Page 130 of Last Seen
When you are a child, you don’t really understand death. Your tiny brain doesn’t have the full capacity to comprehend it. You lose the hamster, the dog, a grandparent, and the people around you, the adults—whocanconceptualize what this forever abyss means—do their rituals, the things that make them feel better. Then, in an attempt to explain to you—their tiny, previously unblemished by the vagaries of death creature—that there is a darkness into which people and things you love disappear and never come back, they scar you. They don’t mean to; they’re just trying to help. But to be a child faced with an existential truth? It’s impossible to properly comprehend.
There are societal activities to ease you through these incomprehensible tragedies: small Kleenex boxes buried under the rosebushes, a church funeral you’re deemed too young to attend, a gravestone to then visit with old flowers wilting in a metal urn. You can understand in some way that you will never see them again, but you are sheltered from the reality. The decay. The decomposition. The embodiment of the biblical concept of ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Then you get a little older, and someone explains it to you in a way that lands, stomping on your heart, or you see a movie that makes it all click, and suddenly, all you can think about is—death. What must be happening under the dirt? What do they look like? Is the skin falling off the bones? How are skeletons made? Do they stay in one piece? What happens if they come back to life? Would they be the person you remember, intact, or a zombie? Would they sit at the end of your bed and play with your toes, or would they lose that kind of dexterity? How do they eat and drink and dream when they are buried in the dirt? Are they feeling claustrophobic? Is it dark where they are? Do they miss you?
It is these terrors that you dream about night after night until you wake screaming, and the doctors try to drug you to sleep, but that only makes it worse. You can barely remember her, and in truth it is the photographs that give you the story of your life, not your memories, which is a very artificial and fragile state to live in. At one point, some of the pictures are lost, or put away by people who can’t handle their own grief anymore, so you have the memories of the pictures only, and that’s simply not enough. She fades away, and by the time you’re an adult, all you have are snippets. Broken memories, unreliable at best.
Even the photos aren’t real. Your favorite is the one of her standing in front of a red door. Her mink-brown hair is curled, and she is laughing. But it’s slightly blurry. You don’t remember the exact shade of her blue eyes, how tall she was, whether her voice was high pitched or low, because there are no other pictures of her in the house. You know you look like her, but the mirror lies.
She is blood of your blood, but simply a figment of your imagination.
Without a mother, you feel alone in this world. You have no one. No anchor. No knowledge. You envy those people around you who have families and an idea of who they are. Where they come from. You have your foundations, but they are not the same.
Grief lies, too. It will sneak in while you aren’t paying attention and lay waste to your heart in the strangest moments. A mother anddaughter at the park, playing on the swings. Walking on the beach, a mother chasing her pink-frilled daughter into the water. A commercial, a movie, a television show, a book, a comedy show, a text. You never know when this loss will materialize, a mother-shaped hole that is irrational, as you have no idea what it’s like to be mothered, not really.
I don’t tell you this for pity. More so you can understand where I’m coming from. I’d already suffered a loss so great none can come close, and yet ... What happened this year is hard to understand, even for me, who lived through it. Nor is it over, not by a long shot. The repercussions will echo for decades. I hope the worst of it is behind me, think that I am sound, safe, and then, like the grief for my lost mother, it comes roaring back, screaming and vituperative.
Vituperative? Come on, Hal. That’s a bit much.
She scratches out the word, replaces it withabusive, then continues.
So for the record, I am not doing this for me. It started because my therapist wants me to write it all down. She feels it will be cathartic. I don’t know if I agree. Remembering is like touching my hand to a hot stove. It’s okay for a fraction of a second, and then your nerves catch up to your brain and you realize how badly it hurts. You whip your hand away and look at the burn, red and blistering, and shake your head.Whydid you grab that hot pan? You knew it had just come from the oven and is warming on the stove. You knew it would burn you. How could you forget? How could you be so careless?
Writing a book about what’s happened ... I feel my hand approaching the hot pan, and the burn burrowing into my skin. I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to wonder what things might have been like if I’d had a mother, if she hadn’t been taken from me in such a brutal way. If I’d known the truth earlier, would I have been able to process it, and be a normal child? Would I have clung so to my father, to my books, to my isolation? Would I have let the world define me as shy, or introverted, or on the spectrum? Having a mother. Goodness. I can’t imagine. I think only someone who’s grown up the child of asingle parent can understand how hard the one that’s left must work to be both mother and father. Comfort and discipline in one sentence.
My dad ... I will learn how to forgive him for it all, that’s what my therapist tells me. We’re working on it. Growing up, he gave me everything you can possibly need, from love to companionship to intellectual challenge. He didn’t care that I wasn’t excited to go out into the world; he understood and homeschooled me until I was. He gave me my intellectual makeup—part English literature, part earth sciences—and where did that take me? To forensics, of course. The one place neither of us could ever imagine me. I caught the true crime bug like half the girls my age and decided I wanted to be a crime scene analyst.
And that’s why everything fell apart. I was so focused on the specifics, on the details, that I missed the full picture. It was stupid of me, and it nearly got me killed.
So I will continue writing in this journal, trying to put the pieces together for myself, to understand how I missed the truth when it was staring me in the eye all along. And I will try to forgive myself, because my therapist is right about that: until I give myself a break, until I allow myself to feel again, nothing will ever be right.
Halley James closes the notebook. She’s chosen a hardback journal with two hundred thirty-five numbered pages, bought a twelve-pack of blue 0.5-point gel pens, and has set aside one hour every day to sit with her story. She is tackling this like every other situation she’s ever been faced with—head on. She might be an introvert, but she’s not afraid of a fight. She is compelled to tell the story. To make sure people know the truth. To protect those who survived. Those she saved.
She tries to ignore the fact that when she looks out the window, her throat closes and the panic rises. It has grown dark; she forgets how swiftly the sun sets this late in the day. She never used to be afraid ofthe dark. Didn’t have the sensation of bees coming to life under her skin, didn’t feel her breath come short and her heart begin to pound, so intense she can hear it.
Alone in the night is the worst.
She laughs lightly to dispel the silence that’s crept into her library office. When the days grow short and the nights long, she’s really going to be in trouble. It’s hard enough to sleep when there are only eight hours. When it’s twelve, fourteen, she’s screwed.
But she won’t be completely alone. Theo still travels, and she counts the hours until his return.
She chastises herself for the thought. She doesn’t need saving. She must get through this herself; delaying the inevitable will mean this fear never really resolves. And we all end up alone in the end ...
Halley snaps on the lamp next to her desk with a sigh of relief, then begins the ritual of the lights, breath held. She needs to get one of those timers people use when they go out of town that turn on the lamps at specific times. She can put one on every plug, and it will never get fully dark.
You are in control,she reminds herself, moving quickly from room to room, until the house is aglow and she can breathe again.
Timers would work. It would be admitting defeat, but she has to stop thinking that way. She has to allow herself to acknowledge she’s been through a terrible, traumatic experience, and it will take months, maybe years, to unwind. That her memories lie. That she is damaged. That the darkness is full of terrors and she is now afraid of the night.
The idea of feeling this level of dread every sunset for years to come is enough to make her square her shoulders. With a deep breath, Halley casts her mind back to that dark place and counts to ten—the only way to dispel the fear is to lean into it, even if only for ten seconds.
Her heart thunders in the darkness. It is alive, velvet in its depth. The absence of light should be a clue to her whereabouts, but she can’t think. She’s panicking, thrashing. She is buried alive. She is alone in the living dark. And he is coming.
Her eyes fly open, and she swallows the rising gorge in her throat. Her hands are shaking.
There. She did not die. She did not run screaming. She will master this. She will not be a victim. She will be the strong one. She will not let him win.
In the before, she would turn on the nightly news while she made dinner, but now that is completely off limits. The news cycle is, and will continue to be, dining out on this story for months. It is salacious. It is terrifying. There are victims—real victims, not like her—who will never be right again. Many are dead. Too many. The others are permanently scarred. Halley’s silly little fears are nothing when faced with what they’ve been through.
