by TJ Klune
Until March 22, 2012, when her purse was found and she was not.
Oh, the terror they’d both felt then, the unimaginable terror that consumed them both and shattered them into the tiniest of pieces. He remembered, vaguely, how anytime he’d been watching the news or looking online before and there being a story about a woman disappearing or being murdered, and how he’d think to himself, almost absently, Thank God that’s not my daughter, and maybe he’d hug her a little tighter when he’d see her next after that, not even realizing what he was doing. But nothing, nothing could compare to what it felt like to actually have it happen to them. They always thought that. Everyone did. Even if it was unconsciously, everyone thought it: At least it didn’t happen to me.
But then it did happen to them, it did happen to David and to Phillip, and they’d understood then what it meant when people said, “You don’t know what it’s like until it happens to you.” Because they loved her, they loved her more than they loved their own selves, they were her parents, for fuck’s sake, and she was there until she wasn’t, and no one knew, none of their friends or people they considered their family, none of them knew because it hadn’t happened to them yet.
Oh sure, they tried, they hugged David and Phillip, they cried with them, they scoured the city with them, burying the streets with her picture, demanding of everyone that passed, “Have you seen this woman? She’s missing, tell me, have you seen her?”
Everyone would take the flyers, the thousands and thousands of flyers that were printed, and they’d smile sympathetically and shake their heads, and David knew what they were thinking, he fucking knew it.
At least it didn’t happen to me.
The police came for them when they finally got their asses in gear, the trail already days old. He was so angry about that, but in hindsight, he should have expected it. Alice wasn’t dating anyone, her last boyfriend having left for Seattle for school. The parting had been amicable (“He’s just a boy, Daddy,” Alice had said, rolling her eyes. “I’m not sad because I have the rest of my life for boys”), and he had an alibi, so he was cleared. After that, it left the parents, and it was fine, they had to rule everyone out so they could focus, but David was so angry at their intrusiveness. “Have you ever hit your daughter?” they had asked him. “Have you ever put your hands on her?”
“No,” David had said, eyes bulging from his head, convinced that this had to be a nightmare that he could not wake up from. That he was still in his bed, twisting and turning, the sheets tangled against his sweaty skin, and maybe, just maybe, he’d open his eyes, and there would be that moment, that breathtaking moment that is one of the greatest human experiences: waking from a nightmare and realizing it wasn’t real.
“Did she do drugs?” they asked him. “Sleep around? Have men over or stay out late?”
“No.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“The morning she disappeared.”
“How did she seem?”
“Good. She was good. She was….”
“It’s okay. Take your time, Mr. Greengrass.”
“She was happy. She had a paper due that next Friday that she’d worked hard on. She said—she said it’d kicked her ass and she was happy to finally be done with it. She said that. She said she was happy. She was taking the day off to just… be. She was going to get coffee and read in a park somewhere. She did that, sometimes. It was….”
“What was the last thing she said to you?”
And, oh, was that something he’d never forget. The phone call had come the night before, that she’d be late because of the fire farther down the line, but she’d gotten home eventually and had finished that paper, and she’d come down the stairs, crowing loudly how good she was, stopping in front of David and Phillip, who were curled on the couch. She’d finished and it felt good. Then she’d lifted her bare foot and pushed it between them, wiggling her leg back and forth until they moved, something she’d done since she was a little girl. They’d laughed as they always had and separated, and she’d sat down between them, feet in Phillip’s lap, head on David’s shoulder, and that was that.
“I’m going to take tomorrow off,” she’d said after a little while. She sounded soft and sleepy. “Only have one class. Nothing due. I think I earned it.”
“Yeah, sweetheart,” David had said. “You’ve earned it.”
“Take a day,” Phillip had agreed.
Phillip was already at the bookstore and David in his office by the time she’d rolled out of bed. He’d heard her clanking around the kitchen, and then she’d come in, rubbing her eyes and yawning, saying “G’morning, Daddy,” and he’d said, “Morning, sweetheart,” and she’d taken his coffee mug and refilled it for him. He’d thanked her distractedly, never taking his eyes from the laptop.
A little while later, she’d popped her head back in, dressed, hair pulled back and covered in a teal bandana, earrings dangling from her ears, and she’d said, “I’m off! I’ll be back later. I’ve got my phone if you need me, okay?”
And every day for the last six years, David regretted what he’d said next. If he’d known what was to come, if he’d known and there’d been no way to stop it, he’d have gotten up from behind his desk and gone to her. He’d have hugged her tightly, whispering in her ear that she had made him the happiest he’d ever been, that he’d been scared when she’d come to live with them because she’d been so tiny, but that she’d made him a better man, that for the rest of his life, he would always think of himself as a father because she gave that to him. He’d have said that he loved her more than anything in the world.
Instead, he had barely looked up and said, “Have a good day. I’ll see you later.”
Have a good day.
I’ll see you later.
She had smiled at him.
Then she was gone.
Have a good day.
I’ll see you later.
“That was the last thing she said to me,” David had told the police. “And that was the last thing I said to her.”
The detective had smiled sympathetically at him.
And then asked if Alice had ever run off before. Maybe she’d gotten herself into something she couldn’t get out of. “She have a pimp?” the detective had asked.
David had been barely able to stop himself from reaching across the desk and grabbing the detective by the back of his neck and slamming his face against the table. “Would you be asking me these same questions if she was white?” he’d spat.
“Of course, sir,” the detective had said, sounding coolly amused. “Of course we would.”
He hadn’t believed that in the slightest.
He should have taken that as a sign. He and Phillip would learn very quickly that many people were, at best, indifferent to a missing black woman. The worst of them were dismissive. They were on the news in DC and in Virginia and Maryland, but it faded. Within a week. They watched in horror as she went from the second or third story to not even being mentioned at all. They’d been outraged, as had Alice’s friends, and GWU had held a vigil for her, a candlelight vigil, and later, much, much later, David would find the photos from that night of him standing on the stage with his arm around Phillip’s shoulders. Phillip, whose face was pressed against David’s neck while David himself spoke to the large crowd that had stood before him.
And when night came, when they would both be wide-awake and staring at the ceiling, unable to even contemplate sleep even though they were both so, so tired, he would think to himself, You keep going, sweetheart. Wherever you are, you keep going, because your papa and I are coming for you. I will not stop. I will never stop.
One thing that they don’t tell you is that fires can’t burn bright forever.
So even though he wanted to keep on going, and even though he did as best he could, David’s fire faded eventually, and somewhere in the booze-soaked third year, he realized he’d spent the last two days in his office working and not out combing the streets o
r organizing another search party or scouring the Internet message boards or calling the police, demanding they do more than they’d done.
It’d hit him very hard.
He hadn’t remembered much about the week that followed, too drunk to function.
And there were others, weren’t there? So many others like him and Phillip, parents, children, brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, so many goddamn people who had someone they loved that one day just disappeared. David and Phillip were shocked by just how many people there were like them, how many people who understood their frantic words, their dead eyes, the way their hands shook. Mothers whose daughters had gone to work and had never come home. Sisters whose brothers had gone hiking and had never been seen again.
They never gave up, they said.
And the fire would always burn.
But it wouldn’t burn as bright has it once had.
And that’s when David first felt it.
He breathed.
He ached.
He lived.
And then there were the deaths. Those daily little deaths where it felt like pieces of himself were just sloughing off as the weeks went by, as it got further and further away from March 22, 2012, and then it was March 22, 2013, and there was a renewed interest, and then it died until March 22, 2014, and it got to the point where he lived for the anniversary, because people would care again, people would take a brief moment to give two shits about his missing little girl who, when she turned seven, had decided that she would like to grow up to work with chimpanzees, because she wanted to marry Jane Goodall and they would live in the forest with the chimps and the apes and the monkeys, and they would be happy.
Each of those memories was a death. A tiny, little death.
Then it came to the point where he said the things he couldn’t take back, accusing Phillip of things that weren’t true at all, and he had said the words, wanting to cut and slice and hurt the man standing before him, even if he hadn’t meant any of it.
“I think,” Phillip had gasped, face wet, breath hitching in his chest, “that you need to go. Please.”
And so he’d gone. Because he’d never been able to resist when Phillip said please.
He’d found a shitty apartment, and he’d moved out, and it’d been fine, or so he’d told himself. It was fine because it gave him more time to do what he needed to bring Alice home, to find her and make everything okay again. Once he did that, he’d told himself, then he could move back home and he and Phillip and Alice would be a family again, and maybe one day they’d look back on this and find the strength to laugh about it, laugh at how scared they’d been, about how they’d almost given up hope.
And it would happen, right? After all, there had been those women in Ohio in 2013 who had been rescued from the home where they’d been held for a decade. Alice could be going through the same thing. It was a parent’s worst nightmare, but at least she’d be alive. At least she would be alive and David could deal with all the rest.
He’d known that all it took was him not giving up hope.
That’s all that it would take.
Because the moment he did, the moment he stopped believing in her, that was the moment she was gone for good and there’d be no one else fighting for her.
So yeah, he’d left when Phillip asked him to.
He lived in a shitty apartment.
He called Detective Harper every Monday.
And some days, when he was feeling his lowest, when he thought maybe the fire was about to go out, he’d get on the train with a single lily in his hand and he’d get off at the Foggy Bottom–GWU Metro stop, climbing those stairs until he was out on the sidewalk. He’d see that Whole Foods, and there’d be those little bushes right near them, and he’d put the lily on the ground right where Digger had found her purse. People would stare at him curiously, watching him kneeling with his head bowed, but he’d ignore them. He’d ignore them and he’d think I am breathing, I am aching, I am living, and even though I die these little deaths, you are my daughter and I will never stop.
The fire would burn a little brighter then.
That was the life of David Greengrass.
That was how he breathed.
That was how he ached.
That was how he lived.
That was how he died these little deaths.
When he opened his eyes again, his husband was standing in front of him in the rain outside of the hotel where they’d have their staycations, their little getaways that Alice would tease them for, saying she didn’t want to know what they got up to in the hotel room, that she’d just eaten, Daddy and Papa, that was just guh-ross, did they want to scar her for life?
His husband. Phillip. One of his two great loves.
Who had just yelled that Alice had been his daughter too.
Because she had been.
That might have been David’s biggest mistake out of all of this. That he’d driven away the one person who understood exactly what he was going through, the one person who knew how much it hurt to see her picture. The one person who knew just how devastating having an active imagination could be, able to think of any one of a hundred different scenarios, of the worst possible things that could have been done to their daughter. That she was trapped in a dark room somewhere, held by a monster, and that she would scream for them—
David had been so focused on Alice and his own pain that he’d barely thought of Phillip at all. Oh sure, he’d known Phillip was at his side, and he’d held him when Phillip had cried, but it’d almost been a cursory thing, something that he was required to do. It was terrible. David was terrible.
Phillip had stuck it out much longer than he should have. He’d put up with David’s shit, had rubbed his back as David had vomited alcohol, had stood by David’s side as he’d pleaded for someone to just fucking help Alice come home. He’d done all of that.
And David had repaid him by telling him he hadn’t loved Alice as much as him.
I want to see you.
David wanted to see him too.
More than anything.
He didn’t deserve it.
He didn’t deserve any of it.
And yet here they were.
Standing in the cold, in the rain, on a late winter’s evening, face to face after not having seen each other in almost eight months.
This was what his life had become.
“She was my daughter too,” Phillip growled at him now, as if trying to convince them both that it was true.
“I—”
“No, you listen to me, David. You listen to me right now.”
David closed his mouth.
Water sluiced down Phillip’s face. His skin was pale. His breaths came out in quick little puffs, swirling up around his head.
David had missed him.
He’d missed him so very much.
So he listened.
“She was taken,” Phillip said angrily. “From both of us. I know she was your little girl, and I know that you were close, but you forget that she was my daughter too. She came to you when she scraped her knee, but I was the one who bandaged her up. You’d do the voices when you read her a story, but I would be the one to tuck her in. I was there for the parent-teacher conferences, the time she decided to try cigarettes and threw up all over the carpet, when she told us she’d had sex for the first time and you had to stop me from going to that little fucking asshole’s house and ripping his goddamn dick off. I was there when she took her first step. When she rode her bike without training wheels. When she broke her arm. When she lost her first tooth and then a second one the very next day. When she came to us and told us that she loved us, but she needed to learn what it meant to be black. When she laughed. When she cried. When she was here and when she wasn’t, I was there, David. I was right there with you and you don’t get the monopoly on missing our daughter, because there isn’t a day that goes by that I wouldn’t give anything for her. Anything.”
Maybe it was jus
t the rain, but it looked like Phillip was crying a little. David was surprised to find that after everything, his heart could break just a little bit further. It did, and the pain was bright and glassy, and he took in this great, gasping breath. It felt like the first one in forever, like he just breached the surface after being underwater so long that he thought his lungs would burst.
His shoulders shook.
He bowed his head.
Phillip was breathing just as heavily, still standing right in front of David. They weren’t touching, but it was a near thing, their hands almost brushing together. David didn’t say anything, not because he couldn’t think of a single word, but because he was full of too many of them. He wanted to give Phillip all the words he needed to hear, and he couldn’t decide which one to say first, which one was more important. And maybe he still hated Phillip, just a little, for saying that she wasn’t coming back, because that was the worst thought he’d ever had, the absolute worst. That was the thought that came to him when he was at his lowest, when he was by himself in his shitty apartment, alone with nothing and no one else to distract him. That was the nightmare he didn’t know if he could wake up from. He’d been told once, by a man whose son had been missing for near two decades, that he just about didn’t care anymore, because the not knowing was the worst. “Just give me my son’s body,” he’d said. “Give me my son’s body so I can bury it and make this end. I don’t care if it’s the whole thing or just a hip bone or a skull, just give me something so I can finally say he’s not missing anymore. I’d rather him be dead and back home than not know at all.”
David understood that. He did. He really did. And maybe once or twice, when he thought the same thing that was making him hate Phillip right now, he understood that. Because the not knowing was the worst thing of all.
When you didn’t know, you were stuck in this limbo.
You didn’t know who to focus your anger on.
Your confusion.
Your fear.
Your anguish.
So it went wherever it could, that focus.
And sometimes, it went toward the wrong person.
Phillip was there. Wonderful Phillip. When David had met him for the first time, he’d thought, Hi, hello, who are you and why can’t I wait to find out?