IN EARLY AUTUMN, when an unusual climate of peace was reigning in the house and we were beginning to abandon ourselves to a dangerous complacency, we received a visit from an angel of death. It was Jennifer’s companion, with his dark, puffy face and the dull eyes of a hard drinker. In his drawn-out, unintelligible jargon, which Willie could barely decipher, he told us that Jennifer had disappeared. He hadn’t heard anything from her since she’d left three weeks before to visit an aunt in another city. According to the aunt, the last time she had seen her, she’d been in the company of some rough-looking men who’d come by in a van and picked her up. Willie reminded the man that often months went by without news of his daughter, but he repeated that she had disappeared, and added that she had been very sick and could not have gone far in her condition. Willie began a systematic search through jails and hospitals; he spoke with the police, contacted federal agencies in case his daughter had crossed a state line, and hired a private detective, all without success. In the meantime, Fu and Grace set the members of the Zen Center, and I my Sisters of Disorder, to praying. The story the man told us smelled fishy to me, but Willie assured me that in such cases the first person to be suspected in the eyes of the law is the one living with the missing person, especially if he has a long rap sheet, as this man did. No question that he had been thoroughly investigated.
We’re told that there is no pain as great as that of the death of a child, but I believe it has to be worse when your child disappears and you live forever not knowing what happened to her. Did she die? Did she suffer? You keep the hope that she is alive, but constantly wonder what kind of life she’s living and why she doesn’t get in touch with her family. Every time the telephone rang late at night, Willie’s heart stopped with hope and with terror. It could be Jennifer’s voice, asking him to come look for her somewhere, but it might also be the voice of a policeman asking him to come to the morgue to identify a body.
Months later, Jennifer still had not turned up, but Willie clung to the idea that she was alive. I don’t know who it was who suggested that he should consult a psychic who sometimes helped the police solve cases. She had the gift of locating bodies and missing persons, and that was how we ended up together in the kitchen of a dilapidated house near the port. The psychic looked nothing like a divine, no star-patterned skirts, kohl-rimmed eyes, or crystal ball. She was a fat woman in tennis shoes and an apron, who kept us waiting while she finished bathing her dog. In the kitchen—narrow, clean, and orderly—were a pair of yellow plastic chairs, and we took our seat in them. Once the dog was dry, she offered us coffee, and sat down on a small stool facing us. We sipped from our mugs in silence a few minutes, then Willie explained the reason for our visit and showed her a series of photos of his daughter: some in which she was more or less healthy, and the most recent, taken in the hospital, already very ill, with Sabrina in her arms. The psychic examined them one by one, then put them on the table, placed her hands on them, and closed her eyes for long minutes. “Some men took her in a vehicle,” she said finally. “They killed her. They dropped the body in a woods near the Russian River. I see water and a wood tower; it must be a ranger’s lookout.”
Willie, pale as death, said nothing. I put the payment for her services on the table, three times what it costs to see a physician, took my husband by the arm, and pulled him to the car. I got the key from his pocket, pushed him into the passenger side, and I drove, hands trembling and eyes clouded, across the bridge toward home. “You shouldn’t believe any of this, Willie. It isn’t science, she’s a quack,” I begged him. “I know that,” he replied, but the harm had been done. Even so, he didn’t truly grieve until much later, when we went to see a film about the death penalty, Dead Man Walking, in which there is a scene of the murder of a girl in a forest, similar to what the psychic had described. In the silence and darkness of the theater, I heard a heartrending cry, like the howl of a wounded animal. It was Willie, doubled over in his seat, with his head on his knees. We felt our way out of the theater, and once in the parking lot, locked in our car, he wailed for his lost daughter.
One year later Fu and Grace offered to have a ceremony in the Zen Center in Jennifer’s memory, to give dignity to that tragic life and closure to the obscure death that left the family in eternal suspense. Our small tribe, and a few friends, including Tabra, Jason, Sally, and Jennifer’s mother with a few of her friends, met in the same room where we had celebrated Sabrina’s first birthday, in front of an altar that held pictures of Jennifer in her best days, flowers, incense, and candles. They had placed a pair of shoes in the center of the circle to represent the new path she had taken. Jason and Willie were moved by the good intentions of all those present, but they couldn’t avoid exchanging smiles because Jennifer had never had a pair of shoes like those on her feet; they should have found some purple sandals, something more appropriate to her style. Both of them, who knew her well, imagined that if she had been watching that sad reunion from above she would be rolling with laughter, for she thought that anything with a hint of New Age was ridiculous, and besides she wasn’t a person to mourn. She was completely lacking in self-pity; she was daring and bold. Without the addictions that trapped her in a life of misery, she might have lived an adventurous life, because she had her father’s strength. Of Willie’s three children, only Jennifer inherited Willie’s lion heart, and she passed it on to her daughter. Sabrina, like Willie, can be dropped to her knees, but she always gets back up on her feet. That little girl, who almost never even saw her mother but who had her image engraved on her soul before she was born, participated in the rites in Grace’s arms. At the end, Fu gave Jennifer a Buddhist name, U Ka Dai Shin: wings of fire, great heart. It was a proper name for her.
In a period of quiet meditation during the ceremony, Jason thought he heard his sister’s voice breathing into his ear. “What the fuck are they doing? They don’t have the least idea what happened to me! For all they know I could still be alive, right? The joke is that they’ll never know.” Maybe for that reason, Jason has never stopped looking for her, and now, all these years later, now that we have the DNA tests, he is stubbornly trying to locate her in the infinite police archives of unsolved tragedies. As for me, during the meditation a scene emerged with great clarity in my mind: Jennifer was sitting on the bank of a river, paddling her feet and tossing little stones into the water. She was wearing a summer dress and she looked young and healthy, with no trace of pain. Rays of sun shone through the leaves and illuminated her blond hair and slim body. Suddenly she lay down, curled up on the mossy ground, and closed her eyes. That night I told Willie about my vision and we decided that that was how Jenny had died, and not the way the psychic had told us. She was very tired, she slept, and she never woke up. The next morning we got up early and the two of us went to the forest. We wrote Jennifer’s name on a piece of paper, burned it, and threw the ashes into the same stream where earlier we had scattered yours. You two didn’t know each other in this world, Paula, but we like to imagine that maybe your spirits are playing among the trees like sisters.