I stood there, just waiting for the day to end, waiting for that heavy, empty feeling to lessen just slightly, even though I knew it wouldn’t, that it probably never would, I couldn’t possibly have known that another crack was coming, waiting to tear us all apart yet again. That less than twenty-four hours later, Noelle would be dead, and I would be left once again, breathless, desperate, trying to make sense of a world that seemed determined to leave me behind, too broken and battered to even try and catch up.
I woke the next morning to the same shattering glass and a feeling in my chest like I couldn’t breathe, the same way I’d woken up the day before, the same way I’d been waking up for the past ten years. The weight of the memorial the day before still hadn’t lifted on top of which I had a slight hangover. I wished it felt different, I wished I felt different, but whatever I did, whatever I tried, nothing ever seemed to change. Or maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough; there were definitely people out there who would prescribe to that theory. As if she knew I was thinking of her, my phone began to buzz insistently on my bedside table, the illuminated screen telling me Serena was calling.
“Hey,” I said, pushing myself to sit up in bed as I spoke.
“Hey,” she said, her voice sounding a little breathless down the line. She was on her way to work. “How are you? How did yesterday go? Are you doing okay?” The questions came short and sharp; rat-a-tat-tat, like incredibly efficient gunfire.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to keep my voice steady. “It was fine, I guess. It was … the same as it ever is. Hard. Cold. Strange.”
“I can’t believe it’s been ten years, Mads. It’s insane. I really wish I could have been there for you. For Nora too.” Serena had modulated her voice, gentle, gentle, but there was wind whipping around her as she walked down the street, traffic noise practically drowning her out, so I had to strain to hear her.
“I know, it’s fine. It was all fine. Ange was there, we stuck together.”
“Mom said you guys went out for a drink after?”
I rolled my eyes up towards the ceiling. My mom and sister sharing notes about me wasn’t breaking news however, so I let it slide.
“Was Nate there?” Serena continued.
“At the memorial, yeah; he didn’t come for a drink.”
There was a little beat, the briefest of pauses before: “How was he? How was that?”
I held my breath before answering, one, two, three, four, before remembering that what you were actually meant to do was count to ten while breathing to calm yourself down, not cut off the supply of oxygen for ten seconds. When I finally let the breath out, the sigh that emanated from me seemed to fill my entire bedroom.
“It was about as awkward as I thought it would be,” I said at last, “actually, you know what, it was worse than I thought it would be. He seems to actively dislike me now. I don’t know what it is I’m meant to have done, but there it is.”
Serena made a sound I had a little difficulty translating and then said: “He needs to get over himself. You’d think after everything that’s happened he could at least be nice to you.”
“It was the tenth anniversary of his sister going missing, Serena. I think we could cut him some slack,” I said, allowing Nate more sympathy than I’d given him the day before, always on the defensive when it came to him.
“Yeah, and it was the tenth anniversary of your best friend going missing! He could cut you some slack.”
I couldn’t argue with her there and she soon arrived at her L stop, so we hung up, Serena promising to call me later, and getting me to promise to call our younger sister, Cordy, even though we both knew I wouldn’t. The room felt colder, and I felt older the moment her voice left it. As I started to think about what the day actually meant—about Nora having been gone for ten years, about ten years of limbo, living in purgatory, not knowing where she was or whether she was alive—I also felt the old familiar weight begin to grow. It started in my chest, always, a boulder I couldn’t budge, a wall I couldn’t climb over or knock down. Trying to ignore it, and my phone still in my hand, I did what I did most mornings and began trawling through Instagram, anaesthetizing myself with photos of coffee, home décor tips and puppies. Should I have been doing something more profound on the morning of the official anniversary of my best friend going missing? Maybe.
It wasn’t enough though, not nearly a big enough distraction, and so I started to wonder what Nora’s family were doing, whether they would mark the day in some way, or if they felt the day before had been enough. There was no grave to visit, not for Nora. Without a body Nora had never been buried but she still left her mark. She was their mark and she was my mark. Maybe we all have them, I don’t know. Maybe I just got mine a little earlier in life than usual. But she was. She was my mark. Indelible. Permanent. Ineradicable. In some ways I was thankful for the constancy of it; I knew she’d never be fully gone as long as I was still here. Maybe that was why the pane of glass I dreamt of every night and could feel slipping from my hands almost every morning kept haunting me; because, in some ways, I didn’t want to wake up to anything else because the moment I did I’d know she was truly gone.
So, I lay in bed and imagined the Altmans slowly waking up, getting dressed and gathering for breakfast. I could see them walking down the staircase that was still gazed down upon by dozens of photos of Nora; I could see them settling down at the large table in the kitchen, coffee smells trailing through the house, snow falling outside the window just as it was falling outside mine. More likely, Noelle and Noah were getting themselves ready for school while Nate packed up to head home to Texas. Jonathan had probably already left for work, and Katherine would still be in bed, staring as blankly up at her ceiling as I had when I first woke up.
I couldn’t have known that Noelle wasn’t there, that Nate was the first to realize, that he tapped gently at his mother’s bedroom door, had to shake her to get her attention and ask where his younger sister was. That when he rang Elle’s phone it went straight to voicemail and a bubble of panic began to build somewhere near his duodenum, and Noah looked on, his wide brown eyes taking everything in. That Nate rang his dad next who was on his way to his law practice in Madison, where he spent most of the week, and that Jonathan couldn’t pick up because he hadn’t set up his hands free that morning because he didn’t want to speak to anyone that day at least not yet. That eventually Nate rang Elle’s girlfriend, Jenna, who said she hadn’t seen her since Saturday, and then finally he rang his buddy, Leo, who was already at the scene and suddenly that bubble of panic popped except it turned into a tidal wave rather than disappearing into air and he had to struggle to keep up with what Leo was saying because it couldn’t possibly be true.
It might have been around that time that my own phone rang again, Ange’s name popping up on my screen. She told me she’d be over to pick me up in an hour to take me back to Madison, and I pushed my covers off, body aching, limbs too heavy, preparing myself for a shower.
I suddenly couldn’t wait to get back to Madison, not because there was anything waiting for me there, but because waking up in that house, in the exact same spot I’d woken up ten years before, only to hear the news that Nora was missing, had too much poetic symmetry for me to handle at any one moment. My teenage bedroom rang with her memory, every inch of that room simply sang with her presence, low and clear, piercing; there was nowhere I could look that didn’t bear some trace of her. Perhaps I should have relished that. Especially on that morning. But really all I wanted was to get away from it all. I didn’t need to have the memory of Nora screaming at me from every wall and every corner to remember her any better, to miss her anymore than I already did. I wanted to hide somewhere deep and dark where Nora had never been, and do my very best to leapfrog over that day. But that was never going to be a possibility. Not that day.
I showered and dressed in the same clothes I’d been wearing the day before