“How’re you doing, Nate?” I asked.
Nate shoved his hands into his pockets and turned towards me with a sigh. “I don’t know, Mads. How do you think I’m doing?” He was facing me but not meeting my eyes, his gaze wandering across the snowy landscape, taking in the fractured group of people who had gathered to remember Nora.
His younger sister and brother, Noelle, and Noah, were walking together towards the house, looking for warmth; his aunt stood with her arm around his mom as she quietly cried. My oldest friend, Ange, was talking to Bright and Leo now, while our parents stood in a small knot, joined by Nate’s dad, Jonathan, and the Winters family. It was a scene familiar to me, too familiar, and I wondered if that was what Nate was thinking too: How many times had we done this, how many times had we stood here, if not exactly in this precise spot, then one very much like it, thinking about Nora, remembering her, trying to keep her with us even while she was taken further and further away from us?
Ten years. I tried to take it in and couldn’t. Ten years was a lifetime, an entire decade. What was there to say about an entire decade that, for the most part, had been marked only by absence? For some people if there’s something missing, if there’s a hole in their life, they fill it; I tend to fall down it.
“How’s work?” I asked, searching his face, desperate for something, anything. “How’s Texas?” Nate had moved to Austin almost four years earlier, and I’d barely seen him, barely spoken to him since, the distance between us so much bigger, so much wider than those thousands of miles.
Nate took another long breath, looked like he was readying himself for something and ran a gloved hand over his face before batting my question away. “Texas is fine, work is fine.”
“Wow, that’s really illuminating stuff, thanks, Nate.” I wanted to smooth out the edges of my words but, for some reason, even that day, I couldn’t. They were sharp and cold, like the weather, like the day.
“That’s all I have for you right now. How about you? You want to tell me all about your great, interesting life?” Sarcasm shaded his voice, adding an unfamiliar arch to it, and he was looking right at me then, his eyes dark and hard, like a dare. I shrugged off his question, trying to pretend it slid right off my back, and he decided that he’d made his point. “See, that’s what I thought. Good to see you, Mads, be sure to have a slice of the coffee cake before you go.”
And then he was walking away from me, hands deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched.
Nate and I used to be able to communicate with each other even through silence. Despite it, because of it, whichever way you want to look at it, neither of us had the words available to talk about Nora and that was how we communicated, through the understanding that she was there, always, in every word we said and every word we didn’t, every word we couldn’t. But it had been years since that was the case and, by then, whenever we saw each other, whenever we spoke, the silences in between had no give to them. They felt like gaps, misunderstandings, another hole to fall down, another hole to be filled.
I didn’t have any cake. I’d long stopped eating at those kinds of things. The food was a necessary distraction, it gave your hands something to do while you tried to figure out exactly what it was you were meant to be doing, but I could never take a bite, my stomach twisting and turning, my throat closing up as soon as I raised anything to my lips. Inevitably I just ended up carrying a loaded plate of food around before finding somewhere to stash it. No one stayed too long that time though. No one wanted to. We’d had ten years of these things after all, and were just marking time now. When she first went missing, even in the year or two after, there was still something close to hope at the vigils and memorials but, after ten years, that was just a way of saying look at how much time has passed, look at how we’re still thinking of you. Nora was gone, and it was simply something we had to do to remind ourselves that we were still here.
Eventually I followed Nate and the rest of the party into the lake house where everyone had decamped to. I would have preferred to have left without even a goodbye, but my parents had attempted to raise me better than that, and besides, they’d driven me there. I helped myself to a coffee in the small kitchen, wishing it was a little later in the day, wishing there was wine instead, or better yet, vodka, but grateful for the pocket of extra time it gave me away from everyone. The cabin was small, just one large room with a utility room off the kitchen, the front door opening onto the living room, and even though there weren’t that many of us, it was still too many. I clutched at my coffee cup, waiting for my hands to warm up, waiting for the crushing feeling inside my chest to ease up.
Noelle was sat on the arm of one of the couches, picking at a thread that was coming loose on the sleeve of her sweater. Ten years younger that Nora, she’d turned seventeen just a few months earlier, the same age Nora had been when she went missing. I stared at her, looking instinctively, automatically, for the similarities between the two of them as I always did when I saw Elle. I didn’t have to look for long. Her hair was lighter, and she wore it longer than Nora had, and her eyes were the same brown as Nate’s rather than Nora’s arctic blue, but Nora was there still. They had the same mouth and jawline, the same shaped eyes and long neck. I knew that when Elle stood up she’d be almost as tall as Nora was, but for now Leo was leaning over her, talking intently as Elle refused to meet his eye. I joined them with my coffee, maneuvering carefully around Nate as I did so, neither of us saying a word.
“Maddie,” Elle said, her eyes meeting mine, looking grateful, I thought, or maybe even a little pleased.
“Hey, you. How you doing?”
We hugged and her body felt small in my arms even as she pulled quickly away.
“Oh, you know. Not great.”
I don’t why I kept asking people how they were, to be honest. I hated that question even on a good day, let alone that day.
I nodded and slid my gaze towards Leo, who raised his eyebrows at me and asked: “How long are you in town for, Mads?”
“I have to get back tomorrow.”
“How you finding being back in Madison? You’re doing a PhD, right?”
Yet another question I dreaded even more than “how are you doing?”
I coughed through my coffee and shook my head. “No. I quit, actually. A while ago. I’m working in the communications department now. At the university.”
“Oh. How’s that going?”
“It’s fine. It has its moments.”
“Sure,” Leo said nodding, polite, polite, “well, it’s a job, right?”
I looked at him, trying to decipher his words but he just smiled, nice and easy, his face wide open.
“They all have their moments. Last call out we got was to save Mr. Hetherington from himself. He’d locked himself out of his house and decided it was best to just sleep off whatever he’d drunk in his car, but the neighbors were worried about him, so they called us. Probably almost died of hypothermia, but what are you gonna do, that’s the job, right?”
It would have been too generous to describe Hetherington as the town drunk. He was simply a guy who got drunk and happened to live in town. I wondered at what Leo was complaining about though. You become a cop in a small town, and what else do you expect from life except fishing drunks out of ditches and pushing cars out of snow drifts? Apart from a former classmate who’d been missing for ten years, of course. It took me a while to realize that he was throwing me a tentative bone. I wasn’t where I’d expected to be in my life, but there had been days, hell, there had been months and years, where getting to even where I was then would have looked like something close to a miracle. And when it came down to it, none of us were really where we had expected to be.
I returned Leo’s smile, or at least tried to and said: “Well, you’ll be running the place soon though, right?”
Leo