* * *
The search party spread out in a single long line. Liz could not see the end. Heads of different sizes, different colors, some wearing hats, others in sunglasses, ponytails. Many young women, Susie’s friends and peers from high school, long hair flowing down their backs, shoulders tanned, with odd looks on their faces as if they didn’t quite know how to greet the day.
It was sunny and beautiful, a beach day, and yet they were picking through knee-high grass, brushing the earth with sticks looking for their friend, for one of their own, suddenly lost in the world.
Liz’s arms were linked with searchers on either side of her. Jerry to her right, Joyce on her left. They were like her fortress, but Jerry’s arm trembled like her own. She wondered if he was as terrified to peer into the grass as she. She imagined a shock of blond hair against the bright green grass, and then shook her head, cast the image away, and gritted her teeth.
The searches went on for days. They combed the woods that butted Tranquil Meadows - their little subdivision. They fanned out to surrounding state forest lands, hiking parks. Liz searched with the parties every day. She couldn’t sit at home while Susan was out there.
* * *
Detective Hansen sat across from Liz and Jerry. He didn’t look away and avoid eye contact. She wondered how he’d mastered that, looking people in the eye in such devastating circumstances. She didn’t think she could do it.
“We’ve talked to everyone in your neighborhood, Liz. Everyone on Susan’s list of friends, everyone she worked with.”
“And?”
“And,” he held up his empty hands. “Hannah was the last confirmed conversation.”
“But-” Liz started.
The detective stopped her.
“We’re not done. I have deputies talking to every business in town. There are pictures on the news and in the paper. People go out of town. If someone saw her, they might not realize it’s important yet. Sometimes good leads take time.”
“We don’t have time,” Liz choked out.
Jerry took her hand. His was hot, slick. His face was hard. Liz saw his clenched jaw beneath his lips.
“What can we do?” he asked, pushing the words out slowly, as if it took all his effort not to shout them, pound his fists on the desk.
“Keep spreading the word. Hand out fliers. Hand out a hundred fliers to everyone you know, and ask them to hand them out too. And keep thinking about any place Susan might have gone that day. Keep searching your memory for a comment, something you forgot.”
Liz snorted.
“Hand out fliers? Try to remember? That’s your big plan to bring our daughter home?”
The detective’s eyes softened.
“Not my plan. The work we’re doing is extensive. Every bit of manpower we can spare is on this, Mrs. Miner. I’m telling you what you and your husband should be doing.”
3
Liz
Missing. Vanished. Gone.
Liz wrote the words on a little notebook next to the telephone, grinding the pen deeper into the page until it struck the wood of the coffee table beneath. Still, she could not stop. She shoved the pen down, holding it in her fist, willing the emptiness that the words summoned to become some sensation other than nothingness.
“Liz?” Joyce stood in the patio doorway, a pitcher in her hand. She wasn’t smiling, but had the crestfallen, somewhat confused look Liz noticed on so many faces lately.
In the first week, Susie’s disappearance mobilized them. Phone calls, search parties, fliers. There was a purpose, direction. Check the high school, the local hangouts, the beach. Each time, Liz swelled with hope. This time they would find Susie. But they didn’t find her, not so much as a hair.
Liz didn’t talk, just waved her in, glanced at the table where she’d gouged it with the pen. It stirred nothing, not even a shred of emotion. She could smash the table to bits and burn it in the backyard and doubted she’d even blink an eye.
Joyce poured them each a drink - sweet tea laced with rum.
Liz sipped it.
She considered pushing it away. She might say, ‘I need to be clear if Susie comes home,’ but too much time had passed. She understood the likelihood of Susie’s fate, even if no one said it, even if her own mind refused to put the words together.
“Jerry’s losing it,” she said. “He screamed at a concession lady at Clinch Park yesterday when she couldn’t remember if she’d ever waited on Susie. He’s got all this rage, this emotion with nowhere to put it. He wants to blame someone. I can feel it hovering between us, like a balloon getting ready to explode.”
Joyce put her hand over Liz’s and squeezed.
“There will be answers,” she said, though she did not sound convinced.
“You mean there will be someone for him to be angry with? Someone who-” Liz’s sob strangled her words. It surprised both women with its suddenness. Liz buried her face in her hands. She couldn’t imagine a bad guy any more than she could say the words. It all led to a single conclusion, an impossible truth. It was the sort of thing people didn’t recover from. The death of a child. No, worse, the murder of a child.
Liz took her hands away, wiped the tears from her cheeks. She wanted that initial energy back. It had turned. Now she felt constant exhaustion coupled with jitters, an inability to sleep as she struggled to keep her eyes open.
“I don’t know what to do, Joyce. Tell me what to do.”
Her friend looked at her, her own eyes heavy with tears.
She pushed her drink closer.
“Just to take the edge off, Liz.”
Liz took another drink. If she drank the whole pitcher, would she finally sleep? She doubted it. Instead, she’d lay in her bed, the room rolling, her stomach a mass of oozing nausea.
“Where is Jerry?” Joyce looked toward the front door, as if he might burst in at any moment and take out his directionless rage on her.
“At work,” Liz said, puzzled. She had been angry when he went to work that morning. She’d screamed and cried. He left her on their bedroom floor, one of Susie’s shirts clutched to her chest.
“Just a for a few hours,” Liz added. “He needed to catch up on paperwork, insurance claims or something.”
“That’s good,” Joyce said.
Liz nodded. It probably was good. They couldn’t sit in the house together, Liz chewing her fingernails to bloody stumps, Jerry bouncing his foot until he wore a hole in the rug.
“Maybe I’m jealous,” Liz whispered. “He has somewhere to go. I have nothing.”
“That’s not true,” Joyce insisted. “There’s still work to do, Liz. We will find her. You just need a rest. Your eyes look, well, like you haven’t slept in days.”
Liz knew it was true - the way she looked and why. She’d gazed at herself that morning in the bathroom mirror. She hadn’t brushed her teeth or combed her hair, and she still wore yesterday’s wrinkled pedal pushers and a saggy, sleeveless blouse.
She’d fallen asleep on the couch sometime around midnight and sat up wide awake just after three a.m. For an hour, she’d walked up and down the neighborhood streets, lightly calling out Susie’s name as if she were a missing cat and not a grown woman. Did she expect Susie to burst from a shed, to wave wildly from a tree?
‘I’m up here, Mom! I climbed up and got stuck.’
The thought caused Liz to stare into every dark tree, searching for movement, for the pale glimmer of a face.
4
120 Days Since Susan Disappeared
Liz
Liz sat on Susan’s bed, clutching Milo - the stuffed giraffe Susie had owned since she was little. Milo occupied a space amongst Susie’s pillows until she was well into her teens. Around fifteen, Susie began to slip the plush toy into her bedside drawer, as if she didn’t want her girlfriends to see him.
Milo’s horns had long ago been rubbed off; its spots faded. Liz liked to think it smelled of her daughter, but she was no longer sure.
It was Christmas
eve. The first Christmas without Susie.
Along the street, houses were lit with Christmas lights. Liz saw Christmas trees glowing through people’s picture windows. In the house across the street, she could see the bright red and green of presents wrapped and stacked near the tree. The image made her feel hollow, terribly empty.
She closed her eyes and smelled the giraffe, conjuring a memory of Susan holding the stuffed animal on Christmas morning, wearing footie pajamas and hopping up and down when she opened the doll house Jerry had bought her. She’d fallen in love with the house months before, when she spotted it in Milliken’s Department Store in Traverse City. Jerry had driven down the weekend before and bought it. Susan was seven. Her blue eyes sparkled in her soft, round face. Her hair was already long, nearly to her butt. Liz had braided it the night before. The doll house overshadowed her other presents. Each time she unwrapped another gift, her eyes wandered back to the gingerbread trim and the heart-shaped windows.
Susan barely left the dollhouse that Christmas day. The promise of chocolate pudding brought her to the dinner table. Otherwise, she would have happily played into the night without so much as a drink of water.
Tears poured over Liz’s cheeks and soaked the giraffe. She’d been careful in the beginning about tainting the stuffed animal, avoiding anything that might remove its scent. Now she didn’t care. She hugged it constantly, slept with it, cried into it. She’d spilled a cup of coffee on it the other morning.
Downstairs, Jerry was putting lights on the Christmas tree he’d arrived with that afternoon. He’d burst through the door, grinning, dragging the tree behind him. He had expected Liz to be happy. She saw the hope in his expression, which drained when he saw despair rather than joy on his wife’s face.
In stony silence, Liz had walked upstairs and closed herself in Susie’s room.
She heard Jerry downstairs, pulling Christmas boxes from the closet. He would string the lights and hang a few bulbs.
Why? Liz wanted to scream. She wanted to drag the tree into the snowy yard and stomp the bulbs into red dust. She wanted to run down the street and rip lights from people’s porches.
Instead, she sat perfectly still, lest the grief catch hold and send her spinning into the black.
She had never imagined a Christmas without Susan. In the days, weeks, and months since that fateful August day, Liz found that she could live nowhere but in the moment. Thoughts of the past wrecked her with spasms of grief, the good times with her beautiful daughter like knives slicing and poking her psyche. Thoughts of the future, the futureless nothing, left her breathless, raw and exposed, hopeless.
But now, one such future had rushed up to meet her. The first Christmas without her child. It loomed, a blanket of heavy despair, a cold sweeping shadow that turned Christmas lights into the shining red eyes of a monster lurking in the darkness.
A knock sounded on the door downstairs, and Liz froze.
What if…? That was the thought every time the door opened or the phone rang. What if it’s Susie? What if the person who took her decided to let her go? It was Christmas, after all. For a split second, the possibility, the all-encompassing joy of that possibility, sent her shooting from the bed. She pounded down the stairs as Jerry opened the door.
Detective Hansen stood on their stoop, his face grim.
Liz shook her head and walked backwards.
“It’s not that,” he said quickly at the look of terror on Liz’s face. Jerry looked similarly horror-struck.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have,” the detective stammered, pulling off his knit cap and scrunching it in his hands.
“No, come in.” Jerry stepped back. He moved to Liz’s side but didn’t touch her. Touching had become hard between them, more and more rare, until even brushing against one another in the hallway felt like an electric shock.
“I was going to wait until after Christmas, but I thought you’d want to know right away.”
“What is it?” Liz asked, squeezing the giraffe so tight her fingers hurt.
The detective held up a single tennis shoe. It was unremarkable, though clearly weathered. What had once been white now looked gray.
“Some kids found it. They were building a snow fort in the woods off Turner Street.”
The woods off Turner Street were just blocks away. They were filled with bike trails and foot paths.
Sometimes Susie jogged in the woods on especially hot, sunny days - like the day she disappeared.
They had searched those woods.
Liz didn’t speak, only continued to stare at the shoe.
The detective sighed, turned it so the heel faced them, and peeled back the tongue. The initials S.M., in blurred purple marker, appeared.
S.M. for Susan Miner.
5
Three Years Later
July 1975
Orla
Much like good deeds, Orla believed that no gift goes unpunished.
Though “gift” was a subjective term coined by her Aunt Effie who believed that, yes, Orla had a gift. Her father, on the other hand, called it a curse, and her mother pretended it did not exist at all. Any time Orla divulged a secret related to her “gift,” her mother fluttered her hands, laughed shrilly and hurried from the room.
Orla learned quickly to be careful in disclosing the gift - which was not always easy.
Take, for instance, her second year in elementary school. She was skipping rope in the play yard with her best friend, Carrie, when a rock came whizzing from a tree and struck Carrie square in the forehead. Her skin split open and blood sprayed down her dress. She fell sobbing to the grass, clutching at her torn face. Without a thought, Orla bent over and picked up the rock. In an instant, she saw Marcus Riley, his buck teeth biting hard on his lower lip as he cocked his arm back and threw the rock. It wasn’t Carrie he intended to hit, but Jessica, who stood a few feet away picking dandelions. Jessica had bested Marcus in the spelling bee three days before. As Carrie sobbed, and teachers rushed to her aid, Orla got the first sickening sense of knowing the truth and not revealing it. She wanted to. She desperately wanted to, for the sake of her distressed friend who still, more than ten years later, bore the scar.
Despite her silence, Orla did not sit idly by. A week after the rock-throwing incident, Orla spotted Marcus swimming naked in a forest pond. She stole his clothes and flung them into a high tree. At school on Monday, the cafeteria was abuzz with sightings of a naked Marcus as he darted down the street, holding a bushel of leaves in front of his privates.
In middle school, her mother sewed her a pair of beautiful white gloves to block the sensations. They weren’t Orla’s style. She liked bright, flowery things. Within two days, she’d soiled them black. Her mother fretted and tried black gloves, but Orla’s mother hated black. The Irish Catholic in her viewed black as funerals and death, and she grimaced every time she saw Orla in the gloves.
Eventually, nude gloves appeared, and Orla attempted to keep them clean. After all, they blended in almost perfectly with her skin, so she could wear them discreetly. She didn’t wear them all the time. Many things she touched barely left an impression. Some things created a spark Orla could ignore, like the sound of traffic on a busy street.
Now and then, she’d get jolted.
At fifteen, while visiting her cousin Liam, she touched his father’s coat and realized her Uncle Clancy was having an affair with a woman he’d met at a pub. He’d been with her that morning.
The gift had peaked in her adolescence. Between the ages of twelve and fifteen, the sensations were so overpowering, she wore her gloves almost constantly, but then they faded, and she learned to control them. If she didn’t attune to the touch, she could almost avoid the images altogether. But still, she wore the gloves often. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to know; she was curious. But she had a keen understanding of the old adage ignorance is bliss. Once you knew something, you couldn’t unknow it.
Orla lifted the nude gloves from her bedside table, and
slipped them on. It was a habit by now. At twenty-years-old, she no longer even thought about the gloves. Putting them on was as natural as wearing lip gloss.
She grabbed her canvas bag of books, and trotted down the stairs two at a time.
Most of her roommates had already left for the day.
She spotted Hazel in the garden, offered a quick wave, and pulled her bike from the shed.
It was the perfect day for a bike ride.
* * *
“Can I give ya a hand?” Orla asked the man.
He stood near his car, studying a flat tire as if he hadn’t a clue what to do about it.
He glanced up, expressionless.
Orla gazed back, lifting her eyebrows and wondering at the blankness in his dazzling blue eyes.
He blinked, looked back at the tire, and then grinned. The smile lit his face, erasing the strange absence.
“Looked like you were buggin’ out for a minute there,” Orla told him, returning the smile.
He laughed and gestured at the tire.
“I was trying to remember if I had a spare. I had a flat a few months back.”
“Got it. Well, I happen to know how to change a tire, so if you need some help….”
“You know how to change a tire?” The man surveyed her, not in the usual revolting way that men looked at Orla, their eyes hungrily bouncing along her curves, over her long legs.
“Yes, believe it or not, there are girls in the world who don’t look at cars like bug vomit.”
“Bug vomit?”
“Yeah, you know, bugs are often gross to girls, so is vomit, put the two together.” She waved her hand to imply the rest.
“Ah, good to know. So, you aren’t afraid of bugs or vomit either, then?”
Ashes Beneath Her: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel Page 2