Cemetery Girl (14 page)

And then she was gone.

Part II

Chapter Seventeen

M
y father died when I was four. Pancreatic cancer. Most of my memories of him are in fragments—little, tattered pieces I carry around with me. They come back at odd moments. I remember the musky smell of his cologne and the rough way his stubbled face scraped against mine. Sometimes when I’m shaving my own face, I wonder how much he and I would have looked alike.

I remember that his hands were big, with thick fingers, and when he picked me up and held me under the armpits, his grip was so tight and strong it hurt a little. A good hurt that I didn’t mind. And I remember his voice, loud and strong, and the way it almost seemed to ring when he called my name or my mother’s name from across the house.

But the most coherent memory of him occurred on a spring day about a year before he died. It’s the only sustained narrative memory of him I have.

My mother wasn’t home. I can’t say where she was or what she was doing, but she wasn’t there, which meant my father was watching me. And I don’t know if he knew he was sick yet or not. If he knew, he would have just found out. More likely, he hadn’t been diagnosed yet, but the cancer was already there, growing inside him, extending its tendrils into his healthy cells and tissue, destroying his body from the inside out.

Our backyard sloped down to the houses behind us. Some kids a little older than me lived back there. Our mothers knew each other, and from time to time they’d let us all run around together under their watchful eyes. On this particular spring day I’m remembering, I was out with those other kids, a boy and girl named Amy and Kevin. The weather was newly warm, the trees and flowers were starting to bud and bloom, and the parents were probably glad to be able to let us all out of the house to burn off energy.

But at some point that day, the skies darkened.

Enormous clouds, thick and purple and looming, grew above us. The wind picked up, making branches and leaves fall to the ground around us. It buffeted our small bodies until we swayed and struggled to stay on our feet.

There’s a gap in my memory. It’s possible the parents of the other children called them in, or perhaps the other kids decided to run home in the face of the threatening storm. I just know that I ended up in our backyard alone as the storm continued to blow. And it seemed as though the entire world had been set in motion. The trees bucked and bent, the fence that bordered the yard shuddered, and everything that wasn’t anchored down—every leaf, every scrap of paper, every grass clipping—took to the air and swirled around me until I felt as though I were standing in one of those Christmas snow globes, the kind that when shaken produce the kinetic spinning of a blizzard.

I turned toward the house, moving my little legs a half step at a time. The wind pushed against me, holding me upright as though I were being restrained by invisible wires. Something flew into my eye, a quick stabbing pain. I pressed my hand against the eyelid and kept walking forward as best I could.

By the time I reached the side of our house and came around into the front yard, rain had started to fall. Thick, pelting drops splattered against my face and into my hair. My breath came in jerking huffs. My one open eye blurred and burned from the tears. And I finally reached a point, standing on the side of the house, where I decided I just couldn’t go on anymore. I let the wind push me back, let my body go slack and loose, and I sat down in the grass, my hand still pressed against my eye. I remember thinking, very clearly, that I was going to die right there, that my life was going to end in the storm, in the side yard of our house.

I don’t know how long I sat there. It couldn’t have been very long, because I don’t remember getting very wet. But at some point I looked up and there he was. My father, standing over me, his face creased with concern. I thought he was angry with me for being out in the rain, but he didn’t say or do anything to indicate anger. Instead, he bent down and gathered me in his arms and squeezed me tight against his chest. I went limp in his grip and buried my head against the side of his neck. I breathed in his familiar scent, and in that moment I knew what it meant to be home. To be protected. To be safe. And long after my father died and this became the only solid memory of him I carried with me, I used this moment as a measuring stick, a guide to remind me of what a father was supposed to be.

Chapter Eighteen

T
he business card with Susan Goff’s name sat on the kitchen table amid the crumbs and the morning paper.

I had picked up the phone twice and put it down twice, changing my mind, before I finally placed the call.

I was alone in the house. Really alone. Abby had been gone three weeks. Whenever I called Ryan for updates, he offered nothing new and told me to be patient. Liann e-mailed me a few times, just checking in, as she put it, but the lack of developments didn’t give us much to talk about. And my occasional trips to campus only reminded me of how little interest I had in writing a book about Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Susan Goff answered her phone with a bright, energetic voice that made it tough for me to estimate her age. She could have been in her twenties, or she could have been pushing sixty. But her enthusiastic greeting did have one effect—it disarmed me and made me more at ease than I’d expected to be.

“I was referred to you by a friend,” I said.

“Wonderful,” she said. “What can I help you with?”

“I don’t know. Do we set up an appointment or something?”

“Yes, of course. But just a casual chat. I hate the word ‘appointment.’ It sounds so businesslike. Don’t you agree?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Okay. Well, just so you know, my name is Tom Stuart, and I’m calling because of my daughter.” I started to tell her the details of Caitlin’s disappearance, thinking she would want to know them up front, but she gently interrupted me.

“Oh. Oh, yes. Oh, I know who you are. Yes, yes.”

“You’ve heard about it on the news.”

“Yes.” She paused. “From the news. And Tracy told me she’d be giving you my card. This is so very sad. I’m so very sorry for this.”

“Thank you,” I said. “It was Tracy who referred me to you.”

“And have you been seeing someone else? A professional therapist?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“You need to know up front that I’m not a licensed therapist or a professional counselor. If you need that, I can’t help you.” She laughed a little, a self-deprecating sound. “I volunteer through the police department, but I don’t work strictly for them. I’m not any kind of police officer, and I don’t investigate crimes. In fact, I don’t just work with the victims of crime. I might work with someone who has a loved one who has committed suicide. Or families that have lost someone in an accident. That sort of thing.” She made it sound as casual as helping someone choose wallpaper.

“So you’re just a person who helps people?” I asked. “Couldn’t I just go out in the street and start talking to someone?”

“I’ve been trained,” she said. “They don’t just throw us out into the community and turn us loose on people in their most vulnerable moments. That wouldn’t make much sense, would it?”

“Do you hold a license or degree in something?” I asked.

“Everyone in Volunteer Victim Services goes through an eight-week training session. At least once a year we go back for a continuing ed course, and we all have criminal background checks. Hell, once a month I pee in a cup so the state of Ohio knows I’m not doing any illicit drugs. It’s all to give us a grounding in the basics of helping people in need.”

“And what do you do for them?” I asked. “What can you . . . ?”

“What can I do for you?” she asked. “I’m really just a support system, Mr. Stuart. Someone to listen to your problems. You know, the police officers are so busy with other aspects of the cases they work on. The investigating, the testifying, the prosecuting. That’s not what I do. Mostly I listen. I try not to judge or offer heavy opinions, but if you ask me for one, I’ll share it. That’s up to you. Does that sound like something you would be interested in?”

I didn’t feel like I could say no, even if I wanted to. She was so
there
, so in the moment for me. She was so ready to help. And the fact that she wasn’t a police officer or a minister or even a crusader on behalf of victims’ rights made me feel better. She did seem like someone who wanted to help me.

“Okay,” I said. “Yes. Do you want to make an appointment—a meeting time—for next week?”

“Let’s get together tomorrow at four,” she said. “Do you know the Courthouse Coffee Shop downtown?”

“I do.”

“Let’s meet there,” she said. “If you don’t like me, at least the coffee will be good.”

A year or so after Caitlin had disappeared, around the time Abby would have been having her miscarriage, she and I discussed what to do with Caitlin’s room. We had been keeping it just as it was the day Caitlin disappeared—the clothes in the closet, the personal items on the shelves. But Abby started to make a case for change. She went out of her way to tell me we wouldn’t throw away anything, but she wanted to pack up some things and move them to the attic, and then paint the walls and rearrange the furniture.

“The room is an obstacle, Tom,” she said, no doubt using language she’d heard from Pastor Chris in one of his “counseling” sessions. “We can’t move on with it there.”

I categorically told her no. I left no space for argument.

And the room stayed intact.

Just before I left the house to go meet Susan Goff for the first time, I stopped by Caitlin’s bedroom. I went in there several times a month. I liked to sit on the bed or run my hand over the desk and the bedclothes, picking up the stuffed animals and putting them back down exactly where Caitlin had left them. In the first hours after Caitlin’s disappearance, I combed through the room, digging into the drawers, opening school notebooks, looking for anything that might give us a clue. Then the police took over that job, and they discovered the Seattle and Amtrak information that conjured the possibility of Caitlin being a runaway.

When I went in there before seeing Susan, something felt different. The space seemed foreign to me, almost forbidden, as though I were about to enter a room belonging to a stranger, one who wouldn’t want me intruding upon her world.

And while I stood there, my mind ran through the
what-if
s: What if Abby and I had had another child; what if she’d carried that baby to full term? Would it have taken over this space? Would Caitlin’s memory have been effaced from our lives?

I pushed open the door.

The blinds were closed and little light entered, giving the room a gray, wintery cast. It smelled musty, as I’d expected. I ran my hand across the top of the dresser to my left, acquiring a thick layer of dust on the tips of my fingers. The floor squeaked beneath me as I moved across the carpet. A cluster of young adult books sat on a shelf; a group of stuffed animals lay at the foot of the bed. On a small shelf above her desk, two trophies from the two years she’d played soccer through a local youth group. She didn’t want to play and insisted, even in the car on the way to the first practice, that she wasn’t going to do it or go along. But go along she did, and she ended up loving it, and even talked of playing in high school someday, all of which amounted to a rare display of interest on her part in a group activity.

The bed remained unmade. I went over and sat on it, felt the springs bounce beneath my weight, and remembered the nights when Caitlin was small and too scared to go to sleep alone. Either Abby or I would take turns coming in and lying next to her until she fell asleep—her soft, whistling breaths assuring us we could go—but we always made sure to leave the door cracked so she could see the faint light in the hallway.

I pushed myself off the bed and went to the closet. This time, before this door, I didn’t hesitate. I pulled it open, then reached up and yanked the light cord. I took a step back. The closet was packed full. Her clothes were crowded together so tight they could barely move from side to side. I recognized and remembered certain things. A pink sweater we gave Caitlin one Christmas. A Fields University football jersey, girl sized and bearing double zeroes. At the far end of the closet, I came across Caitlin’s winter coat, a puffy red parka. I touched it, squeezed the soft sleeves in my hand, and with a stabbing ache was taken back to a winter day six years earlier when Caitlin and I had built a snowman in our yard.

The pain I felt was literal and real. It went through my chest and into my back. I closed my eyes, clenched them shut, and heard Caitlin’s laughter in the yard, a giggling trill. I felt the sting of the cold wind on my cheeks and the wet burning from the snow she’d dumped down the back of my shirt. For that moment, that one painful, glorious moment, she was there, Caitlin, and then just as quickly it passed. The pain eased; the memory receded. I opened my eyes and it was just me, a middle-aged guy standing in a closet, clutching a child’s coat.

And the child was gone.

The thought popped into my head, just like the memory of playing in the snow. I never thought it so clearly and with such finality.
She’s gone. Caitlin is gone.
And I knew, as time passed, the memories would fade, and the haunting, stabbing moments would come back to me with less frequency until, someday, they might be gone forever, and with them all tangible sense of my daughter.

I pulled the coat tight to me, pressed my face deep into its fabrics and folds. I inhaled. It smelled musty like the closet, but I didn’t care. I breathed deeply again and again, letting the musty smell fill me.

I took the coat and placed it back on its hanger, then started working it back in among the other clothes on the rod. I stepped back, my hand on the closet door, when I saw the flash of red. I thought it was a hat or glove. The weather had been cold in the days leading up to Caitlin’s disappearance, but on the day she disappeared, we’d experienced a brief late-winter warm-up, so Caitlin had left the house that day in a lighter jacket instead. I noticed that the red object looked fragile, almost papery, and parts of it fell to the ground.