by Kate Anders
I’m ashamed to admit I don’t really know where to go from here. My first instinct is to ask Clara what she thinks we should do next. Doesn’t really work in this situation.
Being in this room is somehow suffocating, even though it is the emptiest room in the apartment. I quickly move back toward the living room, making a dive for my phone, which has wedged itself between two couch cushions.
I click on Clara’s name again and pray for a ringing.
My prayers are unanswered. Straight to voice mail.
A million thoughts run through my head. Do I call the police? What would I say? Maybe I should retrace her steps this morning. Or maybe I can find a number for one of the people in her class and see if she was there this morning. Was I the last person who saw her?
There’s no way she could have just left because of me, right? It’s not like we had issues, or that she was planning on moving out and just neglected to tell me, right? She literally just told me yesterday that she would be at the apartment on Thursday for when the maintenance guy comes to do a check on the heater. Clara’s also the first one to call me on my shit. The first one to tell me when I am being irrational or silly, or on rare occasions that I’ve been mean or rude. She wouldn’t just leave. At least not without telling me.
Besides, this isn’t just leaving or not coming home one night from a frat party, this is a straight up pack everything I own and find a new place to live kind of thing. Doesn’t seem right to me. Nothing about this seems right to me.
Since I can’t figure out what my next step should be, I decide the best option would be to think like Clara. If Clara came home one day and I wasn’t there, I basically moved out in the span of just a few short hours, and my phone was going straight to voice mail. What would she do?
Clara has always been the logical one of the two of us.
First things first, Find My Friends. We linked our iPhones through the app, I should be able to find her last location on the map. I pull up the app and wait for the spinning circle to show me where she was last located.
It’s from this morning, in the apartment. It’s almost two o’clock now, so the last time she registered on the app was almost six hours ago. A lot can happen in six hours.
“What’s next,” I mutter. “Come on, Clara, tell me what to do.”
I glance over at her desk, still wishing I would see her sitting there working on yet another mathematical application.
I still maintain Clara would never just up and leave, certainly not without telling me first.
“A note.” She had to have left a note, right? That’s the only thing that makes any sense. I run as fast as I can into the galley kitchen to where we have a message board on the wall where we leave notes for each other.
Rapidly I check to see if there is anything new. Sadly, the only thing I see on there from Clara is a note where she wrote the lyrics to “Be Optimistic” from Shirley Temple. She used to sing it to me whenever I was down in the dumps, and after one particularly bad encounter with Chanel, she left the lyrics up on the board to cheer me up.
I reach up to take it off the board, but I can’t bring myself to touch it. No, it stays where it is.
Defeated, I move back to the couch and look down at my phone. Maybe another listen to the voice mail wouldn’t hurt, maybe I’ll hear something I missed when I wasn’t surrounded by the noise of a food place.
As I run through the voice mail for a second listen, it’s not the words I am listening to. It’s the space in between. The long pauses she left along the way. It’s quiet wherever she is. I don’t hear any voices in the background, no ambient music piping through the speakers of a coffee shop. Just quiet. I can hear her breathing, it’s a little bit labored, but it sounds like she has been crying, so it makes sense that her breathing pattern would be a little bit heightened.
It’s not until the end of the voice mail that I notice something. She didn’t hang up the phone call until long after she finished speaking, and I almost started to reply to the message before I heard something quiet in the background, it sounded like a voice.
A man’s voice maybe. I don’t know, it’s too far away to tell.
I replay the whole message again from the beginning, hoping I get something more on this third pass-through.
Definitely a man, one word. I think he says, “done.” But that’s it, that’s all I hear. He’s so far away from the mic on the phone that I can’t even make out anything special about the voice, like if it is one that I would recognize.
She wasn’t alone. That’s something, at least. Not that I know who she was with. Honestly, the only guys she really ever talked to were the guys in her classes, they sometimes had study groups, but she never really socialized with them outside of that context.
Either way, I think my best move from here is a mass text, anyone who knows Clara whose phone number I have in my phone I am going to send a message to.
“Has anyone seen Clara? She was supposed to meet me for lunch and didn’t show up, and now I can’t seem to find her. She’s never late to anything, as you guys all know, so I just wanted to see if anyone has seen her just to make sure nothing happened. Let me know ASAP. Thanks xx, Kenz,” I whisper the words as my fingers fly across the keyboard, typing in my desperate attempt to find answers without sounding like a lunatic.
It takes a few minutes but the answers start to come in. All variations on the same theme.
No Clara.
Hours have passed by and while I have spent more time on my phone than I have in the last week, I am still no closer to figuring out what is going on. I’m beginning to think I am out of options when it comes to sitting at home and figuring this out from my couch.
Pretending that Clara actually decided to up and move out of the apartment without telling me, I think about all the steps that she would have had to take in order to move into a new place. She would obviously need a different place to go to but seeing as how she is super introverted, there is no way she is moving in with someone who wasn’t on the group text where everyone already agreed that they haven’t seen her. So she would have had to get her own place, she certainly could afford it, but she would still have to fill out an application and the landlord here would probably know, right?
Finally, a place to start.
Throwing my phone in my pocket and grabbing my messenger bag, I rush toward the door, only locking the bottom lock. When I find Clara, she can yell at me about the dead bolt, until then, I’m in a hurry.
Mr. Peterson is already standing in the hallway, leaning up against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest. I have no idea how he always manages to know when someone is leaving their apartment but he always manages to be out in the hall.
I decide to ignore him and keep moving forward with my mission to get to the landlord as quickly as possible before they close for the day at four thirty.
“What, no snarky remark today?” Mr. Peterson sneers.
Fed up with the way this day is turning out, I can’t help but stop and take out my frustration on the creep from across the hall.
“I don’t have time for your shit today. You know what? I never have time for your shit. No one does. No one wants to deal with you, we just have no other choice,” I yell at him. “Oh, and just so we are perfectly clear no one here buys into your bumbling old man act, we all know it’s just an excuse to be able to touch us without getting into trouble. We are all sick and fucking tired of this bullshit.”
“Is that right?” he responds. “And what exactly do you think you can do about it?” he taunts.
I start to open my mouth to argue with him when it hits me. He is always out in the hall whenever anyone is in the hall. Coming or going. Never fails.
Time to tone it down.
“Look, I’m sorry, I’m just having a really shitty day. I apologize,” I say, trying my very best to look contrite.
“Uh-huh.” Clearly, he isn’t buying it.
“Have you seen my roommate?” I ask. “Y
ou’ve seen her before, tall, skinny, long brown hair, wears glasses?”
“The nerdy Mexican,” he says, his eyes almost daring me to get angry.
I clear my throat and clench my hands into fists, trying my hardest not to react.
“Uh, yeah, sure, that’s her. Have you seen her today?”
“Not since this morning, she was in a big rush, already out and down the hall when I made it out to check on all the commotion.”
“The commotion?” I ask, so hopeful that he might actually know something.
“Yeah, girl was dropping crap all over the place. And muttering to herself. You know you got to be careful about doing that kind of thing in public, people will start to think you are crazy carrying on like that.” He starts to ramble.
So basically nothing. Well, maybe not nothing, I’m the klutzy one. It makes sense for someone to notice that I was dropping things all over the hallway, I do it all the time, it’s why I carry a messenger bag, before I was dropping my purse all the time. Not Clara though, I’ve seen her carry like fifteen small items at once and never drop a single one.
I file the information away for later.
“Thanks,” I say begrudgingly as I start to head down the stairs.
By the time I make it over to the leasing office, the guy is already locking up the door, but thankfully he is willing to stop long enough to talk for a few seconds.
“What can I help you with?” he asks.
“Hey, Mark. I was just wondering if you had talked to Clara earlier today.” I ask, trying to look calm.
“Hmmm, Clara, not today. I did talk to her on Saturday though, she confirmed that maintenance was going to be by on Thursday for your heating check. Is that time still going to work out for you guys?” he asks.
“Yeah, yeah, of course, works great.” I pause. “So no Clara then?”
“Nope, not today.”
“Does anyone else work in the office during the day?” I ask.
“That talks to residents? Nope, just me, short staffed, you know how it is,” he explains. “Why do I get the feeling this isn’t about maintenance?”
“It’s not, I just, she’s just gone radio silent and I’m just checking everywhere I can think of to see if anyone has talked to her since this morning.”
“Ohhhh, I’m sure everything is fine, she probably just lost track of time at the lab, wouldn’t be the first time, you know?”
“Yeah, hopefully, that’s my next stop.”
“Well, good luck,” he says as he starts to head toward the parking lot.
“Thanks,” I call out as I start moving toward my own car. Only one more option. School.
It’s always amusing to me that the labs are always bustling the later it gets in the day. Clara always jokes about how she goes first thing in the morning because everyone is still asleep and she has the whole place all to herself. At least this way I was able to ask basically everyone she has classes with if she was there today. Hell, I even managed to talk to the Google guy, who is still sticking around going over projects with students. He hadn’t seen Clara either but told me he heard a lot of really good things and was looking forward to checking on her project later in the semester.
I can’t believe she missed the Google guy. She was so stoked about him. I even asked a couple of the guys if she had asked them to take notes for her. The one time she had the flu and missed class, she called like four people to take notes so she would have backups of her backups so she didn’t miss anything. Nothing though. No one had heard from her at all.
In any other situation, I would really believe that something happened to her, like she fell and had an accident or something. She does love running on the trails around campus. But they are well traveled and even if she fell and got hurt, it doesn’t explain how basically every trace of her disappeared out of the apartment. That’s the part that has left me a seed of doubt in my mind.
In the end, the only choice is to stop by the campus police office and see what they think. I’m pretty sure the answer to that question is they think I’m crazy.
“She’s only been gone a few hours.”
“People miss class all the time.”
“Roommates don’t always work out, we hear nightmare stories about roommates all the time.”
And last, and my personal favorite. “We’ll ask around and let you know.” He actually said that as he was trying to usher me out of the office before he even managed to write down my phone number. Could it have been any more clear he wasn’t going to take me seriously? Still, I wrote down my phone number and made sure to place it in his hand before I left to head back home.
The feeling of defeat washes over me as I walk back into the apartment. I must have looked rough because even Mr. Peterson turned and walked back inside his apartment when I was walking down the hall.
One thing is for sure, I certainly can’t sit in my living room where every memory I have of Clara and I together is sitting on the surface of my mind. So I go for the only option left. My room.
Normally I love my room. I’m obsessive almost to the point of anal at keeping everything in its place. The soft twinkle lights on the ceiling and photo collage on my wall by my bed always makes me smile. My room has a strictly happy rule, only things that bring me joy (very Marie Kondo I know).
But there is no joy in this room right now. Sitting on my bed, I feel my body finally start to fold in on itself. The events of the day finally take their due. I can feel my eyes starting to well up with tears. I know I can’t cry, though. I know if I start, I won’t stop.
So instead, I wipe the one tear that made an escape off my cheek and look up at my nightstand.
That’s when I notice something off. The lid to my jewelry box isn’t closed, it’s off center a little bit. My immediate reaction is just to readjust it closed, but something in me makes me lift the lid off the box.
It’s the second time in one day that my world stopped turning.
Clara’s locket is lying on top.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“ONE STEP CLOSER” BY LINKIN PARK
It’s funny how in life one thing can both make your entire world stop and in the next moment make everything start moving again. I had both those moments when I saw Clara’s locket lying in my jewelry box. I don’t want to believe what I am seeing with my own eyes. I can think of almost no situation where Clara would take that locket off. Two years ago we were worried she broke her foot on some ice and they wanted her to leave it with me while they took her for X-rays, she wouldn’t. She would never take it off.
Her voice echoes through my head, “Trust, but verify.”
I reach out to grab the locket out of the box, and I hesitate. I know I have to push through this feeling, but I don’t want to. I want it to be yesterday. I want to talk about our plans for the week and hear Clara blather on about a new algorithm she is trying in her code. Anything but this.
The metal is cold in my hand, logically I know it must have been there for hours, but cool metal against my skin is a confirmation I never wanted.
I need a plan.
I’ve already been to the campus police, I should probably wait until tomorrow to try and get more information. I know it hasn’t been twenty-four hours yet, so I probably can’t report her missing to Durham Police yet. I put the word out, everyone we know is aware they need to be on the lookout. Hell, I’m sure Mr. Peterson is even aware something is wrong.
Tomorrow is a new day, and I am going to find my answers, I don’t care what it takes. Clara would never let me disappear without a trace, she would hunt me down to the ends of the earth. So why would I do anything less when it comes to her?
Tomorrow I’ll go back to campus police. And if that doesn’t work, Durham Police is next on my list. Technically I’m pretty sure she didn’t disappear from campus so it should fall under them. Maybe I should go to them first. I can’t help but find it unsettling that I’m not really sure what the steps should be in the event of an emergency.
By the time morning has come around, the weather has shifted. Normally I hate when it’s gray outside and foggy, but today, it feels like a mirror of how I am doing. I think I was lucky enough to fall asleep a couple of times throughout the night. Not that it lasted for any kind of meaningful amount of time.
I call the campus police first thing and they actually let me make an appointment to come in and talk about Clara. So now the only thing left to do is pass the time between then and now. If you had asked me a few days ago what everyday life was like, I would have said something like, “nothing special.” How wrong I would have been. It still hasn’t been twenty-four hours and yet I know a piece of me is missing. Our lives together are far from “nothing special,” we are family. The family we chose for ourselves after the world left us on our own. That kind of bond, there’s nothing like it.
By the time I’m in my car headed to the police station, the butterflies in my stomach are overwhelming. And it’s not the happy butterflies like when you are going on a first date, but rather the kind that are waiting for the other shoe to drop. I know I need help. I just have no idea if I am going to get it.
Standing in front of the station, I steel myself for whatever comes next. The sad thing is I actually take the time to remind myself to keep my emotions in check, because no one wants to be labeled a hysterical woman.
The morning dew is still on the handle of the door, so I take the time to wipe my hand on my jeans as I walk toward the front desk.
