Five

The clock struck five. Five people stood in a circle around the table. Five was the number of hours they had been waiting in the small grey-walled room that smelled of sweat and urine. ‘Five Guys’ was the restaurant they went to last night. Five were the number of days since her brother went missing. And it had been five minutes since they got to know that her five-year-old brother’s body had been discovered in an abandoned lake.

Sitting on the cream-coloured chair that made a creaking noise every time she moved, she stared at the police officers, clad in their ugly blue uniforms and oversized black caps as they shouted at each other in a state of panic and frenzy. Frantic hand gestures, constant ringing of the telephone, the ‘clunking’ sound of the broken fan and the ‘ding’ sound of her phone’s notifications every time someone sent a condolence message, didn’t overwhelm her despite all the noise - her ears were numb. So was her mind.

Glancing at her dad sitting next to her crookedly, she watched as he stared at the dried blood on the floor with a blank expression on his face. His dark-brown orbs held no emotion and his lips were tightly shut in a straight line as if he were afraid to speak. She knew he wasn’t there to witness Alanis growing up and she vaguely remembered seeing the disappointed expression on her father’s face as a 13-year-old while standing in the delivery room next to her mother when the doctor told him that Alanis was neither a boy nor a girl. She remembered how he had walked out of the room angrily and had refused to hold his child in his arms while her mother watched him, with tears rolling down her sunken cheeks.

Like his name, Alanis, with his small feet and a runny nose 24/7, had captured everyone’s attention with happiness and joy. But unfortunately, not her father’s. He wasn’t there to witness Alanis as he took his first steps, he wasn’t there when Alanis said his first word, ‘Papa’, he wasn’t there when Alanis went to school for the first time and he wasn’t there when Alanis stood next to his dead mother and poked her cheeks asking her to go to the park. Alanis was invisible to their father. But he was visible when their neighbours spewed slurs while their father walked in the streets, was visible when their father slapped Alanis the day he had dressed up in her oversized dress and was visible when their father walked around with his head bowed in shame.

But now, sitting next to her father, she tried to search for some sort of emotion on his face. She wanted to grab him by his shoulders and shake him to the point where he would have to cry because why did he not? Why was he not worried for the past five days while she wailed and sobbed and searched every street of New York that she possibly could find her little brother? Why did he not feel grief?

The five police officers were constantly telling them that they were suspicious about a few high-school seniors who had bullied Alanis and that they would bring them in for questioning. She watched them with eyes full of tears and waited to see her brother again-only to bid him goodbye. Trying to mentally prepare herself to see her brother’s lifeless body – the young child she had raised, the boy with whom she had enjoyed 'Teen Titans' nights, and the young boy she loved more than anything in the world – she realized that nothing could have readied her for the words she was about to hear.

Three policemen with angry expressions plastered on their faces, burst into the room, and grabbed her father by his collar,

“Mr. Daniel Williamson. You are under arrest for the murder of Alanis Jane.”