Cemetery Girl

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.

I reached for it, and it crumpled more. It was a flower, a red carnation. It felt brittle in my hand, a handful of dust. A single stem, with no note or adornment. No ribbon or lace. I didn’t know where it came from, except that Caitlin must have gotten it in the days before her disappearance. Where she’d come across that red carnation, I couldn’t guess.

Chapter Nineteen

I saw them together in the parking lot. I’d gone to the grocery store looking for better food. My bachelor diet was making me feel sluggish and drained, a corpulent lump on the living room couch. I forced myself out into the world, out to where living people ate things that were green or yellow or red and not in a box or a can.

I was leaving the store when I saw Abby and Pastor Chris getting out of a car together. He waited for her, even went so far as to place his hand on the small of her back as she walked by. I stopped where I was and watched them. I held my plastic bag in one hand, the car keys in the other. It took them a moment to see me. They walked close together, leaning in toward each other as though sharing secrets.