She'd started off as a dancer. She lived her life in footlights, amidst smoke machines and classical music, and the quiet rumbling of dozens of slippered feet alongside her onstage. Grace glided through her life, her head filled with drumbeats, her limbs forever itching to move, until the injury that took it all from her. She was eighteen, and her sister had just vanished not far from their house.
Grace moved through her days after that with her stomach tied in knots and weighed down with an anchor. She moved slowly, as if through molasses, unable to finish thoughts or form sentences. She walked the neighbourhood endlessly, until her legs ached and her hunched frame screamed for food, though she could stomach none. She walked in the darkness, she walked at dawn, she walked alone. Around and around, further and further every day, in ever-widening concentric circles, she drifted the earth in search of her baby sister.
She found nothing. There was no trace remaining. The police tried. They brought dogs, they brought detectives, they fielded hundreds of phone calls.
Her parents tried. They plastered the town with posters. Her mother rode the trains around, to random stations, asking every station master and passing passenger if they had seen this girl, waving the flyers under every nose she could find.
But as with most of these cases, nothing turned up, and hope faded.
Six months after the Vanishing, Grace was dancing on a rehearsal stage at the Gilded Theatre in Brisbane. She was on an intensive training program, preparing for auditions for a Swan Lake tour. She spun around lazily, not really thinking about what she was doing, alone on the dusty stage, with no music playing. Sometimes she danced just to not think, and as she completed the turn, she saw her sister's face in the mirror. Startled, she slipped backwards, straight off the stage.
The broken ankle that followed never healed right. It never stopped hurting again. The face in the mirror was of course her own, her mind playing tricks, her thoughts stumbling just as her body did, slamming her straight into a career change.
So Grace went to university. She studied Veterinary Science at the University of Queensland, attending her classes diligently, completing her assignments above standard. She was never late for anything, she smiled and socialised and shopped. She lived her life on autopilot now, not wanting to go on for any real reason, but more out of habit. More for lack of a better idea.
She thought about killing herself a few times, but every time she did, she would call her mother. They would chat about this and that, and Grace paid close attention to the quiet remains of grief in her mother's voice. The echoes of a pain that never dies. And every time she hung up the phone, her resolve to continue on was renewed, because Grace knew that she could never knowingly increase the suffering in that voice on the other end of the phone. Even if it tore her to shreds.
She soldiered on. One day at a time, picking her battles, always reserving her strength, because there was never an end to the struggles of life. Every day there was something else to face, something else to survive. Grace controlled her mental strain carefully, knowing her limits, keeping life manageable. You can never control everything, she reasoned, but you can control what you can, and so you must.
She finished university. She went to work at a Vet Surgery back in her hometown, where she could keep an eye on her parents, and where she could spend her evenings walking her dog. Through her old neighbourhood. Around and around, past the place of the Vanishing. Grace often felt her little sister was walking just behind her, just out of sight, or perhaps just around the next corner.
She kept going. She became a quiet, serious person, muffled by the constant shadow of Gregory Wrigley and the horrors he crammed into her imagination.
Outwardly, over time, she learned to camouflage herself. She smiled, and forced herself to make friends - ones who never knew her sister, so that she might stand a chance of setting aside her pain on a night out - but on the inside she never left that stage at the Gilded Theatre. In the furthest corner of her mind, in the little music box she locked her pain in, the tiny ballerina that spun whenever the lid was opened faced its sister in the mirror, every time it turned.
