Everything changed when I met your mother. She made me want things that I had never dreamed of wanting: a steady job, a reliable car, a mortgage, a family. You figured out a long time ago that you got your wanderlust from me. I want you to know that this is what happens when you meet the person you are supposed to spend the rest of your life with: That restless feeling dissolves like butter.
I think what breaks my heart the most is that you will never learn that for yourself.
I want you to know that your mother has not forgotten you. Not a morning passes that she does not wake up thinking about you. She marks your birthdays in her own way. Every March 4, the anniversary of your disappearance, she walks the same path you might have walked when you left the Manhattan Cafe that night. She leaves a nightlight burning in your old room. She refuses to sell the house on Boulevard, because, despite her protests, she still holds out the slim hope that one day, you might come walking back up the sidewalk and find your way home.
“I want to feel normal again,” she once told me. “Maybe if I pretend I am long enough, it might actually happen.”
Your mother is one of the strongest, smartest women I have ever met, but losing you cleaved her in two. The vibrant, caustic, witty, contrary woman I married splintered off into silence. She would tell you she gave in to mourning you for too long, let the pity and self-hate drag her into that black pit that I still crawl around in. If she did, her stay there was temporary. Somehow, she managed to wrench a piece of her former self out of the ground. She tells me that the other, miserable half, the chipped-off, castoff half, still follows at a respectful distance, ready to take over the second she stumbles.
Only through sheer strength of will does she manage to never stumble.
When your mother told me she was marrying another man, she said, “I can’t sacrifice the two daughters I have left for the one that I’ll never see again.”
She didn’t say that she loved this man. She didn’t say that he moved her, or that she needed him. She said that she needed the things that he could offer: stability, companionship, a glass of wine at night without the drowning sense of sorrow.
I do not resent this other man for taking my place. I do not hate him because I do not want your sisters to hate him. It is remarkably easy for a divorced parent to make remarriage a smooth transition for his or her children. You just keep your mouth shut and let them know that everything is going to be all right.
And I really feel that it will be—at least for the remaining part of my family.
Your mother has always been a good judge of character. This man she chose is kind to your sisters. He goes to Pepper’s riotous, perplexing concerts and pays attention to Claire. I cannot begrudge him attending PTA meetings and carving pumpkins and putting up Christmas trees. They visit your sisters once a month in Auburn (I know, sweetheart, but they couldn’t go to UGA because it reminded them too much of you). I cannot blame your mother for moving on while I stayed rooted in the past. I have widowed her. I would just as soon ask her to stay with me as I would ask her to lay with me in my grave.
I suppose the sheriff called her to bail me out because left to my own devices, I would’ve stayed in the cell until he was forced to either arraign me or let me go. I was trying to make a point. Your mother agreed, if I meant that the point I was making was that I am a stubborn asshole.
You of all people will know that this exchange means that she still loves me.
But she has also made it clear that this is it for her. She no longer wants to hear about my wild goose chases or my crazy searches or my meeting strangers in dark corners and interrogating young women who knew you back then but are now married and gainfully employed and trying to start families of their own.
Should I fault her for this? Should I blame her for giving up on my windmills?
Here is why I was arrested:
There is a man who works at the Taco Stand. He’s the manager now, but he was bussing tables the day you disappeared. The sheriff’s men cleared his alibi, but one of your friends, Kerry Lascala, told me that she’d overheard this man at a party talking about how he saw you on the street the night of March 4, 1991.
Any father would seek out this man. Any father would follow him down the street, let him know what it felt like to have someone behind you who was stronger and angrier and had an agenda that involved taking you somewhere more private.
Which sounds like harassment, but feels like investigating a crime.
Your mother pointed out that the Taco man could hire a lawyer. That the next time the huckleberries come, it could be with a warrant.
Huckleberries.
This was one of your mother’s words. She gave Sheriff Carl Huckabee the nickname during the third week of the investigation, and by the third month, she had extrapolated it to everyone in uniform. You might remember the sheriff from that day at the carnival. He is a clumsy Barney Fife type with a stiff mustache he keeps trimmed in a straight line and sideburns he grooms so often you can see the furrows left by the teeth of his comb.
This is what Huckleberry believes: The Taco man was with his grandmother at her nursing home the night you went missing.
There was no sign-in sheet at the front desk. No log. No cameras. No other witnesses but his grandmother and a nurse who checked the old woman’s catheter around eleven that evening.
You were last seen at 10:38 p.m.
The nurse claims that the Taco man was asleep in the chair beside his grandmother’s bed when you were taken.
And yet, Kerry Lascala says that she heard him say otherwise.
Your mother would call this kind of thinking crazy-making, and maybe she’s right. I no longer tell your sisters about my leads. The Taco man, the garbage man who was arrested for flashing a grade-schooler, the gardener peeping Tom, the night manager at the 7-Eleven who was caught molesting his niece, are all strangers to them. I have moved my collection of clues into the bedroom so they won’t see it when they visit.
Not that they visit much, though I cannot blame them. They are young women now. They are building their lives. Claire is around the same age as you were when we lost you. Pepper is older, though not wiser. I see her making so many mistakes (the drugs, the uncaring and unavailable boyfriends, the anger that burns so hot she could light an entire city), but I feel like I don’t have the authority to stop her.
Your mother says that all we can do is be there for Pepper when she falls. Maybe she’s right. And maybe she’s right to be worried about this new man in Claire’s life. He tries too hard. He pleases too much. Is it our place to tell her? Or will she figure it out on her own? (Or will he? She has your Grandma Ginny’s wandering eye.)
It’s strange that your mother and I are only ever whole when we talk about your sisters’ lives. We are both of us too wounded to talk about our own. The open sores of our hearts fester if we are together too long. I know your mother looks at me and sees playhouses I built and touch-football games I played and homework I helped with and the millions of times I lifted you in my arms and swung you around like a doll.
Just as when I look at her I see the growing swell of her belly, the gentle look on her face when she rocked you to sleep, the panic in her eyes when your fever spiked and you had to have your tonsils out, and the vexed expression she would get when she realized that you had out-argued her.
I know that your mother belongs to another man now, that she has created a stable life for my children, that she has managed to move on, but when I kiss her, she never resists. And when I hold her, she holds me back. And when we make love, it is my name she whispers.