The Weight of Night

by Christine Carbo

  I looked at him in the flat light. The sheet of ice covered by white snow stretched out for miles and was broken only by small islands dotted with pine trees. Per finished putting on his gear and was impatiently waiting for me. “Hurry, Gretch, we don’t know how long this will take. We may need most of the day and it’s getting dark around three thirty now.”

  My cold fingers fumbled with the laces on my ski boots. He was right, of course. The sun rose late and set early, around three p.m., making the days very short. We were lucky in the southern part of Norway, but many towns got only about an hour of light in December, depending on how far north they were.

  Finally I stood and was ready to go. My legs felt a little shaky at first from the day before. Per plunged ahead right from the get-go as if he were in an Olympic race. “Try to keep up,” he yelled over his shoulder.

  I took off too, at first a little clumsy, then found my rhythm. We passed some of the islands with frozen silver waterfalls halted in their drop to the sea. They looked like opalescent columns, and I felt like I was in some other silent world, like I’d entered some great Norse myth about Valhalla. The farther we skied, the islands fell behind us and there was nothing ahead except a long thin line that marked the horizon. The sky was the color of chrome, and Per was already beginning to look like a speck in the cold gray distance. “Per, wait!” I yelled out.

  I felt small and flimsy, but heavy too, like it would require a lot of energy to keep moving for as many kilometers as Per said he wanted us to cover—twenty kilometers, more than we had with Pappa. “Faen.” I swore out loud without caring. There was no one to hear me. I stopped in spite of knowing that we shouldn’t be so far apart from each other. And I knew I should keep trying to catch him, but my mouth and throat were dry again and I wanted more water.

  The floor of ice stretched underneath me. I wondered how thick it was. The previous evening, Pappa had said after we’d returned, after dinner, that there could be unexpected thinning of the ice—that sometimes pancake ice formed, layers with air between them that will suddenly crack and drop you down to a lower strata. He said he didn’t tell us earlier, before we went, because he didn’t want to frighten me. The thought scared me now, and I pushed it away and took a sip of water. The cold air bit my cheeks. In the distance, Per looked like he had stopped to wait.

  “Good. Asshole,” I swore out loud again. Rævhøl. I screwed the lid back on my water bottle, put it back in my pack, and started to ski again. Eventually, in the rhythm and the quiet of it all, with nothing but a dark-colored thread of a line for the horizon among the uniform gray, I thought of how simple everything seemed and how lucky I was to be out in the fresh air, no homework to do and the vague scent of salt and ozone filling my nose. Other than the ski tracks from my brother leading away in a straight line, only fresh prints from otters and fox dotted the thin layer of fresh snow nearby. I kept skiing until I reached Per.

  The snow had grown thinner, and the ice was visible beneath us. We were actually skiing across the floor with only a microscopic film of snow, and each glide made a strident, fricative sound. “I think we’re close to the edge,” he said in a whisper when I got to him, and I almost wanted to say, Why are you whispering? There’s no one out here. I didn’t, though. It was like that too. I held things back because so often I’d said something only to have Per tell me how stupid I was. Mom’s going to be angry if she finds out. / No shit, stupid.

  “I think skiing across the ice like this is ruining our skis. We should be on skates out here. Mamma and Pappa are going to be angry. We should go back. It’s not safe.”

  “Yes, it is safe, and they won’t even know.”

  “How do you know it’s safe?”

  “Because I can see the ice.” He pointed with his pole. “I’ll be able to see it when it gets thinner because it will have a different hue.”

  I shook my head. “We should go back. It’s getting late, and if you fall through—”

  “Don’t be silly. I’m not going to fall through. Just a few more meters. You follow me.”

  “No.” I could tell my bottom lip puffed out with stubbornness and anger. I was certain this was a bad idea. “We should go back.” I could feel the ice move below us, the sense of the ocean that Pappa had mentioned, and it scared me more. Something about it reminded me of the feeling I had when I woke up and I found out that I’d walked in my sleep and rearranged something. Unstable, like I couldn’t count on the solidity of sleep or the very ground I was on. Suddenly a low, soft moan cut free from the slightly flexing and shifting ice, like the ocean was speaking to us, whispering to us. The moan was terrifying and beautiful all at once, like the song of a great whale.

  Per ignored it. “Suit yourself,” he said. “I’m not going back.” He started to ski off. “I came all the way out here to see the edge, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

  “Per,” I yelled. “Don’t be stupid. You don’t know if it’s safe. If something happens . . .”

  “I’ll be fine,” he called back to me. “I can see the thickness, and you can too. You just won’t use your head.”

  I stood for a second. My anger running deep and far as the North Sea. It was him that wasn’t using his head. Why was he always such a jerk? I shook it off, and followed after him. I had no choice. If he went through, he’d need me with the rope on my pack. I prayed the ice would stay the same thickness.

  Luckily, he wasn’t skiing too fast, and within minutes, I saw him stop and quickly reached him. Per held out his arm for me. “This is the limit.” We stood a good six or seven meters from the edge. “Faen.” He spit onto the ice. “I wanted it to be a straight cut. To ski right to the edge and look at the sea, but we can’t. It’s thinning too much to continue.”

  He knew exactly where to stop because he could see it. I could see the change in the color of the ice as well, and once again, he was right. But still, uneasiness settled upon me. “Please, Per,” I pleaded. “I’m cold. Can we go back now? Mamma’s going to get worried.”

  Per looked at me, gold tendrils waving out from under his red hat and his bluish-green eyes intense. His vibrant, radiant face contrasted jarringly with the grim light. He looked like a mythical god out of Valhalla too, put into the steely afternoon just for the day to play with us mere mortals.

  “Ja, sure, Gretch, we can go back.”

  10

  * * *

  Monty

  I PICKED UP A sandwich and some coffee on my way back to headquarters from the North Fork. When I got back, I found Agents Paige and Marcus immersed in meetings, interviews, and phone calls. I went down the hall to my office, dropping my carrier bag and sandwich on my desk. Then I headed to the incident room for an update from Agent Marcus.

  They’d brought Mr. Kelly in and showed him some video footage of dark-colored trucks to see if one out of the hundreds they had taped might ring a bell. He kept shaking his head, rubbing his eyes, saying that he didn’t pay enough attention to the vehicle, only the boy. He wished he had, he whispered. He very much wished he had.

  I asked the agents if there was anything they wanted me to do, and when I didn’t get any clear answers and only a few grumblings, I went back to my office and began working on the Essex bones, telling them both that if they needed me, that’s where I’d be. I also went up front to Emily’s desk and asked her if she’d put together the file that I’d called about after talking to Lucy when I got back within cell range. She winked, swung her chair around, and reached for a folder already thick with papers. “Files from NamUs and NCIC.”

  I went back to my desk and unwrapped my sandwich, staring at the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System file on top, trying to shake my head clear of the search for Jeremy and recalibrate on the case of the bones. I glanced at the local paper on the corner of my desk to see the front-page headline: “Human Remains Uncovered by Fire Crew.”

  I quickly skimmed it an
d read a quote from Joe Smith: “We know very little at this point, only that the bones had been buried near Essex. We’ll release more information as it comes to us.”

  Calls were already pouring in—people wondering about lost and long gone relatives: men who’d gone fishing or hunting and never returned, women who’d left for some reason or another and not come home. Now we had a little more information—that the bones belonged to a white male between ten and fifteen years old and that he’d suffered a head injury. First and foremost, I needed to identify the victim. Without this knowledge, there was no way to proceed locally, and soon I would just have to put it aside and hope for the best in Texas with NamUs.

  Without identification of the victim and without knowing the circumstances surrounding the death, we couldn’t begin to understand who was responsible for the blunt-force trauma to the skull that Gretchen and Lucy mentioned and for the burial of the bones. Without an ID of the victim, the chances of finding the perpetrator would be nearly impossible.

  I took a bite of my sandwich and opened the file, where I saw a pile of NamUs reports. NamUs contained around 23,000 cases, about 12,000 of them still open.

  I felt relieved that the town of Essex and the surrounding area were not high population centers. In Montana, there were sixty-five cases still open. Thirty-nine were closed. If we could assume that the bones came from someone local, and not someone like Jeremy, who was visiting from out of state as one of millions that Glacier Park drew each summer, then the numbers of the missing should be manageable. Including Glacier’s missing was not a formidable task either. Since Glacier Park’s inception, we have kept solid records on who drowned, who fell, who was crushed by falling rock, who was attacked by a grizzly, who froze to death, and who disappeared with no answers.

  In the last twenty-five years, for the Flathead and Glacier counties, a total of four males between the ages of ten and sixteen went missing and were still unaccounted for. I knew Nathan’s file would be included. He vanished in 1991, when we were twelve. I held off on looking through our own files to find his. I told myself that I would not be swayed by his, which seemed to whisper to me to open it first—that I would maintain my order and proceed methodically so as not to jump to unwarranted or biased conclusions.

  I grabbed a highlighter from my desk and began marking the names. Most were assumed to be runaways. Fourteen-year-old Zachary Newton vanished after a fight with his parents seven years ago. Thirteen years ago, sixteen-year-old Tyler Alsworth never came home after going to work washing dishes at a restaurant in Kalispell. He showed up for his shift, left, but never returned to his house. In 1999, thirteen-year-old Shane Wallace from Columbia Falls went missing from a campsite at a place outside the park called Lake Five while his family camped there. If it hadn’t been so many years ago, it would have raised a red flag in terms of what had now happened to Jeremy. I made a note that I needed to check if the family had submitted a saliva sample in case the bones we found were his. I made a note to check with the Alsworths as well, even though he was outside the age determination Lucy had given.

  Then Nathan. October 31, 1991. Twelve-year-old Nathan ­Faraway—soon to be thirteen, on November 7—never returned after going with a friend—me, one Monty Harris, and his brother, Adam Harris, and two friends of Adam—to a local cemetery for a Halloween prank.

  Even though I could hear a low mumble from those working in the incident room down the hall, all went quiet then except the hum of my computer’s hard drive and the sound of the air-conditioning coming through old vents. Usually we didn’t use the air, just let Glacier’s breeze slide in through open windows, but with the fire season, we’d cranked the old unit up to cool the place down so we didn’t invite all the dust and smoke in. I stared at the file. I didn’t need to read the details. I found a picture of Nathan and looked at it, at his unkempt dark hair falling below his brow, freckles on his cheeks, his cockeyed, shit-eating grin, his intelligent eyes. He was one of the smartest in class and other kids teased him for it. Not me. He was my best friend, my only real friend growing up.

  It was another lifetime ago—a time of extreme uncertainty for me. My mother was mentally ill, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and Adam was angry, rebelling and bullying me incessantly. My father worked hard at his construction company and drank even harder when he wasn’t working. Nathan was the one person I trusted, and he had trusted me. And I . . . I had unwittingly led him into a snare that my brother and his friends had set. Inadvertently, I had played a part in his vanishing.

  Looking at the photo brought back raw, sentimental feelings, plus a fresh shot of pure guilt. From an adult, intellectual perspective, I knew that the disappearance of Nathan Faraway was not my fault. I was a child. We’d been lured into going along with my brother and his friends, and there was no way I could predict that Nathan would leave me in the dark woods in a fit of anger at me for trusting my brother. Nathan’s last words to me were: You should’ve known.

  It wasn’t the anger in the words that got to me the most; it was the disappointment, and when the memory of them hits me, I always feel like I’m suddenly coated with a thin film of something dirty. I’d never fully forgiven myself because, on some level, I knew that Nathan was right. I should have been smarter than to trust my malicious brother and his friends. I knew how he treated me on a regular basis; why did I think it would be different that time? I’ve always been a realist, and the cold hard truth was that he was always up to no good. It’s just that I simply had believed for once that it would be different, and that I’d be accepted by him and his friends. I had been very naïve, and swore I’d never be that way again.

  I thought of Nathan’s family. His mother, his father . . . and he had an older sister, Molly. She was the reason my brother and his friends said we needed to join them that night. Molly, with her curvy teenage body, her pink lips, and the bossy way she’d stand with one hand on a hip, was supposed to watch Nathan later in the evening, after we finished hanging out after school. Their parents were at a Halloween party, and they wanted Nathan to be with her when the trick-or-­treating went into full swing. Adam had told me that his friend Perry had a crush on her and that they simply wanted our help. The plan was for all of us to go pick up Molly from her friend’s house and give her a ride home to babysit, which would also give Perry a little time with her in the car. It was all a lie.

  I refocused on the file. I didn’t know what Nathan’s parents did now. I knew they eventually divorced, as many couples do after the loss of a child. I thought they both still lived in Columbia Falls, but I wasn’t sure. I did know that Molly lived in Kalispell—that she’d had a few children and was also divorced. I had a strong sense that saliva had not been collected from Nathan’s mother, father, or sister. Back when Nathan disappeared, no process existed. I looked through his paperwork, and sure enough, no sample had been submitted.

  “Okay,” I said out loud to myself. “Parents.” I straightened in my chair and looked for information on where the parents of all the missing currently lived. After jotting as many down as I could find that still lived in the area, a total of six parents, I grabbed my bag and headed for the door, telling Emily I was off to go visit a few families.

  • • •

  When I pulled up to the Faraway house, it hit me what I was about to do. I’d decided to get Peter Faraway’s over with first—a kind of get-back-on-the-horse line of thinking—and suddenly I felt like a chicken, and that I shouldn’t be the one to do this at all. Maybe I should have sent Ken, I considered.

  Yet here I was. Mr. Faraway still lived in the same house. Apparently, it was Mrs. Faraway, Alice, who had been the one to move out first. I remembered Alice clutching Peter’s arm in the early days while the search ensued, as if she’d never let him go, as if she couldn’t stand up on her own without his help. Sadly, that grasp loosened over time and broke. I thought of the Coreys, of Ron’s hand reaching out to Linda, but not making it.
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  The road and the house looked narrower and more cluttered than I recalled, but then again, everyone said that about childhood places—some function of space appearing different through the eyes of a child. The lawns looked cramped and brown, rather than lush and expansive like I remembered when Nathan and I ran around playing hide-and-seek.

  The color of the house had been changed, but not for a long time. I recalled that it had been a happy yellow with cream trim, but now it was a faded and chipped green. Tall, unwieldy lilac bushes grew against the side fence in the back, those actually much bigger than I recalled. Perhaps Mr. Faraway didn’t spend much time trimming back bushes around his lawn anymore, even though I had memories of him pruning roses and other foliage and calling out to us to stay off his gardens and suggesting that we go inside, where Mrs. Faraway would make us some lemonade.

  Peter answered the door. He had been a tall, handsome man, and in a distant way, I could still see a sliver of his old looks in his stiff posture and his rustic, weathered skin. But his cheeks had hollowed drastically, his hair had thinned and receded, and his dark eyes looked large and buggy. I introduced myself, and saw him flinch and pull back slightly at the mention of my name. I couldn’t tell if the gesture was brought about because I was now a cop in uniform and it brought back an old spark of fear mixed with hope; or quite the opposite, that the sight of me, uniform or not, disgusted him—the boy whose brother lured his son into the woods to never be seen again.

  I brought up the newspaper article about uncovering the skeleton. Surely, if he’d seen the news, he’d have wondered.

  “Yes, of course I saw it,” he said grimly. “Come in, Monty.” He held the door wider. Hearing him say my name like that hit me full on. It echoed all the times I’d come to visit Nathan. Hi, Monty, come in. Nathan’s upstairs. Then off I’d run, light as a feather, taking two stairs at a time to blast through Nathan’s bedroom door, where I’d tell him whatever I had to tell him that day. For me, visiting Nathan’s house, with its cheerfulness, sunny light, home-baked cookies and lemonade, offered a reprieve from a house where my mother insisted on closed curtains for fear that bad people might be watching us.