I Found My Sister’s Diary After She Disappeared
I could go on with the stories. I could talk about the days, weeks, and then eventually months that Emma spent in her room, in that spot on her floor, sometimes cross-legged, sometimes lying on her stomach, sometimes on her side, always looking into that mirror. I could tell you that she never left her room to eat or drink yet somehow didn’t starve to death. Of course I called my mother, I even called our father. I could tell you about the countless times my mother and even my father visited and tried to get Emma out of her room. She never physically attacked me again, but she always had something to throw. She threw a light cover at my mother’s knees, and she launched an electric fan across the room at my father’s head. Along with her behavior, her words became more and more aggressive. She insulted us, she very cleverly crafted her verbal offenses using particular strings of words she seemed to know would cut us deeply. We all threatened to call the police, and actually did on two occasions. But there wasn’t anything they could do—Emma surprisingly looked well, besides having become a little too thin for her height. She was polite to the officers, said she had just been spending more time in her room trying to figure out how to fix her things to sell them for profit. Oh, she was convincing. She was pretty and delicate and calm. She spoke to them to make me and our parents seem crazy, but once they left, she stared at us with such contempt that I truly believed I understood the phrase, “If looks could kill.” My parents gave up after a couple of months. I gave up after four months. I was afraid to stay in the same apartment, so I moved back home, staying out of my mother’s way as much as possible. We didn’t discuss Emma’s behavior. Instead of talking to Emma, I would visit the apartment and slip notes under the front door. She left the front door unlocked, I learned one evening, so I went inside to slip a note (urging her to talk to me, at least) under her bedroom door. On the way to her room, I collected all of the previous notes that she had never bothered to pick up, let alone read. I was nervous. I was afraid of her outbursts. Even more than that, I was afraid that I would find her dead in her room, from either dehydration or starvation or a drug overdose or who fucking knows what. I had no idea what I would find that evening. But what I found was nothing. Emma was not there. Her room was as it had been. If she had left, she took nothing, not even her mirror. I called out her name over and over again, searched the apartment for any sign of anything, of anyone. Nothing was missing or touched or out of place. In fact, things were just as I had left them when I moved out three weeks previous.
The police were involved, my parents were involved, neighbors and friends were involved. We searched woods and parks and shelters and hospitals. The apartment was searched. We handed out Missing Person flyers just like they do in the movies. Emma was more than missing; she was gone.