We Don't Talk About Carol

by Kristen L. Berry

“Baby,” she said finally, her voice kind but firm as the oak tree on her front lawn, “we don’t talk about Carol.”

That wise, sly smile, so much like my own. Baby, Grammy had drawled, we don’t talk about Carol. I’d known better than to bring up a forbidden topic in my family. I never asked about the girl in the photograph again. Before long, I’d forgotten about her entirely.

Her accent reminded me of Grammy’s, sweet and stretched, the way caramel pulls apart when you break a Twix in half. It was a drawl I seemed to notice only among older folks in Raleigh, as if the accent was slowly fading into memory.

The pieces clicked in my mind—the fact that Carol was posing on Grammy’s porch in the picture. The striking similarities in our appearances. The way Grammy had lovingly held on to those tiny dresses. It was so obvious. My kid brain just hadn’t put it together.

“Well. I guess I don’t really see the harm at this point.” She handed the frame back to me. “Effie and Carol had a bad falling out when the girl was around sixteen or seventeen. Carol was a talented singer. Voice like a songbird.

She got it in her head she was gonna go to Detroit, get herself signed to Motown. But education was everything to Effie. She was the third generation in her family to get a college education at Shaw. Her great-granddaddy’d been born a slave! But Carol didn’t have the patience for school. Effie caught on that Carol was trying to leave high school early and planned to book it to Detroit to try her luck at getting a record deal. They fought about it, and I guess Carol ran off.” Eloise shook her head. “That’s what your gramma figured anyway.”

“There were a couple years back in the sixties when a handful of teenage girls in the neighborhood just vanished. All the missing girls came from houses down by the creek that runs behind this house. Folks in the neighborhood got to calling whoever did it the Creek Killer ’cause of that, even though we never knew for sure they were killed. ’Cause they were never found. But what else could’ve happened? Folks don’t just go disappearing into thin air.”

“Child, please. Police didn’t care about a bunch of little Black girls gone missing. They dismissed them, said they must’ve run away, or were caught up in shady things. But these were good girls. College girls, some of them. I kinda think it might’ve been easier for Effie to imagine her little girl out in the world pursuing her dreams than think that something awful might’ve happened to her.”

Police didn’t care about a bunch of little Black girls gone missing. According to the podcasts I listened to, and the crime stories I used to cover back in San Francisco, not much had changed in the years since the girls vanished.

I found the page Eloise described, the words “Forever in Our Hearts” printed in looping script at its top. The corners of the page were illustrated with flowers, surrounding the photos of six Black girls. Like those of the other students in the yearbook, the captions below the girls’ names included the fields they dreamed of working in one day. But they also included their ages the day they disappeared. Clearly someone thought their disappearances were all connected, because though they’d gone missing over the course of three years, they were included in a single list in the 1965 yearbook:

Carol was only seventeen when she went missing. I remembered that complicated age—how unbearable it was living in my childhood home as my parents’ relationship crumbled around us, yet how trapped I felt by my dependence on my parents’ support. Working a part-time retail job after school while still enjoying weekend sleepovers with friends. A child. On the brink of young adulthood, but a child just the same.

But as someone who’s known a lot of loss in her life, I can tell you from experience that you shouldn’t let the past get in the way of living.”

“These things can have a way of consuming a person. Promise you won’t let this consume you?”

“You really are the spitting image of Carol. Or how I imagine she would’ve looked at your age. How old are you now, doll?”

wished people knew how even the most innocent comments could feel like a punch beneath the ribs. They might as well shout, You’re running out of time.

It was one of the many things we’d bonded over, having lost our fathers. Malik carried his father’s death like a heavy shroud that dragged behind him throughout his life. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that when my mother called to tell me of my father’s fatal car crash, the purest and most immediate emotion I felt was relief.

I thought about what little my mother had been able to pull out of my father about Aunt Carol. How she’d abandoned him by running away; how as far as he and Grammy were concerned, he no longer had a sister. As though runaway teenagers were no longer children, no longer vulnerable to the dangers of the world. No longer worthy of empathy or concern.

“This is not your problem to fix, Sydney. This is not your burden to carry.”

It’s as though Mary Wells’ latest song is about him: “someone will wait eternally…and it’s someone who wants your love desperately…”

I don’t think anyone has ever truly cherished me before. And I didn’t realize how much I needed to feel that way until I experienced it.

Sure, all the flowers and sweet notes and gentle words are swell, and I don’t know when he got to be so handsome. But it’s the way he takes care of me that makes me feel like this is love.

Malik and I had been together for nearly a dozen largely happy years at that point, yet while I’d given her no reason to doubt us, Mom would periodically ask me this question, as though searching for cracks in our foundation. Like she expected the floor to eventually fall out from under us. I tried to view this as a lingering

insecurity from her relationship with my father, and not a condemnation of my marriage.

The description of my father and Carol reminded me so much of my relationship with Sasha. Carol and I were both three years older than our siblings, and both seemed to take a protective, almost parental approach to our roles as big sisters. My father was only fourteen when

Carol went missing. I couldn’t imagine abandoning Sasha at that age, running away and never speaking to her again. Given how close they were, I found it hard to believe that Carol would do this to my father, either.

My family has always been so small and scattered; now that Grammy’s gone, it’s just me, my mom, and my sister out in L.A.” Yvonne stood then and gave me a small, almost pitying smile. “Maybe that’s why you’re so determined to find out what happened to Carol.” —

The sensation that struck me reminded me of the weight of a lead apron at the dentist’s office. Gravity’s hold on me was suddenly stronger, pulling me more forcefully toward Earth’s center.

I gripped the railing as the heavy feeling entered my body, filling my chest. It was the feeling of knowing something deep within the fibers of my body before I had any facts to support it. It was the feeling of knowing something terrible but undeniable.

I liked to think of my father as two different people. There was the early version Sasha and I knew when we were little, the silly, loving dad we spent so much time with. The later version was moody, quick-tempered, and unpredictable, and just as removed as our mother. I began mourning the loss of my dad long before my father died.

But I guess that’s what often happens in relationships; it’s the things that initially attract you to someone, the things that make them different from you, that eventually become the very things that repel you.

Black people make up like fourteen percent of the population of this country, but around forty percent of America’s missing kids are Black. Yet very few news stories covering missing kids are of Black children. It’s just so fucked up.”

But I was nagged by the suspicion that she never would have allowed me to move in with her if I’d asked.

Their lives had grown as intertwined as two trees planted too close to each other, their roots so tangled it seemed impossible to separate them without damaging both.

I wanted to tell them they didn’t have to look beyond the dinner table to find strangers lurking in our family tree.

A cold ache spread through my chest at the sight of the cheerfully hued bakeware, tangible evidence that Sasha’s roots in our mother’s home were growing deeper and stronger with each passing year.

It wasn’t like that with my father. His devolution was as gradual as watching a glacier melt.

The tension in the house would darken and expand, the way the air becomes thick and staticky before a thunderstorm.

It was like the sun’s surface, bubbling red, barely stable. But beneath that heat was an unfathomable sadness.

didn’t analyze my chosen profession much at the time; I enjoyed writing and loved a good mystery, so journalism always seemed like a logical path. In retrospect, though, I wondered if there had been a deeper motivation for my choice. Maybe for someone who grew up in a household that favored suppression and obfuscation, choosing a career dedicated to publicly uncovering the truth was the ultimate form of rebellion. Maybe, given that my father died a mystery, there was something cathartic about untangling the mysteries of others.

“Just because your father didn’t make

good on his threats doesn’t make the threats themselves any less traumatic.”

“I’m not made of glass, Malik. And you can’t bubble-wrap me until a baby comes. I need you to tell me if something is going on. Nothing will stress me out more than feeling like you’re keeping me in the dark.”

This was always the part I hated about my journalism days: forcing open the tender wounds of strangers.

A current of emotion surged through me, tickling my already raw tear ducts. I hadn’t realized how much I longed to hear Malik say those words, to show that he recognized the sacrifices I was making for us, for our potential family.

was reminded of a heartbreaking line from Carol’s journal, referencing her fraught relationship with Grammy: Why do I have to change who I am to make her love me?

Maybe going on this trip was also what I needed to prove to myself once and for all that my brush with BPD was, in fact, an isolated incident. It had been nearly ten years since I’d checked out of UCSF. Ten years of therapy. Ten years without a relapse. I’d be able to recognize any warning signs this time. I’d know if the firm lines of reality began to blur. This time would be different.

I felt something twist in my chest. It wasn’t the house that radiated the atmosphere of love and belonging I’d felt as Maya guided us through it; it was the Hall family themselves. This was the kind of warmth a child was meant to grow up in.

Sometimes a missing person is just someone who wanted to start

a new life somewhere else. And sometimes a suspicious vehicle is just a regular old car driving through a neighborhood. Seeing a 210 then would be like seeing a Prius now.”

All those years spent wondering why the story of Hannah McEwan and her family had unraveled me. Never understanding why the physical sensation of my anxiety and the experiences of my nightmares always mirrored the feeling of drowning. The excavated memory of that awful experience on the Pacific Coast Highway was the puzzle piece I hadn’t realized was missing.