The Edifice

7. Mamma Mia

Sleep is for quitters.

Nine at night and my mug of coffee sits beside my open laptop, as icy as the rest of the bedroom. Wrapped tight in my moth-eaten comforter, I breathe in the strong sandalwood incense that slowly smoulders on my windowsill. It is of course, under no circumstance related to the smoky odour of someone I'd had little more than three conversations with but whose company has left my mind swirling. No, don't be ridiculous.

My bedroom desk is a veritable graveyard of massacred succulents and a testament to all the Pinterest décor boards I'd failed to realize on a nurse's budget. Strewn among the frail remains of half a dozen plants lays the veritable mountain of paperwork regarding Bob's will. I'd spent the entire afternoon slogging through it and yet I've still made little headway besides prompting an impending migraine.

Another wave of sandalwood wafts over me and on a whim I close the half a dozen tabs on Hersely real estate and run a Google search instead.

It takes several attempts before anything even remotely related to Hersely's Lee Noble pops up.

A Facebook page from ten years ago, positively flooded with the well wishes and prayers of friends around the time of his disappearance and completely inactive since. The local newspaper's appeal for information regarding the missing teen, headlined with one of the very pictures I had sorted through this morning. The award nominees of Hersely's under 15s baseball team.

The most recent result is still over four years old, a lonesome Blogspot entry on lost children.

Some fragile feeling tears away inside me the more I read, reliving the nightmare Bob had described to me for years. His only son, presumed dead by authorities and half the township. All the while just hiding, waiting for his father to pass.

Frustrated, I plow through a dozen more search terms- Lee Noble magician, Levi Juniper Noble, Lee Noble tarot- all to no avail. In no uncertain terms, it looks like the adult Lee truly accomplished his father's goal of dropping off the radar.

Was I hitting on a ghost?

The more I sit here alone and dwell on it, the more infuriating every interaction we've had becomes. From coercing me into his father's basement to acting like I was moments from death after reading some stupid cards. What a rude and irrational little man. I could retell our day together for hours.

Without thinking about it, I pick up my phone to do just that, and it's only when Bob's scratchy speech echoes through my silent room does the sucker punch of painful realization hit me.

"You've reached the number of Robert Noble, I can't come to the phone right now. Leave a message. End voicemail. End voicemail. Dammit, this stupid phone. End-"

A painfully long dial tone follows Bob's fumbling voicemail, recording nothing but my suddenly constricted breaths. The remnants of coffee curdle in my stomach and I barely recognize the sudden feverish chill that shoots its way down my spine in time.

I hurl myself out of my chair, fumbling for the bathroom just as the acrid sick reaches my lips. I empty my stomach and sorrows into the faded porcelain of my toilet. Maybe I am dying...

The notion wouldn't be so unbelievable if it weren't for the familiar palpitations in my chest. It's the same gut-wrenching anxiety that haunted my final school year after I'd lost my parents. Once my sudden nausea subsides into dry heaving, I switch my phone back on, staring at my pitifully short contacts list.

Asides from my manager at Hersely Aged Care, my most recent contacts are Robert Noble, my college therapist, my old roommate from first-year accommodation and my gynecologist. None of whom are of much help to me now. The peeling walls of my tiny bathroom become all the more suffocating and in a fit of desperation I hit redial, breathing in time with Bob's haggard voice.