No words, then. Quickly. Before the moment had time to pass.
He raised his right arm and pointed, as hard as he could. He aimed his hand across the pretty clearing, and beyond the trees beside it, and over the creek and through the fields of waving green grass to a point that no one could see.
And then he disappeared.
2
Two Steps Back
I bet myself a dollar that he’d pull a picture out of his wallet within fifteen seconds of introducing himself. I only won fifty cents from that wager: He pulled it from his jacket pocket instead.
“Eden? I’m Gary. This is my little girl. Her name’s Casey.”
“She was beautiful,” I replied, contradicting his verb choice.
If he noticed, he didn’t bother to correct me. “Yes.”
The man thumbed at the photograph in a sad sham of removing a smudge. He dug the pads of his thumbs into the glossy the way they all do—as if, should he rub hard enough, he might thrust his way through and find flesh beneath the paper.
“It’s been over a year.”
“I’m sorry, Gary.” I’d learned it was best if I began apologizing early on in these conversations. Things sometimes went more smoothly if they’d grown accustomed to hearing it by the time I had to break their hearts.
Gary put the picture down on the round, marble-top table between us and smoothed it with his palm. “No, I’m sorry. You were just trying to have a cup of coffee and I’m bothering you.”
I put my mug down and closed my book. “It’s okay.”
“I guess you get this a lot, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I admitted. And it never gets any easier.
He dragged his attention away from the photo. At least he looked me in the eyes when he said the next part. “I was hoping you could help. Is there any way you could talk to her for me? I just want to know she’s all right.”
Sometimes they don’t ask so directly. Sometimes they’re so torn between being desperate and being ashamed that they stare at their hands, or at the floor. It’s all they can do to mumble their plea, and they often try to phrase it as though they can’t imagine I might say yes in a million years…because God knows they don’t believe in that sort of thing, anyway.
But just in case, they have to ask.
“I would be…” I stalled, and started again. “I would love to help you, but I don’t think I can. And it’s not because I don’t want to, because I do. But—”
He cut me off there, and he lifted a brown satchel into his lap. “Oh, I know you need information, and I’ve brought it. I’ve got all the newspaper clippings from her kidnapping, and I’ve got the follow-up articles about the guy who did it; and I don’t know how this works exactly, so I brought some of her things for you to touch if that helps.”
“Gary—”
“I’ve got her first tooth, too.” Out from the bag he lifted a blue plastic container on a cord. “She got a dollar for it. It’s clean, don’t worry. It’s a couple of years old now. Here.”
I didn’t object fast enough. He clasped my hand in his and the tiny pebble tooth toppled down. I closed my fingers to keep from dropping it.
“Let me try to explain, please. I need for you to understand.”
He nodded hard, nearly shaking his glasses loose.
I took a deep breath.
“One time, when I was in high school, we had a new guy join our class. The teacher made him stand up and tell everyone who he was and where he was from. His name was Jake, as it turns out, and he’d transferred to our school from Texas.
“This one girl sitting behind him got all excited when she heard the ‘Texas’ part. When he sat down, she poked him on the shoulder and told him, ‘I’ve got a cousin who lives in Texas. Her name is Amy Abernathy. Do you know her?’ And everyone laughed at her.” I stopped there, seeing if he’d pick up the prompt.
“I bet they did. That was a pretty stupid question.” Gary fidgeted and picked up his daughter’s picture, fussing with it again.
“Well, under different circumstances it might not have been so dumb. Say, maybe her cousin mentioned someone with the same name as the new guy. It would be a coincidence if it turned out they knew each other, but it wouldn’t be a miracle or anything. Right?”
“Right,” he said, but his heart wasn’t in the agreement. I think he knew where I was headed.
“Or maybe if she was from another country, and she didn’t understand that Texas is a huge place with millions of people in it—then it wouldn’t be such a crazy question for her to ask either. Maybe, for all she knew, Texas was no bigger than a city block.”
“But it is. Much bigger.”
“Yes, it is.” I put the little tooth back into its case and pushed the case back to Gary’s side of the table. “Do you get what I mean?”
He tapped a fingernail at the tooth case for a few seconds, trying to decide how best to argue. “But being dead isn’t like being in Texas,” he finally said, and I could hear stubbornness working its way into his voice.
“You’re right, it’s not.”
“Then why won’t you try to talk to Casey for me?” He said the words slowly; he needed time to fortify each consonant against whatever I might say next.
“Gary, if Casey were in Texas, I would know where to begin looking for her. I could drive out there—I could look her up in the phone book. But imagine, for a second, that she could be anywhere at all in the entire world. But wherever she is, there aren’t any phones, and no matter how loud I shout, she won’t hear me.”
“Eden—”
“And for that matter, there’s a better-than-average chance that she’s not even here anymore. Listen—when most people die, they don’t hang around. I don’t know where they go, and I don’t know how far away it is, but it’s someplace that’s…well, it’s not here.”
“But some of them stay. You know they do. You’ve seen them.”
“Yes, some of them do. And the ones who do are free to make contact with me if they like, but I don’t have the foggiest idea how to bring them around. Do you understand?”
Clearly, he did not. “But you could try. You could ask around, or something. If you really wanted to.”
“Ask around? Gary, now we’re right back to the Texas analogy. Let me ask you something, and I am asking in all seriousness—without any intention of making fun of you.”
“Go ahead.”
“Have you prayed to Casey at all? And I’m using the word ‘pray’ in the very broadest sense—I mean, have you tried to talk to her yourself?” I already knew he had. Of course he had. They always do. I think it’s part of the “bargaining” stage of grief.
“I wouldn’t say I’ve been praying to her, but I’ve asked…if she might come have a word with me.”
“And you’ve never heard, or felt, or seen anything to indicate she heard you?”
“No. But that’s why I came to you.”
I took another deep breath, and then a third. I was getting frustrated with this poor man, and I knew that we were coming to a point in our conversation where he was only going to try my patience more. “Why would it be different if I tried to call her? You’re her father, and I’m a total stranger. I don’t believe that she could hear me any better than she can hear you.”
“But you could see her if she did come. Couldn’t you? And I can’t.”
“I think that probably, yes, I could see her if she answered you. But I also think that you’d get some sense of her presence too. Or maybe not, I don’t know. What I’m trying to tell you is this, Gary: Unless she’s standing beside you right this second, there’s no way at all for me to communicate with her.”
He dropped the tooth container into his satchel and clutched the picture with both hands. “She isn’t, then? She’s not here with me?”
I could have fed him a line about how she was always with him in his heart, but such a trite sentiment would have only made us both angry. He wanted to know if his daughter was with him still—in a literal, if intangible, sense. We both knew the answer already, but someone had to say it out loud. That was the real reason he’d tracked me down.
I tried to say it gently. “If Casey were still here and she knew you were trying to reach her, she’d stay close to you. She was a daddy’s girl, right?” It was an easy guess.
“Oh yes.” He was crying now, fat and quiet tears.
I pushed my napkin against his knuckles, and he took it. “And if she needed something, or if she was in some kind of trouble, you’d be the go-to guy, wouldn’t you?”
He pressed the napkin to his face and bobbed his head.
“You said you came here because you wanted to know if she was all right. Well, I think it’s safe to assume that she is. If she wasn’t, she’d be trying to tell you. But she’s not trying to communicate, at least not that I can see.”
The mug-sized square of ephemeral coffeehouse napkin proved no match for Gary’s grief, so I fumbled for my purse and managed to scare up a couple of proper tissues.
“You’re not even going to try then, are you?” he sniffled, stuffing the picture back into his jacket pocket. “Is it because I didn’t offer you any money? I don’t have much but—”
“Money? I didn’t ask you for any money.”
I felt like I was sitting in the front car of a roller coaster, and cresting that first big hump. Here we go. Once money’s come up, there’s nothing I can say or do to keep the talk from plummeting downhill. This is always the hardest part, and it always makes me angry, because it hurts my feelings.
“Of course you didn’t. Because then it would be extortion, wouldn’t it? That’s why all the TV commercials for the psychic lines say in the small print, ‘for entertainment purposes only.’ That way, if they’re wrong you can’t sue them. But you pretend to be the real thing—you’re like one of those escort service girls who acts like no money needs to change hands in order to get results. I get it. I see.”