Forget Me Not

by A. M. Taylor

  Well, they have four kids, sir. I’m sure any scholarship or financial aid Nate and Nora get will help them out.

  Don’t get smart.

  Is Nora on any drugs? Adderall? Ritalin?

  She’s on the pill.

  My sad joke is met by silence.

  Is it possible she was taking anything other than … the pill?

  Is it possible? Sure. Is it likely? No.

  I spent a lot of time with Nora. Both Ange and I did, in the way that close friends in high school invariably spend a lot of time together, and I could account for most of her time when school was in session, but over the holidays it was a little harder. I’d been working at the local movie theater since the summer, and took on as many shifts over Christmas as possible, saving for college.

  Ange had a job too, but Nora hadn’t wanted to take anything on over the Christmas break because she was so busy with the musical theater production she was in. They were doing Rent. This was something I tried, in vain mostly, to get across to the officers or detectives or whatever who were asking me these questions. Yes, Nora took on a lot, but she was so focused, so determined, she was always able to loosen the knot in exactly the right spot, because she knew exactly what she had to do to get what she wanted, and where she wanted.

  They didn’t get it. They didn’t get that yes, Nora was under a lot of pressure, just like most high-achieving and ambitious kids at that point in their lives, but that Nora was the one person in the world who almost never cracked under pressure. If anyone could cope, it was her.

  The last few texts and the very last voicemail she had sent me were of course pored over for days and days. Not just by the police, but by me too. I was the last person she contacted before going missing and the police wanted to know everything about our final, virtual interaction. There was very little I could tell them, though. Other than what Nora revealed in her own words:

  ***

  “Maaaaaaaaaads, it’s me. Where are you? What are you doing? Why are you ignoring my calls?? God, I think I’m losing my mind. I can’t stop thinking about Louden fucking Winters, even though I, like, totally don’t care. Ughhhhhhh. I don’t actually care, do I? That’s not what this is, is it? Because if so, it fucking sucks and I was right all along about feelings and emotions and how we should avoid them at all costs because I. Do. Not. Like. This. Anyway, call me back you monster. Think I might go for a drive and clear my head, or whatever it is you sensitive types do. Love you, loser.”

  Is it normal for her to decide to go out for a drive in the evenings?

  Not really, no, but she’s been pretty upset recently, so who knows?

  What is she upset about?

  Her boyfriend’s been cheating on her.

  Is this a recent thing?

  It’s … an ongoing thing. She found out in November. He’s in college, and someone sent a picture to Ange of him hooking up with someone else in a bar somewhere.

  This was in November?

  Yeah. But, they got back together again, kind of over Christmas. He came home, like around the twentieth, I think, and they hooked up, and they were trying to figure things out over the break.

  You sound like you don’t approve.

  I don’t. He’s an asshole. He cheated on her. Multiple times. She deserves better than that.

  Did you tell her that?

  Yeah, of course.

  Did they seem happy together? You say she was upset over the past couple of weeks, but if they were back together shouldn’t she have been happy?

  Yeah, I guess. But how happy would you be if you were with someone you couldn’t trust?

  You don’t trust Louden Winters?

  I didn’t trust him not to cheat on Nora again. Which he did.

  When was this?

  New Year’s Eve. At a party we were all at. Nora was in, like, the next room and he was having sex with Natalie Carmichael. They broke up officially after that.

  Even less believable to me than the idea that Nora had simply walked away from Forest View, abandoning her car just because she had a faulty fuel gauge and had unwittingly run out of gas by the side of the road, was the idea that she had killed herself. The question was only raised a couple of times before being discarded; there was no body, no note, and no history of depression or mental illness. Ange and I talked about it once one evening when we were hiding together up in her room, her voice hushed with the impossibility of the subject. It had been over a month since Nora had disappeared and by then we’d been forced by the police and the media and our parents to think about every possible scenario a thousand times already. Neither of us believed it really. We couldn’t believe that she was just gone—nowhere—but neither could we believe that she would, or could, have killed herself. Not without one of us sensing something was wrong, not without her leaving a note, or some evidence, somewhere, that that was what she was doing. But if Nora was anything, she was meticulous. If she didn’t want someone to find her, they didn’t. If she wanted to disappear, she was gone. If there was anyone, out of everyone I have ever known, who could have somehow disappeared herself, or killed herself without leaving any kind of clue behind, it was her.

  I was still stuck over the reason why, though. There are oceans, rivers, mountains, swirling constellations inside all of us, of course. I know this as well as anyone but I was still stuck there, on why. She wasn’t torn up over Louden, she was mad. Mad as hell. Her last message to me wasn’t “I can’t believe he’s broken my heart,” but “why do I care so much?” That was Nora, always, not so much giving in to her own feelings as fending them off with a large stick.

  Maybe that was why she managed to stay so clear, so focused and resolute the whole time. In the end it was all for nothing, all those questions.

  But Keegan’s questions the previous night had reminded me of all those hours spent in that freezing interrogation room, my mom sat in the corner chewing the bottom of her lip as she watched her daughter be turned inside out. To the detectives asking all those questions, Nora had become a riddle, a puzzle to be solved. She’d lost her distinctness, her shape, whatever it was that made her real, rather than just a face on a poster. It was at that point I knew that although we may never know if she were dead, she was already a ghost.

  Noelle’s memorial was held in the church, even though there wasn’t going to be a burial because her body hadn’t been released to the family yet. I shivered in the church pew after shrugging off my coat and watched as Ange and her parents filed in before coming over to join me and my family.

  “Hey,” Ange whispered as she sat down next to me and grabbed my hand.

  “Hi.”

  “Have you spoken to Nate?”

  I shook my head and returned to watching the back of Nate’s neck as I’d been doing before she arrived. I could feel my mom’s arm as it stretched round me to squeeze Ange’s shoulder, and she whispered, “Hi, sweetheart. You doing okay?” Out of the corner of my eye I could see Ange’s grim, taut smile and the slight blurriness to her eyes that meant she was about to cry. I held on tight to her hand.

  Katherine and Jonathan Altman were sitting in the first pew with Noah in between them, and Nate sat next to his father, furthest from the aisle. Next to him, tiny as usual, was Jenna, and the strawberry blonde, who by now I’d figured out was her sister and then Leia, Elle’s best friend.

  Nate, tall and broad, looked strange and all alone, but I realized that Bright and Leo, along with Louden and Hale were sitting almost directly behind him. At that moment, as if feeling my gaze, Leo turned around and noticed me watching. He nodded at me and I tried to smile but failed. His gaze moved along my pew, to Ange and her family and back to me and my mom and my sisters who were all sat between me and Dad. Leo shook his head a little, sadly, and suddenly I felt myself about to cry. He turned back around and leaned forward to say something in Nate’s ear, who twisted around then and mouthed “You okay?” right at me. I almost laughed. I shook my head instead. No, I was not okay.

  A
t the one-year anniversary memorial of Nora’s disappearance “Seasons of Love” from Rent, the last musical she performed in, was played towards the end, which is a little like throwing a hand grenade into a crowded room and hoping it won’t go off. Everyone fell apart, of course. There should be a law against playing “Seasons of Love” at funerals or memorials, but it was as good a way as any to say goodbye, I guess. If you have to say goodbye at all, why not do it with one of the most operatically sad songs ever written in human history? Nora would have liked it. She was dramatic, and to the point, and way more sentimental than she would ever have admitted and she would have loved it.

  Nate told a story about how, when they were younger, when he was eight, and Nora just seven, he’d lost her at the grocery store. It was a little distasteful to be perfectly honest, considering the circumstances, but Nate told it so well, with a kind of strange, off-kilter robustness that made me think at the time that maybe he didn’t truly believe his sister was gone.

  He spoke about how when Nora was five she wore his old Superman costume every day for two weeks, and that after the first time she watched The Lion King, she sang “Circle of Life” so many times he stuffed her into a cupboard and didn’t let her out for forty-five minutes.

  He told us all about how if you didn’t let her win at Monopoly she’d throw the board across the room and not speak to anyone for the rest of the day.

  Nora had still been alive in those stories he’d told, and there’d still been this tiny sliver, this taunting, tempting chance that she was still alive, and still herself and not just in the stories we were set to tell one another for the rest of our lives.

  This time was different. This time Nate was barely controlled, barely contained. I’d never seen him like that, and I’d watched him over the past ten years, as we both followed the same path that grief leads you down. None of the parts of his face seemed to match up, and when he looked out into the assembled crowd, which he did just once, and very quickly, I could have sworn there was fear in his eyes.

  “No one should die aged seventeen. I think we can all agree on that.” He spread out a sheet of paper on the lectern, and shook his head almost imperceptibly, just to himself. “I’ve lost both my sisters now. Both seventeen. Both vibrant, and bright, and big, and beautiful. Noelle was … Nora and I always called her ‘stringy.’ Because she grew so quickly and there always seemed to be parts of her that were just trying so hard to keep up, and for some reason it made her arms and legs look like pieces of string. To us, anyway. But she was strong too. You don’t become a figure skater without being strong, and you don’t come out to all your friends and family aged fifteen without being even stronger than that. When we were growing up she was kind of like this little mascot to us. Long and loose, and always dancing, always twirling, and spinning, but only around us.

  “When we were with company she became this smaller, more contained person. Happy, but quiet. She’d tuck herself into a corner, and watch everything, everyone with bright eyes and then snap back alive again when everyone had gone and it was just us. She made us laugh. She made me laugh, a lot. I think she probably made a lot of you laugh too. The thing about Noelle, and this is something she had in common with Nora, was that she seemed so sure of who she was. You don’t meet a lot of people with the kind of certainty and self-assurance both my sisters had at such a young age.

  “I don’t have any wise words for you. I tried, and failed, to find an appropriate quote, even from one of her favorite books, because there’s nothing I can say to make any sense of this. Which means there’s nothing anyone can say, no matter how good a writer, or poet, or philosopher they are, that can make sense of Noelle being gone.

  “When I think of Elle I think of how her hair used to reach down almost to her knees when she was seven, or I think of her skating over the frozen lake up by my grandparents’ old cabin, this huge, enormous smile on her face. And I think of her driving all the way back from Texas with me last summer, forcing me to listen to Taylor Swift, and Katy Perry, and Ariana Grande even, making me sing along, teasing that I basically knew all the words anyway. I think of her whole, and alive, and wholly alive. I’d like you to do the same.”

  They played one of Elle’s favorite songs, “No Goodbyes,” by Dua Lipa, as we left the church.

  Outside the church, news station vans dotted the street, parked between the cars of mourners, family and friends. There was a knot of reporters and photographers hanging out round the entrance to the churchyard; I’d already spotted Gloria Lewis as we arrived. She’d looked like she was about to say something, her microphone with its WISNews 3 emblem on it about to be thrust towards me, but Dad had put his arm around my shoulders and hurried me towards the church.

  They were still there, and I watched, unable to look away as the photographers moved closer, snapping pictures as more and more mourners filed out and into the whitewashed graveyard. It all happened in mere minutes. The family came last, their faces pale, drawn. Noah’s hand was buried deep inside of one of Nate’s as the two brothers wordlessly left the church together and someone shouted “Noah!”

  Noah was shivering as he raised his face from where he’d been staring at the ground and looked towards whoever had called his name. The flash went off instantaneously, his eyes huge and wide, and someone else shouted: “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  Jonathan Altman had launched himself at the photographer, grabbing at the camera, wrenching it from the man’s grasp and, in one easy move, brought it back to make contact with the photographer’s head. It made a huge noise in the quiet churchyard, and I looked towards Nate, who didn’t seem to know what to do other than grab his brother and move him away from the scene that was unfolding.

  Ange made a noise of surprise as her own dad strode towards the two men, calling out Jonathan’s name, telling him to stop. The photographer had stumbled backwards when Jonathan initially hit him, but obviously felt very strongly about his camera, as his first move was to reach towards it in an attempt to pull it free of Jonathan’s grasp.

  We all watched as Ange’s dad pulled Jonathan away from the photographer, talking to him in a low voice neither of us could hear. It all happened very quickly but it didn’t lessen the shock, the wrongness of it. Inside the church we’d been allowed to remember Noelle, at least for a little while, exactly as she was. Out here the world interfered, inflicted even more distress and pain.

  Out of the corner of my eye I watched as the small figure of Jenna wandered over to the edge of the church’s graveyard and proceeded to sink down into a crouch amid the snow. She looked so small in her violently red coat, shivering against the cold, the tops of her boots just showing beneath a landslide of snow. She was staring down into the ground, a blank look on her face, her skin streaked red and white with tears.

  I went over to join her, saying: “I’m so sorry, Jenna,” as I crouched down next to her.

  She made no move to indicate that she’d even heard me, but instead drew a long, rattling breath deep inside her and hiccupped through her next words. “It didn’t seem real for a while, I was, like, sleepwalking through it like a dream but now it’s so real. So fucking real.”

  “I know.”

  “Did you love her? Nora?” she asked suddenly, her face pressed against her folded-up knees.

  “Of course I loved her. I still do.”

  Jenna moved her head an inch until one watery eye was looking up at me. “But not like …?”

  “No, not like you loved Noelle. But I still loved her. I don’t know if it’s … less, it’s just different, you know? I still see her everywhere. I still think about how she’d think about things. Does that make sense? She always thought things through so differently to me. I think about what she’d say every time I make a huge mistake, or say something really stupid. Or cruel.”

  “But how did you cope?”

  “I guess I didn’t really.”

  “And it never stops?” She was crying then, really crying, a
s if not only the loss of Elle, but the fact of having to live with it for the rest of her life had suddenly hit her like a freight train. I remembered that feeling from ten years before and seeing it written all over Jenna’s face stole every breath I had right out of me.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know about never, but it hasn’t stopped yet. So maybe never. I think maybe I’m getting better at living with it, but I probably shouldn’t be anyone’s blueprint for coping with grief.”

  “You’re okay, Maddie.”

  I looked at her, with her red-ringed hazel eyes wide with misery, and wondered how okay it was that we were only ever going to get to be “okay.” Jenna deserved so much more. We all did.

  But I didn’t know what to say to her, so I just placed my hand on her back and finally let myself cry with her, our tears dripping off our faces and pockmarking the snow beneath us.

  “Jenna?” I heard a voice say behind us, and the two of us stood up to turn around. It was Leia, Elle’s best friend. She kind of half nodded at me and said to Jenna: “We’re heading over to the Altmans’ now. You wanna ride with us?”

  Jenna nodded and stood up, brushing snow from her black jeans. She said goodbye to me quietly and walked off to join a group of sad-looking teenagers who were all waiting for her. Leia moved as if to follow her, but then stopped and turned back to me.

  “It’s Maddie, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m Leia. I didn’t properly introduce myself yesterday. I don’t know if you remember me,” she said a little shyly as she reached out her right hand and I went to shake it, a little surprised by her formality.

  “Of course I remember you,” I said.