Cemetery Girl

“And have you been seeing someone else? A professional therapist?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“You need to know up front that I’m not a licensed therapist or a professional counselor. If you need that, I can’t help you.” She laughed a little, a self-deprecating sound. “I volunteer through the police department, but I don’t work strictly for them. I’m not any kind of police officer, and I don’t investigate crimes. In fact, I don’t just work with the victims of crime. I might work with someone who has a loved one who has committed suicide. Or families that have lost someone in an accident. That sort of thing.” She made it sound as casual as helping someone choose wallpaper.

“So you’re just a person who helps people?” I asked. “Couldn’t I just go out in the street and start talking to someone?”

“I’ve been trained,” she said. “They don’t just throw us out into the community and turn us loose on people in their most vulnerable moments. That wouldn’t make much sense, would it?”

“Do you hold a license or degree in something?” I asked.

“Everyone in Volunteer Victim Services goes through an eight-week training session. At least once a year we go back for a continuing ed course, and we all have criminal background checks. Hell, once a month I pee in a cup so the state of Ohio knows I’m not doing any illicit drugs. It’s all to give us a grounding in the basics of helping people in need.”

“And what do you do for them?” I asked. “What can you. .?”

“What can I do for you?” she asked. “I’m really just a support system, Mr. Stuart. Someone to listen to your problems. You know, the police officers are so busy with other aspects of the cases they work on. The investigating, the testifying, the prosecuting. That’s not what I do. Mostly I listen. I try not to judge or offer heavy opinions, but if you ask me for one, I’ll share it. That’s up to you. Does that sound like something you would be interested in?”

I didn’t feel like I could say no, even if I wanted to. She was so there, so in the moment for me. She was so ready to help. And the fact that she wasn’t a police officer or a minister or even a crusader on behalf of victims’ rights made me feel better. She did seem like someone who wanted to help me.

“Okay,” I said. “Yes. Do you want to make an appointment-a meeting time-for next week?”

“Let’s get together tomorrow at four,” she said. “Do you know the Courthouse Coffee Shop downtown?”

“I do.”

“Let’s meet there,” she said. “If you don’t like me, at least the coffee will be good.”

A year or so after Caitlin had disappeared, around the time Abby would have been having her miscarriage, she and I discussed what to do with Caitlin’s room. We had been keeping it just as it was the day Caitlin disappeared-the clothes in the closet, the personal items on the shelves. But Abby started to make a case for change. She went out of her way to tell me we wouldn’t throw away anything, but she wanted to pack up some things and move them to the attic, and then paint the walls and rearrange the furniture.

“The room is an obstacle, Tom,” she said, no doubt using language she’d heard from Pastor Chris in one of his “counseling” sessions. “We can’t move on with it there.”

I categorically told her no. I left no space for argument.

And the room stayed intact.

Just before I left the house to go meet Susan Goff for the first time, I stopped by Caitlin’s bedroom. I went in there several times a month. I liked to sit on the bed or run my hand over the desk and the bedclothes, picking up the stuffed animals and putting them back down exactly where Caitlin had left them. In the first hours after Caitlin’s disappearance, I combed through the room, digging into the drawers, opening school notebooks, looking for anything that might give us a clue. Then the police took over that job, and they discovered the Seattle and Amtrak information that conjured the possibility of Caitlin being a runaway.

When I went in there before seeing Susan, something felt different. The space seemed foreign to me, almost forbidden, as though I were about to enter a room belonging to a stranger, one who wouldn’t want me intruding upon her world.

And while I stood there, my mind ran through the what-ifs: What if Abby and I had had another child; what if she’d carried that baby to full term? Would it have taken over this space? Would Caitlin’s memory have been effaced from our lives?

I pushed open the door.

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