Scent of the Missing

by Susannah

  "Ah," said her handler, looking at the brush, the wide scatter of debris. "God." And then he said quietly, "We're going to be here awhile."

  Fine weather in the early days of the search gave way to rain, then freezing rain and sleet by Wednesday of the first week, changing the complexion of the recovery. Now I was assigned to a different group of searchers—a collection of personnel from three separate teams. We were covering areas already searched by others, perhaps hundreds of others, and yet there were still finds, all of them small. Tomorrow there would likely be more. One official said it might take months for any sector to be clean, that every gust of wind brought more of Columbia down.

  We'd been out in the freezing rain since early morning, and in some cases individual searchers stood over human remains for an hour or more, waiting for the process of official recovery to occur. An astronaut and a handful of dogs worked among us, as well as a gridline of young men from a military school who walked the uneven terrain at arm's length from one another, their eyes on the ground. Two of them passed near me as I stood waiting for the recovery team. "Ma'am," they said politely, without looking up. They parted slightly around the tree where I stood, then came together again, their heads bowed, taking careful steps.

  I now stood over a fragment of vertebra, tilted upward among the stones and leaves. Knobbed edges and an internal fretwork gave it a tiny, bony alien face. I had nearly missed it earlier. We had entered the sector in ice pellets and sleet, and though the ground was still too warm for much accumulation, parts of the ground rapidly crusted with ice. Rocks had grown slick. Somehow in the press forward, negotiating the terrain with my head bent against the sting, scanning, scanning, I had walked past it. I don't know what provoked me to turn around, but in the different light behind me the bone stood in sharp relief against the dull brown of old leaves. I called out the find.

  "Yes," said the officer running the sector, bending down to look at it. "Call it in. And stay here."

  I made the required phone call used for human finds and stood there a long while, slapping my gloved hands together and occasionally wiping a glaze of ice from my glasses. Though there were perhaps sixty of us working across that wood—some moving, some standing as I was, waiting for recovery teams—tucked deep into our coats we seemed isolated from one another, so quiet amid the tic-tic-tic of falling ice that I could hear both the ragged crunch of the cadets as they moved down slope and the individual snuffles of the dogs as they passed yards away.

  The dogs' heads worked low today. Perhaps time, sleet, and cold, heavy air had pressed scent down. I could see their noses crossing back and forth, lifting occasionally a few inches from the turf. One sniffed thoughtfully at the boots of a nearby cadet, then lifted his head to his handler and barked. There was little energy in it. To keep the dogs encouraged, last night we'd arranged live finds for many of them by stepping out of our hotel rooms and hiding volunteers there. This dog had been in that group, but now he showed none of last night's exuberance.

  "Barrow," I heard a Bloodhound cry about another find somewhere else in the wood. "Barrow."

  I crouched in place, arms wrapped around my knees. The officer running the sector returned to verify that I'd called in the find. He said, "You look a little green."

  "Just cold," I answered, and that was the truth of it, after days of disturbing human finds.

  "There's counseling back at the command post when you need it."

  Did I need it? I couldn't be sure if the numb I felt was cold or some kind of event saturation that made me feel little at all. No more horror, no longer deep, abiding grief. I had seen enough of Columbia that the vertebra before me provoked only a weary sense of inevitability. I watched the dogs and handlers make their small, tight sweeps, the dark dogs subdued, their backs frosted with ice. The ground around us was rapidly going white. Kneeling there, I cupped my hands above the little bone as though I could warm it. I felt the freezing rain stitch both of us down tight to the earth.

  Days later, outbound along the same road we'd come in on, I led several other cars full of personnel who were also cycling off the search as new responders were due to arrive. We would drive in train until our paths diverged. Two cars would head west. One, northeast. I would drive back to Dallas. The other drivers put me in the lead, saying my red car was the easiest to see in bad weather. As we drove, I occasionally glanced back and could see dog heads in silhouette, sticking up from the back seats of the cars behind me. After a time, I could see only drivers. The dogs were no longer there. They were all tired, surrendering to the long drive and the rhythm of the cars. This had been a hard week.

  Some dog teams had left the day before. There were circulating stories that this dog or that one had been overcome by the work. Not one of them physically injured, but several of them affected by the search. "Too many days of too much scent, none of it good," explained one handler, speaking of his dog now curled in his crate, a normally outgoing German Shepherd, an experienced recovery dog that had stopped eating the day before and had withdrawn from play and affection. Was this illness, stress, field exhaustion, or a canine form of compassion fatigue? The handler shrugged. He said that when a dog gives signals like these, you pay attention. His German Shepherd had had enough.

  The true nature of canine grief—if this was grief—was a mystery to me. I had listened to experienced handlers at this search, and opinions were strongly divided. Some said dogs didn't share grief in human terms, but that critical incident stress was as real for them as it was for their human partners. It could overwhelm a dog in the field, or it might take a while to surface. They said that handlers and dogs would need to proceed cautiously across the coming weeks. Easy, motivating practice searches for the dogs. Lots of play. Upbeat rewards. Pushing too hard could create an aversion to the work and shut a dog down from search for good. Perhaps some humans too—though none of us talked about that before we packed the cars to go.

  We left East Texas in heavy rain that gradually tapered to drizzle, then ceased altogether beneath fringed clouds giving way to blue sky. The road lightened. The woods on either side of us were quiet, the hundreds of searchers who had penetrated them now gone. For a while we could see the twitch of colored tape among the trees: pink, green, orange, and the occasional curl of crime-scene yellow. Less and less of it as we drove free of the area, none at all for a long stretch—then suddenly two trees wreathed in pink, something of the shuttle far apart from everything else. We all slowed. At the base of the trees, a hand-painted sign read godspeed, columbia. Someone in our group keyed his radio, then thought better of it and left the call unsaid.

  24. NO BAD NEWS

  "I'LL LET YOU get dressed," the nurse says as she leaves the small examining room where I've lain for an hour or so, staring alternately at a diagram of the eye and a video on cholesterol. The door clicks shut, but for a moment I am unable to move. The room is meticulously impersonal, like a public bathroom, its furniture all hard, slick sides made for wiping down the more embarrassing truths about being human. Though there's probably good news now and again, they are prepared for tears here. There's a box of tissues on the counter and another on a small cabinet near the examining table. It is the kind of room that hears the kind of news that warrants seatbelts on the single chair for family members and a roller coaster's pull-down, lock-tight bar over the space where patients wait for the sudden drop.

  I haven't cried. Having lost a good friend to cancer nine months ago, I easily see that my own prognosis, while not wonderful, doesn't throw the long shadow that Erin's did. But as I step into jeans that once fit and turn my T-shirt inside-in, my fingertips are curiously numb. The clothes slide on easily, but I feel no connect with them, as though I'm dressing a mannequin using robotic arms while looking the wrong way through a telescope. Buttons are tough. Zippers hard to grasp. I am still finding buttonholes to account for the mismatched alignment of my blouse when the doctor returns.

  He is a tall man with wiry brown hair that doesn't settl
e neatly around his ears. Glasses worsen the problem, so that sometimes he has sticky-uppy tufts protruding over the earpieces. He is young enough to have been my son if I'd been particularly enterprising, or maybe my much younger brother, and some remaining vulnerability in him makes me want to smooth down those tufts, pat the front of his lab coat, and say, "There." His expression is kind, but it is clear he gives this kind of information often enough that the lines of his face quickly settle into a kind of bad-news barrier, and that he speaks from behind that necessary distance. He is there, but not there, with his frequent glances to my medical record. He is compassionate in the way one might be at the sight of a car accident a block away. And he is brisk with his list of recommendations and protocols, clear about what the future might hold in a year. He says, "There will probably be days when you're going to feel very bad."

  He's right. That's already happened. Some days, it's hard to make my feet move. Other days, I feel too weak to stand. And then an unexpected reprieve: I'll go for a few months feeling completely normal, with all the energy I had in my twenties.

  I've had a while to prepare for this. The condition has been a known possibility since I was a toddler—a birth defect combined with factors of heredity have made it a question mark during my adolescence and young married life, which had seen a number of related infections. In short, I have lousy kidneys. I'd grown up with kidney infections that occurred so frequently I could sense the earliest symptoms when they were coming on, but in adulthood I'd decided I would strong-arm the condition and ignore it to the best of my ability. Eat the right things, yes. Avoid the wrong things, absolutely. See a doctor regularly. But other than that, I refused to think about two organs that could become old-lady kidneys even while I was relatively young.

  For the most part, such optimistic thinking has worked. I responded well to medical intervention and found it easy to follow the suggested diet. I continued to fly, worked a few weeks as a deckhand on a tall ship a couple of summers in a row. But a bad episode at age forty seemed to be significant. Was the condition stepping up? My treatment reconfigured and I adapted to it, and when I joined the search team in 2001, I did so firmly believing that I could work despite the illness, planning to stand myself down from searches during the bad periods and deploy during the good ones. I must have done something right. I chugged liters of water and followed the medical protocol. I never failed to show for a search due to illness. Puzzle's chaotic arrival in 2004 seems now to have been such a bright point of distraction that, looking back, I can remember few bad days during her puppyhood.

  Now I leave the office with a sheaf of papers in hand, heading out of the tinted-window gloom of the building into a summer day that has relented, this one time, and traded heat for heavy cumulus clouds and a breeze with the sound of thunder at its back. Any cool in a Texas summer feels like a gift. I don't want to outdrive the coming rain, so I get in the car and wait. I watch drops slide down the windshield and quiver one upon another above the wipers, stacked like circus acrobats waiting for a fall.

  The dogs have known something was wrong for some time. Just weeks after Puzzle's certification tests, Jack and Puzzle were the first to behave differently in my presence, the first to begin to hover when I moved through the house. On bad days, I come home too exhausted to turn on the lights for evening. I throw my jacket over a chair and fall into bed fully clothed, shoes thumping to the floor. Jack has taken to pulling the jacket off the chair and curling up on it next to the bed. Puzzle leaps up on the bed to lie beside me, pressing her forehead to my cheek. Whether the scent of my changed chemistry or the altered homecoming have provoked this, I don't know, but this is the first time I have seen Jack and Puzzle consistently act in common accord. They follow me every evening to my bedroom, and there they stay until I get up again. In recent weeks, Sprits'l too has joined the entourage, following the others as they trail me through the house. Sprits mutters and circles worriedly on the floor when I lie down.

  For several evenings after work, I retreat to the semigloom of my bedroom, drinking ginger tea and considering the future. The dogs like this. Their natural response at the end of hot days is to lie still. They join me in everything but the tea, the Golden lying long across the bed and the Poms stretched wide, bellies to the breeze of the fan. My thoughts are as much on them as they are on illness. The most immediate concern is strength, which I'm told will come and go. It's mostly gone these days, and it isn't difficult to realize that right here, right now, managing the house and the dogs will be difficult. And right now I'm certainly not strong enough to work Puzzle in the field. As my doctor wrangles treatment protocol, this might improve in coming months. Or not.

  Lying beside me on the bed, belly-up, the Golden is oblivious to my private debate. Extended strategically beneath the air-conditioning vent, she has her forepaws bent like a praying mantis and her back legs inelegantly splayed. Her ears extend outward like wings, and her mouth is open; the seed-pearl bottom teeth show. Some of her snores must tickle, because as they come out she gives them a final, unconscious chew with those bottom teeth, which makes a little dipthong of the snore. Or perhaps the chew means she is dreaming of doughnuts, which she nibbles in much the same way. Even in the heat of these late summer evenings, Puzzle presses close. She's my dog now, by choice, and we both know it.

  A firefighter friend and I used to talk about the "tap on the shoulder"—the moment when emergency responders make a choice to put themselves at risk on behalf of another. There are taps and there are taps, he said to me once. The first tap tells a person she wants to become a firefighter, or a police officer, or—and he elbowed me—run after some dog in the dark. Another tap tells him to go into a burning structure when every natural impulse says no. At its most extreme, the "Courage Meets Oh Geez" moment, he called it and laughed, not wanting to claim that he is some kind of saint.

  Now it occurs to me that in this working partnership with Puzzle, I might be the one to fail, and that the tap on the shoulder might instead be saying step aside. Oh geez, I say aloud the way my friend does through his nose, but there's little courage in it. The dogs twitch awake at the sound of me, stretching and grinning with an optimistic eye to the kitchen. Treats? they seem to ask. Did you just say "Treats"?

  I can lie in the dark with a teacup only so long. I remember Erin, who ten weeks before she died was at Home Depot buying mulch. In the heat of the "meanest summer ever," as she put it (and 2005 was a right scorcher), she put in new flower beds full of moss roses and vinca. Fierce gardening for anyone in that vindictive heat, and though I thought it was Erin's sort of karmic make-peace with fate and an unkind universe, she shook her head. No, she said, she liked the bright colors, but her mind was on her aging mother, who would have to sell the house after she died. Theirs was a neighborhood full of foreclosures; Erin wanted her house competitive. She would dig for hours in the garden, then be too weak to stand for several days.

  After she died, her two little Poms came to live with me. They remind me of her often this year after we lost her, and for some contrary reason on a day I'm feeling pretty good, I go to Home Depot to wander the garden department. I tweak a vinca or two and pat several bags of mulch in honor of my friend, before wandering takes me outside to a row of prefab storage sheds in architectural postures. There are red barns and log-cabin look-alikes, and one with a wrought-iron star on it has a distinctly Texas prairie feel. Why am I looking here? I don't need a storage shed, but I walk the row of them, anyway, stopping at the final example. It's not a storage shed at all, but a child's cottage playhouse, complete with porch, shutters, dormers on the roof, and window boxes. Unfinished on the inside, the exterior is already primed taupe and crimson. A sign promises that the primer will take any paint color, and that the whole thing can be delivered and built in a half-day or less.

  SURPRISE YOUR CHILD, a sign on the cottage reads.

  Inside, the scent of raw plywood smells like possibility. I ignore the adult-size side door and choose, instead, to
walk through the little Dutch-door entrance. It's not a tiny playhouse. Six adults could stand up and have cocktails in here, if they were feeling friendly. I bend down to look out the four-over-four cottage windows. When another woman opens the door to come inside, I feel a little silly kneeling there. But she enters with a grin and bends to peer out the other window.

  "I always wanted a playhouse," she says.

  Me too. At forty-six and childless and on the trailing edge of bad news, there's no reason for me to want one now, but I do. I pull loose a free-take-one flyer and make a crazy-lady circle of it next to my head. My companion laughs and asks, "Are you gonna do it?" When I walk out of the little house and across the parking lot for a cashier, I can still see her in there. She's shifted to the other window and gives me a little wave, one elbow on the sill as she looks out at the world.

  I convince myself that I'm building a dog house—a luxe little space to share with my crew and any doggy visitors. Friends are not convinced. "Uh huh," says one of them. "And where are you gonna put the dolls?"

  The cottage arrives on a flatbed truck two weeks later. Two young men spread its sections out across the backyard in a sequence they understand, but which to me looks as though the little house has been felled by a particularly organized tornado. While inside the house the Poms are going nuts against every available window, the two men assemble the house with almost no conversation between them. Cinderblock foundation, floor, walls, roof, dormers, porch, doors, window boxes. They pause only when I come out with canned soft drinks and cups of ice. One shows me a manufacturer's metal tag that's supposed to be screwed onto the roofline of the cottage. He doesn't speak much English, but he holds the sign up where it should go, looks at me, and shakes his head.