Page 68 of The Lost Heiress
“Leland suggested it, actually,” Nisha said. “It was something he read about. He’s been really focused ever since—well, you know. Head down. Serious.”
“I don’t really want to talk about Leland anymore,” Church said. He took a drink of his beer. “You know what I’ve been wondering, though?” Church asked after a moment, changing the subject.
“What’s that?” Nisha said.
“What made you want to spend all your time with dead people?”
Nisha laughed. “I’ll tell you, but you’ll probably think I’m morbid.”
“I already think you’re morbid.”
“Well, then, good. The pressure’s off, I guess,” she said. “I actually went to school to be a dentist originally.”
Church snorted, almost spitting out his beer.
“I know,” Nisha said, “it’s hard to picture. Anyway, first year of dental school, you have to take anatomy with the med students. You basically spend the semester dissecting a human body. It was my first time seeing one. It’s quite a shock to the system, you know? The smell of formaldehyde and methanol from the embalming fluid, the feel of your scalpel cutting through skin, which doesn’t feel or look like skin at all, really. It’s tough and leathery, and the tissue and muscles are gray underneath.”
She told him about the dissection of the body, how they kept the face and hands covered with a towel while they were working. Her lab partners didn’t like to think about the body on the table as a man who had once lived. They didn’t want to think of him as someone’s father or brother or son, though of course he had been at least one of those things. They tried hard not to know him.
But, to Nisha, that was impossible. The human body was so particular. From the plaque in the arteries in the abdomen, she knew the man often ate red meat, and from the scars on the walls of his liver, she knew he enjoyed drinking. On his left leg, she discovered a healed femur shaft fracture. Nisha thought about that for months. What could this man have done to break the longest, strongest bone in his body? All over the body, it was like that. She found indications of stories, subtle signs of who the man had been.
“My classmates wanted to think of this man as just a body, but that didn’t interest me at all,” Nisha said. “I couldn’t separate the body from the man, from the stories that made him. That was it for me. I changed my major the next semester. What about you?” Nisha asked. “What made you want to become a detective?”
Church took a sip of his beer. He so rarely answered this particular question honestly with anyone, but something about Nisha made him want to tell her the truth.
“When I was twelve,” Church said, “me and my little brother, Bobby, and the neighborhood kids would play capture the flag in the park after school on Tuesdays. There was this one day in September, right after school started, and it was just like this perfect game. I stole the flag right out from under Joey McIntyre’s nose and ran it all the way back to home base before he could tag me. Anyway, we decided to play another round. My brother, Bobby, had to go home early. We took turns helping my mom set the table for dinner, and that night was his turn. I was supposed to go home with him, but I didn’t want to leave. It was still light out, and we lived three blocks from the park, and Bobby had his bike. He whined about it—he was sore that I got tostay and play and he had to go home early. I told him I’d watch him to make sure he got home all right. There was a clear sight line from the park to our house. I watched him walk his bike across the park to the street, and then the game started and I turned away. That was the last time I ever saw him.”
What killed Church was that if he’d just been looking, like he promised Bobby he would, he would have seen him.
“Mr. Miller, one of our neighbors, was out watering his lawn, and he saw Bobby straddling his bike on the side of the road, talking to a man in a red Cadillac,” Church said. “He looked away to turn off the hose, and when he looked back, both the Cadillac and Bobby were gone. They never found the man in the red Cadillac, or Bobby. He was ten.”
Church didn’t tell many people this story, because he knew they would try to fill the silence that followed. They would grapple for the right words to make it better, a balm to soothe the pain. They would have told him how sorry they were, how terrible it was, how they couldn’t even imagine. How brave he was to do what he did every day, how Bobby would be proud.
Words that scraped at the surface of the tragedy that had shaped his life. How hollow and insufficient they would feel. And how much more alone he would feel in their wake. Because the words were true—it was terrible, and they couldn’t imagine. But the words were also false. He wasn’t brave. And Bobby wasn’t proudly looking down on him from somewhere up there. Bobby was dead, buried somewhere, he was sure, in an unmarked grave in the cold, hard ground.
But Nisha didn’t say anything. She understood the insufficiency of words. Instead, she sat there in silence with him, holding the weight of it all, and for a moment, he didn’t feel so alone.
“Sometimes, I wish for the unforgivable,” Church said quietly. He had never said this part out loud to anyone before. “I wish that Bobby was dead. That someone would find his body buried somewhere.”
Missingwas the worst sort of purgatory. For three years after Bobby went missing, his mother had insisted that someone always be at thehouse. They couldn’t go on vacation or out to dinner or to a Sunday matinee, because someone had to be home for Bobby. His mother’s worst fear was that Bobby would call and no one would answer, or that he’d come home to a locked and empty house. What would he think, she’d wonder—how would he feel? To be lost and come home to find his family gone, out to a nice meal or enjoying a ball game? It was unfathomable to her that they could do anything but wait.
Sometimes, hope seemed to Church a poison that was killing his mother slowly. If she could just let go, if she could just find peace, if she could just move on. But she couldn’t or wouldn’t—he wasn’t sure which. His mother woke every morning and knelt next to her bed to pray. Hope—she consumed it like a drug. There were cases of the few who were found, the few who came back. Steven Stayner, a boy who had been taken when he was just seven years old, had reappeared seven years later, hitchhiking forty miles to a police station while his captor was at work. There was Jaycee Dugard, who disappeared off the street near her family’s home in South Lake Tahoe when she was eleven while on her way to her school bus stop. She was found eighteen years later. And Elizabeth Smart, taken from her own home at the age of fourteen and found walking in broad daylight on a public street alongside her captors nine months later. Church’s mother watched the news broadcasts, sitting up in her La-Z-Boy, a blanket draped over her lap, the TV screen casting a dull glow in their living room. She cut the news articles out of the paper, folded them up, and kept them in the Bible next to her bed.
Church did not like to imagine his brother afraid or alone or in pain. He wished for a quick and merciful death, that Bobby had died shortly after he was taken, before he realized the sinister intentions of his captor. Something quick and painless. But most of all, Church wished for certainty, for answers to the questions that plagued his mind when he lay down to sleep at night. He wished for an end to missing, for an end to waiting, for an end to hope.
Church had gone to therapy exactly once after Bobby disappeared. He hadn’t had a choice. His grandmother had made him, determined that he wouldn’t become the zombielike shell of a person his mother had, so crippled by grief that she was unable to live her life or care for the son she had left. The therapist was a middle-aged woman who sat across from him on a scratchy twill couch. He’d told her about his mother, how she kept Bobby’s room exactly the same, how she stayed up late with the porch light on in case Bobby came back.
“Grief is like being stranded on a mountain,” the therapist had said. “We all have to find our own way down.”
He thought the words she didn’t say—that some people never found their way down at all.
Now, Nisha raised her tumbler of beer.
“To Bobby,” she said.
Church raised his glass too.
“To Bobby,” he echoed.
