Forget Me Not

Elle comes into the room then, complaining about being hungry, and Nora holds out her arms to her, beckoning her to the couch. She hops up to join us, snuggling up in between us, and Nora starts to feed her marshmallows, daring Elle to keep her mouth open while she attempts to toss them in there. “You excited to meet your baby brother, smelly head?” she asks, and Elle scowls, her face a picture of cartoonish displeasure. She is not excited to meet her younger brother. Nora pulls her onto her lap, squeezing tight and says: “You know I wasn’t excited to meet you either,” which makes Elle turn her head towards her older sister in shock. “Yeah, I thought you were going to ruin everything for me because I loved being the baby and I loved being the center of attention. But then I met you, and you were just the coolest, even though you cried, like, all the time, plus you thought I was awesome, which made me feel awesome, and now you’re my best friend.”

“I thought Maddie was your best friend,” Elle says, looking over at me suspiciously.

“Well, sure. But you’re my other best friend.”

Elle doesn’t look all that convinced, but I smile at her and she slowly takes another marshmallow from the bag and begins to chew thoughtfully on it.

Their parents hadn’t arrived back with Noah until much later, and Katherine had wanted to let Elle stay sleeping, but Nora had crept into her room and woken her. I could still see the look of sleepy awe she had on her face when she gazed down at the baby. I wondered if Elle remembered that day at all; she’d been six, so it was plausible that she did, but I knew that I’d had to fight so hard to remember Nora any other way than being gone that sometimes those memories of her being here felt too far out of reach even for me.

“Have you spoken to Louden yet?” Ange asked, cutting through my memories.

I shook my head. Louden Winters was Nora’s ex and the brother of one of our high school friends, Hale, who hadn’t made it to the memorial but had sent a vast bunch of lilies in her place. We’d all been friends at one point, more than friends really. A group of mismatched friends and siblings who’d grown up together from scraped knees and training wheels right through to tequila shots and heads hanging over the toilet bowl. I’d once been as close to Hale as I was to Ange; but then Louden had been named as a suspect in Nora’s disappearance and for some reason Hale hadn’t taken too well to me accusing him of killing our friend. I’d been trying to ignore Louden’s presence altogether, pretending he wasn’t there, but he was six foot three, taller than most everyone else there and it had been getting harder and harder to ignore the fact that I hadn’t even said hello.

“When did you last see him?” Ange asked.

“A couple of years ago at Christmas I think. At the bar. You were there.”

Ange nodded. “Right, yeah. You really haven’t seen him since?”

“No. Have you?” I asked, unable to keep the trace of suspicion that licked through me then out of my voice.

Ange swallowed a mouthful of coffee and nodded. “Yeah, I was in Chicago for a couple of days last year, remember? I went for a drink with him and Hale.”

I raised my eyebrows, looking between Ange and Louden. “Why?”

Ange shrugged. “Why not?”

I stayed staring at Louden for longer than I meant to, trying to arrange my thoughts in a way that made sense, jigsaw pieces scrambling to find their mate and failing. I knew what I wanted to say: because he might have killed our best friend, and it was almost there, rising higher and higher in my chest until I pushed it down, away, saving it for myself. I wasn’t allowed to say such things anymore.

It had been okay for a while, at least, the wild accusations and rampant theories. Louden’s arrest had come just days after Nora went missing, one of the main suspects, but he’d provided an alibi and been released without charge. It hadn’t stopped my own suspicions of course, and neither had it stalled the small-town gossip, but all these years later there was something childish about those words, an intense naiveté that I wasn’t allowed to indulge in anymore. They were words from another life, another lifetime, the one right after she went missing. Nevertheless, cold sweat pricked at my skin all of a sudden, the airless room stuffy with bodies, my own body still cold from the world outside as Louden turned towards me, feeling my stare, liquid brown eyes catching light. He lifted his chin in my direction and I let out a heavy breath before turning back to Ange.

“What did he have to say for himself?” I asked, my attempt at small talk still managing to sound like an accusation.

“The usual. He’d just started seeing someone, but I don’t know if it stuck.”

“Lucky her.”

“Mads,” Ange said, warning lacing her voice.

“What? All I’m saying is he’s a bad boyfriend, that’s all.”

“That was over ten years ago. People change.”

It was something I wanted to believe, desperately, that people change. And maybe I did believe it, just with certain caveats; that change was glacial, imperceptible, and when it did come it didn’t necessarily mean anyone had changed for the better. It seemed to me as though it was the world that kept changing, often with a loud, deafening crack as life tore itself apart, and we were all left struggling to keep up. Not all of us managed to. I was testament to that; I was still struggling to keep up with the thundercrack that had torn through our lives ten years earlier and led us all there, to that room on a snowy day.

As 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.

CHAPTER THREE

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 for no reason other than when I’d packed to go home I hadn’t been able to think beyond the memorial. Mom had already left for work by the time I made it down to the kitchen, and my dad, who was a retired school principal—my high school principal, in fact—was sat in the breakfast nook drinking coffee. The familiarity of my family home, the sight of Dad reading the newspaper, the muffled light of the kitchen as snow crowded the window pane, crouched over me as it always did when I was back there: Here was my home, a reluctant sanctuary, and yet I did not feel safe. I never did.

“Morning, Mads,” Dad said, glancing up from the paper as I wandered past to help myself to coffee and maybe even a bowl of cereal.

“Morning.”

“When are you heading back?”

“Soon. Ange will be over to pick me up in an hour or so.”

Dad nodded, sipping at his coffee as I leaned back against the kitchen counter and took a long drag from my mug.

“When are you planning to take your car in to get fixed?”

“I can’t afford it,” I said shrugging, “not right now anyway.”

“We can lend you the money.”

“It’s fine, Dad. I just need to save a little money and I’ll get it done.”

“But how will you get around until then?”

“I can just get the bus, it’s not the end of the world.”

Dad looked out the window at the snow and then back at me, an eyebrow raised in skepticism. “You can borrow the Explorer if you want? I don’t use it so much anymore anyway.”

I shook my head. “Dad, if I left you without a car you’d basically be stranded whenever Mom left the house. It’s fine, don’t worry about it.”

“But the bus—”

“Is a perfectly legitimate form of public transportation.”

“Okay, okay, I get it. I’ll back off.”

“Thank you.”

There was a slight pause while Dad weighed out his words and said: “You know your mom and I are always happy to—” his voice trailed off but his words still managed to fill the room, unspoken yet heard loud and clear.

I’d lost count of the number of times we’d had this conversation. It wasn’t always that exact conversation, of course; it wasn’t always about my broken-down, practically worthless VW. Sometimes it was about rent or my meds, occasionally about the cost of therapy and health insurance. It was always there, the helping hand, perennially extended out towards me along with the tendrils of guilt that inevitably accompanied it whenever I took it. But guilt pounded its way through my life, relentless and as all-encompassing as rain in a summer storm, regardless of whether I accepted the help that was offered me.

“I know, Dad.” I said at last.

“Okay, I just thought it needed to be said. Because you’ve been doing really well recently, but if you need a little help with money, then that’s okay. And I know yesterday must have been hard for you, not to mention today, but we just want you to stay on the right track.” He said it all in a slight rush, even though he normally spoke slowly, thoughtfully. He’d obviously worked up to this a bit, not wanting to spook me, as if I was a highly strung racehorse. I wondered if he and Mom had discussed it before she left for work that morning, or maybe even the previous night when I stumbled in through the front door, a little worse for wear.

I thought about every bitten back word I’d never spoken to my parents, and every catapult line I’d thrown out at them and wished I’d pulled back on. It had been a long ten years, and I couldn’t help feeling that I’d made it even longer. The guilt I felt over losing Nora had seeped out, into, and over everything, and eventually evolved into a guilt about feeling guilty; hell, it might even have been guilt over having any feelings at all. There’s no manual for grief, and there certainly isn’t one for being someone a missing person leaves behind; but however you were meant to act in the face of the impossible, I was pretty sure that I’d failed. Everything I did was filtered through that failure, grimy with that guilt, and as much as I hated asking for help, I seemed to be in need of it, all the time. I wanted, desperately, to get to a place where that helping hand didn’t immediately feel like a punch to the gut, but I had no idea how to get there, no idea if I ever would.

I nodded, staring into my coffee cup. I could feel the grief building in me. The small round rock of loss that lived somewhere around my abdomen and rose through my stomach and lungs, and up through my esophagus until it stayed somewhere right at the back of my throat, threatening tears and an inability to breathe. Sometimes it rose even further and lived for days inside my head, growing moss, clouding my thoughts and vision. Those were the days my limbs felt too heavy to get out of bed. Those were the days that had taught me that sometimes it was easier to say nothing at all. I had to be careful here, to maneuver myself around all the ways I might trip up, or fall down, or however you want to put it, because if I didn’t, if I didn’t look for the signs and pay attention, that rock would get bigger and bigger and heavier and heavier and I wouldn’t make it out of the house, let alone back to Madison.

“You want me to make you breakfast?” Dad added gently once it became obvious I didn’t have it in me to reply.

I shook my head again, this time a little more forcefully and said: “I’ll just have cereal.”

I was sitting in the breakfast nook eating my cereal when Ange called me again.

“Hey, I’m just finishing up my breakfast,” I said on picking up, assuming she was parked outside somewhere waiting for me to come out, “you want to come inside and wait for me here?”

“Maddie,” she said, her voice a breathless straight line.

“Yeah?” I said, suddenly sitting up a little straighter. There was something about the shape of her voice that instantly shook me, old memories rattling around in my ribcage making my heartbeat pick up.

“I … I—”

“Ange, what’s going on? What’s happened? Are you okay?” My voice was snappy and sharp, but I couldn’t help it, I knew where conversations like that went and my fear translated to frustration all too easily.

“I was just driving through town to come get you and all these police cars passed me.”

There was no way I could have possibly known, so of course I thought of Nora, blindly following my memory back, racing those cop cars as fast as they could go to a morning so vivid it could have happened yesterday.

***

I wake up slowly, one side of my face still smashed into the cool blue of my pillow case. When my eyes open the room is an even, cold grey. Ange is already up, the bed empty and the curtains opened halfway, not that it’s made much difference. Outside the world is one single color. White.

I reach for my phone, checking to see if there are any calls or texts from Nora, but there aren’t any. There’s one from Nate but I don’t read it, not yet anyway. I can smell hot butter and coffee, and I pull on my bathrobe and slippers before heading downstairs to the kitchen. Cordy is sat in the breakfast nook, her back to the window, feet on the bench and knees pulled to her chest while she texts someone feverishly and almost completely ignores me as I walk into the room. Instead of my mom at the stove, Ange hovers over the skillet, spatula in her right hand, waiting to turn the French toast over. She’s still dressed in her pajamas, one of my hoodies pulled over her T-shirt to keep her warm. Mom walks in through the garage door, waving a bottle of maple syrup triumphantly in one hand.

“I knew we had more somewhere,” she says, closing the door behind her, “disaster averted.”

“Since when do we put guests to work?” I ask, waving my hand towards Ange, and then staring pointedly at my sisters.

“Ange isn’t a guest, honey,” Mom says, squeezing Ange to her side, and kissing her on the side of her head, “she’s family.”

“Yeah, she’s family. And family makes family breakfast,” Cordy says.

“You’re all disgusting. And Ange, I apologize.”

Ange laughs and flips over four slices of bread in the huge cast iron pan, one by one.

“Have you heard from Nora?” I say to her, helping myself to a cup of coffee from the machine.

She shakes her head. “No, nothing. Have you?”

“Not since before I left work last night. You think we should be worried?”

“I dunno. It’s not like her, but maybe she went up to the lake house and forgot to take her charger or something?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

Just then I hear the sound of the front door opening, and my dad’s low chatter as he welcomes whoever it is that’s just appeared. They walk into the kitchen together, Dad hanging back in the doorway as Bright enters the room. He’s running the rim of his hat through his fingers as Mom smiles at him.

“Michael, what are you doing here? You know Serena’s back in Chicago, right?”

Bright nods his head but doesn’t answer my mom, instead looking from me to Ange who’s still studying the progress of her French toast.

“Maddie, Angela, have either of you heard from Nora today?”

We look at one another, Ange’s face suddenly slack, and I shake my head at Bright. “No, we were just talking about her. Neither of us have heard from her since last night. Why?”

“When last night?” Bright asks.

“Um, she left a voicemail on my phone.” I pull out my phone from the pocket of my bathrobe and head to recent calls. “At about 7:30. 7:27 to be exact.”

“What’s this about, Bright?” Ange asks.

“Nora took her dad’s car last night, and it was found earlier this morning, unlocked, keys in the ignition, just off Old Highway 51.”

“Yeah, so?” I ask. “Where’s Nora?”

“We don’t know.”

I could feel the same grip of panic and loss that had folded and tightened itself around me ten years before when I said to Ange: “Where were the police cars going?”

“They were headed towards the old highway, so I turned round and followed them because—” Because that was where Nora’s car had been found, and Ange was a reporter and certain habits are hard to break.

“Are you there now? What’s going on? Is it Nora?”

“Mads, it’s not Nora. It’s not Nora, but there’s a body and I think … I think it’s Noelle.”

All the air I had in my body was pulled out of me and replaced with lead, or granite, or concrete, or something heavy and immovable that dragged me down, down, down. My vision swam, images of Elle rising to the surface. She’d looked so young at the memorial and yet so weary, the weight of the world crowding her shoulders. How could this be happening again? A little over a week earlier I’d met her at CJ’s, treating her to a hot chocolate which had always been her favorite. She’d been filled with a razor-edge energy, cracking jokes and telling me stories about her girlfriend, Jenna, but then something had shifted in her and she’d started asking me questions about Nora. I’d put it down to the anniversary coming up so soon and had been happy to answer them. Normally when anyone talked about Nora I clenched up, went into lockdown, but it was different with Elle. I didn’t have to guess what her motives were when she brought Nora up, unlike with so many other people who just wanted to indulge in their morbid curiosity, to gossip about a missing girl as though she were a celebrity spiraling out of control.

I closed my eyes and tried to keep that picture of her in my mind: sitting in a booth at CJ’s, skimming the edge of her mug with her forefinger so that a pile of whipped cream and mini marshmallows appeared there before she stuck it in her mouth, while I groaned in faux disapproval and she grinned wickedly at me. I wanted to hold it there forever, but I knew how quickly that memory, that moment, would be eroded, degraded, twisted and turned into something else. I knew how quickly she’d go from Elle—the girl I’d helped teach how to ice skate and rollerblade and who’d hated to lose at Scrabble but still tried her best to win every time—to yet another person I’d be forced to mourn.

I was struggling to keep my head above the water when Ange said: “Mads, are you there?”

“Yeah,” I gasped. “I’m here.”

She talked me through what she was looking at: two cop cars and an ambulance. She recognized most everyone at the scene, including Bright and Leo and Leo’s father, Chief Moody. She knew better than to ask me if I was okay, and I knew better than to ask her. She spoke slowly, taking her time, but each word was weighed, freighted down and heavy. She’d spent a couple of years on the crime desk of a Milwaukee paper when she first graduated, but had since moved to the news desk, where if a grisly or interesting crime came up, it was invariably scooped up by one of her colleagues still working on crime. Every time she’d had to cover the death or murder of a woman or girl she saw Nora was all she had said to me at the time; it was all she needed to say. But she was clearly trying to pick up the pieces of her training there, still a reporter at heart, even as she tried to make sense of something that would never make any sense.

“And you’re sure it’s Elle?” I asked eventually, my voice small and young-sounding in the enveloping warmth of my parents’ kitchen.

“I don’t know for sure obviously, but I overheard the cops talking. They all know her, Mads, they know what she looks like. It must be her.”

I nodded, even though she couldn’t see. There wasn’t a single officer on our police force who wouldn’t know who Noelle Altman was.

“I have to go, Leo’s coming over. I think he’s going to ask me to leave.”

“Okay,” I said.

There was a small beat and then, “Should I still come over?”

“Yes,” I said, even though both of us knew we wouldn’t be leaving Forest View anytime soon.

I sat there for a long time, the morning seeping away from me until Ange arrived and told me what had happened after we’d hung up. Leo had been very proper, apparently. Refused to give her any details, saying they couldn’t confirm anything until the forensics team arrived from Wausau. When she’d asked him if it was really Elle, he’d glanced back towards the body—the body—and said he couldn’t say, but she said she knew.

I was having trouble getting to grips with what she was saying though, and although I could barely trust myself to speak, I said: “You’re sure? You’re really sure it’s Elle?”

Ange took a deep breath and seemed to steady herself. “I can’t be 100 per cent sure, but I heard them say her name. Why would they do that if it wasn’t Elle?”

I didn’t have an answer for her but my mind was a storm of other possibilities, other reasons, any other reason but that one which was so impossible I just couldn’t contemplate it. After everything that had happened, after ten years of missing Nora, of Nora being missing, how could it possibly be happening again? As we sat there I felt the past ten years diminish, shrink down to nothing so that we could have been seventeen again, Ange and I, stood in this very same room, as Bright explained to us that Nora was missing and we had to tell him anything and everything—every last detail—of the last time we’d seen or spoken to her, because every little thing mattered now. I thought about Elle’s pale face the day before, her quiet voice. She’d looked sick, or sickened by something, and I hated myself for not having pushed her more, dug deeper, delved further and figured out what—beyond the obvious—was wrong. And I realized then that I’d already accepted it, that I was already thinking of her in the past tense, and the steady pounding of guilt and grief began to build and build until it filled up the whole room.