Identity [ON HIATUS]

7. They Find Her

My heart was in my throat.

And it stayed there, beating relentlessly and without remorse. A constant reminder that I was not in a safe place. That, though I was with my parents and the police, I was in danger. No, not me, Rose was in danger.

Everything was in slow motion. They came in their lit up cars and took notes. Rose hadn't been gone long enough to file a missing persons, but they were still allowed to make a call to Charlie Merchant's apartment. She wasn't there, but apparently, Charlie wasn't happy.

He was angry, of all things, angry. Charlie had told the police that he and Rose had argued, and she had left. He hadn't seen her and assumed she'd come home. There was no sign of a physical fight, and so they'd left him in piece, let him get away with it.

My fists stayed balled, sat on my living room couch with my parents flanking both my sides. It's like the world was against Rose and I, like they wanted us apart. My parents never asked how I knew to call the cops, how I knew that something wasn't right; they'd just listened, understood, and complied. Maybe they were used to it, twins did weird shit, after all.

"Get some sleep; she might be back in the morning."

Rose had other friends besides her boyfriend Charlie, but I didn't know their names, their faces. For all I knew they didn't exist, just a lie Rose had created. But I doubted that; Rose was popular in her own way, she radiated inclusion to anyone who needed it, and though it had slowly ebbed away since getting older, I still saw it in fragments.

When the knock on the door came, I felt the slowness, the calming nature of it. It wasn't urgent, it didn't have drive. Mom opened the door to a policeman with his hat in his hands, his hair soaked from the rain, the relentless, unforgiving rain. It never stopped fucking raining.

"We've found her."

The words echoed in my head, trying to process them, sat on the edge of the couch in out dimly lit living room. His next words were muffled, and my mom broke down into my father's arms, he too, sobbing into her sleeve. I knew and I didn't know.

I slowly stood, edging myself closer and closer to the door where the policeman stood, still out in the rain, as if at this point my parents would think about letting him into the warmth, the dry. That was when he looked up at me, when his eyes widened at the sight of me. I could have been a ghost to him, a hallucination at the sight he had previously witnessed. But instead, his face grew soft, and he squeezed his hat tighter, his knuckles becoming white.

I felt my knees buckling, smacking against the hardwood flooring, so fucking shiny sometimes I could see my reflection. I pressed my face into it, thinking about smashing my head against it, wanting it to swallow me up. My face was hot and cold, my eyes wet and dry from every single emotion I was feeling.

My world collapsed, my brain collapsed, and my heart, my heart lost it's whole.

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