gone.

The photo trembled in my shaking hands. My memory was foggy and distant with grief. I must have taken the photo because I was not in it. I strained my memory to remember the last moments of that day as I stood with camera in hand looking at my friends who stood with the lake at their backs. The fog began to dissipate. It was moments later, I hugged my friends, climbed into the car with my parents and put the horrific summer in the rearview mirror. I brought the photo to my face and that is when I saw it. I did not want to believe my eyes. This changed everything. Everything.

##

I stand with my hand on the handle of the closet working up my gumption to dive in. I call this closet The Abyss. The abyss is a living journal of my life, and it swallows the parts of my past that I’m not prepared to face in any given moment. But I am running out of time, and it must be faced today. The U-haul is coming on Friday.

My living room is a Stonehenge of packed boxes that are starting to leak into the hallway like cardboard mold. On Saturday, a battalion of friends and neighbors, I begged to help me, are coming to load all my possessions into the truck and I absolutely refuse not to be ready for their arrival. I will not be the friend who asked her friends to help her move and when they arrive, I will surprise them with the fact that they have been enlisted to help pack my crap and then move it!

The abyss is full of boxes I never unpacked from the last move. An abandoned chair. A spare television. A dust covered camera. Craft stuff from my creative phase. Canvases and oils from my painting phase. A cello from my musical phase. Three-ring binders full of college papers and textbooks that couldn’t be sold back to the bookstore. Boxes of childhood photos, plaster handprints, watercolor paintings that long ago fell from the fridge museum, and dried flowers from high-school dances with awkward boys. And about four hundred and fifty-six VHS videos from Disney classics in the thick white plastic holders to tv series collections of House, Parks and Rec and Gilmore Girls.

I purposely left this closet for last.

I am already eating on paper plates because I packed my dishes last week. My beloved books were carefully packed in boxes and labeled by genre (small boxes so no one throws their back out). I am showering with a travel bag because there is nothing left on my bathroom shelves except dust and a nail polish stain. I am fully ready to move except for the abyss.

I knew I was going to need time for this closet. This is going to be a battle. A struggle to decide what items I will move again and what items I need to leave behind for good. I’ve never been good at saying goodbye. I’ve already done it more than one person should have to in a lifetime.

The apartment waiting for me a thousand miles from here cannot hold everything. This is meant to be my starting over. The divorce is final. My mom is gone. And my dad is not speaking to me.

I start with the easy stuff. The spare tv can be donated; the random chair can go with the tv; and I can put my painting phase behind me. I promised myself that if the craft items and the glue gun were essential to life in the next city, I will buy them again. I am certain I haven’t been in a Hobby Lobby for a decade.

The VHS. My VHS player gasped out its last video-eating breath last month in the middle of PS I Love You. It must have been all the romantic comedies I played while finalizing the end of my marriage to He Who Must Not Be Named. They could go. Right? Yes. Of course. I don’t even have a way to watch them. Each boxy movie has a memory…not the actual tape. Most of them are on Netflix. It is time to for them to go. I take a few last photos and box them up.

Technology has moved on. So can I.

Then it gets a little harder. I never play the cello anymore, but I can still picture the last night I played for my mom. Just before the end when she was only awake a few hours a day. Maybe if I donated it, it could be someone else’s first cello. I put it in the donate pile but give myself the freedom to veto three items. I allow myself three items to be reversed from the donation pile. So, I put it off to one side just in case.

I turn some music on my phone and look wide-eyed at the stack of photo boxes. The key to photo boxes is to send them on to the next location without looking inside because if you open Pandora’s box of photos, you will be swimming in that pool all night. The stack teeters as I pull it from the top shelf, boxes stacked precariously clear to the ceiling totter and tumble sending photo boxes all over the floor.

Photos are raining down on me and my quick-bun hair to a scattered mess covering my bare feet. And suddenly I am diving headfirst into the memory pool. I clear a space, sit on the floor, and start to sort the photos.

Hours pass without notice as I take a moment, sometimes longer, with each photo. The images they conjure are so dense that I can breathe them in like the scent of dusty volumes of my life opening with the fluttering pages of a book.

I freeze. The next image on the top of the stack is Kate. Oh Kate. I am suddenly standing on the edge of Lost Lake as a fifteen-year-old. A cool breeze is coming off the water and Kate’s hand is wrapped around mine. I look down at our grasping hands and see Kate’s favorite thing in the world – the black braided leather bracelet her father had given her from Africa. Kate and I have met at Lost Lake with our families every summer since we were five. And we have neighboring cabins for three weeks each July.

I was always jealous of Kate with her waist-length, jet-black hair, and deep golden-brown eyes. She is unexpected and sarcastic. She is the youngest of five children. and every year, one of her siblings went away to college or gets married. This year, Kate was the only one who had come to the lake with her parents. Kate has a secret crush on one of the other campers who comes each year. Other families were regulars at the lake: the Walkers, the Drakes and the Nielsens. Erica Walker, Ransom Drake, and Peter Nielsen were our age. Kate was falling for Peter, but she refused to tell him. She didn’t want their friendship to become more and just be a “summer thing.”

Kate and I would ride our bikes around the lake until it got dark, and our mothers were shouting for us to come in for dinner. I brought my new camera and was shooting the lake, the cabins, the woods, my friends, and the fire. I waited all year for summer break with my best friend. After dinner, all of us would build a fire in the pit at the bowery and tell scary stories all night long while wrapped in blankets and roasting marshmallows.

That summer things were different. Ransom had noticed that things had changed with Kate, and he was not happy about it. Ransom had been in love with Kate since the first summer they had met at the lake. But Kate had never felt the same about Ransom. They were good friends but to Kate they were nothing else.

As I’m picking up the other photos from that summer at the cabin, the image in my mind changes and I am standing at the lake alone. The lights from the police cars and ambulances are reflecting off the lake and swirling in red and blue circles as the sun sets. The wail of the fire engines is deafening. My blanket drops at my feet. The goosebumps on my arms are raising the tiny hairs. The chill is setting in, but I can’t move to get the blanket at my feet. If Kate is somewhere cold, I should be cold too. The adults are hovering together in bundles and the police officers are taking notes on tiny note pads.

Kate’s parents are crying. People are emerging from the woods with flashlights calling Kate’s name.

When we returned from grocery shopping in the city with my parents, an officer met us at the front door. Had we seen Kate? We had been swimming that morning and shared breakfast on the deck. Ransom and Erica had ridden past on their bikes as we finished our bacon and eggs. I left Kate at her front door with the promise to meet up when we got back from the city. My mother insisted I go with them. That was the last time I saw her. I could picture her plaited sun dress, her hair pulled back in a long ponytail and her brown sandals.

Kate’s parents, Renee and Kyle Leigh, told the police that Kate had decided to try and catch up with Erica and Ransom. She left on her bike. And never came back.

Her bike was discovered on the other side of the lake but there was no sign of Kate. Erica and Ransom said they had not seen her even though they were on the trail on their bikes. Peter’s family had taken the ATV’s to Beckstead Hill and had also been gone all day. We stood together for hours waiting for information. They would not let us go far on the island because it was now a crime scene. I slid from inconsolable to emotionally comatose. What could have happened to her?

There were only two other cabins in the area. The Whittaker Family was in the cabin on the other side of Leigh’s cabin. The last cabin on the loop was rented that entire summer by a writer, Phil Bennington. Phil did not leave the cabin often. He only emerged to have a cigarette on the porch at random intervals. The police lights brought him to his window, but he escaped back into the darkness quickly. I imagine he didn’t want anything to do with the trouble.

Even now, sixteen years later, the ache brings a lump to my throat. And I wonder if Kate died quickly or suffered.

Under the picture of Kate on the photo pile, I pick up a paper-clipped stack of faded newspaper articles about Kate’s disappearance. It describes how they had all gone out looking and calling her name. They had divers searching the lake to see if they could find her body. I remember shouting her name as we combed the island until I could no longer speak.

The police focused their investigation first on Kate’s parents and then the recluse writer Phil. As the days faded, the leads faded. Everyone was cleared and invited to go home. My mom was worried about taking me home. I felt like I had to be the one to find her. There had to be a clue. How could she have vanished without a trace? I had been with her just hours before. Kate, where are you?

I took a few last photos before I left the island. Suddenly I felt like I should document everything. What if I never saw Erica, Ransom or Peter again?

We all were forced to live our lives without her. Like a life without the sun.

My family returned to the island one more year. I was still looking for Kate even though I knew she would not be there. The Leigh family would not, maybe could not, come back. It was beyond them. Erica and her family came back; Ransom’s family returned but he did not come with them. Peter’s family made their excuses, but they would not be back to the Lake.

##

I hadn’t looked through these pictures in years. When we returned from the island, I couldn’t bear to look at the photos I had taken that entire summer. I put them in this box and never looked back. In the sea of photos, I found those last few images from my last day on the island. There was one of my three friends standing in front of the lake with arms around one another. They look drawn, spent and under slept. Their eyes red rimmed with tears as we held on to each other with a new intensity.

Something caught my eye. I held the picture closer to my face in disbelief. There is no way this could be. What did this mean? Could they have had something to do with Kate’s disappearance? Had they seen her on the biking trail that day? Had she come upon something she wasn’t meant to see?

What do I do with this information over a decade later? I need to take this to the police. And tell the Leigh family.

I would recognize it anywhere. Kate was never without it.

There on Ransom’s wrist. A black braided leather bracelet from Africa.