Missing You, Love Sara

by Jackie French

  I suppose the counsellor helped. In fact, I guess he helped a lot, because I stopped crying all the time. Most of the time at least. Even Dad cried when there was something sad on TV now, like our tears were always waiting to get into the daylight, but we got pretty good at not watching sad stuff on TV.

  Yeah, I suppose the counsellor helped.

  CHAPTER 48

  Letter to Reenie

  Dear Reenie,

  You remember when Grandpa died, and Father Michael came down and said a prayer with us in the garden?

  It’s funny, no one has done that for you. I know Father Michael has left and it’s Father Tad now, but you’d have thought he would have come, even if we don’t go to church except at Christmas and stuff, though Mum used to go with Grandma.

  I suppose it’s because you’re not really dead. I mean we don’t really know that you’re dead. We can’t have a funeral or anything. There hasn’t even been an inquest, because there isn’t a body. I didn’t even know what an inquest was till last year.

  You know Mum has stored your clothes and stuff from the flat at her place? In your old room actually. Even the teapot I gave you for Christmas. Myra and Elaine have another girl sharing the flat now. I suppose they couldn’t keep your room vacant forever. They need someone to help pay the rent.

  Sometimes I wonder what will happen when Mum dies. Will I inherit your stuff and have to keep it stored too? Just in case you do come back, some day?

  But we’ll know what happened to you by then. We must.

  Love Sara

  CHAPTER 49

  One Sunday with Di

  We don’t get the Sunday paper down at the farm, but I saw a copy at Di’s place when I went over there to work on our joint project on Japanese industry after World War Two.

  Di’s place is up in town, but not right in town like Mum’s. Her parent’s have about a hectare on the outskirts, which means Di could have a horse if she wanted to, but she doesn’t. Like me she’s not into horses though her Mum keeps expecting her to be.

  Di’s dad works for Soil Conservation and her mother is a surveyor and her younger sister is a pest. I like going over there because Di’s bedroom is right under the roof with this funny window that you can see half across town from when you look out. Besides, like I said, Di’s my best friend.

  We worked on our project for a while then Di said, ‘I’m hungry,’ so we went downstairs and Di got stuff out of the fridge.

  They always have really great leftovers at Di’s place, like cold chicken or half-eaten apple pies—stuff that I suppose you only get when you’ve got more in the family than Dad and me—and there was this paper on a chair by the kitchen table.

  I sat down to read it, in the way that you do when there’s a paper lying around, while Di was making us chicken and tomato and lettuce sandwiches with chopped olives, and there was an article on page three.

  MISSING GIRLS MUTILATED IN SAVAGE BEACH RITE

  ‘You want pickled cucumber on yours?’ asked Di.

  ‘Don’t care,’ I said.

  They’d found the third body, not far from where they’d found the other two. I found out what they meant by ‘mutilated’ too—the murderer had cut off her fingers and done other stuff so bad I don’t want to even think about it, much less write it down, but it was all there in the newspaper.

  ‘Sara? What’s up?’ asked Di. ‘You’ve gone all green.’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  Di glanced at the newspaper and I think she must have guessed what was wrong, because she ate her sandwich in silence then said, like she was really offended, ‘Aren’t you going to eat yours?’

  So I did.

  ‘I’m sick of homework,’ said Di, a bit casually. ‘How about I ask Mum if she’ll drive us into Lefton Creek to see a movie?’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ I said.

  It’s a long drive down to Lefton Creek and I didn’t think Di’s mum would agree, but Di went to ask her. I guess she told her I was upset because she came back and said her Mum would just put on a clean shirt and would Di go and ring up the cinema and find out what was on and when it started.

  In the end all of us went: Di and me and Di’s mum and dad and her sister Julie AND the dog (who’s this dumb dachshund called Byte—actually he’s cute—who gets carsick). Di’s dad didn’t want to see the movie but said he’d take the dog for a walk along the river, and after that we picked up some hamburgers at the Royal Cafe (they put everything on their burger—tomato, cucumber, beetroot, lettuce, onion, the lot) and took them down to the picnic ground and watched the river just wind its way between the banks so slowly you hardly knew it was moving at all.

  Of course dumb old Byte dived in after a duck, who looked all indignant and flew away, but Byte kept swimming anyway.

  So Di’s mum laughed and said, ‘Well, there isn’t anyone to see you,’ so Di and me and Julie went swimming in our underwear and Byte was all wet and licking my nose and stuff on the way home.

  It turned out to be a pretty good day after all.

  CHAPTER 50

  Another Closed Door

  They caught the bloke who killed those girls.

  He’d been at the disco both nights, and at the party, and he’d known all three of them slightly. He admitted he’d killed them when the police finally challenged him with it. Not that there was any doubt, because the police can match a murderer’s DNA with any stuff they leave about, like hairs or sweat or even spit or something, and his DNA was on all three girls.

  That’s how they’d caught him. Someone had seen him with two of the girls and they’d tested his DNA and it matched.

  But he said he didn’t kill Reenie. Even if he only lived fifty minutes drive away, he said he’d never even been up our way. He’d never seen Reenie, and the police believed him.

  I suppose he went to trial and all the rest of it, but I stopped paying attention after that.

  CHAPTER 51

  Another Idea

  Christmas came and went. I think I had this silly idea in the back of my mind …‘If Reenie is still alive somewhere she’ll ring Mum at Christmas.’

  But, of course, there was no phone call from Reenie.

  Tom rang at the beginning of December though. He’d rung a couple of times after my birthday, just to say hello and chat about things. We talked about the weather and school and uni, and then he said sort of carelessly, ‘I’ll be home for a few weeks over Christmas. Would you like to go to the pictures or something?’

  I held the phone tight in case I dropped it.

  ‘Sure. That’d be great,’ I said carelessly.

  ‘Good,’ said Tom, like he really meant it.

  So we did the next Saturday afternoon.

  It was good. Not girlfriend and boyfriend sort of stuff, even though I really liked him. Just friends, which is different. For all I knew he was going out with other girls in Sydney, and for all he knew I might have been going out with someone in town, though I wasn’t because, what with everything else, it was as if I didn’t have any spare feelings for something like that.

  But it didn’t matter with Tom. We just liked each other, even if he was older than me. We saw each other a couple more times over Christmas and he didn’t talk about Reenie at all.

  Tom had to go back to Sydney the first week in January—he had a job with some company over the holidays. But he said he’d ring me.

  ‘Only if you really want to,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll ring,’ he said.

  Towards the end of the Christmas holidays I had another idea about what had happened to Reenie, but you don’t want to hear what it was. It was all about the drains that run under the town. It’s too silly even to write down.

  But I called Bob Munn about it anyway, because it didn’t seem silly then. It’s just when your mind keeps working at something, you keep making patterns, even if those patterns are mostly made of nothing, and you keep finding answers, too, even if those answers have no relation to the truth at all.
/>   Bob Munn was really nice about it. He never said, ‘You’re being silly.’

  He never said anything like that to any one us at all.

  CHAPTER 52

  Letter to Reenie

  Dear Reenie,

  I just thought suddenly: Why did you want to break it off with Johnnie?

  I know you were going to uni next year and he wasn’t. But you seemed happy together and uni was ages off anyway. You hadn’t quarrelled or anything, not that anyone knew about anyway.

  And Johnnie really loved you. He gave you that pendant for Valentine’s Day and, anyway, you could tell by the way he looked at you. I saw you both in the café one day and I was jealous. It wasn’t that I fancied Johnnie (he’s sort of boring to tell the truth) but I just wanted someone to look at me that way.

  So why did you break it off?

  Had you met someone else? It wouldn’t have been someone local, or there would have been gossip when you disappeared. Maybe you just thought something MIGHT happen with someone in particular if you broke it off with Johnnie.

  And if that’s what happened, then that someone wouldn’t have said anything after you disappeared. You can’t just say, ‘I looked at her and she looked at me and we knew we were interested in each other. But we hadn’t said anything.’

  You’d look a real fool, but it happens like that, all the time.

  Maybe you were involved with someone from somewhere else.

  You went up to Sydney, to Elaine’s, last January. Did you meet someone there? Elaine didn’t think you did, but then maybe you didn’t tell her.

  Was there someone you’d met and you wanted to keep it secret? So secret you didn’t even tell Mum you were breaking it off with Johnnie, because she wouldn’t have approved of that someone? Someone … oh, I don’t know … someone who did drugs or rode a motorbike?

  How do we even begin to find out who that someone might have been?

  WHY didn’t you tell Mum about you and Johnnie, Reenie? You told her everything else, you gossiped about everything every day. Whether you broke it off or he did, why didn’t you ring her straightaway and tell her what had happened?

  WHY did you break it off with Johnnie then? Why not the week before? Or a week later? Would it have made any difference if you had?

  What did you and Johnnie really talk about, on that last phone call on Thursday morning?

  Why aren’t you here, so we can ask you? So we can finally sort it all out.

  Love Sara

  CHAPTER 53

  Nimbin, one year later

  It was autumn when Dad decided Reenie had gone to Nimbin. It was almost exactly a year since she vanished.

  Dad had been so sensible about everything up till then. It had been Mum who had kept crying, or me coming up with crazy stories and theories.

  I just stared.

  ‘Dad? Why on earth?’

  ‘Don’t you see, Sara?’ he said earnestly. ‘It just makes sense. She’d just broken up with Johnnie, and she’d been studying hard for the HSC. Maybe she was having a … a crisis or something, wondering what life was about and stuff like that. So she hitchhiked to Nimbin.’

  ‘Dad …’ I didn’t know what to say. I mean the whole idea was so silly. ‘Reenie would never live in Nimbin. Not Reenie. She hated any hippy stuff.’

  ‘And that’s why no one ever contacted us. They all stick together up there. They’d protect her.’

  What could I say? That the idea of Reenie in a commune was as silly as Dad selling the farm so he could be a ballroom dancer.

  No matter how much of a crisis Reenie had had, she would still have been Reenie. She would still have rung us, let us know SOMETHING.

  It’s funny how you know when someone else’s ideas are silly, but it’s hard to see clearly when they’re your own.

  If Reenie was in Nimbin, why was her handbag in the dump? Why had she never tried to use her bank account? Get her driver’s license replaced? Was she living without a bank account, a car, Social Security, a Tax File number? People need to prove who they are for just about everything these days and once Reenie did use any of them the police would know she was alive.

  (Or would they? said a small voice in my mind. It’s so easy for mistakes to be made, things to be overlooked.)

  We drove to Nimbin.

  It took us three days to drive there during the following school holidays. We called in at the Dubbo Zoo on the way, which was fun even if it was childish, and Dad even rode a bicycle with me, so it was a bit like a holiday, too. And he took me out to dinner in a restaurant every night, instead of just take-away at the motel watching TV, so that made it special.

  Nimbin was green, even in winter, with tall, wriggling rocks and strange-shaped hills as if they’d forgotten to turn into soil.

  We showed Reenie’s photo around the place, at all the shops and cafés, and I had an avocado and banana smoothie at one, which wasn’t as bad as you might think it’d be. We went to a really cool market where I bought sarongs for Mum and Di and this really great necklace made of different seeds and polished stones for myself, and we showed Reenie’s photo to everyone.

  No one had seen her of course. No one was lying.

  It was just that she’d never been there at all.

  CHAPTER 54

  Letter to Reenie, December

  Dear Reenie,

  Guess what? I just won the science prize at Speech Day. It was mostly for my ecology assignment. I catalogued all the species along our creek and wrote about when they’d been introduced to Australia, were they classified as weeds, endangered, or whatever. You never got one of the prizes, did you, though you always did okay.

  People have stopped asking about you, mostly.

  Sometimes it’s as though you really did vanish … I mean like you were never there at all. I think most of the hurt has gone for me—most times at any rate—except it’s still there for Mum and Dad, and that hurts me too.

  It’s so hard not to hurt them sometimes. I was telling Dad about this movie Di and I had seen the day before, about this bloke whose daughter gets killed by a terrorist. Well, she was just a baby in the movie, so it didn’t remind me of you at all; but then when I said the words to Dad his face went all white, though he pretended there was nothing wrong.

  Last week with Mum too. She’d asked this new teacher at school to dinner and I was there, and the new teacher asked Mum if I was her only child and there was this horrible pause in the conversation, like you could rip the silence into little shreds.

  What was Mum supposed to say? Yes? No? I don’t know? Or tell the whole story all over again, and you get so tired of explaining it, of treading the same ground over and over and over and everyone asks the same questions, every time. You checked the hospitals? You checked the Women’s’ Refuges? You checked her bank account? As though we might have forgotten or just not got around to doing it.

  Mum just said, ‘I have an older daughter, too,’ in a voice that signalled, ‘Don’t ask me any more,’ and got up to get the fruit salad for dessert.

  Not much else has happened.

  All the little spiral snails have hatched again—the ones we only seem to get in autumn and spring. The grass sort of crunches under foot, there are so many at the roots. I’d like to find out what sort they are, but no one seems to know, not at school anyway. Oh, and Elaine has moved up to Sydney. She didn’t go to uni after all. She finally decided to do an accountancy course, like Myra, and Myra’s going to be transferred to Bega soon. She’s been made chief accountant at the bank there.

  Mary Blackstone told me that Tom went to a party in Sydney with another girl. Johnnie was up there, and he told her, so she told me. She was just being nasty. Just because Tom’s rung me up a few times doesn’t mean he can’t go out with anyone else. Except I wish he hadn’t …

  I think about him a lot lately. Sometimes I wonder if I’m just dreaming of a make-believe Tom, because I want someone to be in love with to somehow take my mind off thinking about you. But I’m n
ot in love with Tom. I just like him. Really like him. When we’ve been talking I feel happy for hours afterwards. He’s older than me, and I don’t really expect him not to go to parties and stuff in Sydney …

  I just said to Mary, I hope he had a good time, and walked away.

  I wish I knew if he really liked the girl he took to the party though. But I’m starting to understand that even if you think you know people, there are places that are hidden from you, no matter how close you get.

  Sometimes I just can’t help wondering: was everything that happened a surprise to you as well? I suppose what I mean is, was it your fault, any part of it, or did it just happen to you, out of the blue?

  Should I blame you? Were you just a victim?

  The more you wonder about some things, the more you realise you don’t know.

  Love Sara

  CHAPTER 55

  Life Goes On

  You know something? Life goes on.

  I remember when I was ten and I ripped my leg on barbed wire climbing through a fence. It was a great jagged tear. It kept oozing blood for days and then when it healed I looked like a monster on TV who’d been stitched up by this mad scientist, but the scar got fainter and fainter over the years.

  The scar’s still there of course. It’ll still be there all my life. But every year that goes by, you just don’t notice it so much.

  It’s like that with Reenie.

  If this was on TV, of course, it would be easy to show time passing. I’d just have the hills turning into gold skulls like they do in summer, then that too-green colour they go sometimes in autumn, like a calf had had diarrhoea over them or something, then dried winter brown. Or maybe I’d show the creek just whispering through the rocks the way it does in summer; then maybe a flood, all chocolate milkshake froth; then all blue shadows like it is in winter.

  It’s simple to show time passing on TV.

  All that stuff about the hills and the creek did happen, of course. But there was also going to school every day and school dances and cattle sales, and Tom and I started writing letters to each other sometimes, as well as the phone calls, and we sort of agreed without putting it into words that we wouldn’t see anyone else, and then Mum and I went to Tasmania for a week in the Christmas holidays and things like that.