Rootbound

Chapter 1

The pain started the day after my sister disappeared. My body was a Woodstock concert tormented by a thousand tiny lighter flames. "Complex regional pain syndrome," the doctors told me. But I knew what it really was—grief burning through me, making me desperate, restless, compelled to keep searching, searching, searching.

Where were you, Aspen?

My parents had given up after a year but I hadn't stopped. I couldn't, not with the wildfire raging through my limbs. I'd papered neighbourhoods with flyers in an ever-widening circle. I'd DM'd celebrities begging them to share a picture of Aspen on social media. I'd gone on any podcast or livestream or TV show that would have me, reminding an uncaring world about my sister. How good, how kind, how passionate she was.

How gone she was.

It was that fire in my limbs that had driven me to the protest today. Aspen would've gone; she never missed a protest. Climate justice, anti-ICE, Black Lives Matter, gun control—Aspen was there, always with some new, shimmering banner she'd painted draped around her shoulders, surrounded by friends old and new. This morning Canadian police had arrested Elders from the Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish Nations for peacefully opposing the pipeline being forcefully built through their territories. Thousands of people were marching in solidarity through downtown Seattle, the June drizzle doing little to dampen their spirits.

I tried to trail along the outskirts but somehow the vortex of people had swept me into the center. A high school marching band dueled with an old-school ska band and the protestors swirled in something that resembled a mosh pit. I ran a finger over the faded half-moon scar bracketing my right eye and a memory overtook me. I saw Aspen whirling in the neon vest of a protest marshal, leading the crowd of youth strikers in a belted rendition of Lizzo's Juice. Aspen had been mid-scream, mouth wide, when she'd accidentally collided with me—teeth-first. It had been one of our favorite party stories, how Aspen had bitten her little lister—at seventeen. I'd needed ten stitches.

I stared mesmerized at the dancing group, holding back the urge to throw myself at their swirling mass, to fall to my knees and be trampled by their stomping feet. Intrusive thoughts—that's what the school guidance counsellor had called them—these wild, fleeting urges to hurt myself. Apparently everyone got them. But mine were getting more frequent and less fleeting. Some part of me knew I would never give in to the urges; not when they were inevitably chased by the image of my parents' faces as the police told them it was unlikely Aspen would be found alive. I'd never even seen my dad cry before that moment, and he'd howled so loudly for hours that I'd had to wear headphones over earplugs to block out the sound. I couldn't do that to them again.

And anyway. I had to live. I had to find Aspen.

I turned my face to the rain, catching a few drops in my mouth to soothe a throat hoarse from a thousand urgent asks of, "Have you seen this woman? Have you seen my sister?" The pain flared and I promised it I would rest as soon as I'd given out my last handful of missing-person flyers. The pain didn't let up. It was used to my lies.

The crowd took up another chant of "No consent, no pipeline! Respect Indigenous sovereignty!" Despite the sandpaper feel of my throat, I joined in. But what I was really saying was "I'm sorry." The day before she'd disappeared, Aspen had begged me to help her make posters for the divestment sit-in she was organizing at a Seattle U Board Meeting. I'd promised to come but flaked at the last minute.

Sry, sis something came up.

The last words I said to my sister. With a sad face emoji.

My foot caught on something, and I tripped forward. I flailed my arms in a useless struggle against gravity. With a wet thud, my body met the ground. I lay there, face pressed into the pavement, feeling like this was it. There was no getting up.