I’ve had five years for the reality of Chavi’s death to seep into my bones, but that doesn’t keep the memories from bleeding sometimes, doesn’t prevent the nightmares that wake me in a sweat, throat raw from screaming. I don’t know that anything will ever actually stop them.
Mum wakes me with a firm shake, her arms around me before I can open my eyes, before I can properly recall that I’m safe, in my bed in our rental house in Huntington, far away from the neighborhood church outside of Boston where I last saw my sister. The nightmares don’t fall into any sort of pattern—there’s no way to guess what will trigger one—but they happen often enough that we’ve developed a routine for dealing with them.
While I take a cool shower, Mum strips my bed of sweat-damp sheets and heads downstairs to the laundry room. When she comes back, two mugs of tea in her hands, I’m already in fresh pajamas and settled in her bed. Neither of us wants me alone after one of these dreams, but I won’t sleep again and I don’t want her to lose sleep staying up with me, so this is our compromise. We pop in a DVD and Mum is out cold halfway through the first episode of one of the BBC Nature programs.
I brought my journal to Mum’s room, but I’m not really feeling it. There are years of nightmares across dozens of journals; telling Chavi about another one won’t help anything.
Maybe telling someone else might.
Inara’s letter sticks out from the top of the notebook, where it’s been living for the past week. Maybe I finally know how to answer it.
Dear Inara,
My sister Chavi died on a Monday, two days after my twelfth birthday. She was seventeen.
We spent all weekend celebrating my birthday. Saturday we spent at the nearby park. Technically it was a churchyard, but the church was tangled in taxes and repossession, and our neighborhood just sort of . . . took it over. Everything was blooming, and the day was filled with laughter and games and food. Not everyone in the neighborhood got along, but most did. Sunday was for family, for favorite meals and movies. Our only trip out was when Mum and Chavi took me to the mall to get my nose pierced.
Dad stayed behind in protest. My parents were both born in India and raised in London, and he always argued that leaving behind a community of culture meant giving up the signs of it, too.
Monday, though, we were back to school. Usually, Chavi would bike from the senior high to the junior, and we’d head home together, but I had a yearbook meeting and she had a study group. Chavi had more freedom than a lot of her friends and classmates, mostly because she didn’t abuse it. She let Mum know when she arrived or left places, always updated her if plans, locations, or people changed. Always.
When Chavi texted to say she’d be home by nine, we had every reason to expect she would be, but nine o’clock came and went, and Chavi didn’t.
Ten o’clock came and went, and Chavi didn’t.
She didn’t answer texts or calls, and that just wasn’t Chavi.
Mum called the others in the study group, but they all said the same thing: she left the coffee shop around eight, biking the same direction as always. One of the boys offered her a ride, but she said no. Chavi always said no when he offered her something, because he had a crush on her and she didn’t feel the same way. Dad laughed at Mum and me for worrying. Chavi was just being a teenager, he said, and when she got home, she’d be grounded and she wouldn’t ever do it again. That wasn’t Chavi, though.
The disc menu pops up on the television, tinkling music on a twenty-second loop. Rather than get up to change the disc, I hit “play all” again. I take a moment to shake out my hand, rubbing out the cramps starting to form.
Chavi going missing is easy to talk about. What followed is less so.
But Inara’s nightmares are out there for the world to see; until the next girl dies, mine are on the page only for her. I can do this.
Mum called the police. The dispatcher listened and agreed it was out-of-character behavior, and started asking questions. Where was she last seen? What was she wearing? What color was her bike? Could we email a recent photo? We lived outside of Boston back then. Chavi was off to college in the fall, but she was still seventeen, so she was still a child. The dispatcher said one officer would come to the house, in case Chavi came back, but others would be out looking.
By then, Dad was pissed. At Chavi, for making people worry. At Mum, for causing such a fuss. At me, even, for insisting on going out with Mum to search. I missed most of their argument, because Mum sent me upstairs to dress in something warmer, but when I came down, the newly arrived officer was standing in the doorway looking profoundly uncomfortable while Mum told Dad to stay and wait if he couldn’t be bothered to break a sweat for his missing child.
You don’t fuck with Mum.
It was late enough that none of the patrol cars had their sirens on. Their lights flashed, though, and it brought neighbors out of their houses and more people joined the search. It’s something to see, really, everyone throwing coats over nightclothes and pairing off with flashlights and whistles.
Josephine—Chavi’s best friend and girlfriend, though most only knew the first bit—went toward the school to look. Her mother had to hold the flashlight because Josephine was shaking too much. She knew the same thing Mum and I did: Chavi would never just go off or stay out.
Mum and I went to the church. It hadn’t actually been a church since just after we moved there, but everyone still called it that. A few members of the former congregation even donated a salary for Frank, the Desert Storm vet who lived in a studio at the back of the lot and kept everything up. One of the side doors was always unlocked in case of bad weather or a need for shelter. Maybe Chavi had fallen from her bike and couldn’t get all the way home. Maybe her hypothetical fall had broken her phone, so she couldn’t call for help.
We looked through the park first, but when she turned toward the trees at the back of the property, Mum told me to wait by the church. Whenever the weather got warm, transients started camping there overnight, so she didn’t want me back there even with her. She told me again to wait, promised she’d wake up Frank so she wasn’t alone.
I didn’t follow her, but I also didn’t wait. Couldn’t wait, not if there was a chance my sister was inside that building. It didn’t occur to me for a second that it could be dangerous. The church was safe, not because of any religious sensibility but because it was always safe. Chavi and I were always safe there.
We could spend hours at a time there on sunny days. She’d sit on the floor, sketch pad on one knee, puddles of colored light on the grey stone around her. We were so in love with the stained-glass windows. She kept saying she couldn’t get the drawings right, and she’d try again and again and again, and I’d stand off to one side with my camera to capture the dust that danced in the sunbeams, the color on the stone, the way the light and motes made Chavi glitter.
On the good days, that’s the Chavi I see when I close my eyes: light and color and glitter.
I push “play” again on the disc menu and press my hand flat against the blanket, willing it to stop shaking.
I can do this.