Cleave: Part 5
The fifth installment of “Cleave” is coming up.
The first part is here, and the second part is here. The third part is toward the end of this post, and Part Four is here.
Kate slides the backpack up to her lap and wrenches it open. Before she dumps it on the passenger seat like her shaking hands want to do, she decides instead to keep as much of it looking as undisturbed as possible. If Marianna comes back, somehow, Kate wants the benefit of the doubt.
She sees folders inside, as if Marianna were a teenager dragging this thing around to classes. They are filled with papers and have no label. Kate unzips the front pocket of the backpack where Marianna’s wallet drops to Kate’s lap. A key ring rests at the bottom of the pocket. Some clothes, folded neatly, lay behind the folders. No phone. Marianna must have it with her. But her wallet and keys are here.
Kate pulls one of the folders. All the interior lights are on in the car, but it’s still difficult to make out what’s on the pages. Handwriting. In pencil. There must be 20 or 30 pages in this folder, all covered with pencil. Kate hasn’t seen Marianna write anything by hand since they were kids, and she doesn’t recall Marianna having any kind of journal. She glances at the other folders. They seem filled with the same type of writing, all in pencil. The only difference she can tell is that the folders themselves are different colors.
What strange things to keep in a bag Marianna has with her all the time. Folders full of handwritten notes. Kate squints at a page from the yellow folder. There are dates along the left, and sentences scrawled in light pencil strokes. She can hardly make out some of the words, but what she can read is more like a daily log of events. She sees a food log, and the time in the morning Marianna woke. Other words like “travel” and “transfer” appear throughout the page. Nothing exceptional that she can see, other than symbols scattered within the sentences. Kate wonders if Marianna is writing footnotes for her daily events. This doesn’t entirely surprise her; Marianna enjoys tedious tasks, assuring Kate that keeping track of every day’s events is important. Especially now. Especially this year. Kate flips through each of the folders. The same faint pencil, the same three symbols recurring throughout the pages. She doesn’t see a key for the symbols anywhere. She checks the dates at the back of the yellow folder. Where the last page ends does not clearly line up with the first dates of either of the other folders. What is this? Why does she need to keep it with her?
The wallet holds cash, change, and Marianna’s real ID. Kate thumbs the ID from its slot. Their shared birthdate glimmers in the faint light. She stares at the still eyes of Marianna in the picture. They even have the same unsmile to them, the obligatory lift of the eyebrow that Kate also thought would help sell her own smile. Instead, the expression showed more shock than anything. Their mother snapped her fingers in front of their faces when they were little, hoping to grasp the two girls’ attention for a moment while she held with one hand a shaky iPhone at the ready. As infants and toddlers, their eyes were wide and gratifying even when their smiles were not. Once they got older, their mother’s trick lost its efficacy. The habit, however, solidified. Their class pictures every year showed identical sets of big eyes. Kate tries not to smile like this anymore, but she wonders if Marianna even knows she looks this way.
Kate opens the console and finds her own wallet inside. She squeezes Marianna’s ID behind her own. She returns it to the console and slips all of Marianna’s folders back into the backpack along with the wallet. She zips everything up and pushes it behind and under the passenger seat. She checks her phone again for messages, and nothing has changed. Clearly, Malcolm and Kenny are not meeting her here.
She could go home. Laney will be up soon, but her father knows it’s his turn to get her off to school. Dylan would be confused if Kate showed up at home in the middle of the night, even though he knows her nights out with Marianna can sometimes end in sisterly fights and early evenings. But to go home now could mean trouble. Kate doesn’t know what story she’d tell Dylan.
The rain becomes a drizzle that obscures the rising sun. She knows Marianna has her phone. Why hasn’t she contacted Kate yet? They weren’t supposed to separate like this. Not until it was time. Certainly what happened at the house was a mess, but Kate didn’t think Marianna had it in her to split like that. And now that she’d been scribbling mysterious notes for god knows how long about what seems to be entirely mundane daily affairs, Kate feels a gnawing curiosity about her twin. Not only did Marianna leave her tonight, she also has been keeping her out of something.
Kate doesn’t know where to go. She can’t imagine why Malcolm and Kenny weren’t here. Unless they didn’t understand her directions. Maybe they skipped a step in the plan. She turns the car on. Wipers slide against the glass, the new day’s sun poking at Kate’s over-tired eyes. She reverses into a bend in the drive, and then pulls forward out onto the road. She needs to see if they are where she hopes they’re not.