Sister
(having put down the telephone): Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
If she
was worried at all, it was less about her sister being missing and more about
the fact that she might be on her way to visit, and how the little thumbsucker
could possibly be accommodated in the tiny apartment she was renting this year.
Sister
(sighing): Fuck.
With
two essays due and exams imminent she could conjure no distraction less
welcome.
Sister: Look, this is just typical
immature bullshit, it’s just
Mother: That’s, yes, yes it might be,
but it’s not typical of her.
Her
mother’s chief concern had been what knowledge she might have of her sister’s
whereabouts since she had not returned from school that afternoon, had not gone
to school at all even, her absence confirmed by a quick call to the
office,
Sister: Did she, do you know if she
had an exam or something scheduled for today, or a test or something? Something
that she that she, you know, that she would want to bow out of?
and
whether she was co-conspirator in some subterfuge, which she was not.
Her
father, who had made the call, had surrendered the telephone when the agitation
manifest in his voice began to border on hysteria, continuing throughout
frantic in the background.
Father: Get her to ask her
room-mates if there’s been any phone messages today. Margaret. Margaret get her
to ask her
Of
especial concern for her mother was to have found the cache of her diaries
gone. That she had left without breakfast was not typical, but neither was it
cause for real alarm. To discover that absence of those little books she
supposed secret however was entirely something else.
Sister: What about her E.T.?
Mother: What about her E.T.?
She always has E.T.
Sister: Right, yes, but, I mean,
she hasn’t left him behind, is what I’m asking.
Mother: No, no.
Tentative
in raising with her mother any speculation involving Judas, still they spoke a
little of his recent passing and whether all of that might somehow be germane,
knowing her fondness for the dog with whom they had both grown up and the loss
of such a constant’s potential effect,
Sister: You’re sure this isn’t just
a boyfriend thing? She’s not just staying over with some guy?
Mother: Well, not... There’s none that we
know of.
and
neither of them able to determine or remember if there was some minimum count
of hours as must pass before a person could be reported missing.
Mother: What do we do what do we do? Do
we call the police? Do we call the hospitals?
Sister: Just, you have to calm down,
okay? You have got to calm down. And you have to get Dad to calm down.
If there was, if… If she was in hospital, okay, you would’ve been called
by now, right? I mean, she’s probably just at some guy’s house…
occurring
to her at no point in such rumination the idea that her little sister might at
that very moment be lying sedated in an aeroplane thirty thousand feet above an
ocean they had, when they had last flown over it together, looked down upon and
referred to as the Atlantis.
