It is a cloudy, rainy day in Texas when I first get the call. I am out running errands for my parents, grabbing groceries. I don’t pay rent, so this is the least that I can do. I pick up the phone, balancing it against my ear as I press on forward and drag the cart with the broken wheel across the linoleum floor.
My mother is on the other end, and I half-expect her to request that I add another item to the list, but her face tells me otherwise.
“Hi,” she says, and I find myself standing still in the middle of an aisle, obstructing the paths of plenty of other carts. My chest freezes as I attempt to get out of the way.
“Hi,” I respond. “What’s up?”
“I figure I should tell you now,” she says, and I am backed up against the canned food section, nearly knocking over a can of olives in my attempt to get out of the way.
“Tell me what?” This is the kind of conversation that absolutely kills me. Something is wrong, and I want to know what it is rather than have the question dangled over my head. My heart pounds, and I am expecting someone in the family to have died.
“Rory’s missing.”
Normally, these calls are not as half as bad as I imagine them to be, but this news is pretty jolting. I would be home in less than a half of an hour, but my mother felt a need to call me now, and I am glad she did. This should have told me that whatever is happening is serious. And so far, the music in the grocery store is playing far too loud for me to concentrate on anything else that she is saying.
Abandoning my cart, I head out of the store, figuring that I don’t need to buy all of these items just yet and I can return for them later.
When I get home, my mom explains everything. My sister, Clara, is beside herself in panic, and she is upset beyond words. Rory, her husband, went out for a night with the boys and didn’t come back in the morning, or the day after at all. Someone has to be missing for twenty-four hours before they are considered a missing person, and Rory never showed up.
The moment I get home, I call Clara and I hear her voice choked with tears. This is the most painful sound I have ever heard in my life. A voice of a woman trying to be strong, but failing, a voice of a woman trying to keep it together, but everything is falling apart.
What do I say in a moment like this? I can lie and tell her that everything will be fine when I have no idea if it will be. I can try and convince her that things will get better if she believes they will, but how am I supposed to know? I have absolutely no information, and talking about it further will only upset her.
We end up sitting on the phone in silence, and it is the first time that we have talked in a few months. We used to be so close, and we used to spend all of our time together, but life brought us to our separate ways. I stayed home, and she started her life with her long-time boyfriend in Florida. Since we have been apart, I have never stopped caring about her, and we check in with each other via text message and social media but it has been far too long since we have spoken on the phone.
“Do you have anyone that can stay with you while this is going on?” I ask, and I hear her whimper on the other end of the line.
“No.”
“No one to help you with Wesley?”
“No.”
I stay on the phone with her for hours and it is her who breaks the conversation, trying to convince me that she will be fine when I know she won’t be, not so long as Rory is gone. My parents are worried, my father pacing around the house and trying to keep busy while my mother anxiously and repeatedly pets one of our two cats. At least someone in this house is getting the better end of this situation.
