MISSING

Audio: Robin Sarkin reads an excerpt from “Missing.”

We didn’t know anything at all, but we talked like we did. At first, we both said: Misunderstanding. Dead phone. Back tomorrow. After a day of those kinds of stories, we said: Car crash. Hospital. Call coming soon. When I stopped telling stories, my mother only fell deeper in. Murdered, she said. Then, Lost. Taken. I told her we didn’t know, that we just had to wait. She said fine and made a home on the couch by the phone, but this only made her stories grow. “She’s trapped in some deep, dark basement,” she told me. “That’s what it is. Some creep has her down there, and he’s keeping her as his little thing.” I remember waiting, but not for my sister to come home. I only remember waiting for my mother to stop waiting by the phone, for her to stop with all the stories and this act of knowing. 
What I remember most, though, is the dying, the dying I could see without having to wonder. First came the death of the big potted plant in the kitchen, then all the long draping leaves hanging in the bathroom. Next the little ones that sat on the kitchen windowsill wilted, then the ones in the living room were gone, and finally the three in my mother’s bedroom fell dead. My sister had been missing for four months by the time the last plant died. I walked around the house, unsure of when it’d happened. One day they seemed to be green and bright, and the next they looked like skeletons. I found the watering can lying on its side in a pile of dust underneath the sink and felt all of myself turn. 
My mother lay on her side too, mostly on the living room floor. I sat on the couch and listened to the crunch of the dead leaves as she rolled on top of them, felt the crushing cause a strange hurt inside me. “He probably has her tied up,” she told me. “She might even think she wants it, at this point. Maybe that’s it – maybe she’s down in that deep, dark basement thinking it’s what she wants, being brainwashed.” 
“We don’t know anything,” I reminded her. “God.”
“Yes,” she said. “God help us.”
My mother loved three things, and three things only: God, my sister, and her plants. 
“The plants are dying,” I reminded her. “Don’t you see it? The watering can’s just right under the sink. Wouldn’t it be nicer around here if the plants were all plump and green?”
“Yes,” she said. “So nice.”
I don’t know which day it was, or why, but I picked that watering can up and filled it. I watered as she lay on her side, and she began to scream. 
“How dare you?” she asked. 
She stood up, grabbed the watering can from my hand, and threw it against the window. The window did not break the way she’d hoped, didn’t smash and add to her scene. Instead, the watering can fell down the wall impossibly slowly, like God was hovering above it. It then landed back on the floor where it lay on its side once more and let its contents bleed onto the living room rug.
“They’ll be watered when she’s home,” she told me. “How dare you force life into plants that want to be dead?”
I don’t know why I wanted the plants watered. I’d never liked them. Before my mother stopped watering them, before my sister was gone, I told my mother that the plants looked completely ridiculous, that our house wasn’t a goddamn greenhouse. But then, seeing them die and somehow still keep dying, I got the feeling that not watering them was wrong. 
Each way I moved, the crisp, dead plants would brush up against my skin. They would crunch under my feet, and I got the feeling that I was killing them even more. “You don’t want to be dead,” I told them. “How could you want to be dead?”
I tried watering them again while my mother slept that night. I told myself I was a very good person, far better than my mother, and spoke to each plant as the water sunk into the dried dirt. Instead of sleeping, I looked up at the ceiling and begged something, something I’m sure I don’t believe in, to make things right. I tried to be vague like that, thought I could outsmart whoever I was saying it to. “Help make things right,” I said. I said it again and knew that even if there was something up there, they were plugging their ears. That’s what I would do. 


The phone rang the next morning at breakfast, and when there were no developments, my mother made her own. “She’s going to be a mother so young,” she said.  
I looked up and watched a leaf fall from the plant sitting on the kitchen windowsill. I’d forgotten about my watering spree until that moment. I spent my mornings trying to hold onto the gentle block of things lost during sleep, tried to keep blocking them as they turned up throughout the day. Like plugging my ears, only further in.  
“A mother?” I asked. 
“Yes,” she said. “I can just see it. She’ll probably have six children against her will. That’s how these things always go. I can just feel it. It’s a mother’s intuition, this feeling I have.”
“We don’t know,” I said.
“I know she’s alive,” she said. “And why else would she not be home yet?” 


I watered the plants again that night, thinking I was meant to do it. In the morning I sat and let myself remember what I’d done the night before, then I wandered around the house to look at the plant graveyard. At what point, I wondered, is a plant dead beyond any possibility of return? I don’t remember how long it took for me to reach in and check the dirt, but I remember a new hurt spreading through me when my fingers made contact with the impossible dryness of it. I dumped all of the watering can’s contents into one small plant and watched the dirt drink it up. I put my hand in and felt the rock of soil. I picked the plant up and felt the floor underneath: completely dry. “You have to go,” I told the plants. “Go if you don’t want to be here.” 

The next day at breakfast, the plants on the windowsill looked more like piles of crumbs than like plants. This, I told myself, was the point in which one must declare a plant dead. I turned to my mother, who was reading the orange juice label like she might learn something from it, like it might reveal all that she needed to know. 
“I have an idea,” I said. “And it’s okay if you don’t like it.”
She kept reading. I felt a breeze run through the kitchen, but the windows were closed. I felt all the plants in the house, even the ones I couldn’t see, keep dying. 
“What?” she asked. “What will I not like?” 
“I said it’s okay if you don’t like it.”
“God help you,” she said, sighing big. “Just go ahead and ask.”  
“I’ve just been thinking about the plants,” I said.
She looked up and the house, the kitchen, all the plants inside it, stood very still. She looked at me with a face that I knew, still know, was asking me why I came home that day, why I was still sitting in front of her while her sweet little thing was not. 
“I can just see him,” she said. “Can’t you?”
“Mom,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about the plants.”
“Again with the plants,” she said. “Why can’t you just leave them alone? Why can’t you just let them be?” 
“I only wonder if you have a green thumb, you know? If maybe they only want to be watered by you?”
“And so what if I do?”
“It’s only that I tried, and they didn’t want me.”
“I told you not to do that.”
“Please,” I said. “Please water them.” 
“God help you,” she said. “God help both of you.” 
“Please do something,” I said. “Or I’ll throw them out.” 
My mother began to cry, and she went to the living room where she lay on her side and crushed the dead leaves and waited for a ring.   
“I can just see her,” she said. “I can see them both. He dragged her down to that deep, dark basement and she’s stuck down there, crying up to me. I can see his eyes, can’t you? Big yellow eyes – barely even a person.” 
“Yes,” I said. “I guess I can.”  
I watched as she continued to cry.
 “Can’t you just see her?” she asked. “Can’t you just see her down there?”

I looked up at the ceiling and prayed for a change in the leaves.