While she pauses for effect, I think: Kevin and Sean don’t fit. They’re not girls, they’re much younger than the average age, they were more than fifty miles from home. And there were two of them.
“So we need the resources to act fast, too,” Melinda says. Her timing, as she launches into the plea for funds, is impeccable. I’m not surprised to learn that she’s pursuing a new career as a motivational speaker or that she’s written a book, Keeping Our Children Safe, full of pointers about how to protect children from predators without at the same time scaring them silly. The book is available outside the banquet room. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the center.
After the public departs, there’s a prayer circle for parents and relatives of the missing. We sit on folding chairs, holding hands. My neighbor clutches mine with such a ferocious grip, I almost lose feeling in my fingers. After the minute of silence, we take turns reciting aloud the details of our personal catastrophes.
I walk out when I realize that most of those in the circle are in fact grieving. They’ve come to share coping strategies for what they regard – except for the ritual nod to an unlikely miracle – as the permanent loss of their children. Like the parents and spouses of MIA victims lost in Vietnam, they no longer seek their “loved ones.” What they’re after is something else, something always referred to as “closure.” In other words: the remains. Evidence of death.
“I can’t stay here,” I whisper in my wife’s ear. “They think their kids are dead.” When I stand up to leave, she comes with me, but not because she wants to. “Excuse us, please excuse us,” she mutters as I yank my hand out of my neighbor’s and careen toward the door.
In the car, her eyes are hard and unforgiving. “Who do you think you are, Alex – judging them about how they were handling their loss?”
“They think their kids are dead. I don’t.”
Liz bursts into tears.
That night, she makes the announcement: “I’m going back to Maine,” she says. She looks at her fingernails and, once again, starts to cry.
The next day, she’s gone.
Work. Although Al told me from the moment he heard about the boys that I could forget about work for “as long as it takes,” last week I got an e-mail asking me to “clarify” my plans. Either I should come back soon, at least on a part-time basis, or I should request a formal leave of absence, one that specified a time frame and a date of return. The fine print noted that given the circumstances, the station would continue to provide benefits even if I did choose to remain on “compassionate leave.” Benefits, yes, but since my absence would require the hiring of a replacement – no “remuneration.”
Almost everyone agrees that returning to work is “the best thing.” The basis for this conclusion is some sketchy if universal notion of work as distracting and therefore therapeutic. It boils down to this: If I’m too busy to think about my missing sons, I’ll be less depressed.
I doubt this.
Getting up, getting dressed, the old familiar commute – it seems so strange to resume this routine. And the station itself feels like foreign terrain. TV stations are crazy places, loud and frantic with energy, everyone always careening toward or recovering from a deadline. Me? I feel inert and idle amid the hive of activity. I exist within a kind of insular bubble created by everyone’s elaborate courtesy. Voices lower when I walk by, glances slide away, no one knows what to say to me or how to act in my presence. I can see the wheels turning – should I mention it, or not? When I explain that nothing they can do or say could make me feel worse, they feel rebuffed.
One day, after I return to work, Shoffler drops by. He arrives with a six-pack of Sierra Nevada and a huge soggy pizza. “Health food,” he says, with his high-pitched stuttery laugh. “Stick with me and you, too, can be a fat slob.”
I’m glad to see him. In fact, I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather see at my door – except my sons. For openers, Shoffler is just about the only person in the world who’s always ready to talk about the one thing of actual interest to me. Besides, he’s cynical, funny and, I’ve come to realize, very smart. We usually end up going over and over the busted leads to see if there’s something we missed: the origami rabbit, the whippet, the witnesses who saw the man getting into a black panel van, the latest Elvis sightings, the chicken blood, the “enemy” list of folks I’d attacked on the air. Shoffler checks his notebooks – he’s on his third now. The case file, he tells me, is seven binders thick. Each case, he’s explained, starts with a single three-inch loose-leaf binder. The binders – which Shoffler has allowed me to look at – contain copies of every piece of paper generated by the investigation: report, witness statement, interview, crime scene photo, forensics tests, search warrant, search warrant inventory, evidence receipt, and so on.
We eat the pizza, watch an O’s game, and shoot the breeze for a while before he gets around to the reason for his visit.
“I hate to tell you this, Alex,” he starts, then stops. He’s uncomfortable, tapping his fingers against the top of the pizza box, jiggling his foot. At the look on my face, he pushes his hand toward me. “Don’t worry. It’s not about the boys. There’s nothing new. It’s about… me: I’ve been taken off the case.”
“What?” Shoffler is known as a bulldog, who never lets go, who sacrificed two marriages to work, who spends any spare moment pounding away at his cold cases. “What do you mean? You don’t ever close a case. You’re famous for that. Taken off the case? Why?”
A big sigh. “Here’s the deal. It’s not just you – all my cases are being reassigned. There’s this new thing been in the works ever since 9/11 and it’s finally happening: Metro Area Counter-Terrorism Unit.” His hands fall open, like a book. “Officers from every jurisdiction, plus a coupla Bureau designates, folks from Customs and INS. I’m the guy from Anne Arundel. Look, I’m sorry.”
I say nothing. It’s a real blow.
“Your case has been handed over to a young detective named Muriel Petrich. I may be a bulldog, but she’s as smart as they get. And ambitious. That’s a good combo.”
“Right.”
“Look, I know…” He shakes his head. “You can count on me to keep my hand in, right? And call me anytime, any reason. You get an idea, a lead, whatever, I’ll do what I can. But give Petrich a chance – she’s a tiger.”
“Right.” I can’t keep the bitterness out of my voice. I feel Kevin and Sean are being abandoned.
I’ve fallen into the habit of sleeping in the family room. Half the time, I crash on the futon, dozing off while still in my clothes, to wake at two or three or four, the TV still playing, the lights still blazing. Tonight, as soon as Shoffler leaves, I clear away the beer bottles and pizza debris, I put all the dishes in the dishwasher, turn it on, wipe the counters. Then I make the rounds of the house, turn off the lights, lock the doors, then strip down to my underwear and get into bed.
This is the white iron bed Liz scrimped and saved for. She ought to have it in Maine. It seems terrible that I can’t picture where she lives or the things that surround her, that I should be in the midst of all the objects she so lovingly accumulated. The bed: I remember nights when one of the boys or even both would come in at night, waking from bad dreams, or lonely or sick, and stand at the foot of the bed and say, “Mom?” Not “Dad,” never “Dad,” I can’t fool myself about this. It was always Liz they turned to because she was always there. I remember weekend mornings when the kids came in to wake us, piling onto the bed, the four of us launching into a brand-new day.