Forget Me Not

by A. M. Taylor

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  When we were about six or seven Nora decided that the only popsicles she would eat were the red ones. They didn’t seem to have a flavor; they were just red the same way red M&Ms are just red too. Anyway, from then on she only ever ate the red popsicles. Even when we were seventeen. I didn’t care what color I had; as long as I had one, I was cool. Nora was like that about a lot of things. Single-minded, determined. Tunnel vision, I guess is what you’d call it. I used to laugh at her refusal to try any other flavors because it meant she often went without one, even when there were other colors available and I was happy sucking down on a blue one, or whatever else was available, but she was so sure of herself, so intent on the right-ness of her choice that her lack of desire to try something else seemed almost admirable.

  By the time it came round to picking out colleges, Nora already knew where she was going to go. She’d known since our freshman year for Christ’s sake. It was absurd to me that she would limit her choices so much by only applying to Carnegie Mellon, but she was just so damn sure of herself. Of her choices. She’d been singing forever, and had appeared, more often than not as the main character, in every single musical theater production our high school had ever put on. It was pretty exhausting being her friend, to be honest. Me, I had about a thousand different ideas of where I wanted to go. I wanted Northwestern and NYU, Columbia and Stanford, Berkeley and Vanderbilt. By which I mean I didn’t know what the fuck I wanted. I was just as big a mess back then as I am now, I just used to have more options available to me. I laughed at Nora’s certainty about Carnegie Mellon just as I’d laughed at her red popsicle decree. She didn’t need any backup. She didn’t need options or choices—she knew exactly what she wanted, even before the rest of us realized we were expected to have formed some sort of opinion on our future selves. That is, of course, until she had all her options taken from her. Until her future went from certain to nonexistent.

  I can’t untangle lost-Nora from alive-Nora; they’ve become the same person so much that every memory I have of her is blighted, dimmed by the fact of her being gone. Sometimes I can see her as bright and clear as a summer’s day. She stands in my mind in full technicolor, a riot of color saturation. But most of the time the way I think of her is the way I think about the time when we lost her. They’ve become one and the same, and in a way it’s like losing her all over again. Just as I was robbed of my best friend, I was robbed of my memories of her too.

  She got in of course. The letter came, in all its cream-colored glory, heavy with anticipation and congratulations, Carnegie Mellon somehow the only people in the country who didn’t realize what had happened to Nora. Nate showed it to me and Ange, his face grim but somehow determined, and I tried so hard to work out what he was feeling; did he think she was still out there, desperate to be found? Or maybe desperate to remain lost? It took me a couple days to realize that he’d just come to the same conclusion I had. Because in that moment, when I saw those words, “Congratulations, Nora Altman, and welcome to Carnegie Mellon!” I just knew. I knew she was gone for good and not because she didn’t want to be found.

  It’s exhausting coming up with synonyms and euphemisms for dead. We had to use so many in those first few months when she was simply gone. Missing. But that was the first time I let the word enter my vocabulary. It was the first time I realized she wasn’t just a space in my life. Someone hadn’t simply thrown their hand into the ring and snatched her out of our lives. Someone had killed her.

  The impotence I felt in that moment and in the months, years, that followed doesn’t even bear describing. It was all-consuming. It’s one thing to realize your best friend has been murdered; it’s a completely different thing to watch, from the sidelines, as those in power, those with control, fail at almost every turn to find or apprehend the killer. To refuse even to admit that she has been murdered. It is, apparently, very hard to find a killer when you can’t even find the body.

  So, it was that impotence, that dreaded powerlessness that I was thinking about when I parted ways with Ange at the diner, and instead of going home to crawl back into bed as I probably would have done ten years before, I got into my dad’s car and drove out to where Noelle’s body had been found and Nora’s car had been abandoned all those years ago. My hands gripped the steering wheel ever tighter the closer I got and by the time the flickering yellow police tape came into view a low buzzing hum had taken up residence throughout my entire body.

  I tried to breathe deeply, pulling over to the side of the road and staring out at the desolate scene. There was nothing much to see, but just a few yards away I could make out the ribbon tied to one of the nearby trees. It must have been replaced a thousand times, but there had been one there ever since Nora went missing. I could still remember the discussion of what color ribbon to choose; the mundane back and forth between yellow and blue barely cutting through the cloud I’d been drifting through since she disappeared. Finally, I’d had to shout, yell, my voice catching on the words, that it should be purple. I was the only one who remembered it was her favorite color.

  I got out of the car and walked towards the police tape before looking around me and slipping underneath it. There was nothing to see, really. I followed a very small path into the woods, but the recent snow meant everything had been covered over. Willard must have been quick to get even his low-quality photo. I stopped walking after a while, aware that I was just getting ever deeper into the woods, and with no real reason. Whatever it was I was looking for, I thought, I wouldn’t find it here.

  I heard the crunch of the snow coming from behind me before I heard his voice.

  “You shouldn’t be here, Fielder.”

  I turned around to see Leo standing at the edge of the clearing. He was with Bright, both of them dressed in their blue police uniforms.

  “Didn’t you notice the big yellow ‘do not cross’ line down at the road?”

  “I didn’t come from the road. I was just taking a walk and came across it.”

  Leo rolled his eyes at me. “Don’t lie to us, Mads. I recognize your dad’s car. I saw it every day in the high school parking lot, remember? Just like everybody else.” Just one of the many downsides to having a parent as your high school principal.

  I grimaced. “Oh, right.”

  “What are you doing here, Maddie?” Bright asked gruffly. Bright and Serena had been together for almost all of high school and even into college before they broke up, and I like to think he held a certain amount of affection towards us Fielder girls. He never really said much to me, but then he never really said much to anyone, so I didn’t take it too personally.

  “I just wanted to see it. I’m sorry.”

  “How’d you even know where to come? I didn’t think details had been released yet.” Leo’s chest was puffed up in indignation, his face a caricature of concern.

  “Ange,” I said simply. I didn’t add that an article detailing the existence and nature of the crime had already gone live on the Madison Journal’s website.

  Leo groaned and turned away from me as if disgusted, kicking at a small drift of snow. Bright and I caught one another’s eye, but I looked away quickly. He just stood there, arms crossed against his broad chest, jaw set firmly against the cold and the crime scene, determined to remain as stoic as ever. I’d seen him like this countless times before: impassive as a rock in the face of grief, loss, anger, frustration. He was perfect for police work really, never giving anything away, but it sure did make for cold comfort.

  “Well, I’d better get going,” I said, suddenly deflated. I’d hoped going out there would help me understand what was happening, what had happened to Elle, but all I felt was a mixture of disappointment and dread that I couldn’t quite decipher.

  I walked back the way I’d come, squeezing between the two men, knocking Leo’s arm with my shoulder. His head turned sharply towards me but I just stared at him, daring him to say something. Instead, his face dropped and he gave me a soft little sm
ile, mouthing “I’m sorry,” at me. Just so I knew he wasn’t a total asshole. Just so I knew he was only doing his job. I shrugged at him and carried on walking.

  I got a few strides away from them before I heard Bright speak up again. “You heard from Nate?”

  I turned back to check he was talking to me and not Leo and nodded. “I’m going round there later to watch Noah.”

  Bright gave a single nod and then turned back to the clearing.

  There was someone else down by my dad’s car when I got back to it, waiting, but I didn’t think for me. Hidden beneath a bright red bobble hat and matching padded jacket—whoever it was was so small that I’d been taken aback to see they were probably about Elle’s age—when they turned around at the sound of my approach, and not a child as I’d wrongly assumed. The girl had been staring silently at the purple ribbon when I arrived, but now I could see her face and there was something about the terrifying blankness of her eyes that I recognized. Not from a picture or photo I’d seen, but from the reflection of my own face whenever I’d managed to look in the mirror ten years earlier when Nora had first gone missing. It was that, more than anything else, that made me say: “Jenna?”

  The girl took a step back initially, and then moved towards me, shoes crunching on snow. “Do I know you?”

  “I’m Maddie Fielder,” I said. “I … was Nora’s friend. I knew Elle, too. You are Jenna, right? Elle’s girlfriend?”

  Jenna nodded eventually, swallowing hard, and taking a quick look back at the purple ribbon, fluttering a little in the wind. “You’re Maddie? Elle spoke about you a lot.” Her words were stilted, hard come by, almost lost in all that cold air, and I felt bad even forcing her to say Elle’s name, although it’s unlikely there was anyone or anything else on earth currently taking up her mind and time. I looked back up the way I had just come, aware that Leo and Bright were probably going to come crashing down through the woods at any moment. I thought I could just hear the low rumble of their voices, getting louder and closer, but I may have been imagining it.

  Before I really knew what I was doing I asked Jenna if she wanted to go someplace warm and chat, and she surprised me yet again by agreeing to, so we both got into our own cars and drove off back towards CJ’s in convoy.

  Somehow I ended up getting to CJ’s a little before Jenna and watched as she pushed open the heavy door, letting a puff of cold air into the warm diner. Her short reddish hair was cut into a pixie cut and she fluffed it up with her right hand as she walked towards me, having just pulled the bright red bobble hat off her head. Underneath her red coat she was wearing jeans and a massive sweatshirt that completely dwarfed her slight frame.

  Jenna slipped into the booth, Ruby silently depositing two cups of coffee and two menus on the table in front of us as she did so. I smiled my thanks and she left us to it. Jenna wrapped her hands around the mug of coffee nearest her and stared into the brown liquid. She wasn’t wearing any make-up, but her skin was clear except for one spot by the corner of her mouth. Up close, her eyes, which I’d thought looked so horrifyingly blank, were hazel, and upon closer inspection looked puffy but not red. From crying but not too recently.

  I probably should have said something first, I was the grown up after all—I had suggested we come here, and on top of everything I wasn’t the one who had so recently lost their girlfriend—but for some reason I simply couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think of a single thing to say. So, silence settled all around us until finally Jenna looked up and said: “I can’t believe she’s gone. I was on Facebook last night and that was all anyone seemed able to say, you know? ‘I can’t believe you’re gone.’ It doesn’t feel real. Even with all … the other stuff.” She looked up at me then. “Did it feel real with Nora?”

  It took me a little while to answer. For some reason I hadn’t expected Jenna to ask me about Nora, but she had every reason to, of course.

  “At first it was like I was watching it all happen to someone else,” I said slowly, watching her face, “but then, finally, I don’t know, something snapped and I realized it was real. That she was gone.”

  I didn’t normally talk so easily about Nora, especially with someone I’d never met before, but I felt as though Jenna deserved it. The truth. Or my truth at least. I also couldn’t help but notice that we’d completely dispensed with and skipped over the small talk. There wasn’t any place for it there, not then.

  “Do you ever think that she might still be alive?” she asked, her words whispered, her eyes lowered again. Like she was asking me something embarrassing.

  When I said “No,” very firmly she looked a little taken aback by my conviction. “If she were alive I’d know. There would have been something. She would have let us know, somehow.” It always surprised me how shocked people were by my belief that Nora was dead rather than still missing. They thought I should still have hope that she was out there somewhere, alive, but hope had given up on me long ago. I wasn’t willing to indulge in it for the sake of people finding me easier to deal with; when I told people I thought Nora was dead it was as if I had killed her. And maybe I had, up to a point. I’d killed the idea of her being alive, and if I didn’t believe it, then who were they to? What they don’t understand is that hope is relentless, unforgiving, and living within its grip isn’t like living at all. So, I chose to believe in something that let me live, even if only a little, even if only just.

  To her credit, Jenna simply nodded, taking a sip from her mug of coffee and then, as if she’d suddenly just summoned the courage to do so, she looked at me, her jaw set, her chin raised slightly in an image of determination. Her eyes looked steely somehow, something metallic catching amid the green and brown. I could see how she might present quite a formidable opponent on the ice, despite her small size.

  “I want to know what happened to her. To Noelle. I deserve to know.”

  “Of course.”

  “No, you don’t get it. No one’s telling me anything. Not the police, not her family.” Her eyes looked a little wild then; so wide they seemed to jump out of her face. Her resolve from just seconds before had left her completely and she was having trouble looking at me, or anything, for more than a split second. Her gaze flicked from one thing to the next, to the next and I wondered if she’d taken something. “I mean, I get it,” she continued, after taking a deep breath and trying to calm herself, “there’s not much to tell yet, but I’m her girlfriend.” Her chin dipped ever so slightly and the firm, set line of her mouth turned down somewhat. “Was. Was her girlfriend.”

  “Can I ask why you weren’t at the memorial on Sunday? For Nora?”

  Jenna wiped a hand across her face, exhaustion written all over it. “It was my grandmother’s eightieth birthday. I couldn’t miss it; my mom would have killed me.” She stilled suddenly, her eyes catching mine, her face pale. “I mean … I didn’t mean that, I didn’t mean to say that.”

  “It’s okay, Jenna.”

  “No, no, no. You don’t understand—”

  “I do understand. And it’s okay.”

  Jenna slumped forward, her arms resting on the table, showing me the crown of her head. I thought perhaps that she was crying, but when I said: “Had Elle been acting any differently recently?” she jerked her face up and it was clear of tears.

  Taking a deep breath she turned her gaze to the window, which was a little steamed up, snow drifting lazily past it. Calmer by then, she said: “A little, I guess, yeah. She’d been more withdrawn than usual.”

  Elle had been particularly quiet on Sunday when I had last seen her, and although I wasn’t used to seeing her like that, I hadn’t thought much of it at the time; it was the ten-year anniversary of her sister going missing after all. If she had a right to be withdrawn at any time, it was then. I wanted specifics though, so I asked: “What do you mean by ‘withdrawn’?”

  Jenna sighed, pushing back her hair so that it stood on end. “Quiet, distracted. She kept cancelling stuff at the last minute. Like, we’d arrange to
go to the movies, or just to hang out, but then she’d cancel right before we were supposed to meet. I thought … I actually thought she was going to break up with me.” She looked back at me, her eyes once again wide and a little wild, filling with tears.

  “Do you know why she wasn’t home on Sunday night?” This was a question that had been bothering me; why had Elle not been at home and why hadn’t anyone noticed that she was missing earlier?

  “She … she was supposed to come over to my house, to hang out, but then she texted to say she wasn’t feeling up to it, so I figured she was just going to stay home with her family. I texted and called a couple times but when she didn’t answer I thought maybe she’d just gone to bed early or something.”

  There was a shot of silence while I swallowed a mouthful of coffee. “Do you think she went out anyway? To meet someone else?” I asked at last.

  Jenna nodded, blinking rapidly at me as a way to stave off tears. “Maybe. It’s the only reason why her parents wouldn’t have known where she was. If they thought she was at mine, then they wouldn’t have been worried, right? But what if she told them she was with me but she was actually somewhere else?” Her voice broke as she was speaking, tears falling silently down her cheeks, and I reached for a napkin from the stainless-steel dispenser and handed one to her. She took it silently, wiping away at her face.

  “Had she ever done that before?”

  “I don’t know,” Jenna said, shrugging her shoulders helplessly. “Maybe, I guess.”

  “Do you think she could have been seeing someone else?”

  “You mean cheating on me?”

  I drew in a breath, watching Jenna’s face fall ever further. “Yeah.”

  Jenna swallowed, shaking her head. “I didn’t ever think she’d do that. But I don’t know now. Maybe she would?”