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 smile, 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