Chapter Two – Stupor
Softly love and to love softly.
Dew on the sycamore branch by the creaking gate.
Where my heart hurries afterward through the path of wheat along the briar, to that stone, under which I lie.
Tudors, Season One
It was eight months after my seventeenth birthday and the month before Charlie's 19th birthday when she disappeared.
No body. No sightings. No traces. Just gone.
Charlie had planned for us to travel to Phoenix for the weekend with her friend from the hospital, Alison, who was going to visit her parents. Those plans hit a small, Renee shaped problem. I was recovering from a mild stomach bug which Renee also caught. Proclaiming herself to need care to aid her recovery, Renee tried to make one of us stay home. Charlie's protests fell on deaf ears with Renee, and Charles, as ever, backed our mother – insisting that one of us had to stay home. In the end, and despite Charlie's protests, I volunteered to keep the peace.
No one could fault Renee when it came to her single-mindedness regarding her own self interests. I knew how it would end, and didn't want Charlie to miss out on a much anticipated and rare weekend away because of Renee's need for fuss and attention.
So, our father drove a grumbling Charlie to the bus station with her friend Alison. She never returned. I don't think I will ever be able to forgive myself for that. We should have been together, like always. By being good, biddable, keep-the-peace Isabella, I gained Renee's fleeting gratitude and attention but lost my Charlie.
In the furore of the police investigation and speculation that followed, the bottom fell out of my life and our parents' marriage. I quietly dropped out of High School and took on more hours at the library to escape the house. Renee retreated into herself and Charles put in longer and longer hours into work and the investigation about his missing daughter.
For never ending, interminably long weeks we waited for news. Each ringing of the door bell was hell. Every mail delivery empty of news; agony. It was like trying to breathe underwater; smothering and pointless. The weeks quickly melted into months.
In the end Charlie was consider to be a runaway and the town gossips dined once again at the Swan family's expense. My Charlie was labelled a foolish, flighty girl like her mother. Who, chafing against the restrictions of living at home, had left and then met the wrong person and had the worst happen. Due to the lack of any evidence of an onward journey or witnesses to her whereabouts, this was taken as the most likely scenario. I never believed any of it, and I hated them all for believing it.
It was true that there was tension between our parents and Charlie. She had Renee's restless character but our father's steadfast stubbornness. She was not a flighty creature like our mother, but the tighter our parents tried to keep her as their child, the more restless and fixated on what she wanted she became. Her behaviour was a part of childhood; the tension caused by a child stretching for adulthood. Normal. That they believe she could have left only showed me they had never known their Charlotte the way I knew my Charlie.
I tried to explain that to our parents and the police, but was never taken seriously. They were more willing to listen to a tearful Alison who told the police that she and Charlie had sneaked out to go to a local bar with Alison's cousin who was on leave from the army. Her story seemed to add creditably to the theory that Charlie might have met someone in the bar. Alison and she had got separated and in the space of half an hour Charlie was lost.
I knew better. She would never have left me. We had plans to leave together. I was why Charlie stayed with our parents passed her eighteenth birthday. We were waiting for me to turn eighteen and then we had plans to go out into the world together. Always together.
My failure to successfully explain who Charlie really was to our parents and the police left me with a creeping sense of numbness inside because of my failure. That numbness left me withdrawn for the reality of what was going on around me. I listened to the conversations and speculations that followed Charlie's disappearance from a distance. As though I was a stranger voyeuristically witnessing somebody else's life being destroyed.
We had a visit from the pastor of a church that Renee had at sometime attended when her shifting attentions had turned to religion. When he'd called me a "brave girl" I'd thought he was speaking to someone else in the room, because I hadn't felt like I was there at all. At least not in spirit.
With the same detachment, I watched Renee's grief fuelled tantrums and Charles's clumsy attempts to soothe her while fighting his own misery. Throughout it all, I was stoic, dependable Isabella who never missed a day at work, or let anyone see her shed a tear. Even if each step I took to move me through the days, weeks and months of Charlie's disappearance made me bleed inside.
The numbness didn't last forever. I woke up to myself on the day that Renee started talking about funerals and marker stones as some undefined future event. When Charles joined the discussion without a murmur of denial, I knew they had both given up. They were willing to bury an empty box in Charlie's name, and move on.
Quietly, without drama, I walked out of the house that afternoon. The slamming of the front door behind me was the only indication of my inner fury. Finally awake to the reality of the unthinkable, I'd walked around town that day and into the night until I was too exhausted to walk anymore.
I came to sort of realisation; fury was better than apathy I had let myself drown in. It might not be hope, but it might give me enough strength to plan and focus on a way forward instead of losing myself in my own despair.
I surprised myself by how cunning I could actually be on my own without Charlie's wicked sense of adventure to pull me along. I began were my parents had given up – with the police investigation. It was easy enough. I volunteered to help out at the Sheriff's Office. I was the Chief's daughter and was trustingly given keys to the filing cabinets and left alone for hours in Charles's office. I used my time well by painstakingly copying out every part of the file on Charlie into note books and pored over every detail they contained, planning what to do next.
I handed in my notice at the library, telling my boss that I was going to work with Charles at the Sheriff's office, and repeated the lie in reverse to our father so I would not be missed there either. I told Renee that I was going to stay with a school friend for the weekend; she didn't bother to ask who. Renee and Charles were barely communicating anymore so I knew it was unlikely that she would think to mention it to him.
I cleared out our savings account and packed a backpack with necessities and a few precious items that I couldn't bear to leave. Our journal, the one in which we'd written down our plans and kept hidden under a floor board in our bedroom. The books that I'd asked for and she'd given me for my 17th birthday.
Before putting the books away, I'd opened one of them to the first page to see the message she'd written.
Bella, to inspire you with big thoughts while we're in this little world. Always, Charlie. X
It wouldn't have meant anything to anyone but us. In fact, one of the Deputies, on finding the book had suggested it showed she might have wanted to leave. They were idiots, and I'd been more careful about keeping my precious things hidden after that.
The book was on the reading list of one of the many college courses I had researched: Plato's The Symposium. It contained a translation from the original ancient Greek by one Professor from Berkley and the remaining chapters contained discussion and academic analysis by another Professor of Classical literature also from Berkley. Charlie had teased me about my gift choice for weeks.
I'd earnestly explained it was a philosophical text on the purpose and origins of love written as though discussed in a dramatic dialogue, and excited tried to share my enthusiasm and love of the learning contained within the stiff, navy covers. She'd smiled at my eagerness to share my attraction to book, and listened patiently until I finished and asked her opinion.
Irreverent about the classics as ever, she'd said there were better ways to find out about love than reading the crusty, dusty words of some long dead men, and thrust the copy of Gone With The Wind that she kept borrowing from the library at me. We'd hugged and laughed.
That conversation had inspired my birthday gift to her; her own copy of Gone With The Wind signed by the author Margaret Mitchell. Not an easy item to come by, but with the help of a friend of a friend of my boss at the library who happened to work in publishing, I'd managed it. Of course, I'd never had a chance to see Charlie open her gift.
Charlie' book and mine were the last things packed in my backpack. Placed together and wrapped up carefully inside a sweater for protection, they were two of the most important things I owned in the world.
The third most precious possession, I put on before I left the little two bedroom clapboard house in which we had grown up; a woollen navy coat with a sailor collar and pale blue piping. One of two matching coats that Charlie had had made for us, one of which she'd given to me as my second birthday gift.
As I walked to the bus stop, I knew that this course of action would hurt Charles and Renee, but I had to do this for Charlie and I. I wasn't their little girl anymore and they would get over it, eventually. I wasn't leaving secretly to be cruel. I just could not afford to be swayed from this path because of Renee's pleading and needs or Charles's need to indulge our mother. I'd let that happen once to my cost.
My secrecy was deliberate but with the best intentions. I had left them a letter full of reasons but not the truth. I did my best to throw Charles off of my true direction. I knew the Police Chief, as much as the father in him, would compel him to look for me. I boarded a bus and travelled nearly 100 miles in the wrong direction until the bus route intersected with the bus which Charlie had taken so many months before. In a busy bus station, in a nondescript town were many different bus routes met and divided, I changed buses and disappeared, headed to my true destination, Phoenix.
If I could not find Charlotte alive, I would not return until I had the remains of my beloved sister to lay to rest under the marker stone the Renee had so lovingly been obsessing about, or the story of her ending to lay her ghost to rest within my heart. Until I had one of those outcomes, I would not give up searching.
