She had reprimanded him more than once for calling her that—Whatever I am to you now, Benjamin, I’m certainly not your sweetheart—but it was hard to break a habit of so many years. This time she cut in on him before the word was fully uttered.
“What is it?” she said. “Is it Abbie? Have they found her?”
It startled him that she should know. But it was only to discuss their children that they ever talked nowadays. Then Ben realized that by found, she meant alive. He swallowed, still struggling to clear his head.
“Sarah—”
“For heaven’s sake, Benjamin! Tell me!”
“She’s dead.”
“What?”
It was more an intake of breath than a word. How could he blurt it out like that? Kendrick had broken the news to him with so much more finesse. He stumbled on.
“They found her body. In Montana. Somewhere in the mountains.”
“No. Abbie. Oh, no. No . . .”
She began a low, moaning wail and then tried to say something but couldn’t. And because the sound was so harrowing he began to talk, just to keep it from his ears. He talked and went on talking, trying to seem calm and clear, telling her what he knew, about the DNA and the fingerprints and where the body was being kept and about the decisions that they were going to have to make, until she screamed at him and told him to stop. At that his voice cracked and he lost control, as if all his words had emptied and weakened him.
And, separated by so many thousand miles and by distance of another kind far greater, they sobbed as one but each alone for the young life they had together spawned and loved and separately lost.
The funeral home, so Ben had been told, was only a short drive from Missoula Airport and he had already resolved that he would go there as soon as his flight got in. He hadn’t told Sarah he was going to do this and he knew he should probably wait until she arrived from New York so they could go there together. But when he landed and switched on his cell phone there was a message from her saying she was having to take a later flight. She wouldn’t be getting into Missoula until the evening, by which time the funeral home would be shut. That meant going there with her tomorrow. He couldn’t wait that long.
Despite Kendrick’s assurance that the identification was one hundred percent certain, there lingered in Ben’s mind just a sliver of doubt that they might have made a mistake. He’d once read about a case where this had happened. Someone had mixed up two sets of samples and put the wrong names on them. He had to see her, see with his own eyes that it was Abbie.
He had brought only hand baggage and was one of the first off the flight. The chirpy young woman at the Hertz desk welcomed him like an old friend but that was probably just how they were trained.
“On vacation?” she asked.
“No, I’m here . . . to see my daughter.”
“That’s nice. She’s at UM, right?”
“She was, yes.”
It took her only a few minutes to process the paperwork. She told him the bay number of the car and handed him the documents and keys.
“So, you’re all set. You have a great time.”
Ben thanked her and went out through the double glass doors. The sky was vaulted in slate-colored cloud and the air felt warm and restless as if at any moment it might rain. Abbie used to say the weather in Montana was like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: You never knew what you were gonna get. He remembered that first visit to Missoula, more than five years ago, when he and Sarah had flown here with her to check out the university. It was late October and when they arrived it was eighty degrees. They woke the next day to a foot of snow and had to go out and buy warmer clothes. At a store on North Higgins they had bought Abbie a cerise Patagonia ski jacket that cost more than two hundred bucks. God, she’d looked so beautiful that day. So confident, so full of joy.
Ben stopped himself. He mustn’t think about her that way. There was too much to be sorted out, important decisions to be made, people to talk to, the sheriff, the local FBI people, find out what they thought had happened. If he let himself remember her like that, all aglow and happy, then he would be sure to lose it and be unable to think straight. Above all, Sarah would need him to be strong. He didn’t want to let her down, give her yet another reason to hate him.
The car was a little silver Japanese thing. He had to shift the seat all the way back to get his legs under the steering wheel. Sarah would probably think he was being cheap and should have rented something bigger. They hadn’t seen each other in more than a year and he already felt dread welling in his stomach. He started the car up, reversed from the parking bay and slowly headed out toward the highway.
The second time they had spoken on the phone, before Sarah flew home from Italy, she had fully regained composure. She was cool, almost businesslike. Not a tear was shed by either of them. Ben had been expecting a discussion but it was more like listening to a series of announcements. The body would be shipped back to New York, she said, and that was where the funeral would be, where all Abbie’s loved ones lived. The all excluded Ben, of course, but he let it pass. And it would be a burial, which was how Sarah’s family had always done these things. Ben had been planning to suggest a cremation, with the ashes scattered here in Montana, the place Abbie had so often said she loved best in all the world. But he wasn’t going to get into a fight about it.
There was more to come. Sarah had already phoned Josh in New York. He was, she informed Ben, “devastated but okay.” How to break the news to their son was another thing Ben had been expecting to discuss. He was furious. He had been all set to fly to New York to do it in person and now wished he hadn’t waited. Moreover, Sarah had also organized for the boy to go stay in Bedford with her parents. Indeed, they had already driven to the city to collect him. Sarah would see him, albeit briefly, when she got back, then fly on to Missoula. Josh, she said, would not be coming with her.
Ben had thus been thoroughly preempted and excised. And, as usual, he swallowed his anger and said nothing. It was a technique Sarah had used over and over again since he left her and she now had it honed to perfection, excluding him from important decisions about their children with such a casual—sometimes even friendly—aplomb, that to complain seemed churlish. The underlying message was always the same: By leaving, he had revealed his total lack of love for them and had thereby forfeited all rights of consultation.
Sometimes she did it so brilliantly, he couldn’t help but be impressed. And though it surprised him that she should choose to do it now, in their shared desolation, he realized later that she had in fact surpassed herself. For now he would have to call Josh in the enemy camp of his former in-laws. George and Ella Davenport had always considered him unworthy of their golden daughter and his desertion had vindicated their contempt. Ben was now properly consigned to some lower stratum of cheats, liars, and ne’er-do-wells.
Immediately after he had finished listening to Sarah’s list of decisions, he called Josh’s cell phone.
“Hey, Joshie.”
“Hi.”
“I was going to fly over and tell you about Abbie, but Mom says she already told you.”
“Yeah.”
“How are you doing?”
“Okay, I guess.”
There was a long pause. Ben thought he could hear whispers in the background.
“Are you with your grandma and grandpa?”
“Yeah. We’re in the car.”
“Oh. Right. Well, say hi to them for me.”
“Okay.”
“Mom says you’re not coming out to Missoula.”
“What’s the point?”
His voice was so flat and colorless that Ben wondered if the boy had taken too many of those antidepressant pills he’d been on for the last few months. Or perhaps he was just dazed by the news or embarrassed to talk in front of Ella and George. Ben cursed himself for not going to New York. It was he who should be with his son at this time, not those two.
“Well, I guess you’re right.
Listen, will you call me when you’ve got a moment to yourself?”
“Okay.”
“Bye, then. I love you, son.”
“Yeah. Bye.”
The Valley View Funeral Home and Crematory—“Serving Missoula’s Bereaved Since 1964”—stood between a used-car lot and a sinister-looking bar called Mountain Jack’s. It was skirted by a thin strip of lawn doing its best to appear elysian. Ben parked in the otherwise empty lot and, thrusting his hands into his jacket pockets, walked toward reception. The building was all Palladian pillars and swirled cream stucco, a curious hybrid of temple and hacienda that at any other time would have made the architect in him smile. Beyond it, away to the west, lightning flickered against the gunmetal shroud that had lowered itself over the mountains. The air smelled of wet dust and just as he reached the cover of the portico a first few plump raindrops began to smack and speckle the asphalt.
The reception area was a hushed expanse of mushroom-pink carpet and magnolia walls, decorated with elaborate arrangements of fake flowers and framed prints. Away in the far corner, a muted TV was entertaining a coffee table and a pair of empty couches in blue velour. Ben pressed the soundless button at the reception desk and while he waited wandered with soundless footsteps, inspecting the pictures. All were landscapes and all featured water of some kind—a river, lake, or ocean. There was a unifying, bland tranquility to them, nothing too poignant or risky, no sunsets or stormy skies, not a hint of hell or eternal judgment. He wondered if they ever censored the pictures to suit the special sensibilities of their clients. Maybe they had already done it for him because there sure wasn’t a single snowy mountain on the walls.
“May I help you?”
A young man with a friendly round face and a body that seemed too long for his legs was heading across the mushroom pink toward him. Ben introduced himself and saw a fractional retuning in the man’s smile. He wasn’t overdoing it, just finding the right calibration of professional sympathy. This was the Jim Pickering both Ben and Sarah had spoken with on the phone.
“Your wife called to say you weren’t going to make it today.”
“She had to get a later flight. I flew up this morning from Albuquerque. We’re not married anymore.”
He didn’t know why he had volunteered that, but the man nodded, readjusting the smile again, just a touch more concern.
“Is it inconvenient for me to see . . . ?” Ben couldn’t finish the sentence. Should he say Abbie? My daughter? The body?
“Not at all. We’re all ready for you.”
“I just wanted to, you know, make sure—”
“I absolutely understand.”
He asked Ben if he would mind waiting a moment and hurried off the way he came. He disappeared down a corridor and the silence reasserted itself. The place had the best soundproofing Ben had come across in a long time. He caught himself wondering what materials they had used. What was the matter with him? Waiting to see his daughter’s body and thinking about goddamn acoustics?
Jim Pickering came back and asked Ben to follow him. As they walked a sequence of corridors, he explained that they had embalmed the body, as Mrs. Cooper had requested, and that the search-and-rescue people over the mountains had made the process a lot easier by keeping so much ice around her during recovery and transportation. The results, he said, were consequently a lot better in the circumstances than one might have expected. Whether the man was making a modest professional boast or simply trying to allay anxiety, Ben couldn’t decide.
“We didn’t have any clothes, so she is in what we call a hospital gown. And, of course, we didn’t have any reference for hair and makeup, so you’ll see we’ve gone for quite a natural look. There is scope for some minor adjustment, should you wish. And the casket is only temporary. Mrs. Cooper didn’t say whether you would be interested in purchasing one from us or from the funeral home back east. We do have quite an extensive range.”
“I’m sure.”
“Well, here we are. This is our viewing room.”
He stopped in front of some white double doors, his hands poised to open them. He was looking at Ben for the signal to proceed.
“Are we ready?”
Ben nodded.
The room was about fourteen feet by ten, and lit with a roseate glow by four tall uplighters, their tops flared like lilies. The plain, pale wood casket stood open on a waist-high table. From the doorway, all Ben could see of its interior was a band of pink satin lining.
“I’ll leave you,” Jim Pickering said. “I’ll be just along the corridor. Take as long as you need.”
“Thank you.”
The doors closed quietly behind him. Ben stood there a moment, trying to conjure a trace of his earlier, absurd hope that the body would be someone else’s. But he knew it was Abbie. He could feel his blood pulsing fast and insistent in his ears and an icy weight turned in the pit of his stomach. He swallowed and stepped forward.
It was almost three years since he had seen her. Her hair then had been dyed black and cut short and spiky, as if to advertise her anger. But now it was back to its natural reddish blond and longer and neatly combed so that it framed her slender neck and softened her. The face, with its pert nose and prettily arched eyebrows, was light-years from the hostile, screaming contortion that had haunted his head since that terrible night. Death, perversely, had warmed her. The funeral makeup had given her skin a clever, healthy luster. There was even, in the tilt of her chin and in the dimpling at the corners of her mouth, a curious immanence. As if something in a dream had amused her and at any moment she might smile or wake and tell him what it was. And open those eyes. Gray-green and flecked with hazel. He wished he could see them just one more time.
The only other body Ben had ever seen was his father’s, almost twenty years before. And the undertakers then had gotten it all wrong—his hair, his expression, the way he knotted his necktie, everything. They had plastered on so much rouge and mascara and lipstick that he looked like some frightful, unwigged drag queen.
But in her white gown, like the bride she would never be, his daughter looked only serene and innocent and utterly beautiful.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he whispered. “My little sweetheart.”
He gripped the rim of the casket and bowed his head and closed his eyes. And the sobs came quaking through him and he didn’t try to fight them. Alone now, he would allow himself this, and later be the stronger for Sarah.
How long he stood there, he couldn’t tell. When he could cry no more, he straightened himself and walked across to a little table where a box of tissues had been placed. And when he had dried his face and composed himself, he walked once more to the casket and leaned in and kissed his daughter’s cheek. She smelled of nothing and her flesh against his lips was as cold as stone.
FIVE
Sarah let the waitress fill her cup with coffee for the third time, and tried not to watch the two men across the table finishing their breakfasts. The sight and smell of all that egg and bacon and fried potato was making her feel queasy.
Jet-lagged, she had taken a sleeping pill sometime after midnight and all it did was plunge her into a shallow semicoma fraught with anxious dreams. She woke twisted in her sheets like a mummy and with a blurred and aching head that two heavy-duty painkillers had failed to clear. Outside it was still raining. It hadn’t stopped since she arrived.
Benjamin had met her when she got off the plane and had driven her to the hotel in the ridiculous little car he’d rented. Why he had to be so cheap, she had no idea. But she hadn’t mentioned it. On the flight she had given herself strict instructions to be civil. But, God, it was hard. Even the sight of him now, eating his breakfast and talking trivia with this sheriff character, made her feel angry. He had grown his hair longer and bought himself some trendy little wire-rimmed glasses. All very Santa Fe.
Benjamin had booked them adjoining rooms at the Holiday Inn Parkside and after checking in last evening they had borrowed an umbrella and walked over to a J
apanese restaurant on North Higgins. The food was fine but the conversation hideously stilted, perhaps because they were both trying so hard to avoid talking about Abbie. Benjamin had seemed barely able to look her in the eye and kept asking all sorts of eager questions about Venice. She wanted to scream at him to shut up. Who on earth was he? This polite stranger who had shared her life for all those years and was now treating her like a guest with whom he’d gotten trapped at a cocktail party.
She knew she was being unfair and that it was probably her fault that he behaved that way. Some curious defense mechanism seemed to have clicked on inside her brain. Being cold and brittle and angry with him was the only way she could cope. Allow herself to be any warmer or more receptive to comfort and she would lose her foothold and fall off the edge, spiral into the black whirlpool she knew was waiting for her below. Her little girl dead, lying cold in a box . . . No, she wasn’t going to let her head go there. But when he put his arm around her on their way back to the hotel she almost had. And again when he kissed her good night in the dingy corridor outside her room and they went off to their lonely, separate king-size beds, so thinly partitioned they could hear each other’s every shuffle and cough and flush of the john.
Sheriff Charlie Riggs didn’t have an office in Missoula, which was why he had suggested they meet for breakfast here at The Shack. It was a place Abbie had once taken them to, tucked away on West Main and just another short, wet walk from the hotel.
The sheriff had been there waiting for them, his rain-soaked Stetson and a white plastic bag beside him on the bench of the little wooden booth. He stood to greet them, a tall man, even taller than Benjamin, but bulkier, with a bushy mustache that was going to gray. His eyes were gentle and had in them a sadness that Sarah suspected was permanent, not merely contrived for their benefit. He had those old-fashioned Western manners that she had always been a sucker for, politely nodding when he shook her hand and calling her ma’am.
He declared at once how sorry he was about Abbie.