Vanishing Act ✔️

1

Sean Garrett had a secret, a secret that he had never told another living soul; a secret that gnawed at him, screaming to be acknowledged. Yet for twenty-two years, he had managed to keep that secret chained.

Sure, at times this secret bubbled to the surface, but it never escaped him; it never broke out into the world. At times like these, though, when it did fight its way to the forefront of his thoughts, he would mull this secret over for weeks, and occasionally even months. The secret tasted both sour and rotten and it would rise up in his throat like bile, poisoning his life and sending him crashing into the deepest of depressions.

Once, when he was fifteen, the secret became too much. He hung himself from the ceiling fan. Only the fan snapped. His parents had found him covered in plaster with a noose around his neck.

The psych visits began shortly thereafter. Dr. Smith would attempt to wedge out the truth, but even after three years of sessions, Sean had never said a word about his secret. He had, however, learned a thing or two about repression.

With the doctor searching for answers, holding the secret in had become infinitely more difficult. The only thing Sean could do was convince himself that his great secret was nothing more than a childhood delusion. At first, it was a simple lie that he had told himself.

'It's all in your head,' Sean would mumble.

He didn't buy this for a second, but he wanted to believe it more than anything in the world.

'Carrie went away,' he would continue. 'She left and it was nothing more.'

He knew this to be a lie, but over and over he would repeat the mantra.

'It's all in your head. Carrie went away. She left and it was nothing more. It's all in your head. Carrie went away. She left and it was nothing more. It's all in your head...'

Until one day, somewhere inside, something cracked. The line between the truth of memory and the delusion he so wanted to be reality began to blur. At first, he convinced himself to believe just as he wanted, that the secret was a trick; a falsehood fabricated by the mind of a child.

Then, when he turned eighteen, Sean moved away from both his family and from the prying questions of Dr. Smith. Starting over in the sunny suburbs of Los Angeles, home of so many forgotten sons and daughters, even the memory of that secret began to fade. Here in this city, there was no one to remind him of what he saw as a child; no one to remind him that something had happened. No, in this city of promise and broken dreams, Sean could not only believe the lie that he had taught himself, but also, he could come to escape the secret altogether.

Gradually he began to go days without it ever crossing his mind. Days would slide into weeks and weeks into months; and it would be as though time had succeeded in erasing that wound, finally allowing Sean to forget.

Yet always, like that damnable cat from the children's cartoon, the secret would come back. A sight, a sound, a smell, any minuscule cue could trigger that ancient memory. Then, suddenly, up it would rise once more, inescapable – bringing with it all the pain and bile – and Sean would slip back into a dank and dreary world of regret.

In that darkness, he would remember.

When Sean was thirteen, his sister, Carrie, went missing. Yet, this was not the secret. This, a missing child, was the simple face of the tragedy. It was the loss that broke his father, leaving the military vet a weeping shell of his former self; and it was the truth that his mother fought to deny, hoping for a daughter to return that never would.

Carrie was "missing" and now all that remained of her was a collection of data in the briefest of official reports; one more entry in a limitless database of missing children. There was nothing of the truth in his sister's file, only fragments and abstractions. Carrie's life, her vitality, lay hidden beneath dates and words that fell flat. Moreover, the report was missing the most vital piece of information of all.

Sean's sister had not gone missing. She had vanished.

That was his secret, the truth that no one would have ever believed. Twenty-two years ago, Carrie Anne Garrett literally vanished in front of her brother's eyes.