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MY SON WENT MISSING 10-YEARS-AGO

My son went missing ten years ago. I woke up before my wife, only to find the our front door open. I panicked when I checked his bedroom and found he was not there. He was only five years old.

We searched for many months. We put out hundreds of missing persons posters. A picture of my son(Eric) on his 5th birthday, wearing a blue and white checkered shirt and a silver pendent around his neck.

My wife Chimweka was beyond devastated. She couldn’t sleep, and she barely ate. It got to a point where she was hardly functioning. “We will get through this,” I would say. "Do you think he's still out there?”

Chimweka only answered, “I’m not really sure anymore.”

I don’t know what hurt the most, the possibility that Eric was alive but forced to endure some unbearably awful situation, or the possibility that he was dead. I didn’t like to talk about it, I shut my wife down every time she brought it up. We all grieved in our own way.

Somehow, the hardship brought us even more closer. While this kind of loss would tear most married couples apart, it only made us stronger. It was the way she was there for me, the way she picked me up when I was down.

A few years later Chimweka found out she was pregnant a second time. She was nervous, feeling as if she had failed once. I reassured her that things would be alright this time. I couldn't afford her having parenting insecurities.

She gave birth to another son. We named him Ericsson, after his brother. As our son grew up, I noticed there were strange similarities between the two. They looked so much alike, that they even had the same birthmarks on their cheeks. When I had pulled out a few of Eric's old toys, it was like Ericsson recognized them. He even gave his brown teddy bear the same names that his brother had. They also liked the same foods and the same cartoons. We felt like we were blessed with a second chance.

Ericsson was closer to my wife than he was with me. I didn’t mind of course, it gave me more time to focus on my work to provide for them. I was present as a father, but I wasn’t really fond of ‘babysitting’ as I would call it. To be honest I think the similarities were too much for me. Maybe it was just too painful. I didn’t mind it though. I know it’s very selfish, but I liked the fact that our second son preferred to spend all of his time with my wife. Once I had even offered to take him to the play park, but he refused. He wanted my wife to go instead.

Yesterday something very alarming happened. I took Ericsson to the play park. It had a large play structure which he enjoyed, and was surrounded by a few bushes, which I enjoyed. I watched as he played the same way Eric did when I used to take him there.

He was headed down the slide when a notification on my phone distracted me. I pulled it out and saw it was a text from my wife. She was wondering what we were going to eat for supper. I replied her quickly, then returned my gaze to the play structure. To my shock, Ericsson was nowhere to be seen. I swear I had only taken my eyes off of him for a few second.

I frantically began to search for him. After running aimlessly through the bushes while calling his name, I finally found Ericsson. He was underneath a tree, and was digging up something.

I shouted as I rushed to him. He turned to look at me. His hands were covered in dirt, and he looked worried.

“What were you thinking coming out here?” I asked as I grabbed him by the shoulders, “Do you know how much you scared me, huh? You could have gotten yourself hurt, do you understand that?! Never run off like that ever again!”

He apologized. I hugged him and sighed in relief. “What are you doing out here anyways?” I questioned.

He pointed his little dirty index finger to the hole he had started to dig. I raised my eyebrows curiously, and walked over to the shallow pit in front of me. I told him not to play in the dirt.

“But daddy, I have to keep digging!” He exclaimed, “I have to show you something.”

“Show me what?”

“Daddy, just keep digging, you have to see for yourself. It’s a deep hole.”

I don’t know why, but I felt compelled, like I was under some obligation to listen. I found a dry stick, big and strong enough to use for digging. Ericsson did as he was told while I dug. He stayed nearby.

I dusted off the hard surface I had struck moments ago, only to find something that was an off checkered blue cloth. I dusted away the dirt, until I could make out what I was looking at. There— in front of me was a child-sized skull. Beside it, I saw something shining in the light. I picked it up to reveal it was a silver pendant, one from a set I had bought Eric on his 5th birthday.

“Wh— what the hell is this?” I stammered, “What the hell is this?!”

“It’s me daddy,” Ericsson started to say. “That’s where mommy left me after she put me to sleep."

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[yangesstories]

I am worried about my wife. Things haven't been OK with us at home since the beginning of this year— to even think that we have made it this far together is nothing short of a miracle, our family has gone through a bad storm since January and I think Mwangala's fragile mental state is on the verge of collapsing.

It all began after we found Liseli, our five-year-old daughter under the mango tree in our back yard, suspended off the ground, the tips of her toes barely touching the dirt and hángíng by the neck from my wife's chitenge in our back yard. Circumstances leading to our daughter's death still remain unknown but the police ruled it out as accidental suícīde— and that was the most painful thing for me to take in. Accidental suīcíde.

Initially, Mwangala, her side of the family and my side of the family came together to mourn my daughter and the two families helped us to be strong and to get over the grief— though to be honest with you, we never really got over Liseli's death, how could we? As so often happens, time went on, life got busy and the divide ensued.

Mwangala craved constant emotional support, but it became overwhelming for me to bare or to express myself at the same emotional threshold as her— am just not good with all the emotional labour. My mother-in-law was staying with us at the time and she was always tired, of course she was also grieving internally at the loss of her granddaughter but she was also human and got exhausted and Mwangala's daily breakdowns became too much to handle. My wife began cutting herself and threatening to commit sūícīde as a last ditched effort to win her mother’s love and affection, but it was futile. With the promotion she got at her workplace, Mwangala's mother moved across province.

Mwangala went into a complete tailspin after her mother's promotion. She stopped cooking food, she stopped cleaning the house, she stopped bathing and she even stopped talking anymore. There was no intimacy between us in the bedroom area that married couples were to enjoy either, everything was just horrible. Mwangala and I lived in a house of deafening silence until the night time when I could hear her howls of heartbreak echo throughout the house— it was the most painful thing to hear. No mother should ever be exposed to such pain. I love Mwangala so much, but I knew it wasn’t healthy for me to stay in this situation with her.

The morning after another sleepless night I told her that I wanted to go and live with my side of the family, at least until she pulled herself back together and got over our daughter's loss. For the first time in months Mwangala spoke to me, but it was the same rhetoric she had used with her own mother. She told me that if I leave her alone she would have nothing left to live for and that she would surely kíll herself. I told her she had stopped living awhile ago, she was only surviving at this point— an empty shell of the woman she once was. I told her she needed serious help and went outside the door, but I changed my mind and I never reached my family's house.

When I arrived back home that day an eerie feeling crept up all over me. The house was pitch black and Mwangala was nowhere to be seen. I investigated the dining room, which is on the left side of the living room, and I found nothing. I checked for her in our bedroom as well as the bathroom, but they were all clear. I walked down the hallway to our daughter's bedroom and peeped in— I saw a dimly lit candle on Liseli's dresser flickering to a gentle breeze coming in through an open window overlooking our back yard. The orange glow of the candle was illuminating a note.

I went over and began reading the note and an icy cold chill crept up my spine like a giant worm after reading the first few words— though I couldn't physically look at the words, like trying to read in my dream and the words kept jumping into each other, I understood each line though. This wasn’t just any ordinary note, it was a suícíde letter. My chest was pounding and I began to feel a tight knot in the pit of my stomach. With each dancing line on the paper my heart sank deeper, and my stomach felt hot to the point that I leaned forward and clutched my left hand around my belly trying to relieve some of the hot white pain. That was until I reached the bottom of the letter. When I reached the final four words I became frozen with fear and the letter slipped from my moist grip.

The final words were simply 'yours truly— ' and my names 'Muyange Nsefu.'

In that moment, while leaned over and still clutching at my stomach and the burning pain hotter by the second, I felt a cold breeze come through the opened window— the candle went out and the room went dark, the curtain kept swaying and I saw Mwangala in the back yard.

She was under the mango tree, suspended off the ground, a chair knocked off at her feet, hángíng by a noose around her neck— looking directly at me with two bloodshot eyes, glaring a bone chilling, empty stare at me.

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