[ Posted 10 Jul | 98k likes | 5k boosts | share | report ]

It wasn’t always bad times and when the bad times did happen I tried to pretend they didn’t. If you enjoyed my stuff and we never talked, there was nothing you could do about it and if we did talk I want you to know it’s not on you at all. Be at peace. You are loved. It’s me who’s wrong. It’s all my fault that I let you all down and I’m so sorry and I have to stop, before I do it again.

Anything that’s left is for my mom and my sister, Vesta. It was always going to be for them…

–

The low-budget apartment once rented by Sapphire had a new tenant, who was to be pointedly spared the whole story. Any witnesses to the suicide were unwilling to talk, or moved out. The landlord claimed all the previous tenant’s belongings had all been turned over to her family, who lived on the other side of the city. When Rai pulled into the parking lot of the high-rise cluster where the mother and sister lived, Sao was still feeing the dull pang of surprise he’d felt at the news. Orchid, Jasmine and Hazel had all been staying with their families at the time of their deaths, or attempts.

Good parents or bad, family or no, all were susceptible to the same demons.

Maya didn’t live with her family either. That was one of the few facts they knew about her. Sapphire hadn’t been the only one. That made Sao feel a little better.

“This is close to your place, isn’t it?” Rai asked, shaking off the crumbly residue of his chicken sandwich and checking his long-emptied cup of coffee. “The guards for your building never let me inside to park, though.”

“Security is tighter.”

“Aha. Your place is probably more expensive, then.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

Sao didn’t drive. He also didn’t pay for his apartment, which was not in fact his but an acquaintance’s. It was a beautiful space, impeccably furnished and clad in futuristic chrome and icy white tile. While Sao’s limp arms and creaky knees weren’t about to propose knocking down walls or to even the rotation of furniture, he sometimes had an inkling the place could be made a bit more personal. But his landlord forbade him from adding or removing anything larger than a computer, replacing the bedding with his own, or so much as shifting the position of the television.

“Before you think of hanging any family photos, you run them by me,” Hro had said. They both knew Sao had none of those.

Sao was in no position to complain. The place was not his, and the fact that he was being made so comfortable that he often felt that it was his, was even more reason to be grateful. He remembered a moment of Jasmine’s bittersweet sendoff: about having everything, and disappointment at oneself for not being more grateful.

The estate where Sapphire’s mother and sister resided had a touch of the natural, which he appreciated. A vine-laden ironwork gate had admitted them, and the first thing to spring into sight was a fountain roundabout, lined with planters. The ruffled geraniums were standing up valiantly against the heat.

There was something much more homey about the apartment they entered in comparison to his own, as well. There were sunhats and strappy shoes strewn about the doorway around a well-used welcome mat. Souvenir wine glasses and picture frames and shell trinkets weighted heavily on the shelves. Nestled amongst the baubles were pictures of Sapphire, mostly with her sister. Sao was keen to believe this indicated affection. Vesta was ten years younger than Sapphire.

“We scattered her ashes at Southport’s wetland park,” Sapphire’s mother, Ms B___ told them. “It was her favorite place.”

Rai had been the one to field that difficult question.

Vesta, a slender young lady with wet eyes and her sister’s dark hair worn long, brought a box of tissues. To Rai, she pushed a shopping bag filled with spiral-bound notebooks. “You asked if there was anything like this, so I pulled together as many as I could find. Saph kept diaries since she was in high school. I looked at some of them… I hope that’s not an issue?” Her jellied eyes wavered, and wobbled away from Rai, to Sao.

Sao accepted the bag. “There shouldn’t be a problem. Thank you.”

Rai passed forward the picture of Hazel, Jasmine, Orchid and Maya. “Do you recognize any of these people?”

“No… I don’t think so. Do you? Mom?”

Her mother was still sniffling into a tissue. “No. If they’re her new friends, we wouldn’t know. We hadn’t seen much of her since she started her internet work. Why?”

“There’s an active case involving one of them. We’re looking for any connections we can find.”

“One of the girls in this picture? Well, we wouldn’t know.”

“I did get to see her a couple of times in the city, when I was home for the summer.” Vesta said, treading softly to the sofa to stand by her mother. “The streaming job seemed like it was working out for her. She had a lot of spare time and extra money. She said she was finally seeing a really good therapist and the doctor had her on some new medicine that was doing wonders. She also said she had a lot of new friends but I never met them.” She sniffled, and smiled. “She even sent us money.”

Her mother nodded in a sort of dizzy motion but didn’t say anything.

“She used to be really depressed. Always tired and quiet then but she’d flip out over little things. Misplacing her phone, uncomfortable shoes, slow trains and me or mom taking any kind of 'tone'... But she was different after a few years, the last time I saw her. She looked good, she cut her hair. She was supposed to be all better. She was giving people advice online, too. It was actually, really good stuff. But then…”

“We couldn’t have known,” her mother interrupted. “Saph never told us how she was really doing.”

“I know, mom. You keep saying.” Realizing the severity in her voice, Vesta blushed and moved to the window.

“She used to come to me, all upset over nothing. We always told her politely that we understood she was frustrated and didn't mind her blowing off steam, but we didn’t want her to break anything, or hurt herself. It didn’t make a difference. She'd storm off and we'd hear a crack of her hitting a wall or her head or something else awful. It was like living on eggshells. She herself would scream: ‘mom, I can’t help it. I don’t know why I’m like this’. I didn’t know what to do, I just knew if anyone saw what she was like they’d lock her up or worse. I didn’t want her hooked on medications. In the end I let her see the psychiatrists like she wanted – but look what happened anyway. I just don’t know what she ever wanted me to do.”

Rai’s frown deepened and the older woman turned away, to look at her daughter by the window. Below, the azure waters and striped beach chairs of the estate pool were making the outdoors look deceptively enticing.

“Of course I didn’t want her to jump off a roof. But what did she expect me to do?”

“One more thing,” Rai said, “did Sapphire know any magic, or was acquainted with any magic users that you know of?”

It was the first time that day the question had gotten real consideration.

“Would you say it was… one or two years ago?” the mother asked.

“I hadn’t started yet. Did she know anyone before that, when she was prepping?” Vesta bit a knuckle. “Um. I’m studying general magic right now. I mean, when I’m at school… what kind of magic would be relevant?”

Rai snapped to attention, his gaze burning into Vesta. “You’re a magician?”

“I only have a junior license so I can’t do anything outside a university campus.” Her blush reddened, though she did not seem particularly flattered by Rai’s tone. “Saph knew I was going to school for magic but she never asked in-depth or anything… I guess she had a basic idea of what the courses would be like…”

“She was a magic student too?”

“She wanted to be,” her mother said. “She loved those magic detective shows when she was a child… the ones that took place around the South beach, where they’d summon tidal waves to capture thieves and murderers. Her big dream was to become a member of the army special operatives, she was looking into magic courses from the moment she started senior year. But… it wasn’t for her.”

“How so?” Sao found himself drawn in, though he could sense a turn coming.

Vesta piped up, in a tone that seemed to have risen an octave, “The army runs the courses, so qualifying exams are really hard. I had to take them twice. When Saph tried out, she had a lot going on at the same time, so…”

“She didn’t pass,” Rai said.

“She was heartbroken. We said she could try again, when she was better. But she found her own thing to do. I mean, it was probably for the best. She was happier, like I said, she had more free time and got to do creative work, she was always better at that.”

“Crystal and herbs, those are used in some magics,” the mother put in emphatically.

“It wasn’t the kind of magic that she originally aimed for, but spirituality helped her, and she wanted to help others,” Vesta said in a gentle correction to her mother. “It was more like psychology. Psychology is a super important field. It’s kind of like magic in itself.”

“She wasn’t a psychologist, though.” Rai tilted his head toward Vesta. “How did you get into it? Did you always dream of joining a magic course like Sapphire did?”

“We like to think Vesta is doing the magic course in her sister’s honor,” the mother declared before Vesta could formulate a reply.

“She started before Sapphire died, though.”

“Are you saying Sapphire was jealous? No - that’s where you’re wrong. She even contributed to Vesta’s tuition. There were no hard feelings.”

“Oh - right, she sent you money. Was it just for tuition?” Rai gazed out the window. At the pool, the curated grounds with their flowering sills and ornamental iron fencing. “This is a nice place you have. Pricey area. Were things dire when she started passing you money? Like, more dire than things were for herself? Sapphire lived in a two-room closet in a seedy part of the city. When she jumped, she fell in an open dumpster. The police initially thought it was a murder until the suicide note came to light.”

Sao wished he could evaporate in his seat.

Sapphire’s mother gripped one white-knuckled hand in another, apparently thinking along the same lines. “We never visited her place. When she moved out at eighteen, she told us not to come looking for her.”

Vesta had turned her back to them. She was taking in the view, nothing more.

“That was over ten years ago. You regained contact since then. I thought there were no hard feelings?” Rai tapped the bag of notebooks. “Well, you never visited and it goes without saying, Sapphire must have had some sort of lingering negativity...”

The mother stood, tissues spilling to the floor. “You, throwing the blame around, sound like her. What were we supposed to do for her? What did she want us to do? You know so much - you tell me, then. What could I possibly have done for someone like her?”

“I think you should leave now,” Vesta said without facing them.

“She never said sorry, you know. She took and took and never said sorry,” the mother was crying she funneled them out. “Not even in her final words. You know why?”

“Mom-”

“She blamed us. I bet she did. She hated us and blamed us all this time. What do you want me to do about that, now?”

—

Sao watched Rai from his desk. The blood-red light streaming into the office seemed to be doing battle against Rai’s neon blues. Rai was losing.

Rai himself was reading through the stack of multicolored notebooks they had gotten from Vesta and her mother. He had said very little since they returned to his flat. Sao himself gave Jasmine and Orchid’s notes a review, and double-checked there was nothing substantial in Hazel’s big black book that they had missed.

With a groan that dissolved into a sigh, Rai set the last notebook down. As he sunk in his chair, falling out of sight behind his desktop, Sao became aware of a strange tension in his own neck. Rai usually slapped down papers, as hard as he could, when he was finished with them. Out of exasperation, relief, it didn’t matter - it was loud. But he’d set Sapphire’s books down softly, in their neat pile.

“Anything new?” Rai said from nearly under his desk.

“Perhaps.” Sao opened each of his books to their first pages. “The first entries on all of them were dated to the start of September, last year. Even Hazel’s first, incomplete entry. They started, or intended to start, their journals at roughly the same time.”

“That date coincides with the first of their gatherings, according to their online posts.” Rai set his hand, somewhat protectively, over Sapphire’s stack. “Sapphire’s start much further back. She also wrote more about her life than just appointments - real journal entries. Things get pretty hairy, I get the feeling it was a major coping mechanism of hers. She wrote the kind of stuff Hazel said she’d write in hers but didn’t. I wonder if maybe the rest of them copied Sapphire’s strategy after they met. Wouldn’t be the first time an online influencer takes a page from another.”

Sao smiled at the turn of phrase.

Rai opened the top book, leafing through. “I have a hard time reading her handwriting on some of the later pages…”

“I can help with that, if you need. Parsing out handwriting’s part of my job.”

“But I could make out some of her math, where she seemed to be trying to add up some budgets. Checking numbers is part of my job.” He grimaced. “She definitely wasn’t making bank like her mom and sister claimed. To make matters worse, her math was almost always off. It got a little better near the end. Although, the handwriting changed. To be more specific, it looked like someone was correcting her work…”

“This wouldn’t happen to have started around September…?”

“Yeah. Maybe some of her new friends helped her out.”

“They were helping each other.”

“Yeah.” Rai didn’t sound too uplifted by the prospects of friendship. “Depressing stuff. You can see her initial magic study notes in the beginning. Big fancy tables all drawn out with rulers for incantation names and requirements, but with only a row or two actually filled in. She was never an academic.”

“It must have really hurt for her sister to so easily hijack her dream.”

“And even when she was nowhere near academia, she still ended up needing someone to correct her.” Rai cast a bleak look at his assistant. “You think I was out of line, accusing mom and sis of not caring about her?”

“I think they cared. I didn’t feel you were accusing them of not caring…” Sao took a moment to convince himself this was the case. “You were pointing out ways they might have changed things - as the mother kept asking, in the end. You were trying to answer her question, and I think she realized that, but it’s too late to try visiting Sapphire or telling her to keep her money; that’s why she was frustrated.”

“That sounds good.” For a moment, Rai’s voice gave out. He took a breath. “Except I wasn’t trying to give advice. I had already decided they were squeezing Sapphire for cash. That mom wanted a daughter in magic and tossed the second one in when the first was rejected. And I wanted them to feel like shit for asking me to solve something nobody can fix .” Another pause choked by. “Asking me the cure for a suicidal stranger’s depression. Do I look like a fucking miracle worker?"

Sao stopped. He had been swinging his chair from left to right, patting himself on the back for his previous response when Rai hit him with that barrage. “I know,” he said slowly, “Suicide is always going to be a tense topic. But this case is all in favor of helping one miraculous survivor.”

“Right. Just… have to stay focused.”

Getting lightly to his feet, Sao looked over to Rai’s desk. His supervisor looked like his eyes had been pitted out. An onslaught of questions filed through Sao’s head, ranging from sarcastic to overbearing. No, no interrogation. What he needed, what they both needed, was a distraction.

Sao made a show of checking the time and looking out the window. “Let’s get away from this for a while.”

“I’m not going to take a vacation, if that’s the suggestion.”

“I’m just thinking about dinner. There’s a restaurant over the bridge I’ve been wanting to check out, but it’s a pain to get there by bus. Taxiing in would work, but it’s a hell to get a taxi out… and there’s some dishes I think you’d like.”

“Got coffee?”

“I can’t imagine why not.”

“Say no more.” What little color he ever had had returned to his face, and Rai got up. Oddly, he looked Sao up and down. “There a dress code?”

Sao laughed. “None that I know of.”

Rai was unconvinced. Sao’s suit jacket smelled slightly and his slacks were in dire need of ironing, but then there was Rai: his shirt had visible sweat stains in some very strange places, and his jeans had a hole in the knee.

“Wear a jacket, no one will notice,” Sao suggested.

“I think I’ll get a new shirt anyway.”

Sao smiled and let Rai shuffle out. While he waited, he flipped open the book at the top of Sapphire’s stack of journals. Her handwriting was ostensibly cursive, but rushed and jagged; his headmistress would have had her sentenced to remedial practice. He’d been the same, back at school. For that, he looked at Sapphire’s scratchings with a kind of affection.

It appeared that this was her last journal. The back third of the book was blank. On the last page, under a table of numbers, he saw rows labeled ‘mom’ and ‘v’. The table was incomplete. At the bottom, an especially messy line of scrawl had been made in frustration as Sapphire gave up on her budgeting table, and herself.

“‘I don’t want to live here anymore’,” Rai read, coming up behind him.

“Nice blazer. I wasn’t expecting you to so readily show me up.” It was a genuine compliment - met with the blankest of stares. “And I think that’s an ‘o’. It’s hard to tell, since the letters all loop together and Sapphire didn’t often dot her ‘i’s. In addition, she tends to form them with large bottom loops… I think what this says is ‘I don’t want to love them anymore.’”

“Are you sure? That sounds off.”

“Mm… Yes, the wording is awkward. I only read a page or two for an impression; maybe she wouldn’t have said that.”

Sao closed the book and thought about dreams being snatched, or consciously passed on. The latter spoke more to hopelessness, he thought. If a dream was yanked from your hands, you were wronged, but at least you’d had pride to injure at all. But if you opened your hands to pass it away, of your own volition, chances are you’d already given up on it yourself.

“So, where are we headed?” Rai asked, mercifully willing.