Cold. Hard. Empty.
It’s not just the stone that fits that description.
Today was his funeral. No one came. I know because there are no flowers. There are no footsteps pressed into the earth except for mine. No one came. No one left him flowers.
He didn’t deserve to be put to rest like this—not even with what he did.
I hadn’t noticed the person come up behind me, but I know he’s there. I know because the cold blasting from in front of me wanes.
“What are you doing here, Jade?” Torrin exhales like he’s been holding his breath for weeks.
I don’t look back. “There aren’t any flowers. No one left him any flowers.” My back shakes from the sob I’m holding in. I cried in Earl Rae’s presence so many times that I don’t want this to be his last memory of me either.
Torrin doesn’t say anything when he moves toward the fence line. He just kneels and picks through some of the weeds, plucking whatever slightly resembles a flower. I watch him, and I wonder if it hits him the same way—at this moment, he and I and Earl Rae are together. We’re sharing the same space. All of those years of being separated . . . it’s strange how this feels, watching him pull weeds that look like flowers for me to place on the grave of the man who took me from him.
Torrin comes back once he’s collected a small handful and holds them out for me. His jaw is tight, and his shoulders are tense. He won’t look at the grave. He won’t come close to it.
“How did you find me?” I take the bouquet of weeds and let my fingertips brush his before pulling away.
“I followed the trail of breadcrumbs you left.” His voice is strained like he’s being choked.
“I didn’t leave any.” No notes. No calls. No nothing.
“Not the visible kind maybe.” He stares off in the other direction and shrugs. “And after what happened, I’m kind of hypersensitive to you suddenly disappearing.”
I’m kind of hypersensitive to certain things too.
“Everyone’s calling him a monster. A bad man. An evil one.”
I clasp the weeds. There are a few small white flowers bursting from the ends of some, a couple dandelions sticking out. I lower the bouquet to the stone and position it above his name. I notice Torrin turn around completely.
“But he wasn’t like that. He wasn’t,” I add when I hear him exhale sharply.
“What was he then?”
I don’t recognize his voice. I’ve never heard it like this before.
“Sad. Confused. Lost.” I pull my hand away and settle it back over my legs. “He kept me alive. He took care of me.”
“After kidnapping you,” he growls. The words seem to echo through the silent cemetery.
“He wasn’t a bad person. He was sick. He needed help . . . but he wasn’t the evil person everyone thinks he was.” I twist my neck just enough so I can see him but not so far I can’t see the gravestone.
“His medical records might read like an encyclopedia for mental illness, but he wasn’t sick enough to not realize that swallowing a bullet when his house was surrounded by cops was a better option than spending the rest of his life in jail.” He stops like he shouldn’t say anymore, but he does. “Not sick enough to not have the sense to stalk you, meticulously plan your abduction, and keep you hidden for ten years. If that isn’t evil, I must not know the definition.”
I reach over my shoulder, unfolding my hand toward him. “I’ve forgiven him. You should too.”
“I’ll never forgive him.” Even as he says this, he backs up and finds my hand with his.
Our backs stay to one another, but our hands connect us. The cold damp creeping up my legs vanishes. The stonelike heaviness crumbles.
“You’re a priest,” I say softly. “Aren’t you supposed to be all about the forgiveness thing?”
His fingers grip mine harder. Almost so hard it hurts. “Forgiveness is in God’s nature. Not man’s. Not mine.”
We’re quiet after that. We don’t move. Our hands stay connected, and he stays still, silent, letting the night wash over us.
I feel like it’s time to leave—that nothing else can be achieved here tonight—but as I start to rise, something Torrin said hits me. “How do you know that he planned it?”
When Torrin stays quiet, I twist around until I’m angled toward him. He doesn’t want to have this conversation. I can tell because his face is creased from the internal battle waging inside him.
He turns a little my way, his eyes shifting to our conjoined hands. “Because I’ve talked to the detectives working the case.”
The same detectives who’ve wanted to talk to me for days. The same ones I’ve spent days avoiding and coming up with excuses for why I couldn’t talk with them yet.
“Why did they want to talk with you?”
Torrin rolls his fingers in my hand—his knuckles pop. “Because I’m the one who ultimately led them to re-investigating Earl Rae Jackson.”
I feel my forehead crease. “Re-investigating? As in they investigated him before?”
Torrin’s head drops like he’s been balancing a boulder on his neck for years. “I made a list, right after you went missing, of all the people I could think of that you’d come in contact with. All of them.” His eyes narrow into the night. “Right down to the cashier at the gas station we used to buy our Slurpees from every day after school.”
The ground moves beneath me. My world shifts as I go back in time to a period when I’d never been happier. I travel back to the afternoons spent with Torrin when we’d stopped for giant Slurpees after school to fuel up for what we had planned for later—when we told our parents we were studying. I remember the sweetness of the blueberry flavor that was our favorite, remember the way it would freeze my stomach and brain at the same time. The way the foam cup felt rubbing against the pads of my fingers. How Torrin would smile at me when I tried to pay, and instead he slipped a couple dollar bills from his wallet to the cashier before I could. I remember . . . him.
When I inhale, I feel like I’ve been drowning. I suck at the air until I feel my lungs about to burst.
“Oh my god,” I breathe, doubling over because it hurts. Everything.
I never would have remembered Earl Rae’s face from the gas station—I could barely remember anything from that life—but now that I do, I know I’ll never forget it.
It’s one memory I wish I could purge.
“The cops talked with Earl Rae after you went missing, but since he didn’t have any priors and didn’t fit the damn profile, they didn’t take it any further.”
I sway in place. Torrin’s hand keeps me steady. “So how did they finally find him?” That voice isn’t mine. It doesn’t sound anything like mine.
For a second, Torrin leans away from me. Then he kneels beside me, but we’re still not facing each other. He’s aimed one way. I’m aimed the other.
“I remembered something a little while ago. Something he said to you one day after we paid for our Slurpee.” Torrin blinks into the darkness. His jawbone pops through his skin. “He said you looked just like his daughter.” He pauses to take a breath.
I feel like the breath was just pulled right out of my lungs.
“At the time, it didn’t seem like a big deal, and it wasn’t like I knew he’d lost his daughter, but for some reason, that night, I just knew it was him.” When he exhales, his breath fogs the air. It’s summer—it shouldn’t be cold enough to steam the air with a breath. “I called the cops, told them what I remembered, and that’s how they found you.”
My eyes close, the eyelids too heavy to hold open anymore. I feel a tear slide down my face. Only one. But I know there are more. They never dry up.
“You’re the reason I was found,” I whisper.
Torrin’s shoulders stiffen right before they fall. “No, I’m the reason you weren’t found sooner. If I had just remembered that earlier . . . before . . .”
He leaves the words unsaid, but his face tells me the rest when it turns ove
r his shoulder. I see it because my head’s tipped over mine.
“Our lives could have been different?” My eyes stay on his as my palm presses deeper into his. “This could be more?”
He looks at our hands before his eyes sweep over my back facing him. “Yes.”
I have to look away. It hurts too much. Seeing what my future could have been only to realize it never will be makes everything inside me feel like it’s atrophying. Withering. Dying slowly.
I can’t look at Torrin, so I look at the only place I have left. “I miss him, Torrin.” I choke on the words, but they keep coming. “I’m not supposed to miss him. I can’t tell anyone I miss him either . . . but I do. How fucked up am I?”
I have to break away from his hold because I need my hands to cover my face. I don’t like crying like this. Like I’m too weak to control my emotions—too weak to control my body. If I cover my face, no one has to see just how weak I really am.
“I miss the man who kidnapped me for ten goddamn years. What in the hell am I supposed to do with that?” My body’s convulsing in rhythm to my sobs. I’m such a mess—the sobs only scrape the surface of that mess.
I feel the warmth of his body huddle close before his arms rope around me, holding me. Keeping me together. He’s holding onto me so tightly I couldn’t fall apart if I wanted to. His face lowers to my ear.
“Whatever you need to,” he says in the voice I remember. “It’s okay to feel whatever you’re feeling. And it’s okay to miss and mourn whoever you choose.” His arms tighten again when a tremor slides down my back. “No one has the manual for a situation like this, so don’t let anyone tell you how to feel. No one.” He tucks his head into my neck and sighs. I can’t tell if it’s a sigh of frustration or contentedness.
With the way my vision is blurred from the tears, the bouquet looks more weed than flower now. “He was a good man, Torrin. Sick . . . but good.”
His fingers curl deeper into my arms. “It’s your right to believe what you think about him, and it’s mine to believe how I feel about him.”
“How do you feel about him?”
Torrin inhales against my neck, then he rises. He finally looks at the gravestone in front of me. His eyes narrow at it, and I see things flash in them I hadn’t known existed inside of Torrin Costigan. I see things I hadn’t known existed in any man.
“That hell has no inner circle bad enough for a man like Earl Rae Jackson.”
Then Torrin turns his back on the grave, but before he walks away, he holds out his hand and waits. He’s not going to let me fall behind.
FROM MY BEDROOM, I hear Mom arguing on the phone with someone. It has to be Dad because she only uses that tone on him. I don’t have to listen in to wonder what they’re arguing about. It’s me.
I’m the source of tension in the house—the source of tension in the whole world it feels like sometimes.
I’m the houseguest who just won’t go away. They’ll never say anything, but the air is so thick with strain I think I’ve died of suffocation a hundred times. I keep being resurrected though. Back into the same life I don’t belong in and have to be expelled from a few hours later again.
Mom’s in the kitchen, trying to keep quiet, so I wander into the living room when I come downstairs. I haven’t gotten used to the skinny jeans Mom picked up for me yet—they feel like they’re cutting off the circulation to my ankles—but that’s the only style she bought. I guess bootleg isn’t as popular anymore.
Dad keeps the daily paper tucked into the middle drawer of the antique desk pushed up against the window facing the front door, and I find myself being pulled in that direction. Call it morbid curiosity, but I can’t help it. I think part of me’s still hoping “The Childs Child Abduction” will pass eventually. The only way to know for sure is to check the headlines.
When I slide open the drawer and pull out the paper, I don’t have to unfold it to know nothing has passed yet. They haven’t gotten bored by me staying sealed inside my parents’ house or sneaking out through the alley tucked down in the backseat of Dad’s Tahoe.
My hands brace against the edge of the desk for support because on the front page of the local paper are two photos; blown up so large they’re blurry. The first one is of Torrin rushing me to my front door after leaving the hospital. He’s in his priest outfit and managing to block me almost entirely from the photographer’s angle. The second photo isn’t quite as blurry and was taken last night at the party. Torrin’s in his tux, and I’m in my dress, and it was taken when we were dancing. Not just when we were dancing though—when we were looking at each other and smiling. I don’t remember being that close to him. I don’t remember my hand disappearing that far beneath his jacket. I don’t remember his hand being that low on my back.
We look like two people in love. We look like newlyweds dancing their first dance at their wedding. We look like . . . nothing like we should with him being who he is and me being who I am.
The first thing that hits me is that someone at the party had to have taken that picture and sold it. A friend, a family member, an acquaintance. The betrayal cuts through me like a hot knife.
The next thing I feel is anger. Red, volatile anger that starts in my chest and spills though the rest of my body.
Then I read the headline:
Father Costigan or Father Charming?
That’s it. Nothing else. Just those five words stamped in thick black letters as big as my pinkie finger.
I shouldn’t read the article. I should stuff the paper back in the drawer and forget I ever saw it. No good will come from going deeper down this rabbit hole. I know that, but I let myself fall in.
I skim the article, absorbing sentences, all of them making my intestines feel like a tangled, knotted mess. They know about Torrin’s and my relationship in high school. I guess it wouldn’t have been that hard to learn about since everyone at our high school, on this street, who was in the same movie theatre where we spent more time kissing than watching, would remember.
It goes on to talk about Torrin after I disappeared. His trouble in school. A couple run-ins with the law that were only charged as misdemeanors given his “special circumstances”—those being his girlfriend getting abducted minutes after being with him. How he barely graduated high school, how he organized search parties, candlelight vigils, national and local television interviews to keep my picture in the public’s face.
Then the article talks about him going to college, then seminary after that as the explosive Torrin Costigan transformed into the respected Father Costigan of St. Marks. How he’s a favorite in the Seattle Catholic community. How he spends endless hours volunteering in the community, bringing bags of burgers to street kids and helping the elderly measure out their medications into pillboxes. There’s a quote from one of the members of St. Marks who claims Torrin does what four people couldn’t accomplish.
Then there are a couple of anonymous quotes from guests at the party last night. One person talks about how cozy Torrin and I seemed most of the night, and the other . . . it makes me crumple the paper. The other friend, family member, or acquaintance told the reporter how they’d watched me sneak out of the party early without saying good-bye. How Torrin had followed me in the same clandestine way a few minutes later. No conclusions are stated, but it’s so obvious what’s being implied that I feel my nails digging into the wood desk.
This will put him in a bad situation. This won’t blow over. People will read it, they’ll talk to other people, and on Sunday, everyone sitting in those pews will stare at him wondering . . . judging.
They’re going after the people around me—the ones closest to me. They can’t get to me because I won’t let them, so they’re swinging their meat hooks into the closest alternatives.
My head lifts, and I glare out the window. They’re still here. All of them. Metal barriers have been set up and flaggers have been stationed outside twenty-four-seven to guide traffic through the maze of trucks and cameras and life-suc
kers.
Almost two weeks, and they won’t go away. They won’t take a hint. They won’t respect my privacy. They won’t leave. Not until they’ve gotten what they want—however they can get it.
Including crucifying the person I care about most to his own cross if necessary.
I’m still glaring out the window, feeling like I’m about to detonate, when a series of honks pops off outside the barricade. The beeps turn into a blare when the driver isn’t allowed through.
I can just make out Sam’s dark blue sedan being swarmed by reporters who are “supposed” to let her, or anyone else trying to get into our driveway, pass. They’re not though. Why would they? She’s Jade Childs’s sister. Jade Childs isn’t around for them to dissect her life into bloody pieces, so why not just dissect everyone else around her?
In some places, they’re five deep around Sam’s car, and she’s still blasting the horn, but I can see her through the windshield of her car. She’s scared. She’s holding that brave face I’ve seen a lot since returning, but it’s a façade. When reporters knock on her windows, tapping their microphones against them, she starts to cry. Her forehead lowers to the steering wheel, and the horn stops.
I’m running through the living room, and when I reach the front door, Mom’s roaming out of the kitchen, phone still tucked to her ear.
“What’s going on out there?” she asks me.
My hand curls around the door handle. Then I yank it open. “Stay here.”
Before her eyes finish widening, I step outside.
At first, no one notices. They’ll all too busy harassing my sister.
She’s still leaning over the steering wheel, her body shaking. My disappearance ruined this family once. I’d never have guessed me being found would ruin them again. If I had known the lives of everyone I loved would be destroyed a second time, I wouldn’t have spent so much time wishing to be found.
“Leave her alone!” I shout, but my voice doesn’t carry above the roar. I jog down the steps and storm across the lawn.