Death by Disappearance
Clarine thinks about that holiday in the Caribbean. She has a clear picture of Tommy and Virginie, at the poolside, sipping drinks and exchanging meaningful looks with each other above the rims of their glasses. Clarine’s resentment toward Virginie had fanned when on the following morning she had awakened and raced to Tommy’s room to participate in their daily morning ritual, only to find that he had already awakened and was to be found in the dining hall, eating breakfast and chatting and laughing like any grown-up with the pale French girl.
Before that holiday, she and Tommy had had a tenuous relationship; she was the kid sister with whom he was often saddled, and he, the bullying, intolerant older brother who exasperated her. He’d transformed from an aggressive preteen to an even more aggressive teenager, and sometimes Clarine had been scared by his caged fury. It had substantially frightened their mother, too, who had arranged for him to go out for soccer at his high school, Sidney Blessed High, so that he could channel some of his pent-up frustrations into contact sports.
But on that vacation, Clarine had seen another side of him.
For the first time that she could remember, Tommy had become human. Standing on the balcony in the mornings, hurling spitballs, Clarine had actually begun to feel a kinship with him. They had traipsed around the premises, making thrilling little discoveries together and Clarine had felt a new love for him beginning to blossom.
Then came Virginie.
So it really had been no surprise when Clarine, spending the day by herself as a mark of protest, had happened upon them both later that day, skinny-dipping in the river at the secret spot she and Tommy had both discovered on a lot of idle land lying adjacent to the resort’s extensive property.
Clarine squeezes her eyes tightly shut to escape the disturbing images of Tommy’s naked pubescent body ungraceful in its attempt to pleasure. But even behind the backs of her closed lids she can intuit Virginie’s sardonic smile, the taunts held in her eyes. The same unpleasant taste which had risen in her throat then, now fills her mouth again, thick and vile as embalming fluid.
Clarine had squatted, undetected in the bushes, rooted to the spot. Unintelligible noises had come from her brother as he had burrowed frantically inside Virginie, rutting like a farm animal, grunts escaping his lips. Clarine had watched as the girl had lain, like a reclining Madonna, taunting Tommy. “’ave you never done thees before, Black man? Or should I say, Black boy?” she said at one point, her voice full of mockery.
It had been almost a relief, for Clarine, when he had finally erupted in anger and pummelling Virginie beneath him. How Clarine had almost laughed as her fragile, translucent body had begun moving spastically beneath the quivering pillar of sensitised steel which was his. Though Clarine had her many issues with Tommy, she’d nevertheless always been fiercely protective of him, as he’d been of her since the day he’d whupped the ass of a class bully, Chester Mulroney, who had picked mercilessly on her in elementary school.
Clarine had almost cheered as her brother kept pummelling the white girl’s slender body, a hand wrapped around her throat, making her emit gagging sounds that the 12-year-old Clarine had mistaken for moans of passion. Virginie was now thrashing beneath him, her hands trying to wrestle away his big one from her throat, her legs kicking violently beneath her, as though she were doing some obscene reverse breaststroke. Tommy’s other hand joined the other around her throat. His massive arms were like knotted tree trunks, wrapping themselves about the slender column of white in a chilling chokehold until her eyes bugged out and her body had fallen still.
Faster and faster went Tommy, his firm brown bottom pale from lack of exposure to the sun, pumping up and down as he rammed himself, over and over into the girl’s pliant body. When he had obliterated himself he shuddered violently like someone with fever and rolled over onto his back beside her. “Who you callin’ boy, bitch?” he muttered.
Clarine’s heartbeat quickened, her delight giving way to stunned horror when she noticed Virginie’s eyes, blank and staring toward the sky.
It was only then that Clarine
Everybody has to be somewhere.
This is how Clarine begins the first draft of the roman a clef she has been inspired to write.
Right now, she’s courting that altogether elusive muse of fiction – the satisfactory conclusion, the resolution. But how can one close the chapter on a more-than-halfcentury-old mystery, which really occurred and stubbornly, to the present day, defies logic and the ability to be solved?
Where is Virginie? Ou est Virginie?
Only Tommy knew for sure where her body was buried.
But she never spoke of what she’d witnessed that summer to her brother, who, a few weeks after their return from that island vacation, and presumably consumed by guilt, had taken his own life.
Buoyed by the release of pent-up memory, Clarine’s pen scratches an unceasing, inky trail across the pages of her notebook. Fred and Wilma are keeping vigil, ears pricked up as if sensing the importance of the occasion, at her feet. Her pen flashes furiously even when the warm sunshiny day eclipses into night and shadows move around the room. She thinks this is a fitting tribute for Tommy, whose death she now realises she has blamed herself for all these years. If only she’d admitted to him that she’d seen what had happened, maybe his guilt would not have consumed him. Maybe he would have been alive now, bound to her in the horror of the mutual secret they shared. Although Clarine seriously doubts this.
She hears a sound, from somewhere outside the house. Lifting her greying head, which she hasn’t gone to the salon to be dyed in a few weeks, she listens keenly, trying to divine its direction. For a moment the sound of Virginie’s laughter, mocking yet filled with desire, fills the room like an ether-induced dream.
Then she sighs and remembers. Virginie isn’t there in the realm of the conscious.
She has metamorphosed into remnants of rotted, broken-down bits of flesh and bleached bone deposits. She has even, quite possibly, been reincarnated to become a new shade tree populating that wooded rustcoloured beard of land over there where, uninterrupted, a river groans its misshapen secrets to the surrounding pall.