*This prologue and all preceding chapters of The Disappearances that I post here on Substack are unedited works in progress.
*Updated 8-12-6
Chapter 1
The morning of the disappearances, my husband and I woke to the sound of our alarm, screaming that it was seven.
James, my husband, groaned but didn’t move to get up.
I said, “No,” as I reached to hit the button to stop the screeching. Even though he was the one who had to get up, the clock had to be on my side of the bed because he would ignore it and let it scream for a good five minutes before moving.
James groaned again, threw back his covers, and sat up on the side of the bed, with his head in his hands.
I rolled over and rubbed his back.
“Morning,” I said.
“Morning,” he replied, leaning over and kissing my forehead before getting up.
Our morning routine had started. Neither of us ever wanted to be up so early, but James had to be at work by eight-thirty, and I liked to get up with him so I could have two or three hours of quiet before my father-in-law, George, woke up and needed my attention.
Five years earlier, my mother-in-law, Darlene, passed away from a heart attack. Her death had been surprising, as she’d been in good health. Shortly after that, my father-in-law’s doctor diagnosed him with dementia, another surprise. According to the doctor, George had been showing signs of mental decline for over a year, but my mother-in-law had refused to let anyone do the appropriate tests to find out exactly what was wrong. We hadn’t noticed because, until my mother-in-law died and we started checking in on my father-in-law every day, we hadn’t spent enough time around him to see anything more than some minor forgetfulness.
In the weeks following his diagnosis, we moved my father-in-law in with us. George didn’t put up much of a fight when we told him he was coming to live with us. We were relieved by his acceptance of more change, something we’d been told could speed up his mental decline.
We chose to move him in with us because our house was bigger, and the doctor told us that if George lived long enough, there might come a time when we’d need a walker, wheelchair, a lift, and a long list of other medical equipment if we chose to keep him home instead of putting him in a nursing home. We didn’t want to think that far ahead and decided to make that decision later. For the time being, we wanted to do everything possible to keep him comfortable and surrounded by family.
As easily as George went along with everything, we figured he was too busy grieving his wife to care what happened around him. He didn’t notice when we started taking things out of his home and moving them into ours, or that James was paying his bills. He didn’t mention the “For Sale” sign in front of his house. When my husband finally brought his father to our home, George merely sat in his recliner and turned on an old Western. Nothing else was said about the matter. I was astonished at how easy the transition was.
I’d been an English teacher at the local junior high school until we had Tanner. After that, I only substituted, so it made sense for me to stay home and become a full-time caregiver. Luckily for me, George’s disease wasn’t progressing quickly. He could still bathe himself, though we had to remind him. He could change clothes if I left them out for him, but he needed assistance putting on his socks and shoes. He didn’t wander off, but he would get up to do something and forget what he wanted to do the second he stood. He could use the Keurig most days but couldn’t cook meals for himself. He’d never really been able to do that. My mother-in-law had been a stay-at-home wife and did everything for him.
George never remembered to take his medication or check his blood sugar, nor did he know if he’d eaten a meal. So, whereas I didn’t have to watch his every move, thankfully, I had to be with him twenty-four hours a day, just in case he was having a bad memory day. On those bad days, he’d forget he couldn’t drive or that I wasn’t his wife, and he could get combative and argumentative.
Because George could sometimes be demanding and stressful, I tried to set aside the morning hours from when my husband left for work until his father woke, around mid-morning, as “me time.” I spent the time reading, watching television shows I liked, and cleaning areas of our two-story house that weren’t within earshot of my father-in-law’s bedroom or the living room—the two places he spent the most time in besides the bathroom.
The morning the world disappeared was like any other. After the alarm startled us awake and James kissed me, he went to the bathroom, while I went to the kitchen to prepare the Keurig. Once he finished, I took my turn in the bathroom. I peed, brushed my teeth, and changed out of my sleep clothes before checking on my father-in-law, who was sound asleep, and then joined James in the kitchen.
“Dad still asleep?” James asked as he did every morning.
“Yep,” I said, making myself a cup of coffee.
James put the toast in the toaster while I got the butter and jelly out of the fridge.
“Anything important happening today?” James asked, watching me fry eggs.
“Thankfully, no. Your dad had a bad memory day yesterday. I’m hoping we can relax today because he has an appointment with his neurologist tomorrow.”
“Should I take off work and go with you?”
“Nah. Your dad seems to like Dr. Martin, so I think we’ll be all right.”
“Okay. I should be home early tonight. I’ll watch an episode of Bosch with him.”
“Good. That should ensure that he’s in a good mood tomorrow.”
“I thought so,” James said, taking his plate to the table to eat.
We kept up that type of random, unimportant chit-chat while we ate.
After breakfast, I kissed James goodbye and told him I loved him before settling into my recliner to check my email. Aside from appointment reminders, I rarely had anything essential to read, but I liked the routine. Next, I checked my text messages. Again, there wasn’t anything important.
Tanner, my son, sent his morning hello. He didn’t send it every morning, but he did most mornings. I returned with a good morning and asked if he was coming home that weekend. I didn’t wait for a reply. I knew he had a morning class, so he’d answer when he could.
Next, my sister, Katlyn, had messaged me around six, asking if I wanted to see Grandma with her on Saturday. I replied that I did and asked if she wanted to go before lunch so that we could get something to eat afterward. Again, I didn’t wait for a reply. She’d already be at work, so she’d message me back when she had time.
I surfed my social media sites, but there wasn’t much new or entertaining, so I quickly got off, put a load of clothes in the wash, and put food out for our two cats. At the time, I didn’t think about why neither feline came running when they heard the pebbles hit the metal bowl because they didn’t always arrive at the sound. My cats were only slightly predictable.
With most of my essential morning tasks completed, I pulled out my calendar and a notepad and headed to the kitchen table to start making my to-do list for the day. When I had time, I worked for a friend who owned a small publishing house. I mainly updated her website events page, sent her monthly newsletter, and posted updates she requested on her social media accounts. Occasionally, I’d help her with editing and formatting, but not often.
I added the few things she wanted me to do that day to my list, then a few of my own errands, such as calling to make a dentist appointment and checking on a prescription for my father-in-law. If I didn’t make a list and my father-in-law was having a difficult day, I’d forget everything I needed to do, down to laying out meat for supper. Even with the list, I wouldn’t do anything if his day was horrible because dealing with him in that condition was draining. Thankfully, the good days far outweighed the bad. The support groups I joined warned me about potential issues that could arise as the decline progressed, so I did my best to be prepared for anything.
Around ten-thirty, I poured George a glass of milk and his morning meds into a small plastic cup and carried them to his room. Sometimes, George would take his meds and then go back to sleep for another hour. On other days, he would want to get up and have breakfast. The selfish part of me preferred it when he slept a little longer, but if he were having a good day, it wouldn’t matter to me either way.
George wasn’t a tiny man, so I could tell he wasn’t in bed when I opened his door, even with the overhead light out. He wasn’t prone to wandering off, so we didn’t have an alarm on his door or cameras watching him. The downstairs bathroom was next to his room, but I’d been pretty sure the door had been open, and the light was off when I passed it.
Unsure how to interpret the situation, I softly whispered, “George,” as I took a few steps further into the room.
He didn’t answer me.
I didn’t immediately panic as I flipped on his light and didn’t see him anywhere. However, unease ran up my spine, telling me something was wrong.
I placed my father-in-law’s medication and the glass of milk on the dresser and went to his empty bed. Confused by how the blankets were pulled up and not tossed out of the way as they should have been if he’d gotten out of bed, I rushed to his side of the bed, fearing he’d rolled off the mattress, hit his head on something, and was unconscious and bleeding out on the floor.
George wasn’t on the floor, and his shoes were still at the foot of the bed. Aside from the occasional trip to the bathroom, he refused to leave his room until he had dressed for the day, including putting on his shoes.
“George,” I all but screamed as I rushed from the room.
I hadn’t heard him go to the bathroom next to his room, but that was the first place I looked. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t stable enough to go to the second-floor bathroom, but that was the second place I looked.
“George,” I screamed as I rushed up the steps.
Tanner’s room was empty as well. In fact, all the rooms upstairs were empty, so I hurried back downstairs and to the living room, where George’s recliner was. I had to pass the recliner to go to his room, and he hadn’t been there then, but I prayed he’d snuck past me somehow and was there now.
He wasn’t.
I would’ve heard him leave the house. I told myself as I rushed to the front door and threw it open, all the while screaming his name.
We hadn’t gotten the morning paper since George stopped reading it a month ago, but perhaps he’d forgotten that and gone out looking for it.
There was no sign of him in the front or back yard, and my car was still in the driveway.
“George,” I screamed repeatedly as I searched.
If I hadn’t been terrified of what could’ve happened to my father-in-law, I might have wondered why no one came outside to see why I was hollering, or why they didn’t hear a car passing on the road. I was close friends with two sets of my neighbors. If they were home and heard me, they would’ve come running.
“George. Please answer me.” I called and went into the house through the back door.
I searched the entire house and yard twice before letting my panic consume me. Rushing through the house for the third time, looking for my cell phone and still screaming my father-in-law’s name, I fought the urge to call 9-1-1. I didn’t want to call the police until I knew there was an emergency.
I hated calling my husband at work, but the situation warranted more than a text. I pulled up his office number on my cell, hit send, and then the speaker button. The phone on the other end only rang. I wasn’t too surprised. He rarely had time to talk while he was working. Still, I let it ring longer than necessary, until it went to voicemail, which I never do, to annoy someone else into answering. Eventually, I gave up and called his cell. That would let him know that my call was an emergency, and he would pick up. But didn’t. Next, I dialed the company’s mainline. Still, no one answered. I didn’t bother leaving a message anywhere. The second James saw the house number, he would know my call was important and would call me back.
By that point, I was crying, and I’d searched the house, including the attic, for the fourth time. While I continued to call my husband, I went next door to the Harrisons to see if George had wandered over to their house. Surely, if he had, they’d called me to let me know, but maybe something had happened. If he weren’t there, perhaps they would help me look for him.
Since they’d moved in, the Harrisons had been good neighbors and occasionally helped me watch George when I needed to run a quick errand. The couple was a bit older than us, but we’d become good friends over the years, and my father-in-law didn’t mind them sitting with him. He’d never gone to their house, so that morning would’ve been a first, but I prayed that’s where he was.
The Harrisons’ dogs didn’t bark when I approached the side door, which startled me. The dogs knew me well and always greeted me at the fence. Instead of knocking on the door, I went to the backyard gate to see where the girls were. They were gone.
The dogs were never gone.
“Lulu. Macey,” I called, leaning over the gate to see if they were hiding somewhere out of sight.
They weren’t.
“Lulu, Macey, come here, girls,” I said, patting the fence to make a noise the dogs couldn’t resist.
Neither came running.
I stepped back from the fence as if it had bitten me.
Until that moment, I hadn’t felt true fear. The emotion washed over me, making my head spin. Something was definitely wrong, and it wasn’t just because my father-in-law was missing.
“Janice,” I called, rushing inside my friend’s house without knocking or questioning why the side door was unlocked when it didn’t appear anyone was home.
“Janice,” I yelled again. “It’s me, Laurie. Are you home?”
Janice had been a work-from-home mom while her kids were in school. Now, her youngest was about to graduate with her doctorate, and the other was about to graduate with her master’s. Both girls chose to stay home rather than move away to pursue their bachelor’s and graduate degrees, either by attending the local college or taking classes online. People in the neighborhood said the Harrisons were spoiling their kids, but I thought it made great financial sense for all involved.
The more Janice’s kids, who weren’t kids anymore, were in class or at work, the more she worked from the office. It wasn’t unusual for her not to be at home at that time of day. However, it wasn’t normal for the dogs to be gone or for her to leave her door unlocked.
I called out “Janice” again as I circled the rooms on the ground floor. I repeated her name as I searched the entire house, but found nothing. No one answered me.
Giving up, I pulled out my phone and called Janice’s cell. I found the ringing phone on the kitchen counter near Janice’s purse.
“What the hell is happening?” I asked the empty room. I put Janice’s phone back where it was and left her house, feeling panic and fear battling for control over my emotions.
For the millionth time, I called James’ number. As the phone rang, I walked to the neighbors to my left. They were rarely home and didn’t have animals, so I wasn’t surprised when they didn’t answer my knocking.
The people in the house next to them also shouldn’t have been home that morning. A quick search told me they were gone, too. However, both cars were in the driveway, with their doors unlocked, keys lying on the floorboards, and coffee cups slowly cooling in their holders.
What the fuck is going on? I silently screamed as I spun in circles in the middle of their driveway, looking for any signs of life but seeing no one.
Sufficiently scared that something bad had happened and I was next, I ran back to my house. I locked every door and called the police. I didn’t bother looking up the station’s actual number. I called 9-1-1. In my nearly forty years of life, I’d only called that number a few times: once when I was in a nasty car wreck and could barely hit the buttons on my phone, let alone think of any other number to call, once when the lady in the checkout line in front of me collapsed from low blood sugar, and once when I was a teenager left alone for the first time with my younger sister. We thought someone was trying to break into the house. It turned out that the boys down the block were trying to scare us. It worked.
In my limited experience with 9-1-1, I’d never known the line to ring. Yet, that’s all it did. Whenever I called the number, all I got was a ringing phone, and I tried calling every fifteen minutes or so for the rest of the day.
All the while, I paced my house and cried hysterically.
I didn’t want to freak out our son, but I eventually broke down and called him, not noticing that he hadn’t replied to my earlier text.
Tanner attended a college two hours south of us and happily lived in an apartment with his girlfriend. It would take him too long to get to me, and I didn’t want him driving home in a panic. However, I needed to know whether his father had called him, saying he was taking his grandfather somewhere and had just forgotten to inform me.
I’d replayed James and my morning conversation repeatedly in my head, and James hadn’t said anything about taking his dad anywhere. Also, I hadn’t seen or heard from James since he’d left for work, but at that point I was grasping for an explanation of what was happening, and I wasn’t thinking straight.
I lost it when Tanner didn’t answer or send me an immediate text explaining why he couldn’t answer. Tanner wasn’t a mother’s boy. I had no delusions about that, but with him so far away, he understood the need to stay in touch. We showed him the same kindness. If we couldn’t answer when he called, we texted him back to explain why. He didn’t, and I couldn’t reach my husband. The unanswered calls told me that whatever was wrong wasn’t just a local occurrence. With so many of my neighbors missing, I suspected it wasn’t good everywhere, but I could only focus on my family.
Forcing myself to calm down, I called my mother, sister, friends, and anyone I could think of, then dialed random numbers I had stored on my phone. I called pizza places, our favorite Mexican restaurant, an insurance company, and a bank. No one answered.
Two hours later, my phone’s dying battery forced me to plug it into the charger. Not for the first time, I reached for my car keys and purse, thinking I should go to James’ work or to the police station, but each time, I’d talk myself out of it. I’d tell myself I was jumping to conclusions and I just needed to wait. I convinced myself that George had finally started wandering, and the police would pick him up at any time and bring him home. I told myself that everyone was simply too busy working to answer my calls. I told myself so many lies that first day.
While my phone charged and I waited for someone to knock on my door or return my call, I opened my laptop to check Facebook and news sites. As I did that, I flipped on the television and searched for a local channel. No breaking news banner ran across the screen, and the news channels were blank or showed footage of an empty newsroom. Most of the local channels only showed reruns of old sitcoms—their pre-scheduled shows—and the cable channels did the same.
I felt relieved when I opened Facebook and saw all the posts on my wall—or I did until I started paying attention to the times of the posts. None of the posts came after about eight-thirty that morning—none. I had friends who posted every hour on the hour. Those who ran businesses had scheduled posts, but someone among my five hundred or so friends had to have posted that morning. Yet, no one had.
After Facebook, I went to Twitter. It was the same and much creepier. I visited Instagram, Snapchat, and other sites, but found no new content.
The television started to creep me out, but I’d left it on because the world around me was quiet. I closed my laptop and sat at my kitchen table for a long time. Eventually, my eyes fell on my cat’s food bowl. It was still full. It dawned on me then that I hadn’t seen my cats since early that morning.
Knowing I wouldn’t find them, I only searched the house half-heartedly. My throat was sore and squeaky from all the crying. I could barely say their names above a whisper.
Despite the knot of fear in my stomach, I ate something around six that afternoon. I was so tired, but I couldn’t bring myself to go to bed for fear of missing James’ when he returned home from work.
My recliner wasn’t comfortable, but it was where I planted myself to watch the front door, hoping that my husband would walk through it at any moment.
Eventually, I fell asleep. I’m unsure how long I slept, but it was dark when I woke and started screaming my husband’s name. I rushed to our bedroom, thinking he’d come home, saw me sleeping, decided not to wake me, and went to bed.
The bed was empty.
I broke down, crying again. I let myself crawl into bed to cry myself to sleep.
