(October 1998–February 1999)
THEY SEARCHED FOR HER MOTHER IN SILENCE, THE DAYS AND weeks blending together as the sun traveled in tightening arcs against the horizon. Erin sat beside him in the passenger seat of the pickup, staring forward through the windshield at the road ahead or down at the footwell, where the stock of the shotgun rested against her feet. She could feel the weight of the weapon pressing against her left shoulder, the hard metal separating her from her father. She sat on the bench seat and listened to the creak of the shock absorbers as the truck’s frame rattled along dirt roads and uneven pavement, her father muttering to himself as he guided the vehicle through vacant backstreets and familiar neighborhoods.
At night he sat on the porch swing and stared out across the open land. Erin watched him from the kitchen window. Sometimes she would make him coffee because her mother was not around to do it, and she would take it to him in a mug that he’d hold in his lap until it was too cold to drink. There was no place for her on that porch. Her father’s pain took up every square inch of it. She retreated to the interior of the house until it was time for her to go to bed. She walked the hall or sat at the table. Sometimes she would visit her parents’ bedroom to lie on the floor with her face buried in one of her mother’s dresses.
On some nights she heard the truck start up again, the diesel engine coming to life, the sound of the tires rolling across hard-packed dirt and pebbles on the driveway. Light from the headlights swept through the house as her father turned the truck around, and she listened as he drove away, the sound of the engine diminishing with distance.
They found the Dodge Dynasty on Indian Highway, about half a mile east of the airport. The left two tires were flat, and a large hole had been torn into both of them, as if a prehistoric creature had reached up from the earth and clawed at the rubber. The police investigator found some smaller holes in the roadway. It was his guess that whatever pierced her mother’s tires had been drilled into the asphalt—the work of a different kind of monster.
Her father never blamed her for what happened. He never uttered the words that it was her fault that her mother was gone. Still, Erin knew that it was. She had asked to go to the movies, and her mother had driven them because she didn’t want them traveling the streets on their own. They had done it anyway, though, running through the city in the gathering dark, and Erin thinking only about herself instead of the people who risked their lives to keep her safe.
During the months that followed, as the sky turned gray and the ground became dense and frozen beneath them, Erin discovered that there was more than one way to disappear in Wolf Point. Sometimes it was the ones who were left behind who disappeared the most. She erased herself that winter, and her father did the same, sitting on the front porch with his untouched coffee, driving through the streets in search of a person who no longer existed. They faded into themselves, and there was no one left to bring them back.
For four months they searched for her, covering every road and trudging through every patch of brush in search of her body. They spoke to anyone who might have seen her on the day she went missing. Finding her mother was the only thing that mattered, and the intensity of this futile quest kept most of their grief at bay, until one day her father announced that they had finished searching.
“I guess that’s it then,” he said after breakfast, and he stood up from his chair at the kitchen table, grabbed the shotgun leaning against the wall, and disappeared into a bedroom that he no longer shared with his wife.
Erin heard the click of the door as it latched. She looked across the table at his abandoned seat, and her eyes settled on a half-eaten piece of toast near the edge of his plate.
She sat that way for a long time, listening for the sound of him, until eventually she got up and cleared away the dishes. Erin washed them by hand, the way her mother had taught her, and dried them with a towel before returning them to the cabinet. When she was done, she walked around the table and scooted in her father’s chair, being careful to lift it slightly so the legs wouldn’t scratch along the floorboards.
It was quiet in the house, as quiet as she had ever heard it. Erin stood in the kitchen and waited, and when nothing else happened, she turned and went to her own bedroom, closed the door, and climbed back under the covers.
It was seven-thirty in the morning. She closed her eyes and fell asleep, and dreamed of a purple ribbon unfurling above her, the hint of a song that tapered into nothing until she awoke ten hours later and opened her eyes in the darkness.
We can let her go now, she thought. We can figure out how to be a family with just the two of us. Only, they never would. Not really. They would become careful with each other instead of honest. They would focus on daily chores instead of the notion that they were still standing over her grave and that part of them was buried there as well, a part they could never talk about.
When she left for college four years later, it was these things that filled her with the most regret. She had let go of him too easily, and he had done the same with her. And the thing that was missing was no longer her mother, but a fight for each other in the wake of her absence.