Songs for the Missing

by Stewart O'Nan

The state police were closing their investigation, leaving only the nonprofit K9 teams to pursue Wade’s clues. As Fran went on the air to appeal to the public one more time, she had the feeling he was still preying on their hopes. She made a new page for the website, including a transcript of his confession and a map of the I-90 corridor from Erie to Toledo. The area in question was massive. Ed had already started checking out self-storage facilities, every weekend inching his way west. She didn’t have his faith or his energy, and envisioned quitting, as if she was beaten.

  The weather was bad, and because they were looking for a body, the new search lacked the urgency to attract volunteers. After a while he was out there by himself. When she could she went with him, cruising the county roads off of each successive exit. There was nothing but truckstops and farmland, and when they did locate a self-storage it was invariably ringed by a cyclone fence and the ground was covered with snow.

  They debated Grace’s suggestion of hiring a private detective, or just someone who could dedicate himself to the case full-time. In the end they spent five thousand dollars on a retired cop who submitted a beautiful three-inch-thick report that said he couldn’t find her.

  Over spring break they took Lindsay on a tour of the nearby colleges on her shortlist, stopping in Ann Arbor and Chicago, awkwardly sharing a motel room. Lindsay liked Northwestern, right on the lake, and riding the L into town, but the city scared Fran, the sprawl of it, the rundown neighborhoods. Driving out and back on 90 she couldn’t help but think that at any second they might be passing Kim and never know it.

  They celebrated her at every occasion. For Arbor Day they dedicated a tulip tree in the circular turnaround of the high school. The branches were cluttered with yellow ribbons, a fundraiser for the booster club.

  In May, after much discussion, they held a memorial service on what would have been her twentieth birthday. Father John and Ken Wilber, the choir director, helped plan it. The hardest part was seeing Kim’s headstone for the first time. They’d picked out the white granite together, and spent hours tweaking the design and the inscription (BELOVED DAUGHTER in Anglia cursive), but to see the span of her life set in stone was too much, and Fran had to turn away. Holding her, Ed assured the owner it was what they wanted.

  So many people came that they couldn’t all fit—the first time that had happened, Father John said. Blown-up photos of Kim at every age leaned on easels along the communion rail. Across the aisle, Nina and Elise and J.P. sat together, and Ed asked if it was all right if he invited them back to the house after. She thought they had nothing to apologize for, but said it was all right, and in front of everyone he walked over to their pew and hugged Elise and then Nina and then J.P. In the receiving line he embraced them again and nodded tearily, while Fran shook their hands, thanked them for coming and passed them on to Lindsay.

  “I’m sorry,” she said that night, after everyone was gone. “I can’t just turn my emotions on a dime like that.”

  “You knew they’d come.”

  “It would have been nice if you’d told me ahead of time you were going to do that. That’s what threw me.”

  “It wasn’t their fault.”

  “They lied,” she said. “Maybe I’m a bad person for holding that against them.”

  “It had nothing to do with what happened, we know that now.”

  “We didn’t know that, and it could have, but they didn’t care, they were more concerned about themselves. That’s what makes me so mad.”

  “I think they understand that. Did you talk to them?”

  “I talked to Elise. You know Nina and J.P. are dating? That’s a little odd.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “You don’t think that’s odd?”

  “Think about what they’ve got in common.”

  Like us, she might have replied.

  Publicly the service succeeded, providing the illusion of finality, an ending to the story. Privately whatever peace it brought them was temporary.

  The stone was permanent, and so close. Though there was nothing buried under it, Fran stopped by after work, bringing leftover flowers from the gift shop and taking away the old ones. Kim’s friends left unopened packs of Newports and full bottles of beer, which Fran dropped in the garbage bag with the flowers. Once, on her way to lunch, she saw a pickup with a Marine Corps decal parked by her plot, and a goateed dude she suspected was Dennis Wozniak paying his respects. She pulled into the lot of the Dairy Queen and sat there like she was eating, waiting for him to leave. On top of the stone he’d placed a Big KitKat, Kim’s favorite. Ed went with her on weekends, but confessed that sometimes he came by himself as well. He’d seen Wozniak too, and the KitKat. While Fran didn’t care for Wozniak, she was glad Kim had her regulars. As far as she knew, Lindsay hadn’t been back since the service.

  And then, before Fran was prepared for it, Lindsay was off to camp, taking her car, which didn’t seem to bother Ed. He said it was still too early to go back to coaching, but helped Jerry once a week, throwing batting practice and hitting fungoes to the girls. On weekends he had projects around the house. She was attempting to resurrect her garden. Sundays they visited Grace, who was doing better. They worked and fished and went out to dinner, but she found herself drawn to the cemetery more and more, as if Kim was really there.

  In her dreams Kim appeared, completely fine. Fran asked her where she’d been.

  “I was right here,” Kim said, like Fran was making a big deal of it.

  She spent too much time alone in the house. Cooper was going deaf, and every once in a while he jerked his head up, alert, turning as he tracked a sound only he could hear, as if someone was creeping down the hall.

  “Who is it?” she asked him.

  They used to joke that they had ghosts. Now she wished they did.

  She missed Kim, but she also missed keeping vigil. Often when she was trying to lose herself in weeding or watching TV she felt an inner spur, as if she needed to stop wasting time and go look for her. That obstinate hope had sustained them for so long. It was impossible to just switch it off.

  She used the second anniversary as an opportunity to do good, staging a walkathon for autism. She went on the radio and asked for everyone’s help bringing Kim home, but with no expectations.

  She thought she’d resigned herself to this limbo when, one Friday at the beginning of August, she came home and found a pink receipt on the front door saying a package was being held for her at the post office. She didn’t bother to go inside. She took the rest of the mail with her—catalogs and all—and drove downtown. She got there with five minutes to spare, along with everyone else. Standing in line, she found herself wishing for the impossible—that she’d been wrong, the butterfly wasn’t Kim’s.

  The package was in the back. When the clerk returned with a slim padded envelope, it seemed too small to Fran. Though Sandy knew her, she showed her ID before she signed.

  She didn’t open it there, where people could see. She drove home with it on the seat beside her like a bomb. Ed was due any minute, but she brushed off the thought of waiting for him. She carried the package upstairs to Kim’s room and closed the door, took the scissors from the wire cup on her desk and sat on the edge of her bed with the sun falling on her lap and neatly cut off one end of the envelope.

  The paperwork cushioned a flattened cocoon of bubble wrap, through which she could see the curve of one wing. It took her several tries to slide the point of the scissors under the strapping tape, and then the plastic pulled open easily.

  The pendant was bent, the thin gold noticeably bowed. The sun flashed off the finish as Fran tilted it in her hand, and she wondered if they’d polished away any fingerprints. The delicate eyes at the tips of the wings where the chain attached were still intact. After a while she stood and pressed it against the top of her dresser with her palm to see if she could fix it. When she saw that she couldn’t, she slid it off, pressed it to her chest—it was cold on her skin—then brought it to her lips a
nd kissed it. She held it there a moment with her eyes closed, as if making a wish.

  The Grateful Parents

  In the end it took a stranger to save them. In the fall of 2008, nearly a year and a half after James Wade killed himself, Braden called Ed at work. They’d heard nothing for so long that for a second he didn’t believe it.

  There was no mistake. The FBI had confirmed the ID.

  A woman in Mentor, a civilian searching with her own dog and a GPS. She was known to the local cops, a sparky, always phoning in complaints and tips on cases. A lonely older lady. Apparently she’d made it her crusade. They’d gotten lucky. Sometimes that’s how it went with these cases.

  “But I’ll let you go,” Braden said. “You probably want to call your wife.”

  “They’re sure?” Fran asked, worried, as if this good news could be taken away.

  He told her they were.

  “It’s a miracle,” she said.

  The word seemed too strong to him, but he didn’t contradict her. “It sounds like this woman was obsessed.”

  “Thank God she was,” Fran said.

  She would meet him at home. She was leaving right now. “I knew we’d find her,” she said. “I love you.”

  “I love you too,” he said, though once he’d signed off, he felt let down. The news had drained him, too sudden and strange, too final. It registered, he just needed some time to accept it. They’d lived so long with the prospect of never finding Kim that he’d almost convinced himself it didn’t matter. Fran was happy, that’s what was important. He thought he should be too, though essentially, he couldn’t help but remind himself, nothing had changed. He was glad this phase was over, that was all.

  At home, once they’d told Lindsay and his mother, Fran kicked into her old spokesperson role. She took the calendar off the fridge, grabbed a yellow pad and started a list. They needed to book Lindsay’s flight right now. Did he want her to order a wreath in his mother’s name? What should it say? Should they go with the long or the short service? They’d have to find out when Father John was available, because they definitely wanted him. She was thinking they could do the reception here; it would be less expensive and more intimate. She could do the baking herself. She had to run every detail of her plans by him, as if he might object. He hadn’t seen her like this in a long time, totally energized, and wished he felt the same. In the face of all these arrangements, his mind was shutting down, along with his body. He tried to help, but she was moving too fast for him. All he wanted to do was sleep.

  Technically the reward was still in effect. At last count it was fifty thousand. Fran wanted to meet the woman and present her with a check. It was the least they could do. He agreed, though the idea of standing in front of the cameras again depressed him.

  The feeling stayed with him through the busy days that followed. When friends stopped in, he fielded their congratulations with a feigned relief, while Fran gushed. He didn’t know how to explain it, this disconnect. Everyone was happy for them. As Fran said, it was the best news they could have hoped for. Ed knew this to be true—how many times had he wished for some unexpected deliverance—yet now that it had actually happened, he felt as helpless as he did at the beginning, at the mercy, once again, of unseen forces. All along it had seemed wrong to him that his fate was out of his control. This was just further proof. He didn’t see it as something to celebrate.

  Part of his resistance was selfish. With Lindsay gone, their life had been quiet. All summer Fran had worried that they would drive each other crazy, cooped up in the empty house. Instead they discovered—as if it were a surprise—that they liked each other’s company. They spent more time together, bringing almost formal attention to their conversations. They had wine every night, and ate off the good china. It was like a courtship, or a honeymoon, and he was heartened to find that if she was all he had, finally, that was enough. He had come to rely on their quiet evenings, their weekends a cocoon the two of them shared, separate from the rest of the world. They still grieved, but privately, without headlines or reporters peeking in the windows.

  Now not only were they no longer invisible, their story had become this crazy woman’s. Her name was Mimi Knapp, and the press was fascinated with her. The idea that she’d taken on this impossible quest and succeeded was irresistible. She was a regular visitor to the website, one of their many armchair detectives, except she’d gone far beyond that. She’d left messages in the guestbook from one mother to another, pledging to find Kim, and plastered a room of her rental place with topographic maps. Like Wade, she lived alone, a mystery to her neighbors. She was a cashier at a Bi-Lo; in every picture she was in uniform, as if they were the only clothes she owned. She had a Dutchboy haircut, though she was easily in her sixties. Her German shepherd’s name was Ollie. In retrospect, her son joked about her dedication to the search. They fought about it constantly. Many times he’d pleaded with her to stop. He’d seriously thought she was disturbed.

  Fran called her colorful, as if her bizarreness was fun. Ed just thought she was odd. The first time they spoke on the phone, she put the dog on so they could say hello to it. “He’s the real hero,” she said, “Ollie-Ollie Olson Free-o.”

  Ed thanked her and then sat there while she and Fran chatted like old friends.

  She said she couldn’t accept the money, that’s not why she did it. “If my baby was missing, I’d want everyone out there looking.” When Fran insisted, she said she’d donate it to the Humane Society, if that was all right.

  They set a date for the one gap in their schedule—late Thursday morning, so they could make the noon news. When Fran said they were looking forward to meeting her, she responded that Ollie was looking forward to meeting Cooper.

  “She is different,” Fran admitted.

  For some reason, Ed wasn’t amused. He knew he was being ungracious, possibly even jealous, but it bothered him that Fran would let an outsider intrude on them when they had so much to do. They were making this into a production, and while they’d done the big check thing a hundred times in the past, every time he thought of posing with the woman, he felt queasy and short of breath, as if he couldn’t do it.

  Strangely, he was more at ease dealing with the funeral home. Choosing Kim’s coffin and vault should have upset him, but there, at least, the mood was properly somber. He and Fran were subdued as they followed Mason Radkoff through the showroom, calmed by the stately vases of white lilies and cream walls with their tasteful sconces, nodding as he gently went over the benefits of each model. While Ed knew his pitch was false, he could agree with the pretense of comfort and eternal rest. He tried not to think of the expense. This ceremony was necessary, and dignified, and right.

  “I never want to do that again,” Fran said in the lot, as if she’d forgotten his mother.

  The preparations were endless, ridiculous. He wished they could skip straight to the funeral, but even that was turning into a circus, with the reception afterward. Fran had enlisted Connie and Jocelyn. They’d taken over the dining room table, papering it with guest lists and recipes. Ed steered clear of them, hiding out in his office with Cooper, flinching whenever Fran laughed at something. He knew he should be glad for her. Instead he tried to imagine himself laughing, and couldn’t.

  What puzzled him most was that just last week he’d been happy, or happier than this. Since the news, the world had turned sour. He wasn’t able to concentrate, and gave up before he could form his thoughts. Nothing seemed worthwhile, not even old reliables like the Indians. It was all noise, pointless. The one thing he was looking forward to was seeing Lindsay, and she’d only be there for the weekend, and would probably spend most of it with her friends.

  For the event on Thursday, Jocelyn wanted to use the backyard, thinking of the dogs, and the space they’d need for all the media. Connie thought it would be neat if they made dog biscuits for Ollie. Fran sent him to the Foodland for cookie cutters and a five-pound bag of whole wheat flour, and Wednesday night they filled
the kitchen with smoke. Cooper was their official taster, leaving Ed to watch TV by himself. The Indians were fighting for home advantage in the playoffs, but the game didn’t hold his attention. He kept picturing tomorrow, the reporters lined up on the sidewalk, and his thoughts started to circle on him. When he tried to swallow, his throat caught, a web of saliva stuck halfway. His gut was rumbling, and though it was only ten o’clock, he told Fran he was going up to bed.

  “Take some Gaviscon, that’ll help.”

  It didn’t, as he knew it wouldn’t, just as he knew he would feel the same way in the morning.

  He was resigned to the invasion, yet even at his most dour he hadn’t foreseen the scope of it. At dawn Lakewood was an unbroken wall of satellite trucks. Fran said she expected some of them were national. He shaved and showered and tied his tie, his head spinning as if he were hungover.

  He stayed inside, watching from the living room as Jocelyn took charge, lining up the media in the drive, checking their credentials before letting them into the backyard. A dozen techs paid out cables along the gutters, duct-taping them across the sidewalk. It was like they were making a movie. By nine there was a bank of lights and tripods aimed at the back deck like a firing line.

  Out front a crowd gathered, some neighbors, some people he’d never seen before, many of them children, though it was a school day. A police car rolled up. With a twinge, he realized the patrolman waving them off the street was Perry.

  The woman was late, and it was almost time. Jocelyn had arranged for Fran to do an exclusive with Channel 12 from Erie, a reward for being the first station to cover them. Ed wasn’t needed, and he retreated to his office, closing the door. He sat sideways at his computer, swiveling in his chair and absently scratching Cooper’s ears. Cooper panted, confused by all the excitement. Ed closed his eyes and tried to control his own breathing, but it was no use. He smoothed Cooper’s fur, fingering the hard lumps under his skin—fatty deposits or tumors, the vets weren’t sure. He wouldn’t be with them much longer, and Ed would miss him. Soon he would lose his mother too, a fact he could barely grasp.