J. Margos - Shattered Image

“Well, of course you have to do it,” he said.

I nodded. “I know that, but I need help to get through it. To go to Vietnam again, so to speak.”

He nodded. “Toni, you’re a spiritual person. I know you read the scripture and keep a strict rule of meditative prayer. I also know that you read the works of the spiritual fathers and continue to expand your knowledge of our faith, but there’s one thing I notice about you lately.”

I waited a moment for him to gather his thoughts.

He spoke slowly and softly, “All the work you do is great work. Your work is bringing peace to a lot of people and their relatives who are still on this side of life, but you never interact with any of these people anymore.”

“What do you mean, Reverend?”

“Toni, you’ve become disconnected from the living in the results of your service. It seems now your only connection is what you do for the dead. You were able to deal with the things you experienced in Vietnam by focusing on your service there, on its results and by focusing on others. Many times you’ve told me the stories of the relatives of the soldiers and how much it meant to them that you had been there when their loved ones died.”

“I know.”

“With this work you do, I think you’ve found a way lately to anesthetize yourself from that a little.”

“I see what you mean,” I said. It was hard to hear, but I realized that what he said was true. It was easier to deal with the pain of what I had seen and done in Vietnam and in my work here by distancing myself from it.

“Now it’s hitting close to home again with Teddy,” Reverend Iordani continued. “It’s hitting close to home and your thoughts are about what it will mean to you and what you will go through. Focus needs to be redirected to Irini, Gregory and Eleni, and what it will mean to them to finally have this resolved. Your service to others is the focus-away from yourself and to the needs of those you serve. It is only through selflessness that we can heal our internal pain.”

“Yes,” I said, looking down at the crushed granite on the trail. I pushed some of it around with the toe of my boot. Easier to say and to understand than to do.

He placed his hand gently on mine.

“I want you to go with me this afternoon. I have a visit to make to a local seniors’ home. I want you to meet some people.”

Maria Pappas was seventy-eight and her husband, George, was eighty-two. They were both small, frail people. Maria was only about five-one and George was maybe five-four, tops. They both had thick, dark, coarse hair peppered lightly with gray. George didn’t know anybody anymore and couldn’t do anything for himself. He lived at Riverview Assisted Living. Maria lived there with him and waited on him hand and foot. She had to do everything for him.

Their little apartment was very nicely decorated. It consisted of a sitting room and a kitchenette with a small table and two chairs, a bedroom and a bath. It was small, but Maria had made it warm and cozy with her furniture. Many beautiful pictures hung on the walls around us. An old and well-used Bible rested on a table near the door.

Reverend Iordani said some special prayers and then we all sat down in the sitting room to visit. Unhampered by the kitchenette’s limited resources, Maria had made us a wonderful snack of koulouria-Greek butter cookies-served us Greek coffee, took care of all of George’s needs, and all of ours. I tried to help her, as did Reverend Iordani, but she wouldn’t have it. At seventy-eight, she had more energy then I did thirty years ago.

She spoke of the past, the good times with George. Her hands trembled when she lifted the coffee cup. She spent the entire visit reminiscing about those days. If George made a sound or moved, she attended to him immediately. I saw then that there was fatigue there, too, but she would not and could not give up. Something inside her gave her that energy-the energy to continue. Her energy came from love-selfless love.

Reverend Iordani was right. I had become disconnected. In turning too inward, I had become selfish with my service. Suddenly it occurred to me-watching Maria tend to George and listening to her talk about their old days together-I thought about Irini trapped in those days of Vietnam all this time, never able to fully move on. To move on would be to leave Teddy there, and she could never leave Teddy alone, any more than Maria Pappas would leave George. This wasn’t just about freeing Ted, it was about freeing Irini-and Irini could never be free until Ted came home where she knew he would be safe forever.

I had laid down the initial layer of clay on the Red Bud victim and had stepped back to check it all over. I would leave for Hawaii in less than a week. I wanted to get this sculpture completed before I left, so photos of the face could be disseminated on television and in the papers, and a possible ID made while I was gone.

The face was round, with broad cheeks that had a slight flatness to them. The nose was short, narrow at the bridge and then flaring to become much wider toward the end. Her brow line was straight from the nose bridge, only arching slightly over the eyes. Her rounded face circled the broad cheeks to a soft, small chin. It wasn’t a glamorous or particularly remarkable face, but it was a sweet one. I was getting to know her and beginning to feel an even greater sorrow at thinking how this lovely woman could have been killed and dumped this way.

I was now at the stage where the intuitive part of my work would begin. The science of tissue depths had been applied to all areas of the face. Normally, I would take into account clothing found with the victim and any other personal articles to give me an impression of the person as I finalized the face, but in this case, there was nothing but a jumble of bones in a makeshift grave, and one sad scrap of flowered cloth.

I thought about what Leo had said about the grave site and the method of death, and about the kind of killing she thought it was. This woman’s identity would tell us a lot about her life, with whom she might have been involved, or who she would have encountered that could have done this to her. Who was she and where had she been buried for those years before she turned up on the river’s edge at Red Bud Isle? Were it not for an early-morning kayaker, her bones would have washed down the Colorado River in anonymity.

I sat on the stool in front of my workbench just looking at the bust as it was. I sat there in my blue-jean cutoffs and an old, faded red T-shirt, with my bare feet propped up on the rungs of the stool. I let the image of the face as it was permeate my thoughts until I felt that I could “see” the person as she had been-until I could feel something of who she was.

When I look at faces I see shapes and the way those shapes come together to form the image of that person. Most eyewitnesses’ identifications of criminals are faulty, not only because of suggestions that might have been made, but mostly because of the way most people observe other people. They “snapshot” the view and then they do something that totally distorts the memory-they make a judgment about what they saw. They form an opinion.

I decided, based on my years of experience with faces, how I thought her eyes and nose should look-on the aspect of her expression. I had to breathe some artistic life into the static clay reconstruct. I would work through the night to finish this one. I would have to add more clay to smooth the features of the face across the tissue-depth markers, without adding any depth that would distort the image. At the same time, some knowledge and experience would come into play to interpret what had been there before she died. It would be early morning before I was through with all that, but there would be time to catch up on sleep on the way to Hawaii next week. Meanwhile, there was hard work to be done and a lost woman to be found.