by David Bell
“Look, I have to go. The dog’s done his business.”
“I’ll call you when I get to town. Okay?”
“Sure. But don’t feel obligated-”
“I do feel obligated,” he said. His voice dripped with sincerity, and I wanted to believe him. I really did. “For you, anything. Just let me know. I’ll be by your side.”
Frosty and I faced the choice of going around the track again, something we almost never did, or getting in the car and completing my mission. Frosty pulled a little in the direction of the car, but I pulled harder, and we entered the cemetery together.
I knew they didn’t want pets in there, digging up flowers and shitting and pissing on the graves. But Frosty’s tank was pretty well emptied, and I preferred to face the prospect of an accident in the cemetery over delivering him to the pound.
We walked down the road that cut through the center of the cemetery, then turned right and headed toward the back. I recognized the names on the larger headstones, the same names that adorned the buildings and parks throughout town. Potter. Hard-castle. Greenwood. Cooper. They didn’t skimp on death, these founding families and innovative educators, these city councilmen and spiritual leaders. Not only did they have elaborate headstones, beautifully engraved and clean as the day they were cut, but they paid for life-sized guardians to watch over the graves. Vigilant Virgin Marys and winged angels, Christ with his eyes cast to heaven as though begging for intercession. While the stone we’d picked out for Caitlin didn’t approach those lofty heights, it wasn’t cheap either. Buster was right-we’d spent too much money.
I read the signs posted at knee level and found section B; then I worked my way up until I came to the number. Despite the presence of the sleeping and buried dead, it was a beautiful day. The temperature climbed toward eighty, and only a few high, puffy clouds disrupted the blue of the sky. In the distance, somewhere, a lawn mower engine churned, but I couldn’t see where it was, and when I looked around the cemetery, I found myself alone. The walkers and joggers kept up their work in the park, so I just listened to Frosty’s panting breath and rattling collar.
“It’s just a little detour, boy.”
Most of the cemetery was full, the stones nestled close together so that it didn’t appear there was any room left for new burials. I kept my eyes peeled for a small open place, a last remaining plot that we purchased only to-hopefully-never fill. My eyes wandered over husbands buried with their wives, the headstones a monument to eternal love and union. I saw children buried near their parents. Veterans of wars, their stones decorated with small, fluttering flags. And then I thought I saw Caitlin’s name.
It was a brief glimpse, something caught out of the corner of my eye, and I just as quickly dismissed it, assuming that my eyes and mind, in their haste to find a closer connection to my daughter, simply imagined her name. But as I came closer, I saw it again, chiseled into a large rectangular headstone. It was really there. CAITLIN ANN STUART. DAUGHTER. FRIEND. ANGEL. 1992–2004.
The stone didn’t belong there.
Abby had told me it wouldn’t be placed until days after the service, that when we stood at the grave on Wednesday for the memorial, we’d just be facing a small area of green grass. No earth would be churned, no stone in place. And I took comfort in that scenario because it seemed less permanent somehow, less final than what Abby had intended. I convinced myself that the ceremony would bear no real relation to my daughter, that we were there remembering some other kid or maybe even some person I never knew. A stranger, the faceless, nameless victim of a distant tragedy.
I stared at the slab. Frosty walked away, pulling the leash taut, and sniffed at a nearby stone while a chorus of cicadas rose and fell in the trees above, their chittering eventually winding down like a worn-out clock. I often tried to imagine what had happened to Caitlin. Try as I might, a coherent, sensible narrative concerning the events that had taken place just yards from where I stood in the cemetery never formed in my mind. But I did hear the sound track in my head. Often.
I lay in my bed at night, the lights from passing cars dancing on the ceiling and walls, and I heard Caitlin’s screams, the sound of her voice rising in terror and growing hoarse. Did she cry? Was her face soaked with tears and snot? Did she suffer? How long did she call for me?
I pounded the mattress in frustration, buried my face in the pillows until it felt like my head would explode.
I knew the statistics. After forty-eight hours, the odds of a child being found alive were next to none. But I managed to ignore the numbers and pretend they didn’t apply to me. Not then. Not ever. I still stopped at the front door every night, flipped on the porch light, and made sure the spare key-the one Caitlin occasionally used to let herself in after school-lay under the same flowerpot, right where she could find it.
But it was difficult to argue with a headstone.
Frosty came back and nudged at my calf with his snout. I could tell he was growing impatient and wanted to move on. He didn’t like to stand still when there were sticks to fetch and trees to mark. I shooed him away, lost in my own thoughts. I resented Abby for the ease with which she chose to move on, to accept that our lives would go forward without any hope of seeing our daughter again. I’d crusaded on behalf of my daughter’s memory, and for what? To find out that life progressed without me as well as Caitlin?
“Frosty. Come here.”
He wandered back, happy, tail wagging. I crouched in the grass and placed my hands on either side of his head. He opened his eyes wide but didn’t resist, perhaps remembering the swat he’d received earlier. I felt his hot, stinking breath in my face, saw the stains on his long teeth. I asked the dog a question I had asked him several times before, ever since that day he came home from the park trailing his leash with Caitlin nowhere in sight.
“Frosty? What did you see that day? What happened?”
He stared back at me, his panting increasing. He didn’t like the way I was holding him, and he squirmed.
“What did you see?”
He started to slip away, so I pulled him back. He shook his head as though trying to knock the feeling of my hands off his body. I stood up.
“Fuck you,” I said. “Fuck you for not being able to talk.”
I looked at the headstone once more, letting the image of my daughter’s name and possible-likely-date of death burn into my brain, before giving the leash another tug.
“Come on, Frosty,” I said. “We’ve got someplace to go.”
Chapter Two
Buster came to the memorial service late.
I’d assumed he wasn’t coming at all. He liked to promise to do something-come hell or high water-and then not follow through. His appearance surprised me, but not his tardiness.
As I stood in the back of the church, feeling constrained by my coat and tie, a whirl of emotions stewed within me. Every person who passed by, every hand I shook or hug I received, brought me closer to tears and bitterness. I associated a memory, a fleeting glimpse of Caitlin, in so many of the faces I saw. A girl who’d gone to school with Caitlin, for example, looked grown-up and every one of her sixteen years. Did Caitlin reach that age somewhere in the world away from us? Did she ever become a young woman? When I saw a former neighbor, an elderly woman who used to babysit for us when Caitlin was a child, I wondered: Why was she allowed to live, approaching eighty, while Caitlin might be dead?
My throat felt full of cotton, and I choked back against the crying and the anger until my jaw ached. I did this not because I didn’t feel the tears or anger were heartfelt, but because I feared that giving in to them would validate the entire ceremony, making real what I still refused to accept.
By the time Buster came in-late and apologizing-my feelings toward him shifted a little, and I welcomed the distraction his appearance provided. Most everyone else was seated, and all that remained was for us-the funeral party-to walk down the aisle.
“I’m sorry,” Buster said. “My car. And then the traffic. .”
To his credit, he wore a suit. It looked like he’d borrowed it from a midget, but still, it was a suit. The pant legs rode up above the tops of his shoes, revealing white socks, and I doubt he could have buttoned the jacket. He wore a pair of cheap sunglasses that hung loose on his face and kept sliding down the bridge of his nose. He pushed them up with the knuckle of his right index finger every few seconds.
No one said anything for a long moment. We-Abby, Buster, Pastor Chris, and I-stood in an awkward little circle, waiting for someone to speak.
Finally, Pastor Chris smiled and said, “We’re glad you’re here.”
Abby remembered her manners before I did. “This is Tom’s stepbrother-”
“Half brother,” Buster said.
“Half brother, William,” Abby said.
Buster shook hands with Pastor Chris, then leaned in and gave Abby an awkward peck on the cheek. She averted her eyes like a child receiving an inoculation. She’d never liked Buster, which is why I was so surprised that she’d gone to the trouble of inviting him. She’d meant it as a gesture of goodwill, something she was willing to sacrifice for me, I’m sure. So I clung to whatever faint hope remained for us-between Frosty’s departure and the memorial service, she and I might be able to dig our way back toward common ground. I never imagined Caitlin’s homecoming without imagining the three of us reuniting as a family. I couldn’t think of it any other way, even though I knew there had been cracks in our marriage even before Caitlin disappeared.
“Quite a church,” Buster said.
And it was. A former warehouse purchased by Christ’s Church eight years earlier and converted. It sat two thousand people and included a workout center and coffee bar in the back. Plans were in the works to buy a large video projection system so that Pastor Chris could be seen up close and personal by everyone. More than once, Abby mentioned donating money toward that cause.
“We should begin,” Pastor Chris said, looking at his watch and then the settling crowd. “Is that okay with all of you?”
Abby nodded silently, and so did I. She reached out and took my hand. The gesture surprised me. Her hand felt unfamiliar in mine, the hand of a stranger, but the good kind of strangeness that comes when two people have just met and are beginning to get to know each other. My heart sped up a little; I squeezed her hand in mine and she squeezed back. Like two scared children, we followed Pastor Chris down the aisle to the front of the church with Buster trailing behind.
Pastor Chris was like a celebrity on the altar. His straight white teeth gleamed, and despite his slightly thinning, slightly graying hair, he still looked youthful and vibrant. At forty-five, a couple of years older than Abby and me, he ran obsessively, even competed in the occasional marathon, and his body was trim and sleek under his perfectly fitted suit. He believed that God rewarded those who maintained their bodies and that exercise kept the spirit sharp, so it was no surprise that the addition of the workout facility to the church complex had been his idea.
Buster and I grew up Catholic, trundled off to Mass every Sunday morning by my overbearing stepfather, who believed that to miss one Sunday was a sin of the worst kind. While I no longer practiced or believed much of anything, I found it difficult to attend a new church, especially one that seemed so different from the religion I knew. Christ’s Community Church felt too touchy-feely, too positive for me. Pastor Chris offered nothing but encouragement to his congregation, as well as the sense that heaven could be attained through the application of a series of steps found in a self-help book. I expected my spiritual leaders to be removed and slightly dogmatic, wrapped in their colorful vestments and staring down at me, and I didn’t respond well when one of them wanted to be my friend. I also couldn’t fully understand the nature of Abby’s relationship with Pastor Chris. I understood the spiritual side of it-Abby was looking for guidance and community and found it in the church. But in recent months she’d grown even closer to Pastor Chris, going out to lunch with him on weekdays and referring to him as her “best friend.” Never in the eighteen years of our marriage had I suspected Abby of infidelity, but the “friendship” with Pastor Chris-as well as the perilous state of our own marriage-made me wonder.
Abby and I continued to hold hands through the beginning of the service as Pastor Chris led the congregation through a series of prayers and readings from scripture, including the one in which Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. Buster sat to my right, holding his sunglasses in his left hand and bouncing them against his thigh. He seemed older. The crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes looked more permanent, the gray in his hair more visible. But he appeared to be paying attention, his eyes focused on the altar, and my initial instinct turned out to be wrong: I was glad to have him there. My brother. My closest blood relation.
Pastor Chris started his sermon-which I still thought of as a homily-by thanking all the friends and community members in attendance. But they were Abby’s friends and people from the church. Her family was a small one. Her father had died when Caitlin was little, and her mother had retired to Florida. She and Abby had not been close over the years, and while Abby had extended an invitation to the service, her mother had apparently chosen not to come. For my part, I didn’t invite any of my colleagues from the university to attend. It was a sabbatical year for me, one I’d reluctantly decided to take in an effort to complete another book, and I knew my colleagues would not mix well with the evangelical crowd.
Pastor Chris continued, his voice a little high and reedy, almost like an adolescent’s on the brink of changing. “While we’re here as the result of a tragedy, the loss of a young life, we are also here to support one another as well as to take comfort from Christ’s eternal pledge to us. And what is that pledge? The pledge is that those who die having been redeemed by Christ’s eternal love shall not die, but rather have eternal life in Christ’s glory.”
Voices through the church muttered, “Amen,” including Abby’s. I studied her face in profile. Somewhere in there, I told myself, a vestige of the person I fell in love with nearly twenty years ago still remained. It must. But it was increasingly difficult for me to find it, to see her, and as I watched her mutter, “Amens,” under her breath and stare at Pastor Chris like he himself incarnated the Second Coming, I wondered if what I knew of her, or thought I knew of her, was gone forever, just like Caitlin.
“I was blessed to speak with Tom and Abby last night.” At the sound of my name, I turned back to Pastor Chris. It took me a moment to process his words. He said he’d spoken to us-to me the night before-but he hadn’t. I hadn’t seen the man. “And while they are understandably devastated by the loss of their dear Caitlin, they both told me, Tom as well as Abby, that they took comfort from the fact that Caitlin is now in heaven, reunited with Christ and basking in his divine love.”
I looked at Abby again, but she still stared forward, muttering her “Amens.” Buster leaned in to me on the other side. His breath smelled like cough drops.
“You were really shoveling it last night.”
“I didn’t say that,” I whispered.
I removed my hand from Abby’s. She didn’t seem to notice.
After the last prayer and the final song, we filed out. Abby, Buster, and I went first with Pastor Chris; then we stood around at the back of the church while people headed to their cars. Abby and I stood side by side, still not touching.
“I’m going to ride with Buster,” I said.
“You don’t want to ride with us?” Abby asked.
“Buster doesn’t know his way.”
“It’s a procession,” she said. “He can ride with us.”
“I need to talk to him,” I said, breaking off eye contact with her. “It’s fine.”
“But you’re going to the cemetery, right, Tom? You’ll be there?”
I didn’t answer. I put my hand on Buster’s arm and guided him toward the parking lot.
We stopped in Shaggy’s, a bar near campus. Students occupied most of the tables. Guy
s were trying hard to impress the girls, and the girls sat back, absorbing the boys’ attentions, encouraging more. We ordered sandwiches and then Buster asked for a pitcher of beer. When the waitress left, I asked him if he was drinking again.
“Just beer,” he said as nonchalantly as a man waiting for a bus. He’d been in rehab twice and then was arrested for drinking and driving. He’d also been arrested for indecent exposure, a fact that had caught the attention of the detectives investigating Caitlin’s disappearance. Buster claimed he’d been drunk and lost his clothes, but at some point he’d run past a group of children in a park and was initially charged with the more serious crime of child enticement and lewd and lascivious behavior. He’d spent two days in jail and served a thousand hours of community service. “You sure you don’t want to go to the boneyard? We can still make it.”
I shook my head. “Forget it.”
“Abby’s going to be pissed.”
I shrugged. He was right, of course. But when I heard Pastor Chris ascribing beliefs to me, actual words even, that clearly weren’t mine, something gave way. I tried to go along, to appease, but I’d reached my limit. Someone-maybe Pastor Chris, maybe Abby-decided to lie, to misrepresent my beliefs in public. I couldn’t stand being part of it, being lumped in with the flock of blind sheep.
The beer came and Buster poured it into the disposable plastic cups they provided. One of the drawbacks of living in a college town-restaurants and bars don’t invest in glassware. I took a sip and it felt good. And then another. That was all it took to start a buzz at the base of my skull.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. A text.
Need to see you. Four p.m.
“What’s that about?” Buster asked. “Abby?”
“No. Liann Stipes.”
“Who?”
“She’s a lawyer here in town. She handles the everyday stuff-mortgages, wills. Small-time criminal cases.”