by Roman Dial
Closure
Passport, money, machete, map: May 22, 2016.
Courtesy of the author
We regrouped at the Fiscal’s office in Puerto Jiménez. Roman’s gear and clothing were laid out in a back room. All of it was muddy. Much of it looked rotten. Asking questions, I inspected it closely, piece by piece, handling it, weighing its meaning in my hands. The pack lid was found separated from the pack. Inside was an unopened bag of cookies labeled “Chiky Chips” and a package of Tang. “He hadn’t starved,” somebody pointed out.
His passport had been in the lid, too, and inside his passport were three colorful bills totaling $37 worth of colónes and the disintegrating folded remains of “the best map yet.” Inside his pack OIJ had found his mosquito-net tent and some extra clothes; outside of it, they found his headlamp, his Visqueen tarp, and his sleeping pad. It appeared he had stopped and was perhaps making camp. His compass, too, had been on the ground, its bearing set at 240 degrees, the direction from there to the Rio Claro. It had probably been around his neck for reference.
The heavier, metal things lying in the stream bed had been upstream a few yards from the logjam: the machete, a green fuel canister about eight inches long and four inches across, and the unidentified green item in the photo. This last piece was now obviously part of the stove. Roman must have assembled the stove, which was then struck by a massive blunt object that snapped the burner from the canister and pinched and folded the threads on the burner’s valve. The steel fuel canister was dented with a broad divot, as if something hard and large in diameter—perhaps a hardwood tree limb—had hit it with extreme force.
Like Ken, Jorge from the embassy had been sure it was foul play until he saw the site. Now it was clear: a natural death, an accident. Snakebite or tree fall, it was all speculation now. I preferred a scenario that matched all of the facts with as little anguish as possible.
IT SEEMED TO me that Roman had met Jenkins and his band of miners along the Zeledón on July 10 or 11, then hiked upstream after breakfast. He would have taken the left and better-used fork, following Jenkins’s trail. He passed by the path to their tunnels and descended to the Negritos, having bypassed its canyon. From there he negotiated a series of waterfalls upstream for a half mile to where he died.
This is what closure feels like.
Peggy arrived the next day and we inspected Roman’s things together. We spread them across a table outside the Pearl. Like I had, she handled and inspected everything, verifying Roman’s presence in the material remains, seeing his passport’s muddy and faded photo taken when he was a teen, his name and birthdate visible, his neat handwritten notes on a folded sheet of paper.
Lauren came into the Pearl. She called in her big voice across the room for everyone to hear: “This whole time, for two years, you always said that you knew your son—that he would never walk with a guy like Pata Lora. And you stood up to Dondee and Carson.” She smiled her big smile. “And you were right all along. You did more than any parent could be asked to do, Roman. You went above and beyond.” Speechless, I tried to thank her, but couldn’t.
Aengus, who had made a six-part series based on a story that wasn’t true, wasn’t so sure. He took me aside. “Don’t you think we should get the FBI in here to do a real investigation? Just to be sure?”
“No. I don’t, Aengus. You haven’t been to the site where Roman was found. If you had, then you would know that it’s impossible that Pata Lora or the Guichos were involved. There’s no conspiracy. There’s no murder.”
I looked to Ken for support. He shrugged. “Yeah, Aengus, I know, it’s hard to believe, but the money and passport were there. Nothing was taken. . . .”
“But aren’t you just a little suspicious that all this is happening now, when the show’s coming out?” This was the producer who had hired the ex–DEA agent who convinced me my son had been murdered. The producer who then turned the murder into a titillating trailer shown on TV ten times a day, as I saw myself in a hotel room.
I erupted, emboldened by Lauren. “Look, Aengus, can’t you just let a grieving parent be? For two years I’ve felt like I’ve been held underwater. And for the first time I can come up for air and I can breathe. And you just want to shove me back down? No, Aengus, I have had enough!”
At that moment, I saw in Aengus what others had whispered. He had seemed to be on our side. Now I wasn’t so sure.
The next morning, Peggy and I went to El Doctor. I held her hand as we slipped and slid down the steep muddy hillside, following the tracks left by the repeated passage of a dozen OIJ, Fuerza, and MINAE. Peggy ducked beneath the yellow crime tape and started digging, first with a small stick and then with a spoon, brought for our lunch.
The rangers wandered off. Hesitant at first, I slipped under the yellow tape and joined her, the now-familiar feeling of looking for sign of Roman washing over me as we searched for anything that might help us understand what had happened. From experience, I knew that seeing anything of his would bring him close to me again and touch my heart.
A sympathetic Costa Rican had given us each a long solid walking stick made of local wood. Peggy’s was light but sturdy and an inch and a half across. Mine was heavy, longer, and thicker, made of a tropical hardwood called manu. We used our walking sticks as levers to move the eight-and ten-foot sections of log aside, digging underneath, pushing aside the sediment and debris, looking, but finding nothing. The OIJ had been thorough.
I pointed out the dead tree, the new growth. “It looks like a tree fell on his camp, doesn’t it? Although some of the rangers think it was snakebite and found a terciopelo down here. What do you think, Peggy? Do you think somebody killed Roman here?”
“No. No way. Why would anybody be here in the first place?”
“Maybe somebody killed him and brought him here?” I prodded.
“Too much work. How would they get him down the steep hill? Cut him up and carry him? It’s hard to walk here even without a pack. No, he died here. He was probably in camp or making camp and a tree fell, probably in the dark and he couldn’t see to run out of the way. Lots of trees fall here. Like we saw near Dos Brazos. Or when you were here with Brad and Todd and the Learn to Return guys.” She sounded as convinced as I felt that it had been a natural death.
Afterward we walked back to Dos Brazos to meet the miner who had found Roman. The miner said that the locals felt a kinship with Roman, because he had explored off-trail in a very challenging canyon and forest area, and he had done it without permission, against authority. The miner said that Roman had the spirit of the gold miners and they all admired him for that.
WE LEFT THE Osa for San José, where we joined a press conference with the OIJ and embassy. In front of a room full of media, I thanked the miners, the rangers, Cruz Roja, the OIJ, and the embassy, even all the people of Costa Rica for their big hearts and helpfulness. Afterward we met with Georgina, gave our blood samples for DNA testing, thanked everyone personally, and prepared to leave for home.
There was only one step left. In an office in OIJ’s brooding granite building in downtown San Jose, we told a soft-spoken translator that Pata Lora’s story wasn’t true. He had never been with our son. We retracted the denuncia that the OIJ had prepared to arrest Pata Lora for murder.
TIJAT’s producers had been right: the power of the camera is real. The effort to have Roman’s case moved from missing persons to murder had been successful, thanks to Carson and Missing Dial. But in the end, the media’s search for sensationalism had left us all vulnerable to a schizophrenic’s self-incrimination.
Almost two years after Roman’s last emails had thrown Peggy and me into a valley of grief that darkened and deepened with time, we now found ourselves atop a small hill of relief rising up from the valley bottom. Roman had not been murdered. He had not waited for us to save him. He had probably died before any of us knew he was in trouble. Before I had even read his last words: “it should be difficult to get lost forever.”
We had found him.
Chapter 50
Gather the Ashes
Clouds over Costa Rica, December 2016.
Courtesy of the author
By August 2016, we heard from Georgina that Roman’s dental records matched. In October, she sent the DNA results from the bone marrow sampled inside a tibia. The DNA showed conclusively that the tibia came from our son. Then the embassy wrote asking us what we wished to do with his remains. We agreed on cremation. At the end of November, we flew down to see the bones, collect the ashes, and pay the reward to the miner who had found him.
Tourism was down since Hurricane Otto had just hit Costa Rica and the volcano had erupted again. We met Peggy’s sister Maureen and her husband, Steve, at the San José airport. In the morning, Gerhardt picked us up and took us through thick traffic to the funeral home, where I paid for Roman’s cremation. Then we flew to Puerto Jiménez, rented a car, and went to the bank, where Steve donated money into a Cruz Roja account. I had a big wad of $5,000 in American bills to give to the miner who had discovered Roman’s remains. The $50,000 offer was only a ruse to get Pata Lora to talk. We had no intention to pay that sum.
The entire town served as a reminder of our two years of searching. Peggy and I pointed out the new Fiscal headquarters to Maureen and Steve. It had moved from Golfito to Puerto Jiménez about the time Jorge from the embassy took charge of the investigation, perhaps because of Roman’s disappearance, but more likely because of crime’s increase on the Osa.
We walked by the ballfield where we had studied young men’s feet in search of Roman’s Salomon shoes, the secondhand store where we had looked for Roman’s gear and clothes, and the Corners Hostel where Roman had stayed. Doña Berta recognized us and came over to say that she was happy that we’d found Roman, clutching my hand in hers. At a restaurant where we had breakfast, Andres, who’d taken us to Cerro de Oro, said the same thing. Maureen even spotted Pata Lora at the grocery store. I made sure to avoid him.
We drove past the waterfront restaurant where I had called Peggy and told her, “Roman will probably be irritated I’m here,” and we had both laughed but agreed it was the right thing to do, coming down. So many places triggered so many memories of being wrong so often about what had happened to our son.
Sitting there along the waterfront, a gringo nodded and smiled. He looked travel-worn, with curly beach-blond hair, a scruffy beard, and a flowered travel shirt. Hmm, another local who recognizes us. Nodding back, I realized it was our friend Chris Flowers from Anchorage. We had planned to meet up in Costa Rica, but not here and not now.
Chris had his boys with him: Cody, nine, and Cole, eleven. When his second son was born, Chris called to tell me the news. I asked his newborn’s name and Chris said, “Cody,” adding, “I just hope he doesn’t change his name to ‘Roman’ when he gets older.” We both laughed.
Chris and his boys followed us to Dos Brazos to pay the miner’s reward. We bumped along the potholed road, past flooded fields and Brahma bulls. The recent rains from Hurricane Otto had ravaged the Rio Tigre’s banks and eaten into the oil palm plantations. Even the road looked like it might fall into the river.
We went to Jenkins’s place. He had a nice new house with a metal framed roof and white walls, a tiled floor, and two bedrooms that opened with doors rather than curtains. Jenkins’s younger brother was there. Out of hospitality, Jenkins’s wife, Gladys, and their teenage daughter passed out pink Nestlé’s Quik to all.
Jenkins told us the weather had been bad for almost three weeks, leaving everybody out of money, like the jungle’s birds and monkeys were out of fruit. He showed us the portable sluice box he had received as a tip from a client he guided. He looked a little tubbier than when we had last seen him. He said that he was like a little sausage in his shirt: “fat and happy” came to mind.
He had his new house, built by the government, and he’d made money in construction out at La Leona on the park boundary past Carate. Peggy and I had walked there six months earlier to tell him that Roman had been found and most likely killed at El Doctor by a fallen tree or a snake. We thought he should know, since he had been the last person to see Roman alive.
Jenkins said the town was happy. Most had seen the show and everyone could see that Pata Lora was lying, and that I had conflict with Carson, who believed all of Pata Lora’s story. Tourism was returning now that the rains had slowed. People in Dos Brazos had heard what I said on the news after Roman’s discovery. It seemed to confirm what the consul general, Ravi, had relayed to me: that everyone had appreciated my gratitude toward Costa Ricans.
We talked about fathers and sons. Jenkins told how his father was part Nicaraguan Indian and could charm snakes with his touch and wrap them around his neck like a scarf. Jenkins said he read a lot about Christ but wasn’t religious. I told him I liked Christ, too, and that I hoped there was a God.
Jenkins went with me to translate while I paid the miner who had found Roman, then took Jenkins home where Arnoldo was waiting. Arnoldo had hosted Pata Lora and Cody all those years ago. I greeted him, then hurried after Peggy and the others who had hiked into the hills on the Fila Matajambre trail. I caught them where they had stopped to watch a big millipede crawling across the forest floor.
Before it rained, Cole found a green and black poison dart frog and a yellow spot damsel fly that looked like a helicopter as it flew. Peggy spotted a tamandua, the small black-and-cream-colored anteater with a long prehensile tail. The handsome little animal had been walking along the trail when it reared up like a boxer just a foot away from her, brandishing its long razor-sharp claws before climbing up a slender tree to escape.
Somehow, through all the ordeal while looking for Roman, I had come to see the tamandua as a sort of spirit creature for him, ever since the first day when Thai and I had driven to Carate and seen one climbing along a fallen roadside cecropia tree.
We stopped at the supermarket for ice cream and tamales full of moist cornmeal and seasoned pork wrapped in a banana leaf, then headed for Carate. We made it only as far as the third river crossing. The water was high. We could have used the current to cross, but returning at the same level or higher would have been impossible.
We parked there by the water and watched a half-dozen dainty little squirrel monkeys with black-capped heads, white faces, and straight tails. They watched back, curious and gentle. Chris and I helped a young guy get his dirt bike across the deepest channel, where the wheels floated and the current threatened to pull it away.
Driving back to Puerto Jiménez, we inspected a freshly dead armadillo and watched through binoculars as white-scrotumed, cat-sized male howler monkeys roared at each other. Chris’s boys delighted as we drove through a noisy flock of red-shouldered green parrots. It had been great to have the excitement and enthusiasm of Chris’s boys, a throwback to our own tropical trips with our own kids, and I felt we had come full circle—almost. Almost, because what I would have really wanted was something like this with Roman’s kids.
AFTER OUR TIME on the Osa, Peggy and I went back to San José to view Roman’s remains before they were cremated and we could bring the ashes home. I had brought a poem that resonated with Roman and his life and his death and reading it aloud over him held some meaning for me and for Peggy, too, I hoped:
SLEEPING IN THE FOREST
I thought the earth
remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
>
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
Its poignancy set me sobbing, the words capturing how I imagined his final time had been. The funeral director in his shiny black shoes and neat mustache slipped out the door, closing it behind him to leave Peggy and me alone with Roman.
We stood over a stainless-steel bin that held the physical remains of his life. The smell of decay touched our hands as we poked and probed at the bones, soiled and brown, held by the forest for nearly two years. The source of the odor, I could see, was the head of a tibia, cut clean by a saw for the marrow’s DNA.
“It’s a little smelly,” Peggy said.
She was so brave, as always, holding her heart together more strongly than I, checking to be sure this was her little boy. Peggy looked closely at the teeth, holding her eyeglass case as if it were lips to see that the teeth were right.
“I don’t have my phone. Do you have a picture?” She wanted to see his toothy smile.
I fumbled through my phone’s photo stream but could find no picture of Roman to use for an impromptu dental comparison. I thought of Peggy’s strength when she bore him the day we had first seen him, how I came apart then, too. This was the same.
She grabbed the bones, pushing the skull this way and that to get a better view, to be sure it was him. I was already sure, had been sure, and said something like, “What good would doubt bring here now?” At first, she thought that these teeth, these bones, were not his. But the sealants on the teeth were there, she said, and when she finally found a chip that she recognized in one of the incisors she confirmed this was our son after all.
I was relieved that the funeral director had left so we could pore over Roman’s bones, looking for something, a story, or maybe just that connection to him that I missed so achingly, that I still miss writing these words now.
Epilogue: Meat, Ravens, and Seeds
