Winter Flower

by Charles Sheehan-Miles

  My stomach twisted at the sight.

  The doorbell rang. I stayed in my seat, no longer paying attention to the computer. I was listening. Footsteps, as my mom walked across the hardwood floor to the front door. Muffled voices. Mom and Dad’s voices were recognizable, but I couldn’t tell what they were saying. A third voice, low-pitched and gravelly.

  I slipped out of my seat and tiptoed to my bedroom door and opened it. From there I could hear better.

  My mother was speaking. “… not since last night. We went to bed around ten. She was watching TV in her room.”

  The deep voice again. A detective? “When did you realize she wasn’t home?”

  A slight pause. My mom’s voice, a little muffled. I had trouble understanding the first few words. “… to get ready for church. Her bed was made, and she wasn’t in her room. That’s when I checked and saw that her car was gone.”

  More muffled voices. This was frustrating. Screw it. Brenna was my sister. I had a right to be part of this. I intended to sneak close to the dining room where the voices were coming from, but as soon as I got downstairs one of the uniformed officers saw me. No sneaking around then. I walked into the dining room.

  Mom and Dad were sitting at the dining table next to each other. Lately they didn’t get near each other, but right now their hands were clasped.

  The dining room was usually unoccupied unless Mom and Dad were hosting dinner with guests. In the center of the room stood a polished near-black table that seated twelve. An ugly oil painting covered half the wall, depicting a bare-breasted woman crawling across a wheat field. Brenna called the painting Christina’s Boob, because it looked like a bad copy of another painting, Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth. I always thought the painting was terrible, but I’m no painter, so who was I to judge?

  Two chandeliers could light the room up like a stage, but not that day. Dim recessed lights highlighted the painting and gave the whole room a creepy feel.

  Across from Mom and Dad was a bulky African American man in a dark grey suit. In his right hand he held a small notebook, and in his left, a pen. He looked directly at me when I walked into the room. “Hello. I’m Detective Hunt. You must be Sam.”

  I nodded and sat down at the table without asking permission.

  Dad spoke immediately. “Sam, I think you should wait upstairs—”

  Detective Hunt interrupted. “Actually, I’d like to ask Sam some questions if that’s all right, Mr. Roberts.”

  Dad nodded. “Of course.”

  Hunt turned his attention to me. He was in his forties, with close-cropped hair that showed signs of grey. His skin was dark brown, his eyebrows fierce and unkempt. “Sam, can you tell me when you last saw Brenna?”

  I thought for a second. I could see her lying on her stomach on the bed, fingers tapping away on the keyboard of her computer. “About eleven o’clock last night. She was lying on her bed with the door open, typing on her laptop.”

  His eyebrows raised. “She has her own laptop? In her room?”

  I nodded.

  “Did she say anything to you when you saw her?”

  “No. Wait … yes. She said good night.”

  “Does she normally say that?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Almost always.”

  He wrote in his notebook. How could that be relevant? Why was he sitting here instead of looking for her? After he finished writing, he looked up from his notebook and looked right through me. I felt guilty, and I had no reason to feel that way. “Are you and Brenna close?”

  Mom leaned forward. “They’re very close.”

  Hunt’s eyes darted to her then back to me. “Yes?” he prompted.

  “Yes,” I said. “She’s my big sister. Of course we’re close.”

  “Okay. You know her boyfriend?” He consulted his notebook before speaking again. “Chase Morton. You know him?”

  My eyebrows pulled together. I was sure he knew Chase’s name without having to look it up in his notes. Checking the notebook was for show. “Yes, I’ve met him.”

  Dad frowned. “Are you going to arrest Chase or not?”

  “It’s a little early to be arresting anyone. We don’t even know if she’s actually missing yet. Is it possible she stayed at a friend’s and overslept?”

  Mom shook her head. “She always asks if she’s going somewhere.”

  “Always except this time,” Hunt replied.

  Mom and Dad met each other’s eyes. I couldn’t tell what they were communicating with each other.

  “She’s not an idiot,” I said.

  “Look, we want to find her just as badly as you do. But I need everything I can that might lead to her, all right? Is this Chase guy on the up-and-up?”

  Mom shook her head. “I don’t know … I thought so. We’ve given her a lot of rules, because I don’t like that she’s dating someone older than her.”

  “Is it possible she ran away? Has she said anything like that?”

  “No, of course not!” Mom said.

  “Sam? What about you? Did she say anything to you?” His eyes bored into me.

  What are you going to do when I’m gone? Don’t you think it’s time you learned to stand up for yourself a little? I could still hear the words from her mouth. “I … she did say…” I trailed off. She couldn’t have run away. Could she?

  Mom sat forward, suddenly fierce. “Did she say something to you, Sam? This is serious! What was it?”

  I stammered the next few words. “I … she … she said … she asked me what I would do when she was gone. Jake had jumped me again at school, and she stopped him. She asked when I was going to start taking care of myself!”

  Hunt looked up at one of the other officers. Then back to me. “Sam, it’s important you tell me the exact words she used. What did she say?”

  I looked down at the table. Then I said the words in a near whisper. “She said, ‘What are you going to do when I’m gone?’”

  Hunt’s response was quiet. “Okay. Thank you, Sam.” He sighed. “For the time being, we’re going to treat this as a runaway situation.”

  “WHAT?” Mom screeched. “What does that mean? You’re not going to take it seriously?”

  “Mrs. Roberts, we take runaway girls seriously. It’s a dangerous world out there. Our procedures are a little different, but that doesn’t mean we won’t do our best. Do you have a current picture of her?”

  Mom turned to Dad and collapsed against him. “We have her school picture,” he said.

  “That doesn’t look anything like her,” I said. “Use her Facebook picture. She just took that a couple days ago.”

  Hunt gave me an appreciative look. “Good thinking, Sam. Speaking of Facebook … we need to examine her computer. Do you have her passwords?”

  Mom stood, and the rest of us followed suit. “It’s in her room.”

  Cole

  The morning Brenna disappeared may have been the longest morning of my life. In retrospect, it’s difficult for me to forgive my initial attitude. When Erin was charging around the house panicking about Brenna not being home, I didn’t take it seriously. I mean, I took it seriously in the context of being irritated that my kid had been disobedient. But at that point it never crossed my mind that something had happened to her. I believed that she’d come stumbling back into the house, hung over or still stoned, careless of how her disappearing act had affected the rest of her family.

  The week before, I’d been in California for meetings with the IT department of another company we’d acquired. System by system, we were assessing what to keep, what to merge with our own systems, and what to discard. Human resources and some of the other support functions would be eliminated and transferred to the parent company, and it likely made sense to close their data center in California and move everything to our data center in Herndon, Virginia. The discussions were tense. Everyone I met with was worried about losing their jobs, and with good reason.

  On the flight home that Wednesday night, I’d written up
my plan for the merger and emailed it to my boss. I caught a cab from Dulles, and on the way home, I read an email from my best friend, Jeremiah. He and his wife had just paid off the mortgage on their house in Atlanta, twenty years early. Amazing. Our new place was so expensive that we’d never have it paid off.

  There had been a time when Erin would have driven out to the airport with the kids to pick me up, but those days had passed. I hadn’t known if it was my fault or hers, but the bottom line was, sometime after we’d bought that mausoleum in Fairfax, we’d grown more and more distant. Was it the travel, or the stress she felt dealing with the kids, or just that there was so much room in that house you could get lost in it? Things got worse and worse, and I didn’t think she would ever forgive me for Teagan.

  I can’t say I blamed her.

  When I got home that night, Erin was curled up in front of the television. She gave me a smile, which was rare enough to be remarkable, and I collapsed on the couch next to her.

  “How was the trip?” she asked.

  “Good. Though I’m getting a lot of resistance from the folks there. What’s been going on here?”

  “Oh, not much. I had lunch with Angela yesterday.”

  My favorite person in the world. I didn’t voice the thought. Instead, I just said, “How did that go?”

  “Okay. She just got back from Europe. We were just catching up.” Her voice sounded sad, and I felt a twinge of guilt. Erin and Angela had once been inseparable, and I was part of the wedge that had introduced so much distance between them.

  “Also, Brenna brought home a D on her science test Wednesday. Can you talk to her about that this weekend? She doesn’t listen to a thing I say.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, “though I don’t know that she’ll listen to me any more than you.”

  “I’m worried about her, Cole.”

  I nodded. “I am too. Especially with that asshole she’s dating.”

  “I don’t know. He’s not as bad as I thought at first.” Her voice trailed off, as if she wasn’t sure she agreed with herself.

  “He’s too old for her.”

  “True. She’s still young. And she thinks she knows everything.”

  “I’ll talk to her about it, I promise. But let’s get through her birthday, and I’ll catch her Sunday evening. Okay?”

  I didn’t get a chance, because on Sunday Brenna was nowhere to be found.

  My calm leaked away a little when Erin spoke with Chase on the phone. My composure fell apart when Sam informed us that Brenna had talked about going away.

  Where was she thinking of going? It had to be with Chase … it’s not like she could support herself or feed herself. As soon as Sam said those words, I knew what it was. Brenna had planned to run off with Chase. Maybe they were planning to sneak off and pretend she was eighteen and try to get married? Go to Mexico together? Or just someplace where the age of consent was ridiculously low?

  The first person to talk to was Chase. So why were the cops still sitting around my house?

  I leaned forward, unintentionally brushing Erin aside. “I’m going to ask you again, Detective—when are you going to arrest Chase? He’s behind this and you know it.”

  Detective Hunt stood up and frowned. “Questioning Mr. Morton will be our next stop, Mr. Roberts. In the meantime, I want you to stay here with your phone lines open. If she’s a runaway, the odds are she’ll change her mind within the next few hours. You need to be able to take her call when it comes.” I stood too.

  Detective Hunt had not made a good impression on me. Disheveled, his suit cheap, his beard unevenly trimmed. Typical government employee, I thought.

  He gave instructions to two of the officers, then said, “I’ll return as soon as I learn anything, Mr. and Mrs. Roberts. Please try to stay calm.”

  Hunt left, followed by the officers. As soon as they got out the door, Erin turned on Sam. “Sam! Why didn’t you tell me Brenna said that about going away? Are you keeping her secrets? Why didn’t you tell me?” Her voice sounded strained, high-pitched like wind blowing through reeds.

  Sam recoiled. Shock spread across his still-childlike features. “I didn’t know … I didn’t—” With that, he sobbed and buried his face in his hands.

  “Erin,” I said. “It’s not Sam’s fault.”

  Erin turned on me. “No, damn it! It’s your fault. She wasn’t running around with twenty-year-olds before you screwed up our family. She wasn’t getting in trouble in school before then. She wasn’t—”

  “Stop!” Sam cried out, tears running down his cheeks. “Why do you think she always wanted to be out of the house? Because you two never stop fighting!”

  Sam stormed off to his room, slamming the door loud enough we could hear it all the way at the front entrance.

  “I can’t talk to you right now,” Erin said, then stormed off herself.

  I had staggered back to my office, sinking into my desk chair and staring out the window. The need to do something was overpowering. I needed to search for her. But where? I had no idea who most of her friends were these days. I could ask Marion. But first I needed to make a difficult call. I picked up the phone and dialed my parents.

  Four: Dreams

  Sam

  The message popped up on my phone at 7:54 p.m.

  Hayley: Hey.

  I texted her right back: Hey. What’s up?

  Hayley: Nothing u?

  Me: Homework. Bored.

  Hayley: Still going to library tomorrow?

  Me: Yeah.

  Hayley: Okay. cya ttyl

  I slid off the bed and to my door to double-check the lock. Dinner had been difficult. How was school? What did you learn? Did you make any friends?

  Boring. Nothing. No. Those were the answers I wanted to give them, but that would only provoke a lot more questions. So I answered, “Great,” and told them a story about precalc that was basically made up, and I told them about Hayley.

  Mom and Dad zeroed in on that quick—especially Dad, who was always pressuring me to chase girls—but I brushed them off successfully then retreated to my room after dinner.

  At least they were talking to each other for a change, and Mom seemed somewhat sober.

  I checked the time. Almost eight. I slipped into the chair at my desk, double-clicked on the Second Life icon, and typed my login information.

  Moments later, the progress bar completed and the world began to fill in.

  First, my avatar appeared.

  She was tall, but not too much so, with long red hair braided into a French braid. She wore a vaguely steampunk outfit: knee-high boots, a tattered skirt, a ruffled rose-colored blouse, and a black coat. A pistol was holstered at her left side and a sword on the right. Above her, the name Tamara Goldwyn floated in the air. Underneath my name was the legend Brigade Sergeant.

  After my avatar was clear, the surroundings began to fill in, starting with the walls of the apartment I rented above a shop in Erie South. I still had a ton of money left over in Second Life … almost one hundred real dollars. But I had no way to convert it back into real currency. So instead of getting the meds I needed, I wasted it here. Not that one hundred dollars would pay for the pills for more than a couple of months.

  A loud beep announced an incoming message. Lilya Marjeta was the captain of the Brigade, the faction I was a member of. She lived in the Netherlands and was often online several hours ahead of me. I opened her message.

  Lilya: Tamara, are you on long? Can u come to the hq?

  Tamara: On my way.

  I clicked on the door to the apartment and it slid to the side, then I made my way down the dark hallway and stairs to the front of the building. My heads-up display only showed a few dots. Probably not friendly: half a dozen different factions with competing and shifting loyalties dominated Erie Isle, and the Brigade was often a minority amongst those factions.

  Across the street was the canal, which cut through the island out to the ocean to the south. In that direction were mostly privat
e residences owned by different people who supported the sim. To the north, was the main sim, Erie Main. There I would find the Brigade headquarters and my closest friends in the world.

  Crazy, right? That my closest friends in the world didn’t even exist? Or they did, but I didn’t know their names, or where most of them lived, or anything at all except what went on in our world here.

  I didn’t care. In real life I was Sam: depressed, outcast, freak. But in this world I was a leader. I had friends and people I cared about. Sure, it was a game. Sure, it wasn’t real. But maybe that didn’t matter. Maybe it was more real than stupid Ashley and her asshole boyfriend Cody. More fun than my high school and my parents. More accepting than my slightly racist and semi-homophobic grandparents.

  So I walked, carefully avoiding the dangers in the darkness of my virtual world.

  A knock on my door jarred me back to the real world. I minimized the game, my heart suddenly thumping, and opened a Word document with my English report on it. Then I got up and walked to the door and opened it.

  Dad stood at the door. His hair was chaotic and his eyes were sunken with deep exhaustion. The uniform he wore, blue polyester with the words Waffle House embroidered on the sleeve, looked like it was soaked. Dad had gone back to the restaurant after dinner … something must have gone wrong.

  I stared at him but didn’t say anything.

  “Sam…”

  He didn’t sound sure of anything as he said my name.

  Hesitantly. “Yeah?”

  He looked at me for a second like there was something complicated he wanted to say. Then, it seemed like he sagged in exhaustion. “Just wanted to say good night.”

  “Good night, Dad.”

  He half smiled then staggered down the short hallway toward their room. Dad’s room, really … it’s like they thought I was stupid. That I didn’t noticed they never slept in the same bed anymore … that Mom was always on the couch.

  Hoping to prevent any more interruptions, I called in the other direction, “Good night, Mom.”

  “Night, honey…” It sounded like she was watching the ten-thousandth rerun of Law & Order. Her words were slurred, yet another bottle of wine on its way into the recycling. They always talked about how broke we were, but a bottle of wine a day can’t be cheap.