my own thoughts. I resented Abby for the ease with which she chose to move on, to accept that our lives would go forward without any hope of seeing our daughter again. I’d crusaded on behalf of my daughter’s memory, and for what? To find out that life progressed without me as well as Caitlin?
“Frosty. Come here.”
He wandered back, happy, tail wagging. I crouched in the grass and placed my hands on either side of his head. He opened his eyes wide but didn’t resist, perhaps remembering the swat he’d received earlier. I felt his hot, stinking breath in my face, saw the stains on his long teeth. I asked the dog a question I had asked him several times before, ever since that day he came home from the park trailing his leash with Caitlin nowhere in sight.
“Frosty? What did you see that day? What happened?”
He stared back at me, his panting increasing. He didn’t like the way I was holding him, and he squirmed.
“What did you see?”
He started to slip away, so I pulled him back. He shook his head as though trying to knock the feeling of my hands off his body. I stood up.
“Fuck you,” I said. “Fuck you for not being able to talk.”
I looked at the headstone once more, letting the image of my daughter’s name and possible-
“Come on, Frosty,” I said. “We’ve got someplace to go.”
Chapter Two
Buster came to the memorial service late.
I’d assumed he wasn’t coming at all. He liked to promise to do something-come hell or high water-and then not follow through. His appearance surprised me, but not his tardiness.
As I stood in the back of the church, feeling constrained by my coat and tie, a whirl of emotions stewed within me. Every person who passed by, every hand I shook or hug I received, brought me closer to tears and bitterness. I associated a memory, a fleeting glimpse of Caitlin, in so many of the faces I saw. A girl who’d gone to school with Caitlin, for example, looked grown-up and every one of her sixteen years. Did Caitlin reach that age somewhere in the world away from us? Did she ever become a young woman? When I saw a former neighbor, an elderly woman who used to babysit for us when Caitlin was a child, I wondered: Why was she allowed to live, approaching eighty, while Caitlin might be dead?
My throat felt full of cotton, and I choked back against the crying and the anger until my jaw ached. I did this not because I didn’t feel the tears or anger were heartfelt, but because I feared that giving in to them would validate the entire ceremony, making real what I still refused to accept.
By the time Buster came in-late and apologizing-my feelings toward him shifted a little, and I welcomed the distraction his appearance provided. Most everyone else was seated, and all that remained was for us-the funeral party-to walk down the aisle.
“I’m sorry,” Buster said. “My car. And then the traffic. .”
To his credit, he wore a suit. It looked like he’d borrowed it from a midget, but still, it was a suit. The pant legs rode up above the tops of his shoes, revealing white socks, and I doubt he could have buttoned the jacket. He wore a pair of cheap sunglasses that hung loose on his face and kept sliding down the bridge of his nose. He pushed them up with the knuckle of his right index finger every few seconds.
No one said anything for a long moment. We-Abby, Buster, Pastor Chris, and I-stood in an awkward little circle, waiting for someone to speak.
Finally, Pastor Chris smiled and said, “We’re glad you’re here.”
Abby remembered her manners before I did. “This is Tom’s stepbrother-”
“
“Half brother, William,” Abby said.
Buster shook hands with Pastor Chris, then leaned in and gave Abby an awkward peck on the cheek. She averted her eyes like a child receiving an inoculation. She’d never liked Buster, which is why I was so surprised that she’d gone to the trouble of inviting him. She’d meant it as a gesture of goodwill, something she was willing to sacrifice for me, I’m sure. So I clung to whatever faint hope remained for us-between Frosty’s departure and the memorial service, she and I might be able to dig our way back toward common ground. I never imagined Caitlin’s homecoming without imagining the three of us reuniting as a family. I couldn’t think of it any other way, even though I knew there had been cracks in our marriage even before Caitlin disappeared.
“Quite a church,” Buster said.
And it was. A former warehouse purchased by Christ’s Church eight years earlier and converted. It sat two thousand people and included a workout center and coffee bar in the back. Plans were in the works to buy a large video projection system so that Pastor Chris could be seen up close and personal by everyone. More than once, Abby mentioned donating money toward that cause.
“We should begin,” Pastor Chris said, looking at his watch and then the settling crowd. “Is that okay with all of you?”
Abby nodded silently, and so did I. She reached out and took my hand. The gesture surprised me. Her hand felt unfamiliar in mine, the hand of a stranger, but the good kind of strangeness that comes when two people have just met and are beginning to get to know each other. My heart sped up a little; I squeezed her hand in mine and she squeezed back. Like two scared children, we followed Pastor Chris down the aisle to the front of the church with Buster trailing behind.
Pastor Chris was like a celebrity on the altar. His straight white teeth gleamed, and despite his slightly thinning, slightly graying hair, he still looked youthful and vibrant. At forty-five, a couple of years older than Abby and me, he ran obsessively, even competed in the occasional marathon, and his body was trim and sleek under his perfectly fitted suit. He believed that God rewarded those who maintained their bodies and that exercise kept the spirit sharp, so it was no surprise that the addition of the workout facility to the church complex had been his idea.
Buster and I grew up Catholic, trundled off to Mass every Sunday morning by my overbearing stepfather, who believed that to miss one Sunday was a sin of the worst kind. While I no longer practiced or believed much of anything, I found it difficult to attend a new church, especially one that seemed so different from the religion I knew. Christ’s Community Church felt too touchy-feely, too positive for me. Pastor Chris offered nothing but encouragement to his congregation, as well as the sense that heaven could be attained through the application of a series of steps found in a self-help book. I expected my spiritual leaders to be removed and slightly dogmatic, wrapped in their colorful vestments and staring down at me, and I didn’t respond well when one of them wanted to be my friend. I also couldn’t fully understand the nature of Abby’s relationship with Pastor Chris. I understood the spiritual side of it-Abby was looking for guidance and community and found it in the church. But in recent months she’d grown even closer to Pastor Chris, going out to lunch with him on weekdays and referring to him as her “best friend.” Never in the eighteen years of our marriage had I suspected Abby of infidelity, but the “friendship” with Pastor Chris-as well as the perilous state of our own marriage-made me wonder.
Abby and I continued to hold hands through the beginning of the service as Pastor Chris led the congregation through a series of prayers and readings from scripture, including the one in which Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. Buster sat to my right, holding his sunglasses in his left hand and bouncing them against his thigh. He seemed older. The crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes looked more permanent, the gray in his hair more visible. But he appeared to be paying attention, his eyes focused on the altar, and my initial instinct turned out to be wrong: I was glad to have him there. My brother. My closest blood relation.
Pastor Chris started his sermon-which I still thought of as a homily-by thanking all the friends and community members in attendance. But they were Abby’s friends and people from the church. Her family was a small one. Her father had died when Caitlin was little, and her mother had retired to Florida. She and Abby had not been close over the years, and while Abby had extended an invitation to the service, her mother had apparently chosen not to come. For my part, I didn’t invite any of my colleagues from the university to attend. It was a sabbatical year for me, one
