“Well, son?” My father’s voice said, We all know what happened, so now be a man and admit it.
“We were careful,” I said, looking at Mrs. Cayne. She slapped me in the mouth and then started bawling. I knew it was the wrong thing to say, but I didn’t expect to get hit for it. I couldn’t think of any other time I’d been hit. I’m sure my parents spanked me, but not that I remember. I’d never been in a fight in school, and I’d never done anything that provoked somebody to haul off and hit me, especially not a grown woman. And here Mrs. Cayne had slapped me full force in the face and no one was doing anything about it. I sat on the bed and put my cold, sweating hand up to my burning face. My father didn’t say anything. Mr. Cayne didn’t say anything. They looked at me as I sat in my bed, the left side of my face red and shamed.
Finally Mr. Cayne spoke. “Is there anything else you can tell us? Anything else you might know about where Anna might have gone?”
“I don’t know anything,” I said. “I wish I did, but I’m at a loss. She didn’t say anything to me at all.”
“Has she left like this before?” my father asked.
“Never,” Mrs. Cayne replied.
“Her coat’s gone, but it doesn’t seem like anything else. Probably her phone, but she’s not answering it,” Mr. Cayne said.
“Or can’t,” Mrs. Cayne added. “Maybe we should call the police.”
“They’ll probably want you to wait awhile,” my father said. “At least today. To see if she’ll come back.”
“I’d like to call just the same,” Mrs. Cayne told him.
My father took them out of the room, to the phone.
He came back alone. “You don’t know where she is?”
“I told you, I don’t,” I said. “I wish I did.”
“I heard you last night,” he said. “Around four. What were you doing?”
“I got up for a drink of water.”
“Downstairs?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“She wasn’t over here? You’d better tell me what you know right now. This isn’t a joke or a game—this is serious. The police are involved. If you’re covering for her or hiding something, you’d better stop right now.”
“I’m telling you the truth, Dad. I don’t know anything about it.”
He stood in the doorway, glaring at me, trying to figure out if I was telling the truth. “All right, then, get up and get ready for school.” He turned and went downstairs.
I reached for my cell and called her. There was no answer. I checked my log to see if I had missed a call from her. There was nothing.
I had to go to school and sit through every class. Nobody was really paying attention; we were all waiting for the principal to announce something, or for somebody to rush in and say that she’d been found. Part of me thought that she would walk into class any moment and surprise everybody. There was a lot of talk, a lot of speculation, but no one spoke to me, except Carl. He didn’t know anything, but he said that most people thought she had run away from home. Others thought she had been kidnapped. Some said she had been abducted by aliens. Carl said they weren’t joking. There were some people who thought that I was involved and that I shouldn’t be in school. I should be down at the police station, locked up. That hadn’t even occurred to me until Carl mentioned it. “Who’s saying that crap,” I asked, “Melissa?” It wasn’t Melissa. She wasn’t saying anything.
The school day ended and people started going home. There was still no news. I walked to Mr. Devon’s room. He was loading a bunch of cameras with film. I sat and watched him for a while. He didn’t say anything, and neither did I. That’s what I liked about Mr. Devon.
Finally I spoke. “What can I do?”
He knew what I meant. He shook his head. “Wait. That’s the hardest thing anyone can do right now.”
“What are the teachers saying?”
“We’re all hoping that everything turns out all right.”
I looked at him, hoping he would give me something more than the official, politically correct crap, but he didn’t.
“It’s all your fault,” I said.
“How is that?”
“I met her in the library.”
We both laughed a little. Then I left. “If you hear anything, would you let me know,” I said when I was at the door. “I feel like I’ll be the last person to know anything.”
“I’ll call you as soon as I hear something,” Mr. Devon said.
It was almost dark outside as I started to walk home. I was a couple of blocks away from school when a car slammed on its brakes and the driver rolled down the window. It was Kevin Hermanson, a senior. “They found your girlfriend down at the river,” he said. “Dead.” He was excited, practically yelling at me from the street. He pulled his head back into the car and drove off. I just stood there, staring at the spot where Kevin Hermanson’s head had been.
I ran back to school. The door I had come out of a few minutes before was locked, so I ran around to the side of the building where Mr. Devon’s classroom was. His light was still on, and I pounded on the window. He came to the window, then motioned toward the front of the building. I ran there and waited for him.
“Kevin Hermanson just told me that they found her dead in the river,” I said.
Mr. Devon grabbed me and hugged me. It was one of those hugs where I didn’t know if he was hugging me or needed the hug himself.
“Let me take you home,” he said.
“Take me down there.”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“I’ll go by myself.”
He didn’t want to go, but he didn’t want me to go by myself either. He slowly put his coat on, trying to think of a way out of it. “Maybe I should take you home first,” he said. I shook my head. “All right,” he said, and then drove us to the river.
There wasn’t anything when we got there. I guess I expected to see ambulances and police cars and a crowd of people watching as Anna’s body was pulled from the water, but there was only the river. It was dark by now, and Mr. Devon drove until he saw a police car parked along the road, just above the water. He parked and told me to stay in his car, then went over and talked to the officer sitting in the squad car. Mr. Devon walked back and said, “Come on.” He kept his headlights on and grabbed a flashlight.
We walked down the shallow bank to the river. Yellow police caution tape stretched between some trees, blocking our way to the edge of the frozen river. Mr. Devon swept the flashlight beam across the surface of the ice and we saw a hole about halfway across. There was snow on the ice, and the tracks and markings made it look as if there had been a lot of activity between us and the hole.
After a few minutes I heard somebody walking behind us. The beam of another flashlight reached toward us and then out across the river. It was another police officer.
“Let’s take you home,” he told me.
I told the police everything. They told me almost nothing. I told them how we had crossed the river once before in the dark. I told them about Anna and me, and the night we spent together before she disappeared. I told them about the condom and Mr. Cayne’s pulling it out of his pocket like some magic trick. We sat in our dining room while my mother made coffee for the police officers. She put dinner aside for later and I told them everything. Almost. I didn’t tell them about our code.
My father had wanted to get a lawyer to make it all official, but I didn’t see the point. I had nothing to hide. “Once you talk to the police, that’s it,” my father said. “That’s the official story. You can’t change it later. You know that part, ‘Anything you say can and will be used against you’? That’s what they’re talking about.” There was only one story, the truth. Why would I change it? I wanted to help. I thought it might help.
I told them about her notebooks, about the fact that she was constantly writing obituaries. The officers seemed interested in this. They asked what the notebooks looked like, how many of them there were, all that stuff.
They hadn’t found them. I wondered if she had taken them with her. Maybe she had destroyed them or hidden them.
I told them about the strange marks I’d seen on Anna’s body, the bruises and scratches. I didn’t tell them about the cuts on her arms. Maybe they knew about those already, maybe they had seen them on her dead body. They probably thought it meant that she was suicidal. I didn’t want to support that. It didn’t make sense. Anna was ravenously curious. She read all the time, she listened to music, she watched movies, she was always online reading about more things to read, and more things to listen to, and more things to look at. There didn’t seem to be anything she didn’t want to know. I can’t imagine a person with that much interest in the world wanting to leave it. It didn’t fit.
My mother looked at the officers. “What do you think about that?” They didn’t respond. “Maybe you should be over at the Caynes’ asking them about this?”
“We’re talking to everyone,” one of the officers said. My mother was about to continue, but my father’s hand on her shoulder stopped her.
“What can you tell me about what happened?” I said.
The officer was writing in a small spiral notebook. He had his head down and kept writing. He clicked his pen and pushed it through the spiral and then put the notebook into the pocket of his leather jacket. I realized that I hadn’t taken my jacket off either. I wasn’t hot; in fact, I was still cold. I wanted some coffee, I guess, even though I’d never had any before and couldn’t bring myself to ask. I had to wait for the officer. He put his right hand on the table and leaned on it. He looked at the hand as if studying how it supported the weight of his body. He looked at his partner, and then at my parents.
“This is not official,” he said, “but we believe that Anna Cayne drowned in the river. We’ve started a search for her body.”
“What? I thought you found her body.”
“No. We haven’t recovered the body.”
“Then what was out there on the ice?”
They hadn’t found her body after all. They’d found only her dress, arranged neatly beside a hole in the ice, like someone lying facedown, looking into the water. “That’s bizarre,” my mother blurted. The officer didn’t say anything, but only shifted his eyes from my mother to me.
“So she killed herself,” my father said.
“We’re not speculating at this point,” the other policeman said. “We need to locate the body and then go from there.”
The officers left, and my mother took the coffee cups to the kitchen. My father sat at the table, his hands pressed together in front of him. “You don’t know anything more about this?”
“Somebody told me they found her body,” I said.
“Did you think they would?”
“I didn’t think anything. I don’t know anything. I wish I did.”
“Is that your story?”
“It’s not a story,” I said.
“I saw you lie to the Caynes this morning,” he said. “I hope I didn’t see you lie to the police tonight.”
“It was the truth,” I said. “Everything I know about it, and what happened.”
“Let’s hope so.”
I had a dream about Anna. Or about a book. Or both. There was a book in the dream, and her name kept appearing in odd places on the page and then disappearing. I turned a page and her name jumped around, like a floater in your eye that moves every time you try to look at it, always remaining just a bit ahead of you, elusive and fleeting. The book didn’t make any sense, the chapters and pages were all out of place, but I kept riffling through them, hoping they would provide some meaning, some sense. Carl and Claire were in the dream too, suddenly asking me what I was doing. I tried to tell them about Anna, but they didn’t know what I was talking about. “You don’t read,” Claire said. “You can’t read,” Carl told me.
“That’s not true,” I said to Carl. “We read Sherlock Holmes together.”
“I remember that. Who do you think is smarter, Sherlock Holmes or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?”
“You can’t imagine someone smarter than yourself, can you?” Claire asked.
“No,” I said, and when I looked down, the pages of the book were empty.
When I woke up the next morning, I was surprised. I was shocked that the world could continue, that I could wake up as I did every morning. I didn’t wake up and think that the day before was a dream, or any of that crap; I was too acutely aware of what had happened. She left. She was taken. She was gone. She was dead, or she wasn’t, but she was still gone. That’s what made everything so shocking. There was a disturbing ordinariness about everything. How could such a terrible thing happen and the world just go on? Everything should stop and wait until it had everything figured out before everything started up again. Everyone should be at the river, searching, smashing every last piece of ice and straining through every drop of water until she was found. But it wasn’t like that at all. My father was finishing up in the bathroom, as he did every morning, combing his remaining strands of hair in the proper place, adjusting his tie, brushing a spot out of his suit. My mother was in the kitchen, drinking coffee from the pot my father had programmed the night before to start brewing at seven-thirty sharp. Everything seemed programmed. My father showered and shaved and left for work as he usually did, my mother appeared to do or not do the things she usually did or didn’t do every morning, and I had to go to school. The world had a hole torn in it yesterday, but today it would go on as normal. Maybe it was too used to these sorts of things. To me, the world wasn’t unhappy enough. I was afraid that I wasn’t unhappy enough.
Before that day I had always imagined that it took strength to continue after a tragedy, but I now realized that it was really weakness. I didn’t want to face directly what had happened, or imagine what might have happened, so I tried to ignore it from one moment to the next. I didn’t go up to the third floor before school; I didn’t want to hear what Bryce had to say. Instead, I searched the first floor for Billy Godley. He was on his way to homeroom, and I stopped him and asked him what he knew. “I don’t really know that much,” he said. He knew more than anyone else, though. He said people were down working at the river, cops and the volunteer fire department and a couple of rescue teams from nearby towns, all looking for her. He said his father had mentioned that it was strange that all they found was a dress. “No coat, no shoes,” Billy said. “No body, though that could be good.”
grief can really fuck you up
I wasn’t even there and I can’t get the image out of my head. If this were a movie or a graphic novel, there would be an overhead view of the snow-covered river, with her black dress laid perfectly on the ice, the hem curving in a dramatic arc, the arms stretched straight out on each side. It would look like a black snow angel, with the neck stopping just at the edge of the jagged hole in the ice, exposing the churning water below. It’s a great image—and I can say that only after knowing Anna—she would have appreciated it, and I have thought about how well the scene was set, how perfectly the image was composed, and I wonder if maybe she didn’t appreciate it too. I was still confused by it, though. Why weren’t her coat and shoes there? She wouldn’t walk all the way from her house through the snow and then across the frozen river without a coat, and without shoes. “Maybe they went with her,” Billy had said. He meant that maybe she had run off, sure, but I couldn’t help thinking of her going through that hole, like Alice through the looking glass, slowly drifting through the cold water, her boots weighing her down.
After school I walked along the river. Carl had said that he would come with me, but he had some business to take care of at the last minute, and Bryce was driving Claire and the other Goths. I didn’t want to go with Bryce. You could see cars streaming in the same direction, seniors and parents and everyone else who shouldn’t have come. They were all coming to gawk, but there was little to see. Her clothes were gone, the ice was gone, and the hole she had gone through was gone. The only thing that was still the
re was the yellow caution tape. The police had to put up barricades to keep the crowds back. The rescue-and-recovery team had brought in an excavator to claw through the ice and break it up so they could get boats into the river and start searching. The boats were in the water when I got there, men in red jackets dragging poles through the river and peering over the side. Somebody said they had been there all day. Somebody else said they wouldn’t be coming back to look tomorrow. Another person said the river would be frozen again by morning. This proved to be wrong, but it was frozen again in the next few days. Just walking by after those few days, you’d never have known that anything had happened: the crowds were gone, the barriers were gone, the yellow tape was gone, the water was gone. There was nothing but ice and snow and cold; everything looked the way it had before, as if the clock had been turned back, before everything changed.
Anna’s locker became a memorial. People taped poems and prayers on it, and it was covered with yellow ribbons. There were flowers and unlit candles on the floor in front of it. The pile grew and spread throughout until finally an announcement was made, telling everyone to stop blocking the hallway. A designated area in front of the principal’s office was now the official receptacle of the school’s anguish. There was a large cardboard box with a handwritten sign above it: “A. Cayne.” You had to laugh. Carl told me that he saw the janitor shoveling the pile that was in front of the locker into the box. “He was using the same shovel he uses to clear the sidewalks,” Carl said.
“Anna’s just going to throw it all away when she comes back anyway,” I replied.
People held a vigil down at the river. It was bitterly cold, well below zero, but about a hundred showed up and threw bouquets of flowers onto the ice or piled them on the snowy shore. I don’t know who organized the thing or how people knew to show up, but they did. Police tried to keep them away from the river, but Bryce pushed his way through and placed a lit candle on the ice. A number of people followed, until there were a dozen or so candles flickering in the darkness not far from where she had disappeared. Finally one of the police officers spoke. “Please stay back, just stay back, away from the river. We don’t want another person falling through the ice.” That seemed to get people’s attention.
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