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CHAPTER TWO

I was dreaming of the sheet of glass again.

I was carrying this huge plate of glass that was beginning to crack, tiny spider webs of distortion spreading fast, and as it did the pane shifted in my heavy arms and slipped from my grasp. I woke just as it should have been shattering into a million pieces on the floor below me. I carried that great big sheet of glass everywhere I went, my arms straining with the effort, my forehead shining with sweat, the glass itself slowly, slowly cracking as I shifted it slightly from hand to hand, arm to arm. It was exhausting and debilitating, cumbersome and controlling and, I thought, so, so obvious to everyone I met that I was struggling. People recognized the struggle of course, just as I knew they would, gave it a name, and either pushed it to the back of their minds or worried about it endlessly depending on who they were and what they were to me. They all made the same mistake, though: thinking that pane of glass made me weak. You try carrying something like that around with you wherever you go. You get tired, sure; but you also get strong.

There was nothing particularly special about waking up to that shattering glass. I’d done it a thousand times before and no doubt it would continue to haunt me after; it wasn’t a portent, or an omen, I didn’t have to write about it in my dream journal, or put a black mark in my diary so that in the years to come I’d be able to look back and say “ah yes, the dream. I should have known something terrible was going to happen.” Because there was no way anyone could have known.

Because when the worst has already happened, you don’t expect it to happen again.

But this story doesn’t start with a dream. What story ever does? No, this story starts with Nora.

Nora’s parents had chosen Sunday for the memorial because more people were available. The day was white and gray, the sky thick and heavy even though the snow didn’t come until nightfall. It had been the same on the day Nora disappeared but then that should have hardly come as a surprise. January has a way of making every day look and feel the same, the month lasting forever and then suddenly over. I don’t know why we gathered at the lake house rather than at the Altman home, although I was glad we weren’t huddled around the trees by the side of the road where her abandoned car had been found that morning, so many years ago. Too many impromptu vigils had happened there in the days and weeks following Nora’s disappearance for me to feel anything other than nausea when I drove past. At least the lake held some happy memories, long gone but still just about holding on. So, Nora’s dad, Jonathan, spoke, and then her older brother, Nate, did, and then we all just stood looking at the lake for a while, no one really knowing what to do, what we were expected to do. That’s something I’ve learned over the last ten years; no one ever tells you what to expect or what’s going to happen next because no one knows. You’re on your own.

I waited for a while, wanting to get Nate on his own, but Leo and Bright were stood with him, their faces pale and maybe even a little drawn but talking to each other as animatedly as you can at a memorial. They were trying to draw Nate into the conversation, trying to coax him out, but wherever he was it wasn’t with them. I had a feeling he hadn’t been with them for a while.

“Hey, Maddie,” Leo said as I approached. “Nice to see you.” Leo had just graduated from the police academy when Nora went missing. Three months on the job and he was investigating the disappearance of his best friend’s little sister. Whenever I saw him back then the image of him in his brand-new uniform would shock me all over again; he looked so young, too young to be in a position of such authority, as though he’d put the uniform on for Halloween and never taken it off.

Bright, or Michael Brightman to give him his full name, was a year older than Nate and Leo; the same age as my older sister, Serena: They’d gone out for a while, in fact, back in high school. He’d had a year longer on the job than Leo, a year or so to prepare for something neither of them could ever have seen coming when they decided they wanted to be cops in the same small town they’d grown up in, where nothing ever seemed to happen. I could still see his face, stark, stretched and stunned, when he told me they’d found Nora’s car but that there was no sign of Nora.

“Nice to see you too,” I said, leaning in for awkward hugs with both Leo and Bright before stopping at Nate whose eyes were turned towards the lake, or where the lake would have been if it weren’t blanketed with snow. I had lain my hand on Nate’s arm in an attempt to get his attention, and he finally turned towards me.

“Hey, Mads. Good of you to come,” he said, his voice scratching the cold air around us.

I looked at him, trying to make sense of what he was saying before just nodding my head slowly and saying: “I wouldn’t miss it.”

Nate sucked in a breath, still not really looking at me, and I turned back to Bright and Leo, the latter of whom met my gaze and shrugged. “Can you guys give us a minute?” I asked, the two of them sharing a look before wandering off towards the lake house without another word.

“How’re you doing, Nate?” I asked.

Nate shoved his hands into his pockets and turned towards me with a sigh. “I don’t know, Mads. How do you think I’m doing?” He was facing me but not meeting my eyes, his gaze wandering across the snowy landscape, taking in the fractured group of people who had gathered to remember Nora.

His younger sister and brother, Noelle, and Noah, were walking together towards the house, looking for warmth; his aunt stood with her arm around his mom as she quietly cried. My oldest friend, Ange, was talking to Bright and Leo now, while our parents stood in a small knot, joined by Nate’s dad, Jonathan, and the Winters family. It was a scene familiar to me, too familiar, and I wondered if that was what Nate was thinking too: How many times had we done this, how many times had we stood here, if not exactly in this precise spot, then one very much like it, thinking about Nora, remembering her, trying to keep her with us even while she was taken further and further away from us?

Ten years. I tried to take it in and couldn’t. Ten years was a lifetime, an entire decade. What was there to say about an entire decade that, for the most part, had been marked only by absence? For some people if there’s something missing, if there’s a hole in their life, they fill it; I tend to fall down it.

“How’s work?” I asked, searching his face, desperate for something, anything. “How’s Texas?” Nate had moved to Austin almost four years earlier, and I’d barely seen him, barely spoken to him since, the distance between us so much bigger, so much wider than those thousands of miles.

Nate took another long breath, looked like he was readying himself for something and ran a gloved hand over his face before batting my question away. “Texas is fine, work is fine.”

“Wow, that’s really illuminating stuff, thanks, Nate.” I wanted to smooth out the edges of my words but, for some reason, even that day, I couldn’t. They were sharp and cold, like the weather, like the day.

“That’s all I have for you right now. How about you? You want to tell me all about your great, interesting life?” Sarcasm shaded his voice, adding an unfamiliar arch to it, and he was looking right at me then, his eyes dark and hard, like a dare. I shrugged off his question, trying to pretend it slid right off my back, and he decided that he’d made his point. “See, that’s what I thought. Good to see you, Mads, be sure to have a slice of the coffee cake before you go.”

And then he was walking away from me, hands deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched.

Nate and I used to be able to communicate with each other even through silence. Despite it, because of it, whichever way you want to look at it, neither of us had the words available to talk about Nora and that was how we communicated, through the understanding that she was there, always, in every word we said and every word we didn’t, every word we couldn’t. But it had been years since that was the case and, by then, whenever we saw each other, whenever we spoke, the silences in between had no give to them. They felt like gaps, misunderstandings, another hole to fall down, another hole to be filled.

I didn’t have any cake. I’d long stopped eating at those kinds of things. The food was a necessary distraction, it gave your hands something to do while you tried to figure out exactly what it was you were meant to be doing, but I could never take a bite, my stomach twisting and turning, my throat closing up as soon as I raised anything to my lips. Inevitably I just ended up carrying a loaded plate of food around before finding somewhere to stash it. No one stayed too long that time though. No one wanted to. We’d had ten years of these things after all, and were just marking time now. When she first went missing, even in the year or two after, there was still something close to hope at the vigils and memorials but, after ten years, that was just a way of saying look at how much time has passed, look at how we’re still thinking of you. Nora was gone, and it was simply something we had to do to remind ourselves that we were still here.

Eventually I followed Nate and the rest of the party into the lake house where everyone had decamped to. I would have preferred to have left without even a goodbye, but my parents had attempted to raise me better than that, and besides, they’d driven me there. I helped myself to a coffee in the small kitchen, wishing it was a little later in the day, wishing there was wine instead, or better yet, vodka, but grateful for the pocket of extra time it gave me away from everyone. The cabin was small, just one large room with a utility room off the kitchen, the front door opening onto the living room, and even though there weren’t that many of us, it was still too many. I clutched at my coffee cup, waiting for my hands to warm up, waiting for the crushing feeling inside my chest to ease up.

Noelle was sat on the arm of one of the couches, picking at a thread that was coming loose on the sleeve of her sweater. Ten years younger that Nora, she’d turned seventeen just a few months earlier, the same age Nora had been when she went missing. I stared at her, looking instinctively, automatically, for the similarities between the two of them as I always did when I saw Elle. I didn’t have to look for long. Her hair was lighter, and she wore it longer than Nora had, and her eyes were the same brown as Nate’s rather than Nora’s arctic blue, but Nora was there still. They had the same mouth and jawline, the same shaped eyes and long neck. I knew that when Elle stood up she’d be almost as tall as Nora was, but for now Leo was leaning over her, talking intently as Elle refused to meet his eye. I joined them with my coffee, maneuvering carefully around Nate as I did so, neither of us saying a word.

“Maddie,” Elle said, her eyes meeting mine, looking grateful, I thought, or maybe even a little pleased.

“Hey, you. How you doing?”

We hugged and her body felt small in my arms even as she pulled quickly away.

“Oh, you know. Not great.”

I don’t why I kept asking people how they were, to be honest. I hated that question even on a good day, let alone that day.

I nodded and slid my gaze towards Leo, who raised his eyebrows at me and asked: “How long are you in town for, Mads?”

“I have to get back tomorrow.”

“How you finding being back in Madison? You’re doing a PhD, right?”

Yet another question I dreaded even more than “how are you doing?”

I coughed through my coffee and shook my head. “No. I quit, actually. A while ago. I’m working in the communications department now. At the university.”

“Oh. How’s that going?”

“It’s fine. It has its moments.”

“Sure,” Leo said nodding, polite, polite, “well, it’s a job, right?”

I looked at him, trying to decipher his words but he just smiled, nice and easy, his face wide open.

“They all have their moments. Last call out we got was to save Mr. Hetherington from himself. He’d locked himself out of his house and decided it was best to just sleep off whatever he’d drunk in his car, but the neighbors were worried about him, so they called us. Probably almost died of hypothermia, but what are you gonna do, that’s the job, right?”

It would have been too generous to describe Hetherington as the town drunk. He was simply a guy who got drunk and happened to live in town. I wondered at what Leo was complaining about though. You become a cop in a small town, and what else do you expect from life except fishing drunks out of ditches and pushing cars out of snow drifts? Apart from a former classmate who’d been missing for ten years, of course. It took me a while to realize that he was throwing me a tentative bone. I wasn’t where I’d expected to be in my life, but there had been days, hell, there had been months and years, where getting to even where I was then would have looked like something close to a miracle. And when it came down to it, none of us were really where we had expected to be.

I returned Leo’s smile, or at least tried to and said: “Well, you’ll be running the place soon though, right?”

Leo rolled his eyes towards the other side of the room where his father, Patrick Moody, stood, replete in his chief of police uniform, too big for this room. “Yeah, just as soon as the boss retires.”

“Hey,” I said to Elle, grabbing at her bicep, “is Jenna here? I haven’t met her yet.”

Elle shook her head. “No, she couldn’t make it.”

“That’s a shame.” Talking to Elle felt like talking through a mask or as though I was trying on another character. I tried so much harder around her than anyone else. Not because I wanted her to like me or anything, but being around her made me act the way everyone else seemed to act around me. Drawing me out, pushing for information, wide concerned eyes, forced cheer; I went the whole nine yards with Elle even as I knew how much she must have been hating it. I couldn’t help it though, the blanket of concern that overwhelmed me whenever I saw her. I so desperately wanted her to be okay, even while I came to accept the fact I never would be. Hypocrisy doesn’t always come from a bad place, just a confused one.

My efforts normally paid off with Elle though. It would be a stretch to describe her as bubbly and I hate the word vivacious, but her infectious energy was hard to ignore normally. She’d been all of seven when Nora disappeared and, in some ways, I think her youth had shielded her from the worst of it. Sometimes I wonder if it would have been easier—better—if it had happened when we were all younger. Or older. There’s something about seventeen, those soft teenage years when you think you’re made of sterner stuff but are really still filled with cotton wool. It imprinted itself so hard, so firmly into and on to me because I was so malleable, so yielding. At seventeen you think you’re done, fully formed; but really you’ve barely even got started. It was like a handprint in wet concrete pushed in at just the right moment and then made permanent.

“You talking about Jenna Fairfax?” Leo asked, and Elle nodded.

“How do you know Jenna?” I asked.

“I’ve been coaching the hockey team for a while now. Me and Bright. Fairfax is one of our best players. On the girls’ team, I mean.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Of course.”

“Elle’s getting pretty good too these days. Most elegant player on the ice what with all that figure skating,” Leo said.

Elle’s face seemed to pale even further, and her lips pulled back in a grimace as if she was about to speak before she stopped herself.

“Elle, you OK?” I asked.

“Actually I’m feeling a little sick. I might go upstairs and lie down.”

“Okay,” I said, watching as she placed her glass of water on the coffee table and pushed through the crowd to the staircase.

“She’s taking this pretty hard, huh?” Leo said.

“I don’t know. Maybe she’s really just not feeling well.”

“What about you?”

“You’d think I’d be used to it by now,” I said.

“It’s a rough thing to have to get used to, Mads.”

I shook my head, not disagreeing with him, just trying to shake something loose. To get to the root of what made it all feel so disturbingly empty. “It’s just not getting any easier. Sometimes I wish we’d stop with all the commemorations and memorials. It’s not like any of us have to be reminded, right? It’s like we’re trying to prove something, but what are we proving? Look around, there’s what, sixteen, seventeen people here?” I was talking in a strained rush, my voice low and jagged, and Leo had to step towards me to hear properly. “What good does this do any of us? All I see is us getting older and Nora staying the same.”

Leo’s brow was furrowed as he leaned over me, his hand stretching out to rest warmly on my shoulder; but someone behind me spoke before Leo had a chance to answer.

“You can go home whenever you want, Mads. No one’s keeping you from leaving,” Nate said, his voice stripped of emotion, warmth.

My hands tightened around my mug of coffee which had started to go cold. “That’s not what I meant. I want to be here; I just wish we didn’t have to be.”

“That’s not what I heard.”

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t have been eavesdropping.”

Nate’s jaw clenched as his gaze shifted almost imperceptibly so that he was now staring just to the left of my face.

“All I’m saying is, I wish one goodbye was enough. Or I wish we even got a goodbye. But we don’t even get that luxury, so we have to keep saying goodbye over and over and over again and it just feels less and less real the more that time passes,” I said in a rush.

“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.”