The Battle of Love : Part IV

You know how much I hate clichés, but if you are reading this diary you must know that I am far away from you now. I don’t know if I am dead already, but in case I am not, it won’t be long before someone comes knocking at your door to let you know that I am. You should know that I did not intend for this to happen. You must promise me that my confession will always remain only between the two of us. Nobody else could ever know about it.

Confession is always weakness. The grave soul keeps its own secrets and takes its own punishment in silence. 
Dorthia Dukes

But my soul is laden in abundance with dark secrets and I don't think I could bear the burden of you not knowing what drove us apart, because you of all people deserve to know.

You have loved me patiently, kindly and immensely. I had never known true love until I met you. And for that, I want to thank you. Whatever time we spend together, we were in love; love that was intense and passionate and honest. I am glad to have lived long enough to have met you, to have loved you and to have made the decision to marry you and spend the rest of our lives together. Your love empowered me and often guided me through my darkest hours.

William, once you read this you could never un-read. So if you have made peace with my disappearance, with my death, then I beg you to read no further and burn this diary down to ashes. Because though all I want is for you to know, I would never be able to forgive myself if this knowing was to come at the cost of your life. I want you to never think of revenge. I want you to love me like you always have despite the knowing. I want you to forgive me. I want that you never think of me with disgust or shame or anger. I want that you stay happy and content and find in yourself enough strength to move on. I will and have always loved you. I want you to honor my love and read this only to know, and nothing else.

I get goosebumps every time I read this. Every single time.

Soon after Gina’s disappearance turned into an official missing person’s case everything around the house changed. Mother refused to eat and spent almost all her time in the bedroom. The police initially were very keen in figuring out Gina’s whereabouts and almost every man on the force had been deployed to investigate the disappearance of my sister. No foul play was suspected, she didn’t have any known enemies and because we received no ransom calls the police concluded that Gina hadn’t been taken, certainly not for money. My father knew people who knew people, which is to say that the police were under significant pressure to yield quick results and locate my sister soon. The media was all over Gina’s disappearance story too. Everything was a mess. Everywhere we went, whoever we spoke to, whom so ever we met, everybody only had the same questions to ask, the same assurances to give. After a point everyone’s concern and worry came across as nothing but social obligation to me. 

The news channels loved the story because it was the perfect mystery. There was no crazy ex-boyfriend to pin this on, no enemy at workplace who would want Gina out of the picture and she had had no issues with her family either, close or extended. No financial strains were unearthed which could have forced her to go down a dark path. More so, she was ready to get married soon and her fiance loved and adored her immensely.

One infamous news channel even ran a very Gone Girl-esque story one night and made claims about how in all probability it was Gina herself who had staged her disappearance to get away from the people in her life because the perfectness of it all carried implied expectations which she wasn’t capable of meeting anymore. William had been so angry that night when the story was aired on the 9 ‘o’ clock slot on ANM News that we had to physically stop him from almost smashing the television into bits. I had never seen William so violent and out of control. Father filed a complaint against the news channel for defamation and they in turn apologized, not airing that story again.

A volunteer headquarters was established at the Yakuz Residence and a hotline set up. Margaret, Rick Nelon’s wife, was by my mother’s side day and night. The two women had known each other since they were six year old girls in pigtails. Gina was as much a daughter to Margaret as were her own daughters. I was grateful for her help in dealing with mom through this nightmare. She was the one who had managed to convince mother to reach out to the public and involve as many people as they could in finding Gina. A website was designed by a group of young volunteers and  www.FindGinaKramer.com was made live within 10 days of her disappearance. It urged people to keep an open eye and share whatever relevant information they could think of or came across that could help in locating Gina or establishing contact with her. A press conference was arranged by father’s PR team and all of us were present there-- mom, William, Gina’s boss Ms. Andy Ken, Uncle Bill, Rick and Margaret Nelon, Jake and Megan Stiles too. Dad had asked me to speak on behalf of the Kramer family but I had refused. Every passing second only left me more confused, worried and anxious than the last as I failed each time to come up with a reasonable explanation for everything that was happening with us at the moment.

I even had the note Uncle Bill had handed me over that day sent to a forensics lab in the next town to have it analyzed for prints and DNA, hoping if anything useful could be recovered from it. Jake’s classmate’s brother was a promising forensics science student who was interning with a lab to gain some work experience. That's the one I had picked. He was more than surprised when I'd gotten in touch with him, hoping to squeeze out a favor from someone I barely knew. He had hesitated at first but when I promised his girlfriend an internship with our company’s marketing department, he agreed. I also had the note sent to a handwriting expert I'd made acquaintance with almost two years ago at some offbeat seminar I had attended on criminology. She had confirmed that it was indeed Gina’s hand writing and that the note hadn’t been tampered with in any way. The lab results didn't turn out to be of much help either. Since the note had changed enough hands before reaching them, they could not pull any distinct finger prints off of it except Gina’s, mine and Uncle Bill’s. No traces of DNA of any kind were left on that note; not even partial or residual prints that they could scan and run through their system to see if anything popped up. Disappointed, I had let my quest rest there but I hadn’t given up. I was however in no position to address the general public on behalf of my family and address my sister’s sudden disappearance.

At the end of an exhausting and lengthy debate between dad, mom and I, we decided that it would be best if William spoke at the press conference and he did.  Surprisingly, after that press conference the media’s interest in the story began to subside. No camping out of reporters around the front porch anymore. No more 9 ‘o’ clock report on the missing tale of one Gina Kramer. I assumed that people began to grow bored with the story because it had been stuck on the same chapter for far too long now and nobody was patient enough to wait to find out what would happen next. So, they simply moved on.

By the end of a month and a half there was no mention of my sister’s disappearance anywhere-- not in the local newspaper, not on national television, not on the radio. The volunteers’ headquarters was officially shut down a week following that. The website hadn’t proved to be of much assistance from the very beginning and it was also taken down. When the police chief stopped by for a quick lunch with dad on a Sunday, he expressed his concern over the force having spent considerable and more than usual amount of time, effort and resources on the case. The police had decided to stop and let go of the case, adding Gina’s file to the pile of open, unsolved cases. They had other important matters which needed their attention, matters that seemed solvable.  Dad concurred, thanked him for staying on the case for this long and showed him out with a shake of hand. I still remember the look on dad’s face. Mother and he were convinced that Gina was dead. That the police’s failure in locating her, her body or any other clue with respect to the case that could have led us to Gina’s whereabouts were all a sign.

Dad decided to work from home from that day on. Mother never moved on and the loss of her first child ate her raw inside out. A bout of depression turned into looming death. She lost her will to live, refused to see a doctor or take medication, refused to meet people, refused to talk, and refused to listen. She refused to love. She refused to try and look alive for her husband or her second child. She refused to fight. And her refusals led to her death. A year after Gina’s disappearance, I lost mother too.

William moved in right after mother’s death and also took over dad’s responsibilities in the company to keep business strong and sturdy. Dad was still on the Board-- it was his company, his child after all, but it was William and Rick Nelson who largely ran the empire now. I was more than happy when William made the proposition and asked if we'd be open to him living with us for some time.  "When I promised to love her and protect her, my promise had also extended to her family, to you guys", he'd said, and with that dad realized he had nothing in his arsenal to beat William. His company kept dad away from lonesome evenings and he continued to keep the old man occupied with light office work on the weekends.

I found Gina’s diary at William’s place while I was helping him move out of his condominium and into our home. He hadn’t said much about Gina’s disappearance. Unlike dad, he did not believe that Gina was dead but he had his doubts. He had confided in me one day about how he couldn’t bear to look at any of Gina’s pictures anymore because all they reminded him of was a time that was now far out of his reach. He was in constant pain. He had requested me to pack up all of Gina’s stuff from his condo and put it back in her room at our house. This diary had made its way to me then, when I had started to pack Gina’s belongings into boxes, labeling them as I moved from one to the other. She was an avid reader and had set up a library of sorts in the attic at William’s. The diary had been shoved in-between two fat and dusty law books. I did not know that Gina kept a diary and was mistaken at first, assuming it was William’s. But when I saw her name inscribed at the bottom left hand corner I realized it must have been a present and put it away with the rest of her books. Just because Gina wasn’t around did not mean I could steal a peek into her personal diary. "If she was to ever find out she would probably kill me", I had said out loud to an empty room almost involuntarily.

I didn't come face-to-face again with the diary for quite some time. I did not consider the possibility that it could contain Gina’s penning, unraveling the story leading up to her disappearance. I had strayed into her room one day while loitering around the house aimlessly when my hand had reached straight for the diary for no apparent reason. I turned it over, inspected the hard cover for a minute and then opened it, giving in to a moment of weakness, my curiosity getting the better of me.

Surprisingly, what I encountered next was completely off my guesses and extremely shocking. Gina’s diary did not contain a dirty secret, some dark wish or a kinky fantasy. Instead, its words told a story-- her story, that had been recorded intricately, every event jotted down meticulously, with no details left to spare. Anybody could tell that the writer hadn’t just scribbled some gibberish away for someone to read for the sake of it. Considerable amount of time and effort had been invested in filling it up. Only the writing on the first few pages wasn’t marked Chapter; the remainder of the diary was a first hand, hand written account of what had taken place with my sister that had crumbled her life, leaving only ruins. It was after reading Gina’s diary that I resolved to focus my life solely on finding out who was truly and in all sense responsible for ruining my sister’s life, and the lives of people she loved and cared for. I moved out of the house the very next week. Luckily, dad and William didn't need much convincing and I faced minimal opposition to my proposition of moving to a different city altogether.