by A. M. Taylor
I wouldn’t breathe easily until I got outside, the cold washing over me as I took off at speed, long strides, my head down, hood up, still hidden but looking for all the world as if I knew where I was going. I liked to feel the build-up of breath in my chest, air clinging to my throat and lungs, the feeling familiar and something close to comfort. When I breathed, in, out, in, out it was like I was trying to push something away but also like I was taking something back too.
There were nights when I’d return from a walk like that to find Nate waiting for me. The first time it was February, just a month or so after the one-year anniversary of Nora’s disappearance.
***
He’s sitting on the floor with his back against the door, head tipped back, eyes closed. I kick the soles of his shoes.
“Hey. What are you doing here?”
He opens one eye, grins, and pops up to standing. “Hey. Where you been?”
“Out.”
“It’s half three in the morning.”
“Exactly. What are you doing here?”
“Just came to see you … you gonna open the door?”
I open the door even though I really don’t want to. I wish there was somewhere else we could go but it’s late and everything on campus is closed. The door swings open and I look at the room through Nate’s eyes. My laptop sits, still open, the screen a serene blank black, within the swirl of my duvet and blankets. The bedside table is crowded with dirty glasses and mugs, books I haven’t yet opened piled high next to the lamp which has been shunted in between the bed and the table and is about to fall to the floor at any moment. My garbage can overflows, an extra plastic bag filled with trash sitting next to it. Clothes scatter the floor, draping themselves over a small chair that’s hiding in the corner. It smells of stale yoghurt.
“Sorry it’s so … gross.”
“I live with five other guys, Mads. This is nothing. Seriously.”
I choose to believe him, if only because I’m too tired all of a sudden not to, and sit down on the edge of the bed. “What are you doing here?” I ask again.
“Was in the area. Thought I’d stop by.”
“It’s late, Nate.”
“Yeah but I knew you’d be up. It’s not like I woke you, right?”
I’m struggling to talk, to make conversation, even with this person I’ve known most of my life. I want to crawl into bed and stare at the screen of my laptop while whatever DVD is already loaded plays out.
“You okay?” he asks eventually after I don’t say anything.
“Yeah. Fine.”
“I get worried about you sitting all alone up here. You need to get out more.”
My throat constricts, my chest contracting. I want to say I get worried about him out there, even with other people all around him, but I can’t. “I was just out.”
“Yeah, for one of your weird nighttime walks. Can’t believe you’re still doing those.”
“I like it at night. I like the dark.”
“Well, you need to get out in the light more, Mads. Seriously.”
I don’t bother trying to explain it to him: that he is the light. That it spills out from him, without him even realizing. That I’m over here, lost in the dark, just trying to find the switch and he’s over there, glowing, phosphorescent. I wonder what he’d say, what he’d do, if I said that to him. If I ever said that to him. But of course, I don’t. I don’t say anything at all.
Nate looks at me kind of sadly, and I let myself see him for a second before looking away. “Well, I guess I better go,” he says, “turns out this was a doomed mission.”
I want to ask him to stay. I want to be brave enough to ask him to stay. But a much, much larger part of me can barely even stand to let him look at me. My insides grip and tighten every time he turns his head towards me, my eyes slide away from his, my jaw clenched, my shoulders rising ever further towards my ears. I never thought of myself as a scared person, but I’m frightened all the time, terrified.
So, I don’t even say goodbye when he finally leaves. I don’t even feel relief or release when he’s gone; I don’t even get that. I just feel the same as I did before, which is to say like something burnt and curling up at the edges. But at least with him gone I don’t have to worry about someone peering around those burning edges, realizing how fragile they are, how close they are to crumbling.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CJ’s was busier than I thought it was going to be, but I still didn’t have any problem picking out Ange in the crowd. She had her head down, hunched over her laptop, a familiar figure of concentration that sent a stab of useless nostalgia through me. I don’t tend to look back fondly on my teenage years; Nora cast a shadow so large it obstructed everything, turned it monochrome. But I realized that more than anything I missed the simplicity and the wide-open promise of youth. At that point in time, the future had felt like a trap, something you fell into and were caught by, its teeth wrapped around your ankle, its jaw shaking you back and forth as you held on for dear life. But back then, before all that, the yawning maw had been something to run towards, full tilt, with nothing nipping at your heels but hope.
“Morning,” I said, sliding into the seat opposite Ange. She looked up quickly, her brown eyes wide with surprise before seeing it was me and settling back down again.
“Mads, it’s you. I was in my own world there.”
“What world was that?” I asked, slipping off my coat and scarf.
“One where none of this had ever happened,” she said after swallowing her mouthful of coffee. She then swiveled her MacBook towards me so I could see the screen. She’d been feeling nostalgic too evidently, because her browser was open on Nora’s Facebook page and Nora herself was staring out at me, a little disdainfully, from her profile picture.
I pulled the laptop towards me, peering into the screen. It wasn’t just that Nora’s life, and therefore her profile page, was caught in amber, but that it was from another time altogether. She’d only been on Facebook for two years when she went missing. Her profile page was a relic from before Instagram, and Snapchat, before either Twitter or even Facebook itself had become ubiquitous; before all our lives, from toddler to grandparent, from cradle to grave, were lived out online.
It had been disorientating to see, or at least be reminded of, how far the world had come, how many spins on its axis we’d lived through since she’d disappeared. I felt guilty then, that deep trench of betrayal rising up, as I thought of how much life I’d lived without her. I missed her then not the way you miss another person, but the way you miss another, earlier version of yourself. I wanted to hold her and warn her at the same time of everything that was to come, of everything she would miss, to give her the whole world while holding back everything that could harm her.
The diner went in and out of focus while I stared at her and eventually I had to turn the laptop back to Ange, to reclaim my position in the world, whatever it was worth.
“I did something a little weird a few days ago,” I said.
Ange turned sharply towards me, her shoulders rigid. “What did you do?” she demanded.
“I logged into Elle’s Facebook,” I said, finally telling her all about John Smith. I don’t know why I hadn’t told her sooner; probably I’d been worried and waiting for her judgement. I was always the one fucking up, after all, but she visibly relaxed at my confession. Clearly I hadn’t fucked up too bad with this one.
Her voice was tired, though, when she finally said: “That could’ve been anyone, Mads. Literally anyone. That’s pretty much the point of the internet.”
“Yeah, but—”
“What’s this really about?” she said, eyes narrowed, her mouth pulled into a firm line.
“What do you mean?”
“Is this about Nate?”
I struggled to see how any of “this” wasn’t about Nate, so I just said: “In what way?”
She sighed, rearranging herself in her seat, trying to get comfortable. She looked
like she was about to explain a simple math problem to a small child. “Are you in love with him?”
“I’m having a vague sense of déjà vu. Haven’t you asked me this before?”
“Yeah, only about a dozen times. I still want to know though.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re … stuck. And I want you to be unstuck.”
“I don’t know if I’m in love with him. I love him. But then, I love you too.”
“Yeah, but you don’t want to sleep with me.”
My brain felt as though it was encased in cotton wool. I was having trouble accessing it. “I don’t want … I don’t want to sleep with Nate. I have no idea what I want. From him, from anyone.” I hadn’t yet told her about the kiss on the night of Elle’s memorial, and I wasn’t about to. “It’s all so messy. What I want more than anything is to know what I want.”
“See, this is what I’m talking about. Stuck.”
“But that’s me. That’s not Nate. I’d be stuck even without him in the picture.”
“You still don’t get it. What you want, how you feel, it doesn’t exist on a different plane from what I want or feel, or what Nate feels, or what Serena or anyone else feels. You can’t siphon yourself off from your friends and family as a way to figure out what it is you want. Everything you do affects everything I do, because we’re here, doing it together. You can’t try and figure out whether or not you want to be with Nate without him. If it’s a mess, it’s both of your mess. You can’t deal with it on your own or figure what it means on your own, because it wouldn’t exist without him.”
I thought about the night of Elle’s memorial, and how close I’d come to finally telling Nate how I felt, how I’d always felt about him. But there had still been something holding me back, stopping me from finally reaching out and meeting him wherever he was.
It had been my inability to reach out that had pushed him away, all the way to Texas and out of my life, and that hadn’t made me any happier, hadn’t made my life any easier, hadn’t lightened the load or loosened the stitches that seemed to bind my life together. But he’d tried to siphon himself off too, just as Ange was accusing me of doing and, in the end, we hadn’t let ourselves grow and change together, and so whenever we saw each other it was brittle and raw, rather than lived in and familiar, and that shock was too much, too overpowering, so we pulled away again and fell further and further apart until we got to where we were at that point, a place I didn’t recognize, a place that tripped me up and pulled me down, a place I couldn’t find my way through.
But maybe that wasn’t the problem, maybe I didn’t recognize Nate at that time because I’d never really known him then; a desperate need for comfort could dull your edges, make you blind to danger and, what if, after Nora’s disappearance, I’d searched him out so much because what I was really searching for was her? And if that was the case, I thought, had I ever really known Nate at all?
What if Nate hadn’t been fueled by grief, but guilt? Then, I still couldn’t quite comprehend it, not yet, even as articles and blog posts, and even close friends exhorted me too. I’d known I would have to eventually, but for the time being, the river of fear was too wide and I was too scared to find out what was on the other side. Because, I reasoned, what would it mean if the person I found standing there was Nate? What would it mean for me? That would mean losing not just him, but part of myself too, and I wasn’t sure if after that there’d be enough of me to go round. It was selfish and cowardly, I know that now, but sometimes selfish and cowardly are the only tools you have to protect yourself.
“Maddie?” Ange said, bringing me back to the diner. When I still didn’t answer she gently rapped her knuckles against the side of my head and said: “Anybody there?”
“Sorry,” I said, reaching for Ange’s coffee and taking a sip, “didn’t sleep well last night.”
“I haven’t slept in days,” she said, and I could hear in her voice how exhausted she was. “I just want this all to be over.”
I had wanted it to be over as well, I just still hadn’t been sure if I was ready to accept that particular ending. Not yet, anyway. I looked back at her laptop screen, but it had gone dark once again; Nora was gone.
Ruby the waitress was walking towards us, ready to take our order and suddenly my heart clenched, my stomach knotted, the thought of eating anything too much. I asked for a coffee and Ange got a refill, and when Ruby was gone I said: “What if we logged into Nora’s Facebook?”
Ange visibly blanched, her whole body stiffening once again. “Why would you do that, Mads?”
“To see if anyone was messaging her the way they were Elle? And we have no idea what was really going on with her and Louden at the end there; what if we log on and there’s a bunch of angry messages from him? That could be something.”
“Maddie. I get it, okay. You don’t want Nate to be guilty of this. Because if he is, then that makes all your complicated feelings about him even more complicated. Even messier.”
I had to fight my way through the next few minutes, each one a small war. She was right of course; I was terrified of that: that sooner or later I was going to have to confront my own guilt in believing so blindly in Nate. Not just trusting him, but loving him, even if it was only from afar. But there was something else I was scared of even more.
“Or maybe I can’t bear the guilt of letting him rot away in prison just like we’ve left Nora to rot somewhere for the past ten years.”
Ange didn’t say anything, but she didn’t look away either. She nodded, just once, as if to say, okay we’re done with this now, and by the time Ruby arrived back with fresh coffee I was ready to order waffles, Ange asking for the same thing when Ruby turned to her.
It took me a little while to get up the courage to log in to Nora’s Facebook account. Ange clearly hadn’t thought it the wisest of ideas, so I’d waited until I got home, and even then, I felt the only way I could do it was under the cover of darkness. It had never once occurred to me to do this before; I’d continued to sporadically send Nora messages after she went missing, but visiting her profile page was a small torture and I’d given up after a while. Her absence was so present I didn’t need to be reminded of her presence to remember it. It was probably the same reason why I’d never found the blogs about her, or the Reddit thread, or the different true crime podcast episodes that had apparently been made about her disappearance, before now. In some ways, she was always with me, and so I didn’t need to find her.
But Noelle had changed all that. Like her sister, Nora hadn’t been big on internet security or thinking up intricate passwords no one was likely to guess. Her one password had always been “Altman1234” and by entering in those ten characters I was let into the last space she still existed. Every June 18th I was reminded of her birthday and watched as fewer and fewer people each year continued to write on her wall. I had, on a number of occasions, been exhorted to “reconnect” with Nora over the years, an act that no one had bothered to inform the good people of Facebook was near impossible.
As I had done when I first logged into Elle’s account I quickly turned chat off, so that Nora’s little green dot wouldn’t suddenly appear on anyone’s sidebar. I breathed slowly, in and out, daring myself to continue, and yet also willing myself to calm down. Despite the darkness and the lateness of the hour, or perhaps because of it, energy fizzed through me, a static feeling trapped just beneath my skin. My nerves shouldn’t have surprised me, I suppose. I hadn’t been alone in a room with Nora for ten years, after all.
I spent a few minutes just looking through her pictures, which I could have done from my own account, but it gave me time to get used to her, to feel her reverberate through me. Again, and again, as I scrolled through photos, I felt the loss of her rip through me as if it were something new, and not something I lived with every day. She looked so young. I couldn’t get over how young she looked. There were photos of Ange and me that I hadn’t looked at in years, our faces so much rounde
r than I ever remembered them being, my hair a completely different color, Ange’s eyes brighter than I’d seen them in years.
We were different people then; we would have been whether Nora’d been still with us or not, but it had made me feel every single one of those ten years and just how long it had been really since I’d last seen her.
I bunched up all the courage I had and discarded whatever shred of integrity I had about reading my missing best friend’s private messages, and headed to her inbox. I wasn’t the only person to have continued messaging her after her disappearance. Hardly a surprise really, considering everything, but what really stood out was that very few of them were unread. Even the ones which had appeared after she went missing. I hovered over my own message stream, which had been one-sided since early 2008, and yet which showed that someone had read them all. Who the hell was reading Nora’s messages? Feeling more than a little nauseated I clicked through to Ange’s messages, only to find the same thing; a stream of messages sent after Nora went missing, all of which somehow had been read by someone.
It was starkly different to logging into Elle’s account, which had been inundated with messages. In comparison, Nora had remarkably few messages in all, and if Louden had sent her any angry messages in the lead up to her disappearance, they weren’t there.
In all likelihood, if there had been any they would have been on her phone, which had disappeared along with her, but that didn’t stop me logging into her Yahoo account just to double-check there wasn’t anything there. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to get into the account—not because she would have used a different password, because she hadn’t—but because I thought it might have been suspended after ten years of disuse.
Luckily, it was still there, the inbox full of junk, every other email an offer for Viagra or Hot Fun with a Sexy H00kup. I searched Louden’s name first but there was nothing to see there, so I just trawled through the inbox, looking for anything that popped out at me, or snagged at my eyes, something that shouldn’t be there, but not really expecting to find anything, not after all these years.
