A Disturbing Silence

                                                            A Disturbing Silence

A disturbing silence overtook the house the night after Julia disappeared. My older sister, Rachel, listened to her music with earbuds in, as opposed to blasting Deborah Cox through Hi-Fi speakers for the whole house to hear, like she usually liked to do. Dad took his seven P.M. shower right on time like he usually did, but stayed in the bathroom for thirty minutes as opposed to the ten minutes he usually took. When he went to bed that night, instead of closing his eyes and snoring for the next eight hours, he stayed awake with his eyes wide open.

Mom was the one I was worried about the most. Instead of arriving home late from the office with a large paper bag full of fresh groceries, scrambling into the kitchen to cook up a meal as she so often did, she came home with three paper McDonalds bags cuffed in her thin hands. Her normally pale face was reddened with sweat, and her normally neat blond hair was frizzled all over the place.

“Hey guys! I brought home McDonalds!” she shouted.

Dad was in the living room first. He was both buff and large-statured, his face oily and a bit wrinkly, his hair a thin, greasy shade of grizzled gray. Without a single word, he took one of the bags and headed upstairs.

“Thanks Mom,” Rachel said, taking me by surprise. Rachel never thanked Mom for food. Adjusting her puffy brown hair, she took one of the bags, and headed upstairs.

Mom pointed to me and sighed. “I have two more bags in the car,” she said. “One for you, and one for Julia.”

At this point, nobody had seen Julia since that morning, so it was beyond me just why Mom decided to bring her home food. That morning in particular started out as the usual for our home. Rachel up ten minutes before the morning bus, with Mom darting back and forth from the kitchen to her room in a simultaneous effort to both cook and wake her up.

I was the youngest of three sisters, and I sort of got ignored in their favor most of the time, unless it was to tell me to do something or to tell me that I was doing something wrong. People tend to do that sometimes when you’re thirteen. Dad was already gone for work at that point, and Julia, having just graduated and having a whole circle of friends, was usually gone for at least a couple days a time.

But that morning, strangely, she came home. “Mom?” she casually said, heading inside the kitchen. “What’s for breakfast?”

Mom glanced at her and rolled her eyes, sneering audibly in her direction. “What brings you here today,” she said in a condescending tone of voice, as if she was speaking to a complete stranger rather than her own daughter. “Don’t you know to knock before entering?”

Julia rolled her eyes and sighed. “Funny, Mom,” she sighed. “Always have been funny. Aren’t you going to wonder where I’ve been?”

“You’re eighteen now,” Mom reminded her. “You’re an adult. You can make your own rules, can’t you now?”

Julia nodded. I turned around towards the fridge to get some orange juice out, but by the time I looked at where she was standing, she was gone.

I never saw my sister again.

The relationship between Julia and Mom wasn’t always like that. It all started when Julia was fourteen, and she brought home her first boyfriend, Jack Howell, a sixteen-year-old junior with a tan, handsome complexion, bright blue eyes and silky hair as dark as the night sky. Mom wasn’t impressed.

“Who is your friend?” Mom asked, dangling a silver spatula in her left hand.

Julia squeezed Jack’s hand in hers, smiling brightly yet flakily at her mother. “Mom, this is Jack Howell,” she explained. “My new boyfriend.”

My mom’s eyes widened, and her mouth hung open as she dropped the spatula to the floor. “You, you what now?”

My mom never liked Jack. She had this insane way of knowing right away whether or not to trust a person – and she didn’t trust Jack at all. “He’s no good!” she’d yell whenever she saw Julia.

“I love him!” Julia would yell back.

“He’s going to be the death of you!” Mom would respond.

“No he’s not!” Julia shouted back.

Mom was right. The next year, the month after Julia turned fifteen, she broke the startling news at the dinner table, the old cliché. She was pregnant.

Mom jumped to her feet, furious with anger. “Calm down,” Dad said. “Let’s talk about this like rational adults, huh?”

“You were fourteen-years-old,” Mom said. “By the grace the Lord has invested in me, there is no way my daughter is pregnant!”

Mom grabbed her coat off the hanger, and Julia followed her shortly after. “Mom! Mom! Where are you going?” Julia asked.

“Away from this ridiculousness,” Mom said.

I didn’t see Mom again until two months later, when she returned home to confront Julia. Little did she already know that the drama was long over.

“I want you to know that I support you,” Mom said. “I’m your mother. And it’s God’s place to judge you. Not mine. My place is to support you no matter what.”

Julia sighed. “I’m not having a baby,” she said. “I had an abortion last week, Mom.”

Mom shut her eyes, sucking in her gut like she was ready to spit out fire all over her daughter. Her muscles shook, and legs trembled underneath her.

She threw back her shoulder and lunged a fist towards Julia, striking her across the right cheek. Julia clutched her face, not in surprise, not in anger, but in a bizarre display of amusement. She stormed out of the home in nothing but silence.

Jack’s father taught Julia how to drive, and got her a car for her seventeenth birthday. After that, we rarely saw her, and if we did, it was only for a couple minutes a time. I was thirteen at the time of my sister’s disappearance, and I thought she was alright somewhere. I thought she was just going to come back some day once things boiled over, just like Mom did.

But she never came back. Now I’m fifty-five and I know better. Julia died that morning. Whether she killed herself, or got into an accident or was murdered by the man she said she loved, I’m not sure, but I know she left the planet Earth. And I know her disappearance was the beginning of the end for my mom, who vanished off the face of the earth two weeks later.

Some mysteries are never supposed to be solved, I guess.