Chapter V #2
We were quiet as Bernie double-checked the cameras, first the front door, then the back door.
“Did she go out a fucking window?” Bernie mumbled, mostly to herself. “This doesn’t make any sense.”
“She’s not here,” Clara said slowly, puzzling it out. “But she didn’t leave…”
“Could the cameras have glitched?” I asked. “The cameras must have glitched. That’s the only solution.”
“I guess,” Clara said. “They’re pretty expensive cameras, though…”
“But she couldn’t have just disappeared,” I said.
“We looked everywhere,” Bernadette reasoned. “Winnie is right; the cameras must have glitched.”
“But then where did she go?” Clara asked. “Where is she?”
I sat down on the bed, holding the sides of my skull with my hands, holding myself together. Where would Evelyn go if she was betrayed by the very people who were supposed to protect her the hardest? Where would she go if she couldn’t trust us, her sisters, anymore?
“Maybe she really did go to Danielle’s?” I said finally. “Maybe? Just to … get away?”
“Aunt Bea’s?” Bernadette said.
“But she didn’t pack a bag,” I asked. “If she was going to Vermont, she would have packed a bag.”
“And she would have taken her phone,” Bernadette agreed.
I covered my face with my hands. I wanted to dig a hole in the ground and crawl into it, bury myself alive in penance for the terrible thing I’d done to my sister. I had driven her away. I had driven Henry away and now I had driven my sister away, too.
Bernadette slapped my hands down. “Get it together,” she hissed, and I saw how worried she looked, how nervous and scared, and I shook my head.
“It’s all my fault,” I said.
“It doesn’t really matter whose fault it is,” Clara said matter-of-factly. “What matters is that Evelyn is gone, we have no way to contact her, and Henry isn’t answering us. So what do we do?”
“Maybe she left something,” I said.
“Something?” Clara repeated. “Like a clue?”
“I don’t know, like … Just something.”
“No, that’s a good idea,” Bernadette said. “We should look for something. Anything.”
It gave us something to do.
We searched Evelyn’s room, top to bottom, then moved into the shared attic space, methodically overturning couch cushions, peering into bathroom cupboards, shining a phone flashlight into the crevices of Evelyn’s piano, eschewing all logic to look in the most unlikely of hiding places.
And then we actually found something.
It was buried in the bathroom trash, which Clara had overturned on the tile floor and gone through meticulously, piece by disgusting piece.
“What does this mean?” Clara asked in a small voice, flattening out the crumpled piece of notebook paper on the floor, pressing the creases out as best she could.
There was one single line here, written in Evelyn’s unmistakably neat, careful handwriting:
I know why you did it and I
The line was crossed out, the paper torn and balled up, discarded.
“Wherever she is, she might check her email,” Bernadette said, and walked into her own room, emerging a moment later with her laptop, so covered in band stickers that not a speck of its metal case was still showing. We sat down on the couch, Bernie in the middle, Clara and I on either side.
The note was in Clara’s pocket but it was burning a hole into my skin; I could feel it as clearly as if it were pressed against my leg.
Bernie opened a new email message and began typing feverishly. Clara and I were both grateful she didn’t ask us for input. I didn’t think, at that moment, I would have been able to come up with anything remotely like a sentence.
We found the note you put in the trash can and we know you left sometime last night.
We know you’re upset with us and you have every right to be.
We just want to know that you are safe. We won’t tell Mom and Dad you’re gone okay, just let us know you’re safe and we’ll give you all the time you need.
She didn’t bother addressing it or signing it and she didn’t ask for our approval before she hit send. A gentle whoosh flung the email into the void, and I pictured it bouncing off satellites, trying to find my sister in this cold and dismal city.
Bernadette closed her laptop and for a minute we just stared at it, stared at Bernadette’s hands resting on it, her chipped black nail polish, the one signet ring she wore on her left pinky (it had been our grandfather’s and it featured our worn family crest, the bust of a soldier in plate armor, head turned to the side).
“So what do we do now?” Clara asked, but what she meant was something like, Would it be really terrible of us to still go out to breakfast because I’m genuinely very hungry.
“Let’s go,” Bernadette said, standing up abruptly. All the worry that had been on her face before we’d sat down to write the email was gone, replaced with anger.
Going to Todd’s was the last thing I felt like doing, but I followed my sisters downstairs and out the door.
Out on the sidewalk, before I could stop myself, I turned around to glance up at Evelyn’s bedroom window.
For just one moment, my mind conjured up a shadow there, either a ghost boy or a living sister, but then the sun moved out from behind a cloud and there was nothing but an empty pane of glass.
We stuck together the entire day, the remaining Farthing sisters, as if letting one of us out of the others’ sight was an invitation for another missing girl.
After Todd’s we came home and took showers and tried to pretend not to notice the obsessive way Bernadette was checking her phone, every five minutes taking it out of her pocket, refreshing her email once, twice, three times, pulling down with her thumb and letting the screen bounce back up, over and over and over.
Around two o’clock the doorbell rang, and Clara almost fell down a flight of stairs trying to get to it, as if, had it been Evelyn, she might leave again if not immediately attended to, as if she might have rung the doorbell at all.
It was UPS.
“We have got to get out of this fucking house,” Bernadette announced, and we agreed at once, unanimously, pulling on layers to combat the cold, heading outside with no clear idea of where we were going, ending up at the entrance of the American Museum of Natural History, wordlessly showing our membership cards and diving into the crowded exhibit halls (going to a major museum on a Saturday in Manhattan was not something I generally recommend, but if you’ve just misplaced a sister, it can be a welcome distraction).
We wandered into the Akeley Hall of African Mammals.
Carl Ethan Akeley, as my father had discovered from reading every single plaque available to him in the museum (multiple times), was known as the father of modern taxidermy, which meant he was not afraid of slaughtering animals to make a cute little diorama (he refused to call what he did murder or even killing and instead referred to it only as collecting) (he died of dysentery at the age of sixty-two so I guess he got his).
And even though this was morbid and gross, it was also hard to imagine these animals as having once been alive.
Staring into their unseeing glass eyeballs was a bit like disassociating, and that’s exactly what each of us did, me blocking the entire display of okapis until a mother with a triple-wide stroller pointedly cleared her throat and glared at me until I moved.
“Sorry, um,” I said, scooting to the left, “I just really love … okapis.”
I found Clara in front of the greater koodoo display and we collected Bernadette by the ostriches.
“Do you think there are lesser koodoos?” Clara asked.
“There are,” Bernadette said, pointing. “They’re over there.”
“What makes an animal greater than or lesser than?”
“I don’t know,” Bernadette replied. “I’m not a fucking zoologist.”
We were all a bit tired and cranky by then and Bernadette was still moving with her phone permanently grasped in her hand, waiting for an email from Evelyn that I think we all knew wasn’t coming.
“Let’s get something to eat,” I suggested (the newly appointed peacemaker in Evelyn’s stead).
“The food here is gross,” Clara said, but we course-corrected and headed downstairs to the food court, which was completely devoid of windows and felt a bit like eating in a dungeon.
Bernadette got a slice of pizza, Clara got a veggie burger, and I stood in front of the grill for so long that Bernadette finally shoved a piece of pizza in my hands, along with a tepid bottle of lime seltzer.
We found a table in a corner and sat down.
The pizza tasted like cardboard. Clara picked pale, watery tomatoes off her burger.
Bernadette ate with abandon. There was a fourth empty chair that was so metaphorical in nature that before I’d taken a bite of my meal, I’d had to get up and drag it to the next table, depositing it next to a small family that didn’t even look up at me.
“Fucking hell,” I said, upon my return.
“I don’t have great service down here,” Bernadette said, figure-eighting her phone through the air.
“The service is not the problem,” Clara said.
If there were five stages of grief, there must be at least that many stages for losing one’s sister, except I was bouncing around all out of order, swinging wildly from denial to anger to depression to bargaining (skipping acceptance altogether, of course, it would just never be my thing), and inventing some new ones for good measure: blaming-myself-horribly, disassociating, turning every girl vaguely Evelyn’s age into a facsimile of her, doing double- and triple-takes until they shot me rude looks, turning back into themselves, becoming firmly not-Evelyn.
Why hadn’t Henry answered?
I found myself wishing there was a ghost manual somewhere, a forum people could join where they could discuss the ghosts that lived in their own attics, where we could share tips and tricks and manifestation techniques and advice on what to do when your sister fell in love with a dead boy.