Page 39 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

And I know what’s wrong.

And I say it:

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

And I’m right.

A little boy from the reservation found her. He was hiking with his father when they saw deer grazing, and the boy, no more than eight years old, tiptoed off the trail for a better view. Guided by an invisible hand or another supernatural force beyond comprehension, he noticed a human foot jutting out from a sparse blanket of leaves.

The boy and his father are still there when I arrive at the scene. The boy is crying. His strangled wail echoes through my bones. This is the thing I will always remember. Other details, such as the vulture-like mourners busily erecting a makeshift memorial in my mother’s memory and the blistering heat and the white sheet over my mother’s body, will be sanded away by time. But years from now, I will still hear this little boy’s cries in my dreams.

I am in a daze, numb except for an ache deep in my core. My lack of emotion is anticlimactic. I am being cheated of something. To be a motherless daughter is the most primal pain of all, yet I am not mad with grief. I am lost in labyrinthine recollections of my childhood, staring blankly ahead as if I’ve suffered a traumatic brain injury and been rendered a vegetable. Behind a strand of yellow caution tape strung around the trees, police comb the nearby woods for evidence. Crime scene marker number one denotes the pile of foliage my mother hadbeen buried under, and a trail of leaves lead from her resting place to the stretcher she lies on now. Her bare feet stick out from beneath the sheet. The left dangles by a single bloody tendon.

Time has turned molten. Hours feel like days.

Two people bookend me and weave their arms through mine. Connor to my left, Zoe to my right. It touches me to see them band together and come to my aid. I rest my head in the curve between Zoe’s shoulder and neck.

“There are … there are things they need to do to her body,” Connor says without looking at me. He lets me keep my fragment of intimacy with Zoe private. “You don’t want to see that.”

“He should have buried her,” I say.

Zoe’s voice strains above a whisper as the wind whips her flaxen hair into a tangle. “What?”

“Whoever killed her,” I say. “He left her out here to be eaten by vultures and coyotes. He should have buried her. It’s the least he could have done.”

“Providence …” Connor begins. He stands with his back to the crime scene. He never had a stomach for gore. Just being near the carnage is making him turn green.

“She’ll never get buried. The women in my family only get cremated. She’ll gather dust on the mantle. He should have at least buried her.”

Connor and Zoe exchange a look, but I remain fixated on the crime scene. One of the tribal police officers places a yellow marker beside a gnarled tree. A tatter of fabric? A strand of hair? There must be dozens, maybe hundreds of invisible traces of my mother scattered in these woods, all screamingElissa was here.

“And her shoes,” I say. “Where are her shoes?”

They steer me away from the crime scene and back up the trail. The onlookers wait for a police officer to provide anupdate, to emerge from the woods like Moses descending Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. On a distant bench, the little boy continues crying. He clings to his father’s arm as Daniel kneels before them with a notepad, trying to draw information out of the shell-shocked boy. The boy sniffles, shakes his head, and asks for his mother.I want my mom. I want my mom.

While Connor and Zoe squabble about who should drive me back to the trailer, I approach the boy. I open my mouth to interrupt Daniel’s gentle questioning, but nothing comes out, and I stand there unnoticed with my mouth ajar like a baby bird waiting for its mother to deposit worms into its maw.

Daniel acknowledges me with a curt glance. “Now isn’t the best time.”

I point to the boy. “Can I talk to him? I feel like—I feel like we might need each other right now.”

“That okay, sir?”

The father nods. The boy shrinks further when I sit beside him on the bench. He’s so young, so innocent, the last person in the world who should be drawn into this sordid ordeal. It is the smallness and senselessness of the injustice which makes it so insidious. Why couldn’t it have been anyone else to find her body? Why not his father? Why not me? Why this poor child?

“Do you need a hug?” I ask the boy.

He crumples into my arms. I hold him as he cries.

“It was kind of you. Checking on the little boy.”

Zoe does not look at me when she speaks. Her eyes remain glued to the countryside sprawling before us, miles upon miles of flat earth without so much as a tree or bush to disrupt the visual monotony. She props her arm on the armrest between us. Her palm upturns, her fingers relaxed in invitation, and Ican’t tell if I’m imagining it or if she truly pities me enough in this moment to indulge me with a chaste embrace of our hands.

“He wanted his mom,” I say.

“You were the next best thing.”

I place my hand beside hers, close enough for our pinkies to touch. Zoe senses this is all the courage I can muster and entwines her fingers with mine. A few hours ago, the gesture would have sent me soaring; now, it merely tempers the ache suffusing every inch of my body. I close my eyes and commit her touch to memory.

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