Adaline Archer
I haven’t written a letter in years. Not since we were kids and Mum made us write to our Canadian cousins that summer, do you remember, Elodie? It’s been a long time since I felt the weight of a pen in my hand, heard the scratch of it on paper. I’m writing without knowing what to say. Where to start …
I went to your house again today and stood on the street opposite. It’s a crime scene now; blue and white police tape strung up outside. Even though you’ve been missing for almost a week, and the trail of police and forensics has stopped, there’s still a police officer stationed in the front garden. Your picture is all over the news – you’d hate the photograph the media chose. It was taken at my rehearsal dinner – do you remember? You’re smiling but it’s been snapped on your ‘bad’ side – your left – which you insist makes your forehead look weird even though it doesn’t. I don’t think it’s possible for you to take a bad photograph.
Anyway, I don’t know why I keep going to your house. I know what it looks like inside – the wrecked bedroom. When you didn’t show up to lunch, Mum was disappointed, but she made excuses for you, that you were working on edits for your book or you had a shift at Mugs you’d forgotten about, but I was so angry. I thought, typical Elodie, always does what she wants.
I ordered me and Mum a chocolate orange torte for dessert – your favourite – and even though I’m cutting out sugar and I’d have to go for a run that evening to combat the calories, I ate every single morsel just to spite you. We drove to yours. Book or not, you don’t leave people sitting in a restaurant for an hour – waiting.
Mum was the first to notice your front door was ajar. I’d already raised my fist to bang on it before she reached past and pushed it open. Just like in a horror film, the door slowly creaked open into darkness. We froze. Everything froze. As though the house was holding its breath. Then Mum called your name and went inside.
I knew you were gone.
We hadn’t even got to your bedroom before I knew. There was none of you there – your energy, your bounce.
You could almost pretend the mussed bed and cracked vase and toppled glass were because you’d always been untidy. But that illusion shattered the second I saw the mirror – the blood, the shards on the floor. Mum saw it too. She started bleating, ‘Elodie, Elodie, Elodie!’ the way she did that day you wandered off in the supermarket aged six. You got scared and hid in the toilet roll aisle. It took us fifteen minutes to find you. And even after, Mum’s bleating didn’t stop; she pulled you to her, gripping you so tight her fingers left little red marks on your arms.
In your house, I rushed after Mum as she hurried along the hallway to your bathroom. ‘Mum, stop,’ I told her. ‘We need to call the police!’
She pushed past me, flew downstairs and swung into the living room, then looked surprised when we didn’t find you curled up on your sweetheart sofa with a book.
‘Mum, please just—’
But she shoved me aside and ran for the kitchen.
I grabbed her wrist. ‘It’s a crime scene!’ I snapped. ‘We can’t be in here.’
She paled – my words pinpricking her delusional bubble that you were playing a game of hide-and-seek in your tiny house.
I’ve gone back a few times since then, but today was the first occasion a police officer recognised me. I lifted my hand in a half-wave and she did the same. On the way home, I popped into Mum and Dad’s.
For the past week, Dad’s had this look in his eyes – a searching, a confusion – like he’s lost his keys or his phone. And Mum, well, that delusional bubble is back. She keeps saying, ‘Elodie’s probably gone on holiday and forgot to mention it.’ Even though she knows your passport and phone and debit cards are all still in your house where you left them. ‘She’ll be back soon. She has her book coming out. Anyway, maybe she’ll have a tan. She never tans, not like you, Ada.’
We sat in the living room, drinking sweet cups of tea in silence. At thirty-three, I thought I’d experienced every kind of silence: tense, angry, awkward. There isn’t a word for the silence that lies in Mum and Dad’s house now – it’s heavy yet fragile. Does that make sense? I was only halfway through my tea when it became too much, and I put the TV on. We stared dutifully at it.
There was an advert for the RSPCA. A clip of a woman in uniform scooping a lurcher up from the floor of a squalid house. The camera zoomed in on the dog’s woeful eyes and panned slowly over her body. Puckered, round burn marks where a lit cigarette had been stubbed out. A gash across her side where a blade had split her skin. An angry red mark around her neck where a rope had been pulled too tight.
This is what people do to animals.
This is what people do to other people.
Is this what is being done to you while we sit and drink tea?
I left pretty quickly after that and came home. I’ve just had a new chest of drawers delivered for the second reception room. You’d say you didn’t like them just to save face but really, they’re something you’d have in your home if you had the money. I’ve noticed how you try to disguise envy with indifference whenever you come here.
Anyway, I thought I had the perfect place for these drawers – in the little alcove by the door, but when I moved them there, they didn’t look right. So I dragged them over by the fireplace, which just looked odd. Then I hauled them to that spot where the armchair used to be. Better. But not quite right. No matter how much I fiddled with them, they didn’t look the way I pictured. Too far forward, too far back, too far left then too far fucking right. I was sweating and frustrated and then, as though my arms were independent from my body, I gripped the drawers tight and pitched them forward. They slammed into the hardwood floor with a bang that would leave an ugly dent.
Even before you vanished, I sometimes get the urge to smash up my whole house because this life doesn’t feel like it belongs to me and
Ethan came hammering down the stairs and into the lounge, panicked. ‘What was that?’ He spotted the toppled drawers. ‘What the hell?’ I watched as he righted them. He glared at me. ‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said lamely.
‘I thought someone was breaking in.’
‘Sorry.’
‘You’re shaking.’
I shoved my hands into the pockets of my yoga pants. ‘I’m fine.’
Silence.
‘Did you go back to her house again this morning?’
I didn’t answer. It’s none of his business.
He shook his head. ‘Maybe you should start those letters like the therapist suggested, yes? Get it all out so you don’t smash the whole house up.’