Since Owen was expected to be out of town for some weeks, that situation wasn’t difficult to deal with. His truck, I tucked out of sight until I could move it safely in the night. I left on a road he would’ve been taking south, the door open like he’d gotten out for some reason, keys still in the ignition, and left his phone on for a few minutes before popping out the sim card and taking it to dispose of in the woods.
Derrick’s car took a bit to find, parked in the forest, and I left it there after dumping his camping gear in the trunk until I can plan where to hide it in the vast empty space out here. The car has Ontario plates, so he didn’t bother with a rental out here—he drove his own vehicle. Someone will look for him back home but probably not up north. I found physical maps of his route to the Yukon in his car and no cell phone, like he didn’t want his presence here—and my death—traced to him. I also did not suppose he told many people where he was going and likely covered his tracks.
Funny how things like that backfire.
A few days after the storm hit, the sun came back and melted some—but not all—of the snow. Winter’s here to stay, and even more now will pile up on the roads and deep in the woods where two bodies are now buried.
Life continues as it always did.
Nick is still missing. I still wear my wedding ring. I’m still in the house he built, still feeling him everywhere I turn.
A few of his sculptures now reside on the mantel between three framed photos: one from after our civil wedding ceremony, him in a casual black suit and me in an off-white shift with Nadia clutched between us; another a selfie he took of us two years ago while hiking; and the final one is of Nick with young Nadia on his knee as he showed her the guitar. His guitar sits in the corner and I’ve looked at YouTube videos to learn to play but haven’t attempted. Janelle has helped me unpack, I’ve had her twins over for sleepovers, and the house is officially a home, even if it’s waiting for its builder to return.
There’s another version of my life I feel here, moments where it seems to bleed through to this one: a version where Nick finished securing the house in the storm and returned safely to our apartment. Where I met him on the stairs just before I headed out to find him and he apologized sheepishly for his phone not having a signal to reassure me he was fine. We’d have curled up and weathered the storm together and gone back to finishing the house. Maybe we could’ve moved in by Christmas. And we would’ve spent the past year walking the woods together as a family, snuggled in front of the fire at night, maybe tentatively planning a sibling for Nadia, and my past would’ve remained safely where it belonged.
My heart aches for that version, and I can close my eyes and pretend for a moment I feel it, the veil between worlds wavering enough that Nick lives on, so close he seems to brush across my skin.
But I also feel a third path. One where I never left Ontario. Where I’m trapped with Will in that townhouse where Nadia—and who knows what her name would’ve been—is growing up to think that a woman should be scared of the men around her. Where I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper every day into depression and fear and self-loathing. Where I’m possibly even dead for trying to leave, and my child is being raised by a monster.
I want so badly to have the version of my life with Nick, the fairy tale ending I briefly thought was within my grasp. But maybe that was never going to be an option for me, no matter how I wish it was different.
Though considering the path I could’ve landed on instead...I will accept this version of my life.
I have to.
There is still the paperwork to sign to have Nick declared dead—I haven’t touched it yet, but it’s coming. I know we’ll probably never have an answer to what happened, just as police in Ontario will never have an answer to what happened to Constable Derrick Tremblay, and like they’ll never have an answer when it’s discovered Owen didn’t make it down south and he seemed to just...go missing on the road one day leaving his truck behind.
They never had an answer as to where Chloe Marie Morgan ended up either.
Sometimes people disappear.
Montgomery’s final article about the Yukon goes live the second of December; I subscribe anonymously not only to the Lost Ones Advocacy Network now but also her personal site blog and news. While she has moved on to other cases, I’ve been wary, and my stomach coils in knots as I curl up to read the part about Nick:
“There are strange things done in the midnight sun” goes the famous line from Robert W. Service’s poem The Cremation of Sam McGee, one of many about the Yukon that he wrote.
Strange things indeed.
We’ve followed a lot of missing persons cases at the L.O.A.Net, some with good outcomes and some with less than satisfying endings, but we’ve always come at it from the angle that every case can be solved. Every person can be found. The problem is that too many slip through the cracks because they’re not white enough, not pretty enough, not “innocent” enough. That the key to finding anyone is to get enough people to care.
But people already cared about Nicholas Sparrow.
His father was a Musqueam band member from Vancouver originally, his mother French Canadian. They moved north to a tiny village called Red Fox Lake, with a primarily white population, where they raised their son. I thought the missing Nick Sparrow might be a case of that familiar tragic Canadian story—an indigenous person disappearing in a world not inclined to notice, police unwilling to thoroughly investigate.
I was wrong, and those of you early on chastising my “white saviour complex” were right to say as much. Nick Sparrow was beloved by this close-knit community, just as his late parents were. He’d lived in Whitehorse for several years as youth most often do, working as a contractor and sculpting in his spare time. He married, had a daughter, and headed back to his childhood town with his family while they built the house of their dreams. Even the stories of his wife perhaps having something to do with his absence turned out to be salacious local rumours, blaming a perceived outsider, a woman from the south, because no one wanted to face the truth: Nick just...disappeared.
In my time speaking to those in the territories as well as in Alaska, I learned this is not as uncommon as I thought. Something about the remoteness, maybe, the lack of potential witnesses to pool sightings from, the danger of the vast wilderness...a person can step into the snow and vanish. I often think of the famous case of Lucy Ann Johnson, missing and presumed dead for fifty years when she’d fled north under a new name to find a new life—the world of snow makes for a strange place where people can be lost both by choice and, perhaps, not.
If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound? That’s a question that has many answers for debate.
But if a person disappears without anyone seeing what happens, are they ever really gone?
Walking the woods behind the Sparrow house, now completed by his wife Imogen as if she’s readying it for him to come home to, I wonder. I wonder if something drew Nick’s attention as he came back that day during the storm to lock things down. I wonder if something pulled him into these same woods. I wonder if instead he went in the opposite direction, toward the road where someone he knew was driving. I wonder if something much darker happened, though there’s no evidence to suggest that.
I wonder if anyone will ever know. Even Occam’s Razor doesn’t help—there is no simple explanation for this.
The Yukon is full of the silent places where the falling tree is never heard.
And where someone is never truly gone.
- Jenni Montgomery
L.O.A.Net
She ends it with a photo of the woods in back of my house taken that day I caught her skulking around, the slim trunks marching along in the faint snow, closing in at the back to hide the secrets only they—and I—know.
Of course maybe the picture wasn’t ultimately of my woods.
There are a lot of silent places out here.