Chapter Two: September 8th, 2015

Even though his wife disappeared years and years ago, Amar Kayani is still haunted by the mystery surrounding it all. He's a detective. Surely he should have been able to solve the mystery.

Amar Kayani is the kind of man who tries to keep himself as busy as humanly possible. He’ll take on every extra assignment, every after-school activity, every single little side project. If he’s not working, he’s helping out with something at the school, or doing favours for his neighbours. When there’s none of that to do, he’ll be taking his children places, or cleaning his house, or cooking.

                It’s when there’s no cooking or cleaning to be done that Amar starts to suffer. When he’s busy, his mind is occupied with the task at hand, be it scrubbing toilets or interrogating a suspect. When he’s not busy, that’s when he starts to think about the past, and there’s nothing he hates more than thinking about the past.

                Thinking about the past hurts. Thinking about the past is like tearing the stitches from an ancient wound for the billionth time, and each time the hurt is just as bad as the last. The wound still bleeds, even though it’s been years, and oh God it should have healed by now but for some reason, it hasn’t.

                Today is one of those days where there’s nothing more Amar can possibly do. The twins are at school, and since it’s the first day they don’t have any events or anything. Amar’s boss sent him home early because he’s been working extra hours every day for the past two weeks, and no argument would change the choice. The house has already been cleaned from top to bottom. None of the neighbours need any help doing anything.

                A picture of Amar’s missing wife hangs in the upstairs hallway of the house. It’s the only picture of her in the house, other than the ones stowed away in the basement that are doing nothing more than collecting dust. Amar doesn’t think that the picture really captures her as she was. She wasn’t really smiling when it was taken. Of course she wasn’t, she was posing for it, faking the smile to look pretty for the camera. If one really wanted to see what Lenore Kayani looked like, they’d take a peek at the pictures in the basement.

                And that’s exactly what Amar does. Heads down the stairs to the basement, turns on the light, finds the box, blows away the dust. He tries to hide the past away within cardboard boxes and behind closed doors. It’s never worked very well. When he opens the box he gasps. The first photograph he sees is a picture of Lenore, holding the newborn twins. She was exhausted after nearly sixteen hours of labour, but her smile was a mile wide and she was still beautiful despite how tangled her hair was and how her eyes were swollen from crying.

                Amar remembers exactly the conversation he and Lenore had just before that picture was taken.

*****

“We’ve still got to name them,” Amar says, “Do you have any ideas? We really should have thought about names beforehand…”

                Lenore smiles and thinks for a moment. “What do you think of Lily for the girl?”

                “I think that’s lovely. But what about the boy? I’m going to guess we’re giving him a name that starts with L too?”

                “Well, it does make sense to do it that way. That’s what my parents did with my brother and me.”

                For a while, they try to think of ideas for their son’s name, but they come up with nothing.

                “Lyn,” Amar says finally.

                “Lyn? Isn’t that a girl’s name? Or does it mean something in Punjabi?” Lenore looks at Amar like he’s crazy, and she laughs softly.

                “No, it doesn’t mean anything, and no, it’s not just a girl’s name. It could be a boy’s name too. And besides, when we found out we were having twins you said that you could pick one name and I could pick the other.”
                “Lyn it is, then. Maybe it’ll grow on me, eventually.”

*****

Lyn turned sixteen this past June. He’s always hated his name, because when he was little kids used to tease him for having a girl’s name. By the time Lenore disappeared, she had grown to love his name just as much as she loved Lily’s. But now she is gone, and Lyn barely remembers her.

                Another photograph, another ghost. Now the face of Jonah Stone stares up at Amar, all smiles, yet sadness and sorrow was hidden right beneath. It’s hard for him to think that it’s been almost twenty years since Jonah died.

                Jonah Stone’s grave sits full, his body sleeping soundly and peacefully in a box beneath the earth. Lenore’s grave is empty, a headstone without a hole dug to match it. Some late nights when he can’t sleep, Amar swears that he can hear her voice, and that she’s come home at last. The old hurt of losing her gets worse when he forces himself to accept that she’s not really there. That tiny flickering flame of hope that still burns within him whispers that she could still be out there, and some days, Amar can do nothing but listen to it.

                A picture of Lenore and her twin brother stands out from the rest, as Amar finds himself noticing how much they look like his own children. Logan’s mischievous grin reminds him of Lily, and Lenore’s subtler smile is very similar to Lyn’s rare moments of happiness. Doesn’t Amar have a picture of Lily and Lyn that’s almost exactly like this? He probably does, somewhere in the house.

                Elisabeth, darling Elisabeth. The pretty blonde girl in the picture Amar is holding now is smiling radiantly, her arm around Lenore. She’s married to the richest man on Greywatch Island now. She wouldn’t dare to be seen with the likes of Amar, a humble single father. Things were different, not so many years ago. Elisabeth was friends with Amar, Lenore, Logan, their whole group. Her baby changed that. Amar heard that Elisabeth had a daughter with Martin Holling, whose father owned the mine. Now Martin owns the mine, Elisabeth is his wife and he and Elisabeth’s daughter goes to some private school in the Lower Mainland.

                Another photograph of Jonah and Lenore, another one of Logan doing something stupid, a few of Amar staring at things he’d never seen before when he had just moved to town all the way from Pakistan. Finally, Johnathan McCreary’s square face and broad shoulders appear. In the photo Amar is looking at, Johnathan is asleep. How odd. Amar doesn’t remember who took this one. Johnathan looks peaceful and content in the photograph, but when he was awake he looked much different. If someone were to have shoved a grizzly bear into a man’s clothing and expected him to act civilized, they would have gotten Johnathan McCreary.

                There’s another old hurt that still hasn’t healed. This wound is one that Amar reopens far less often, but when he does reopen it, it seems to hurt more, because Johnathan is alive and well and lives not far away, in a house on the top of the highest hill on Greywatch Island. Words that can never be taken back echo in Amar’s head as he sighs and stares up at the ceiling.

                The last thing Johnathan ever said to him, I hate you. The last thing he ever said to Johnathan, oh, go to Hell. He replays that final conversation in his head over and over, wondering if an I’m sorry or a please don’t do this would have changed things. Perhaps if words that weren’t so hateful had passed through his lips Johnathan wouldn’t have left for a place so far away, so cold and remote. Then again, a cold and remote place for a cold and remote man. It’s fitting, really.

                But a few years ago Johnathan came back, his heart warmed by the wife he found and every single one of his eight sons. In all the time since his return, he’s made no attempt to reconcile with Amar, or even speak to him. There has been nothing but a stale silence between them.

                Amar arrested one of Johnathan’s sons once. Johnathan didn’t even answer the door, one of the boy’s older brothers did. Both boys had Johnathan’s grey eyes, like smoke from a campfire. They stared at him not knowing who he was or what he had once meant to their father. The older boy closed the door, and it has not opened since.

Author's Note

Anything goes.