It was Wednesday. I had just got up from bed and made myself coffee. I looked at the bleak morning sky outside the window. The cityscape, though filled with buildings and bustling with people, looked to me flat and lifeless. Maybe it was time to move again.
There was a knock on the door. That was unusual. We rarely ever got any visitors there.
I opened the door. There was a girl on the other side. Her face wasn’t entirely unfamiliar, but I couldn’t have said where I’d met her before.
“You are?” I asked.
“I’m Catherine. Is Janis here?”
Excuse me?
“You’re Janis’ friend?”
“Yeah, yeah,” she seemed to be in a hurry. “Is she here or not?”
“Why would she be?”
The girl sighed.
“She hadn’t been to work in days and she’s not picking my calls. If she’s not here, I’ll look for her elsewhere. Thank you for your time.”
Catherine turned her back on me and was hastily walking down the corridor toward the stairs. All the while, I tried to make sense of what she’d just told me. Janis was missing? How come?
“WAIT!” I yelled.
I grabbed my purse from the coat hanger next to me, locked the door and ran after that girl.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I’ll help you look for her.”
Even I was surprised with the way I reacted. Maybe I just did it out of guilt, some sort of half-baked apology for the way I had treated Janis back when we met. Maybe deep inside me I still wanted a chance to set things right, to start over. One way or another, the knowledge that the girl I’d just realized I had feelings for was missing got me really worried out.
“There’s no need,” said Catherine. “I can do this alone.”
“It may be easier with the two of us.”
Catherine was visibly uncomfortable. She stopped in front of me, blocking my way down. She looked at me as if I was some sort of soap-opera villain.
“You,” she said, with spite in her lips. “I don’t like you. You know that?”
“Err…”
“You’ve hurt my best friend. And I don’t care if you intended to or not. I don’t care if it was all Janis’ fault or even my fault. Janis got hurt because of you. And I’ll never forgive you, or even tolerate you, capisce?”
Scary.
I nodded. “I know.”
“So… even if you could somehow help me look for her, what makes you think Janis would be glad to see you once we got there?”
She wouldn’t. I knew that much. But I knew that this was not the time to be indecisive. One wrong move here and Janis’ friend would go away. I’d be left at home worried sick about her, clueless about where to look for her. No, that girl was being entirely honest with me, for Janis’ sake. No matter what, I had to tell her the truth.
I took a deep breath, as if to gather up whatever courage I had left, and spoke:
“I love her.”
That caused an impression on her. I could tell that, given my behavior toward her friend, that girl Catherine would never have expected me to come up with such an answer. Still, it was the truth and it was about time I admitted it, too.
“But… but you… rejected her…” she was pretty much speechless.
“I know. I was scared, I made a mistake, which now I regret. And yes, I know Janis got hurt because of me, I know she’d not be happy to see me again, but I love her and I’ll be damned if I’m just going to sit at home knowing she could be in danger. I’m going to look for her too. And once we find her and we make sure she’s safe, you can go to her alone, I’ll leave and she’ll never know that I was even there. Just… let me help look for her.”
Catherine inspected my face meticulously, as if looking for any signs I could be lying.
“You know I still don’t like you, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“And you know that I won’t let you get close to her. You’ve hurt her once. I’m not taking any chances.”
I nodded. “I’m well aware.”
“Fair enough. Let’s get going.”
She turned around and walked down the steps. Though my chest felt tight with the knowledge of Janis’ disappearance, I couldn’t help but smile a bit at this tiny victory with her friend.
---
Despite Catherine’s initial distrust and blatant contempt toward me, she did open up a little, or at least enough for us to chat with each other. I learned that she’d already been looking for Janis ever since the previous day. She had made a list of all potential places Janis could have been at. My address was listed somewhere near the bottom. I giggled, for the address was labeled “That Bitch’s Place”. I guess I did deserve that.
There were only a few more places on that list, mostly places I didn’t know.
“The Botanical Garden?” I asked her, when we were in the bus together.
“Jay’s twelfth birthday was there. She got all excited about those different plants, kept saying she’d live there and become a gardener. Lasted for less than a week, that excitement. Jay was never one to keep an interest in a subject for too long. Still, I figured that if she was just ditching work for some reason, she might be going there during the day. Just wild guessing, of course.”
You do know a lot about her, I wanted to say, but kept to myself. Apart from my sister, I never had anyone even remotely close to a best friend, I had no idea what that was like.
Janis was not at the botanical garden.
Nor was she at the São Conrado beach, or at Arpoador. Those, I learned, were places Janis and Catherine liked to go together to chill out during their time off school.
There were only two more places on Catherine’s list and they were both too far away for us to go there that day. One of which was in another city. We hadn’t enough time to catch a bus there and back again, the sun was very close to setting.
Now what? I thought. Was Janis really hiding in one of those places, or did she go someplace else Catherine didn’t know?
Sitting side-by-side at the subway, I tried to ask her about that.
“Isn’t there any other places she could be at?”
“Honestly, girl, Janis could be anywhere. These are all just wild guesses, places from her past she could have wanted to revisit. But suppose she ran away to another town, one she hadn’t visited before?”
“We’d never find her.”
“Right. So we gotta keep looking at those places and hope for the best.”
“Did she ever do this before? Disappearing, I mean.”
“Did she?” Catherine put a hand on her chin, like Rodin’s The Thinker, then very theatrically gestured in the air as if having an idea. “Oh, there was once. It happened several months ago. This douchebag customer from her shop dragged her to a party, made her fall in love, then later went and broke her heart. She disappeared for a night, that time.”
Right. She was talking about me, of course. Douchebag? Catherine sure liked to let me have it. I was starting to wonder if what I did was really so horrible that it warranted being hated for a lifetime. Still, the second part of her sentence made me happy. Janis really had fallen in love with me, hadn’t she? If only I could go back and redo things.
“You have to get off at the next station and take the other train,” she said. And she was right, my house was in line 2 and we were riding a line 1 train.
“Give me your phone number,” I said. “So we can meet again to look for her.”
Catherine, despite being very stubborn and irritable around me, didn’t actually protest against that. Maybe she thought that finding Janis took priority over any other feeling she had toward people, including her despise of me.
We parted. I took the line 2 train home feeling devastated, to say the least. Even hearing of Sophie’s adventures with other kids in the playground wasn’t enough to take my mind off Janis’ disappearance.
A couple of hours after we got home, I got a text.
It was from Catherine, Janis’ friend.
The police found Janis.
I immediately let out a sigh of relief.
Then another message came.
She’s in trouble.
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