The Night Before(11)

Does the past visit you at night, Laura? Is that why you can’t sleep?

She shook out the covers and then made the bed. Replaced the throw pillows that had fallen to the floor. Laura was everywhere in this room. Her smell. Her clothes, strewn about the pieces of furniture. A chair. A bedside table. Even the floor. They hung in the closet and draped from the shelves where they had been placed without any concern for folding. For order. And Rosie found herself straightening them as she checked the pockets, undoing the chaos in this room as though it might turn back the clock and bring Laura home safe and sound.

It was just after five-thirty when she sat at Laura’s desk. A laptop was open, its screen black. Papers and books were stacked in piles. A notepad. Pens. Writings on paper.

Rosie looked through them, slowly at first, cautiously, as though Laura might walk through the door and see her. It was ridiculous. Of course she was looking for something, anything, that might tell her where her sister had gone. If for no other reason than she had Rosie’s car and she had promised to have it back by morning.

Page after page, there was nothing but work. Notes and data about companies. She’d said she was staying on top of things. Rosie hadn’t fully believed her.

She started then with desk drawers, finding most of them empty. A stapler, but that was Joe’s, when this had been his desk. Some more pens. Paper clips. Nothing personal. Not even a checkbook.

She closed the last one and sat back in the chair, her eyes now on the computer. She placed her finger on the track pad and swirled it slowly until the screen came to life. It wasn’t locked.

She sat back then and stared at the screen, now filled with the color from a photograph.

Rosie was startled as she saw herself staring back, just ten perhaps, with Laura, who must have been eight. Beyond them, at the edge of the creek that ran behind their house, were two little boys. She knew them instantly.

One of them was Joe—strong and tan, his dark hair long, past his ears. How strange it was to see him as a boy, to be reminded that they’d been friends since birth, that they’d ever been friends like that, wild and free and young.

The other boy was Gabe, of course. He was the opposite of Joe—tall and slender, with a buzz cut. Each of them was so different, like they had been cast in a television show. Still, the four of them had been inseparable, and even though other kids came and went, they were the ones who’d stayed together until the end of junior high when Joe’s family moved closer to town. Rosie hadn’t seen this picture for years, since their mother had left for California. Laura must have had it copied and scanned. But when? And why? Laura hated everything about her past here.

They’d been collecting frog eggs that day, large masses of gray jelly with tiny black dots. They used to put them in buckets of water and wait for the tadpoles to hatch, which only happened once over the years. They’d been too young to know that the eggs needed to be fertilized after they were laid. It hadn’t mattered. The excitement had been in the hunt and the waiting and, of course, the friendship that surrounded the adventure.

Rosie wore candy-striped shorts and a pink shirt with frills around the collar. Laura was in her tomboy attire by then—dirty jeans, torn T-shirt. Their skin was tan, their hair streaked blond from the sun. Rosie was smiling, a big wide smile right at the camera. Laura’s face was not empty, exactly, but searching, her eyes not focused on the camera, but instead on the person behind it, holding it. Her eyes were on their father, her image out of focus because she was not the subject of the lens or the man behind it. Rosie was. Not Laura, though her eyes pleaded to have the camera turned her way, to focus on her. Good Lord, how this knowledge struck hard, as though it were the first time she’d found it.

She leaned forward and studied her sister.

How far back did it go?

The angry child, fits of rage, uncontrollable. Rosie tried to remember. It was forever. Their whole lives. Laura had bloodied her fists even back when she still wore pink, pounding them into a wall, breaking through the plaster. Rosie closed her eyes to see it clearly. Blood dripping on a snow-white arm. Tears streaking a freckled face. She couldn’t have been more than six.

Had anyone else bothered to see her? The grown-ups in the neighborhood had their own lives. Couples sipping cocktails on someone’s patio. Wives sipping coffee in the kitchens. Men drinking beer, their lawn mowers idling side by side on a Sunday afternoon.

A wave of guilt made her close her eyes.

Their mother told Mrs. Wallace that day in the kitchen that Laura had been hard to love, the little girl with fists for hands. With rage inside her. But maybe they had created the rage—all of them. She knew this now, having her own child. How easy it was to damage them with nothing more than words. Or indifference.

None of that mattered now. Time only moved in one direction.

Rosie started to click on the icons.



* * *



Two hours later, she heard the floorboards creaking. First came the slow, heavy steps of her husband. Then the quick shuffles of her son.

She heard her name being called.

First by Joe. “Rosie?”

Then by Mason. “Mama?”

Morning was here, though she tried to deny it. Even as the dark sky began to turn gray and then orange. Even as the clock ticked relentlessly on the table beside the bed. Minutes, then hours had passed with no headlights coming down the driveway.

“Rosie?” Joe was outside the door, knocking softly.