears come hot and fast and spill down my neck, forming wet spots on the sheets. I can’t stop. The grief and fear and not knowing feels as if it will swallow me whole. And perhaps it will — perhaps I won’t exist anymore, just like Juniper.
Just like the horizon being consumed by the black expanse.
There’s nothing more I can do tonight, so once the tears subside I finally let myself breathe deep and settle in as much as possible. At least I am breathing. At least I can feel my heart beat at a normal pace. For the past 36 hours, I’ve felt like my heart has been beating a steady rate fit for cardio. The fear is still here. The grief and worry continue to consume. But for now, my exhaustion wins. My heart rate continues to slow as my eyes grow heavier and heavier and my breathing deeper and deeper. My mind is still racing, but I’ve effectively worked until I cannot move anymore. Sleep comes quick.
.::.
The next morning I’m woken up by seagulls. For a brief moment, I’ve forgotten about the particulars of why I’m within earshot of the coast and I allow a slow smile to creep across my face.
My body remembers before I do.
I feel the tension in my neck and my heart begins to race in anticipation. It’s a desperation: a please please please tap of staccato that jolts me awake as memories resurface.
Juniper. Missing.
I rub my face and try to blink the night away, feeling the soreness settle in my joints. I’m suddenly v
ery thankful I decided against the unopened bottle of sparkling wine I saw in Juniper’s fridge last night. I wanted to open it so bad — wanted to dull the sharp edges of how my mind was playing tricks on me and crafting worst-case scenarios over and over and over again. Ultimately, I left it in the fridge. If I had started drinking, this morning would have been even more miserable.
It doesn’t take me long to get dressed and find a taxi to take me to Sacred Heart. Once I get there, I’m struck by the architecture. No wonder Juniper spoke about the tight-knit community of the school. It looks like it’s only the elite who are able to step through the iron gates guarding the property. I see her car in the parking lot and chills cascade down my arms. There’s no way in hell she would leave her car anywhere. Juniper is not someone who fights for material things, but she saved for years to purchase her own car and completely splurged with an all-leather-interior Subaru. She takes meticulous care of it. I notice students and teachers parking and greeting each other with smiles and laughter and I grimace involuntarily.
How life continues to move on with normalcy in the midst of chaos and trauma is beyond me. It’s as if my sister never disappeared. I blink and turn my attention toward the school as the car slows to a stop. I see a man talking with a woman who has a badge around her neck — clearly someone who works here — near the entrance of the school. As they talk he nods and looks down, writing down notes in a small note pad. That must be Dan. I pay the driver and step out of the car, waving in his direction. He looks at me and widens his eyes in surprise then purses his lips. We’ve never met in person and I don’t even know if he knows it’s me, but it feels like he doesn’t want me here.
Tough titties, Sherlock.
He’s ending a conversation with the woman when I walk up to him.
“Thanks. Let me know if you hear anything.”
“Of course,” she offers half a smile and squeezes his arm. “We’re all worried about Juniper and hoping she’s taking care of herself, wherever she is —“ her voice falters and her hand flies to her throat as she glances my way and freezes.
Curious Obsession Page 2