Cara

Ubi'm Cubaruba Nubeufubeld. Ubi’m dubead. Can I tell you a story? I think it will help.

When I was six or seven years old, growing up here, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. I wasn’t terribly ingenious when it came to hiding places; it was like I wanted people to find them. I would cradle a penny at the roots of a tree or place a new shiny penny right smack dab in the middle of the sidewalk.

Then, I would take a piece of chalk, sometimes pink, sometimes yellow—never boring old white—and starting at either end of my block I would draw these huge arrows: Treasure ahead! Gifts ahead! This Way!

I was always terribly excited thinking about the first passerby who, regardless of what they’d done that day good or bad, would receive a free gift from my universe: a precious penny unearned, but still theirs.

The thrill for me was that I had to imagine all this, because I never stayed around to actually see what happened. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, oh, months later perhaps, I would find myself on the sidewalk, chalk in one hand and a handful of new pennies in the other.

This is like that. I mean where we’re going and what I’m going to be saying. It’s like I’m drawing these arrows and hoping when I’m not around you’ll find one of those unearned gifts. I hope this helped.

Ubi'm Cubaruba Nubeufubeld. Ubi’m dubead.

By now you’ve heard of me and know what happens – I’m murdered on November 30th, 1984 and left in a closet. I’m a dead girl and only two people know what happened exactly. But do you really know me? I was thirteen, my father was Barry and my mother was Wanda – I still hope that one day they will get back together. I had twin sisters. I went to the school around the corner. I sang in the choir. I had my own language – Ubbi Dubbi – say “UB” before every vowel. My boyfriend was the most popular guy in school. Pubeck. I wasn’t his girlfriend though. And he didn’t kill me. And it wasn’t Sarah or Lorne either. But I know they think they did.

My face was all over the city that winter. I was on flyers handed out in the neighborhood and taped in store windows; my picture was in the papers, on television. I was so embarrassed. It was a terrible picture of me. I wasn’t really smiling and my hair looked all greasy and flat. And that shirt!

Everyone was looking for me. No one thought to look in that shed until the old guy went looking for that tool. Fifty-two days I was in there. Don’t worry I wasn’t awake for it. But when the door opened, and I saw the look on the old guy’s face I wanted to hug him, but I couldn’t move. I tried, but I couldn’t—it was like those nightmares when someone is chasing you and your legs won’t move. Lubike thubat. It looked like he saw me, there, above my body, but the air wasn’t very clear. He had a look, but I couldn’t tell what it was exactly. It wasn’t good.

I know who put me in there now, but then it was a bit of a surprise –. And, I still wonder why, though, I think I know now. When he was trembling, alone, in that light, much later, I held his hand – I knew where he was going and knew that it could be scary. He whispered in a low, quivering voice, “Forgive me.” He was looking past me, still.

I think he saw me. But I’m not sure. I know he could feel me, because he squeezed my fingers. I sang. I sang my favorite song – “Friends,” by Michael W. Smith. I hoped it helped. It helped me.

Now, a few things. It is 1984, but there are times when it can be right now – Yubou knubow. I get to go back there and take you. I can go wherever and whenever I’m thought of. There are limitations of course. The further ahead I go from the day of my death the less I can see. I can’t see the future, you could say. I’m slowly going blind. The dead cannot see much past their deathdays; it’s more about what is felt.

I died almost right away. I mean I was dead that night – I didn’t really feel a thing, I mean pain-wise. From that point on, I was able to get around, hang around I guess. It happens less now. When I’m thought of now, it’s all hazy. It’s like I’m looking through sheer curtains. I’m on one side and they’re on the other. But no one ever made like they saw me, although some have reached out and attempted to part the curtain. And I’ve tried, too. I tried to get their attention. They must see something else. The curtain keeps getting harder and harder to see through; now, it’s almost entirely dark.

There’s a lot the dead can and cannot do. The deceased can do a lot, but none of it solely on their own. As in life, we cannot get by on our own. We help one another. Or, at the very least, we can influence others to do our work for us. I realize that sounds sinful, evil perhaps. But that’s not it. Just because something is unknown, unknowable does not mean it is something to fear, and that that fear should be evil. Sin, I believe, is a missing of the target. My friends were aiming for one thing and got, received, quite another.

They couldn’t have known.

To influence is not an easy thing. I’m small, always have been and always will be. And, now that I’m blind, really, I need help more than ever. Oh, you couldn’t possibly know! Sight is the first thing to go. It’s no longer important anyways.

I whisper. I don’t whisper out loud. That would be what Mrs. Klassen, my Grade 7 English teacher used to call an oxymoron – a big stupid lie. That’s how I remembered the term for grammar class: oxy-ox-big; moron-stupid-not true-lie. Oxymoron. It is not hype nor is it bull—hyperbole. So it’s not really a whisper either. It’s a suggestion, inkling, a seed planted. I repeat the whisper, like a song. “The ties that bind you will undo to free me.”

But even before the dead can influence people have to think of us, the dead. They must think of me. It was always sad. It was always dark there, except where the curtains parted, slightly. The light came through there, or light went through there. I could never tell who was the light: them or me. And now it’s all getting darker and I don’t know why. But I know this; the inkling was a light in a dark time.

I try for light. I strive to influence my friends that all that has happened was that they sinned. They are not the sin. They simply missed the mark. To call them evil, well, that’s just one big lie.

I know that they feel that it was a mistake, a missed opportunity, a mishap my disappearance, my death. I know because I’ve been there, in their sad times when they are frozen to the core, unable to understand why anyone could possibly love them now or every again. I have whispered to the back of their heads, praying. I have come to them, as they lay awake at night, shivering, rocking in pain. I have cinched up their blankets, in my own way; I have drawn the blinds and turned off the lights. Wrote my name on frosty windowpanes.

It doesn’t end up being too much responsibility. The dead always find that just when they’ve given all they can give, they realize, they can always give a little more. We give and disperse. It was only the living that, by giving, is made more alive. What the dead can and cannot do could fill volumes – I guess that’s one right there for the books.

I tried talking to my father, but it did no good. I tried and tried and nothing. He glanced up once, I think, but he was distracted. I would be above the garage, among his pigeons nearly screaming my head off – nothing. Then, as if cut loose from an anchor, I would begin to drift away. And, I’d find myself at my old bedroom window, staring in at the sewing room that it has become and a lady sitting there in the closet staring at my engraved initials. Or, I’d find myself alone in the church with the cleaning ladies, humming a sacred song I’d learned in the choir. But mostly – and for this I’m happiest – I find myself in the library. I think I’m there because on the shelf, in the True Crime, non-fiction section, there’s a book about me – or rather, there’s a book about my disappearance. It can’t be about me, because I’m missing in the time frame of that book, the one my mother wrote. “Have You Seen Cara?” No.

According to the book, and everyone that checks it out, I’m always lost, and then found frozen to death. A thousand times over, I am lost and frozen to death. So by weak association I am drawn here, because I am missing and then discovered here, dead and dead again.

I keep leaving impressions on those around the book about my disappearance. I do this so they’ll help me with the curtain or talking to my sisters, my parents. If they’d only listen, they would know what was truly missing in that book.

This gives me some pain; it’s a pull in the shoulders, as if from behind. A part of me wants the book to be finished and another doesn’t.

The book doomed me. I am doomed again and again, by the past. It is written in stone. It was – and is no more. Being free of the past can be wondrous, but it can also unhinge you from what makes you in the first place. Perhaps that’s an oxymoron too?

Let’s talk about truth. You get two stories, sometimes more, but most of us get two stories. Two stories are told at your funeral. One story told by your family, your friends. Their memories, their pictures, and their words. The second story is your own, only you don’t get to tell it. Not really. Your lips are glued together. And you can’t speak. But you do, you do. No one’s listening. And when they do, they don’t believe it.

There are two stories here. One from me a dead girl. Yubou cuban trubust mube.

I can sense their sadness. I have tried to move things. Because there are tired of me, sometimes it can get confusing for them and me. It is confusing because while I can live only in the past, they want me present. So another me goes: A faint one goes in my place, sounding and looking less like me as winters come and go. I’m hazy.

I wish for the freedom of choosing when to go, and when to stay. That is not my decision. When they think of me, mostly I am there. Sometimes only a part of me goes; I know this simply because a part of me feels missing. I find things easier now because I’m constantly looking without my sight. My family and friends miss so much, because they’re looking for me. But I’m missing right?

Because I’ve lost my sight, I mostly eavesdrop on audio books, on conversations. I can hear people reading to themselves. There are some people I can get to read to me aloud – mostly children, sometimes Peck, my boyfriend. He’s still adorable, but his tastes are not what I had expected. If he wants to know about the dead, he needs only to ask me.

People seldom listen. They rely on what they see or think they hear.

There was a lot I didn’t hear when I was alive, that only now seems to resonate in my bones. It’s all sacred music now. It all vibrates now, all that remains disappeared and considered, again and again, long gone.

Ubokubay, rubeaduby? It is 1984 and I’m singing. That’s me there…

The Twins

We sunk ice-cold hands into buckets of dark red paint. When we pulled them out, sluicing paint fell from our fingertips drizzling stark crimson talons; these retracted when we held our hands back up into the air. From our smothered appendages, globs of paint moved down our forearms coalescing at the elbow, before trickling over bone, and falling, splattering at our feet. There on the ground were stars and explosions, scarlet and startling. Fingerprints of paint, sometimes smeared and smudged, graced everything we touched. When the paint dried our traces cooled into stains. Our hands, depending on how much paint covered them, desiccated, dyeing our skin or caked and cracked when we moved our fingers. Red leaves fell to earth. Around us the snow was pockmarked. This was our memory, the snow, these dark smudged stars, the fading smeared explosions, the startling screaming pink stains of what we’d held: evidence of a murder, evidence the quality of mercy was not strained.

We begin November 30th 1984. Never start with the weather, we are told, but we must. It’s that important. It had already been a bitter cold winter for our city by the two rivers; snow and the cold temperature came Hallow’s Eve and never left; and this day was no different. It was overcast, in the mid-twenties all day, exhaust hung in the air and frost covered every surface. Nothing moved very quickly. The snow-cover was hard and unforgiving. Unsurprisingly by late afternoon daylight died out in the west and the temperature was dropping five degrees Fahrenheit every half hour of light left over New Quantico. We all lived in the same northern town New Quantico – River City, A Place for Families; attended the same church, The Crossing – the Inerrancy of the Word and Life Everlasting; and the same school, Van Buren High – Martin Van Buren, the “Little Magician” and 8th President of The United States. Four high school students all from The Crossing church walked home from school. Three made it home. One didn’t. The one that didn’t went missing for over fifty days. On the fifty-second day she was discovered in a shed, frozen to death. Police never solved her murder. No one served jail time. It became the mystery at the core of several people’s lives. Including ours. We tortured our memory; we clawed the facade of our dominion. All we came up with were fists of snow, and then when the snow melted away we were left with nothing but ice-cold hands.

We believed what we were told: We were in part to blame for Cara Neufeld’s death. This wasn’t what the world was told, the world was told Cara’s murder was unsolved, the killer never found. She died over twenty years ago and we were spared, Selah. We hold in our hearts the guilt of that death, but also the need to know the truth. Over the years since we’d all been gathering little pieces of the puzzle, evidence, unaware the gaps our inquiries produced could have been filled by others’ thoughts and understandings. We ended up living such different lives — some of us living farther away than others — making it hard to put it all together. If we’d simply asked one another, sent letters or e-mails or asked simple questions. But we didn’t. The past was best left alone. There was nothing we could do about it now. Cara was Cara. She was the dead girl we all knew, but we all knew her in our own way. Cara the singer. Cara the runaway. Cara the straight-A student. The sister. The devout. The sycophantic girlfriend. We concluded this was one of the reasons why it was supremely difficult to ascertain, with any accuracy, a complete picture of what happened. Cara became collage. We might have known more back then, but we were too young and very much afraid. We believed what we were told: We were to blame for Cara’s death. We didn’t know better. Accidents happen, Pastor Ed Reimer said, and it was wrong to confuse children with angels. We were forgiven, Selah. We had fallen short of God’s intent. We had been, ever so briefly, children of the Father of Lies. We were being rescued, we were told, not forsaken. It would take us decades, and the amassing of evidence, to discover exactly what we had been rescued from and by then it was our turn at clemency. We know now, we didn’t look for it, but mercy was looking for us.

We have gathered the evidence over the years. Exhibit one to twenty is newspaper clippings, bound in a large, three-ringed binder. There are several large storage boxes with ancillary materials including books, journals, recordings and other odds and ends. In a separate box we have five individual manila folders with pertinent information on Barry Neufeld, Wanda Neufeld, Sarah Redekopf – yes the Sarah Redekopf, Pastor Lorne Penner and Tarrance Peck Simons (now deceased). There is a large scroll, which diagrams the associations between all those involved. A word about the evidence, before we proceed: We’ve tried to arrange the evidence in a pragmatic order that reflects how an understanding of one piece will shed light on the piece of evidence that follows. We’re fallible, and we have no doubts that we have, at times, missed the mark. We tried. So many years have lapsed, making it somewhat difficult to remember everything. We’re not the most organized, either, please forgive us. Please put on these gloves while handling the evidence.

A good place to start might be the twenty-first piece of evidence. This is “The Magic” our 1985 yearbook. It was dedicated to the memory of Cara Neufeld. She died the winter of 1984-85. Her school picture can be found on page forty-three. Before she died, Mrs. Simons gave us the yearbook with all our pictures eloquently framed in black Sharpie. “Peck,” she had said with just a hint of pride in her voice explaining the origin of the artistic frames. “It was my boy Peck.” Indeed we have newspaper clippings from the New Quantico Daily Tribune and The Quantico inside the yearbook of Mrs. Simon’s obituary and another clipping, a story of a hotel fire. We haven’t had time to properly catalogue those on account of them being very recent acquisitions.

When Cara was found dead we were still in school. News stories clipped from the next day’s papers and included in the binder say a worker found her. She was in an ill-used shed where machinery and tools were stored. The worker, David Ebbers, told reporters it took him a minute to notice the girl (draped in her maroon and white Van Buren High School jacket) lying inert on the cold floor. In fact, Ebbers first noticed the graffiti. Yor? He later told us (we have the tape recording, Exhibit twenty-three; we have since move to digital recordings, but initially we used tape) Cara Neufeld looked peaceful laying there. She was beautiful he said, and blue.

That was January 1985, the dead of that harsh winter. Mrs. Crabtree, a neighbor of the Neufelds, told us she’d seen Cara the day of her disappearance, or the day before, she couldn’t be entirely sure. Actually the transcript, Exhibit twenty-four (we misplaced the actual tape) showed that Mrs. Crabtree “heard” Cara first. She could hear singing. Cara was on her back in the snow, waving her arms back and forth, and she was singing – one of her favorite things – singing. Mrs. Crabtree said she went to the front door to see what the noise was, and saw Cara.

“Get out of the snow,” she said she told Cara, who didn’t move at first. Then Cara tilted her head back to look at Mrs. Crabtree.

“Why?”

“Child, you’ll catch a death of a cold.”

“Who would care?” she told us Cara replied. This matched up with how we remembered Cara then, and how others more or less characterized her demeanor the days prior to her disappearance. Mrs. Crabtree said, the girl then got up and brushed snow from her pants. We noted on the transcript how Mrs. Crabtree mimicked brushing snow off herself. From that point on, for the rest of her life, Mrs. Crabtree thought of death and mystery whenever she smelt snow.

It was a sheepshank. The knot that bound Cara’s hands behind her back was a sheepshank. Beautiful name, right? We have an example of it: It’s Exhibit twenty-five. Now remember this isn’t the actual piece of rope, (Please keep the gloves while handling the evidence.) this is one we bought down at Greene’s Hardware and fashioned into a sheepshank after talking with the cop and having a look at the Ashley Book of Knots down at the library. This was the kind of knot, though, that Cara’s hands were bound with behind her back. The French cop with the cigarette breath told us this — that the knot was a sheepshank. This wasn’t in the papers, he said. We thought he liked us. The French cop confirmed what we’d thought: Peck hadn’t done that. He’d simply tied her up in a normal, everyday knot, not something as fancy and complicated as a sheepshank – it took us several attempts to get it to look like the one in Clifford Ashley’s book. We have a composite drawing of the knot we expect Peck tied. We didn’t get an opportunity to interview our high school friend. There was a lot in the files about Peck, but some of it, we suspect, apocryphal. There was much we didn’t know about Peck, and still to this day he remains as much a mystery as Cara.

Here is Exhibit twenty-six – Peck Simon’s suicide letter found by and provided to us by New Quantico Tribune editor Martin Ford. We show it to you because it would seem odd to talk about Cara without Peck. But the fact is there is no more Peck. The letter was placed inside an envelope and placed inside a freezer compartment of a hotel room refrigerator. On the outside of the envelope, discovered by Ford, was written a single word: “Cara.” It’s a long and wordy suicide note. Our study of suicide notes tells us they are short. We hate to disappoint you, but Peck’s does not meet that criterion. All we can say is that length confirms its authenticity. Peck was a contrarian.

As you can see the handwriting is neat, decorative, and in sections Peck wrote in a personalized calligraphy. There are small drawings. On other pages the script is scratchy and nearly incomprehensible. There is a one-line preface: “This was years in the making… [“self-portrait” in ink] and unmaking.” Then the note goes on for pages…

“Dear Dots:

I’m

No

Longer

Yours…

If you’re reading this, then you must have found me out. But of course now it’s too late; I’m gone for good.

Why?

I needed to take back my own life. This was the only way I knew how. This was the only way I knew I could erase all that was me and give you another version.

When we die there’s a story they tell about us. It’s the one thing they can talk about at the funeral; it’s that one thing they can hold on to in order to explain what we do, who we were and why we’re placed on Earth. None of us gets to choose our own beginnings, we can change them, make up some story, but that’s just fooling ourselves. The beginning is the beginning. We cannot be other than what we are. What’s worse is that we cannot change the people we become—it’s like a slow-motion collision we get to watch. Everybody knows: The great nothingness between birth and death is a series of decisions we make thinking they’ll always be others, when there are not. And one after another this hope, this crazy dream that some day we’d have the life we’d always wanted, it adds up to one big lie. The only place anyone can shake a fist at all the crap is at the end, if we choose the ending. And I choose my own. If we steal a part of our own story, particularly the ending, it makes all that comes before it dubious. It will take them forever to figure it all out and by then we’ll be long gone. This way they can’t pin us down; they can’t decide whether we’re worthy of getting our feet washed by them. They have no idea about us. We’re out of reach. We’re out of their grasp. We may not be who they thought we were. I say fuck ‘em; they can’t touch us now.

The ending for me came at the library. I was there getting out of the cold. I walked through the stacks just running my fingers over the books, reading the titles, killing time. If a book interested me I took it down, opened it and read the first passage that came to me. The security guards kept walking around, checking me out. I just smiled and kept pulling books off the shelves and putting them back. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe the rent-a-cops had me spooked. I don’t know if it was my fault; I could never be my own judge, I suppose, but this one book fell on the ground. I think I accidentally hit it loose when I was pulling books off the shelf. I don’t know. I left the book on the floor and went around the stack to see if someone had pushed from the other side. I looked down the aisle: nobody. The place was empty; everyone else had a life, a job. I was just getting in from the cold, so there was nobody but my monkeys and me. I picked up the book and there was a piece of paper, folded several times and all gray and dirty, sticking out from between a few pages. I opened the book where the piece of paper was sticking out, and someone had underlined a sentence with a squiggly line; it looked like a snake. “An unapparent connection is stronger than an apparent one.” Heraclitus—a Greek philosopher I had never heard of before. I grabbed the book, sat down in one of the ratty couches there by the windows, and read for hours. One of the guards tapped me on the shoulder after a while, “Weather’s cleared Peck, time to head back out,” he said all in a friendly voice as if we were cousins or something. He was a Crossing Crazee, I could tell: crisp, freshly iron shirt, big smile. All us Crazees have big fake smiles. His last name was Toews or something like that, or so his badge said so. The weather had cleared and I looked up to see the sky turning a color I had never seen before. It was like the sun was melting the air; we were all under water.

I got up, put the book back, with the paper bookmark—which turned out to be an old torn piece of newspaper—for someone else to find. I left and I knew immediately what I was going to do. I guess you could say it became apparent. It wasn’t always that way with her. I guess it’s always been about her. Hasn’t it? [A few unintelligible lines, scratched out several times in pen tearing a hole into the page. There are three star-shaped specks of blood the color of rust.]

It was in the middle of a snowstorm when I first saw her; I was 14 by then heading home in the dark after detention with Principal Skinner that fat prick. The snow was flying in the air. I had to put my head down and walk as fast as I could; the snow was caking all over me. I don’t know why I looked over there? The urge to go back a few weeks to that very spot and start all over again was so great—I think you know what I’m talking about. It wasn’t really what I was thinking of then, mind you. This is all after and I’ve had time to think it over. Then, I don’t know what made me look; I wanted to be home so badly, it was cold and the blizzard was really kicking up. I turned. I just did. There, there she was.

One thing I’ve learned is that strange things do happen, they do, they do. They happen all the time. Books fall off shelves. Snow angels walk upright, Selah. [The handwriting is so bad for a page or so the note is unreadable.]

Ever since then, I had glimpses of her out the corner of my eye. It was around that time I began disappearing, going to places alone, and not giving a shit for much at all. I was just beginning to disappear. There were times when I was alone in the dark with the constellations, the northern lights, and the moon, all that snow. I tried to figure it all out. I often saw her there; at least I think I did. Years passed in a blur because I wanted them so desperately to be over, so I could leave the place behind. Always in the winter, I thought I saw her. But I didn’t tell anyone. Nobody was listening to me anyway. [Gibberish. A hand drawn picture of gigantic fist descending from a cloud made up of blue microdots. More cryptic art.]

Those things I saw, they were just mine to bear. They were like snowflakes freezing on my eyelids making me see things. I saw something.

So—it was her?

I know you’re all asking that. Not exactly, she was different, all covered in ice, with hoarfrost; her hair was stiff, her lips, her face, milky white and blue… the color of windowpanes. Her school jacket hung over her small shoulders. And she was singing, “Friends are Friends Forever.” God, I pissed my pants then. She was there and it was all blue—a blue I have always associated with Demeter, empyrean, hyacinth. It was a blue like a new skin of ice on the Cross Fork river—no cracks, perfect. I made drawings of her in tiny blue dots. Dots slowing down. It was her, I know it. But not exactly. Her singing was different too, trembling slightly, calling. She wanted to be looked at and admired for what she is, was. [Picture of a girl, in blue microdots.]

I couldn’t look at her for too long my eyes stinging. But, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I remembered our last kiss. None of you touched her; I did. And I never considered I would be joining her, but now, yes. In a way it is only now, too tired, too fucked up, am I able to stop myself from shaking. “Weather’s cleared, Peck.” That warm sanctimonious Crazee fuck.

For years after the first time, whatever winter path I took, she was there too, a blue shape flickering through the frost, the drifting snow, and the exhaust of cars and chimneys; a crack in the ice. There, singing, longing for me to join her. Once I saw her, near the Cannabis Cathedral, where I had stumbled drunk and confused. She was crouching near a bank of snow pocked with stones and mud, writing something in the snow with her finger. She was heaving, her jacket on the ground at her feet. There was a wordless cry. I stumbled on, keeping to my jagged footsteps through the knee-high snow trekking toward a light on a distant horizon I envisioned as some kind of shelter. She stood, then, and barred my way. It wasn’t a threat; she extended her shoulders forward, such as they were, puckered her dark lips and closed her eyes. Her hands were always behind her.

No it wasn’t intimidation it was a request. And in the swirl of darkness and snow, my eyes, my face biting from the cold, I turned and screamed at her; “fuck off!” I shouted with all my might, forcing blood from my raw throat. I turned away, heat rising in my strained throat, and she was gone. Time and time again she returned singing, writing her words in the snow, with her pleading there in the darkest, cruelest winter nights. I could care less how cold it was out. I was on some sort of sojourn, stumbling in a funk, towards some imaginably place, a light always over there, not here, a place where I’d feel I belonged. She kept returning, standing there, waiting for me. One final night, just the night as I wrote this, after my library moment of clarity, she stood before me again. I could not get around her and I realized I didn’t want too either. If I was to find my way to the light in the distance, to be through, to be out of it, I would have to come to terms with her, and acquiesce to her will. So there, as the winds of God whispered, and they do, they do, we stood facing one another.

This is insane, but true. Her hand came up from behind her back. Slowly she raised the hand, palm towards her; she covered her face. For a moment there was a heat, slight, but there and then water, water dripped from between her fingers, from the back of her hand, off her chin, her hair stuck to her moist forehead. Taking away her hand her face emerged. It was the color of the sky where the sun had melted the air.

It was my face, Selah.

The snowy field, as if it were a lake of perfect ice, mirrored back to me a line, a shape, a color and it was my own. And I knew that I have always known, what lay beneath the cold I had felt for most of my life since that day when we did what we did. The unapparent connection, perhaps.

For a brief moment, she looked me over and my face must have been a surprise to her too. Then she smiled, with my mouth, a smile that was shy and sorry. “Forgive me,” she whispered. “No,” I found myself murmuring, my breath coming in gusts of fog from my mouth, “No, it is you who must forgive me.”

The light in the distance without my notice grew with such velocity that it engulfed us both so suddenly. We stood and burned with the blue flames of light, and the sleep came as it does and it does come so sweetly in the cold arms of Morpheus. It does.

When I awoke, aching, cold and near dead, I found that she was gone. And I knew I would never see her again, here. But I also knew I would never stop looking. [An eye etched in blue pen.]

I walked to my room, a place where you never came to find me, a place you’d never crawl to, the place where I’m from. The last place you’d ever think to find me because it was the most obvious. I walked there, wrote this letter there, hid it there…

…And lit the fire there, left it there, to grow, and forgave her there.

And then there, there…fully absolved. Light, finally.

I’m

No

Longer

Yours…

Goodbye

Tarrance Peck Simons

H-E-Double Hockey Sticks”

We didn’t really know Peck, that’s clear. We’re not sure if this helps at all. Please place the pages back into the protective, zip lock, plastic sleeve. Thank you. Gloves please and thank you. No photocopying is out of the question. We’re sorry. Did we meet at the Redekopf unveiling? It was such a bizarre day.

We had thought Cara ran away. She’d said so to each one of us – “Whuben Ubi rubun ubawubay thubey’ll nubevuber fubind mube, Subelubah.” Sarah Redekopf – yes the Sarah Redekopf – was the first to talk about it. They went to Van Buren together and sang in The Crossing choir. “Sarah-Cara sounds like a song!” They were at choir practice when Cara told Sarah her future plans. “I’m going to run away.” Sarah turned and looked at her. They weren’t friends, we wouldn’t want to mischaracterize their relationship, they just knew one another from church and school; no one would call them the best of friends. Some at school teased in falsetto singing, “Sarah-Cara sounds like a song!” Really, no girls were close to Sarah, she’d be the first to admit it and Cara was just too much of a goody two-shoes for anyone but a few nerds. “Thube subide uboppubosubite tubo thube rubight ubanguble ubis thube hubypubotenubuse.” This was how it was. It was pretty clear Cara’s secret diary, written partly in Ubbi Dubbi, the language she got off the television and used frequently, she was envious of Sarah’s popularity with the boys, especially Peck.

Sarah told us in interviews (We realize the plural of anecdote is not data, but still the quality of this material lends itself to importance) we did with her over the past few years and months now both on cassette tape and digital file that she said to Cara: “Run away? So do it…”

In one rambling story, Sarah told us they turned and watched the stage being set up for the choir. Each row of blocks had to be aligned just so. The boys were doing it – all grunts and bravado (Sarah’s words, not ours you understand). Sarah said she remembered Leslie Skinner to Cara then, but can’t recall what brought her to mind. “… Leslie did it you know.”

“I heard she’s a waitress in Yorktown.”

“If you’ve heard that don’t you think Skinhead has?”

Cara seemed to think this over. We knew she could scrunch up her nose when thinking. Sarah said this is what she saw and so we knew she’d perceived Cara correctly. On this one day, the choir director was calling the girls over. “So where is she?”

“Skinner’s daughter? Gone for good, that’s for sure,” Sarah said and got up. “You could be too.” Of course Sarah regretted saying that but only later when Cara did leave and was gone for good. Sarah said she’d regret that for the rest of her life. We don’t doubt. Sarah got a tattoo for that too. Back then she had her reasons for saying what she said, but now they’re just pathetic she told us. We believe her.

That Friday night when Cara didn’t make it home, we didn’t think much about it. We weren’t being evil or mean, or overly insouciant for that matter. It was kind of cool. Cara wasn’t and yet, here she was doing something that was cool. Running away was the thing, back then; everyone did it to piss off their parents. Cara talked about it, Whuben Ubi rubun ubawubay thubey’ll nubevuber fubind mube, Subelubah, so Cara had gone and done it. Gone for good. Gubone fubor gubood. Barry and Wanda were having shit fits understandably. When they talked to us we acted calm and surprised – we didn’t mention the running away option or what we’d seen. It was one telephone call after another; the hours and days were filled with talk. We sometimes forget or mix up who said what and when – thank God for recorders and transcripts. Back then people said a lot of things. In the years since, we talked to Barry and Wanda about their daughter, to friends and school officials, we spent inordinate amount of time reading old newspapers and police reports; going over and over the evidence, all of it failing to paint a complete picture. It seemed that none of us could remember correctly, Cara and her death. Well, the facts spoke for themselves because they were largely indisputable. The night, the girl, her death. We’ve all the voices in our head. We’ve all red hands, Selah. Like we’ve all been catch red handed. Thanks be to a merciful God.

We have a copy of the New Quantico Police’s unsolved crime case number twenty-seven – Exhibit 22. The French cop with the cigarette breath finally gave us a copy. The file was stuffed with papers, some of it redundant. The facts are all there, but not the story. What does the unsolved case file say? It states that thirteen-year-old Cara Neufeld disappeared while walking home from school November 30th, 1984. The case file shows she was found seven weeks later. Cara had frozen to death in an old machinery shed on some industrial land five hundred yards from her home. The record says friends last saw Cara, as she walked home alone. It was shortly after four in the afternoon, the file states. She was seen on Tinker Avenue. We’re mentioned. Sarah Redekopf – she pulled a few strings, we’re told – got the file from the French cop and made photocopies. It was a real surprise to go through the file and not find any conclusive assertions about what they did to her and how they were part of it. We saw. But, there’s no Sarah, no Peck, no Lorne (he’s a pastor now, near Springfield) did this, or did that. They all walked home with Cara that night. We know this because we saw them too – but they didn’t see us. We heard the talk; we have a good idea now as to what happened in the Cathedral. And yet, their names are in the file, but it’s just the obligatory police report stuff. Names of friends – last seen details. That’s it. Nothing about them at all. At the time we thought for sure the Neufelds and the other Crossing’s parents had spoke to the police about it. There were meetings at Pastor Reimer’s house and at the house. Surely they would have said what we had done, what Sara, Peck and Lorne had done to Cara to the police. We know now they hadn’t.

We all told our parents the same thing. We last saw Cara on Tinker. No one said anything about the Cathedral. Everyone wanted to keep that a secret. We said a snowstorm was coming; it was getting dark so we all decided to head home. Cara wasn’t the only Neufeld missing that night. Wanda was out looking for us.

On the phone the following day, Barry and Wanda called everyone in the church directory – we all gave the same response: Cara had not been seen. Some of us lied, of course. Cara ran away and found a good hiding spot — just like Leslie Skinner, Sarah said. Lorne Penner’s older brother Gerhard had told us about Leslie. She ran away after her father, the school principal, caught her smoking dope in the basement of their house. There were rumors, of course, that she fled to Europe; that she was a truck stop waitress. There was even one that Skinhead buried her in his yard after killing her. Leslie’s stuck in the ground by ole Skinhead/Leslie’s gone for good, good and dead. Peck Simons said the police dogs would have found Leslie in the backyard if that were true. “You just can’t dump a body anymore,” he’d said. “You have to do something extraordinary.” Besides, he said, the graffiti down at the Cathedral was pretty clear as to what Leslie did. We have pictures of the graffiti; we’ll get to those. No, Cara had run away. We were sad, of course we were. But, we were also glad. And we thought it was best to keep it to ourselves. Hush, hush. Give her some time to get away, we’d agreed. Cara was going to be a heroine. She was going to be a whole different person. Disappearing did that for you. Her name would be spray-painted on the Cathedral wall.

Peck said too it was important not to say anything, about Cara running away. “You don’t want to end up like Larry.” No, we didn’t. We most certainly did not want to end up like Larry.

There are too many names, of course, we know this. But that’s life isn’t it: too many names. It was extremely difficult to wheedle out all the stories, and make connections between them. We have boxes and boxes of files, recorded tape, transcripts, pictures, diagrams, plastic bags of dirt and wood; bottle caps and string. Everything is labeled. But still it’s hard to make connections, to see it all for what it was. We found Cara the biggest mystery of all for the ways she acted in the last days. We found her school notebooks to be particularly helpful in one sense and maddeningly frustrating in another. Dubamn Ububbubi Dububbubi!

Finally, we had to draw an organizational chart, a family tree if you will, to get a good look at how everything flowed. It’s Exhibit twenty-six. We used a newsprint roll. When community newspapers print their editions they feed bolts of lightweight, durable, faintly grey paper through printers. These bolts are huge. They must be moved by forklift and it takes several men to load them into the room-size printers. We visited a few newspapers to see this in action. When the roll is of no use to the printers, it is taken off and stashed in a corner. The bolts, at most newspapers, are given away free. For our purposes, for anyone’s purpose to be frank, there is still a lot of paper left on these bolts. We got one and used it for the chart.

The chart measures eight feet in width and is three feet wide. It tears easily so we’ve had to be careful with its storage and moving it from time to time. We have taped the edges now to reduce the risk of tears. To unroll this chart of newsprint you will need a large table and some weights to keep the ends from rolling up on you. We carried it around in a tube for years and would take it out from time to time, just to see if there was something we missed. It was our road map. Each person has their own box and lines run from the boxes to other people and boxes based on relationships.

At the very top are Barry Neufeld and Wanda Neufeld. They are the parents of Cara, Carmichael, and Charon Neufeld – us, the twins. A broken line runs between Barry and Wanda on account of their divorce shortly after Cara’s death. There is a solid line to the children. We thought of erasing the solid line leading to Cara, but decided against it based on our interviews with Barry and others.

There is a box beneath Barry which indicates that today he is a “mechanic” – he owns a service station on the interstate near the Six Mile Run Mall. The box also lists “opera singer” and “pigeon fancier.” Anyone who knows Barry will attest to these classifications being added. He is always humming or singing aloud something from an opera. He told us in an interview that he had at one time wanted to train to become an opera singer. The other thing about Barry is that he loves pigeons. He has several cages on the roof of his service station. “There are times when I think I see her,” he told us. We have transcripts from our interviews with him. “I see her in the strangest places.” Barry described it more of a feeling than an actual sighting of something that reminded him of Cara, the first born. He made a point of saying that it was crazy to think in this way, that he sometimes could see or feel the presence of his dead daughter. “She tells me it’s okay.” Barry believed Cara got herself into trouble and had died trying to get herself out of it. “Her friends didn’t help, but you can’t blame children for being children, Selah.” That was The Crossing talking we could tell.

Wanda is Cara’s mother. When her daughter went missing she was a stay-at-home mom, taking care of the family, which also included us ten-year-old twins, Carmichael and Charon. It was a lot of work, she said. In an odd sort of way the disappearance and death of her daughter invigorated Wanda. She became famous. During the ordeal she wrote a book, Have You Seen Cara? The book led to many appearances on radio – she was on with Larry King once in fact, as part of panel and she had an appearance on local and national TV shows – that one, America’s Most Wanted, we have a tape of the show. Eventually, Wanda got her own. “We still haven’t. Caught her killer,” Wanda said in her typical halted speech, when we interviewed her. She didn’t know then, what she knows now. She told us, “It’s not over. I will work. Until my dying day. To find him. It’s not about absolution. For them,” she said meaning Sarah, Peck and Lorne, “they deserve every piece. Of guilt that comes their way. But they didn’t murder. Cara. Someone else did. And I’ll find him.”

Sarah Redekopf, Lorne Penner and Peck Simons were high school friends. Thick as thieves as the saying goes. They’d all known each other since they were babies. Peck wrote in one of his journals that Lorne and Sarah were his “family, outside my family.” He affectionately called them The Dots. During the days of Cara’s disappearance witnesses say Sarah, Lorne and Peck were largely inseparable – we, everyone really, thought the trio were simply amazing. We wanted so badly to be like them. We wrote “SLaP,” on our forearms in ink. Cara had just begun hanging around them when she disappeared. As evidence by notes found in her textbook, notebooks, and papers in her bedroom, Cara had a crush on Peck. Sarah reported to us, “Peck didn’t even know Cara existed.” Sarah and Lorne was boyfriend/girlfriend and if Lorne’s family hadn’t moved to Ecuador, some believe he and Sarah would be married today. They’re not.

Lorne, once a hot hockey prospect, ended up going into the ministry and now pastors a church in the country. He’s married and has two daughters. At first, Pastor Penner wouldn’t talk to us about Cara, but did say, “It was in God’s hands.” One striking surveillance video, part of Exhibit twenty-seven (the box of tapes), we have Pastor Penner on the tape kicking at a dog who had run from a porch to bark at him. “Get, get!” he said. “Get behind me.” He kicked that dog until it couldn’t move. A few months later at the urging of Sarah, Lorne contacted us and we talked to him about that night – he and Sarah served as the bulk of information on what happened to Cara on November 30, 1984.

Sarah never married. She has a son, Ben, six, whose father, J.B. was a semi-famous rock singer before drowning. Sarah wasn’t famous then. She is now. The art magazines call Sarah, “The Sublime Sculptress,” or “Ice Princess,” depending on what materials she is using to make her art. She became famous for creating naked statues of historical figures. In one magazine article all of her twelve tattoos are pictured and explained. She had a sheepshank tattooed on her left shoulder blade a few years back. “Cara deserved better,” she told us. We were sent an invitation to the special springtime unveiling – an ice bust of Cara that was displayed at the site where she was discovered.

Peck died a few years back in a hotel fire. To the best of our knowledge, he was dead before the fire consumed him. “My son was a junkie. He threw it all away. Utter debauchery,” said his mother. We have numerous reports of Peck sightings: staggering along railroad tracks; sleeping in the library; darting between buildings. There was that long suicide note discovered by Ford, which we were given a copy of for our records. We were able to recover a few of Peck’s journals from his family, but little else. “He’s a mystery,” Sarah offered. The last time she saw him, just a few years ago, he was “getting his life back,” and planning to move to the west coast. There was an argument that last time, but Sarah couldn’t recall what they had fought about. They were both stoned and tired. “Little of anything makes sense when you’re talking about Peck.”

We gave all of our information, copies mind you, about Cara’s disappearance and death to Martin Ford when we found out he was checking into her case. It’s been well over twenty years since her death and we thought we were the only ones who cared about what happened. Apparently not: “The hotel fire,” he told us, “was the key to unlocking this thing for me.” It was the fire Peck died in, and where the letter he wrote was discovered by Ford in the refrigerator. We asked and received permission to take a picture of the rosary he always carried in his pocket. When he talked with us, he held it in his hands and played with it as if the beads could transfer some kind of magic into his hands. His picture in the paper clearly shows he’s a handsome man. Word was Martin was a real lady’s man. Published reports show he married a university classmate, but that she died two years into their marriage. We always got the impression Ford was holding something back from us, but it was nothing we could prove with any sort of corroborating evidence. It was more of a feeling. Newspaper clippings from 1984-85 show he’d written some of the original stories of Cara’s disappearance and suspicious death. It was somehow fitting that he wrote the definitive story once all the facts were out. It was a touchy situation, for some, but he made the most of it.

There are a few more people in boxes on our scroll, drawn into the chart, but we can get to them as we progress through our findings. Each had a say, one way or another. We’ve got pictures of everyone, and a few videos; we have scrapbooks filled with newspaper stories; we have transcripts, audio tapes; we’ve got a collection of ephemera enclosed in plastic bags; we’ve got Cara’s school jacket, her knapsack that Barry eventually found, her books; we’ve got an old typewriter and notes and notes of our own theorizing.

We’ve pieced together from what we saw that day, from interviews and notes from Sarah, Peck and police records a narrative of what happened the day she went missing. Quotations are approximations. Actions were always verified, and sometimes surmised. We will attempt to tell you when we deviate from the facts and enter the realm of speculation. That’s only fair.

We begin in November 1984. It’s a bitter cold winter and by afternoon the light is dying out in the west and the temperature is dropping exponentially. Four high school students walked home from school. Three made it home. One didn’t. The one that didn’t went missing for over fifty days. On the fifty-second day she was discovered in a shed, frozen to death. The case was never closed. No one served jail time. It became the mystery at the core of several people’s lives. Including ours. By turns we tell their story and we tell ours. The line between the two at times can become very thin, Selah. Settle in, here’s the bulk of it.

They were just kids, all of them around the age of thirteen—full of inexplicable chemicals and stormy uncertainty. Sarah, who by turns could be mean or inviting, was walking home with Lorne, her boyfriend at the time and his friend Peck; all had been serving detention at school. She wanted the attention of both Lorne and Peck and wasn’t at all interested in Cara, that tag-a-long. Although she was Sarah’s “friend,” Sarah wasn’t interested in seeing her when there were boys around. But there she was. They had all been in detention – a rarity for the straight-A Cara, whose detention was for smacking her bubblegum in class during a film: “The Life of Bacteria.” The detention had been shortened by an oncoming storm. The brewing blizzard was already rattling the school windows in great gusts, Sven Thomason, the janitor had told us. Students in detention that day with Cara, Sarah, Lorne and Peck said nothing much happened, because detention was abandoned once the windows got real frosted over. So, they said, Principal Skinner, also known as Skipper to family and friends and Skinhead to his students, informed all the detained students that they had better get home to their parents. He said this with particular emphasis, Sarah felt, because everyone in the detention room knew Skinhead had no children – his own daughter had run away just last summer.

Outside the school, Sarah was trying to move the boys along; she could see Cara, walking behind them, trying to catch up. It really had nothing to do with the weather. She’d survived worse if we could believe what the papers said – as a child Sarah had been left outside during the winter and survived several hours of subzero temperatures. There were flakes in the air, big deal. It was the girl that made her impatience, insistent. Sarah didn’t want that girl walking home with them. “She wasn’t cool.”

Cara had a church singing voice most would die for, but she could be as quiet as a church mouse out in the real world. “Peck,” Cara said outside the school. Sarah said she had to strain to hear it and was taken aback by its “timorousness.” Of course this is a word the adult Sarah used, not a word she said she would have arrived at the age of thirteen. In our notes we have it that Sarah said the “voice was so quiet it was almost like it wasn’t even there.”

Peck turned (on a page of one of his many journals, dated November 30, he wrote in his scrawl: A seraph followed…there was a miniscule drawing of wings) even though Lorne tugged on his sleeve and Sarah stage-whispered, “No, come on: dork alert, dork alert.”

There was another squeak from behind. “Sarah,” Cara had said, doing up her maroon and white school jacket and running after them like a pleading dog – something we speculate occurred given our own knowledge of how Cara could be when she wanted something. “Can I walk home with you guys? I phoned my mom, but she can’t come to get me. The twins.” We had slipped out to give Peck a birthday present, a card we had made. All birthdays were printed every week in The Crossing bulletin. We couldn’t wait until Sunday, because his birthday was that Saturday. We couldn’t trust anyone with the card. It needed to be our secret.

Wanda said she remembered the phone call as if it was still ringing in her ear. “The twins… I had to look. For the twins – they’re outside. Playing. Barry wasn’t. Home yet.” Barry was still drinking his rum and Cokes.

As we expected, it was Peck who turned and gave Cara that smile. By all reports he was an admirable, if odd duck the very kind of person who would one day take their own life in fear of something else consuming it, but we had our misgivings about that diagnosis. We’re told, Peck said, “Sure,” and that Cara’s face broke forth in a smile that was luminance itself. Peck ambled on, as he did. That was Peck; “He settled the world with a shrug of his shoulders,” said one of his sisters, Inez, a close friend of ours. Sarah told us, “Peck didn’t seem to give a damn that every girl in the school thought he was dreamy. It didn’t seem to matter to him. Or if it did, he hid it well, which many thought was entirely possible. Girls loved that something hidden. They would line up just to be in his wake.” It was possible Sarah was being nostalgic in her remembrance and we took that into account.

Sarah could have him, if she wanted, we begrudgingly understood this. But she hadn’t because she had Lorne – a huge hockey star at the time and the son of a very religious and prominent family of The Crossing community. He wasn’t second best, to be exact, because unlike Peck, Lorne had actually paid attention to Sarah, whose mother said, “Someone’s watching out for that one.”

Cara was another in that long line of girls who adored Peck – his yearbook Exhibit twenty-one, you’ll recall was filled with promises and wishes; drawings of hearts and birds all professing “true love forever!!!!!” Twenty years later we wrote – “We miss you,” on the page with his picture. That cold November afternoon, Cara ran after him and “rather pathetically,” slowed her steps to walk with him, Sarah reported. He wasn’t ignoring her, but he also wasn’t really paying attention either. Peck had a look on his face Sarah had come to recognize. Peck wasn’t really there; his hands were in his pockets and he was staring off as if expecting someone, someone else to come ambling down the street. “He wasn’t always in the here and now,” Sarah said rather cryptically for us, but okay, whatever. A little speculation on our part: Perhaps that was his allure: aloofness, mystery. Sarah said she could see Cara was in love; her eyes were frozen on Peck that day. The girl was hooked. And, she was humming beautifully. It was an involuntary habit she’d picked up from Barry. The humming made them all stop dead in their tracks. “Wow,” Lorne said and actually tugged on Sarah’s arm. At first Sarah thought she too would hum, then, no, she couldn’t pick up the note. They were both in the choir at The Crossing, both singers, but Sarah clearly knew she was outmatched. When music came from Cara it was as if it was heaven-sent. It was corny, but true that when Cara sang people thought of angels. “Enya, that’s who she sounded like, Enya,” the choir leader Sallie Northrup told us. We got Enya recordings to get a feel for it, being that our memory of how Cara sounded made her more like Pat Benatar than Enya. Cara was nothing to look at dressed in Sally Anne thrift most of the time, clothes we eventually inherited; the family was not a well-off. The song came from this thin little girl, small for her age, all bones and no style. The pictures of her all show how stooped her shoulders were, how afraid or averting her eyes. She was insubstantial; her whole body blew in the wind. But that voice. Cara was sound, more than body. Pastor Reimer said, “When Cara sang solo, well, the walls moved—undulated—as if God were breathing in supreme satisfaction.”: Hyperbole to be sure.

Sarah’s own voice was more “birdlike.” Even though her mother had paid for singing lessons, her voice had not improved beyond her scale of mumbles and screeching, because of a stubborn tone-deafness her coach had said; but the reason she couldn’t sing as well as Cara was that “not everyone is born a singer,” Sarah said. Still, Sundays she stood her feet apart, her chest thrown out, and vibrating arms slightly akimbo – singing in the choir – when Pastor Reimer told this story he made faces as if he’d swallow lemon and strychnine. On those days, she’d looked back to see Lorne and Peck staring in her general direction, their mouths open, or moving slightly to mouth the words of the song. This encouraged Sarah to cover for them, to raise her voice; there was a special relationship between Sarah and the boys, she their savior, they her suitors. Sarah was easily undone by Cara in the front row, small Cara, the voice of sheer light. Music shone from her mouth and all the darkest of thoughts in the minds of babies and the irascible faded, Selah. The choir and congregation appeared to be reaching for her, but fell short. Above the musical triage of voices, Cara hovered as if salve. Sarah was somewhere further down, cawing, and her arms, to gather strength, flapping, imperceptibly snared in a bramble of her own desire. The sound was not pretty but at least she was trying to fly. Reimer laughed uproariously as he flapped his wings. Sarah’s memory was kinder, as to be expected, but honest, as much as she could be.

Sarah had first heard Cara sing at Bible camp that previous summer, which for young girls in the throes of puberty meant Sarah had known Cara in another lifetime. “Back then you chose your friends based on how your stomach felt,” Sarah offered. That previous summer then, she’d recalled hearing a voice, first thing in the morning, rising amid the racket of songbirds. After finding out who was doing the singing, they became friends for the summer. They hung around together, then, collecting wildflowers, and memorizing the psalms – Psalm 100 was a particular favorite. “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands. Serve the Lord with gladness: come before his presence with singing.” Sarah watched Cara do her vocal exercises with Barry always nearby at the camp, lifting his hand in the air and tapping his foot, or playing the piano in the dining hall.

“You must practice if you want to be the best,” he said to her protests that everyone else was at the beach and not stuck inside a smelly old hall doing scales or singing old-time songs. Sarah was discouraged from singing along, even though she persisted. He asked her to turn the pages of the sheet music. “Be of use.” She obliged, feeling it only right. Nothing came for free. She thought at the time that perhaps if she breathed the same air as Cara her singing chops would somehow transfer to her. The practicing never lasted long. Cara would purposely sing off-key or badly – making silly faces – and sooner or later Barry would release them.

They would then run off for the beach or for a trail in the woods squealing and laughing. The afternoon cliques had already formed. The sports girls off playing baseball, the little women doing each other’s hair back in the dorms or at the beach or the tomboys smoking cigarettes and cussing down at the local general store, which also had the area’s only pinball and pachinko machines, something we learned all too well when it was our turn to go to camp.

Sarah knew Cara was suspiciously happy about their friendship. “Don’t you want to be with your friends, down at the store?”

“I want to be with you.” At first, it was uncomfortable; Sarah had no idea how she’d make up their friendship. It wasn’t something she’d earned or worked at, it just happened because of that voice. Then, well: great—So, does talent rub off? Could I breath in her breathe?

To Sarah’s unabashed response tears would form in Cara’s eyes, a not uncommon occurrence to be frank. Cara was a crier. Still, tears running down her slack cheeks, Cara would stop running and ask, “Why?”

Sarah quickly said, “You’re smart and you can sing so well…”

“You can sing.”

“Not like you.” Sarah was in the full mania of conversing with herself that summer. So while Cara stood on the beach path, chest heaving in and out and tears on her cheek, inside Sarah’s head she screamed: Tell me your secret, how do you do it, how do you make those sounds? Cara’s voice was unfair and it made no sense to her, and still doesn’t.

“I can sing, but no one wants a smarty-pants for a friend…” Cara was only too aware of her intelligence and how it kept many people at bay. The only thing Cara failed at her teachers reported, was trying to dumb herself down. She was incapable of that, but was in the end, we surmise, only too capable of another kind of ignorance.

Sarah was emboldened that summer to say and regret later: “You have me, so come on.” If she was Cara’s friend, then perhaps God could give her a voice as a reward. Why not? Prayers were answered – right? That was her thinking. She wondered if her delusions colored every decision she said in the coming months, if not years.

They would go down to the beach, where the counselors were sitting in chairs, sweaty glasses of iced tea gripped in their hands, a site we can attest to having spent far too much time stranded on the beach while reading about Aslan and those idiotic British war orphans. Sarah and Cara would spread a blanket and plunk down on the sand. Sarah talked about boys, nail polish and created elaborate sandcastles. Cara read passages from books she was reading. She tried to build a sandcastle, but ended up with just a mound of sand. Sarah made a small doll fashioned out of Popsicle sticks and thick stalks of grass and placed it on top. It would fall and she would continue to place it atop the castle.

Every girl has The Conversation. Sarah remembered it being with Cara, of all people, at the beach that day. “Sometimes it’s hard being a girl. Have you?” There was a silence on the beach. Cara seemed to shiver. “Have you? …” Sarah motioned downward with her eyes.

“What?” One former teacher had said that if Cara couldn’t read about it in a book, then, it was as if it didn’t exist at all.

“You know.” Sarah said she made a face, but Cara didn’t have a clue. She tried pointing with her chin. “Blood. We all do. Don’t tell anyone at school…” They looked out at the water. Sarah wonder if at that moment, at the mere mention of the word, school, they knew their friendship wouldn’t last the journey from beach to back to reality. A portable eight-track was playing Spandau Ballet. Cara changed the subject by looking away. Sarah offered, “This is a singer’s stage.”

“It’s embarrassing.”

“Try singing like me. This much is true-ewe-ewe… That’s embarrassing.” And then Cara said something that caught Sarah completely by surprise. Cara’s voice didn’t quiver once.

“I don’t want people to look at me as if I’m some kind of toy, a windup toy. Sometimes, those dolls, I had a doll once that had a string on its back and when you pulled it, it would say the Lord’s Prayer.” We have the doll, Exhibit forty.

It was as if the air changed. All she could say in response was, “Weird.”

“I feel like that sometime.”

“The worst thing in the world is to be embarrassed in front of your friends – that and actually not having friends.”

“Right, like when Becky hit you with that water balloon and you dropped your Kool-Aid…”

“I beat her up after that. She’ll never do that again; she’s probably down at the store right now talking about me.” Sarah admitted she was a bit of a conspiracy theorist – “always have been.” We were told that day on the beach was the time Cara had mentioned her father in a negative light. It was noted because it was a line of inquiry the police took, that ended up nowhere. On that day, Cara expressed frustration and anger about her father.

“My dad embarrasses me.”

At the time, Sarah remembered thinking of her own father—or lack thereof. Oh to have a father. Her own father was less and less a part of the family. She prayed sometimes that he would just go away and then maybe her mother would be happy. She had learned early that you don’t prayer for what you want, but for what you’d like to see happen. She loved to see her father disappear.

At Bible camp, Cara and Sarah sat together at breakfast, lunch and dinner and during all activities. They were always on the same teams for volleyball or baseball; Sarah spread the word. Sarah was building points. That voice was coming any day now. But then came the spelling bee.

Everyone had expected Cara to win. Cara was the straight-A student. She wasn’t a big talker, but could often be heard humming. To Sarah the humming was the secret to her competitor’s beautiful voice, so she too hummed, but only when she was alone and assured no one could hear her. Cara could hum the same song for days. There was love in her eyes, her lips together, the throat vibrating, and the body a conduit. Sarah stared. Where did it come from? What was her secret?

But when it came to give an answer in class to speak up to part those lips and without singing answer a teacher’s question, Cara would blush and defer. It was like she could not or would not speak up for herself. Sarah could speak up and did all the time because it made her teachers like her. They said, “good, Sarah, good,” and that made her want to do it more and more. Not Cara. She was a shut trap. Teachers say in private, with them, Cara could tell them ten different ways to solve a math problem or recite an Elizabethan poem extemporaneously. She aced tests and wrote exquisite essays.

But in class, in front of people: “I don’t know,” she said as she lowered her face, “I don’t know.” It was maddening. Everyone in the classroom knew Cara had all the answers. They expected it. Her father grilled her with flip cards, she had told Sarah. Just answer, just… Cara appeared to contemplating her notes there on the desk in front of her. She was forever scribbling, writing down everything, a clever answer from one of her classmates or what the teacher said, into one of her composition books. The white paper in those books was furrowed with line after line of her script; we ran our fingers across the rippled pages. Sarah told us she too felt them with her fingertips as if the mere impression of it would make her smarter, would unlock Cara’s mystery. The pages made a crinkling sound when she turned them. When she lifted a page and the light shone through Sarah could see that the pages were written on both sides. She wrote pressing down hard, her face within inches of her pen nib. She wasn’t shortsighted; Cara said she liked to be as close as she could to what she was writing as if to concentrate.

There were times when Sarah felt odd watching Cara, for she too studied people—this ironically, Sarah uncovered while secretly watching her classmate. Cara watched them read their books, talk to their friends, and underline words in their textbooks. She studied their clothes, their shoes, and the rings on their fingers. She twirled her own K-Mart bought clip-on earrings as she watched girls conversing by their lockers.

While Sarah stared at Cara, Cara stared at Peck. It was no secret she was in love with him. She had written “Cara and Peck 4 Ever” on her binder in ink so marked upon the plastic cover that it buckled. Repeatedly she’d written over each and every letter of his name that “Peck,” once blue, turned black.

Peck was the coolest kid in Sarah’s class. He was the only person smarter than Cara in the seventh grade. He wore clothes no one else wore, lavish colors sometimes, scarves, parachute pants, military jackets. He listened to different music than everyone else, David Bowie, Max Webster, Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, The Spoons, and some jazz, which to Sarah didn’t sound like music at all. He too observed people and wrote copious notes. His cramped writing and crinkled pages reminded Sarah of Cara’s pages – maybe their pages communicated to one another, but no notes were ever passed between them that she was aware of. He seldom talked to Cara. Peck was kind and never brushed her off. He always spent time talking to her and listening to her rambling thoughts. He didn’t have a girlfriend, but had girls who were his friends. Sarah couldn’t recall Peck having a girlfriend. He was too cool for that. He didn’t let anyone, get that close to him. There was Larry Tiefschwartz, the artist, and the only other person Sarah had recalled ever having Peck’s attention. The church kicked Larry out of the community – something Pastor Reimer didn’t want to talk to us about; he actually pretend to not know what we were talking about. Sarah told us why though.

At the time Sarah said she, Lorne and Peck talked about it. Peck said, “They didn’t like the way he dressed.”

To Sarah this was incredible: “So they kicked him out?”

“Didn’t like the way he looked.”

“God, look at us…” Lorne said.

“Said he was weird…”

“Just because of that?” Sarah asked.

Peck shrugged his shoulder. “Gone.”

They said he shouldn’t be anywhere near children. They were the church leaders. Larry was gay and everyone then knew it, except us. Sarah said Peck was close to Larry for a short while, but that Larry was older, and lived on his own and it just didn’t seem right. Please God have mercy on his soul, make him see the error of his ways. Let him find a cure… said the church. And then he was gone. Sarah’s church was good at turning its back on those who didn’t meet its standards. “Peck had been cryptically warned: Be a good Christian soldier boy.” Peck said, “Make a mistake in this church, and God knows you burn in H-E-Double Hockey Sticks.”

Larry had been “exercised,” the rumor went; that’s what Sarah and her friends had called it, “exercised,” not even aware that the word was “exorcised” and that wasn’t even what had happened. The elders convened and, the law was handed down, or so Mrs. Simons told us. They prayed for his soul, they wanted to wash his body, several witnesses said. They cast him out, because the evil inside would not leave well enough alone.

Peck was always half someplace else then. He liked to disappear on his friends; there one minute, the next, not. He could be seen nodding and writing in his journal, one of so many black, and leatherette books outlined in gold gild. He drew complex pictures, dot by blue dot, in those books. He kept lists written out in his bizarre handwriting, a bricolage of calligraphy and scrawl. Peck wrote down all of the things that interested him, or if they didn’t interest him right then and there, he knew it would mean something to him later as evidenced by all the question marks on the page. He’d explained this all to Sarah once. She began to think Peck knew things the elders didn’t tell them.

The short walk that late November Friday night took them from Hickman Highway, down Tinker, to Cross Fork Avenue where off in the distance light industrial plants sat on the banks of the Cross Fork River. Sarah’s bare hand was on a top rail of a fence covered in a thin layer of ice. The ground was hard with snow. Their friendship would change that winter. They would drift apart; disappear from one another’s lives, connected by a night in late 1984 that changed everything. Peck would take to the streets. Lorne would move away with his family. Sarah would stop praying. Cara was never seen alive, again.

Who was the last person to see her? We know, even though now it’s too late. The casket is smudged with red paint.

The rumors were persistent enough to lead us to believe them. It wasn’t just pure volume – it was that the rumor never changed, as they do depending on who’s telling it. Again and again: Cara had run away. Where? No one could be sure. Some said she’d gone where Leslie Skinner had gone. Gone for good. In the dead cold ground? Yorktown? It didn’t matter where, as much as why. There was nothing in the papers about running away. The papers and other media told another story, stories we’ve read over and over again. Almost immediately every television or radio report, every headline and story spoke of “disappearance” as if it was death itself. We heard the word and couldn’t completely comprehend its meaning. It was like a really bad turn in a hide and seek game. Someone had gone to hide and had disappeared – off the face of the planet. It was weather reports from that time, that night, twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit; snow: the bitterness of it. Anyone out there in the elements, the dead darkness of winter nightfall, unprepared, wouldn’t last the night – until slowly, inevitably as if breathing in this cold the ill-equipped were gassed by winter’s sleep-inducing ether. When dying in winter, beautifully, tragically, the wary first fall asleep.

“We don’t know what happened,” Wanda was quoted in the paper. “But something, someone, is keeping her from coming home.” In her own book published a few years after Cara’s disappearance and death Wanda wrote, “It was only a fifteen minute walk home… A short span for a lifetime.” We walked the fifteen minutes ourselves. We tried it. Under the same conditions, we could do it, but longer, much longer there would be trouble, we surmised. We walked looking at what Cara might have seen or not seen as the case may be. We found nothing, out of the ordinary. The walk was not out of the ordinary if it were a straight line; or unimpeded. Any child could do it. But police told us a lot can happen in the dead of winter in fifteen minutes or longer. It was the longer that kept Cara, all one hundred and five pounds of her. She wore a maroon jacket with white, raglan, sleeves. Blue jeans—tight as the style suggested back then. Tennis shoes. No gloves. No hat or scarf. This was gleaned from the first story that ran in the paper, the Monday after Cara had been missing the entire weekend. Cara ran away everyone whispered. The paper said she disappeared.

The next day it was off to the big city, to shop with her mother.

Thirteen years old. Blue-grey eyes. Voice of an angel. All of five feet, two inches. Still growing.

On December 4 – four days after that fifteen minute walk home after school on a Friday night, her school picture made the paper. That look: “A child thumb-sucking averting blue-grey,” Mrs. Simons recited from one of Peck’s journals. She was about the only person who could read his handwriting.

On December 4 – Fifty students from her school helped search. Even though: Cara ran away! Time off from school, even if it was out in the cold. They search. They found nothing.

Yorktown? Truck stops? The cold dark ground? It seemed the entire city began to look for her. Children were coddled. Students scattered and hide. We were told not to go out alone. Why? What did they know? Now, we know she wasn’t far, not held by someone. She was placed.

Cara made the front page that Wednesday – a full five days after her disappearance, eighty students helped search. They came from other schools, not just her own. They came because their parents wanted them to know, there were not to go out alone. They found nothing. The day was clear and very cold, the night a stunning twenty-five degrees. Don’t go out alone. Exposed skin froze in under a minute. Eyewitnesses maintain they say Cara – we’re still not sure. They say they saw her outside a convenience store on Herbert the night she disappeared. We wondered then and now if they meant they saw her after that night.

More students poured in to help search in the week after Cara failed to make it home. There was a one-hour blitz of a twelve-block radius. We’ve gone back over this radius turning over every rock and piece of garbage for what we couldn’t really say for sure. Just searching. The students found nothing. We found nothing.

One thousand flyers were printed up and distributed with Cara’s school picture on it. One thousand Caras. One though blue-grey thumbsuckers. Bitter cold. All of five feet, two inches. There were six city police on the case, including our French cop with the cigarette breath. One thousand. One thousand red hands.

Her report card, Exhibit seventeen, showed Cara had been slipping academically; the straight-A student hadn’t been as straight as we expected. Sarah said, “Did we really know her?” Wanda maintained Cara couldn’t have run away.

“We had plans. We were going to the city to shop. She didn’t run away – she was looking forward to it.”

Someone knew that not to be true. Someone knew that Cara, all five feet, two inches of her was carrying less than a dollar in her pocket and suffered a fatal case of ignorance.

Someone knew. Cara didn’t run away. One thousand someones.

Over a series of months we spoke with Pastor Lorne and Sarah about what happened that night when they walked home with Peck and Cara. At our first meeting, Sarah brought along three of Peck’s journals, books with pages stuffed with leaves from other books and magazines. The journals weren’t complete, all contained several blank pages and most of the pages in these journals were undated. “I remember…” she began flipping the pages. Pastor Lorne touched her arm.

“This one time, we spoke about if we’d remember one another, you know as we got older.” She looked at Lorne. “Peck said he’d remember each one of us because long ago we’d been marked.”

Lorne smiled and nodded. “But, em, to be sure…” he said.

“A dab of red paint.”

Sarah flipped through the journal, looking for the correct page. “Here. I remember he wrote it down as he was talking to me about it. Memory works like this: When we do something for the first time, when we meet someone that first time, our brain marks the spot and the route all the firing in the brain does that first time. And every time after that, when that something comes up again, you have do it again or see that person again, the brain recalls that spot, that route.”

We took the journals, as Exhibits thirty-four through thirty-six and opened to the page Sarah talked about. Peck had drawn a large paint bucket and two hands, dripping in red ink. We often find things that make no sense to us, but to someone else it’s clear as a bell. “One way to look at it,” Pastor Lorne offered, “Say you, em, have a flat bike tire. You go to the garage to work on fixing it. Before touching any tools needed to change the tire, you, em, dip your hands in red paint.” He pantomimed dipping his hands.

Sarah said watching Lorne, “Everything you touched from that point on would be marked with red paint.”

“And the next time you needed to fix a flat, you see all the tools that had been marked with red paint, em.”

“Memory.”

“Memory.”

In a city the size of ours, it was not uncommon that one news story could capture the entire populace’s imagination. Everyone was looking. No one found Cara. She’d been missing four very cold days and nights. Everyone was looking for a trace of her in the snow; a foot protruding from the brambles or a fleeting glance of someone, something, lurking beneath the bridges. At the time we were ignorant to the fact that people knew exactly where Cara was left. Police did speak with Sarah, Lorne and Peck eventually, but all they could offer was the beginning of the trail, not an X that marked a spot, a spot where all of five feet, two inches of her resided. There where grey-blue eyes awaited. How it came to that, we didn’t know until decades later when we pieced together all the evidence. Everyone held a jagged piece and thought it didn’t fit in anywhere. Everyone was looking – elsewhere.

Several tips were phoned into police. One tipster said she’d seen a girl at a Wahl Street bus stop being dragged by her hair by two other children. “Not related,” the police said rather cryptically in news reports then. We have copies of print and radio news stories to that effect. What we wonder about is how they knew they were unrelated when they didn’t have Cara or know her whereabouts? What had they been told? In a similar story on tips, written by Martin Ford, it says the city police were also begging to search. Cara was expected there to shop Saturday the first of December. Tips indicate people wanted to help. We were told any piece of information could be helpful. Everyone was looking to help, except Cara’s friends. They remained silent, thinking not the worst had happened, but that the very best had occurred: Cara had run away. She had successfully run away and left no trace of her whereabouts. To Sarah, Lorne and Peck, Cara had entered the annals of fame few dared or even attempted. She’d defied parents, stood up to the elders – and won. The prize was infamy and high praise from her peers. Her exploits would be spray-painted on the walls of the Cannabis Cathedral, a derelict shack where local teens went to smoke marijuana and have sex. Her legend would be on display for all to see. Her name, her adventure would be painted on the walls with the other revolutionary cant. Gone for Good. What’s Missing From Chrch? What’s Missing From Yor? Have You Seen Cara? Cara’s absence moved her peers more than her presence ever had. Five hundred students took part in searching for her, a week after Cara’s disappearance. The throng distributed over three thousand flyers with her picture, with a plea – “Have You Seen Cara?” Everyone was looking, no one was finding.

We knew that everyone knew in the back of their minds, Cara had run away. Yet, Wanda said in a television interview (we have the Beta): “She didn’t run away. We have to go get her.” She said this as if she knew the place where her daughter was curled up sleeping. We asked her about it and the exact words didn’t make sense to her; she talked about mental exhaustion and stress. Words are a jumble when you’re insane, she said. But in her book she wrote that at the time of that interview she still thought Cara was alive, a week after failing to come home from a fifteen minute walk from school. Friday night, dead of winter, all five feet two inches of her bony body: Still alive?

Four days later, Cara’s father Barry clearly thought otherwise, “We seem to be mourning her.” The day she disappeared he’d gone into her bedroom to get her up for school. They play-wrestled and as they lay back on the bed, playfully exhausted, Cara told her father she’d been dreaming about a cat. The cat had followed her wherever she went. When he left the bedroom, he could hear Cara put a record on her portable turntable and the song, “Friends Are Friends Forever,” by Michael W. Smith playing through the thin walls of the house. It was Cara’s favorite song and she played it every morning and every night. He knew then she hadn’t many friends. Smart children don’t. Talent children are shunned. Barry played the record once when Cara had been gone for nearly ten days, but he couldn’t get through the first verse without bursting into tears.

The torture of not knowing made Barry get up one night from bed and trundle through the house when everyone else was asleep, dressing for the cold. He told us one time while we visited him on the roof of his service station, he went out into the frosty night and walked to where Cara was last seen. We know now he’d not yet been told by then about Sarah, Lorne and Peck their part in Cara’s misadventure. He only knew what most of us knew. Cara was last seen standing on the corner of Tinker. He couldn’t place her anywhere else. Cara’s escape was being kept a guarded secret by a slumbering trio of miscreants; by us all. Even as hope diminished and the Cara Neufeld Search Committee was formed it did not dent the cabal’s collective desire for secrecy. Until, little by little, jagged pieces of the puzzle were being given due scrutiny by those that possessed them. “We just have to go get her.”

But we found that even if there are gaping holes in a puzzle some will maintain a complete picture out of haste and undying desire. This is human nature, its wont for easy solutions. We’ve written papers on this. People just didn’t want to know, back then or made things up to suit themselves. It was only years later did we come to the realization that some of the pieces simply didn’t fit – they were crammed in. Other pieces were from some other puzzle. Other parts of the erected set were fabricated altogether. We too held a token or two that didn’t fit or for year sat in the drawer we’d thrown it in to be with lost keys, thumbtacks and matchboxes. Until we too remembered something, we too recalled a cat following us, until we turned and asked, “Why have you been following us?”

Sarah and Pastor Lorne’s memory of that night was patchy to be expected. We got the impression there might have been some paint added to their memory after an initial coat had already been applied. We found generally that people tended to speak highly of themselves, or, bent over backwards in self-deprecation. We couldn’t say for sure which was more laudable in the long run, the people who lied or those who simply interpreted their own lives with much rosier glasses than most.

There was a field, a walk through the snow, the coming storm. We’ve gone there of course; we’ve check the meteorological records – it pans out. That night we hovered nearby, eager to be home and warm. We shivered. Sarah, Lorne, Peck and Cara agreed to keep going even though the hour was getting late. They would be in trouble, this we could understand. Rules were rules. The Crossing was strict about child-rearing. On a Friday night, you had to be home by five and if you weren’t you had to call. We could recite this rule and every child in our city would nod in agreement. It was a rule perhaps borne of winter and early darkness.

Sarah said they all agreed that if they were going to sin they were going to sin big – we understood this to mean, if they were going to be late, they were going to be really late. And of course, Cara tagged along. Peck was there, after all and she was eager to be with him, we were told over and over again.

There was a fence on the property back then, but now it’s gone. Lorne said they had to help each other through it. The field was a mess of old sheds, rusted machinery, and rocks that looked like “buried dinosaurs,” we’ve been told. It was rock. But that was Peck. There was still a little light left in the day, but not much, the metrological reports gathered by us via the Internet bore out this point. (We printed them off and placed them in labeled manila folders for the file cabinets we purchased and stored at the rental place downtown.) In winter it is not uncommon for darkness to come as early as four in the afternoon; storms arose that winter just as quickly.

Crossing the field, the frigid wind began kicking up snow. “I remember having to cover my eyes: Snow,” Lorne offered. Black clouds formed on the black western sky. The 1984 night was becoming dark, “a Bible black.” Peck’s journal continued several drawings of starry night skies; of bizarre rock formations rising from a void of white we took to be snow. He drew rings of hell, too, indicating to which ring some parents, teachers and church leaders were assigned. Again, we had to rely on the translation of his mother, and in some cases that of Sarah; Peck’s writing was atrocious – perhaps in an attempt of concealment.

Lorne was swinging Sarah around, we heard from a few sources, eyewitness accounts, although he never admitted to as much. Mr. Mukherjee, a resident of Tinker said he saw Lorne swinging Sarah around by her waist and could see two others off in the distance, walking. He watched from his living room window. We have our doubts, given the light at that time of the day and the distance from Mr. Mukherjee’s home and the field. Windows can become quite viscous in wintertime. “You light my way,” Lorne said holding her waistline from behind, lifting her easily off the ground. “Look at how we move.” Sarah recalled this somewhat embarrassingly. He swung her like a rag doll. As she was being twirled, Sarah looked about for stones. This was something she did, for as long as she could remember – scoured the outdoors for special stones. “He spoke in stone.” We will include somewhere else in this narrative Sarah’s habit and its origin – for now it merely warrants mentioning.

Nearby, Peck counted the emerging stars, aloud, Lorne offered, and connected the rambling dots with his finger. “Eight” he said, and then something like, “The wind seems to be pushing them into a fall. They have exited Hell and have entered Nether.” He’d been reading Dante’s “Inferno,” one of the several books his grandfather had given him recently. We obtained a “gently-used” copy off an on-line reseller and have confirmed those lines. The page is marked and we have underlined the lines in yellow. It’s part of the evidence now.

Over the years, we’d run into Sarah at church or mall, son Ben always in tow – the two inseparable. We’d always bring up Ben’s famous Daddy and then regret doing so. We had to say something about the terrible accident, the loss to the music world. Sarah would always just stand there, half expecting it we supposed. A clove cigarette would be wedged in the side of her mouth, unlit or smoldering depending on where we stood. In our estimation Sarah had hardened over the years, but then who hadn’t. Her demeanor always suggested that we keep our distance. When we turned up, apparently, so too did Cara; few people wanted to be reminded of their past, their youthful indiscretions. It was to this that the mystery of Cara’s case could be explained, or at least be theorized. We understood this and took it into account. It took years to gather the evidence, we took long breaks. Spending so much time in the past, digging around, wore on us, took its toll. Our marriages didn’t last. As the years progressed and the anniversaries of Cara’s death came and went more and more of those involved were living vastly different lives and to revisit that past was to put on an old costume they’d long ago discarded. It was ill-fitting and bothersome. The collar too tight. The buttons and zippers all wrong and broken. If most could they would have burned the artifacts of their past, or found a closet so deep and dark that once the detritus was shed and thrown in there it could hardly be recovered. Getting at those things required a few to sift through ashes, to get dirty, while still others groped in a seamless lacunae for threads, for articles they could don to with assuredly disappointing results. Going there, doing that excavation at our prodding, meant temporarily, at least, each and every one of them had to face their own mortality. For if not now, when. Pastor Lorne said everyone had to “face the cross.” By examining the past it brought to relief the texture of time, its relentless scree, how much had changed and in this recognition how all that really was, was in the here and now. How faulty the mechanism of memory then, a device of the brain, wrought by God, whose sole purpose was to remind its owner of its impending death. Cara will always be back there, but also here, in the present because we carry within ourselves those locked closets, those slag heaps of the past. Cara was in there, in each of them, we asked them to produce her.

Sarah was only too obliging to be fair. She had a hard core, but we could tell the stone cold guise she gave to the world was the result of that winter’s freeze. We actually thought our inquiry helped her in some way. If we’d not begun to ask questions, maybe she’d never have decided on “Thawing Cara,” (her words) the way she did. We got glimpses early.

One time, outside a drug store, she’d told us she was tired. “Being notorious is hard work.” Her work as a sculptor was just beginning to make waves. She created impressionistic life-size naked sculptures of the rich and famous. Her first was historical. Sarah created a larger than life nude sculpture of Lincoln. It was a commissioned work Sarah had won by competition. The eleven-foot fall statue ended up being surrounded in panels of concrete because of public complaint. It still sits on the bank of the river, across from the state house, in a park frequented by gay prostitutes. The naked Lincoln controversy simply brought Sarah more work and more notoriety – it made the cover of a book that carried the thesis Abraham was gay. While the money was good, she said, it wasn’t enough to make her overly wealthy. “To keep my street cred’” she said she retained her Dobbler Street apartment and her rundown Studio on Cross Fork. That’s where she told us what happened that night, when Cara went into the dark and never returned.

Sarah greeted us at the back door of her studio. This was a few months ago. We rapped on the back door as she instructed and when the door opened we were a little taken aback. Sarah stood at the back entrance in a guise and expression we thought clearly marked her as a loony. Her short black hair flew in all different directions. A clove cigarette burned from her lips. Loud jazz came from the studio. It was early evening, and the light in the studio was no help—it was darker than it was outside. Sarah stood looking at us as if she was seeing ghosts and was a little perturbed by the visitation. We reminded her, carefully, that she’d invited us. She wore an old dark blue sports coat, unbuttoned, with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She had on black flannel pants with the pant legs cut at three-quarters length. Sarah was barefoot. Her nose, her ear lobs, her eyebrows twinkled with piercing. She wore no shirt beneath the sports coat. Her breasts, pendulous and large, jutted from between the jacket’s lapels. Her hands were in her pockets. Her skin, marked in spots, was white and stretched across her taunt abdomen was a lavish tattoo. In strong, cursive writing one word covered her exposed torso: Cara.

Her studio was warm, dark and chaotic. That frantic jazz welled up from a battered and paint splattered boom box sitting atop a stack of books on a shelf. Clove scented-smoke filled the air. In a quick scan we could see that every surface contained a work in progress. There were small constructions of wood and what looked like clay. She’d done some paintings, and those canvases leaned against walls defying interpretation. There was a large wooden credenza lining one wall and it was covered in pots, pails, easels, tools and frames. A table held a stack of clay brick, wrapped for its protection. A bag from a local donut shot sat atop the brick, a Styrofoam coffee cup nearby, its white plastic lid, off. The cup was covered in blue ink drawings, small dots and swirls. While we took in the room, Sarah turned down the music and turned toward us. She stood with her hands on her hips, again, legs apart, clove smoldering in her mouth.

“Here’s my thing. She wasn’t found where we left her.”

It was startling. We hadn’t expected Sarah to be so forthcoming, so soon. We had that “don’t come near,” expression she wore, emblazoned on the surface of our brains. We knew her public reputation for unpredictability and anger. We had expected small talk. Sarah was all big talk. She plopped down into a large wing-back chair in a dark corner and gestured for us to sit in two adjacent wooden stacking chairs. It was like going to the principal’s office.

“We left Cara at the Cathedral.” We have pictures of the inside of the Cathedral and its exterior. It was serendipity that we go the shots considering the shed was torn down years ago, a few months after Cara body was discovered in it. We got the photographs from the French cop with the cigarette breath. Their copies of the police file photographs. We ask that you handle the pictures by their edges as they are very rare. Since the pictures constitute Cara’s point of departure, we consider them somewhat reverentially. Sarah hadn’t kept these photographs from the file. She gave them to us.

Sarah lit another cigarette. “We went back you know.” We know this and told her so, based on what we’d read of Peck’s journals – or what could be translated by his mother. We opened our notebooks and before turning on our digital recorders requested the music be turned off completely. She complied with a click of a remote control button. There was a silence, briefly, as we looked at her and her at us.

“Here’s my thing. We did nothing wrong.”

“We did a wrong. But the quality of mercy, em, is not strained,” Pastor Lorne Penner told us. We were walking rather briskly through his church’s neighborhood. We drove out one morning. “We did wrong, em, we were forgiven. It was the sinner that was forgiven, em, not the sin. Me. Sarah and Peck.” Walking, the early morning sun rising high in the sky, Lorne’s bulky frame cast a long and ominous shadow on the sidewalk. His hands were clasped behind his back. He walked with his head down and we followed close behind.

The pastor remembered Cara by Bible passage. He could recall what he said, what passage he offered, more than what he did that night. His details are sketchy and we know it. It was difficult interviewing him for this and several other reasons. While most people we spoke with invited us into their homes – Pastor Lorne Penner did nothing of the kind. He met us on the steps of his church, a forty-five minute drive from the city. Our conversation was over cups of coffee or wine, or beer usually. Not with Penner. We walked away from his church, out of the neighborhood. Most interviewees looked us in the eyes. Not the pastor – he was too busy looking down at his feet or over his shoulder. Most of our questions, if at all possible, were answered. Not with Lorne. He spoke flat out, like giving one of his sermons. He spoke in a halting cadence, as if he’d written out his response and rehearsed it.

Knowing what we now know, we are not at all sure why Penner was the way he was. In fact, he was nothing like what we’d expected. The confident star athlete we saw in all those newspaper clippings and TV appearances of his youth, walked with a stoop; he spoke nervously and often admonished and corrected himself. Dandruff flaked his black coat. His eyes were jumpy.

“You have to remember. We were just kids. I was heading straight home. I had a hockey game the following morning. Hockey players need their rest. It was really cold. I was walking, as I say, straight home with my head down, like this, head, em, down. Minding my own business when Sarah called out. Em. She needed me to carry something for her. You know how girls are. I told her I couldn’t. Em, she insisted. I had to get home. Straight home. My parents, were, em, expected me.

“I continued straight, as I say, home but she kept after me like a stray dog. It was her school bag, em, you see. I looked at it and I knew it wasn’t really heavy or anything. You know how girls are. I threw it over my shoulder and motioned for her to lead the way. We needed to get home. I might have muttered, em, as I do, under my breath of course, Psalm one, Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly… Ms Redekopf had a bit of a reputation back then, em. Oh, and now I under…” He suddenly stopped and pushed us aside walking back from where we’d came – he was looking for or at something we couldn’t see.

The street was empty of anyone but us. There were the houses, the parked cars, but nothing else. Trees. “Do you see that?” he asked. It was the strangest thing. We looked, but really, there was nothing. We said as much. But Pastor Lorne Penner stood silent, stood erect finally, his hands holding us back as if danger loomed. He squinted into the morning sun, into that empty landscape. “There,” he said pointing. Then, “No, nothing.” He turned and continued to walk, stooped, head down, talking. We thought of what Peck said in his letter, that he was haunted by something.

According to the pastor Sarah and he walked together a few blocks from school when they were joined by Peck and Cara. “He’d gotten strange,” he said of Peck. “I’d known him all those years, since we were baptized, but still then, he suddenly got all strange. Looking back on it I knew it had to do with his grandfather passing away. That, and his home life, well, that wasn’t a, em, godly home.” Penner stopped to pick up a small stone at the toe of his boot on the sidewalk. “Peck was a collector. He was always picking up something, stones. Mostly stones. …and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows… Part of Genesis, chapter twenty-eight, verse eleven. I don’t know why Cara was with him that day. I remember they were holding hands.” Penner tossed aside the stone. “Peck collected the weirdest stuff.”

“They began walking with us. It was all very, bizarre. I mean, I don’t remember asking them to join, em, us. I tried walking faster in fact. I could do that, walk, em, faster. It was Cara’s idea that we go to the, em, Cathedral – you know the hangout. I said no, right away. No. My righteousness I hold fast. But children, you know. Mob rules. They ran ahead. I tried to stand my ground. But…” He looked behind us and intently watched something hidden – was a closet door left ajar or squeaking on its hinges?

“I ran after them. That bag. Sarah’s bag was still strapped to my back. I remember I had to shield my eyes: Snow. ...because of the blindness of their heart.” We have the weather reports for all of the fifty-two days Cara was missing. That first night a storm blew in shortly before five in the evening. It still surprised us that they didn’t go immediately home. But what did we know. We were home by then, snug as bugs. Lorne said it didn’t surprise him at all. “Peck could have cared less, and Sarah, well, you know the story. Cara staying did not make much sense. I kept thinking about her singing voice. Wasn’t it just too cold out there for her, for that throat...I said a little prayer.”

Praying as he did, Lorne stumbled through the snow following the path Cara, Sarah and Peck plowed. He’d heard of the Cathedral by then, but had never been there before that night, but he didn’t let on as much. Sarah was so easily disappointed. They all ran into the building and stood briefly taking in the strange sight of it. Lorne said it felt evil what with the graffitti, the walls of warped wood vandalized by lighters and spray paint. “What is missing from chrch,” Lorne said it read. “You,” he said somewhat triumphantly. There were other sayings on the walls, but Lorne didn’t highlight those. He walked in and dropped Sarah’s bag at the entrance. They sat on a landing inside the building and listened to the wind rattle the structure. “We’d better...” Lorne said he began to say. They all really needed to get home, out of the storm. He liked Sarah, he wanted to please her. She could make him do anything, and she knew it. Lorne couldn’t look small or scared in front of her. Lorne told us and Sarah confirmed it, that Peck produced a “marijuana cigarette.” Everyone had a try even Cara, which we found very hard to believe and but had no way to prove or disprove it. Autopsy results showed no traces of cannabis, but fifty days after inhaling marijuana the drug is no longer present. Besides, Lorne told us Cara only took a puff and didn’t inhale much. “She coughed.”

Whatever the effect the drug had or did not have, what she did next was a little startling; Cara was not a brave girl and by all accounts that night, the night she disappeared, she miraculously demonstrated a new found supply of courage. She began to sing. “She was enraptured,” Sarah said. Cara began singing to Peck. Exhibit thirty-five is a picture found in Peck’s journal of what appears to be an angel, singing. Clouds pour from her open mouth. Lorne and Sarah said the song lifted fog from Cara’s gaping mouth, which floated on the cold air. We do take into account the admitted fact of their drug inhalation, which might have chemically altered their perceptions. It would have had to been an extremely strong joint for this effect to have taken hold on them so strongly and quickly.

Soon their parents would be missing them, but before then, before they had to walk through those doors and became whatever was required. Sarah told us they stood in a field; to the west the sky drained its skim milk daylight – “blue john,” Peck had called it. Sarah was determined to stick to her agenda and not be swayed one way or another. She led the way to the field, to have a cigarette before going home.

“Won’t we be late?” asked Cara. “I have to be home…”

“So. We’re already late,” Sarah said over the increasing wind and ducked beneath the pulled-aside fencing.

“To the Cathedral!” Lorne barked.

They ran through Dahlsip’s Yard to a storage shed, about the size of a garage that the locals used for a hangout – there were several other buildings but only the Cathedral drew the local attention because it was so ugly. It had no roof and the junk inside was one step away from the dumpster.

Sarah and her friends stepped into the cavernous structure, the smell of old machines and tools, clinging to its walls, bearing down on them. The Cathedral was just over twenty feet in height. It no longer had doors on either sides, or a roof. Inside it was all sky. Its gray-boarded walls, rattling and buckling in the bracing wind, were covered in graffiti and ice. All day long the Cathedral’s interior would heat up, thawing the ice and snow, which clung to the structure. By night, and with temperatures dropping, the rivulets of water turned to ice. They went to a platform, which ran alongside the west, inside wall. Moonlight cast the interior in blue and darker blue.

“Gone for good,” and “Yor,” were scrawled above the platform in fading black spray paint. “What’s missing from chrch,” was written beneath it in faded red, the “u” intentionally missing. A single cross, a large eye and mad annulus and curves finished the collage. Sarah hadn’t the nerve to make her own drawings here.

“Skinner’s daughter did that,” Lorne said pointing at the “Gone for good,” graffiti script. “Skinner did that.” His breath came out in puffs of crystallized air. He was talking about the principal’s daughter who ran away when she was sixteen and hadn’t been seen or heard from since.

“Nah, that’s talk,” said Sarah stepping back into Lorne’s body. “She left a long time ago, that hasn’t been here that long – has it?”

“If people say she did it, she probably did,” Peck said strongly and hoisted himself on the platform. “Knowing our church she couldn’t wait to get away from them. If you’re not the right person, the perfect Christian, if you do one bad thing, or whatever, you’re going straight to H-E-double hockey sticks, Crazee fuck.” Cara jumped up beside him and stared at the graffiti. There was a silence in the Cathedral, permeated only by the howling of wind outside. Sarah said blushing that Lorne gave out a howl, and grabbed her around the waist before placing her on the platform.

“I came here one night. Just to think. My parents thought I stayed at Larry’s—they were furious. But I didn’t. Slept right in there the whole night,” Peck said pointing to a door.

“Weren’t you afraid?” Cara asked and blew on her cupped hands, which were all bony knuckles and white. Reportedly, he shook his head. They sat on the edge of the platform and smoked a cigarette, while Lorne watched, standing with his hands in his pockets in a shaft of new moonlight. This is easy to imagine; we’ve all been there.

“Hockey players need their lungs,” he said tapping at his large chest. He was so strong and imposing. Sarah loved him like every bold shape she conjured from the nothingness. He was beauty. Sarah could look at him for hours, the lines on his face, his eyes knowing, his hands, warm. He was a rock. When he held her, she felt whole and radiant, and always knew he’d be there for her. We’ve replayed the recording and still marvel at how the register in her voices changes when she speaks of Lorne, the old Lorne, mind you, not the pastor.

Sarah said she remembered Peck was emptying his pockets onto the platform (he’d lost a Cat’s Eye marble back there in the field he was sure of it; either that or Inez his sister, who expressed a fondness for the marble, had stolen it from him) and they silently watched him. He collected the wildest things: rubber bands to be sure, but also bird feathers, marbles, torn up pieces of paper, rocks, laces, spent match covers, bottle caps.

Sarah said Peck mentioned something about his grandfather, who was terribly ill and would die a week later. He said holding a ball of string, “I would always know how to get back. Things tell you their history. History is what we throw away.”

“How does that work?” asked Lorne.

“Everything has a story, I guess. Take this match cover. Got a number on it. I found it by that telephone booth on Hickman, by the drugstore. I called the number last Wednesday, and a guy answered. I didn’t say anything. The guy says he can hear me breathing. ‘Angie, I can hear you breathin.’ Imagine that.”

“What did you do?” Sarah asked.

“Hung up. The guy was starting to cry…or something…It was a little weird. But I never forgot where I found this match cover. I got a mental picture of it right here.” He tapped his temple.

Sarah told us this next part several times, slightly varying the story each time; we’ve chosen to cobble together some of what Lorne told us to Sarah’s various versions of what proceeds. It was Cara.

She said, “Hey. Remember when we were kids and we played that game,” She said that so suddenly a silence fell over the group. Their collective breath hung in the enclosed air as if a cloud. (Sarah made a rambling reference to aero flux, the lightest substance on earth. We checked it out, interesting, but not apropos.)

“What was it called?” Peck asked.

“I can’t remember, but it was like all that stuff. I mean all those stories there. Like that pack of matches. We played it at birthdays…”

“Yeah,” screamed Sarah, mocking Cara. “It was sooo much fun.”

“No, I remember,” Peck offered. “There was a tray…and…” Although she didn’t want to, Sarah was recalling those birthday games. Red, white and blue rubber balls, taffy bars and twiddley-winks. The song, “Popcorn.”

“There’d be all this stuff on a tray. Scissors, cotton balls, paper clips, a broach, a blue balloon… Just stuff.”

“And cover it with a towel,” Peck said and motioned with his hands as if he was actually covering a tray of scissors, cotton balls and such. Cara pointed. “They’d turn around and take something away. But not the scissors.”

“Too big,” Lorne offered. He was leaning against Sarah’s legs. She gave him a punch in the shoulder, which didn’t register.

“Yeah. They’d take something small away, but something that was unique, the balloon, say.”

“Cover it up,” Peck said. “And then viola!”

Cara nods. “Parties. Birthday parties. I always got to sing ‘happy birthday’ solo.”

Peck said, “Sing it Cara, please!”

But Sarah wanted to hear more. “Wait, wait, what about the tray thingey?”

“They pulled the towel away and you had to guess what was missing. The one to do it won a prize.”

Lorne said, “Oh, okay, I think there’s a parable in the Bible like that…”

“Don’t start that, not now,” Sarah said and kissed him on the cheek. The kiss registered.

It was Peck that asked her to sing; he insisted, but didn’t look up from his lap. Neither Sarah nor Lorne could read Peck at this point. “Come on Cara, sing the birthday song. Sing for us.” He was looking at a jumble of things in his lap; he kept covering it all with a tissue, closing his eyes, and opening them again taking away the tissue.

“Sing the birthday song.” He had a vacant look in his eyes. Peck got that way sometimes, most thought it had to do with the grandfather’s ill health.

“She doesn’t want to do that, she’s not a trained monkey you guys…” Why would she want to sing, wouldn’t that be embarrassing? What was her secret?

And she did. She sang it straight through and it made the Cathedral, cavernous, as it was, seemingly resound with waves of joyous sound. The walls seemingly thawed, ever so briefly.

When she was done singing, it was as if someone had punched Sarah in the gut. Cara’s head dropped and her chin went to her chest. Barely audible she said, “You guys are great. Peck. Lorne, and SssSarah. God, it’s cold, my lips are numb.”

“Hey that spelling bee at Bible camp,” Sarah said nudging her. Cara laughed nervously.

“I heard he locked you in your cabin – is that right?” Lorne asked and was promptly kicked by Sarah. “Well, that’s what I heard.” His eyes said, “From you.”

Cara looked at Sarah and said: “Chrysanthemum.”

“It’s a hard word to spell.”

“C-h-r-y-s-a-n-t-h-e-m-u-m.”

“You…”

Cara closed her eyes, “C-h-r-y-s-a-n-t-h-e-m-u-m.”

“Cara: You could have won that damn spelling bee and then he wouldn’t have gotten so mad. And then…”

“I’m not his trained monkey.”

“But…”

“He’s always giving me words to spell at home, always making me do math formulas at the kitchen table, all those history books he bought and put in my room, for what? So people can think I’m a, a, fucking…”

“Goddamit, Cara…”

“…Fucking freak! Pull my string hear me. Sarah, you’ve seen how mad he can get. Chrysanthemums. God, we’ve got them growing in the backyard in the summer. Of course I knew how to spell it. And I knew he’d get mad. So I hid from him. I can hide places where no one will ever find me. That was a just a rumor that he locked me in the cabin.”

“So you let me win?”

Cara’s face brightened with a grin that subsided as quickly as it arrived. “You’re my friend.” Her voice rose at the end in a questioning tone.

“That’s not being a friend,” Sarah said.

“You let Sarah win?” Peck said and laughed.

“I didn’t lie. I did it so he’d get the idea.”

“We have secrets we don’t tell anyone else,” Sarah said more loudly than she intended. Why would you tell someone about your secrets unless you hoped they would tell you theirs?

“Sarah, spelling bee queen,” Peck said laughing.

“That’s not fair, is it – Lorne.”

“Well…”

“Come on for fuck sake’s are you going to let them make fun of me. Fuck! I’m smart.”

“I didn’t…”

Sing dammit sing. “Shut the fuck up.”

The only sound was the wind and the elevator boards creaking in protest. It was Peck who broke the solitude.

“I think we need the weed,” Peck said withdrawing a marijuana joint from his jacket pocket.“Blue sage – mondo.” He lighted the joint and passed it first to Sarah.

“I am to smart,” she said and took the joint in her fingers. After she’d finished toking, she handed the joint to Cara. She shook her head. “I just wanted to be your friend…”

“Come on one puff, you don’t have to inhale,” she said. Cara took the joint and put it to her mouth. The end grew brightly as she sucked on the joint. She immediately began to cough.

“Here, here, don’t drop it,” Lorne said taking it from her. “Hockey players need to relax, too.” He took a hit.

For a while there was nothing but the sound of the wind, gusts of snow at their feet. Sarah was stoned. It was good grass, and soon all four of them were high. They didn’t even hear the storm raging outside they were so high. Lorne howled like a wolf, baying, his throat stretched, his head thrown back. When Peck barked in reply he stopped immediately; a surprised look formed on his face. He smiled sheepishly at Sarah. Although she’d taken only one puff and coughed until her eyes filled with tears, Cara was clearly stoned too. “Gone for good,” she said, and laughed. Everyone else laughed too and soon they were all rolling around the platform, “gone, gone, gone…” Peels of laughter and shouting came from the wrestling mass.

“I’m having a vision quest,” Peck said and looked at something on the floor that wasn’t there. “You know like the young Indian warrior sent out into the forest to conquer his shadow.”

“Like Job, or Ezekiel,” offered Lorne, who also stared at the ground.

“I just go to my room…” Sarah said, her voice trailing off. In her room she’d been practicing her singing; at choir it had been announced a new solo would be incorporated into the Christmas Eve service. Sarah wanted that solo badly.

“They rolled the rock away and he wasn’t there…”

“And the young warrior saw his future in the cold eyes of the wolf, the wind in the trees, the way of the water…”

“Can I be your friend?”

They turned together and looked at her. Cara was searching their faces, looking from one to another. “Peck…”

What if she caught a cold? “She must stay here the night. If you really want to piss off the old man – like Leslie did – you have to stay here tonight.”

“Sarah’s right, you must have your own vision quest, your own time here alone to gather your thoughts, to…”

“Calm and quiet the soul,” Lorne said and raised his hands into the air. He was imitating his father.

Peck pulled Cara off the platform. “Our own initiate. We must exercise.” He took a pair of skate laces from his pocket scattering pennies and marbles from his coat pocket on the white ground.

“What should I do?” Cara asked and dramatically thrust out her thin wrists. Peck tied up Cara’s wrists.

“Lock her in her room,” said Sarah and Lorne, grabbing her. They pointed toward the tool closet in the corner where Peck had slept. Lock up that voice. Drown the monkey. Make her useless. Chrysanthemum. “C-h-r-s-a-n-t-h-m-u-m,” Sarah tried.

“Friends are friends forever…” Cara sung. It was a popular Christian song back then. It was her favorite. “Never and never, ever shall we not be…”

“Into your room…” the old door swung open, and into the darkness they pitched Cara who was giggling. “Chrysanthemums,” she squealed, “Chrysanthemums.”

All three pushed the door and it slammed shut—and it crunched. “This place is so old,” Lorne said looking up at the walls, the open roof. Clouds didn’t so much as float by as race through the opening.

“I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous,” Lorne said looking up at the clouds and then the closet. He was a good boy, the apple of his parents’ eye. “Come on Sarah, I’ll walk you home.”

“Continue.”

“But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother…”

“Father?” Peck offered.

“My soul is like the weaned child that is with me…”

“Cara?” Sarah said and opened the door.

Cara was sitting on her haunches. “I’ll show ‘em.”

This seemed to inspire Peck for he leaned in and kissed Cara on the forehead. She closed the door behind her.

“Call you later,” Sarah said at the door, which would not shut. Lorne lifted an oil-saturated railway tie from a nearby pile of garbage and leaned it against the door – He maintains to this day he did not do this, Peck did. Sarah told us differently.

The light inside the Cathedral grew darker. Her voice, clear, but obviously scared, could be heard through the flimsy door. “Peck, was it warm enough in here for you?”

He didn’t answer her question. Instead Peck said, “This is what it means to leave your mark on the world. Stare into the darkness and do not be afraid.”

Not a good thing to do, mention being afraid. Sarah stood in the doorway with Lorne. He smelled her hair. He wanted her, Sarah could tell. Soon he would have her and he would be a man and she his women. Peck turned from the door and before leaving bent down to picked up something from the ground. He held it up saying it was a brass pin the kind used to squeeze through an eyelet of a badge that could be fastened to a lapel. “Hey look –,” he said turning. Sarah couldn’t tell what he was looking at or what Peck was talking about. After this there was nothing but the moonlight being chewed by shadows, a door, an oily column of wood, a wall of indecipherable graffito. The Cathedral shuddered against the bracing winds.

“Cara! This is your re-birth!” Peck had to scream to be heard over the howl as they exited the Cathedral.

“Goodbye,” she sung in a voice that rang in Sarah’s bones.

A few blocks from the Cathedral the driving wind made walking difficult. Snow was beginning to whip hard from the dark sky. A car was abandoned in a ditch and was being devoured by a snowdrift. People were watching from their living room windows glad to be out of the storm.

We speculate, given what we now know, sometime later, how long we can’t be sure, but it couldn’t have been long the door to the small space where Cara had been stashed, opened. Cara saw that she was in trouble…

They all last saw Cara on Tinker, humming away not a care in the world, that’s what they told her parents – no one said a word about stopping at the Cathedral, only that they had walked home together after school in the storm and then parted ways at Tinker. Why? The three of them agreed Cara was really trying to piss off the old man. She’s found a really good hiding place – just like Skinhead’s daughter. They decided to keep it “hush-hush,” just to make sure. They weren’t in trouble, were they? No one wanted what Larry got; no one wanted to be “exercised,” or called an abomination. Cara was going to be a heroine. She was going to be a whole different person. Her name would be spray-painted on the Cathedral wall. It would all work out. Or so they thought. We did too.

That Saturday morning, Sarah called the others. She was crying a lot, unsure of their theory that Cara had finally run away. Lorne told us he thought about hanging up once or twice he was so embarrassed. Still, he stayed on the line. “She’s alright.” He said this but really didn’t believe it. “Should we go back there? How could she move that board we…”

“I’ll go and check.”

“No,” Sarah pleaded with Lorne. “Don’t go. Don’t go. It’s too cold.”

She sounded desperate to Lorne. He had to calm her down; “All right, I won’t.” There was no way Cara could move that board… no way. He looked out his bedroom window at the wonder Christ had beckoned. Lorne sang, in his hoarse singing voice, a few words of Cara’s favorite song to Sarah over the phone: “Though it’s hard to let you go/In the Father’s hands we know/ That a lifetime’s not too long …”

“You’re terrible.”

In the afternoon, around two, Lorne hung up the telephone after talking with Sarah again. His bedroom window was covered in snow. There had been quite the blizzard all day long. And Cara had still not come home. This was not good, not good for anyone and we all secretly felt that way. Barry and Wanda, understandably, were worried. Had Sarah seen her? They had called Lorne too.

No, no I haven’t seen her.

He read the Bible on his bed and later, because he couldn’t stand it any longer, he walked downstairs to his father. During the trip downstairs, Lorne practiced what he was going to say… and what his father would say in return. “My God, what have we done…? Forgive me.” But he didn’t.

Lorne, Peck and Sarah kept quiet, as much as teenagers can, until they could find out if Cara had left on her own, or else someone took her. There were two Caras then: one strong and determined to brave the elements; she was as strong as her voice, embodied, the other Cara, she was defenseless in the clutches of something evil and overpowering.

It stormed a swirling and ugly constant drive of snow and ice all that day. Events were canceled and no one left their homes. The storm didn’t break until late Saturday night. People had to shovel their way past the mound of snow on their front stoops and outside their back doors. Snowmobiles had the run of the city.

Sunday morning, Sarah was at the breakfast table staring into a bowl of soggy oatmeal her mother had made. The radio was on. “A severe weather watch is in effect until three p.m.,” the announcer said. “Precipitation…” Her father coughed, Sarah looked up, but he wasn’t there at all. He was gone too. We were told by Mrs. Simon and Pastor Reimer that Sarah was prone to having conversations with people who were there. Her father had long left the family behind and The Crossing members could still see her walking through the snow, talking with someone not there.

Sarah stared into her oatmeal. “And now today’s top stories…” She held her breath. It had been several days. It was a few hours before church. That day, she would encounter pews of faces turned to get a look at her, judgment in their eyes – words traveled fast – “she was last seen by friends.” Cara was the top item on the news. She kept her head down as CQOB AM – Sounds of the River – told the world her friend was missing. There were two Caras then: one singing in the falling snow, her face turned upward, the other, nothing but vapor.

Sarah stared into the lumpy and graying oatmeal, the milk turning a tinge of blue.

Missing, she heard. Tears welled from her eyes, heavy and stinging. With Cara’s name hanging in the charged air, she felt the room temperature drop. The kitchen light dimmed. Everything was blurry. Everything was oatmeal.

Her breakfast, that one-tablespoon she forced in her mouth, churned in her stomach. The room jerked violently, spinned; the cold in her veins made her shake – she felt cold! Sarah never felt cold. The news was a roar of white noise, a rush of cold air. The oatmeal rose in her throat, Cara! Sarah leaned forward, tried to balance herself, but couldn’t stop; she vomited the lone spoonful of oatmeal, then yellow egg yolk-like phlegm, strings of translucent, rubbery spit, flecked with small triangles of blood. Sarah brushed her hair out of the mess and sat back, spittle on her chin.

At this time, Lorne was probably sitting on the edge of his bed, Bible resting on his lap, ready for church. Clandestine reconnaissance tells us, we don’t have to picture this and that our best guess is probably the correct one. Once, we spied on him standing on Wilma Hendrickson’s bed. At that vantage point we could look through our classmate’s bedroom window, across the side yards and into Lorne’s room. It was quite exciting when we discovered this. Wilma took our oath not to divulge our efforts. When we spied from her room, we turned out the lights of course, so he’d have less of a chance of seeing us, seeing him.

On the Sunday of Cara’s disappearance, we were, quite understandably, unable to be at Wilma’s keeping Lorne under surveillance. We were home. So, as in many cases, we have to rely on the fidelity of the interviewee as to the veracity of facts. That day, he remembered for us, though he wasn’t quite sure of the soundness of his memory, he was suffering from heartburn and anxiety. He stared at the floor not far from his feet, wanting to concentrate, but unable to because of the Heinrickson’s dog, Pulsar. Whenever anyone went by, it barked, a full belly woof, woof… He wanted to stand, that was all; stand and yell out the bedroom window, try to calm the dog down. We knew what was coming. We knew because Wilma had told us. She had the lights out that day. She was watching from behind her curtain. She saw. She told us. This is one of the pieces that we held but never understood as to what puzzle it belonged to at all.

Woof, woof…

Lorne wanted to be a man, someone his parents would be proud of. There were two Caras then: one he found in his thoughts, the other, outside the window and missing Woof, woof… She was the one everyone was talking about. Cara. Woof, woof… He couldn’t concentrate. He rose and dropped the Bible onto his bed and went into his closet. Woof, woof… He took out his hockey stick and carried it outside. Woof, woof…And “calmed the dog down,” as he told us. Wilma watched from her bedroom as Lorne split open Pulsar’s head with his hockey stick. Even when Pulsar failed to move, or bark, Lorne kept hitting the dog again and again and again… He was yelling, what Wilma thought was: Get behind me, Satan… Wilma kept quiet though, for years, because she was good Christian from The Crossing. And Christians don’t spy. But mostly, she feared Lorne and his hockey stick.

Back in the house, he closed his eyes and let out a breath. His brother Gerhard met him on the stairs back in the house. His brother’s head was down: “Quiet now,” Lorne said, “I can be strong.” With an audible gulp he passed his elder brother on the stairs and continued to his room. There, he said, he quoted scripture.

“… From this time on and forevermore,” he read on the open page. A shaft of bright winter light fell across the letters. He raised his eyes and stood looking out the window. It was quiet, but the sky was dark. A winter storm was gathering in the clouds that had drifted in from the edge of the prairie.

Peck planned his disappearance. We know this from his journals. It might be prudent for an aside at this point. Perhaps you can help us out. A few years ago Peck became involved with an on-line community called One Thousand Journals. They have a Web site. The community exchanges journals with each recipient adding passages and artwork to the journals before sending them on their way. They travel the world. And people talk about the journals via the site; entries are transcribed and commented on. Well, two of Peck’s journals got into the system, but never made it back out.

We got this from the site: “The Search for Journals 152 and 234: Journals #152 and #234 were contributed to by a fellow named Peck, (also known as Tarrance Simons). Tragically, he died recently in a hotel fire. His family and friends have asked that if we find the journals that they be allowed to transcribe his entries. Peck was an avid journal writer, and helped start off both these journals.

“We attempted to track them down once before, but nothing came of it. The more we think about it, the more it bothers us. It shouldn't be that hard to find them, so we're going to try again, this time with your help.

“Journal 152 was taken to Narooma, New South Wales, Australia, and dropped off in an unknown location while Journal 234 was taken to the Rainbow Serpent Festival in 2001, and given to a girl named Claire. From there it was suppose to go to a Adelaide DJ named Nixon. Last know location was Townsville, outside of Brisbane, and probably heading for Darwin. Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated. Please e-mail us with any information you might have. Thank you.”

Of course nothing came of the Web site’s appeal. But we checked recently and found this:

“News UPDATE: Well, we've had one lead, sent in from someone who works at the Rainbow Serpent Festival, and tried to track down DJ Nixon... but it didn't work out... does anyone know a DJ Nixon? Or a Claire that attended the festival?”

And again:

“UPDATE: A note sent to the site: Would the missing diary happen to have been in possession of a DJ named “Nickson” not “Nixon?” This would make more sense, as I don't know about anyone else, but I've never heard of a DJ named Nixon. Nickson is an Australian boy of amazing talent who was alive and well the last time he was in Townsville. This could all be useless info, but it was just a thought! Maybe it’s worth a try?”

Apparently not.

“We e-mailed DJ Nickson... and it's not the same DJ.”

The journals, in which Peck describes exactly, we speculate, what happened the night of November 30th, 1984 remain out there. If you come across them, let us know.

At church that Sunday, Pastor Reimer made an announcement about Cara. It had been since Friday since Cara had been seen. “If you have… Have you seen Cara? …The Neufelds are concerned, they haven’t seen her…” She was just hiding from her old man, the murmurs went. This was Cara breaking out, we said. What’s missing from chrch? The pastor asked for prayers, for miracles large and small. The parents had asked for volunteers to go door to door with her picture. We went along too.

Sarah told us begrudgingly that she nearly peed in the pew that day. The solo – the one she coveted so badly – might go to her instead if Cara never made back in time for the Christmas Eve service and choir concert. Sarah wanted to scream; she wondered if they could see the guilt on her face. She pretended to pray, a lot, her face buried in her hands. The service was about the miracles of Jesus. Lorne was particularly “jazzed.” We remember him talking excitedly at the church door about spitting on the ground, and using the spittle to gather up the dust into clay and spreading clay on our eyes, washing them with snow. We said he could, if he wanted to. We’d volunteer, we said to no avail. Sarah stared at a scoop of crystallized snow in her hand: What a wonderful idea to make something out of dirt. Sarah threw the ball of snow aside and began kicking the ground near the shoveled sidewalk; she kicked at the ground with her heel until she came to the dead grass and then kicked her heel in some more. The ground was hard and was unyielding, we could tell, but she kept on kicking and kicking with her heel, each thud making a dent in the ground. Finally there it was: Clay. Lorne and Peck stopped their conversation to give Sarah a look. Lorne raised his magical eyebrow. She cocked her head and smiled to indicate she was not going totally crazy. Their conversation started up again.

There are, of course no recordings and no one told us about this particular conversation. We observed it ourselves. So at this point, you’ll have to take our word for it.

“But then he disappeared,” Peck said.

“Who the blind guy?” she asked staring down at the brown muck near her heel.

“No Jesus, shit-kicker. He’s not around, just like RimMe said.”

“Don’t call him RimMe,” Lorne protested.

“Jesus was already gone. He always is.”

“But he comes back.” Sarah had a lump of mud in her hands and was turning it over and over caking her fingers with muck. “He just has this way cool hiding place.”

“Right,” said Peck walking away. “Right. I think I saw him just the other day pushing a shopping cart full of ratty old newspapers and skanky beer bottles.”

“Jesus was God’s messenger. Through Him is the way. We shouldn’t turn away…” But Lorne was talking to a ghost of Peck, for he’d already walked around the corner of the church.

They agreed to meet at the Cathedral that night because Cara had still not called nor returned home. When they pulled the towel away what was missing? What had she done? Left a clue for them like Leslie Skinner: Gone For Good! Yor. Talk was Leslie was caught by Skinhead in the family room watching a video with some other girl, and they were smoking dope and lying on top of one another. The movie was “Yor,” a cheesy science fiction movie. Both girls were naked. “Yor,” became slang, shorthand, for exclamations like “no way!” or “surprise!” In the box, Exhibit forty-two, you’ll find a copy of the movie. We’ve scanned it for clues, but couldn’t find anything; the movie itself really makes no sense at all.

We saw some of this, but mostly we heard about it from Sarah, and to a lesser degree, Lorne. Peck’s journals were a little chaotic on these dates. They met that Sunday night to go back over to the Cathedral. The snow at Dahlsip’s Yard was to their hips. They trudged through the field to the Cathedral. We walked stealthily behind in the footprints they made in the snow. Peck, Lorne and Sarah had to shovel with their hands to get the snow away from the gaping doorway. Inside drifts of fresh, undisturbed snow covered the floor; the place looked like no one had been there. “Just like your Cosmic Christ,” Peck said. “Here, but He’s left no trace.”

“You’re just being mean.” Lorne gave Peck a light shove but it was enough to send Peck headfirst into a snow bank. Sitting up, dusting snow off his hair, Peck said, “Like Jesus wasn’t mean to Larry. Or my grandfather?” Peck’s grandfather was suffering from Alzheimer’s at the time and would die in a few days.

“Cut it out you guys,” Sara said she said helping Peck up. We vaguely remember hearing this, but maybe not. At our vantage point, Lorne seemed to ignore this. “Don’t say that. Look I’m sorry about your grandfather, but you don’t know.” His voice was deafening in the still winter air.

“Oh, I know.” Peck was up brushing snow from his coat sounding a little intimidated.

There was no moon that night so inside was dark and colder. They stepped inside not saying a word. The ground, beneath the layer of snowfall, was hard. The snow made our boots squeak. We walked as gingerly as we could and watched from behind a rusted piece of machinery.

The tool closet door, still barred with the oil-stained railway tie, was encased in a pane of ice. There are no cracks. The ice was perfect, like skin. Lorne lifted the tie aside after several tugs and grunts. The door did not fall open as they hoped. Ice still held the door in place, stubbornly.

“Who wants to…?” Sarah began, when Peck grabbed the handle and tugged leaning back on his haunches. His fell backwards as the door jarred open. There was nothing but darkness, a black so dark it appeared to be blue. The darkness gave them nothing. On all fours Peck crawled to the entrance of the tool closet. He flipped the top off his lighter and ignited it. They leaned in. The darkness was hiding nothing. There was no Cara. She was gone. “Thank God.”

Sarah said she wept, holding a hand to her lips. Sarah told us what she was thinking back then. It’s not solid, but it’s all we’ve got at this point. Sarah wondered if Cara was missing, but not gone? As in: not dead. Sarah, who believed the world was people by “mythical creatures.” One creature in particular that had previously come to her aid was perhaps Cara’s savior? Had He come for her? Did He carry her in his white arms? Where did he leave the message? Stones? Stones? Or was that little bitch making fun of everyone and hiding? She looked deeper into the flicking orange-lit enclosure. Into the corners her eyes strained. Up on the walls, on the ground, up to its ceiling. Anything?

“This is good news right?” she asked tearing a shard of ice from the elevator wall.

“This changes everything. Now we don’t know. We don’t…”

“Well, Peck. Where could she have gone? Maybe she’s at home right now? Thank God.” We knew otherwise.

“Lorne, you barely got that board off.”

“Maybe somebody helped her.”

“Who, who helped her? How did she tell them – telepathically?”

Lorne shook his head and turned away. Peck stepped into the closet and closed the door behind him. “What are you doing?” Sarah asked tugging on the door, which she could not get open. “Let go of the handle.”

“I want to see what it’s like in here,” Peck’s disembodied voice was muted through the door. It sounded like a ghost. “What did Cara…it’s not dark in here, your eyes get used to it.”

Sarah let the door handle go and walked away. She went to Lorne and grabbed his hand. He was standing near the platform, looking through the doorway to the river. We ducked out of sight.

“Now what?” he whispered. Her head was against his shoulder. The sound of his voice vibrated through his body and into her; Sarah described it for us. She said getting a dreamy look in her eyes that she could have rested there forever. Finally, she said into his arm, “Maybe we should call her parents.” Now, that would fix her. She would be grounded and couldn’t sing…Behind them Peck was standing. “You have the right to remain silent…” They turned.

“…Anything you say may be used in your exerciseism.”

“It’s exorcism,” Lorne said matter of factly correcting Peck. Their breath hung in the air as they surveyed the inside of the elevator, whose walls were veined with thick ice and covered in hoarfrost, which made every surface appear to be scared with sulfur. There was nothing to indicate Cara had even been there. “Oh dear God. What have we done?” Lorne asked into Sarah’s neck. She threw the shard of ice hitting the wall with a muffled thud, before falling to the ground in one solid piece. When they departed, we ran and picked up the icy spike its heaviness in our mittened hands a wondrous thing.

That Monday, Sarah was at her desk when Principal Skinner announced over the public address system to the entire student body that Cara Neufeld was missing; he said students would be taking a portion of the day to help search for her. For us all, there were two Caras then: one an empty desk and the other, a faint remembrance. Few knew Cara, like we did.

The news rippled through the school like a shockwave. In its wake, a clamor rose as students gasped out loud or exchanged exclamations with classmates. That day, Sarah turned to look at Peck, who was usually in her homeroom. His desk was empty too, but no one organized a search party for him. Everybody knew Peck. We all thought wrong.

Sarah and Lorne kept together, moving from their lockers to their homerooms clutching books to their chests. They were quiet, overwhelmed. Peck was nowhere, doing nothing. No one expected much, from him. Both newspapers had stories of Cara on their front pages. Her picture was on the TV. It is the dead of winter and a little girl is missing, every story read. The TV announcers on all the stations sounded dire. New Quantico stopped in its tracks. At every dinner table, at every coffee and doughnut shop, the conversation centered on the missing girl; where could she be, who had taken her, how could this happen here? Children don’t go missing in here conveniently forgetting about Leslie. Everyone looked for Cara. All abandoned buildings, under every bridge, along tree lines and bluffs, the city searched to no avail. Parents kept their children in, and schools talked about street-proofing the student body. The authorities said they had no clues. The media brought fresh ones daily. The weather remained bitterly cold. Sarah heard the experts on the radio say the elements were unforgiving she remembered this to us explicitly, as if to relish in the fact the winter was bitter. During announcements, Principal Skinner informed the school that once again following first period, all students would be part of a school-wide search party. Homeroom teachers were to give out the instructions. A notice, photocopied on bright pink paper, would be distributed throughout the community. School prayer mentioned her name. The “Sermon To The Birds” was mentioned as if to placate those who thought prayer was nothing but a waste of time; God provides, in His time. Teachers asked students to see the guidance counselor if they needed to talk.

“What did you guys do with Cara?” someone asked Sarah innocently. Every one knew Cara had walked home with them; it was in all the papers, on every radio program, on every dinnertime news hour.

Without turning, she whispered, “Nothing.”

Lorne was the first to panic.

“We are going to fry in hell.” When Lorne said this, Peck replied, What like red devils and pitchforks and rising columns of fire.” Sarah said Lorne moved to punch Peck, but drew back.

Peck continued, “Big fucking joke. It’s just one big lie. We’re just shitty little dots of insignificance. There’s no hell and there ain’t no heaven. If there was…”

“How do you know,” Lorne shot back.

Peck gave him a look.

“Guys guys, this isn’t helping things. We have to say something now to the parents, we have to,” Sarah offered. Cara had been missing over a week. The weather was bad all that time. During that time Peck’s grandfather grew sicker and died; Lorne was scouted by the National Hockey League and Sarah told us it was then that her father came back into their lives, ever so briefly, before leaving again. They had excuses for what they’d not done. But finally, Sarah told us it was the barrage of media that convinced her they needed to speak up. She wondered, then, why Cara hadn’t spoken up if she’d run away, wouldn’t she have called back by now. We wondered too.

“Tell your parents then, go ahead. And when she turns up in another town serving truckers coffee under a new name, don’t come crying to me.”

The parents called one another; Peck’s parents, Terry and Mindy wanted to call the police immediately and while everyone agreed that would be the prudent thing to do, the other parents suggested they first make sure, to avoid the inevitable police. Lorne’s father had rushed over to the Cathedral and confirmed what his son had told him. Peck’s father said the children were an embarrassment. Peck should be taught a lesson.

Cara was gone. The Penner family fell into deep prayer. There were two Caras; one was in a closet, locked in there by her friends and now gone and the other was out in the wider world living under an assumed name, living another life as someone else. At least she wasn’t dead, at least Cara was still out there, but where and why were questions still to be answered. One thing was certain; Cara was not where the children had left her. Cara was gone.

Sarah, Lorne and Peck’s parents met at the Penner house to discuss things. We take what happened from testimony Sarah gave to us and it’s found in our notes. It’s incredible what transpired. We still wonder to this day.

Lorne’s parents asked question after question.

“Are you sure that’s where you left her?”

“Was she okay then?”

“Has she contacted any one of you?”

“Have you told anyone else?”

“Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”

“Why?”

“It was just a game,” Peck offered before Terry slapped him across the face.

Sarah couldn’t speak. She sat on the couch; her mother’s head in her lap, crying. Peck, finally with some prodding, produced a story that gave everything save the laces, the tying of her hands behind Cara’s back. This stumped us, when we heard of it years later: Our Peck? Sarah surmised, it gave him a perverse sense of control over his insistent parents. No one called Barry and Wanda, just yet. Maybe she would show up they said, maybe it was just a prank and she was a prankster. Right?

“Did she talk about running away?”

Meanwhile our house was dead quiet. The police had phoned; Barry drove up and down the roads of the neighborhood. Friends had been called and they gave muted responses to inquiries.

“No, I haven’t…”

“The last time…”

“Yes, the last time…”

Lies: Some of the parents, some of the Neufeld friends lied, we know that now.

The media coverage became too much for the families, they feared that their children’s names, their names, would begin to circulate. Something had to be done. A meeting was called after Cara had been missing thirteen days. Lorne’s parents, Karl and Connie called our parents. All the other parents were telephoned as well using The Crossing’s church directory.

Our house was tidied up and coffee was made. We were sent downstairs when everyone arrived, while Peck, Lorne and Sarah joined the adults. We sat on the basement steps, the door slightly ajar. We recollect the following:

“Barry, Wanda. Lorne has something to say,” Karl began.

Lorne began to cry. “Oh God, what…” He clamped his mouth shut and began again, wiping away tears from his cheeks. He presented the events of their time with Cara. We didn’t hear a false word. It was all true. “And that’s the last we saw of her…” A presence filled the house.

There were two Caras then: one, a missing girl, and the other girl floating somewhere in the room.

Barry and Wanda sat together weeping, heaving, with their conjoined hands in Barry’s lap, Sarah told us. “Sorry,” Peck said but again Terry intervened grabbing his arm and forcing him to sit down on the floor. Sarah sat in her mother’s arms.

“Oh dear God why, you mean bastards!” Wanda yelled before being restrained by Barry. “Our baby.”

We rose to the door, and peeked around the corner into the living room. The room simmered. Pastor Reimer stood beside our parents his hands on their shoulders. He began softly to recite a prayer and one by one everyone in the room dropped to their knees or bowed their head in prayer.

Wanda prayed so forcibly, her eyelids clamped shut, that she felt blood straining in her throat and behind her eyes, she told us later. She wanted so badly for everyone to disappear for all of it to be over. She threw her glasses across the room; they landed in a plastic palm plant. Barry consoled her. “It was an accident,” he could be heard saying, “It was. She’ll be fine. I know.”

“Do we go to the police?” asked Lilly, Sarah’s mother. Sarah hiccupped a cry and sank into her mother’s chest.

Principal Skinner stepped forward raising his hand, palm forward. “Not with this… not yet. Remember my own daughter…” His words hung in the air. When Skinner’s own daughter went missing there was fear she had been abducted. Three days after her initial disappearance, the daughter had called home to say she was “gone for good and would never be coming back.” He never again mentioned her by name.

“Are you insane? This is my daughter you’re talking about,” Wanda raged, trying to rise. Barry held her in his arms. She began to cry anew. The room fell silent over her tears. Peck looked around the room.

Skinner again, all jumpy eyes, we imagined given what we saw in his face at school: “For now, we just need to get Cara back. We have to think since she wasn’t where they left her, that she’s sought shelter or… Wanda, I know what it’s like to lose a daughter to…” No one offered to finish his sentence. Was Skinner’s daughter pregnant, crazy, high on drugs, did she run off with a carney or a Catholic; no one knew. There were suspicions.

Sarah looked across the room to see the parents all nodding. They all knew Principal Skinner’s daughter had run away because her daddy liked her more than her mommy.

Gone for good. Yor Gone for Good. Yor? What’s missing from Yor?

That night, the search began. But no discussions were ever held with police about what Sarah, Lorne and Peck had done, because she was no longer where they left her. Someone or something had intervened after Cara had been placed in that closet. Someone had come afterwards and had taken Cara away. Now the search was hot for her trail away from Dahlsip’s Yard.

From our own observations and through interviews years later, we came to an understanding of what Barry was doing to find his daughter. That Monday, Barry drove around a lot peering into the darkest of corners and the most complex brambles and twists in woods and fences. Often he would stop, get out of his car, and walk over to lift a board, or peer through a thicket. “You just want to find her,” he said, “Just find something. It’s the not-knowing. Crazy.” He talked to street people and teen-agers downtown; he learned a lot, but not about Cara. But he kept up his vigil. He didn’t trust the police to find his own daughter since they, “had other priorities.” He drove his car day and night. Through his own neighborhood, he canvassed by foot. He took his time, and examined every garden shed, derelict building, and empty field – he felt responsible for not finding her in the shed that held her. But in his defense, Barry had been so vigilant in his search; he was absent from work almost every day. For a few weeks the garage owner was sympathetic, after over a month of absences, Barry was let go. He was on foot when he met her. It was a bitter cold January day when he walked on Pigeon George’s tract.

Every town has a Pigeon George. His house was the local eyesore, unpainted, its yard strewn with old cars, buckets and rusted lawn furniture. On Pigeon George’s property, which had once been a farm, stood an old, gray-board barn atop which rested hundreds of pigeons. The police had been there several times, checked out the yard, the barn and Pigeon George’s house – which legend had that it was filled to the ceiling with newspapers, old maps, catalogues and books – and half consumed children, if you believed the rumors. Out walking the week Cara disappeared, Barry had seen something in the window of Pigeon George’s house; a curtain moved and there was a small hand – he was sure of it.

He banged on the door. If George answered, Barry was going to storm in and to find the one who was connected to that hand. It might be Cara, he told himself. It might be her. It’s possible that the police missed, they have a lot to think about.

The police could miss a little girl. On our recording you can hear Barry’s voice quiver, even now:

Bang, bang.

Is she in there, is she…come out, come out wherever you are, wherever you are…

Bang.

As he told it, the door to Pigeon George’s swung open and standing there, making Barry suck in his breath, was a woman with long blonde hair, white skin, and the bluest of eyes. He immediately wanted to say he was sorry, that he was intruding, but – Cara.

“Have you…”

“Cara Neufeld. Are you Cara Neufeld’s father?”

He just shook his head, his chin wouldn’t work, his lips wouldn’t move. He just stared into her eyes, pools deep and warm. “Come in out of the cold. Come in please. Have some coffee.” She led him in taking hold of his arm. Gently leading him out of the cold and into the warm, overly warm, house which was alive with cats and dogs, and radios and TVs all going, all moving and mewing, moaning and nudging him.

“Come on in the kitchen, my name is Marta.”

“Have you seen my daughter?” It was a reflexive action. He simply opened his mouth and it was the first thing out; it was second nature.

“Sorry, no. We’ve told the police each and every time that they were here that we have not seen your daughter. If we had not been shown her picture, we would have never known who she was…”

Barry asked, “We?”

“Papa and me.”

He sat down at a large wooden kitchen table. Her back was to him as she poured cups of coffee. “Are you George’s wife?”

“No, I’m Pigeon George’s daughter.”

“I’m sorry, I, Pigeon George,” he said laughing somewhat, embarrassed. It was hard to say those words, to call her father by the name the community had despairingly given him on account of the pigeons on the roof of his barn.

“If you don’t tell anyone that he likes it, the name I mean, I’ll give you a few of these cookies.”

Barry felt like he was all of ten years old. He stared at the plate of cookies Marta was holding in front of him. He took off his gloves and retrieved a cookie from the plate. She placed the coffee on the table and sat down opposite him. He smelt cinnamon in the air. Their conversation came easily, as if they’d known each other for years. “Anything new?”

“Nothing. Nothing’s showed up. I am beginning to mourn her, but I want so desperately to…” She straightened her back and took the coffee into her cupped hands. Barry looked at her fine boned hands, white and beautiful. “It’s very, very hard to talk about it, no doubt. It’s personal, terribly personal and…”

Barry leaned back, the coffee cup in his hand. It was like they were husband and wife talking over the day’s events. He felt at ease with her. She was warm and inviting, she was gentle.

“My papa is in the barn. I had thought you were him coming through the yard.” She smiled broadly.

“Your father…” Barry was picturing the old man in his plaid shirt, buttoned up to his chin come rain or shine, his green work pants, his black boots and the farm machinery baseball cap. The muttering as he walked down the street in his strange stride, his eyes downcast.

“It was the war. The second one that was supposed to be the last war to end all wars.”

“You seem to know…”

“What people think of my papa? That he’s a nut, that he lives in such filth he could possibly abduct little girls and keep them in this house?”

That stung. “No…”

She stood, “Sorry, no that was the wrong thing to say.”

There was a flutter at the window, which the cats and dogs noticed by moving about the kitchen. Barry hadn’t noticed how tidy the kitchen was until that point. There was no doubt the house was old, but it warm inside and well kept.

“Would you like to meet my papa, he’s out in the barn?” Barry nodded. They walked together through the labyrinth of old machinery, cars, and barrels in the yard to the barn. At the door, she knocked twice, a staccato knock and opened the door for Barry.

He went into the barn and was temporarily blinded. When he got used to the light, a diffuse, dusky light streaming in through open windows and cracks between the boards, Barry was stunned to find the barn, from floor to ceiling, lined with cages and perches. Hundreds of pigeons, their eyes blank, their small heads turning, gazed at him. They flew in great sweeping circles in through a hole in the barn roof, through the open window, which at one time must have served as the hayloft.

A chocolate brown pigeon landed on Barry’s shoulder. “Oh, shit!” He staggered back into Marta who held him briefly. The bird simply rose and flew up and onto a wooden perch.

“That’s Lady, the friendly one.”

“I’ll say.”

“Come over here.” Marta said taking Barry by the arm. He could see the old man now over at a workbench, a pigeon on both his shoulders. His back was to them, a radio was playing and he was singing low.

“Papa,” she whispered. He didn’t turn. “Papa…”

“Helium, helium…” he was muttering, or at least that’s how Barry heard it, “helium…helium…”

“Papa!”

He turned. The corners of his mouth rose. “Shalom…” he said and there was a great pause, filled with the cooing of birds. He looked Barry over. “Mr. Neufeld have you found your daughter yet?” Barry shook his head. The old man held a pair of scissors in his hands. He was wearing his plaid shirt, his work pants, and his black boots. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows.

“Thank you for asking. But no, nothing yet. We’re looking...”

Pigeon George seemed to contemplate this. He looked about the barn at his birds, swooping, cooing. He muttered something and turned to place a rolled up piece of paper on the leg of one of the pigeons. Barry peered around the short man to see that he was handling the bird firmly, but gently. He cupped the bird in one hand while placing the paper on the leg. Without uttering a word he turned and gave the bird to Barry. He motioned for Barry to hold it like he did. Holding the bird, he looked at Marta and then back to Pigeon George who bent at his waist and threw open his hands up and into the air. Barry did as he was instructed. He bent his waist slightly, crouching, the bird cooing in his hands. He leaned upward and opened his hands and released the bird. It rose, its talons scratching the palms of Barry’s hands. The bird circled the expanse of the barn ceiling once, found the opening in the roof and flew out. “And they come back?”

“They always come back, unless…” Marta began. The old man had returned to the workbench and was affixing another paper note to the leg of the second pigeon. He turned and released the bird, which circled as the first did and exited the barn through the same opening. Pigeon George smiled briefly and walked past Barry. When he was near him, he patted Barry on the shoulder. He left the barn, mumbling something low and constant. Barry watched the sun swallow the man as he opened the barn door and closed it behind him.

He stood there for a moment with Marta watching the birds. She cleaned up the workbench, replacing tools to their proper place, piling paper in a stack in a tray. She picked up one rolled up piece of paper from a small pile of similar rolls, and gave it to Barry.

“Here, open it.”

Barry unfurled the small paper roll. “Have you seen Cara?” was written on the paper in pencil.

“Come back and see us any time you want Mr. Neufeld.”

Inevitably, Barry would find himself back at Pigeon George’s home. It would be after a long walk, one he told Wanda he was going on to look for Cara. And he did, he looked for her ceaselessly, but hunger would arise, or thirst and he would turn and find himself too far from home and close to Pigeon George’s. He would turn and the wind would whisper, “Marta.” One part of him would chide, the other would encourage him to explore all of the life’s options.

Often the old man was in the yard, rummaging through piles of sheet metal or looking through crates, muttering and murmuring to himself. Barry would walk up to him and say hello, but Pigeon George wouldn’t turn, wouldn’t stop his low words, his rummaging. Barry couldn’t tell what he was looking for… “Helium…helium …” it sounded like and the searching, his ungloved hands continue to pry, to disturb, to move among the imaginary brambles and confusion in crates and buried beneath burnished sheet metal.

Barry would turn and find Marta at the window, the curtain held aside by one of her fine white hands, gesturing for him to come in. “He can be out there for hours…and never catches a cold. Look at him. Only that hat on his head keeps the warmth in. Listen to me, come sit down at the table.”

He would bang his feet on the mat and walk across the wide plank wooden floor to the kitchen table, long and heavy and thick feeling as if he’d entered another country, a European one with hearty soups and freshly-plowed fields. The place harkened back to another time. It was part frontier, and part European given all the accoutrements. The air was different in the house too. She would place a cup of coffee in front of him, and a plate of cookies or soup, depending on what time of day it was.

Barry had found out she was a nurse. She had been away living with relatives in Rhode Island and had only returned a year ago to her father, who was dying of what she never said. She’d gotten a part-time job at the hospital. The money wasn’t important they had enough. The house was paid for and a well-to-do aunt covered all of their expenses. She was an only child. Her mother, George’s wife, Yael, had passed away when Marta was a child. When she was five Marta was taken from the house by relatives fearing George could not care for himself, let alone a small child. And all those pigeons, they were a health hazard and made the man all the more crazy, they rationalized to Marta when she was old enough to understand. She returned summers, often, for brief visits with her papa. She sent him report cards, pictures she drew and when she was older, letters. He had them still, she told Barry.

“He keeps everything because he’s lost so much.”

Eventually Barry would feel guilty sitting there in a stranger’s house sipping coffee and talking when he should have been out looking for Cara. He would suddenly rise, excuse himself and leave. Outside his breath would come begrudgingly.

But he would be back, almost every day. And Marta would be there, at the window, seemingly waiting for him. He liked that: the white hand, the blond hair, her fragrance and the energy that surrounded her. The old man was on the periphery; all murmur and moving, searching, pigeons in the sky above him. It was a foreign place to Barry and it did not lie within his normal routes to work or for winter walks. He found an excuse to be there. “You must let me rebuild that old truck near the barn. It looks like it still has all its engine parts.”

She nodded and handed him a cup of coffee, with just a sprinkle of cinnamon. “Of course.”

She caught him singing. Barry was under the hood, a lamp in his hand, steam rising from his work, and he was singing. “You have a nice voice,” Marta said. She was standing behind the truck in her winter jacket and boots. A large floodlight on the garage lighted the yard.

He rose from the engine and turned; Barry continued to sing. He threw open his arm dramatically and grabbed Marta by the wrists. Soon they were dancing and singing in the snowy yard, round and round in a circle. They stopped in a cloud of steam made by Barry’s singing.

“Come from a long line of singers in my family,” he said. “Cara is the only one now that sings…”

There was a pause and then she asked, “Anything new?”

He shook his head. Barry turned and began to gather up his tools, and closed the hood of the truck. Suddenly he felt he needed to be out in the dark, calling out her name, walking the streets, peering into shadows, or through walls. Wanda and the twins were at a church function, he told her. He should be out searching not working on an old machine. He coughed into his hand. “I should…”

“Come inside for a moment, there’s something I want you to hear…come.” He hesitated for a moment, scanning the horizon with his eyes as if there might be a sign there for him. When he saw it was nothing more than the usual darkness and distant lights, he shrugged.

Barry followed Marta into the house. It was only just after eight in the evening and already the old man had put himself to bed. Kerosene lamps dimly-lit the house filling it with amber haze. Wherever they went their long shadow rippled and smothered, rippled and smothered, he remembered to us, his eyes containing a far off look. Barry took off his jacket; it was stiflingly hot in the house.

“He likes it that way,” Marta said, guessing at Barry’s thoughts. They walked into the living room. Marta threw a fresh log on the fire and stoked the embers. She motioned for Barry to sit in a chair by the fire. She offered him brandy, which he thought at first was too extravagant, and then thought was perfect for the dark winter night. After she filled two glass tumblers with brandy and handed one to Barry, Marta dropped to her knees and began filing through a stack of record albums. She pulled one out, opened it and put the disk onto an old turntable.

A voice rose slowly, angelically from the scratchy record. It was opera, light opera. It was a sweet, but strong voice.

“My mother at an arts festival in Krakow when she was sixteen.”

“Such an incredible voice.”

“Of course I never heard it from her, only this one record, only this one song. Over and over again.” She got up. “I though you would appreciate it. You ever think of singing on stage?”

He nodded. “Only all the time. For as long I can remember, I dreamed of walking out from behind one of those velvet curtains and standing there center stage, singing.”

“Why don’t you?”

“So much has gone by… I was hoping Cara would be the one to have the singing career. Opera, perhaps, or…”

“It’s not too late.”

“Well,” he said, embarrassed. He hadn’t talked about his dreams for a long time.

Marta swayed in the flickering light from the fire; her brandy cupped close to her chest, her eyes closed. The undulating score rose and rose and her mother’s voice sweet warbled like birdsong. Barry put down his brandy and stood on his uncertain legs. He held her in his arms and he danced with her, in the melodic warmth of the song and fire. They danced holding each other closely. Tears on her cheeks held light as if amber. First he let them fall onto his fingertips pressed against her subtle cheeks, and then he tasted their salt when he kissed her cheeks, her nose, and her lips. She returned his favor; she kissed his tears too, the ones he didn’t even know were there to sate her.

Cara had been missing over ten days by then. This was hard for us. This accounting of what Barry did and how it took him away from us. Marta declined our requests for interviews.

The first press interviews were over the phone. Soon the reporters, with notepads and tape recorders, and still others, with television cameras and lights, came to speak with the distraught mother – we got our inspiration from these reporters, the way they asked questions and took notes. Wanda’s picture sitting at the picture window looking out was front-page fodder in the New Quantico papers. Complete strangers recognized her on the street or at the mall. We received unreserved attention, and rightly so.

“We’ll keep our eyes peeled for Cara,” they would shout across the mall walkway. Wanda would wave and smile, like a minor celebrity. It was hard not to picture her every time the “Have You Seen Cara?” campaign was ever discussed in the media. She did talk shows, gave speeches and never declined an interview. In New Quantico, Wanda was becoming a star.

Wanda’s thinking at the time, unaware of what we knew was: if the perpetrator – who else could have taken her Cara? – could see her face, and her plea, he or she would let Cara go free. On most days she could be seen out in public with a special sweatshirt with Cara’s school picture on it and on the back “Have You Seen Cara” emblazoned in black letters.

There were so many interviews and speeches in the beginning, she could not even remember saying much of what she said. Words and pleas just rolled off her tongue, which was understandably given that her daughter was missing and had been for well over a month and counting by then. She prayed, we noticed, every day these special intercessions for guidance not only for herself but also for anyone who spoke to the media about loss. She felt the light of her celebrity was double edged though, she told us years alter. There were times when the attention was too much. She wanted her quiet moments too.

In those quiet moments, she heard herself. It was not the words she spoke to the media about asking the perpetrators to let Cara go, or in the way she described the life of her little girl. The words that came back to her, when the media lights had dimmed, were the six little words she spoke on a Friday night in November. She wished she could take her words back. It was hard for her to even tell us what they were, but we knew, we’ve always known. It was the six words she gave into the telephone receiver that Friday night.

Walk home; the twins need me.

That’s her memory of it. Sarah and Lorne gave slightly different versions of this to us, when describing what Cara had told them. Regardless: Six harmless words uttered with the brevity of a mother’s impatience and exhaustion: We had slipped out to give Peck a birthday card that night, one we made ourselves. We were so proud of it.

Then it was too far. The farthest point between a mother and a daughter was when men come in between them. God came between Wanda and her Cara.

We watched her of course, silent and trying to stay out of her way. Years later she filled in some of the details for our notes. She said at first there were the silent prayers fumbling, prying out the words, the intervention of a parent seeking a favor from the world: bring back my child. Behind squeezed-shut eyes, the snow had thawed, the ground grew warm and Cara walked upon the earth.

She tried to shut out the horrific, the worst-case scenarios abrogated by police officers and well-intentioned friends. She’s with God now. God became this worst-case scenario, this end game piece of hardness coming between daughter and mother. It became a wedge, an expanse, forgetfulness, and an unforgiving ache in the heart. This hardness where once lay great compassion, took hold, but was kept covert to the outside world. Its roots could be felt in her toes. She gripped the ground upon which she treaded. Wanda would not rest until she covered the distance to bring her closer to understanding how incessant silent prayers can go unheeded, how a child can go missing so close to home, how the bonds of marriage can be worn thin, fray and tear.

“Why didn’t you go just go pick her up?” Barry screamed at her his voice piercing the thin walls of our home.

“It was just from school. The twins needed me – where were you?” Missing.

But there were no missing words. She said them forcefully and often… “Heavenly Father, please…” And she became the spokesperson of the family; Wanda personified anyone who had a child go missing, of anyone who had been a victim to the horrid empty spaces between what they thought their lives would be and what it actually was. She felt her soul change over the weeks, her words the idiom of her transformation.

“This isn’t like her.”

“The school is just around the corner.”

“We’ve talked to all her friends.”

“We’re not going to stop until we find her. Until she’s safe at home.”

“Everyone is looking for Cara. All her friends, the school, the church.”

“We pray she’s just lost.”

“We still believe she will walk through that door.”

“We pray that she’ll still come home.”

“We pray that whoever has her, doesn’t hurt her.”

“We pray that if she had come to some sort of harm that it was quick.”

“I just want to say to those holding her. We will find you.”

“We just wanted to say to Cara’s killer. We forgive you. You are forgiven.”

“She’s with God now.”

This is the hard part, for us, given the nature of what happened. We were a happy family and then we weren’t: “Damn you,” Wanda said, “How could you?” She wanted to beat Barry for what he had done; being with another woman while their daughter was missing was unforgivable.

Barry stared off into the distance. She told us that rage boiling inside her uncontrollably moving her to slap his face; Wanda would make sure he knew how much it had hurt her and us. “Did you think people wouldn’t talk? It’s disgusting that you would do this now. Now, of all times, Barry.” We clung to the kitchen wall near the phone, half in the kitchen and half out.

She filled his silence with her own words. “Every night you would go and every night I would follow you. And I knew it wouldn’t be good. I just knew it. We know these things. We know the presence of sinners. I was right. Pigeon George’s daughter, Barry? While you were with her, I was out there asking anyone who would listen if they’d seen our daughter.” They both looked worn, frayed and torn, in our memories. Our adult selves ruminated over the details. The distance between two ends of a sundered bond is forever. Other things fill the gap. Nature does not abhor vacuums – it fills them with the baying appetite of insatiable hounds. Wanda needed attention, a dutiful mate, someone to shoulder her burdens, to listen to her cries, to hear her demands. The public, through the media, became that lover. Camera lights, microphones, tape recorders, newsprint and radio waves filled her days with appointments and avenues for her pain and her urgent need to talk through the widening space between her and God. She would tell the world of her Cara. She would tell the world of her God. She would tell the killer or killers, the ones that took her baby after her friends did that horrible thing that she had the words to bridge whatever expanse laid before her. Each interceding word was a step towards forgiving herself. The space before her, between her and her Father, she felt, was of her own doing. She’d turned her back on Him and while doing so was carried away by a river of doubt. She recognized, the rock in the current had not moved but she had.

It got to the point she no longer knew who she was talking to; she just kept talking – swimming against some invisible flow. “Have you seen Cara?” It was reporters with notepads, reporters with microphones, reporters with microphones and accompanying camera people. There were police and social workers, pastors and principals. Cara’s teachers all turned out to search and Wanda spoke with them too. And she talked to God, again and again.

“Have you seen Cara?”

The letters began to pour in; some went to television stations where she’d been interviewed. People sent cards and wrote letters. They sent prayer cards and they sent money. Wanda began to keep them tacked to the refrigerator with magnets, when there became too many she began to pin them on the walls of Cara’s bedroom. Soon the room, with its walls covered in card, came to resemble the lair of butterflies, sleeping off winter.

With all that, she thought, someone had to have seen something? We took some of the cards and letters, but never any money, to keep for ourselves.

Her friends from the church helped her search during the day, they arranged for flyers, photocopied with Cara’s high school picture at the center, to be distributed and tacked up in stores and community centers. These friends baked cookies and made meals Wanda could put in the freezer and take out whenever she needed to feed her family, but had forgotten she was their mother. Her employer, a history book publisher, allowed her to take days off when she needed them. The publisher paid for the flyers and produced them in their own facility. It was as if the entire city was behind Wanda.

When Wanda said on television that she forgave the person who was holding her baby, she became the talk of the town, even though we know now that wasn’t the case at all. She couldn’t go anywhere without having people stop her asking questions about the search. Wanda spoke at schools, in church halls and shopping malls. She spoke on street corners and in front of shops. At the end of the day her throat was raw, her jaw ached and she felt utterly exhausted. She could barely speak with us; we came to hate the whole thing. When we told her Cara had probably run away, she slapped both of us.

It came that there were no longer words to describe her feelings; she stumbled about for the right words to say. Often consolation is for the sympathizer more than the consoled. She know longer felt she had private thoughts.

“You said this?” Barry would ask standing in the kitchen a newspaper splayed open on the table. They were still talking; they had to for Cara’s sake. It was as if they could step in and out of the marriage bubble, when it was needed. “When did you say this?”

Wanda would glance down and not recognize herself or the words attributed to her. It seemed like an alien had been imitating her. The words sounded bloodless. She would turn white.

“I don’t know.”

It was then she began to write letters to Cara, filling pages and pages of a blue, spiral school exercise book she kept in the kitchen amidst the cookbooks. Every night and every morning she would sit with her coffee and stare out the window look at the empty spaces of winter, and write her letters.

Wanda took to carrying the notebook with her, a pen behind in her purse or behind her ear. She would attend search party gatherings and news conferences with the notebook. People asked what the book was for and she would just scrunch her nose and defer. “It’s nothing.”

She would walk Cara’s route home from school and take notes placing down her thoughts whenever the moment arose. She followed footprints in the snow; Wanda entered abandoned buildings, peered into dank and empty railway cars – something she never would have done previously. Down by the rivers she made notes near brambles so twisted and confusing she was amazed by people who thought the world was so simple. She told us once she stared at a bush until it grew light in color and from the light burst a single dark bird: A chocolate brown pigeon.

Wanda scrambled up the bank of the river, her boots slipping on the wet snow. Her nose dripped and her ears ached from the cold, but she didn’t want to go in. She wanted to keep with the bird. It flew high, but not high enough to disappear completely. Wanda was able to spot it. Once or twice she lost sight of the dark bird, but it always swooped back into her line of vision as if wanting to be followed. The bird took her through her neighborhood and even before she reached the pigeon’s perch, Wanda knew where she was going as would anyone seeing a pigeon in New Quantico – Pigeon George’s.

What she wasn’t prepared for was when she got to the property where the unpainted barn and house stood, where farm machinery and lawn furniture turned to dust, where in summer the grass grew to your waist and in winter the snow softened the blemishes. In all those images that came to her mind of broken down vehicles, metal, corroded barrels and pigeons, Wanda was unprepared, for she was still the ignorant spouse, to see Barry, her husband of the past two decades, when he should be at work, his hands on his hips. He was standing before the open hood of a truck.

Our notes say, from the road she said, “Barry, what are you doing?”

He turned as if automatically responding to her voice. From where she was standing she could see her husband’s face, its look of shock. His body twitched as if piqued by a volt of electricity. Then he froze.

“It’s rebuild the engine, not fix.”

Wanda heard the words, but wasn’t paying attention to them. The radio station, CQOB, even at the early hour of morning was alive with activity. She and Barry had a short argument in the car driving over about fixing Pigeon George’s truck and whether or not – under the circumstances – it was the best use of his time. We were in the backseat, taken out of school to go with them to the radio station.

They were both given headphones and told where to talk over the microphones, which hung from metal arms of rods and springs from a console in the middle of the studio. They sat opposite the show host, Paul Warren. “OK, right after this commercial, we’re going live,” he said, and slurped his coffee. After the commercial, his words came and they were the same ones. The ones that said Cara was still missing and that there were few clues, if any, as to what happened. Friends walking home from school on a cold Friday night. Last glimpses. What was the latest? Our condolences, our condolences and so on.

The voices came inside her headphones, she said, the echoing soft voices of those wishing to help, those who had lost a daughter, a son to war, to killers, to mystery. Our condolences, our condolences and so on.

While Barry said little, Wanda spoke to every person on the other end of the airwaves because that person may be holding Cara, may have her in their basement or locked in a closet, in a place where there were no windows, no door handles. She spoke to every person because that person had eyes and could see where she could not. She told them to look, to listen, and to hear her.

“They’re just children, you know. Forgive them.” She was thinking about Lorne, Peck and Sarah. If they hadn’t done what they’d done. If only the world wasn’t full of sinners. God bless them.

The host looked from aside his microphone. “Children?”

Wanda corrected herself, “All of them. Children. We’re all God’s children. And we are forgiving our sins. Whoever has Cara I forgive them…”

“Mrs. Neufeld with all due respect if someone has your daughter, how can you forgive them?”

Peck

Nothing: no words, no arguments, no petitions, nothing but, “Ubaruben’t yubou dubead yubet?” in some strange language from his sister Henrietta, all of nine, raven-blue/black hair and precocious.

He was a dot; who cared?

After they had met with the other parents and with Wanda and Barry, Peck’s parents sat him down on the couch and said: “You have killed this family. Do you realize what you have done?”

“Wa…,” he began sobbing. The world was spinning and it was cold and empty and nothing survived. Exposed skin burned with the ironic deep freeze of winter. He felt raw and stupid and angry and tingled from the bottoms of his feet to the ends of his hair.

Why won’t they? Why won’t they help me? Goddamit! What about justice? What about mercy? Where was that…? The truth adds up to one big lie.

The universe is what we name it.

There were two Caras then: one was Cara and the other was Larry covered in swarming blue dots.

“Don’t say another word, not another word.”

His family met in the kitchen; he could hear them talking. His father was doing much of the talking, but there was a discussion, a plying of directions to inquiries both motherly and ignorant of adult ways. When he went to the doorway and stood there, they turned in unison, silently, and stared. He glared at them his eyes filling with tears until they became fuzzy globs of nothing.

Peck was outside his bedroom window in his housecoat. He sat on the rooftop smoking. The house behind him was stock-still and silent as church on a Saturday night. The entire world was a circle of gapping swarming emptiness. He tapped cigarette ash onto the roof; the slag rolled and was whisked up in the steely breeze.

Please God have mercy on his soul, make him see the error of his ways. Let him find a cure…

His family moved mutely as if in a funeral procession from the front stoop. A faint click and the door was closed securely behind them. They walked single file down the short, shoveled pathway, to the car—they resembled hunched vespers monks. Four blue dots off to bible study.

He pecked four dots onto the page of a journal, which sat on his lap. No one turned to see him up on the snowy roof, in his housecoat, smoke dangling from his mouth. No one. Four heads, all forward. His father, mother and two sisters folded themselves into the car in a rehearsed hush.

He was cold, but didn’t care; his ears sensitive, straining to hear something, rang with nothing, which was its own kind of noise. Soon enough the noise of silence was not enough: He could hear someone yelling his name, but then realized; no it was just his dream. How much did a howl of winter wind sound like his name? And how that wind sounded, familiar. The curl of his tongue, the vowels of woe; he said aloud his own name into the winter air; it was blue oxygen crystallized, falling and breaking.

His family was leaving; he waved, a pathetic half-wave, but they did not return the gesture. All eyes were forward. Peck shrugged his shoulders and blew smoke out the side of his mouth. He folded his journal back into his housecoat pocket along with the pen.

With the tip of the cigarette within his pinching fingers he wrote in the blue winter air: “Cara, where are you?” There was two Caras then: one the smoke in the air, the other one a memory of her face.

He stood, his toes making small imprints in the rooftop snow. The bracing snow invigorated him, gave him a taste of freedom on his tongue, his burning cheeks. He did not shiver. Grabbing a hold of his bedroom window gable he shimmied across the roof to the west side near a stand of Evergreens. On the ground, one storey below was a bank of fresh snow, which sat in a deep shadow. The bank was high, almost halfway to the rooftop. With the cigarette wedged in the side of his face, Peck stood at the edge of the roof. He leaned back his head, closed his eyes, threw open his arms and tipped himself forward off the roof. His housecoat billowed.

Air.

Snow.

Darkness.

He loved the freedom of falling knowing there was no one, just himself. He would save himself. Peck needed to take back his life. This was the only way he knew how. This was the only way he could erase all that was. It was like suicide.

In the snow he rolled over, wet and now shivering. He inhaled a guff of smoke from the bent cigarette, blew a ring of smoke, which rose into the air, warbled and then disappeared.

Peck entered the empty house. He turned on the radio to a rock station—92 CITI FM—and turned the volume level up to 10. The dusty brown speakers crackled and distorted the music. He tired to imagine his family still here, in the house walking with their heads bowed, their mouths thin white lines, eyes on their shuffling feet all the while Ozzy Osborne, his mouth dripping with bat’s blood, barks on about crazy trains, about madness.

He showered, changed into some clothes and lighted another cigarette. Before leaving the house he opened every window, in every room. There was a winter storm coming, the radio announcer in a voice filled with sparks and pops said before introducing a song. Aldo Nova sang that life was just a fantasy.

Peck left the front door open when he left for destinations unknown to those who thought they knew him.

Lorne

Lorne stowed his hockey gear in the trunk. Following a meeting at the church he had a practice. Lorne was light on his skates, a power forward with “good hands,” they said, one who could put the puck in the net. His coach was a pilot from the nearby Canadian Forces Base. Sergeant Major Oliver Bugeja said, “The boy had potential, real potential. He was a real diamond that one. There were a lot of pineapples out there; Lorne wasn’t one of them. He was the real deal.”

A few scouts had attended his games. His name was in the sports pages all the time, because of his size and scoring ability. Once, his picture made the front page of the newspaper. In the picture, his arms are raised up and forward over his head in celebration.

He stickhandled in his sleep. Deeked out goalies when he was walking and scored goals at the breakfast table with pieces of dry cereal and his spoon. He wore a crucifix beneath his shoulder pads; the other players call him “Penner The Punisher,” but also, “Penner The Pastor.”

“Jesus saves, and Penner picks up the rebound and scores,” they said.

For years he and Peck played on the same team, until Peck stopped playing altogether at age ten. Lorne wasn’t the only Mennonite on the team—there were four—and he knew three of them from his school. The team was mostly white; one player the team’s second top scorer, after Lorne, was an Indian named Cody Lafontane. Cody was the fastest skater Lorne had ever seen. He had quick hands. He was very quiet and small. He wore homemade mukluks in the winter.

He had two practices a week and a game every weekend. Several times during the season there were road trips. To travel most winter evenings was foolhardy. At night, with any wind, snow bombarded the windshield resembling a miniature meteor shower. Conditions were often wet and the road was frequently hard to see.

On one trip, one night traveling back to Winnipeg from Dauphin a week or so after Cara’s disappearance, the team bus lost and trying to find the road home again, hit an animal. Coach Bugeja had been sitting beside Lorne talking a blue streak about what a player had to do to survive. He said he wasn’t coaching the team to make kids to be better players, but to be better men. This wasn’t anything new to Lorne, who only shook his head at his coach’s rambling speeches.

“You gotta sacrifice, you gotta stick your neck out some times,” the coach said the very first practice. “You must stand up for something, or fall for anything,” he droned on and on. The team did lines after that, skating from goal line to blue line back to goal line, to centerline to goal line, from goal line to the opposite goal line. There was a scrimmage.

“Men of character know what to do,” he said in the bus that one night last winter when the bus hit the poor beast.

Lorne couldn’t really see his coach’s face. The lights were out and most of the team was asleep. He was nodding off himself. The coach had made the decision to go with Kenny Magura over Gaston for goalie duty that night and the team had lost badly. A lot of soft goals got past Magura.

“Magura has been through a lot. He knows which way the wind blows,” the coach said. “He’s a diamond.” Just as Bugeja said this, a loud thump came from the front of the bus and it lurched forward to a sudden stop.

Some of the players were yelling, Lorne couldn’t make out what they were saying. Mayhem ensued with the bus crooked in the road, slightly tilted to the right, and boys squealed and mewed. Coach Bugeja left his seat and went to the front. Lorne saw Bugeja talking to the bus driver.

“OK; girls quit your squawking and get off the bus. We had a little accident. Why doesn’t everyone go outside—stand on this side of the bus please gentlemen that side is the highway and we don’t want any of you cheesecakes flatter than your seventh grade girlfriend. Get some fresh air, powder your faces,” said the team manager.

The bus door opened with a hydraulic sigh, and everyone began to file out, still chatting and gawking out the windows at the dark night. The smell of cold, of the forest alongside the highway, filled the bus when the doors were open. Lorne breathed in the night air. He went to the front and saw the bus driver just sitting there in silence. He had a dazed look on his bulbous face.

“You all right?” he asked.

The driver didn’t respond he just blinked, looking straight ahead. He sipped soda through a straw. He made a sound with his mouth, bubbles, maybe.

Lorne got off the bus and there on the road lying in the twin cones of headlight was a mass of fur, a pool of blood, and a chain trailing from the thing’s neck. Coach Bugeja had the animal’s head in his arms. It was a dog. The chain looked as if it had been ripped off a post. The team was in a semi-circle around the coach and the animal.

Lorne moved through his mulling teammates and stood beside a defenseman named Randy.

“Isn’t it dead yet?” Randy asked tossing the words over his shoulder.

Lorne nodded. He could see the coach checking the dog’s eyes and nodding his head. Bugeja dragged the dog to the ditch and dumped it. He cleaned his hands with some slush. A trail of blood, bright red, marked the road and the swath made by the damaged body. It glistened in the moonlight. Briefly all that can be heard was the bus engine, purring. The team manager checked the front of the bus for damage. Everyone’s breath hung in the air.

“Come on men, back in the bus, we have time to make up,” coach said finally. He was standing at the front of the bus with the team manager then. He picked hair out of the grill. “Come on. Have to get you babies back to your mummies.”

“OK, let’s go fat farts, back in,” the manager intoned. Clots of wet snow caught on his jacket. Obligingly, all the players started to pile back into the bus. They all took glances back at the blood, or the dead animal slumped in the ditch. The dog appeared to be in mid-leap by the way the carcass was positioned its paws up and forward. The chain was trailing in the snow. To keep a dog in its place, you need a good chain.

Lorne turned around, as if looking for what had just spoke to him. But of course, no one was there. It was from another time, not that one.

For a moment, he just stood there. He wanted to do something. Bury the poor thing. Say a prayer. Sob.

But no. Nothing came. And still, he knew, they wanted his soul.

The coach stood behind him, staring at the ground or perhaps a fleck of blood on the toe of his black boot. “There’s a lesson in everything. And it’s not always easy to understand why.”

“How can we just leave?”

“We have to, it’s dead.”

In his sleep that night, back home and safely tucked into his own bed, Lorne dreamed of the dog. It was lying in the snow, inert, when a flash of bright, white light jerked it awake as if it had only been sleeping. Its black tongue licked at blood on its snout. The dog stood, shakily on its uncertain limbs, blinked with its black eyes.

It appeared unsure of what to do. Lorne was there, his hand on its heaving ribcage. He could feel its beating heart, the heat of its skin, and the roughness of its fur.

The light intensified. He had to cover his eyes with his arms. As he did that, the dog turned, quickly, and jumped up and forward into the light, a swaying of snow-covered evergreens perhaps, a curtain certainly, and away.

The snow at his feet was pristine. There was no more blood. The air was still. A small bone in his ear was vibrating. The dog had said something before leaping off. Inexplicably, because Lorne knew that only in cartoons do dogs speak, that the animal, which stood in front of the path of a hockey team bus, had said something to him.

He awoke, not sweating, not panting, but calmly, serenely by simply opening his eyes. His hands were folded on his chest as usual. He opened them and raised them up and forward.

No one said anything, and if they did, it appeared to be trivial, meaningless. Cara was missing. His parents are quiet and kind; they prayed often with Lorne, the middle son of five strapping, athletic and spiritual boys: the Penner Missionaries.

There were two Caras then: one that was missing and other squeezed between the yellow bones for teeth of a giant dog. This just cannot be happening, how could God allow this to happen? Why was I spared?

He pictured Cara in the mouth of a giant dog racing through the forest and into a shower of blinding light. The dog said something, even though its maw is filled with Cara’s body, her singing cry.

His optometrist father and his actuary mother were and still are disciplined and steady people. They did their jobs, attended to their families and gave of themselves and a good portion of their money to the church. His mother and father were avid missionaries; when Lorne was three the family lived in what was then Rhodesia working at a school for orphans for the Mennonite Central Committee, the outreach arm of his family’s faith. The two younger boys had not yet been born. It was a compact family of five.

They prayed together in the mornings, had dinners together most evenings, and always attended church on Sunday. Before going to bed, Sunday nights were silent in the house, except for the muffled and restrained clamor of bodies in motion. The family prepared for their weekly rite, Sunday evenings. It took place in the living room, lit only by candle. Everything that could be quieted in the house had been. The telephone had been taken off the hook, radios turned off. Clad in pajamas the entire family trudged into the living room. They sat on the sofa in front of a basin of hot, not scalding, water. In the clear water, always, was a blue, terrycloth facecloth. There were several towels, folded neatly, and placed off to the side. The entire family was barefoot.

It started with the father. He moved the basin of water before his wife. With one hand he gently held her foot over the basin. With the other hand he retrieved the facecloth, wringing it gently with a squeeze. He washed the right foot first, the entire foot up to just above the ankle, and then he completed the left foot in the same fashion—all without saying a word.

Then it was Lorne’s mother’s turn. She moved the basin over to Karl, Jr., the eldest, and washed his feet. It moved mutely down the line, with one member of the family, the elder, washing the feet of the younger. The youngest, Stephan, seven, washed his father’s feet and said, “do as I have done to you.”

In that solemn air the family filed out of the living room, feet squeaky clean, in silence. Lorne could hear the water being poured into the kitchen sink as he entered his bedroom, the one he shared with two brothers.

To his knowledge, he knew of no other family who did this, it was considered a little too much by most Mennonites, even though it was encouraged.

As he walked to his bedroom, Lorne would place his feet down precisely as possible as if to keep their holy cleanliness. It was as if a skin of darkness had been wiped clean and his feet, tingly and cooling, were nothing but light, billions and billions of molecules of brilliant light, buzzing for Jesus, itching to take him, but where, but where dear Father, where would you take me?

In bed, he pulled the covers from his feet and let them walk through the darkness of his dreams. They took him where he was asked to go. The booming voice of a hockey coach whose utterances could be heard deep down in the bones of his toes filled his soul.

Lorne always stood where he was asked to stand. He was humble. He was going to be a hockey star, but found he was caring less about that and more about where his feet would take him next—where? Cleanliness is next to Godliness.

So where? He was thirsty, but he didn’t get out of bed. That would have ruined the state of his feet. He fell asleep thinking of all the journeys he would take, and invariably, as his dreams were wont to do then, he soon found that his fingers were inside his girlfriend, Sarah’s body, and that she was singing, crying and he was a ravaging beast with yellow bones for teeth.

Sarah

Sarah is a baby again her fingers glued together with frost, her lips cracked and dry, and the left side of her face stuck to the ground. She is asleep again, and again there is the old, all-white giant of winter his white boots digging heavy spoors in the crunchy snow with each step.

He lifts her in the palm of his gigantic coarse hand, parts the cracking lips and blows air into her tiny, aching and reluctant lungs. Frost-lined eyelashes flutter and tear apart. She is thawing and yet to be home. Sarah is on the brink of love her eyes filled with the giant—

“Sarah, Sarah, sweetie,” her mother cooed.

And he dropped her into the snow bank pillow, his satchel swinging at his side. Inside a single footfall he has dropped a rock. She pears over its hoary edge to read what it—

“Sarah you’re having that dream again, wake up…”

But she cannot yet read.

“Sweetie, wake up.” Lilly was seated on the edge of her bed. “You had that dream again.”

“And?”

“Same as always.” Her mother combed a bangle off Sarah’s forehead and kissed her. “Get some sleep.” Sarah laid back and watched her mother leave her bedroom. When she closed the door, she sat up and looked out the window at the dark night. She wondered if Cara could read what the old, all-white giant of winter left her? Would he help her too?

Ever since any one could remember, Sarah had been immune to winter. She seldom got cold or if she did no one ever knew because she never said. When she was a 13-month old she wandered away from her house in the dead of winter wearing only a diaper. Her father, a drunk, was on the couch asleep. Sarah stumbled through the snow and eventually got lost. When her father awoke, he ran panicked through the neighbourhood and found his daughter lying facedown in the snowfall with her hands curled underneath her body. Sarah’s heart had stopped beating; her fingers and toes were frozen together when she was rushed to the hospital. She was revived en route to the hospital and by the next day was breathing without a ventilator. Doctors said her heart had stopped beating for two full hours. Her body temperature had dropped to 60 degrees. Sarah survived the doctors said she was so small and that young children tended to cool so quickly that their organs and blood are preserved. None of her toes or her fingers had to be amputated. There is still some scaring on her fingers. Most amazingly, no brain damage; the little girl shut down so efficiently there was very little oxygen depleted. Sarah’s picture—ruddy cheeked, blank stare and tussled hair—was on the front cover of every newspaper for a day or two. They called her the miracle winter baby.

“Our daughter loves to wander. She is the creator of her own misfortune,” her father was quoted as saying in one of the yellowed newspaper clippings that Sarah had read when she was old enough. The family didn’t talk about the incident, and Sarah can’t remember anything at all about her time out in the elements. She got her story from the newspapers. But she had her dreams; it was a hazy memory of an old man, wearing all white, with a white beard and satchel. He left rocks in the snow making it melt.

Lorne

It wasn’t until a full month and more had passed before Lorne saw his two friends again. They all seemed to traveling different paths. Lorne had his hockey, even though he’d been playing terribly lately. Peck had his books, his journal, and his life elsewhere no one was told about. Sarah kept to herself in her room, drawing and doing her homework. He’d talked to his girlfriend a time or two, but that was it. She sent him a love poem, which Lorne read once and then ripped up and flushed it down the toilet.

When he walked around the school that day, he could see Peck and Sarah standing there awkwardly and quiet. Lorne walked up without saying a word.

Initially every one looked at their feet, their boots in the dirty schoolyard snow. On a nearby telephone poll posters asking “Have you seen Cara?” fluttered in the slight breeze. Lorne thought it only Christian and right of him to speak first, to break the silence between friends. “Where have you been?”

Peck looked up at Lorne, his eyebrows rising. He shrugged. “Nowhere, really.”

Sarah reached out and took Lorne’s gloved hand. “Come on guys let’s go.”

They walked the same route they had for the past year. They took the same route home as the one they took the day Cara went missing.

For a change the day was not terribly cold, nor was there snow blowing in their faces. The sky was beginning to darken and the night was starting to consume the day by sucking up all the light from the snow.

“How have your parents been?” Sarah asked Lorne pulling him in closer. She was always asking about his parents, because his parents said Sarah was their favorite and Sarah liked that. The couple, unaccustomed to their togetherness, bumped and teetered a little in the snow.

“Good, supportive. We’ve prayed.”

“Mine have been all but dead. I think they’re praying I’d just up and leave. But, really, praying doesn’t do anyone, any good…”

He felt Sarah tugging on his hand. “I know it doesn’t make sense to everyone, but it does to me. Things happens when I pray.”

Peck was lighting a cigarette, he didn’t seem to care any more that his parents forbade it and that the smoke clung to his clothes in the cold. He was, instead, staring off at something flying in the air.

“Pigeons.”

“From Pigeon George’s.”

Lorne pictured the gray board barn, the junk cars, the farm machinery and the old sagging house surrounding by the apartment blocks and convenience stores. Pigeon George was a Jew, one of those “camp survivors.” There was something about him Lorne considered strange. His father had said something about the Jews not understanding Jesus. Who could not understand Jesus?

“Someone should check that place out.”

“Yeah,” Lorne said directly after Peck.

“For what Peck?”

“Cara.”

“The police already have,” Sarah said. “It was in the papers, my mother read it out to me. It said the police checked there because the neighbors had complained about the mess.”

“Come on who lives like that?”

“We all did at one time?” Sarah said in typical teenager upspeak.

“There’s something wrong there,” Lorne said. About the Jews not understanding Jesus. Chain to concrete, chained to the cross.

“How is daddy?” Peck asked Sarah with a hint of malice detected in his voice.

Lorne could see his friend was champing at the bit for a fight and he had to admit his own stomach was burning for something. He felt this way sometime on the ice during a hot shift during a game. But, a good chain. He thought of his Bible back home on his bed, open to words in red. He wanted to come to Sarah’s honor.

“Leave it alone.”

“No, it’s okay. My father’s a prick. But really I won’t know because he’s been gone for a month now. There, are you happy? That doesn’t get Cara back.”

Peck shot back, “Neither does praying. Our church does fuck all for those it doesn’t really want in the first place.”

“Hey,” Lorne protested.

“Hey, how do we know, how do we know we won’t get her back? She’s not dead yet.”

Peck mumbled musically, “Ubaruben’t yubou dubead yubet?”

“What?” Lorne and Sarah asked in unison. Was Peck now speaking in tongues?

“Nothing.”

There were two Caras then: one in spirit, clinging to their clothes as if smoke, the other a stone cold body wrapped in darkness, muted, her body never really straining for freedom—yet.

Sarah

Another day with no word on Cara.

Sarah’s cheeks burned as she entered the church; the sound of milling and talking rumbled in her ringing ears. In the foyer the heat was overwhelming, suffocating. Every since her prayers sent both her father and Cara away, she dreaded coming here to God’s house. She tore at her jacket zipper, unfurled her scarf, and pulled the wool cap from her head causing her hair to release static electricity into the air. She stood briefly combing her hair back down with her fingers. There was a smell of cold winter, of electricity and wood polish. Invisible sparks flew through the sanctum air.

Her mother and Beatrice, a friend from her mother’s work who had been consoling her, moved in behind her. Sarah eyed the statues; the way eyes are just polished orbs disturbed her in a way she could not comprehend. How could they see?

The gowns of flowing stone perfect and clean amazed her; it was as if they have been frozen that way. Mary and the baby, Jesus, palms facing outward, barefoot, clad in flowing gowns of stone. Sarah looked for cracks and seams.

Where did this start, where does it end?

“Hubellubo Subarubah,” came from behind, but she didn’t turn knowing full well that the little witch was taunting her. Peck’s family moved to the front of the church, while she continued to look at the statues.

Sarah extended her hand, retracted it, and thought it might be better to warm it with her breath. The touch of her hand on the hard, smooth surface reminded her of flesh. Jars of clay, a line went somewhere in the Bible. Who shaped this and eroded it until the barefoot Messiah, the blind baby, looked at what they’d done?

They were not at all cold, not at all; everyone touched them and the heat must have transferred from churchgoer to Christ, from the milling to the Madonna. The blind touched the blind.

Sarah warmed her hand and extended it, her eyes closed. And stopped.

“Come on sweetie,” her mother said with great impatience and moved past her. Principal Reimer walked by almost knocking her down, his head high on his snow-covered shoulders, coughing into a clenched leather fist. Flakes of snow glistened on his slick black hair.

Ahead, amid the tumble of shoulders and bobbing of heads, Lorne waved from a pew. He was cast in a hazy rainbow of stain-glass light. She raised her arm, slowly and waved back with her flapping wool cap. Her mother and her friend were in a row shuffling down to a seat.

Sarah moved to the row and excused herself as she slid down to the spot Lilly had saved. As she sat she was surprised that the church wasn’t as quiet as she thought it would be, with Cara missing. A smile crept across her hot face. There were two Caras then: one was a voice, echoing off blind messiah and Mary, the other was a girl standing in Hell watching the hem of her dress catch on fire.

Peck’s parents and sisters were sitting near the front, their heads bowed in prayer. “Hubellubo Subarubah,” echoed annoyingly in her ears. She couldn’t locate Peck. Usually she could spot his uncombed hair standing straight up from the back of his head, but not that day. No Peck, he was that other place he was found of—nowhere.

When the pastor and his entourage entered the congregation rose to its feet, stiff as statues, and quiet as gravestones. For a brief moment the wind could be heard rattling against the doors and windows. Then, the words began and with them another Sunday without Cara.

Jesus let in the sun, anyway.

Lorne?

At the end of service the Neufelds stood at the back of the church, the twin girls in their embrace. Everyone agreed to meet back at the church in an hour to help comb the neighborhood, to put up posters. The newspapers had her picture and her physical description again; Cara had been missing more than a month. Nothing else was said, nothing about the families meeting, about the friends who put her in a tool closet in a condemned building. No one said a word about that, and neither did they. The police were told, but Barry and Wanda insisted no charges be laid or no blame. Cara wasn’t where the children had left her, something else had happened, afterwards. Cara had gotten out and wandered; someone else had her…

Committees were created, assignments handed out. Lorne was almost moved to tears. The service, the call for help, the sight of Cara’s parents was all too much for him. It was as if a window had been opened and everything was rushing in and out of his body. He had to grasp his chest with an open palm. He had to check his emotions; he was elated, lifted up. He felt as if his toes had to grip the inner soles of his boots to keep them on his feet. He imagined rocks in his pockets, cinder blocks tied to his waist. He didn’t want to feel lifted up he wanted to feel badly. A dog needs a good chain.

Get in control of yourself. He tried to imagine being beaten. Hockey sticks struck at his back, hacked his ankles.

“Sarah, Lorne,” said Pastor Skinner his hands on Barry’s shoulder. “Have you told us everything?” It was becoming all too common that phrase. The two youth stood silently nodding. Lorne glanced over at Sarah who was being held by her mother in her crisscrossed arms. What else was there to say?

Every time the door to the church opened the storm rushed in with gusts of wind, a gush of blinding winter light and snow. Collars were cinched and hats tugged down foreheads as people left the church to quickly jump into awaiting, running, cars.

“We will have to dress warmly,” Cara’s mother said staring out at the blinding snow, the light intense and unyielding.

In the back of Lorne’s throat words were forming, but he couldn’t say them aloud. Not yet anyway. There were two Caras then: one words in the storm air, the other words caught behind teeth. He would not say that Cara was with God. The winter wind was speaking to them all.

“Forevermore…” he whispered into his jacket collar. But he does not say her name aloud.

He tongued the back of his teeth.

Sarah

Sarah sat on the church steps piling snow into a column. She patted it with an open palm, shaped it. The snow and the air were very cold, but her bare hands barely registered the frost. The air pressing down her open collar did not bother her. There was an internal heat; she could feel heat rising from the soles of her feet. She tried to imagine willing the heat in her body through the palm of her hand. She pressed it against the column, making it plateau. Using her fingertip she traced three letters: SOS

Save our ship? No; Save our Souls.

A shadow cast across the steps made her look up. It was Reimer.

“Come on,” he said holding out three fingers of his brown leather gloves, “Your mother’s car won’t start; I’m giving you a lift.” It was the same hand he struck her with in the office once for swearing. He was wearing his jumpy eyes. She rose on her own, skirted past him and got in the car waiting at the curb. Her mother and Beatrice were in the back seat. Mrs. Reimer was in the front seating staring out the windshield.

Inside the car, while waiting for Reimer, Sarah glanced back at her small creation, her small SOS of snow. Someone had smashed it with a boot. It was gone.

As the car pulled away, her forehead pressed lightly against the window; her principal emitted a grunt of disgust.

“More snow.”

“Maybe she found shelter,” her principal’s wife said in a low voice, turning her head to look out the window. “Maybe…”

Sarah closed her eyes, released her body. She did not try to stop it from moving every time Crazy Eyes Reimer turned a corner, or changed lanes or stomped on the brake. She just let go, relaxed her shoulders and placed her hands, cradled, on her lap. She imagined she was drifting snow. Sarah felt smoothed over and loose in her clothes. Her lips quivered, but she did not cry. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

Lorne or The Twins

It was becoming a routine. At two that afternoon men from the church gathered at the Neufeld’s house to form search teams. They were to scour the area with police and their dogs. Children and women, about fifty in total, made new posters and stapled them to telephone poles or taped them onto storefront windows throughout the neighbourhood. “Have you seen Cara?” shouted from every pole, from every storefront window and from men clad in parkas and wool caps, dogs on leashes, snouts down in the snowy paths, leading the way. From what Sarah, Lorne and Peck had told the authorities the search took place mainly off Talbot, near the Cathedral and on the banks of the Red River.

A blizzard, which had kicked up a lot of snow in the morning, gave away to clear skies and a biting cold immobility. Most of the searchers wore sunglasses to avoid snowblindess. The search lasted three hours, and as usual, there was no sign of Cara.

Lorne walked in a field near the river, his boots crunching through the thin snow. His father and brothers were ahead of him. Principal Reimer was beside him cleaning his sunglasses walking awkwardly in his dress shoes in the shin-deep snow.

“Snow,” he said.

Lorne shook his head toward his principal. “Lots of it.” He watched his principal prancing like a bird unfamiliar with the ground.

“Snow changes as it forms and falls, and it continues to change after landing,” Reimer said pointing toward the banks of snow around them nearly tittering and falling. “The larger the flakes, the looser they lay and the more quickly they change.”

Again Lorne shook his head.

“Every situation is an opportunity to learn, Mr. Penner. Every situation, don’t forget that. Even when you think there’s nothing to see, that’s something. Mathematicians study nothing. We study knots by looking not at the string or the knot itself. That would make sense. That would be logical. But no, we look at the spaces the knots don’t occupy. Not knots.” the principal said donning his sunglasses. He stood with his hands on his hips as if surveying all that was before him.

He turned and placed one hand on Lorne’s shoulder. “It is difficulties that show what men are,” he said and blew his dripping nose with a handkerchief he pulled from his jacket pocket. He pulled the handkerchief, which was stitched with a sailboat, away from his face and looked off in the distance.

“I think that’s from Epictetus, if Peck were here—where is Peck by the way? He’d know he’s the one with the encyclopedic knowledge.”

“I dunno.”

The principal walked away his head turning mechanically to the right and the left, scanning the horizon.

Lorne trudged through the snow towards his father. When he was in earshot he whispered to his father: “What if we don’t ever find her?”

“Seek and you shall find,” his father said acknowledging his son. “Knock on the door…” He acted out knocking on an imaginary door.

“What if we don’t find her?” Lorne whispered again standing closer. His father stopped and crouched on his haunches. Nearby brambles on the riverbank bustled in the slight wind. Men in the distance called out “Cara.”

“Men search for God their entire lives never once realizing He is on every blade of grass, is every grain of snow. We have to want to see. We have to believe that she will be found. She will be found. We have just got to keep looking. I would want the world to keep looking if you were missing. Maybe she’s hurt and can’t walk. Maybe someone’s… maybe she doesn’t know where she is and she’s lost. We have to believe that she will be found.”

Lorne knew they were looking for Cara and for more; they were also looking for clues as to what could have happened that dark night when he last saw her. But what good are clues, if you don’t know what they look like? In the snow it wasn’t so much what was there, but what had been there.

“It’s been more than a month. What do we look for?”

“Anything that tells us Cara was here. Look for things that appear out of place.”

Lorne scanned the field before him, his stomach tightening into a knot. He pictured the knot his stomach had become, and the nothing there, growing, and breathing as if alive.

Peck

Once again Peck headed nowhere.

“Where you going?” The chorus went.

“Nowhere.” He would respond.

“Where you been?” It would come.

“Oh, nowhere, really.” And it would go.

Peck leaned his head against the bus window as it traveled across the bridge heading into downtown. An unlit cigarette dangled from the side of his mouth; he liked the taste of the cigarette butt, and it helped to keep people at bay for it lent him a sense of unpredictability, he thought. He sat up in clear view, for the most part. However, at one bus stop, he had to duck to hide. Friends of his parents were in a car waiting at a stoplight. When the bus pulled away from the stop, with its fresh load of passengers, Peck eased himself up and looked out the window. The car with the family friends was gone. He didn’t know exactly why he was hiding, he just thought that he should and not give anyone a clue as to his whereabouts; maybe that was Cara’s plan, too. He mulled that over. A gust of wind smacked the window and he instantly got a mental picture of snow trailing into the house through the door he left open that day and his father cursing. It was worth it. He had to shovel for hours and then, he had to vacuum and clean up any mess that was left. It was worth it.

Snow drifts, he said to himself and smiled. He wrote that down in the black journal that he had open on his knee. His grandfather gave him the book for his last birthday. The book had been pulled from his grandfather’s shelf, where he’d kept a series of journals. He pulled it out, looked at it and gave it to Peck. “History.” It was before his grandfather got sick, before he began to dwindle before their eyes. They had been talking about Russia, where his grandfather was born. “If you know your history, your own story, in here,” he said pointing at Peck’s chest, “they can never take it away here. Name it and it’s yours.” He touched the boy’s forehead. “Do what you want with it, but never forget it. Or else, you’re doomed.” Snow drifts.

Peck filled the journal with tiny drawings, pictures he made by dotting the page with thousands of blue ink pinpricks, and dots Peck saw when he squinted. When he gazed squinting, he could see the shape of things, their ghost patterns, their history. Swarming noseeums, microscopic flying insects, formed into claymore-wielding dragon slayers. Haze became a mountain. To get ideas Peck went to the library at school or the one downtown and randomly picked a book from the shelf. Anything at all, anything out of the ordinary caught his attention—it was as if he thought part of the universe were hiding from him and he only need find it to unleash its power. He would write down whatever caught his eye and drew pictures to capture what it was. When he couldn’t account for what he was reading, couldn’t picture what it was that was being shown to him, he simply wrote down the words, the phrases. He made lists of them. Nautical terms, geology, botanical Latin, racehorse names, lines of poetry, excerpts of journalism, unique and complex words. He compiled these into sensible and insensible successive lines. The universe was what he named it. And the universe could be unpredictable.

The old man’s health turned bad, quickly. He caught pneumonia and never appeared to snap out of its deep fog. Something went in, thought Peck, but it never came back out. On Sunday afternoons he visited his grandfather prior to his death at the convalescence home. One time, while his father stood looking out the window Peck was examining his grandfather’s blank expressions when suddenly the old man spoke, his voice full of rumble and phlegm.

“Kalita, Donskoy, Ivan the Terrible.”

The sound scared Peck. It was the sound of something crazy, detached. The voice was not that of his beloved grandfather. He tried to will his grandfather back to normalcy, to quell the strange voice, to fuse freeform dots into what he remembered, less than what he witnessed. It didn’t work, the fog bellowed and gurgled. Mad eyes, clenched fists, drool.

“Dad?” Peck asked feeling out of control. His thoughts filled with discontinuity, with a maelstrom of nothing, but static, disorganization. No shapes.

“It’s nothing.” His father said, nonchalantly, moving unhurriedly over to the bed. He watched as his father touched his grandfather. He combed the old man’s wispy, silver hair with his hands and asked patting his forehead, “Do you want anything Dad?”

The old man, his mouth yawning silently, opened his eyes, searching, but not looking. “Who are you people?” The voice had changed again.

As this was happening Peck wrote down the names that the old man croaked. He didn’t care whether the names were spelled correctly; he just wanted to get them down. It took him some time to find them again at the school library. The men the old man had blurted out were Russian royalty. They were The Grand Dukes of Moscow.

“Daniel, Yuri, Ivan I Kalita, Semeon, Ivan II, Dmitri Donskoy, Vasily I, Vasily II and Ivan III The Great.”

His father looked at the list in his son’s black journal at the dinner table some time later. He didn’t need to ask about the list, where it came from or why Peck had written it down. He just said, “Your grandfather was a historian, like me.”

“But why…”

“It’s the old timers. It’s gibberish.”

On another visit, with his mother, Peck read the list to the old man, who was withering right before the young boy’s eyes; his grandfather was the only one who truly understood him, the only one to say that no matter what he became he would always be a “Simons, strong and brave.” His history was withering, disappearing down a sinkhole of madness.

“See, you got most of them, you just missed the order.” He tore the pages from his journal and taped to the wall near his grandfather’s bed. This way the old man could just turn his head and see right there the names and the order of The Grand Dukes of Moscow. Peck’s grandfather looked him with his watery eyes. His mouth opened, his lips dry and cracked white.

“Papa,” the old man said in a voice that sounded agitated, his arthritic fingers frantically gathering the blanket on his lap. “It’s getting cold, Papa.” The voice had changed again.

“Silly man, he doesn’t even remember how much he hates,” Peck’s mother said cryptically, half to herself, ignoring the voice changes and the strange things he was saying. She steadied the old man by fluffing his pillow, ironing the front of his stained night shirt with an open palm and pulling the covers up beneath his quivering chin.

Back in the bus making its way across the bridge to downtown, Peck opened the journal and turned back to the missing pages. He had since re-written the list of Russian Dukes. He felt along the jagged edge of what had once been there—a break from the past. As the bus tumbled over the bridge across the river, he read aloud, softly, the royalty of Russia’s past. Over his shoulder, behind him then, through the bus window the snowy, rolling banks of the Red were visible. The outstretched branches of trees rose up bony and stark like his grandfather’s gnarled knuckles. Between those branches, those arthritic fingers, the search party silhouetted, looking for Cara, appeared. They appeared alternatively, to Peck who turned to look through the fogged window, as if noseeums, dots of morphing hemoglobin, or a single word and then as sentences moving across the crisp, white page of a large volume of history whose pages had been well thumbed in the past. Then, they were gone.

He phoned home that day just to hear his mother’s breathing. “I’m okay,” he whispered and hung up.

Peck was at the bus depot. He had used the pay phone to call home, just to let his mother know he wasn’t with Cara in any shape or form. Over at the bench, Peck had staked his claim. There sat his knapsack, a few newspapers (thrown, discarded) and his black journal. This was nowhere now, time was nowhere had familiar faces.

Nowhere had always meant Larry’s place and his ratty couch. But, Larry’s Furby Street apartment had been emptied and he was gone, long gone said the landlady. He was nowhere to be found.

“Moved out to the west coast.”

“Where?”

She shrugged. “You his son?”

With his back on the cool marbled wall he was able to be on the phone and keep an eye on his world. After discovering his friend had moved without telling him, Peck thought of Cara. She had only wanted to be his friend. After speaking with the landlady he had spent Sunday and early Monday searching for Cara. He spent some time too, just going over that night when they placed her in the tool shed, how he secured her with his hockey skate laces, how…

Red, white and blue rubber balls, taffy bars and tidily-winks; “The mom or the dad would put all this stuff on a tray. Scissors, cotton balls, paper clips, a broach, a blue balloon… Just stuff.”

“Peck, yah” a boy called out. He turned to see the boy making his way through the crowd. When the boy was closer, he asked, “Hey man, still here, yah?”

“Hey Slavo. Yep, still here.” Peck tried hard not to look at Slavo’s teeth, which were gray and ugly on account of his illness. Slavo had told Peck his blood was no good, a dis-ease, and that he’d be dead before he was thirty. They met last night at a party off Broadway.

“Have you got any money, yah?” He sat down.

“No, I just spent my last piece of change.”

“Whatcha going to do, yah?”

Peck thought for a moment, and began to tidy up around him. He’d been thinking of a plan, too, while he was searching for Cara. He could get some money and buy himself a bus ticket for the west coast. Slavo had told him things the night before about a way to make money. Slavo had mentioned this place where they could both make money, good money—millions.

“Head to the Basement like you.”

“Oh man, not in the afternoon, yah. Later, yah.”

He nodded; he was hungry and wanted a big fat hamburger from Super Burger, but knew that Slavo had no money either.

“What about heading to the Hudson’s Bay?”

He tapped Peck on the arm and winked. He gathered up his stuff and placed it in the knapsack and two left the bus depot.

The department store was half a block from the bus depot. Downstairs in the Hudson’s Bay was a grocery store. Slavo had said there were no cameras in the grocery aisles and the clerks were dumb immigrants who could barely speak English. “The tellers are old hags who could care less, yah,” he’d said. They devised a plan on the way over.

Slavo went to the drug aisle, while Peck moved toward the bakery. The hard, freshly polished floor squeaked under his snow-boots. His knapsack was on his back, hanging off his shoulder, unzipped. He stood behind the bread and waited for it.

“Clean up on aisle three,” echoed out over the grocery store intercom.

And there it was. There was a general commotion behind him and he remembered not to turn around or freeze up; he moved. Peck stuffed a loaf of bread in his knapsack. Moving sideways, without turning, he went to the freezer section and grabbed a tin of kippers, a block of orange-yellow cheese and a can of whipped cream. The knapsack began to sag with weight. The noise a few aisles over intensified. It sounded like a stack of cans, of thunder, of squeaking shoes on the grocery store’s freshly waxed floors.

“Run Peck, yah,” he heard as his hand reached out for a bottle of soda water. He withdrew and peered over his shoulder. Slavo, running: “Peck!”

Just as Slavo had told him, Peck faced the brick wall with the others when Van Man came.

“Basement,” Van Man said in a flat voice.

The back alley behind the bus depot was dark and quiet. Peck could feel the energy change. With his eyes clamped shut—as he was told to do or risk being beaten—he saw millions of dots floating, it must be his blood. The man walked down the line of boys and one little Indian girl. He tapped the shoulders of the ones he chose; Peck could actually hear the man tapping this kid and then another. As the man tapped, another man blindfolded; Slavo had mentioned that part. Peck was tapped and a black blindfold of soft cloth was tightly wound over his eyes. He was herded into a van with the others.

The drive was short and uneventful. No one spoke. Peck had been told the Basement was “nowhere and smelled of nothing” he’d ever smelt before. Stepping out of the van, into the cold briefly, Peck could see beneath the blindfold that it was a wooden dock of some sort. He was gripped by the arms and led into the building. He smelt a sweet smoke in the air. It smelt like a church.

“Remove.”

Someone helped Peck undress.

“Safety.”

He was doused with warm water and dried, his eyes still blinded. A straitjacket of rubber was put on him, with his arms wrapped behind him and bound at the small of his back. The blindfold was removed, and replaced with another. For a split second he saw the dark room, men in black, more boys and a few girls.

“Mouth.”

His mouth was pried open, wide. Someone blew smoke into his mouth, which Peck tasted briefly before it was replaced by a plastic ball. The ball was forced into his mouth, and he gagged slightly. The orb was attached to a mask with straps that were done up at the back of his head. He could not breathe and shudders ran through him.

“Breathe through the nose.”

His hands, loose and not uncomfortable, were formed into a cup. “Like this.” What felt like a single flower was placed in his hands.

Peck was warm, perhaps even a little hot. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead. His clothes and knapsack were placed at his feet.

“Transfer.”

He moved with the others from the dark room to what felt like a large open room. Peck peered from beneath the blindfold, but it was no use the room was sparsely lit and featureless. He could hear that one by one the boys and girls were led to individual spots. Peck was led to his: A step up.

“Serenity.”

A large door, sounding like a metallic garage door, was shut, and a low hum began. The energy in the room changed; it was heightened. Peck’s bones vibrated, his skin broke out in Goose Bumps.

He was standing on what could only be a small platform, which he figured placed him about three feet above the hard, black floor. The low hum was a trance. There was no other sound. A light shone from above his head close enough to warm him. He tasted marijuana smoke on his tongue now; he thought of Larry; he’d smoke grass with Larry once. He was woozy. His body was made of pinpricks. He tried to peer beneath the blindfold, but there was nothing he could see. Slavo said it would be better that way.

Someone touched his penis. Later, he would say it was “the first” one. The first touched his penis, lifting it with cold fingers. Peck flinched, slightly. The first eased it back in place, ran a finger along its shaft. A second, with soft hands, cupped Peck’s testicles and caressed his thigh from behind. The second lingered, a warm hand on Peck’s inner thigh. It was a gentle touch. A thumb moved, caressing back and forth and around the leg. The kisses began on his naked toes. The second lingered the longest and when leaving took Peck’s flower; the others came and went without registering an impression. They were a blur; he lost count.

Perhaps two hours went by, maybe three. Children, a boy here, a girl there, cried out; Peck moaned once uncontrollably sounding like his grandfather. There was a low hubbub of shuffling feet, groans and gasps. A single bell intoned and the room was emptied.

The children were herded back to the dark room. The rubber jackets were unclipped and taken off. Plastic wristbands bound their hands behind their backs.

“Water.”

They were doused with hot water and foam. The towel drying was vigorous and scratchy.

“Powder.”

Light, fragrant powder was applied to their bodies. They were led to their standing positions, near their belongings. He could feel his knapsack at his feet. There was silence accept for the sound of shoes on the smooth concrete floor. The shoes inched closer and closer to Peck and stopped. He could feel the person was beside him, standing in front of him, inspecting him. His knapsack was lifted and unzipped. He could hear his journal was being opened, the spine cracked, and the pages being turned slowly. Peck could smell his journal; he often pressed his nose in its pages, he knew how it smelled. A page was torn out, slowly. The shoes leaned into Peck and hovered at the left side of his face. Shoe’s breath was hot against his ear.

“Vasily,” the shoes whispered in a slight accent.

The journal was placed back in the knapsack, which was zipped up. The shoes walked away, through a door, and the door closed behind him.

“Dress,” came a different voice.

He bent down, still blindfolded, and dressed. Once dressed the boys and girls were placed into the back of the van. Frequent stops were made the back doors opened and closed, and one by one the children exited the van. He was one of the last to leave.

Peck was tapped on the shoulder. He stood and a hand guided his head through the back of the van. The air was cold and sounds filled his ears of birds, traffic and the sound of water.

“Count to twenty-five, when I say,” a voice said. The plastic wristband was cut and his hands and arms swung freely, aching slightly; they felt alien to him, outside his body.

“Begin counting.”

The van left spitting gravel at Peck’s feet. He counted to twenty-five and took off the blindfold. He was beneath an unfamiliar bridge in a part of the city that was foreign to him and it was then morning, yet dark. A crisp fifty-dollar bill was pinned to his jacket. It billowed in the slight wind. He felt lost.

There were two Caras then: one a missing girl, a person he’d been responsible for, moaning in a suit of leather, and the other was on the west coast creating landscapes out of blue noseeums.

He searched. All throughout the day in conditions both pleasant and clear and extremely cold and dark. Peck trudged through the snow, hiked under bridges, pool halls, and grain elevators, along the riverbank and into warehouses. A shock of flesh, a hand, an arm sticking out of brambles, skin where there should not be skin, her raglans coat. Her singing. Anything. But he found nothing. For two days he searched for Cara, but could not find her. It was a game, where at one time all that was available was placed on a tray, then a blanket of snow, then a thaw, and then something was missing, something was missing, and something was…

Her name no longer sounded like her name. Peck had yelled it out so often and so forcefully, half in will and half in a need for it to bend and dip into small dark corners and hovels. Ubaruben’t yubou dubead yubet?

He headed back to the bus depot, tired and feeling dejected. At least he had some money. When he got to the depot, he saw two police cars parked outside. He decided not to go in, maybe his parents had called the police and they were looking for him. He turned and walked away.

Across the street from the depot, up four escalators, was the University of Winnipeg library. In the back, in the quiet area, Peck scanned the book titles, and flipped open books at random. He came to one, and it had a quote from a small boy. Dhammapada was the boy’s name. The boy was a reincarnated something-er-other. The quote was about radiant gods, and how happy people can be, how happy they can live, with nothing.

Peck had nothing; nothing but his dots and his secrets. The boy says the radiant gods devour bliss, and that the rapture that comes with nothing allows mere mortals to do the same: feed on rapture. His chest carried a burning he could not explain. He wished his life were back to normal, back to a time before they kicked Larry out of the church, before his grandfather sunk into the hole, before Cara became more than one little girl. Peck wished he were dead and that he could be reincarnated into a something-er-other, a new him perhaps. Vasily. What could he devour to get there?

The Twins

Fifty-one days and no sign of Cara; the police had no leads and everyone was thinking the unthinkable—Cara was dead. The city was in the grips of a deep freeze during those fifty-one days. The New Year was bone cold winter and a sense of charity came with it. The hungry were fed at shelters and soup kitchens, the thirsty sated with powdered blue john and orange juice, the strangers were unquestionably harbored and campaigns were held to collect old jackets for the homeless. A bout of Asian flu filled the hospitals; a minister at the prison married an inmate and his girlfriend; the dead were stored in warehouses before the ground frost ebbed, allowing burial—but not for Cara. A guilty man was found innocent; an idiot savant played accordion, his teacher won a national award; Peck’s church spoke of hope, but no Cara. The Neufelds were comforted; Sarah and Lorne walked to school together and returned together; no one bothered them for what happened to Cara for so few knew.

All prayed for the living and the dead. But there was no Cara.

Peck

Exhausted, dirty and in need of rest, Peck returned home. He found his family in the kitchen around the table their glances not at him, but on the floor. They did not speak when he entered, although he could see that his younger sister Henrietta wanted to say something. His mother rose, her arms held by his father. She sat back down, looked at her bowl of oatmeal. The floor squeaked beneath his feet; a kitchen clock talked loudly. Toast popped. The smell of coffee hung in the air.

Peck could hear Inez’s asthmatic gasps. She used her puffer. Quick whooshes of air filled the small room with sound; her cheeks glowed with exertion. She lowered her head into her chest.

Later in the hallway, after Peck had a shower and was walking back to his room, he saw Henrietta leaning against the wall. She puckered her lower lip. “They found her.”

He walked past, numb. Peck entered his bedroom and closed the door. The room, moonlight diffused through the Evergreens, was bathed in a rapturous blue light. He sank to the floor and cried.

During the night, his grandfather died.

The Twins

Cara was dead.

Inexplicably, she was discovered not more than a few feet from where her friends had placed her that dark Friday night. She was not in the tool closet in the Cathedral, but in a nearby shed. It was a fluke really because several searches had swept through the yard. But that’s where Cara was found, sadly, where police and search parties had looked, but had not seen. No, Cara must have been moved. Or, the theory went, Cara moved, during the snowstorm that roiled that night and, perhaps, exhausted, near death, moved to leave, but faint, unable to go onward, blinded by snow and frozen to the core, crept in the hollow space for shelter.

On the morning of the fifty-second day of her disappearance, an employee who once worked at Alsip’s was back in town. He went to that old structure to reminisce or at least that’s what he told authorities. In his day the shed was where the boys would hide their whiskey. The guy was out walking, got to thinking, and went into the yard on a hunch. He had to dig through snow, and pry open the half concealed door, which had frozen shut. But he knew where to look, at what weak corner of the door to pry. He knew where the best hiding spot was and so it was that he came to crack open the door of the shed, beside the Cathedral. He found Cara. She was laying face up, her winter coat draped over her like a blanket. Her hands were behind her back. There was nothing else in there with her, no school knapsack. He had no idea what he was looking at; he knew it was a girl and that something terrible had come to her, but that was it. He didn’t know the entire city had been looking for her and that he, looking for remnants of another life, should find the one life citizens had been hoping could survive whatever had befallen it. He was shocked at what he saw. He stared for a long time. Her skin, he told authorities, he had never seen that colour skin before.

Barry, Wanda and the parents were taken to where Cara was found. Wanda wanted to know every detail herself, rather than hear about it from the police. Peck, Lorne and Sarah all said they did not put Cara in there. The police could find no evidence that there was a struggle. Snow was the great eraser of the past; footprints, boot prints, were long gone. Frost covered the walls, which the sun melted during the day only to be covered again at night by the cold. No fingerprints. There were so many cigarette butts and matchbook covers, beer bottles and used condoms littered around the shed it was nearly impossible to know if any one thing could lead them to the killer—if there was a killer. Cara could have simply tried, and failed, to go home during the storm?

Seeking shelter, maybe she crawled to the platform and to get out of the cold, tucked herself behind the trapdoor? Maybe. That was the mantra. Maybe.

Pastor Skinner held prayers at the site, with Wanda, Barry and the twins; with Lorne, Sarah and Peck there as well with their families. They stood silently before the shed, its door open, looking at where Cara had her final rest.

At the end of the ceremony, Barry spoke because he felt that he needed to. It would be the most he would say ever again. “It was an accident, and we forgive you. God forgives you.” He could feel Wanda tugging on his arm, her body jerking in waves of grief. Walking back through the field to the street, Wanda took Barry by the arm. “Have we forgiven the wrong people?” He tore his arm away and walked on without her.

SarahIt seemed a little bizarre to be standing in front of her locker staring at it, but that was what they did. Sarah wondered if that made people think they had something to do with her disappearance. She reminded herself that they, indeed, did have something to do with it—it was their fault. But whom had Cara been with after them, before she died? Who?

There were two Caras then: one alone locked behind a door, which was boarded up with a railway tie and the other Cara was with some madman pleading for her life.

The rumours continued.

She had her books up in her arms and Lorne was standing near her, his arms at his side. Peck leaned his head against the locker still not saying where he’d gone. The school was unusually quiet.

“Can you believe it?”

Peck turned, looked and said nothing.

“God took care of her,” Lorne said.

“Yeah he let her freeze,” said Peck.

Sarah couldn’t believe her ears. “How can you say that?”

Lorne cut in, “Keep your voices down.”

The families all agreed the children’s involvement should be kept quiet. No one needed to be blamed, the families said. We stay together, pray together.

She inched closer, pulling Lorne toward her by pulling on his shirt. “Why the hell should I keep my voice down?”

“You know why.”

“That’s how things are,” Peck said and pretended to zip up his lip and throw away the key.

“How are you so sure?” she asked and stared into Lorne’s eyes. She wanted to see deep inside his eyes.

He whispered, “It makes sense. Someone…she got there, and… No one could last out there. Besides you.”

She blinked, and he was there: All-white giant. “That’s different.”

He shook his head and turned to go to his next class. Peck was already gone, his back to them. The hallway was a stream of students and teachers moving oddly silent down the hallway; Peck disappeared among them.

Sarah grabbed Lorne’s arm. This wasn’t the place to discuss this, she admitted to herself, as she pulled him into an empty classroom.

“What?”

She walked over to the windows and stood there, her back to him. Sarah could feel his body behind hers and could feel his breathing. “We did nothing wrong. Why do we need to be quiet?”

“It’s for the best.”

His reflection in the window was warped. She watched his reflection change shape, sculpted into a vessel. In her head there were voices, mostly the voices of rumour. “We’re not murderers.”

“I didn’t say we were, and I don’ think anyone else is. It’s just—”

“What?”

He placed his hand on her shoulder and she turned to face him. Hold me.

“We did something I pray for God’s forgiveness for what I have done.”

The words hung in the air. She looked out at the rows of desks, the name scribbled on their surfaces, the pen caps and balls of paper on the floor. “What did we do, exactly? We were just playing around. And by keeping silent we do nothing but make ourselves look guilty. What we did was an accident. But where she ended up we had nothing to do with it. That’s somebody else.”

“Who Sarah?”

The classroom doors opened and the lights came on. “You too mind telling me what you’re doing in here?”

“We were just leaving,” Sarah said and walked out of the room.

When Lorne got to the door the principal stopped him. From the hallway she could see her boyfriend, his hands his pockets, looking up at Crazy Eyes and the two men nodding.

Peck

That night, Peck ventured out alone. He’d snuck out his bedroom window and jumped to the snow bank at the side of the house, which had grown with each snowfall. He was following the stars, ice cubes really, in the black milk sky. Earlier in the day at the school library he’d written out the names given to warm and cold stars. That night he was eager to see if the list matched the books in the library, if what you found there, could be found somewhere else. He really wanted to see a super hot blue star or an orange one. It was not possible, but he squinted and tried to imagine their colour.

The moon was so bright he could see a mile in either direction. It was only nine, but it felt well past midnight because the streets were deserted and the sound of silence crackled through the air as if electricity. The city had seemed quieter since Cara was found. The night was quiet. He was mulling over how blue can be hot, when large daggers of ice hanging and sparkling from the low roof of a shed caught his eye. They were teeth without dis-ease.

“Monday, fair of face…” he said reaching up to tug a tonsil from the mouth of the dark shack; his sisters had been playing a rhyming game just before they went to bed and it was lodged in his head. He stuck the icicle into his mouth.

He didn’t know where he’d been walking, because it didn’t really matter, until he found himself standing in front of the Cathedral. A spike of ice snapped from the roof of the nearby shed and fell to the ground with a thud. And he walked on.

With the ice in his mouth he gazed up at the constellations imagining the darkest outer reaches of the universe. Earth, atmosphere, interplanetary space, interstellar space, intergalactic… Sirius? There? Were the stars the same over the west coast?

“So far away,” he said as he walked around the Cathedral. A cloud of his breath obscured Phecda. The Big Dipper was somehow wounded; it was an empty vessel. He lifted his journal from his jacket pocket and clicked his pen. The ink would not flow it was too cold. He threw the pen aside, onto the ground with the other litter.

What are the stars of the Big Dipper besides Phecda and Merak? Tomorrow, he would have to look it up.

“The closest star: Proxima Centauri….” He turned to see his moonlit shadow elongate… In the neighborhood, a dog yelped once, twice. Then went suddenly quiet.

He pretended he was in a university amphitheater with the greatest minds in attendance and the instructor asking him a question. “Light years are a measurement of what, Mr. Simons?”

“Distance, sir, not time, distance.”

His shadow darkened the world behind him, onto the Cathedral wall. Throwing the ice-dagger aside, he sunk to his haunches having second thoughts about the discarded pen. It had fallen behind a stack of decrepit wood. He was sucking his wet lips, staring with his stargazing eyes into the darkness, now, where…as he reach behind the wood. He felt… “Tuesday…” a piece of cloth? He looked in and saw it, half covered in snow behind the stack of wood.

Nothing. We are nothing but insignificant dots. And the universe is what we name it.

Peck moved in, pushing the stack slightly. He watched the line of darkness the stacks made, take his hand, his arm, and his shoulder… “Distance, sir, not time, distance.” He reached in, hand quivering and grabbed hold of the cloth and pulled it from the ice and snow.

It had been white. It was a handkerchief with a small blue sailboat stitched in the bottom right hand corner. Peck grunted and rolled the handkerchief up into a ball as he placed it in his pocket already bulging with books of matches, oddly shaped pebbles and coins. He looked again, and found his pen.

Sarah/Lorne

They were alone. The silence that was between them was filled with a sense of urgency. Sarah has never felt so alone—or anticipating the feeling of being alone. Lorne was lying beside her, his eyes closed. The house was empty except for these two souls. They skipped school to be here together, alone. It was an afternoon of empty streets, house cats in windows, sounds of leaving.

“When?”

“Soon… A year.”

“Why?”

He nodded.

Sarah traced the light on her boyfriend’s face, the way it changed when the curtain in the wind moved. The window was slightly open; they had shared a cigarette, blowing the smoke toward the outside air. She traced the light down his throat, his bare chest, and his stomach. Sarah kissed all the spots she wanted to, and lingered where it felt right.

He rocked her in his arms; he said there would be letters and wonderful things. It was only a year. I would only be twelve months. His family thought it was best. To be a servant was what it was meant to be: To serve.

Sarah was the first to consider it, unbuttoning her blouse. She looked at him; “I love you.”

He began to cry, full cheeks of wet silent tears. “I love you.”

He was her first. Her servant.

LorneLorne filled his days with getting ready to leave for Costa Rica with his family. He quit playing hockey, he did as much schoolwork as he could and he attended church. The hardest of three was church. He felt Christ’s eyes upon him.

When those eyes lined gutters and bobbed in trees, formed in the skulls of pigeons and congealed in the heads of wood knots and bag ladies, he spoke with his father.

In the evenings, his father worked on jigsaw puzzles, but not just any 500-piece puzzle, he worked on Stave puzzles. They came in blue boxes and inside the puzzle pieces were wrapped in green tissue. There was no picture on the box, and the grain on the back of the pieces did not always match; there were few edge pieces. His father worked on the puzzles for months.

“I don’t know what to do,” Lorne had said. His father listened carefully and motioned for his son to sit on his lap. He did and his father hugged him tightly. They were close.

“Go to God, son. Continue to look to Him. Life is a puzzle, God is where we go to have another look at the box.”

“I think you’ve always known that. Remember our cat, Speckles?”

Lorne shook his head. He couldn’t remember.

“Well, you were only four. The neighbor’s dog, well, you see. Got Speckles. And you came running into the house, with, your hands were covered in blood.”

“What?”

“Speckles didn’t make it and we really wanted to have the neighbour’s dog put down. It was dangerous. Honestly, a dog needs a good chain.”

“I don’t remember any of this.”

“Of course you don’t you were so emotional that day. You asked us if we could go over to the neighbour’s house and forgive the dog for killing our Speckles.”

SarahIn the days and weeks following Cara’s discovery, Sarah spent her time doodling on notepads, building papier-mâché planets for a school project and watching for the White giant, his boot-thundering avalanches in the trees, his swaying satchel, his gentle, massive hands. But no.

When she once thought she saw his back (a spine of incredible height among the bare oak) and no more…Sarah spoke of her hopelessness.

PeckPeck was gone, even when he was at home.

The days passed by without a whimper. Without a sound. He made pictures of vast nothingness, galaxies and vistas that swarmed with infinitesimal dot after dot of blue hoary singularity. He thought of rapture, of gods with gaping maws. He thought of killing himself and becoming something-er-other. He thought of Dhammapada. He glued match covers into his journal; he glued the handkerchief in there too, writing on it “the shroud of Talbot.”

Wanda/Barry

A young reporter sat on the couch, his notebook open and lying flat on a low coffee table. Several newspapers were piled near the couch. It was early evening. Barry sat in an easy chair and Wanda was at the window. Music could be heard coming from another room. “Yes, just there.” A photographer was standing aiming her camera at Wanda. She was giving her instructions on how to look and how to turn her head.

“I can’t imagine,” Martin Ford said in a hushed voice after clearing his throat.

“Right,” Barry said watching the flash of the camera and his wife standing at the window.

Wanda looked out the window at the waning light. She felt a sense of purpose in now with Cara found and buried. She had written in her journal that morning, “I can forgive because I am forgiven.” She felt strong and certain.

There was a flash, and then it went out.

The twins/Sarah

Peck came and went part ghost part shining glory. Sarah and Lorne spent all their time together. No one seemed to want to be near them as much as they didn’t want others around. People talked about a killer on the loose for a few months, then it was no longer there, and the specter seemingly disappeared.

At the end of January, Lorne’s family packed up their belongings and left for Costa Rica to do missionary work for the Mennonite Central Committee.

“It’s a year.”

Sarah shook her head. Lorne kissed her on the cheek and held a piece of her hair. He left her sitting on the stoop. She watched him walk away, down the street and vanish into a spark of sunlight around the corner. Only when he was around that corner did she raise her arm as if to wave. Sarah wanted to tell him, but didn’t know how to get the words out of her head and out of her mouth. It didn’t seem like the right time to tell him she was late. It was nothing, she assured herself. Nothing to worry about.

Sarah always knew she could turn to Peck—if she could find him. She eventually tracked him down. He told her he would take care of everything. He had a place downtown; he knew where to go, who to talk to. He had someone who would do the right thing. He stared at her from behind a plume of blue-white cigarette smoke. He wiped tears from her cheek.

“If it’s what you want?”

Sarah didn’t respond right away. How could she? There were times when she could feel the little body inside her moving and she wondered if it would move to protect itself when in danger. Through her stomach and up through her chest and into the back of her eyes visions traveled. She saw little arms of light crisscrossed and lifted to guard the softest spot; that place where we hurt the most is that one place we admit our love and desire. Not the face, not the eyes, no this tiny eggshell. Mommy?

She just shook her head, yes. The beautiful are not born they are endured, their haunting easily envisioned, their burden substantial and Sarah knew this from the aching that time would not diminish.

Sarah

“Follow the yellow line to the elevator, take the elevator up to six. Once you get off the elevator on the sixth floor, look for the blue, not the green, the blue line and it’ll take you right to the reception area.”

“Right,” said Peck who turned to smile at her. Sarah smiled weakly in return afraid and uncertain.

They road the hospital elevator alone up the six floors with bland, lilting music filling the small chamber. She thought of funerals, these thoughts born from the pungent antiseptic air, the sterility of the cold floors and walls and the crisp, white uniforms of physicians and nurses. Sarah clutched Peck’s hand and squeezed. His hand became Lorne’s.

They left the elevator and follow the blue line painted on the floor as instructed. It was a brook of stone. They came to a reception desk where a nurse was sitting behind a desk writing in a folder. The nurse was singing along with the radio, which sat on the windowsill behind her.

“Hi honey whatcha name?” the nurse asked startling Sarah. The nurse was too perky for funerals. Sarah wondered if the blue line that ran up to the desk, traveled beneath it and through the soles of the nurse’s shoes and up into her veins, resting only at the back of her blue eyes? Peck nudged her and she prepared to lie.

“Luby Stanislavsky,” she answered glancing at Peck. He smiled as warmly as he could; Sarah felt reassurance from that smile, that split second spread of his lips, which helped to quell the screaming that she heard inside her own skull.

She could see the nurse scribbling the phony name on a pink form. That’s not me, that’s not me… blue line, blue line. Follow…

The nurse was humming.

“I really don’t need you right now. You can go have a seat with the others,” said the nurse swiveling herself around in her chair. She motioned to a waiting area directly behind her. For a brief moment, so briefly she hoped no one noticed, Sarah clung to Peck. Then he left her and sat in the waiting area.

The nurse, still humming, handed her a paper wrist bracelet with a dead teenager’s name on it. Luby died last year in a car accident, Peck had told her. “You’re now the dead girl.” He knew a guy who could do that: change your identity. It all had to do with paper.

“Won’t they…”

“It’s all arranged. This way there will be no record of you being there.”

The paper bracelet around her wrist floated and slid down her thin arm as she walked toward Peck. Sarah felt lightheaded and weak in the legs. She had to concentrate to place one foot in front of the other. “Thank you Luby,” she said to herself and suppressed a need to burst into tears.

She plopped down beside him and offered up her wrist. Down slid the bracelet.

“Luby,” she whispered and pinched him.

“Tubby.”

“I’m second, behind that girl over there,” she said quietly pointing to the smaller of the two Native girls in the corner.

Sarah wrapped her arms around his left arm and eased her head onto his shoulder. The music on the radio had stopped and the news came on, one of those fifteen-minute news wrap-ups. She felt it echo off cold hospital walls.

The lead story was that a NASA shuttle had exploded the day before on take-off in the sky over Cape Canaveral in Florida. A teacher, from New Jersey, or somewhere, was aboard. She was killed instantly in the blast, along with six other astronauts.

Peck back at the apartment would later show her a drawing of a rain of dots, millions of them falling from the sky like fading sparks diving into a dark sea. He drew stars floating, phosphorous and enormous, and then sinking, determined to live at the bottom of the ocean.

“That’s awful,” Sarah whispered without lifting her head from his shoulder.“Okay Sweetie, you’re on,” the singing nurse announced to the whole waiting room. The nurse was standing by the reception desk holding a folder. A blue line on the floor ran between her feet. The Native girl in the corner got up and went over to the nurse.

A few minutes passed, “Ms Luby. You can go to prep now,” the nurse said motioning over to Sarah who at first thought the nurse was asking for someone else.

She rose, took off her rings, necklace and earrings. She placed them in the palm of Peck’s hand and rolled his fingers into a fist. He gave her a hug, holding her in tight.

“Friends are friends forever,” he whispered in her ear. “I’ll be right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

“And you’ll help me with math afterwards?”

“We’ll make sure you’re all better first, then we’ll worry about math…”

“You won’t see her for about two hours,” the nurse said to Peck.

PeckLuby was killed when metal and glass entered her body and in surprise gave up a piece of her soul. All was but gone before she realized she was giving up too much. But by then, the sucking of death was all too powerful; it moved around inside her an invader with a cooing voice and eager tongue. And then, she was gone. Where she rested was no longer a recognizable body. It was an it. It was and then it wasn’t. It burned and was returned to ash. Sometimes, when she is tired and alone, and the music of night is still and sweet, and Sarah feels the drift of her own being, she will look down at her cigarette, at the slag in the ashtray and she will think of fire, of burning. She will think of funerals.

SarahAfter Sarah lay still in the room where things happened. “They’ll never send anyone up there again,” the nurse said stuffing a file into a three-drawer cabinet at the side of the room. Sarah turned her head slightly.

“Go home, get a lot of sleep. Have your boyfriend get you whatever you want, Luby.”

Her hands were on her wide hips. The nurse appeared to be assessing Sarah. She turned to go, and ask if preparing herself for what was on the other side of the door, preparing herself for public words, she offered: “It’s cold already. It’s cold; cold enough for them sun dogs. You know those rainbows around the sun?”

“Why do they call them sun dogs?” Sarah lips, dry, cracked when she spoke.

“Because it looks like it’s chasing its tail. The rainbow keeps going around and around…”

“Never knew that.”

“You take care of yourself. As I’m sure the doctor has told you, there will be some bleeding.”

She nodded.

“OK, rest a few minutes more and then I’ll come back in to get you. Then you can leave.”

PeckThe basement cafeteria was full with patients, the milling of people nervously waiting and staff on coffee breaks or coming in for their shifts. Peck paid for his coffee and walked out of the cafeteria. He wandered through the twisting and turning hallways in the basement sipping from his plastic cup. He came to a door marked: “Don’t Enter” and tried to open it. Locked. Behind the metal door he could hear a distant humming.

Further down the hall he came to a set of double, swinging doors, both with large windows cut into the doors. Through the windows he could see it was the laundry department silently folding sheets in even, bright light.

Folds of white whipped over their hands. It was dreamlike, a dance. Hands folding the white sheets over and over again, quietly and efficiently. Their eyes were elsewhere, while their bodies did the work. One after another the sheets, tight and folded, were stacked in a neat batch. One woman quickly looked up, locked eyes with Peck, but then diverted them just as quickly.

When he got back to the reception area more people had arrived. The singing nurse was prancing around, directing traffic, tagging girls and telling men and boys to sit down and wait.

Peck sat and went through Sarah’s purse for some gum. He found some sugarless kind in the bottom of the bag. He offered a stick to a redheaded man beside him.

He took her math textbook from her knapsack and began to flip through the pages. Basic calculus, he thought. As he was running figures through his head, he felt the red head staring at him. Peck turned.

“A counselor came by,” he whispered.

Peck looked at the guy, who was much older than he had originally thought. “About what?”

“She just want to make sure we’d take care of the girls after their operations. Both of our girlfriends were just about to go into the operating room.”

He wanted to correct him, Sarah was his friend, not his girlfriend, but it seemed like a lot of work.

“They’re just going in? It’s already been an hour,” he said.

“The nurse said things are backed up.”

The red head got up and walked toward a table of magazines and newspapers. He came back with a newspaper and opened it. Peck put the math textbook back into Sarah’s bag.

The red head brought the paper back up to read. Peck looked at the picture on the front, but couldn’t make it out. It resembled a microscopic germ, magnified a thousand times, the kind he studied in biology.

“What’s that?” he asked.

The red head turned the front page down and looked at it.

“Shuttle explosion. Happened yesterday in Florida. Boy, what a waste huh? They send this thing up into the sky and... Said it touched the face of God. Fuck man, I think God saw it coming and decided to teach us all a huge stinking lesson: Don’t fuck with me.” The red head stared at the page for a moment. Peck didn’t say a word.

“Luby will be right out,” the nurse said and gripped Peck’s knee.

He picked up his stuff. Sarah walked from behind the yellow door as he packed her purse up to go. Sarah walked shakily, gingerly across the shiny hospital floor. Her face was pallid.

“All done,” Sarah said standing before Peck, who seemed to shrink right before her eyes. She knew of death now and wondered if Peck felt the same way, given his grandfather had recently died. And they had both lost Cara.

“Are you okay?” he asked holding her at arm’s length.

“It really wasn’t that bad, really.”

Sarah

Sarah rested in the bed, in a stranger’s apartment too weak to offer up her reluctance. She canvassed the room and recognized some of Peck’s drawings taped haphazardly onto the walls—she could recognize his drawings anywhere—his swarming blue dots like gnats on the slightly yellowing pages buzzing with intention to capture the image of a woman’s hand there, a hooded bag lady uttering gibberish over there, a strange and wonderful flower, as if fluttering in the wind, near the bed.

Peck walked in with a portable cassette player at his side.

“Billy Joel, please,” Sarah pleaded in mock moaning. He held the cassette up in his hand and gave it a rattle.

“Whose place is this?”

“A friend’s… The Piano Man, at your request…” The music began to lift through the unfamiliar room.

“Anything else before I go to the store?”

She motioned him over to the bed. “Peck…”

He tilted his head and sat down beside her grasping for her hand. “No need to say anything…”

“And there’s so much to say. I, Peck, I don’t want to tell Lorne.”

“Sure, but why?”

“Can we keep it our secret?”

He held up his little finger. She held up hers and they hooked fingers.

“Promise.”

“Promise…”

Peck

Peck was not expecting it to be as cold as it was when he got outside on his way to the store. The sky was steel-gray and without clouds. The light was so bright, he thought he have sunglasses.

He wrapped a wool scarf around his throat. “Nippy,” he said recalling his grandfather’s favourite word for the cold. His breath turned to frosty air and flew upward before disappearing. He watched his breath rise and had to shield his eyes from the blinding sun. There were rainbows around the sun. He thought they were called sundogs.

Peck hadn’t realized he was standing in the middle of the road in front of the apartment block. A horn sounded and it was just enough to break his gaze from the sun. The car was not going to be able to stop as it was sliding on snow and ice.

He darted across the street ramming his foot into the curb causing him to trip and land on his knees. The jagged ice covered sidewalk tore at his knees. Pain soared up his legs, traveled the length of his spine and hit his cavities. His jeans, at the left knee, ripped open and his skin was gouged with ice and gravel. Bright thick blood ran down his knee.

The car continued on its way, its horn bleating repeatedly. Just before it tore around a corner, Peck looked up to see in the rear window the face of a small white dog, its mouth going, its teeth bared. He couldn’t hear its barking.

SarahIt hurt to pee. But Sarah had to go real bad. She had gingerly walked into the bathroom while Peck was out at the store. After cleaning up she walked around the friend’s apartment. Her curiosity was greater than her pain.

Who did Peck know who had an apartment?

There were four rooms, one of which was the bedroom she was recuperating in. The living room directly across from the bathroom was packed with leather and overstuffed furniture, plants, antique lamps, and shelf upon shelf of books. Sarah ran her hand along the spines of the books. The books were all hardback, most felt made of leather. There were ones with titles in another language—perhaps Russian. It looked Ukrainian and Sarah had seen enough Ukrainian around town to recognize what she was seeing was a close proximity. There were art books, too. These were fat and glossy. There were books of Greek myths, Russian and Jewish folk tales. The Torah lay open on a credenza. A row of books had names of philosophers Sarah had heard of: Plato, Socrates and Kierkegaard. But there were others, Heraclitus (which was open and atop other books), Nietzsche and Russell, which she only assumed were philosophers. The room also had a stereo with a shelf of records and tapes, most of which Sarah hadn’t heard before.

The room adjoining the living room was the kitchen, a cold and barren room of gray tile and white walls. There was an old-fashioned icebox built into the wall. She opened the icebox to find the shelves empty except for one glass jar containing dentures. She shook her head and opened the freezer compartment. Inside there were plastic bags, and inside the plastic bags were dollar bills.

She closed the icebox with a sense that the more she delved into whose apartment she was in, the less she wanted to know. A door, nearly concealed by the whiteness of the walls, stood before her.

Is this where the old all- white giant lives? Is this where he rests?

She always thought of the white giant, the one who came to her as she lay freezing in the snow when she was a child. He came and made her live…

Sarah opened the door and found darkness. With a flick of the light switch a florescent light on the ceiling blinked once, and then stuttered itself on showering the room in an intense white light.

The room was white tile from floor to ceiling. At the center of the room was a dentist’s chair, like the one she sat in when she went for her annual check up with the family dentist.

Along the wall there was a sink, a cabinet of jars and what looked like tools. There were portable stands, lights on wheels and other contraptions Sarah had never before seen.

A sound from behind her, at the door, made Sarah turn off the light and return to bed. She lay there imaging who in the world would have a dentist’s office in their home?

PeckThe pain in his knee was intense and stinging. He bit down on his tongue as he picked off a patch of skin and throwing it into the dirty snow. A shard of ice ripped from the sidewalk cooled the sting, but only made his leg throb.

“That baby could have had a life,” he said pressing the ice down hard. Tears welled up in his eyes and he didn’t care that his nose was running and that his ears were being bitten by the frost. Indiscriminate dots.

He looked up at the sundogs and marveled at how they appeared to chase their own tails. “What did it do? What did it do? He allows too much pain. He allows too much. Why is there more bad than good?”

He was not shouting, but he knew he’d been talking too loudly. He rose and looked around to see if anyone had been watching him. Peck looked up the three storeys to the apartment window. Had Sarah heard him?

“He just takes,” Peck whispered to the sundogs. The stinging subsided every so slightly, his heart stopped pumping so fast, and he unclenched his jaw. “Why give, when He takes.”

Peck limped to the store, which luckily for him was just around the corner. It was a grocery store where the stock was changed so seldom most of the items were covered in dust. The majority of the patrons spoke little or no English. It was a cheap and convenient place. He wandered down a few aisles looking for Sarah’s pads. He didn’t want to ask where they were. At the bulletin board near the produce aisle, he met a Chinese woman who was busily stapling posters on the board.

“You see?”

It took him a little by surprise. She had just turned from the board with a leaflet in her shaking hands.

Peck was almost positive the dog on the leaflet, under the words “missing,” was the white Pekinese he’d seen in the rear window of the car that just about ran him over.

“No,” he said and limped off.

What would be the use of saying anything? What would be use, it was over and there was nothing he could do about it.

The clerk told Peck where to find the pads. He purchased them and limped back to the apartment. By the time he got back into the apartment, Billy Joel was crossing some bridge. He could hear it through the door.

Peck pushed open the door of the apartment, put the grocery bag and the newspaper he’d found at the apartment door on the hallway chair, and hung up his parka. He went into the bedroom with the pads and found Sarah sitting up smoking a cigarette. He saw something in her face, but couldn’t quite place it.

“Hey, I can put this out if… What happened to you?” she asked looking at Peck’s knee. He’d forgotten about his knee. He looked down.

“Come here. Take those pants off and wash it, there’s dirt still stuck in there.”

“Ah, it’s nothing. I just tripped,” he said and walked over to the clothes closet. “Just leave it.”

He opened the door and gingerly took off his pants. He tossed them into the black hole that was the closet. His jeans simply disappeared, swallowed up, as if, he thought, they’d been caught in something, a dark whirlwind, and he couldn’t see, something cold and hungry. It made him shiver.

Sarah mumbled from the bed. She was falling asleep. He doesn’t know what she was saying; he thought he heard his sister, in her taunting voice speaking that language he couldn’t understand.

MartinIt was like a sentence that ended with no punctuation. It made Martin sick to his stomach. He wanted to know more, to say more. He fumbled for his beads and moved them through his agile fingers.

What more was there to say? Was this to be one of those mysteries that are never solved? How could a young girl go missing, turn up dead and no one be blamed?

The police had no answers. Her parents had all but fallen apart over the incident and that did nothing to produce an answer. “How do things like this happen?”

Martin Ford had written this in big, black letters in his reporter’s notebook and propped the book open on his disorganized desk. His editors wanted more because the public wanted more—but Martin could not deliver.

Cara Neufeld’s killer had not been found. There were two Caras then: one a dead girl whose skin was the colour of ice, the other one was black and white and ate newsprint.

He was at his desk, leaning back in his chair, when she came by dropping the note. Martin quickly retrieved the note and flipped it open.

“Are you coming tonight?”

Katherine instantly came into his mind. What excuse could he give her? He picked up the telephone receiver and dialed her number.

“Kat?”

They exchanged small talk about the day, the weather and when he had enough nerve he told her his lie. “Can’t make dinner tonight.”

She of course wanted an explanation. They had made dinner reservations at Dubrovnik’s and it was a big deal. They hadn’t been out in a while.

“This Cara thing. I have to keep looking into it… I won’t. Kat. Katherine…”

He hung up the receiver and snatched the note from his desk. He walked over to Cecil’s desk.

“I’m right in the middle of something, don’t fuck with me,” Cecil said staring at the computer screen. He held a hand up, palm forward.

“Just one question.”

“Okay, one question.” Cecil leaned back in his chair and gave Martin an exasperated look. “You want to know her name, don’t you?”

“Who?”

“Don’t play dumb with me. You think I couldn’t see her dropping that note off on your desk.”

“I know her name,” Martin offered and glanced down at the note, which was signed with the letter “F.”

“No you don’t, because you don’t know who she is or what you’re doing.” Cecil turned back to his work and without looking at Martin said, “You didn’t know what you were doing with Gail, with Candace, with… what Kristen?”

“Oh and you’re perfect.”

“No,” Cecil offered, still concentrating on his story on the screen, “on deadline.”

Martin called the girl up and luckily for him she answered the phone, “Franny.” She was a young researcher in the news library. He had seen her several times and had had a few drinks with her, and colleagues, after work. He’d flirted and she returned his suggestive body language.

After making love in her rickety, brass railed bed Martin assumed was fresh from her childhood home, they lay smoking cigarettes and listening to her Quiet Riot tape. While she nattered on and on about nothing in particular that Martin was interested in, he found himself drifting into her eyes.

They were black. A deep black that appeared as if silk.

It was less a drawing in, and move involuntary. He felt his body move. There was something there in those dark eyes, it was in his bones and sucking him in and he could not resist. Soon he simply disappeared, the being that was Martin, lying naked on a bed with a strange woman, was swallowed up. It was, as if, he thought he’d been caught in something, a dark whirlwind, he couldn’t see, something cold and hungry. It made him shiver.

Barry

For most of the winter Barry stayed in his bare home. There were times he would wander down the street to see Pigeon George and to be with Marta. When Marta was home from her shift at the hospital, they would sit in the living room and she would play the piano. Barry would sing, soft songs, lullabies and the occasional aria unaccompanied. Pigeon George would be asleep in his armchair the Torah on a stand at his elbow, dog-eared and well thumbed.

“Why haven’t you done more with your singing?” Marta would ask as they went into the kitchen to refresh their coffee.

“It’s over…”

“Well, it’s a gift you have. Look you’ve put Papa to sleep with your soothing voice. You have a beautiful voice.”

Barry appreciated the compliments, and the nights he spent at the George home with Marta, the piano and all those birds cooing outside. But mostly he stuck to himself and to his house. He called out the girls’ names and wept on the carpet floor of Cara’s bedroom. Wanda had taken most of the house’s furnishings, but had left Cara’s room virtually untouched.

Mariner lived in Cara’s room. Barry had spread newspaper on the floors and atop the dresser and bed. He often just left the cage door ajar. He was careful though of not allowing the pigeon to fly out an open door or window. He was unsure what Mariner would do, and that scared him.

He would wander the cold, empty house with the bird on his shoulder. And he would sing, high and mighty songs in German, and soft ballads like the kind Sinatra sang when slowly snapping his fingers.

While singing and humming parts of “Time To Say Goodbye,” Barry suddenly and somewhat inexplicably decided it was time to set Mariner free. He stood in the kitchen, near the sink, and slid open the window. Winter tumbled in, and the cold made everything feel brittle. Briefly, before letting the pigeon through the open window, from his open palms, Barry wondered if it was too cold, if the bird could withstand the winter cold.

But it was too late. She was gone disappearing into the dark night winter sky. Instantly Barry felt unburdened. “Goodbye,” he said and re-latched the window. He stuffed his hands into his pocket and went into the living room to watch television.

A scratching at the living room window the next morning awoke him in his recliner. He opened his eyes slowly, the room filled with bright winter sunlight. At first he was uncertain what was sitting on the exterior windowsill. Then, his vision focused and so astonished him that he jumped up from his resting place and went to the living room window.

It was her, Mariner. Her little chest was heaving in and out, and her head, adroitly, shuttle to and fro. Her beak opened slightly.

Barry, bent at the waist, stared in wonder at his bird, which had come back to him. He stared until his eyes grew sore. He stared into those black, blank eyes trying to discern the pigeon’s sense of place. Soon, he simply disappeared, and was swallowed up by those eyes. It was as if, he thought, he’d been caught in something, a dark whirlwind, he couldn’t see, something cold and hungry. It made him shiver.

He went to the front door, “Mariner.”

The bird flew into the open door, through the living room, down the hall and alighted upon its perch within its cage in the room where Cara once slept.

There was something there, Barry said to himself, going over to latch the cage door.

SarahNot far from Sarah’s house she walked alone to the last place Cara ever knew. The snow trampled and dirty was slippery with so many people having been there looking at what she could not be sure. And yet, she looked about for signs for more than her memory allowed. Was this an evil place? She could feel its emptiness.

The sound of wind.

The moving branches.

The frozen river.

The stark building, standing against the darkening sky.

The emptiness inside her.

This and more came to her as she carefully made her way to the yard, to go inside and sit where they had sat, to say those words she had wanted to say but could not until she felt she was ready for them.

Sarah walked into the Cathedral, securing her steps by bracing her hands on either side of the doorframe. On the wall the “Gone for Good” and “What’s missing from chrch?” “What’s missing from Yor?” was joined with “Cara is freezin’” and “I killed her.”

The building moved and began to swing her on unsteady legs. There was a sucking, a darkening hunger. Doubling over, she fell to the snowy ground, clutching her stomach. On all fours, bile forced its way into her mouth. Her cheeks bulged, and she opened her mouth at last to stain the purity there in front of her.

“Forgive me,” she whispered, and then louder, “forgive me.”

But the wind that moved her, muffled her plea, and she straining with all her might, straining her neck upward and throwing her voice to the depthless stars, the infinite universe, she screamed; “Why didn’t you come? Why didn’t you come for her like you came for me? Why did you save me, save me, save me…”

She was a dog scratching at the door, howling, howling for dear life to be released from the tightening collar, the taunt chain, cold against her yoke.

“Savemesavemesavemesaveme…Someone, anyone.”

WandaWanda stood at the podium, staring into the bank of floodlights. She was not blinded and did not have to squint, but she could not see her audience. Was the killer out there? The microphone warped her voice at first, feeding back a sonic noise that hurt her ears.

“Cara…” echoed.

“Whomever prevented my daughter from coming home to us, to living out her full and wonderful potential, I am sorry for you.”

A round of applause.

“I am sorry for you because you do not hold life dear as most people do. You need help.”

Even after a few minutes, she could not see the faces in the audience. It was a seamless black beyond the myriads of shining suns of television cameras and flash bulbs.

“But…” echoed. God bless them.

“I forgive you. We must forgive you to help you. Whoever you are, I forgive you. Hating you will not bring you back…”

Echoes.

It was as if she could see her voice, the echoes, travel in waves from her mouth into the seamless black sea, nosily churning in front of her. But Wanda could not see this. She could feel it. Her body swayed. The podium moved in her grip, the stage shifted beneath her feet, and the dark audience, making pleasing noises, grew and grew until there was nothing but the black of its endlessness.

She no longer heard her own voice, saw not her own body. She was floating in that darkness moving, involuntarily, towards a whirlpool, its sluicing seeking her body, her soul. It felt like hunger.

If she cried, she doesn’t remember. For the hunger was oddly familiar and childlike. And it was cold. It was a coldness she’d never before felt. It was there, hungry and cold and sucking away the very foundation on which she stood.

Wanda shivered.

A round of applause, a bank of shining suns, and the echoes only grew and grew, and before long they no longer surprised her.

PeckPeck held the old man’s head in his hands. His cock was stiff and he was about to cum. Up and down the Russian’s black head of hair rocked over his crotch. He moaned making the Russian move even faster.

It would not be long.

Peck tried to stave off the inevitable, but he knew that the next sixty seconds could be an eternity and that all the truth in the world adds up to one big lie. The universe is what you name it. The dentist continued and Peck thought of his father’s life, his grandfather’s passing, Cara forever frozen at thirteen. All of it parts of deception.

He’d used to care, but it had all changed. The dots only connected briefly then the unapparent connections between things were gone. Dust, ash, slag. Whatever you call it, it’s that and nothing else.

Peck looked away at the walls of the bedroom, walls that held his own artwork. A woman’s hand, a hooded bag lady, a flower. All of it would be gone, dot by blue dot the air would eat the paper as if fire. It happened when we were not looking he’d thought. The dots go elsewhere.

What we say about the universe we say about ourselves and the universe is a gigolo.

As he came into the Russian’s mouth, Peck closed his eyes against the stars, the squeezing of his body’s cells. He watched sparks and spider webs gyrate, weave and diffuse throughout the darkness behind his eyelids.

When it was over, and his eyes still closed, he felt drained and empty.

“Vasily? Where are you my flower?”

“Adrift.”

The dentist stood in the doorway looking back at Peck as he did up his pants. “Do you need your teeth cleaned? I can do it I have time.”

Peck shook his head.

“Lock up when you leave.”

Footsteps, a door, a key in the chamber, a swift turning; a quiet filled with hunger. He hungered for something, but he didn’t open his eyes, because he knew he would be disappointed. Money would be thrown on his clothes—green for cum.

Peck stayed with the darkness, the hunger. As he was drifting into sleep, he glanced further into the webs and sparks as they faded. He watched as they swam, ineptly against a tide. Soon he too felt himself advancing to the throbbing edge of this unseeable maw. He could not turn away. Perhaps he had wanted to.

He wondered what was there, in there. Were there things he could list in his journal, shapes to connect by myriad blue dots? Was Cara there singing?

Crawling under the covers was not enough to quell the ever-expanding center of cold that came with the travel downward.

He began to shiver.

Lorne

Look for what is not there, his father had said. So that is what Lorne looked for. He was praying when he felt the chill of the Costa Rican night on his back.

He turned on his knees; his hands clasped together and looked out his bedroom window. A silver moon hung high and its rays shot glory from the stilled heavens.

“There is a plan for me,” he said and closed his eyes. Lorne prayed hard, pressing his hands together until his knuckles turned white. His eyes were clamped down and his words of intercession hissed through his clenched jaw.

When the house began to move and the rain came rapidly, it did not shake his determination to find God in the pit of his pleading.

“Be there,” he said. “Be with me.”

When the windows blew out and the tiny bedroom filled with glass and rain, he could hear his mother screaming; he could hear his father’s yelling out his name and that of his brothers and sisters.

There was something sucking at his heels. A hunger, a swelling cold hunger. He turned to see that the bedroom wall was missing and that his bed, his dresser, his desk and chair were being swept up in a deluge of water. A shudder of incredible intensity ripped through his entire life, as it slipped beneath the torrent, the glass, the whirlwind of detritus and determination.

He remembered succumbing. He remembered not ceasing his prayers. When they found him, his legs were broken, a rib or two also snapped, and he was suffering from a concussion. What amazed his rescuers was that they could not get to him until a pack of dogs were chased away. They were circling around him as he lay in a fetal position beneath a briar patch. They were circling, as if one dog was connected to the other by its tail. When the rescuers got to Lorne they could not pry apart his fingers.

“Miracle,” he heard.

“I am here,” he heard.

Lorne’s fists were still clamped in humble equipoise. He shivered, in his wet clothes, but felt warmth he could only describe with a muted smile.

He did not mention the dogs had been there to take his soul.

God is a good chain.

The Twins/Sarah

There are days like this in March, although it’s rare to have the sun out first thing in the morning and temperatures rising and rising so that by noon the winter wonderland has melted. The sun can be out and it still is extremely cold. This happens the majority of the time; here the snow-blind and frostbitten legion lurch towards spring thaw with head down, covered from head to toe, determined not to let the cold into their bones.

But this was not an ordinary, run of the mill morning. Everything is melting, the sky a bright azure, the sun seemingly closer. Winnipeg’s extreme weather makes its citizens amnesiacs—a warm winter day always trumps months of nothing but cold and snow and a rainy cold summer one cancels out all of dry, hot weeks of harvest. The weather here is Job incarnate.

Sarah tisk-tisks aloud and then laughs at the watery world outside her apartment window. She thinks about her sculpture, the one she had made in memory of Cara, the one she has invited everyone to come and see. She had it especially delivered overnight and placed at the Cara memorial site—on the banks of the Red—not far from where she was found. By now the sculpture’s sharp edges will be rounded and wet. This is what she wants, but later rather than sooner.

Lorne is still asleep and this makes Sarah smile. He has been staying with her in the city getting sober, again, and hopefully for good. She goes into the kitchen to pour herself more coffee and to get one for him, to awake him. It’s time.

Armed with the two cups she bumps her hip against the door to open it. Lorne’s got his baby face on, the one he was born with, angelic and unharmed, half-smiling: blissful. Sarah stands to watch his body rise with each breath, the way the light gilds his hair, his glow radiating warmth.

“Lorne,” she whispers stepping closer. “Lorne, sweetie…”

A little too softly. A little too…not enough.

“Lorne, you’re back. I love you I always have,” she says, a little louder, into the shards of dancing, infinite dust moats showering the object of her affection. The moment is perfect, if not for Morpheus and her memories. Things flood, returning to shimmer below phantoms of the day’s deluge.

“It’s very difficult to keep the mind between the past and the present,” she says to herself placing the mug down on the nightstand. The sound of the cup on the wooden table awakens Lorne. One eyelid, then another, flutter and slide open. He blinks, surprised.

“Morning.”

“Already?” Lorne rests on one elbow. He stares down at the coffee. “Just like we’re married.”

“Yes, just like.”

“I was having the craziest dream.” Lorne looks up at her and shakes his head. He picks up the mug and takes it, cradled, to rest on his chest. He turns to stare out the window. “Wow and wow backwards.”

“Everything’s melting.”

“Spring…”

Sarah begins to leave, “I’ll just…”

“No, no stay, sit.”

She sits down at the edge of the bed. Her tongue moves, but her teeth refuse to part. He looks better these days, better than when she first saw him back in January, all cooped up in his pastor clothes. He’s since shaved his head and changed his wardrobe to T-shirts and jeans; he ditched the cardigans, the starched white shirt and black pants. Sarah introduced him to her tattoo artist; he got an open bible, a flaming heart and a crucifix tattooed on his left forearm—all in brilliant colours. He looks at it, still to this day and shakes his head.

“Colouring outside the lines,” Sarah says looking the tattoo and Lorne’s fixation on it.

“Maybe it’s time…”

She knows it is. And in a way, she’s glad. He’s come back, but they’re so many more miles to go. But it all lays ahead, she hopes, not behind. Sarah kept busy after Peck’s funeral and Lorne’s decision to sober up. She took on extra work (more penguin waiters) and completed the sculpture for the Cara memorial. Her mother is no healthier, but has days of lucidity and purpose. Beatrice is always there.

Sarah would always be there for Lorne, if he needed her. She knew that she’d helped, but that it was time for him to go back home, to his family and to his church. Sarah begins to cry.

Outside everything continues to thaw under the unusual warmth.

BarryBarry stands on the roof, scanning the horizon. He knows today is the day and is pleased to see the weather has cooperated. Still, he is nervous of what he knows and the decision he has to make. But what do you do—what do you say—when you suddenly discover the answer to a mystery that has haunted you for decades?

What do you say?

It started the day after he spoke with Liz Reimer at Wanda’s book signing. She gave him the keys to an old car and said he could have it. The next day he went to the house.

The house didn’t look like Liz Reimer had lived in it for months. The entire yard and home was covered in snow. A lone trail to the front door was no wider than a foot; the snow there looked as if someone had simply kicked his or her way through to the house. A rusted “for sale” sign jutted out of the snow, as if surfacing from a long burial. To Barry the house looked stale, its windows greasy with old snow. The garage, where Liz said the car would be, was out back of the house, behind a snowdrift. That day, six weeks ago, Barry trudged through the waist high snow to the garage, which was gray in colour and smelled of dog shit. The rusty garage door wasn’t locked.

She said it would be open.

A putrid wave of dog shit and oil hit him in the face when he walked in. He stood briefly, a hand at his mouth. The car was there, half covered in an off-white, stained tarp.

Why did he agree to do this?

From floor to ceiling the garage was stocked with boxes, bicycles, lawn furniture, barbeques, model boats, rope, tools and a fake Christmas tree. The area around the car was cleared.

Barry noticed first that the trunk was open. Out of habit he placed his hand atop the trunk and pushed down. It didn’t latch; it popped open. He tried again and again it popped open. He took both of his hands and using all his weight, he pushed down. The trunk yawned open.

“Fine,” he said lifting the trunk hood. He checked the latch; maybe something was stuck in there. When he lifted the hood he could see there was a wad of newspaper jammed in it. He took the newspaper out and cleaned the latch with the tip of his finger. He threw the newspaper on the ground. But then out of curiosity—he thought there was a spark of light, but he couldn’t be sure—he picked the newspaper ball back up from the dirt garage floor and unfurled it.

It fell from his hand.

“Cara Neufeld Found—Frozen to Death.”

No. Her picture.

Cara?

The garage spun and Barry nearly toppled. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe and his limbs felt as if they would buckle. He began to moan and turned to hold himself upright by grabbing the trunk. His head fell and he leaned into the trunk at the point of retching.

It didn’t at first register. It took his mind a while to understand what his eyes were seeing. His heart was racing; bile filled his throat. An enormous pressure on the back of his head pushed through to his eyes as if forcing him to recognize.

Inside the trunk, amid a viper’s nest of coiled rope, sailor’s knots, was a knapsack. When he allowed himself to think it, he said it. “That’s Cara’s schoolbag. Oh Jesus, that’s Cara’s schoolbag.”

Why was Cara’s schoolbag in Principal Reimer’s car?

Although Barry did not look into the rest of Principal Reimer’s old car until later, he would discover in the back seat a manual typewriter, covered in cobwebs. The typewriter stilled worked, but the keyboard had a jumpy “I.”

Since then Barry had done a lot of thinking. He could tell everyone what he found, but what good would it do? It wouldn’t bring her back. He’d called Liz—obviously she knew. He got her number from a neighbour. She had moved to Florida. Liz said the discovery didn’t come until after Skipper’s death and she was forced to deal with all his possessions. She threw most of it away, but some of it she gave away. She thought Barry should know. He then knew he’d have to tell Wanda, and if Wanda, then the others. The quality of mercy was not strained; it simply fell upon the wicked as well as the deserving like snow in a blizzard.

What to say?

Lorne

Lorne is holding Sarah in his arms and it is a memory of a feeling he no longer knew was apart of him. It is as if time and space has bent and he is somehow bent along with it, bent back into a form he long ago was, a boy holding a girl, a future as yet struck divine, the call not yet sounded, nor if it had been, heard. It is before Costa Rica, before the miracle of his survival, before his return, the light that kept the dogs away.

He rocks her while she weeps into his arm. “Did I ever tell you about the dogs?” She shook her head looking up at him. “Did I ever tell you about the all-white giant?”

Lorne is the most sober drunk in the world. Sarah feels as if light has entered her bones. “I still love you.” “I love you too.” But they know their love is of a shared past, not a mutual future. They talk sitting together on the bed facing one another; they talk about dogs and chains; they talk about stones discovered in the memory of snow; of forms rising from the clay; of light permeating the darkness. The talk turns to Cara.

Lorne/SarahThe field has been cleared and partitioned with rope and bright yellow ribbons. Cars line the street and the field near the entrance to the ceremony. Cameras are up on tripods and are being worked on; reporters speak into microphones and check monitors. Photographers peer through their cameras, switch lenses and refocus their attention on a platform ahead which houses a large object draped in gray tarp.

Police, although largely unnecessary, mill about. Invited guests are required to show a special badge the city developed for the event; no media is allowed past a certain partition save only Martin Ford of The Winnipeg Free Press, an agreed upon condition put forth by Cara’s parents.

Pastor Lorne and Sarah are in a taxi watching the proceedings. They see Wanda arrive. They see her stop to sign autographs. They see some of their former classmates. Some dignitaries arrive, including the mayor who receives a light round of applause. School officials, former teachers and administrators, arrive and walk solemnly together as a group to the small stand set up near the sculpture.

Sarah wonders about her sculpture. “Can you believe how warm it is today?” Her tone is flat.

“What about the sculpture?”

She doesn’t turn. “It’s just meant to be.”

As if to change the subject, “Haven’t seen Barry yet?”

“Is that Greta?” Lorne looks over to see his wife and the girls standing near the podium. The back seat of the taxi is silent except for the low din of the crowd outside. “Yeah.”

“Are you going to tell her everything?”

“The only way…”

Sarah nods and turns to look at her old friend. He smiles meekly. “There is so much to do I don’t know where to start. I thought maybe I could simply go back and make everything all right again, to wash my hands of everything. Life is on my side, right.”

“God is on your side.”

“Where was He for you, Pastor Lorne?” She doesn’t say this with malice, but carefully.

He stares out the window, his head leaning against the glass. “We are all tested in our own way. The quality of mercy is not strained. I was always forgiven, I just had to accept the gift, not deny it. There much to that—accepting and denying, it can take a lifetime. Have mercy upon me…”

“There is just too much.” Sarah’s eyes fill with tears. She thinks of Cara, singing in the darkness.

“Give it all away. …O Lord heal me; for my bones are vexed. Give it all away…”

“Everything, even that?”

He touches her on the knee. “I am always yours, you know that.”

“I gave up our child. I had an abortion when I was fourteen.” It was intended to trump, but it did not. She can’t understand why she blurted it out, but she has and now it’s out there.

“You are forgiven. But you don’t need me to tell you that.”

She sits up her senses telling her Lorne has known for a while about her abortion. “You knew?”

“Peck could never keep a secret.”

“He lied to me…” she says remembering her friend is now dead.

“Forgive him.”

There is a knock at the taxi window. It is Barry. Sarah rolls down the window. “Shall we,” he says. He is carrying a cage of pigeons.

They walk the path that has been sliced through the snow to the opening where the sculpture awaits its unveiling. The crowd gives a murmur, and then with the sun shining down, everyone watches as Wanda and Barry join hands to walk toward the podium.

Sarah

It is as if she can feel the earth rotating. Her feet shuffle in the snow around the tarp. All eyes are on Sarah. Even as Wanda, the master of ceremonies, begins, the sculptor knows everyone’s gaze is upon the gray elephant waiting for its trick master flash, its escape.

The sun is so bright; it takes Sarah a moment to clearly see what he has in his hands. It takes her breath. She tugs on Lorne.

Lorne, at her side, is gripping her hand. “What is going to happen here?” Sarah is now behind the sculpture, untying the ropes that hold the tarp down and secured. She tugs and the knot willingly loosens, and the two strands of rope fall away. Rough tarp is in her hand in a ball, and she begins to pull. In her mind, she reads the stones that the all-white giant left her that day. One stone, warm to touch beside her reads: “Remember.” Another, she has grasped and huddled her small body around reads, “Love.” The rocks are hard to read, their words requiring special attention, shifting from recognized patterns to mineral striations before her memory’s eye. She sees a hand clutching a rock upon which, briefly, the word, “hope,” appears. It is Cara, there, in her mind, a shining bright light, a fist, her fingers, the the fading in and out of a word, “hope.”

The tarp is still in her hand. Time is no longer heavy with doubt. She pulls, she yanks and the burlap slips off the opaque sculpted shard of ice.

People gasp.

There is a round of subdued applause. It is uncertain how to react to the sight of two loops, thick and strong, knotted together. Barry stands near the sculpture his hand inching up to touch it. Sarah feels Lorne behind her, his hands on her shoulders. The applause, muffled by winter gloves, continues.

The sun moves from behind a bulwark of clouds and surrounds the two loops in resplendence. The air is still.

“Ties.”

It is Sarah and she has broken the silence. Her voice is crackle dry. Beside her Barry falls to his knees. Wanda is there too, staring in wonder as the sculpture, under the sun’s scrutiny, begins to shine, sparkle off its opaque core and turn into something new.

“Where?” Barry is saying to Sarah, who is now kneeling beside him, her arms over his shoulders.

“It just came to me… A vision.”

Now Lorne and Wanda are kneeling too and in the small group has formed one indistinguishable mass of people. Martin Ford stands, dumbfounded, staring at the two loops trying to discern why it makes him feel as if he’d left something unsaid, undone. The urge to smash the sculpture grips his heart so forcefully, he feels he must dig in his heels deep into the snow.

“Ties. We are so tied to her, all of us. And we’ll never…” Sarah says. They are hugging one another, weeping and squeezing. “We need to let her go,” Lorne adds.

“We need to untie her,” Sarah says tentatively. “And let her go. We need to untie her and let her go.” Barry and Wanda embrace, wiping each other’s tears away. “If we don’t untie her, we’ll never let her go. She is as tied to us as we are to her. We will never forget.”

“Allow forgiveness,” Barry says looking at Sarah, at Lorne and Wanda before staring up at the sculpture.

Under the intense sun the sculpture will probably last a day or two; Sarah knows this and that is what she had hoped for, it was the substance of her hope that it would melt away. Sarah stands and returns to address the audience, but she doesn’t speak, she begins to sing, “Packing up the dreams God planted…” It’s Cara’s favourite song, “Friends,” by Michael W. Smith. “…In the fertile soil of you…” Barry stands, holding Wanda. Lorne folds Sarah into his arms. They stand, all four, singing as the sun continues its thaw. “…Can’t believe the hopes he’s granted. Means a chapter in your life is through. But we’ll keep you close as always. It won’t even seem you’ve gone…”

Martin wipes away a tear.

BarryBarry opens his cage of pigeons. They rise in unison up, swooping, towards the river. On each foot a single pink note is attached, “Have you seen Cara?” He is on the banks of the river, with Wanda, Sarah, Martin, Lorne and his wife Greta. The ceremony is now over and the crowd has dispersed; Lorne and Greta’s children home with grandparents. They are sitting on Sarah’s tarp.

“Barry, I think it’s time,” Wanda says looking up at him. He is staring at the horizon where his birds have flown. He feels weightless, as he too was soaring. Barry settles down on the tarp.

“You had nothing to do with Cara’s death.” It is a surprise to hear Barry utter more than a word or two. Still, Sarah begins to protest, “We’ve been over this, we…”

“But there’s something you don’t know. And you,” Barry says, and points at Martin, “You can write about this if you want, but I don’t know if it’ll do any good.”

“I’m confused, what’s going on?” asks Lorne.

“I thought about not telling you, but that wouldn’t be fair. I know who harmed our baby…” Barry swallows.

“Just tell them the way you told me,” said Wanda.

“You guys are scaring me, what…” Sarah said.

“Two months ago at Wanda’s book-signing, Liz Reimer came to see me.” He let that sink in before he told them all about the car, the trunk, its contents and the truth: Principal Reimer had killed Cara Neufeld.

CaraIt was dark and I couldn’t see that well. When the door opened, I thought it was Peck. I hoped it was Peck. But it wasn’t. It was a man, and he was taller. In a voice I had never heard before, but still sounded familiar, he said, “Come on Cara, let’s get you home.” He extended a hand and I pulled one from behind my back. Peck’s knot wasn’t even cinched. I gave him my hand. He took it and pulled me up and out of that darkness. The wind had really picked up and the Cathedral was filling with snow. He pushed me ahead, and as I walked forward his hand came around my face. He forced something onto my mouth; a cloth of some sort. I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t breathe. I turned as hard as I could. I needed to see; I needed…I…

Jumpy eyes.

Whuby?

MartinMartin Ford drives Sarah back to her apartment. Pastor Lorne left with his wife and Barry and Wanda went home to tell the twins about what they learned. In the car Martin is still buzzing from what he had heard—he either can’t believe his luck (such a story) that or else he is, like the rest of them, in awe of what transpired. He turns the ignition and instantly The Lounge Lizards blast from the stereo. He moves quickly turn the volume down. “It’s fine,” says Sarah staring out the passenger window, “It doesn’t bother me. I like the ‘Lizards.”

“You know this?” He is pointing at the stereo, flummoxed—no one knows The Lounge Lizards. He turns it down anyway. Horns fight horns and the jazz is the sound of surprise, every time something new, unheard, unfelt. Martin is feeling light.

“What now?”

“You mean going home?”

“No I mean, what now for the rest of your life... I mean something pretty awesome just happened. Sure, it’s incredibly sad and a murder was committed, a long time ago, but you were involved.”

Sarah turns slowly as if thinking about his last comment. Her pierced nostril twinkles in the light. “I don’t know if it goes away so quickly, if someone just says it’s over and it is...”

Martin nods, “But it is.” The blue rosary is in his pocket, bead by bead a trail of mystery, miracle and light.

“Are you going to write about it? Barry and Wanda did say it was fine with them. But they’ve never gone to the authorities.”

He sits for a moment, letting the car come to life, letting the jazz swirl through their thoughts. He looks out at the sculpture, already diminished by the sun’s heat. It won’t last long. “Some times journalism is what we don’t print. A part of me wants so badly to put this down, but I’m sure I couldn’t do it justice. I’d really have to think about it. What do you think?”

“Some would say I never should have done that sculpture. But I felt that if I didn’t, I would never be able to say goodbye—there has to be that point. Why was this story so important to you? Why are you here.”

He put the car in drive. “Just my job,” he said all too quickly. “Where to?”

Sarah

Sarah invited Martin up for a drink; truth be told she didn’t want to enter the apartment alone. She’d gotten use to having Lorne around. In the living room they sit with beers and each smoked a fresh cigarette. Dexter Gordon plays low after the two jazz aficionados combed through Sarah’s collection making a selection. Martin turns, ever the reporter, and asks, “Were you at all surprised about Peck?”

“Are you writing a story?”

He laughs, “Curiosity, the cat and all that. Just talk.”

“I wasn’t surprised, sad, but not surprised. He was a different one that boy. Different.” She takes a drag of her Gauloises and blows the smoke into the air. “That note...” She looks for it hanging in the air.

Martin misunderstands her and says, “The most eloquent suicide note I ever read.”

Jazz filled the space between them. Sarah blinks, sucks on her cigarette. More jazz, more surprise upon them. Martin moves to take a sip of his beer—”You don’t think?”

“With Peck anything…Oh my God. You don’t think he…faked it?”

“It’s possible.”

“Well of course it is. We’re talking about Peck. He got an education none of us got. He went places none of us went. He… the universe is what you name it.”

Martin’s brow furls. “Something he used to say. Hey, think about it. If Peck didn’t die in that fire, who did?”

“Good question. A lot of bums down on Main; he could have used one of the stiffs they find frozen to death… Oh sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“I meant you.”

“What a bum?”

“No the frozen part. You’re the miracle winter baby, aren’t you?”

“You’ve done your homework. But what about Peck, what does your homework say about him.”

“I think he made the whole thing up.” He says this with a confidence that even startles him. Must be the beer and the haze and the smell of the French cigarette, the daring woman in front of him heightened his thoughts too.

“What about the book?”

This catches him off guard; he tries to think back...book? “The one in the library, the one he said fell to the ground? The one that had that note?”

“Note.”

Martin stood abruptly. “Let’s go.”

Martin

He gets the security guard to let them into the library. Martin is known, in that media sense of the word, well enough in Winnipeg that he can get access like that. They go to the philosophy section and find the book by Heraclitus; a Greek philosopher. “You never came here?”

“We just never thought…It was all in his journal. His parents gave it to me…”

Martin finds the book and pulls it off the shelf. They stand with it in the quiet library aisle. “Here, it’s still… It’s a newspaper clipping. Did he mention that?” He opens the book and hands it to Sarah.

“What?”

“You open it.”

“Why?”

“It’s for you?”

“I don’t think so…” Sarah opens the newspaper clipping. “It’s for you.”

Martin takes the newspaper clipping from Sarah and stares down to see his own name—his byline: “Martin Ford, Winnipeg Free Press.” The story is about Cara Neufeld’ it’s the first story he wrote on her disappearance. “The ties that bind you will undo to free me,” is written in ink on the margin of the article and under the line, “Peck, Menno Fuck.” Martin places the article into his pocket. He feels his father’s rosary.

“Martin?” Sarah asks with concern. Martin is white as a ghost. “Are you…”

Taking the rosary from his pocket he places it in the gutter of the book. He closes the cover of the book and places it back onto the shelf. “…okay?”

He slumps to the floor, holding the story. The story of Cara. He is blue and about to change.

“Martin? Martin?”

He drives home and enters his bedroom to find she is still there; Katherine is by the window, hovering. He asks her to sit on the bed. Sometimes she obeys him, but mostly she lingers.

“Darling…” he begins and kneels down in front of her as if in prayer.

“What is it?”

“I’ve been unfaithful.”

“I know…”

He lays his head in her lap, which to anyone else would appear as nothing more than the bedspread. His dead wife strokes his hair. “Please forgive me? Please forgive me?”

When he awakes, the moon bright and full shines through the window. Martin knows that Katherine won’t be back and that she is finally gone. He just needed to ask her forgiveness. And then she was gone for good.

Sarah

There is a phone booth on the west coast and she stands in it. She is looking out at the ocean, the way the waves break and roll. The receiver is in her hand and she dials the number committed to her memory. As the ringing begins, she practices what she will say.

“Hello,” the voice asks on the third ring.

“It is you?”

Silence. No human voice, only sparks and the sound of surprise, then: “Yes.”

“Do you hear the ice breaking?”

The Twins

At the river’s edge shards of ice glisten in the sun. She licks at the drops of the sweetest water she has ever tasted and sings. Martin is there, with his son Marty. Sarah has told him everything, about how Peck used the death of an old friend as his final exit. He used a man named Slavo, who had bad teeth and a curse. He used this man as his finale. A longtime lover, a dentist, helped pry Peck’s teeth out of his skull and place them into Slavo’s—who had recently died.

This was his way out; this way his way to leave it all behind. She told Peck that his secret was hers too. Sarah told Peck all that had transpired, that Reimer had sent the letters, that Reimer had killed Cara, but he said that it didn’t matter. He was no longer alive. He was someone else and that the universe was what you named it. He named it “Larry.” Peck said, “I needed to take back my own life. This was the only way I knew how.” Sarah hung up and returned home, deciding not to see him in the flesh.

Now, she sings, “The ties you unwind will serve to free me. Friends Are Friends Forever…” Sarah sings. The spring is alive and glory streams in the glowing infinity of dust specks and microscopic seraphim and spirits.

There was two Caras then, one long ago dead and buried, the other? The other was thawing Cara. Lifting—untethered.

There where ice turns to water, the moats of glistening magic which speaks of a coming season, when long ago buried seeds burst forth into new light… and drink in salvation, there a glimpse of her finally, slowly, leaving, yearning to be forgiven.

A trace on her shoulder—a voice, a lilting whisper of mercy in the air, and then gone like the memory of snow.

All gone, but the substance of all things hoped for: new seasons, new sojourns, and new Caras.

A shiny penny, an unearned gift, Marty turns it in his little fingers, and smiles.

“Look.”