Evelyn Clark
Most people don’t have a good idea of silence. In today’s world, it is incredibly hard to find true silence.
I, however, am used to silence. Working as a night security guard, I don’t usually hear much. Rustling of trees, hooting of owls, occasional footsteps. Add that to living alone with very limited human contact, and my ears are nearly as lonely as I am.
I suppose I should not feel lonely. After all, my isolation is self-imposed.
I do not trust people, not one bit. I have been lied to by everyone I have ever known, even my parents, and so I simply decided to cut everyone out of my life. I now live in a small cottage on the outskirts of my hometown, Mount Gulber, and make nightly commutes to work at the prison which is just a ten-minute drive away.
That is where I am currently headed- the Rosmore Correctional Complex. Perched high on a hill, overlooking Mount Gulber, is the high-security prison, the home of some of the worst criminals from this area.
Perhaps the things that I have seen inside those reinforced steel walls had contributed to her distrusting demeanour. In those walls, I have seen everything. Murders and attacks, rebellions and suicides, smuggling and rivalries. Since being moved to the 10 pm night shift, I have seen fewer of these events but still occasionally hear about them from other security guards during shift change.
I flick on my indicator and turn onto the winding road that takes me up to the prison. I look out over the Rosmore Valley that sinks deep into the earth on my left. I can see Mount Gulber in the distance, perched on a gentle slope that leads down into the valley, in between two steeper sections of the valley’s sides.
Taking one hand off the steering wheel to rub my eyes, I yawn. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since what happened to my little sister Lucy.
Lucy and I were playing in their backyard. I, the older sister at age ten, was pushing my younger sister Lucy, aged five, on their swing set.
Lucy’s brown hair, like our mother’s, flew back as I pushed her forward. Lucy gripped the chain for dear life.
“Evie, too high! Too high!” she squealed as she soared into the air.
As she plummeted back towards me, she let out a joyous giggle. I just smiled and pushed her back up once again.
Our parents had sent us outside to play about ten minutes earlier, but they stayed behind in the kitchen. Lucy was unable to hear them arguing through her giggles and the wind rushing past her ears, but I could hear raised voices coming from the kitchen.
Curiosity getting the better of me, I said to my sister, “Go and play on the trampoline for a bit, Luce. I’ll be back in a minute”.
Still giggling, Lucy jumped out of the swings and ran over to the trampoline, flinging off her shoes and climbing on.
I crept towards the kitchen window, crouching beneath it and pressing my ear to the wall.
“We’re still behind on rent, Michael. Where is all this money you said you were going to get?” I heard my mother ask.
“I’m handling it. I need a little more time. This deal I’m working on, once it’s over…”
“That’s been your answer for months! The girls need stability. We can barely afford for their schools.”
“I’m doing all I can, Rachel! The market’s unstable at the moment, there were setbacks,” my father tried to reason.
“Setbacks? We’ve drained the savings, taken out loans- where does this end?” I could hear my mother beginning to shout.
“You think I don’t know that? I’m trying to fix it, but your constant complaining isn’t helping!”
I pushed away from the wall and stood back up. Mustering up a smile, I turned back towards the yard, deciding against letting Lucy know that anything was wrong. She didn’t need to worry about the family’s finances. I don’t either I told myself.
But Lucy wasn’t in the backyard.
“Lucy? Where did you go?” I called. Maybe Lucy had decided to play hide-and-seek?
She loved hide-and-seek.
After a few minutes of walking around the yard, and calling out Lucy’s name, I began to panic. I couldn’t find her. She had never been this good at hide-and-seek.
“Lucy? LUCY!” my screams eventually drew my parents out of their argument, and out of the kitchen. They came sprinting out the back door.
“What happened? Where’s Lucy?” my mother asked in a fluster.
“I don’t know. I looked away for a bit, and when I looked back, she was gone.”
The search for my sister continued all through the night. Made infinitely more difficult since our back fence essentially opened out into the Rosmore Valley, the search turned up nothing. It was as if she had simply vanished into thin air.
Even now, after so many years have passed, I can’t help but feel partially responsible, for if I hadn’t taken my eyes off Lucy to snoop into her parents’ business, maybe she would have been able to grow up alongside me. Lucy was declared legally dead many years ago, but something never felt quite right. I have always felt that there was something we didn’t know. Something happened to Lucy, I know it.
The stress of Lucy’s disappearance tore my parents apart. That, on top of their financial situation, pushed them to hate each other.
When my father left, my mother was forced to return to work as a nurse. Nursing took up most of her time, and I was left home alone a lot.
Paranoid about what happened to my sister, I would call her constantly from the home phone to report strange noises outside the house, shadowy figures I saw out of the corner of my eye, and our neighbours taking out their bins with suspicious looks on their faces.
I didn’t call her because I thought the noises were out to get me- I called her because I thought they had something to do with Lucy. Or I thought she had finally come home.
The second my mother decided I was old enough, she got me right out of her house, barely giving me enough time to blow out my eighteen candles.
Since then, I don’t speak to her for more than five minutes, when she sees me at the supermarket in town, or out on my morning runs. She feigns care for me and asks how I am, I feign being eager to inform her about my life.
I know she loves me, but she probably feels guilty about being so absent in my life from the age of ten onwards.
As for my father, I haven’t seen him since he left us, which was shortly after Lucy died. I don’t know where he ended up, or if he is still in contact with my mother.
To be honest, I don’t care. I’m happy by myself, with no one to condescend me, no one to lie to me, and most importantly, no one to leave me.
