A Breath After Drowning

by Alice Blanchard

  He spoke for twenty comforting minutes, before introducing Nikki’s creative writing teacher, a middle-aged woman who spoke about Nikki’s great gifts as a writer. Next came Nikki’s best friend from high school, a pink-haired girl with kohlrimmed eyes who told stories about her BFF’s sneaky sense of mischief. More friends and relatives spoke, and then it was Kate’s turn.

  On her way to the podium, she thought about Nikki’s fondness for licorice whips and Minecraft. She liked to say “fuck-a-duck.” She liked to dress all in white with blood-drop earrings, like Dracula’s bride. Kate knew a few things about Nikki that she couldn’t share with this audience: she’d taken ecstasy more than once; she’d called her mother a cold, uncaring bitch; she blamed her stepfather for drinking too much. She loved them both, but they wouldn’t let her be herself. She felt like a loser half the time. The other half, she felt like Miss Universe. She had self-destructive mood swings. One week she’d post a hundred selfies on Instagram but the next week she’d cancel her account.

  Kate couldn’t publicly reveal what had caused Nikki’s initial break with reality eight months ago. Last year, she’d developed a crush on a boy at school who didn’t love her back. For months, Kate had been piecing together the girl’s shattered psyche while explaining that sometimes our love wasn’t reciprocated.

  Now her mind went blank as she took her place behind the podium and looked at the congregation. The pressure was intense. Two-hundred-plus people waited for her to cough up an explanation. Finally, here’s an expert who can tell us what went wrong. Finally, someone with all the answers.

  But honestly, what could Kate say? She had no idea why Nikki had chosen to end her life at such a time, in such a way.

  She took a deep breath. “The worst thing I can say about Nikki is that her illness finally won. The best thing I can say about her is… well, there are so many best things. Her smile lit up half the planet. She radiated a wonderful self-possessed energy. I’ll never forget the day she came into my office, soaking wet. It was early September, one of those warm Indian summers, and she’d forgotten her umbrella. I offered her my sweater but she refused. She told me that she loved the feeling of being so close to nature that you were immersed in it. That day we talked about her future… she was so excited about the countless possibilities ahead of her. We made a lot of plans. She dazzled me with her enthusiasm.

  “Part of what made Nikki so special is the same thing that took her down—her illness. She had visions, good and bad. She had up-days and down-days. The down-days were rough. But the up-days were remarkable. Not too long ago, she came into my office holding an imaginary kitten. And by the end of the session, I was holding that kitten in my lap.” Kate smiled. “Of course, I gave it back. Reluctantly.”

  Smiles rippled through the congregation. Standing at the back of the church was an older man who nodded as she glanced his way. He seemed awfully familiar, but she couldn’t seem to place him.

  “One day, Nikki came to me with a school assignment. The students in class were supposed to come up with their own epitaphs. She already had hers. ‘Here lies Nikki McCormack— there was nobody braver.’ And she was. Brave. Funny. Fearless. Bold. Smart. Sensitive. Inquisitive. Courageous. And maybe we can all honor her memory today by being just as brave as she was. At least, I’m going to try.”

  Kate felt emotionally raw as she picked up the rumpled pieces of paper and made her way back to her seat. A group of Nikki’s classmates got up to sing “Angel” by Sarah McLachlan. When it was over, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

  The minister thanked everyone for coming. The ceremony was over. The heart-shaped balloons were taken outside and released. Kate had done her very best. She only hoped it was enough.

  19

  OUTSIDE, THE CROWD DISPERSED as people got in their cars and drove across town toward the cemetery. A winter storm was moving in swiftly. Clouds rolled like a herd of buffalo along the horizon.

  The burial was deeply moving. People sang and recited poetry. Soon it began to snow—the angels were weeping, Nikki’s cousins all agreed. At the end, Nikki’s mother broke down, weeping uncontrollably and sitting cross-legged in the snow. Nikki’s father and stepfather escorted her back to the embrace of her family, where she was engulfed and smothered into silence.

  A catered luncheon was served at the McCormacks’ postmodern home in their exclusive Newton neighborhood. Kate couldn’t help but notice the sturdy cedar beam that ran across the living room ceiling where Nikki had hanged herself. How were they ever going to live underneath that beam?

  She wandered around the house, finding all the proof she needed that Nikki’s parents had doted on her—expensively framed childhood drawings, family photos trapped in Plexiglas cubes, bookshelves dedicated to Nikki’s honors and awards, ribbons for perfect attendance and certificates of achievement, trophies for soccer and track-and-field. Hanging on a peg in the mudroom was Nikki’s red vinyl jacket, and underneath the Shaker-style bench were her battered Converses, knotted together at the laces like an old married couple.

  Nikki’s stepfather, George, was a tax attorney who had spared no expense for his only stepchild. It was painfully obvious that her parents—all three of these hurting people— cared deeply about Nikki, despite the ugliness of the divorce.

  Outside, the snow flew about as if in celebration. Inside, people gathered together in small groups, talking softly. Kate found herself involved in a revolving conversation about loss and grief. She followed her attorney’s advice and let the McCormacks take the lead.

  She eventually found herself in the family room, which a handful of teenagers had taken over, texting and playing video games. One of the boys picked up a red rubber ball so cracked with age it looked like a huge blood-soaked eyeball, and tossed it to one of the girls. They all ignored Kate, so she left and wandered down another hallway lined with pictures of Nikki at various stages of development—pudgy toddler, skinny tomboy, gawky tween, beautiful swan. Kate took out her phone and texted James. Very sad. Lovely people. Great eulogies. Did my best. Spoke from heart.

  Lunch was served. People stood around eating quarter-sandwiches and arugula salad off of paper plates, awkwardly balancing their wine glasses and plastic utensils.

  James texted her back: Bedlam here. Miss you.

  Once it stopped snowing, the young people went outside. Kate watched from the French doors as Nikki’s friends remembered her in their own special way, laughing and sobbing, dueling breath clouds painting the air. They threw snowballs and traded war stories, and Kate found their raucous grief to be much more honest than the long faces indoors.

  After a moment, she sensed a presence watching her and turned to find the older man she’d seen at church standing six feet away. He was in his mid-sixties and seemed very comfortable in his own weather-beaten skin. He was tall, like her father, but more muscular, formidable and square-jawed. He had a leathery, old-school style that reminded her of a character actor from a black-and-white western. Strong, proud, confident. Not ashamed to be different. He wore a fringed calfskin jacket and a bolo tie. He was idiosyncratic, and yet he radiated a temperate kind of professionalism.

  “Hello, Dr. Wolfe,” he said.

  “Sorry, have we met?”

  “Palmer Dyson.” He reached out to shake her hand. His grip was firm. “I was one of the detectives on your sister’s case.”

  Kate felt the surprise in her gut. She’d met him sixteen years ago, only he’d been much younger then, and thinner, with short dark hair and long ugly sideburns. He had worn sharkskin suits—none of these cowboy trappings.

  Detective Palmer Dyson had been one of dozens of investigators working on her sister’s case—a polite, respectful, observant man who stayed mostly in the background. In contrast, she vividly recalled the lead detective, Ray Matthews, a scary-looking older guy with ginger hair and acne scars, who’d passed away a few years ago. And then there was the rookie detective, Cody Dunmeyer, now the chief of police, a handsome young man
who’d managed to soothe Kate’s frazzled nerves while asking her some very probing questions. And last but not least was the medical examiner, Quade Pickler, with his outdated mullet hairdo and his cynical, mistrustful eyes—he was the one who’d gotten so upset when she peeked through the cracked-open morgue door.

  So many professionals had been involved it was hard to keep track of them all. The FBI initially, because of the kidnapping angle, and the Blunt River PD, but also state troopers, social workers, members of the medical examiner’s office, volunteers from various missing-persons organizations, attorneys from the prosecutor’s office, private detectives, and the media. Kate had forgotten most of them in the blur of activity surrounding Savannah’s death.

  She would probably have forgotten Dyson, except that he hadn’t allowed her to. Over the years, she’d received dozens of letters from him requesting a meeting to discuss an important matter involving her sister’s case. He signed his name with a flourish—Palmer. She’d thrown all his letters away, along with hundreds of other requests from people wanting to “discuss” the case with her: reporters on deadlines, authors with book proposals, psychics with visions, anti-death-penalty advocates with an agenda, true-crime bloggers, serial-killer fanatics, and various assorted freaks too scary to mention. She didn’t want to talk to any of them. She didn’t want to talk to Detective Dyson now.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t recognize you.”

  “Been a long time.”

  “You used to have sideburns.”

  “Oh yeah, the sideburns.” He laughed. “A holdover from the seventies. I have a tendency to hang onto things beyond their expiration date.”

  She smiled nervously. “What are you doing here?”

  “Nikki’s uncle.” He pointed out a gray-haired man across the room. “He used to work for the district attorney’s office in Concord.”

  “Oh.”

  “Nelly Ward tells me you’re Maddie’s psychiatrist now?”

  Kate was taken aback. “She told you that?”

  “It’s a small world in our little corner of New Hampshire. Probably one of the reasons you left, I’m guessing. Everybody knows everyone else’s business. Claustrophobic for some. Paradise for others.” He smiled. “Like I said, I have a tendency to hang onto things. For instance, your sister’s case.”

  Kate stared at him. Maybe this was how police detectives operated, especially detectives who held onto sixteen-year-old closed murder cases. They poked their nose into your business and wrote you letters, inviting you to meetings you’d never attend. They asked you to revisit what was dead and buried in your head, if not your heart. They had ulterior motives.

  “Look, Dr. Wolfe, I’m sorry to bother you.” He placed his hand on her arm, and it was like being courted by a civilized bear. “I don’t know if you’ve read any of my letters, but I’ve been investigating some unsolved cases involving local girls gone missing. You may have heard of some of them. Makayla Brayden, for instance, who was from Blunt River. But there have been others, lesser known, from nearby towns… Anyway, I believe I see a pattern.”

  “I have to go,” Kate said, feeling panicky and hemmed in. It was strange to hear Makayla’s name so soon after thinking about the case herself. She looked around for an exit.

  “That’s okay. I get it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You don’t want to deal with it.”

  “I don’t know how to respond to that,” she said angrily. “As for your letters, I threw them all away. I’m trying to move on with my life.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Now if you’ll excuse me…”

  “I didn’t mean to insult you.” Again, he rested his hand on her arm. “Indulge me for a moment. It’s just that Nelly has confided in me a good deal these past few years. And just recently she told me that she lied on the witness stand sixteen years ago. She insists they locked up the wrong guy.”

  Kate’s heart was thundering. “How can you even say that!”

  A few people turned to stare. She stormed off in search of her coat, but the detective followed her to the sunroom, where outerwear was piled high on a beige loveseat.

  “Please, let me explain,” he said as she rummaged through the pile, pulling at parkas and wool jackets in search of her camel-hair Hugo Boss, the one that had cost her a mint. “I don’t mean to impose on you,” he said softly. “But if I could just have a minute of your time…”

  “You’ve taken all the minutes I can spare.” She found her coat.

  “Here. Let me help you with that.” He tried to take it away from her.

  “No thanks, I’ve got it.” She snatched the coat away and put it on. “Excuse me,” she said and made her way to the front door and out of the suffocating house.

  The detective caught up with Kate at the bottom of the driveway. “Dr. Wolfe? One last thing. I’d like to explain how your sister changed my life.”

  Kate froze—it was such a hurtful thing to say. “Did you put her up to this?”

  “Sorry—what?”

  “Nelly Ward? Did you convince her to bring her daughter to Boston for treatment?”

  “No.” He drew back, seemingly deeply offended. “Not at all. I bumped into Nelly yesterday, and she told me what was going on. I’m a detective. I’m nosy. It’s either a blessing or a curse, depending on your perspective. Look. Can we discuss this over coffee?”

  “I really have to go,” she said stiffly.

  “Just to be clear, I had nothing to do with Nelly’s decision to drive down to Boston,” he said emphatically. “It’s none of my damn business. Maddie’s a sweet kid who for some reason keeps hurting herself. That’s all I know. I didn’t mean to upset you. It certainly wasn’t my intent. I’m not good with people, I guess.”

  She got in her car, slammed the door and buckled up. He tapped on her window, and she rolled it down.

  “Look, here’s my card.”

  She accepted it wordlessly, hoping to get rid of him.

  “I understand evil, Dr. Wolfe. I have lived with it. I have hunted it down. And believe me… there’s a killer out there. Unknown, unsuspected, uncaught. Call me if you change your mind.”

  20

  IT WAS PSYCH 101. When faced with an unpleasant truth they weren’t equipped to handle, most people ran away. Kate found herself running home to Blunt River, New Hampshire. She had a powerful urge to visit her father, since he was the only person who understood her losses as deeply as she did.

  Downtown Blunt River was a bustling commercial district full of restaurants, cafés and boutiques, with lots of pedestrians milling about—mostly college students and office workers. The streets unfolded in a grid pattern, neat as a Monopoly board. Many of the historic shoe factories had been repurposed into high-end condos and office parks, but despite the modernized sheen, nothing of significance had changed over the past couple of decades. The Stoned Café was as popular as ever. The retro movie theater was showing a Fellini retrospective. The Thyme-to-Eat Diner was open for business, a decadent high-fat eatery where the waitresses called you “dollface.”

  Kate turned off the main drag and drove past the mom-and-pop stores where she and her friends used to hang out after school: the vintage clothing boutique, the indie record store, the cozy feminist bookshop where she and her BFF Heather drank organic coffee, thinking it made them look sophisticated and grown-up.

  She left downtown behind and took a meandering three-mile route back to her old neighborhood. She spotted the yellow-brick funeral home where they’d picked up Julia’s ashes, and a dull ache settled in her stomach. On the drive home, Savannah had insisted on holding the cardboard box in her lap. She kept shaking it to confirm that it contained their mother’s ashes, with maybe a few bits of bone. See, Kate? Do you hear that? Shake-shake-shake. And Kate had been mortified but fascinated, which explained her half-hearted attempts to stop her sister. Their father hadn’t said a word. Savannah kept shaking the box, trying to provoke a reaction out of him. It di
dn’t work. Anything—even a bark of anger—would’ve been preferable to that stony silence.

  She drove past snowy fields and dense woods, sycamores and hemlocks swaying in the wind, skeins of snow blowing off their branches like the Dance of the Seven Veils. Almost home. Her stomach sparked with every passing landmark.

  Her apprehension ticked up a notch as she rode the three hills up and down. Her father’s house was a renovated gem of salvaged lumber painted deep forest green with stone-gray trim, a combination of colors that pulled the harmony out of the wood and created the illusion of coziness and warmth. The house could’ve been torn from the pages of Country Living magazine, but it was all smoke and mirrors. Her father lived here alone. His family had fled.

  She pulled into the slushy driveway and parked behind his Ford Ranger. She took a sharp breath and got out. The cold winter air smelled crisp and delicious. Emerald rows of evergreens defined the white hillsides.

  Bram Wolfe came to the door with a plastered-on smile, which surprised her. She never knew what kind of mood he’d be in. Today, he seemed happy to see her. Maybe this time would be different? After her last visit, she’d been depressed for days. Her relationship with James had been pretty new back then; she could remember complaining to him, “I keep expecting my relationship with my father to improve, but it never does.”

  “Doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results, is the very definition of insanity,” James had joked. He hadn’t meant her to take it seriously, but she hadn’t been back in three years.

  Her father wore a woolly sweater, tweed slacks and polished loafers. He had a perspiring face and a prominent aristocratic nose. His shoulder-length hair had gone completely white, and he tucked it behind his rather large ears. He was tall, and like most tall men, he had a tendency to slouch. Kate had never been able to find herself in him—she took after Julia, thank God. Both she and Savannah shared their mother’s heart-shaped face, her slender frame, her ballerina-like grace and excitable laugh.