Ange made a face at me, grabbing back her coffee. “You know that’s not it.”
“Do I? We’re not exactly friends anymore. If we ever were.”
“You’re friends. Don’t overanalyze this, it’s just a weird day.”
“Yeah, I know. I’d say something trite, like ‘can you believe it’s been ten years?’ but mostly I just feel old. And tired.”
“You know what I keep doing? I keep looking at Noah and thinking that he was a baby when she went missing. That’s what I can’t believe. That his entire life has been the same length of time as Nora being gone.”
I looked around for Noah, unable to find him, and wondered if he’d gone upstairs to join his sister. He’d been almost a year old when Nora disappeared. He had no memory of her except the one we’d built for him in her absence, and I wondered what that looked like. What that could possibly look like. We’d spent the past ten years of our lives at events like this, memorializing someone we loved, someone we missed, but for Noah this had effectively become his life. He had no memories that weren’t connected to, and hijacked by, Nora’s disappearance. At the very least I could look back to when she wasn’t gone, but for Noah, it was all he’d ever known. I thought back to the day he was born, and realized his birthday was coming up. February 14th.
***
Nora’s pissed because the birth of her baby brother is ruining her Valentine’s Day plans, so we’re lying on the couch in her parents’ living room, illegally eating marshmallows. “I don’t know what they think they’re doing,” she says, widening her eyes at me, “having a baby at their age. It’s gross. Plus, you just know this is a save-the-marriage baby. It’s so obvious.”
“That’s not fair, your parents always seem pretty happy to me. And your mom’s not that old,” I say, but Nora’s eyes just get wider.
“Oh, really? You know the doctor said Mom had a geriatric womb?”
Nora starts laughing, and I can’t help joining her, throwing a marshmallow at her head at the same time. But she catches it easily, popping it in her mouth and starting to chew while saying: “She said she almost stabbed him with a scalpel or whatever.”
“That sounds about right.”
“Yeah, as soon as I reach, like, fifty, I’m gonna start carrying a knife around to threaten people who call me ‘old’ with. No one will be able to arrest me though. I’ll just be the eccentric, kinda scary old lady.”
“It’s the perfect plan.”
“Right? I’ll get away with so much.”
Elle comes into the room then, complaining about being hungry, and Nora holds out her arms to her, beckoning her to the couch. She hops up to join us, snuggling up in between us, and Nora starts to feed her marshmallows, daring Elle to keep her mouth open while she attempts to toss them in there. “You excited to meet your baby brother, smelly head?” she asks, and Elle scowls, her face a picture of cartoonish displeasure. She is not excited to meet her younger brother. Nora pulls her onto her lap, squeezing tight and says: “You know I wasn’t excited to meet you either,” which makes Elle turn her head towards her older sister in shock. “Yeah, I thought you were going to ruin everything for me because I loved being the baby and I loved being the center of attention. But then I met you, and you were just the coolest, even though you cried, like, all the time, plus you thought I was awesome, which made me feel awesome, and now you’re my best friend.”
“I thought Maddie was your best friend,” Elle says, looking over at me suspiciously.
“Well, sure. But you’re my other best friend.”
Elle doesn’t look all that convinced, but I smile at her and she slowly takes another marshmallow from the bag and begins to chew thoughtfully on it.
Their parents hadn’t arrived back with Noah until much later, and Katherine had wanted to let Elle stay sleeping, but Nora had crept into her room and woken her. I could still see the look of sleepy awe she had on her face when she gazed down at the baby. I wondered if Elle remembered that day at all; she’d been six, so it was plausible that she did, but I knew that I’d had to fight so hard to remember Nora any other way than being gone that sometimes those memories of her being here felt too far out of reach even for me.
“Have you spoken to Louden yet?” Ange asked, cutting through my memories.
I shook my head. Louden Winters was Nora’s ex and the brother of one of our high school friends, Hale, who hadn’t made it to the memorial but had sent a vast bunch of lilies in her place. We’d all been friends at one point, more than friends really. A group of mismatched friends and siblings who’d grown up together from scraped knees and training wheels right through to tequila shots and heads hanging over the toilet bowl. I’d once been as close to Hale as I was to Ange; but then Louden had been named as a suspect in Nora’s disappearance and for some reason Hale hadn’t taken too well to me accusing him of killing our friend. I’d been trying to ignore Louden’s presence altogether, pretending he wasn’t there, but he was six foot three, taller than most everyone else there and it had been getting harder and harder to ignore the fact that I hadn’t even said hello.
“When did you last see him?” Ange asked.
“A couple of years ago at Christmas I think. At the bar. You were there.”
Ange nodded. “Right, yeah. You really haven’t seen him since?”
“No. Have you?” I asked, unable to keep the trace of suspicion that licked through me then out of my voice.
Ange swallowed a mouthful of coffee and nodded. “Yeah, I was in Chicago for a couple of days last year, remember? I went for a drink with him and Hale.”
I raised my eyebrows, looking between Ange and Louden. “Why?”
Ange shrugged. “Why not?”
I stayed staring at Louden for longer than I meant to, trying to arrange my thoughts in a way that made sense, jigsaw pieces scrambling to find their mate and failing. I knew what I wanted to say: because he might have killed our best friend, and it was almost there, rising higher and higher in my chest until I pushed it down, away, saving it for myself. I wasn’t allowed to say such things anymore.
It had been okay for a while, at least, the wild accusations and rampant theories. Louden’s arrest had come just days after Nora went missing, one of the main suspects, but he’d provided an alibi and been released without charge. It hadn’t stopped my own suspicions of course, and neither had it stalled the small-town gossip, but all these years later there was something childish about those words, an intense naiveté that I wasn’t allowed to indulge in anymore. They were words from another life, another lifetime, the one right after she went missing. Nevertheless, cold sweat pricked at my skin all of a sudden, the airless room stuffy with bodies, my own body still cold from the world outside as Louden turned towards me, feeling my stare, liquid brown eyes catching light. He lifted his chin in my direction and I let out a heavy breath before turning back to Ange.
“What did he have to say for himself?” I asked, my attempt at small talk still managing to sound like an accusation.
“The usual. He’d just started seeing someone, but I don’t know if it stuck.”
“Lucky her.”
“Mads,” Ange said, warning lacing her voice.
“What? All I’m saying is he’s a bad boyfriend, that’s all.”
“That was over ten years ago. People change.”
It