Sarah Sparrow - A Guide for Murdered Children

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

Maya screwed up her face in sorrow and remorse. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean it when I asked about what would happen to us! I didn’t mean to be so selfish.”

“Stop it now,” said Annie, hugging her. “I love you and everything is going to be fine. See you Tuesday. Now run along.”

The Porter nodded to Dabba Doo that she was ready for their conference. As Maya walked to the door, she passed Dabba Doo and her elbow brushed his.

“ We need to talk ,” she whispered.

3.

For the final time, Ganesha Ashanti Sinclair went home to his subdivided loft in Core City, not far from Cliff Bell’s, the club where he occasionally played jazz.

After the moment of balance , he felt less like Rhonda—though it wouldn’t have been accurate to say that he felt more like Ganesha either. All identities, all forms, were receding. Annie once told him, “After the moment is done, you will come to know a new kind of serenity.” She said the feeling would be unlike any he had experienced “in this life”—and it was true. He tried comparing it to the peace he’d felt at the ashram in Bangalore but this was something else, otherworldly and indifferent. Impersonal… Again, his heart and thoughts touched upon his parents, his twin and all the people he had loved. He recalled his enemies too, real and imagined, closing his eyes to watch the magic lantern of characters pass before him—an extravaganza of poignant beings caught in the majestic dance of suffering and bliss, of birth and death, choreographed by the Source. Everyone was alive but everyone was already dead, like the tale Krishna tells Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita . He felt so privileged to have been chosen.

He made a final cup of tea.

He unfurled the yoga mat on the floor of the sparsely furnished living room. Before he lay in savasana, the corpse pose, he examined the grain of the wood floor that he had proudly sanded himself. It contained the universe.

Such was the last wonderment he had on Earth.

1.

In his life, Willow had worn love in all sizes—small, medium and large. A few times, he’d tried to wear all three at once.

But no woman had ever been kinder to him than Dixie Rose Cavanaugh. She felt his woundedness and was mindful of his moods, knowing when to go toward him and when to back away. (She hadn’t become a nurse for nothing, he thought.) Neither wanted to swamp each other—they were happy to have separate places to retreat to—but both thoroughly enjoyed their overnights a few times a week. That worked out anyway because Dixie’s migraines forced her into solitude and darkness, sometimes for days. She was a night owl and liked to read for a few hours before she slept; while she perused her Kindle, she multitasked by petting him with a free hand until he passed out. The first time she did that, after an hour of hypnotic caresses, he guiltily said, “It’s okay, babe. You don’t have to.” Dixie said it calmed her . “I do it to my cat,” she said, with a bewitching smile. “It chills us both out.” He came to believe that it wasn’t a codependent, OCD thing, and only an expression of love. What a concept, as Adelaide liked to say . He didn’t believe that Dixie loved him and told himself that he didn’t really care. But he was starting to get feelings and wasn’t sure what to make of that. It seemed too easy, too simple, too perfect.

Maybe that was true love’s secret.

Once, in the middle of the night, she did something extraordinary. As he lay back down after having a pee, Dixie’s hand reached out from deep sleep to stroke him. How was that even possible? He tried returning the kindness by holding her in his arms when she had “pre-migraine nightmares.” She yelped while dreaming, and he would shush her and rock her until her screen went blank. She never remembered the demons that gave chase. Her dark side appealed to Willow and made him want her more.

He thought about Dixie, and all the women in his life, to distract himself during the half-hour drive to Farmington Hills. He needed to occupy his brain because he was on his way to see the Rummers, an errand that filled him with trepidation. Willow had been astonished when he learned they still lived so close to the ground zero of the Falls; for some reason, he imagined they would have moved to the farthest ends of the Earth. Wasn’t that what he would have done? Maybe not, because the detective knew it was human nature to stay close to the land of the ghosts one still loved. Even the peasants of Chernobyl refused to leave, their desire so strong that the government could do nothing to prevent them from staying.

In a different set of circumstances, the Cold Case Kids would have been the ones making the trip to interview them, but it was incumbent on Willow to make the pilgrimage. He’d been with them on that hellish day and all through the hellish nights that followed, and owed them that much. The cruel, inescapable truth was that upon the disappearance of their kids, Elaine and Ronnie Rummer became sacrificial goats, spit-roasted and carved by the parents of Saggerty Falls and beyond. For a few weeks, it felt like the entire nation embraced the myth of the burnt offering because one couldn’t help having the primitive belief that those children’s abduction and likely slaughter were an inoculation, a protective necklace that could be worn to ward off the same fate befalling one’s own.

The detective wanted to get the lay of the land as well—to reopen his heart and strange gifts to the tragedy. When he made the call from his office, he wasn’t sure how they’d respond. From what he had learned about Elaine at the barbecue, he doubted that she’d be in any kind of shape to meet, and Willow had actually begun to worry that the news of dredging up the case might cause a domino effect ending in her suicide. He was grateful when Ronnie, not Elaine, picked up the phone. They small-talked and Willow tested the waters. He asked about stopping over to say hello.

“Of course, Dubya, come on by! We’d love to see you.”

He sounded weirdly insouciant but Willow didn’t want to read too much into it.

The day had turned windy and haunting.

As he stepped from the car, a premonitory image flooded him (as they often did), but without blue mist, without “the Blue Death.” Simply that of Elaine in bed, cocooned in darkness, a bright patch of light at her feet.

Ronnie Rummer opened the door before he could knock.

They hadn’t seen each other since the event and the week of its aftermath. In the overeager way of old friends long separated, they took each other’s measure, downloading the version they saw before them while tweaking, updating and deleting the one they’d been carrying in their minds’ eye. Ronnie had a little more work to do than Willow in that regard, because the detective’s rugged travels on Alcohol Road had done some damage to the vehicle. Dubya’s awareness of his own haggardness was rekindled in Ronnie’s wide-eyed look, even as his gaze softened with warmth and affection.

The man was genuinely glad to see him, almost deliriously so, and it struck Willow that his former neighbor may not have had a visitor in a long, long while. What really took him aback was his host’s sheer normalcy, if one could call it that—he was so affable, so upbeat and well-groomed. Willow had imagined stepping into the broken house of a broken man, but realized in an instant how silly that was, and overwrought; the wound never heals yet people find ways to move on. What about Elaine, though? Her “way” must have wreaked all sorts of havoc on the man… Still, it was a bit topsy-turvy. If they’d been put together in a lineup it was Willow, not Ronnie, who’d have been fingered as the casualty and lost soul.