Sixfold Fiction Summer 2015 Page 3

Valerie Cumming | Among These Very Trees

  “All narratives, even the confusing, are implicitly hopeful;

  they speak of a world that can be ordered, and thus understood.”

  Lucy Grealy

  Later, looking back, they would talk about the camping trip as the night that Lynda Greenway was lost. To their parents, to police and reporters—later, much later, to their own spouses and children—they would describe Lynda with this one word, lost, as if she had been misplaced somewhere and was waiting, patiently, for them to find and retrieve her.

  It implied accident, and mistake. A lack of intention. A blip in the natural, intended order of things.

  Only with each other did they sometimes use a different word. That word was taken. Taken by what, they didn’t know. Yet time and again, it was the word they returned to. It was the word that implied guilt, and intention, and fault.

  It was the word that seemed the most true.

  Every autumn, for six years in a row, twenty members of the junior class of Centerburg High School went camping: twenty students, led by Mike Newman, the school’s Biology and Life Sciences teacher, for three days, in the woods twenty miles east of town on land rented from the local Girl Scout council. After the first year, Lucy O’Dell, who taught English, came along too, as a result of complaints from the parents of some of the female students that it was inappropriate to send their daughters out into the woods all weekend with only a male chaperone. The weekend of the sixth and final campout, the earth was dry and hard and brittle, scented with rotting leaves and the ever-present autumnal tinge of smoke. In the day, the sky glowed a brilliant, cloudless blue, still warm enough for shorts during the few hours each day when the sun was directly overhead and not broken by the trees into shadow. By mid-afternoon, however, it had slipped low enough in the sky that its light filtered through red and gold leaves, so that the woods, during that magic hour, shone like stained glass. But the shadows in the woods were always long, and it was into these shadows that Lynda Greenway disappeared.

  The female students who had once been Girl Scouts themselves and knew the woods showed the others where to find the best tucked-away hidden spaces: pockets among the trees where you could smoke a cigarette or two or let your boyfriend lower you down into the dried and crunching leaves without anyone—even Mr. Newman, with his legendary outdoor skills—finding out. Year after year, the girls taught their classmates how to jimmy the lock on the pool house, and told stories about the old hermit who was rumored to be living in the hills and who was blamed whenever a bag of chips or a two-liter bottle of soda went missing without explanation. They pointed out the secret places where they had marked their territory as children by carving with pocketknives into the rotting wood frames of the bunks: names usually, and the occasional peace sign or smiley face, and on one bunk, inexplicably, the words Batman was here. Lynda Greenway herself had once, when she was eleven years old, carved a single “L” into the wood of the cabin wall itself, just below the window frame, where it was partially hidden by a ragged curtain that looked as if it had been made from a recycled dishrag.

  Years later, after Lynda was gone and the annual campouts discontinued, groups of students still made their way out to camp and busted through the padlocked gate. For years, rangers found empty beer cans and condom wrappers littering the floor of the cabin where Lynda had stayed as a girl, where her single carved initial remained. It was as if—the rangers told police—the kids needed to get a look at that L, even the ones who were younger and had never known Lynda to begin with; it was as if they needed the proof that she had ever really existed in the first place.

  Mike Newman grew up a Boy Scout and had studied, for a time, to be a naturalist in the National Park Service, before getting married and shifting gears to teach high school science instead. A year before he proposed the idea of the campout to the school board, he had agreed to lead a teacher in-service entitled “Disaster Preparedness,” which turned out to be the best-attended session of the semester, despite the fact that, as a few of his resentful colleagues pointed out, it had no direct relevance to teaching itself, or to the science curriculum. Mike showed his fellow teachers how to create a disaster kit out of an empty Altoids tin, and how to start a fire with nothing but a piece of flint and some twigs, and the seven steps to surviving a zombie apocalypse; he even demonstrated a few of his jujitsu moves. At five feet and barely seven inches tall, Mike Newman modeled, before a room packed with nearly fifty of his colleagues, how to put six-foot-two-inch assistant principal Bruce Foster into a sleeper-hold, releasing him just before Foster would have lost consciousness and slumped into the podium.

  It was the first time during any in-service that anyone could remember that the participants actually stood up and clapped for a speaker, and after that day, it was said, Mike Newman could have proposed a field trip to the moon, and the school board would have happily written the check.

  His rules for the campouts were simple: Safety first. Stay within the boundaries of camp at all times; take a buddy with you to the latrines, especially at night; no long hair or loose clothing near the campfire. No climbing trees taller than six feet, or taking the canoes out without an adult; no drugs, booze, cigarettes, or sex, though it was said among the students that both Mr. Newman and Ms. O’Dell had had a habit of turning a blind eye whenever a boy snuck into the girls’ cabins after dark, or one of the girls snuck out of them. Fighting was forbidden, though it had happened a few times in the past, and then parents were called to come to camp to retrieve the offending students.

  Later, of course, it came out that Mike Newman had confessed to smoking pot regularly, even dealing it a bit in his youth, but that he had not been high the night of the campout: had, in fact, never been high or even intoxicated, had never even so much as smoked a cigarette, at any school function of his career, on campus or away from it. Transcripts of court hearings and depositions also tell of how Lynda’s friends, once they realized that she was actually missing and not just playing a game, ran to Mike Newman’s tent for help, and found him missing as well; and that when he was eventually located, it was in Ms. O’Dell’s cabin, despite the fact that he was a married man, and that when he emerged into the frigid night, he did so while still buttoning up his shirt.

  The rumor was that Lynda herself was drunk the night of her disappearance: that she’d been drinking steadily from a bottle of rum hidden in her luggage ever since she and her friends got off the bus. There were those who said she could barely even walk the wooded paths without stumbling, that she dropped her flashlight twice, that she shivered uncontrollably. But such a bottle was never found, and without proof, these are only stories, passed down by word of mouth. It is possible that her level of drunkenness was exaggerated, or invented altogether. Like so many of the facts surrounding that weekend, they were left behind in the woods with Lynda herself: lost or taken, though the difference, in the end, matters little.

  Lucy O’Dell was the one responsible for keeping track of the food, and was the one who noticed first whenever any of it went missing. She stored it all in the picnic shelter next to her cabin, in sturdy eighteen-gallon plastic totes with a brick placed on each one to keep critters out. The morning of Lynda’s disappearance, while Mike took a dozen of the students fishing—those who weren’t too hung over from the night before, or too squeamish about baiting their own hooks—Lucy, rummaging through her coolers and bins to prepare breakfast, noticed that a significant amount of food was missing: three bags of jumbo marshmallows, several cans of fruit cocktail, a package of turkey dogs, and an entire loaf of bread had somehow vanished in the night.

  “The hermit,” Mike joked when he got back from his fishing trip and she pulled him aside to tell him the news; he laughed about it, and touched her face, and after a moment, she laughed too. There was still plenty of food, after all; they would hardly go hungry. It was only later, after Lynda was gone— vanished, or taken—that Lucy thought again of the missing food; and by then, in light of
all that had already been lost, it seemed too trivial a detail to mention.

  In a twist of fate that later became a cruel irony, Lynda Greenway’s mother had made a career for herself writing stories about missing and murdered persons. Elizabeth Greenway grew up on Cape Cod and chronicled the deaths that had occurred there in the past fifty years, explained and unexplained, in three volumes of books which, while they didn’t exactly make her a household name, nevertheless cemented her as a local celebrity on the East Coast. Each summer she left Lynda and her sister at home with her husband and travelled to bookstores in Falmouth and Hyannis and Provincetown, where she would give readings and autograph copies for her fans. A Haunted Land, the books were titled: difficult to locate in Ohio, but front and center on the shelves of just about any guest house, gift shop, or museum on Cape Cod.

  When Elizabeth Greenway’s daughter went missing herself, the books gained a brief cult following in the Midwest. People interested in the case of Lynda’s disappearance perused the volumes again and again, searching for clues hidden among the stories of mysterious shipwrecks and unidentified women found dead in the dunes. The English teacher who replaced Lucy O’Dell at the high school even taught a semester-long course on the books, entitled “Haunted Places,” before parents complained and the class was removed from the roster for its “inappropriate content” and “poor taste.”

  Those who read the books called them beautiful, like love letters, filled with melodious descriptions of the changing light in Truro, the expansive Wellfleet moors, the shifting sands and tides of the Outer Cape. They wondered what life had been like for Lynda, growing up with a mother who was so often absent or distracted, whose mind and heart were thousands of miles away. It was possible, some theorized, that Lynda’s disappearance was a fake, that she’d staged it herself as a way to finally gain her mother’s attention. Even as weeks and then months went by, and this scenario began to seem less and less likely, there were still those in town who whispered to each other behind closed doors that disappearance was the next logical step for a girl who had never truly been seen at all.

  Going through Lynda’s things revealed nothing out of the ordinary. In her duffel bag were three T-shirts, two hooded sweatshirts, long johns, three pairs of underwear, two bras, an extra pair of jeans, and a zippered pouch containing her toiletries and a pack of filtered cigarettes. Under the bed she had lined up neatly her creeking shoes and her rain boots, which meant that she must have been wearing her canvas tennis shoes when she disappeared, though of course everyone already knew that from the police report filed by her friends, the ones who were with her that night.

  On her pillow was a flowered case, the pink roses muted and pale with age. Her sleeping bag, by contrast, was obviously new, practically shining, with a smoothly-working zipper and no frayed edges. Plenty of the students had brought along fancy equipment—battery-operated lanterns, water purification disks, unbreakable silverware, towels that folded up to the size of a dollar bill—but Lynda had brought only a flashlight, which they assumed had disappeared with her too until it was discovered two weeks later by one of the search parties combing the woods: its batteries dead but still fully functional, which seemed, to the cold and weary searchers, like a positive omen.

  Those students who believed that Lynda was still alive and hiding out in the woods somewhere wanted to leave her things as they were, on the chance that she would wander back for them; it was late September, after all, and the nights were getting colder. She would need the expensive sleeping bag with its strong zipper and thick quilted lining just to survive. But the police were adamant, and the items stopped being Lynda’s possessions and became evidence: like the woods itself, and like all of them who had been there that night, who had witnessed it all, and yet somehow seen nothing.

  The game had been Lynda’s idea. Hide and seek in the woods, by flashlight: four of them followed her, stumbling on the paths, tripping over dead wood, laughing and shushing each other, to the abandoned, weed-choked archery range, the trees so high on either side of the meadow that they left only a narrow rectangle of sky in between. They thought, clicking off their flashlights, that they would be left in utter darkness; but there was the brightness of the moon to consider, the orange haze of the nearby highway in the distance. Grayson counted first; through eyes that looked closed, but were not really, he watched the others become blur, become shadow, as they dashed across the meadow and vanished into the trees; later, he would not be able to say for sure which blur had been Lynda, or which way she had gone. He only knew that, after he found the others, they called together for her for nearly an hour before they gave up, flying down over the same paths back to camp, falling on roots, bloodying chins and elbows; he remembered that the girls were crying, but wasn’t sure if he himself was.

  When they found Mr. Newman’s tent empty, he’d had the sudden, gut-wrenching fear that all of the others had packed up and left them, that the four of them were all who remained, the victims of a cruel practical joke, until one of the girls suggested that Mr. Newman might be with Ms. O’Dell and they found him there, his eyes—caught in the beams of their multiple flashlights—wide with fear, buttoning up his shirt, pulling on his vest and boots, grabbing his own light and following them back out to the trail, although it had been Lynda who led them before and they argued now over which path was the correct one, wandering blindly until they somehow, through fate alone it seemed, made it back to the archery range. Grayson said that he half hoped Lynda would be sitting there in the middle of the field when they returned, laughing at their panic, at Mr. Newman’s hastily-buttoned shirt shoved haphazardly into the waistband of his jeans; if he’d found her there, he told police later, he would have killed her and cried with gratitude at once. But she was not there, of course. Not in the clearing, and not in the woods that surrounded it, hidden away in a hollow log or tree trunk. Nor, as the weeks went by and rescue teams searched the woods, did they find her body; she had simply vanished. Lost or taken, the friends whispered to each other, shivering at the fate that was so nearly their own; though even they knew that the things they called it were only words, and didn’t make much difference in the end.

  Once, when Mike Newman’s youngest daughter, Ruby, was three, he lost her.

  They were fishing out at the pond near the high school, he and Ruby and his older daughter Amy, and he was watching the way the spring breeze shifted the pattern of sparkles on the surface of the water and thinking of Lucy O’Dell when he glanced around suddenly and noticed that he could no longer see Ruby. “Where’s your sister?” he asked Amy, trying to keep his voice calm.

  “Don’t know. Maybe she went into the woods to pee.”

  “You didn’t see her go?”

  “You didn’t either.”

  He looked around for her fishing pole but that was gone, too. It seemed unlikely that she would take it with her to pee. Like an icy, burrowing insect, the thought entered his brain that it was possible that she hadn’t gone missing after all, possible instead that she had slipped from the bank and drowned, had seen a silver flash of fish and leaned over too far to graze it with her fingertips.

  True, there had been no splash. But wasn’t that what everyone always said about children drowning: that it wasn’t loud like the movies, that the victims slipped beneath the surface and sank like a stone, silent, with very little ability even to struggle?

  When he cupped his hands around his mouth and, in desperation, bellowed the girl’s name, he was shocked by how far his voice carried. How it reverberated off of trees and sky like he was the last remaining person on Earth.

  When he found her—and of course he found her—she had only gone as far as the clump of daffodils under a tree at the edge of the woods a dozen yards away. She looked up in surprise when he called her and said, “Daddy, where were you?”

  As if it was he who had been lost, and not the other way around.

  Nearly a decade later, he would have that same feeling again on the night he w
as summoned from Lucy O’Dell’s bed to find that Lynda Greenway, one of the girls in his care, had gone missing in the woods during a game of hide and seek. It was the feeling that Lynda was the one found, and that it was he, somehow, who had become lost and alone in the woods.

  The difference was that this time, no matter how long or loud he called, no matter that he destroyed his vocal cords to the point that he couldn’t speak above a whisper for days, she never answered.

  The night of September 25—two weeks after Lynda Greenway’s disappearance—the temperature in outlying rural areas dropped to forty-eight degrees; by the end of that week, the average low hovered around forty. On the morning of October 3, the town woke to the first frost of the year. Those who knew of the case, which would have included nearly everyone within a fifty-mile radius, turned their eyes up to the wooded hills surrounding the town, commenting to each other that the curtain of reds and golds to which they had become accustomed had now become bare, frozen, almost threatening.

  They tried not to think about Lynda.

  They wondered if they would ever again be able to look out at the hills and think about anything other than Lynda.

  The early frost killed the apple crop and decimated the pumpkins; jack-o-lanterns that Halloween were so rotted and caved in on themselves that they could barely stand up enough to hold a candle. Still, though, it didn’t snow, which everyone agreed was a blessing; the handful of local men who still dressed and drove faithfully to the woods each morning to search were able to carry on their mission of hope or stubbornness.

  Snow did not fall until the second week of November: a light dusting that silenced the rush of cars on the nearby highway and clothed the dead lawns in a white carpet. But the silence felt less cozy than foreboding; with it, the last of the search party abandoned their hope and stubbornness and stumbled back home from the woods, empty-handed once again.

  As weeks passed, stories were born and died again, some with more staying powers than others. A student came forward who claimed that he had seen Lynda and Mr. Newman emerge together from one of the supply closets a week before the campout; another said that Grayson had been witnessed threatening Lynda in the school parking lot the day they left.

  It was Lynda’s younger sister, Jo Ann, a freshman, who first came forward with the story that Lynda was pregnant at the time of her disappearance. By then, Lynda had been missing for eight weeks, the rescue effort called off with the first brittle November snows. Everyone blamed the story on the delusions of a bereaved sibling, until Jo Ann produced Lynda’s diary, which had been hidden in a shoebox on the top shelf of her closet and, until then, overlooked by the sheriff and his deputies, who had combed the house for clues a week after Lynda’s disappearance. She had written in the diary all about buying the test, and taking it, and watching the little pink plus-sign appear in the stick’s transparent window; she wrote that Grayson was going to kill her, if her parents didn’t do it first.

  It was the kind of thing any sixteen-year-old girl in her predicament might write—words of panic, not to be taken literally—but it was enough evidence, in the sheriff’s opinion, to revisit the case. Grayson Scholl’s neighbors were no strangers to police cars on their street—Mr. Scholl was well-known as a drinker who had once wrapped the family’s pickup truck around a telephone pole—and so they thought nothing of it at first, when the line of cars with their flashing red and blue lights made their way down the familiar road to the house, until the deputy knocked on the Scholls’ front door and returned, almost instantly: not with the man, but with the boy.

  According to the police report, Mike Newman and Lucy O’Dell and their students had spent the day canoeing on the lake; Mike was a certified instructor, and except for the usual horsing around by the kids, nothing unusual had taken place. After canoeing, after rest, they began plans for cooking dinner, and sent the students into the trees for kindling and tinder. It was five o’clock, the sun already dropping quickly behind the trees; in another six hours, Lynda Greenway would be gone.

  For one semester, in the spring of her sophomore year, Lynda Greenway had been Mike Newman’s faculty assistant. Each day during her free period, she came into his lab to help him grade papers or set up for the next day’s lesson. They didn’t talk much; Mike preferred to work silently, and she didn’t appear to have a problem with that. He noticed that she was a nail-biter; grading papers, she would sometimes chew her nails down to raw, bloody stumps. According to her permanent record, which he retrieved from the office, the nail biting had been problematic since elementary school, when one of her teachers had recommended that she see a therapist for anxiety; but the elementary school guidance counselor, a sixty-year-old man, had determined that nothing was the matter. She was simply a girl on the edge of her “change,” he wrote—something that every girl could be counted on to deal with in different, sometimes odd or antisocial, ways.

  By the time that counselor retired and a new, more competent one instated, Lynda had already graduated to the middle school, where teachers had more significant habits to watch for in their students, like cigarette smoking and bulimia. There were girls who drank in the morning on their way to the school bus stop, girls who smoked a joint each day on the way home, girls who carved messages into their arms with the sharp metal points of the compasses from the geometry classroom; there were boys who punched each other black and blue behind the movie theater, and girls who starved themselves or threw up every meal, and boys who drove too fast, who came home late or not at all.

  Lynda kept her grades up, the high school counselors said later. She stayed out of trouble—out of big trouble, anyway. It seemed silly to get worked up about something as harmless as nail biting.

  Her beautiful hands, Grayson Scholl cried when he was called back to the police stationing for questioning, in the days after Lynda’s sister had uncovered her diary. He stared at the ceiling, witnesses reported, to hide his tears. Her beautiful, fucked-up hands.

  Once, Mike Newman caught the girl watching him. He was preparing slides for the next day’s lesson, placing an eyedropper-full of water between two thumbnail-sized pieces of glass, and when he looked up, she was staring at him, chewing on her hands in the way he’d grown used to and come to expect.

  “You look sad,” she said, cocking her head to one side as if studying a specimen. “Were you thinking about something sad?”

  And Mike Newman, who, up until that point, had been thinking about nothing more significant than finishing up quickly so that he could beat the student traffic out of the parking lot and get home to his wife and girls, surprised himself by saying, “I suppose I am a little bit sad.”

  She nodded, as if this did not surprise her. The thoughts in his head now, the thoughts that had come rushing in, as they did a thousand times a day, whenever he completed whatever task immediately engaged him, were of Lucy. He thought of touching her face, of smelling her hair. But Lynda Greenway didn’t ask him anything further. If she had, he would have said, “It turns out I’m not the kind of man I thought I was.” But she didn’t ask, and only returned to her work, which was grading a stack of multiple-choice midterms he’d given earlier that day to his Life Sciences class; and eventually he returned to his work as well, until the bell rang and they said goodbye and she left, and the moment, no matter how many times he went over it in his mind later for clues—for evidence—was gone forever.

  There were those who said that you could hear a baby crying out in the woods at night, if you were quiet enough, if you listened hard enough. The nearest houses were ten miles away, on the other side of the highway; there was no chance of such a sound carrying that far, even on the clearest night. For a while it became the thing to do, after the Homecoming dance or Prom, for couples to drive out to the now-abandoned campsite and make their way along the overgrown paths, listening for the cry of Lynda Greenway’s lost baby in the woods.

  Grayson Scholl, for his part, was one of the few who stayed away. There was something wrong w
ith those woods, he told anyone who would listen, until everyone got bored of the tragedy and started to move on to talking about other things again. You couldn’t get me back into those woods again if my life depended on it.

  Still: couples kept going out to the camp and returning with their stories of a crying infant in the woods; until the sheriff, under pressure from local parents, finally agreed to investigate. For two weeks, after the first thaw of spring, the sheriff and his deputies and a massive team of volunteers once again combed the hundred acres of the camp and the woods beyond it. For those few weeks, there was something in the air in town that was almost like excitement; wives again took to waking early each chilly dawn to pack tomato and cheese sandwiches for their husbands, wrapped in waxed paper, with a Diet Coke and a bag of chips; each evening, when their husbands came home empty-handed and without even the faintest sliver of news, their wives picked their filthy, sodden clothes up from the floor of the bathroom and washed and dried them and laid them out so that they would be ready to wear again the next morning.

  By mid-April, the sheriff had once again called off the search, chalking the noises up to what he liked to call “group hysteria.” With the search parties called home, the woods became once again a place of mystery, impenetrable. Evil, some people called them.

  Lucy O’Dell, looking out at the trees each night from the window of her new apartment, knew better. She knew that nature was only a backdrop, after all, and not to be blamed for what had happened in its midst.

  The word she thought, when she looked at the woods, was not evil.

  The word was indifferent.

  In July of the following year—twenty-two months after Lynda Greenway’s disappearance—one of her shoes was found, sunk in the dirt and half rotted, less than a hundred yards from the cabins where Lynda and Lucy O’Dell and the other girls had slept.

  By then, the camp belonged to a local church; the Girl Scouts, unable to convince parents of the safety of sending their daughters to spend their summers in the woods where Lynda had disappeared, had finally given up and sold it to the church, which used the campgrounds as a place for retreats and marriage-encounter weekends. The shoe was found by a couple out for a walk during a break from a session. At first there was some doubt about whether or not the shoe was even Lynda’s to begin with. It was a cheap canvas sneaker of the kind that had been trendy a couple of years earlier; any number of girls camping that weekend might have been wearing the same color or style. Its advanced state of decomposition made it impossible for the forensics team to determine anything other than that the shoe had been in the woods since the previous autumn, roughly the time of Lynda’s disappearance. Still, the search opened anew: a dozen or so local men once again donned boots and gloves and returned to the woods, linking arms and combing the same patch of ground they’d been over dozens of times before, with renewed hope this time that any number of clues could lie just beneath their feet, hidden beneath a year and a half’s worth of decomposing leaves and loam.

  It wasn’t good for the church’s business to have the sheriff and his team traipsing through the woods, every shift of a tree branch a constant reminder of the unsavoriness of all that had happened there in the past. Eventually the church, too, was forced to abandon the property, and this time, when the camp closed, it closed for good.

  “Tell me now,” Lucy O’Dell said to Mike Newman ten weeks after the girl disappeared, the one time they agreed to emerge from their own self-imposed exile long enough to meet for a cup of coffee. They chose a popular, well-lighted spot, one where they were sure to be seen together, and sat on opposite sides of the table, careful not to touch, though by then, neither of them had any particular desire to. When Lucy spoke, she leaned forward a little; in response, Mike turned himself a bit away. “Tell me right now if there was anything going on between the two of you, please,” she said. “I, of all people, have a right to know.”

  When the first snowfall of the year came, Mike Newman watched it from the window of his new apartment, the one he’d moved to after his wife asked him to leave and he no longer had the heart to argue. The apartment was really a townhouse, with two small bedrooms upstairs for his girls, who were supposed to stay with him on the weekends but were teenagers now and so often busy with their own school activities and social engagements. The winter that year was the harshest on record; one night in January, Mike woke in the night and went downstairs for a snack and looked out the window to the houses on the other side of the street and saw a man there shoveling his roof, so that it would not give under the weight of the wet snow and collapse on his family while they slept. Mike watched the man for the better part of an hour, fascinated, imagining the satisfaction of this man who was working so hard at protecting his sleeping family from the elements, who would wake to the alarm clock in a few hours’ time with blistered hands and a sore back and be filled with an exhausted pride. Eventually, the man raised one glove and, looking directly across the street into Mike’s lit window, waved; and Mike, in his warm kitchen with nothing but the two empty bedrooms upstairs, with their view of the woods and all of its misery in the distance, looked away, and could not bring himself to wave back.

  In time, the high school set up a scholarship fund in Lynda’s honor, and a tree was planted just south of the flag pole with her name engraved on a plaque beneath it.

  To Grayson, and to everyone who had been there that night, it seemed like a cruel joke: that to remember a girl lost in the woods, the school would choose to plant a tree.

  The planting ceremony, held before the first bell rang on the morning of April 24, 2008—what would have been Lynda’s eighteenth birthday—was widely attended: though, with the exception of Grayson himself, very few of those present had ever even spoken to Lynda before her disappearance. Her parents had long since divorced, her mother and Jo Ann departed back to the East Coast; no one ever saw the father, who had stayed on as a shut-in in the same house where Lynda and Jo Ann grew up. The other students who had been there that night had scattered to private schools and other districts, moving on in their new lives with people who had no memory of their old one.

  Mr. Newman and Ms. O’Dell, having been relieved of their positions by the school board the previous winter, sent flowers. Separately.

  The other students who had been present the night of the disappearance refused to have anything to do with the ceremony, which was no surprise. They wanted nothing to do with Grayson, period; they passed him in the halls between classes without even a hello, though their eyes slid over him carefully in class when they thought he wouldn’t notice, eyes that he knew were watching him for evidence, for some kind of sign.

  Bruce Foster, now principal, suggested that Grayson say a few words, and he did; he stepped forward from the crowd and took his spot next to the open hole, which was freshly dug and was awaiting the sapling to fill it; he would not later be able to remember what he said, though Foster and some of the other staff assured him that it was lovely.

  When the bell rang, and everyone else went back inside to the warmth of their first-period classes, Grayson Scholl stood alone in the grass, his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his jeans, watching as the custodian placed the sapling’s bagged ball of roots into the ground and then began to cover it with shovelful after shovelful of dirt; and when it was all over he sat down right in the grass at the edge of the mound and hugged his knees to his chest and rocked back and forth with his face down and his shoulders shaking.

  Several of the students witnessed this from the windows of their various classrooms, though no one raised their hand and asked to be excused to join him. There was a time when seeing a guy like Grayson Scholl break down would have been all anyone could talk about. Now, though, nothing he did surprised them or interested them much. He was always alone. He moved among them like a ghost, like someone who was already gone.

  By the time he left town for good a month later, people barely even noticed.

  When his girls were littl
e, Mike Newman would sometimes find himself watching them, calculating how many years he had left until they would become the age of his teenaged students. Once they became that age, and everything that was destined to happen had already happened, he could not look at them without thinking about Lynda Greenway, and thinking about all the ways he had failed her and them, ways both real and imagined and which were permanent in their scope and could never be undone.

  Mike Newman never forgot that he was a lucky man. He watched his girls graduate. He drove them to their first college dorms. He walked them both down the aisle.

  Always, through it all, Lynda was right there beside him: Lynda, the girl he could not save.

  Mike’s daughters were forgiving; they met his gaze with kind, tolerant eyes. “A good father,” they reassured him, before looking past him to other things, to husbands and children and jobs, to the parts of their lives which were secret, and did not include him.

  And so, he lost them, too: in a million smaller ways.

  He supposed it was that way for everyone.

  Though always, it was Lynda who eclipsed these other, more benign losses: Lynda he lost all over again, each time his own daughters brushed his cheek with their obligatory kisses; Lynda he lost each time they smiled, each time they stepped away.