Lisa Gardner - Before She Disappeared

I don’t have time to say yes or no, before he unzips his backpack and removes a battered laptop.

I turn back around, unlock the door, and lead him into Stoney’s bar.

“You do not know my sister,” he starts. “People think because she’s a teenager she must be silly or stupid or impulsive. She’s none of these things.”

“Water?” I ask.

“Coffee,” he orders.

“What are you, thirteen?”

Emmanuel looks up at me blankly. Apparently drinking coffee at thirteen is not shocking in his world. I head to the kitchen to brew up a pot, because I certainly need a cup, giving him time to boot up the laptop. By the time I return, he’s seated at the booth farthest from the front door, frowning over the screen on his laptop. The machine is making a funny whirring noise that doesn’t sound particularly healthy to me. Idly, he lifts up the slender instrument and bangs it down on the table. The grinding noise stops. The battered case, I notice, is covered in stickers. Everything from favorite coffee shops to the Haitian flag to the Red Sox. You can learn a lot about a person from their stickers. So far, I’ve deduced that Emmanuel has the same interests as an average teenager.

“Cream, sugar?” I ask.

The answer turns out to be all of the above. Emmanuel pours enough extras into his mug to turn it into a coffee-flavored milkshake. I take my first sip of shuddering-hot brew, and remind myself it would not taste better with a shot of Baileys. Or Kahlua. Or maybe even that RumChata stuff.

Emmanuel turns the laptop till I can see the screen from my side of the table. It takes me a moment to understand what I’m seeing.

It’s like a virtual bulletin board, filled with photos of his sister, and plastered with what appear to be scanned copies of newspaper articles. There are bubble comments here and there and fierce words scrawled across certain sections in bold.

Big Sister. Caring Daughter. Star Student.

It’s a digital collage. Without asking for permission, I take the laptop and pull it over to me. I study each image, each pull-out quote.

A faded photo of a baby with her face covered in smeared bananas. A photo of a little girl sitting on an old couch next to an infant, patting his head like one would pet a dog. Next photo, Angelique and her toddler brother are holding hands, beaming in front of a homemade swing.

Then the most recent photos. Angelique sitting at the table in the apartment, head over her schoolwork. Angelique on the sofa, holding up an exasperated hand, as if to ward off the photographer. Angelique curled up asleep on the sofa, colorful quilt pulled up to her neck, an anatomy book splayed beneath her chin, where it must’ve fallen when she dozed off.

Angelique smiling that same shy smile from her missing poster. But also Angelique laughing, Angelique working. Fifteen-year-old Angelique, growing up in front of my eyes.

Then, I start scanning the words, and I understand everything.

“It was you,” I murmur, looking up at Emmanuel. “You’re the one who keeps posting online, visiting the message boards. You—your posts—you’re the one who brought me here.”

“I didn’t mean you.” He scowls darkly.

“Tell me about this.” I push the laptop back to him. “How did you do this? Why?”

He takes a moment, clearly gathering his thoughts. “That Friday, when my sister didn’t come home, when my mamant called Officer O’Shaughnessy . . . I could see they didn’t take the situation seriously. She will come home, they said. Maybe she had to run an errand or made plans with friends. Don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t worry. These things happen with teenagers. But these things don’t happen with my sister. Not with LiLi.”

His personal nickname for his big sister, from when he was little and couldn’t pronounce Angelique. I had read about it online. A detail provided by Emmanuel, I realize now, in order to humanize his sister. Make her real not just for sympathizers, but to any predator who might be holding her.

“Officer O’Shaughnessy promised he would ask around. He even called a detective, to make my aunt happy, and more officers arrived to question our neighbors. But I could tell they didn’t believe anything was wrong. That they thought at any moment, the door would open and my sister appear.”

“They interviewed your neighbors?”

“Up and down the block. The ones who would answer the door.”

“Knock-and-talks,” I murmur, the beginning of any search.

“I conducted my own knock-and-talks.” Emmanuel feels out the sound of the official words. “Except I reached out to LiLi’s friends. When they said they didn’t know where she could be, I knew she was in trouble. And I knew the police would not be able to help us. But I can’t knock on every door. I can’t make adults talk to me or force the police to listen. So I made this. To keep my sister alive. To let the world know who she is, so that maybe if someone sees her, they will call us. Or”—his shoulders square—“if someone has her, they will see she is a daughter, sister, niece. She is kind and smart. And that person will let her come home again.”

“What about Officer O’Shaughnessy? I thought your aunt liked him.”

“She likes that he speaks Kreyòl. That he drinks soursop and brings over his mother’s homemade meat patties. He’s familiar, but he’s not the same. He’s an American whose family came from Haiti. My aunt, my sister, myself, we are Haitians who now live in America. He has never felt the ground shake beneath his feet. He doesn’t understand that it can happen again.”

The way Emmanuel says this, I realize he’s not talking strictly about the earthquake that flattened Port-au-Prince ten years earlier. He’s speaking of their life even now, filled with an uncertain future.

“Are you happy here?” I ask. “Do you—did Angelique—want to stay?”

“We want to be Americans. Very much. LiLi talks of nothing else.”

“I’ve heard of the complications of your visa status. That it’s already run out once, and may still be revoked. Was Angelique scared that she would have to return to Haiti? Does she even remember your home island?”

“You do not understand my sister,” Emmanuel repeats.

“I would like to,” I tell him honestly. “I would like to, very much.”

Emmanuel sighs. He leans forward, gets that look on his face people reserve for speaking to idiots. “I do not remember Haiti. I was three when we left. Even my own mother, I know her face from photos, her voice from the phone. The rest, it’s been too long now.”

I nod.

“What I do remember is the dark. Waking up to a noise that scared me. I didn’t know what, I was only a little boy. But I woke up and I knew, without seeing, that something very bad was happening. Then I heard my mother, crying, pleading. ‘No,’ she was saying over and over again. Then I heard a terrible sound again. Smacking. Like flesh hitting flesh.”

I’m not sure what to say.

“I couldn’t get up. I peed the bed in terror. Then, LiLi took my hand in the dark. She told me it was just the TV, even though we both knew it wasn’t. She sang me a song, one of our favorites, and after a while I sang with her.”

“She would’ve been what, six at the time?”

Emmanuel nods. His gaze is far away, his young face grim. “Later, the earth started to shake and pictures fell off the wall and my sister was there again, grabbing my hand, pulling me outside into the open yard. ‘Stay,’ she ordered me. Then she disappeared into the house. I wanted to follow. I was so scared. People were screaming. I thought I would die. I thought we would all die, and there was nothing I could do.”

“You were three,” I remind him gently.