Missing

Lamia places her palms rigidly, queenly, on the arms of the overstuffed bookstore armchair. It is sage green, nondescript. The fabric has pilled in all of the places on which a multitude of anonymous people has sat. She fidgets slightly, warmly. She has been awake for 23 hours, maybe now a full cycle of 24. Having been awake so long and for no purpose, she feels excessively American: were it not for the iced coffee stirring in her stomach, Lamia is sure she would’ve nodded off to sleep in her comfortable-enough pillowy chair.

But her back is rod-straight, as it’s been for as long as she’s been in the store: shoulders rolled back, posture erect as a model. The chair threatens to swallow the diminutive childish figure she makes swimming in a much-too-large jersey dress. Her hair is soft, unwashed, a tangled mass of bleached-white curls and diminished shine. Lamia’s dress is expensive-looking but frumpy, a design tailored for a middle-aged woman, not for a girl her age. Yet somehow it suits her, its sequins in all of the wrong places, its blasé shade of purple appearing to make her delicate skin appear even more like pearl: this statue-girl sitting stilly with eyes like glass, hearing past the dull gentle roar of the Barnes & Noble patrons huddling into their overpriced coffees and unpaid-for books.

She could call Schützen. She knows that she could and knows that she won’t: it has been too long, and it hasn’t been long enough. When they last spoke he had said, “Bee. Rely on me if you must.” He had spoken and left the room for who-knows-where—again. Schü had business to worry about, business more important than his wayward and unmanageable younger sister. He had the hotel to run. Lamia had left then: hitched a ride to the train station and ended up at Hunter’s doorstep, where she’d lived like a vagrant since.

Until last night. Now she was nowhere again.

Lamia hadn’t intended to love him. She certainly hadn’t planned it, hadn’t acknowledged her capacity for loving, even. Not since Laila had she been so comfortable with another person—and there was the entirety of the problem. She’d been careless. And now here she is: huddled in a scavenged dress she’d found forgotten in an attic storage bin, her suitcase stuffed with Vivienne Westwood plaids and thrift store T-shirts left behind at Hunter’s. Her hands were shaking when she woke spooning his still-warm body. He smelled of her lavender soap and of something sharp. Lamia had been wearing her favorite outfit—a tartan skirt over a faded Mistula T-shirt—but as her senses returned knew she’d have to burn it: she’d have to burn the red away, the red of the tartan and the red of him.

She knew she couldn’t drag her suitcase through the streets all night, much as it pained her to leave her baubles and sundries behind. Lamia didn’t have the money for a hotel room, and using her credit card would have tipped off her father to her whereabouts as soon as the transaction cleared. Out of the question. She wasn’t ready to return to that place, even if it meant returning to Schützen. So Lamia left her pretty things behind while she walked the streets—aimlessly floating like some specter of a lost dream—until the rouged hush of morning arrived hand-in-hand with the opening of a store in which she could hide.

Now Lamia sits, increasingly aware of her immense and burning stupidity. She has no tears. She was prepared for this inevitability as much as she had dreaded it, had insisted that it would never happen. She hadn’t planned to love him and therefore didn’t see her love for what it was: a tender, yawning hole that couldn’t close until it engulfed him, too. Alone again, feeling the seconds tick by unperceived by the laughing crowd surrounding her, Lamia knows that she will have to call Schützen, knows that she will always rely on him like this—that he wants her to rely on him as much as doing so repels her. As much as doing so makes her love him enough to kill.