The Artist

part vi:

They stood in the kitchen on Magnus; neither of them uttered a word. Richard had told Nancy what he knew on the drive from Richardson Airport, which was pretty much nothing at all. She had vanished in the middle of the night, he said. A deviant wouldn’t have bothered to stop for her coat and purse, so it seemed fair for Nancy to assume that she had walked out on her own.

The silence the two near-strangers shared was not shared, really. Richard was fragile and desperate for answers. Nancy was too busy grieving the woman she didn’t know. She took in her sister’s home, running her fingers on the countertops, breathing in the smell of their mother’s piroshkies and cabbage rolls that lingered in Lena’s kitchen. The vacant thud of her footsteps on the tiled floor held such a lonely sound. Were these the same footsteps her sister heard?

“Well. Like I said, I got to step out for a while. But make yourself at home, k? An’ ah... I’ll see you in a while then.”

“Okay, Richard. Thanks.” Nancy stared into his eyes for traces of her sister, and when the door shut behind him, she paced the length of the house in pursuit of something lost. She didn’t know what she was looking for until she entered the bedroom, the one Lena had shared with Richard until six days ago.
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