Severance

II

A high chime sounded when we pushed the door open. The air was thick and it smelled of citrus. The kind that bathrooms at fancy hotels smelled like. A ray of sunshine cast a spotlight on a line of thick, floating specks of dust that cut through two aisles diagonally. Cheap and off-brand toiletries, drugs, and candies chiefly lined the dusty metal shelves. The cigarettes were on the shelves behind the counter, and there was a Coca-Cola fridge in the back of the store. A packet of sunflower seeds made me salivate.

Mr. Meyer didn't look over. He was speaking with a statuesque brunette across the counter. She spoke with a weak American-stained British accent.

"Are you sure you haven't seen him?" she sniffled frantically. It sounded like she was crying.

"No, I've said it before, no, I'm sorry ma'am," he responded. His tone fissured with sympathy, but he couldn't help her.

She released her tensity but said nothing. She turned to us. Her eyes were blue, but not a sharp, cold blue. It was a cloudy, light blue. Gentle. She wasn't crying, but her eyes were hazy.

A mother searching for her lost child.

"I'm sorry," Mr. Meyer repeated, "I'm sure he'll turn up. Your husband could organize a search party or something."

She remained in silence. Following a thorny moment of false quietude, the woman exited between Robyn and me, reaching into her pockets anxiously for what I assumed was her cellphone.

Mr. Meyer turned to us, and he raised his posture. His eyes brightened when he turned to me.

"I don't believe it!" he chuckled, "I haven't seen you in ages, boy!" His speech changed quickly. He had an impressive prowess in pleasing everyone.

We used to visit the convenience store every morning and sometimes in the late evening. Robyn, Reese, and I. Reese Lauterbach was my second brother. He was the youngest. He sported short, faint brown hair that he wore combed to the side. He had focused, dark brown, almost black eyes that rolled away distractions from what he found important: school, work, family. He used to be the serious one. When we were in elementary school, he was shorter than Robyn, but not shorter than me. As he grew up along with us, he became taller, towering both of us. Ironically, he began to lose his dullness as his life became more dull. He had become washed away, bleached by earlier tragedies of his life, nothing more than an empty orphan who cracked jokes all the time to cope with it all. But he had us.

Reese left about three years ago.

I was drowning in the deep oceans of sleep to the sound of rain dancing upon the rooftop. He had knocked on the door long past midnight. He was panicking, confused, tempestuous. It was freezing. He must have come a long way because he was drenched, yet a midnight storm had long calmed into a light drizzle.

He tried to explain what had happened, but he was lost in his speech. His parents were driving home but crashed into a tree on the roadside just outside their home. Reese went to go check on them. The car was completely totaled. It had bent around the tree on impact, and dark pools and sprays of velvet blood morbidly decorated the interior. Nobody found them until morning because they lived in the middle of nowhere in the country. For the first time, I witnessed Reese express his emotions. He cried and cried and cried.

It was that night I learned that even the most seemingly stable people can break in the heaviest of storms.

I didn't know what to do then, so I let him sleep on a spare mattress beside my bed. I think I was half asleep at the time, so I went back to sleep right away. I didn't have a good dream, nor did I have a bad dream. I didn't dream. I rested uneasily to the sound of the rain marching across the canopy of this jungle where suddenly nothing seemed in place and within which Reese Lauterbach was lost.

I don't think he slept that night.

I lived with my father then, and he didn't find out about the night's refuge offering until the next morning. He called the cops, but they had already found the crash. Reese was supposedly missing for several hours. They took him in and a week later, he was sent to live with his aunt Emilia up in Ohio. I never really got to say goodbye to him.

The last I've talked to Reese was a series of letter exchanges months ago. He's seventeen now, and he dropped out of school to work to support himself and his struggling aunt.

"Yeah, been a while, old man," I smiled at Mr. Meyer. A couple of years after Reese left, I was next to leave. My father got a job in tech in Richmond, Virginia, and I moved upstate to Spartanburg to live with my grandmother, Gam. I never understood why I couldn't follow my father.

It's been a while and I've decided to drive back south to visit an old brother.

"What was that all about?" Rob cut in, chewing sharply on a toffee.

"That," Mr. Meyer replied, "was Constable Eckford's wife, Charlotte. 'parently their son's gone missing yesterday."

"Ah, John?" We barely knew John. He's always been a familiar face and a name throughout school. It's been a long time, and I forgot what he looks like now.

After Rob picked up his cola and cigarettes, we left the store. Despite my earlier protest, we were set on getting breakfast and catching up on the past. The sun was beginning to rise.