We leave for the prayer vigil at six thirty.
“You girls look lovely,” Mrs. Hathaway says, smiling in a kind of sad way at us when we come out of Vanessa’s room, ready to go. I borrowed a grass-green linen sheath dress from Vanessa, and twisted my hair up into a bun to keep it off my neck. Vanessa has on a blue and white flowered sundress; her short dark hair slicked back. We’re dressed up like it’s Easter Sunday or something, and I don’t know if that’s right, but we want to show respect.
“So do you, Mom,” Vanessa says, and puts her arms around her mom. Her mom hugs her back, and in profile they look a lot alike with their short noses and short chins. I watch them and try not to think about how another whole day has passed without my own mom. Dad, at least, called me today. He wanted to check in and see how it was going, and I said fine, and he didn’t ask if Mom called me back about brunch, and since he didn’t ask I didn’t say anything.
We go out to the driveway to get in the minivan, which Mr. Hathaway has cleaned out and kept running so that the interior is nice and cool. Vanessa and I take the second-row bucket seats; Robby is all the way on the back bench. I heard the rooster go off in his room this morning and he came running out in the hallway, and I went out there and teased him for a while about where it could have come from and how maybe it crawled in through his window and he should check to see if it laid eggs, then I told him it was from me. “Why?” he asked.
“Just because,” I said, bending low so that I could look him in the eye. “You’re almost eight. I got it when I was eight. An eight-year-old needs an alarm clock.”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “It does.”
Mr. and Mrs. Hathaway are in now and we’re all buckled up and ready to go. Mr. Hathaway looks back at us for a couple of seconds. “Everyone okay?” he asks.
“Yeah, Dad,” Vanessa says.
Mrs. Hathaway doesn’t turn. It’s hard to tell for sure but she might be crying. The van pulls out and we drive the short distance in silence until Mr. Hathaway says, “Oh, sweet molly, look at all these cars.”
The church parking lot already overflows into the street. There aren’t any spots along the curb in front of or across from the church, either. A white KPXU van is double-parked, and so are two vans from the big network affiliates up in Dillon’s Bluff.
“Drop us off here,” Mrs. Hathaway says. “We’ll save you a seat while you look for parking.”
We pile out and head for the church, passing TV vans and camera setups that are taking footage of people going in. It’s stinking hot, still. We’ve been inside all day; it was too hot even to go to Daniel’s house for the pool. I have no idea how all these people are going to pack into our church and not die of suffocation.
One cameraman we pass has a blue ribbon tied to the handle of his canvas bag of gear. Mrs. Hathaway suddenly stops, staring at it. “Mom, come on,” Vanessa says, “we need to get seats. Brandy Wilcox might be here.”
“Maybe we’ll get on TV!” Robby says, suddenly excited.
Then, Mrs. Hathaway whirls around, so fast that Vanessa and I step back. She grabs Robby’s arm and looks back and forth between him and us. “Listen to me. This isn’t a reality show. This isn’t for being on TV, or for seeing a celebrity. If that’s what you’re here for, you can march right back to the car and tell your father to drive you home.”
A few of the people walking by slow down. Robby’s lip trembles. Vanessa pulls him close to her. “You don’t have to yell,” she mutters, red-faced.
“I’m sorry.” Mrs. Hathaway’s eyes fill. People walking by glance at us, curious. “But it could have been you, Vanessa.” She looks at me. “Either one of you.”
“We know, Mom. It scares us, too.”
Then she takes them into a hug and I stand there in the hot parking lot, watching, until Mrs. Hathaway says, “Come on, Sammy, you, too,” and holds us all tightly.
We find seats in a pew near the back of the sanctuary. It’s crowded with people I don’t know, people I don’t even recognize. A lot of them have blue ribbons pinned to their shirts. A lady behind me tells someone else that she drove all the way from Wyoming with her daughter, who’s fifteen. Like me. And I realize that this isn’t mine, or Pineview’s. Now everyone thinks they have a right to a piece of Jody being gone.
There was this boy in my eighth grade class, Ronnie Gomez, a scholarship kid. He died of leukemia halfway through the school year and suddenly all the kids were crying like they’d lost their best friend. People who had treated him like dirt before he got sick—because he came here straight from Mexico and barely spoke English, because he only had two outfits to wear to school—put up this memorial poster in the cafeteria. As if they’d ever even said hello to him, let alone visited him in the hospital the way I did, with my dad, touching the gray, sick skin of Ronnie’s hand while we prayed by his bed.
“That’s the way it is with most things in life, Sam,” Dad said when I complained about the poster, and how no one even asked me if I wanted to sign it. “No one is there to see your finest moments and give you a medal. But that’s not why you do good things, right?”
A Teachable Moment. A reminder about the parable of the workers in the field, how the workers just do what the workers do for the agreed-upon wage and shouldn’t expect things to line up with human ideas of fairness. And then Dad ended up using it as a sermon illustration—changing the names to protect the innocent, and me.
Tonight, some part of me can’t help but feel the way I did about Ronnie, and want all these people to leave. This happened to us, not them.
Pretty soon Mr. Hathaway, sweaty and out of breath, joins us. I can see the back of my dad’s head in the front row. Jody’s parents and Nick are next to him, with Erin and a few of the youth group kids in the pew right behind. There’s still some sun coming in from outside, and also candles light the sanctuary, the way they do at Christmas. My dad gets up, and people start to quiet down other than a few whispers and rustlings as they try to make room for more arrivals.
Dad climbs the three stairs to the chancel. I know he’s saying the Lord’s Prayer under his breath because that’s what he’s done my whole life right before he speaks in church, to calm his nerves. I know there’ll be a small Dixie cup of water on the shelf of the lectern. It used to be my special job to put it there, when I was little. I don’t know who does it now.
He clears his throat.
“This will be simple and brief.”
His eyes search the crowd. I sit up straighter so he can see me, if that’s who he’s looking for.
“Members of the Shaw family would like to say a few words. Then we’ll hear from the choir, and have some moments of silence before heading out.” He looks down at the lectern for a second, then up again, smiling slightly. “Don’t worry—no sermon.”
Titters of laughter.
“We’re simply here to ask God to bring Jody home.”
He steps away from the lectern, and Jody’s mom and dad, and Nick, come up from their seats. I wonder how many people here are thinking about all of the rumors on the Internet as Jody’s dad adjusts the microphone,
“Each one of you,” he starts, then turns from the mic and clears his throat. “Each one of you,” he says again, then stops and looks at Jody’s mom and shakes his head.
In our pew, Mrs. Hathaway is crying very softly, and digging through her purse for a tissue.
Jody’s mom steps up to the lectern to take over. “What Al is trying to say is thank you. For coming tonight, and for everything you’ve been doing for us and for Jody.” I don’t know how she’s able to keep herself together, but she is, while Nick and Jody’s dad look on with stunned expressions. “She’s going to come back. We know she is. We believe in miracles.”
How?
Jody’s mom and dad go back to their seats while the choir files in and Gerald Ladew crosses the chancel, and I want to know how to believe in miracles. How they can, after all of this. How Job kept believing in everything. Does God give some people a kind of special faith? How does he decide who gets it? Or do you just decide that you do believe, no matter what, and then force your mind shut when doubts try to come in?
I used to think my faith was mine. When I was Robby’s age, or even two years ago, I thought that what I believed was what I believed. Now I think maybe I’m just like Kacey Franklin, only here because my parents expect it. The difference is at least she’s honest.
The choir is in place. Gerald approaches the organ with slow, deliberate steps, then suddenly turns and goes to the lectern where he stands in front of the microphone for a few seconds. We all wait, curious. He never says anything before the choir sings. One time he wrote an original piece for the choir and my dad asked him to introduce it, but Gerald said he likes the music to speak for itself.
He swipes a string of his thinning hair to the side of his head. “Jody,” he says, then covers his face with one hand. He exhales a shuddery breath we can all hear through the sound system. Then he says again, “Jody. Has a beautiful voice. This is her favorite hymn. You can imagine her singing it.”
I recognize the opening notes of an old hymn we haven’t sung here in a long time, especially since we started having mostly guitar music during the service—after a big controversy during which everyone over the age of sixty threatened to leave the church if we didn’t still have organ and choir every week, too. It’s strange to me that this would be Jody’s favorite. It’s not “Amazing Grace” or one of the others that people always name. I don’t think I even have a favorite hymn. I feel like I should.
“O Joy that seekest me through pain, I cannot close my heart to thee,” the choir sings, sounding perfect, and a lot of people are sniffling and shaking now and I wonder how there could possibly be joy in this kind of pain. Vanessa is starting to cry, too, bent over with her face in her hands. But I don’t feel anything. Just… numb. And suddenly I can’t stand to sit here another three seconds in the stifling sanctuary with all these people who believe in this God, who’s taken Jody, who’s taken everything.
I get up, and try to stay bent low so that I’m not a distraction.
It’s hard to get out. The church is thick with people standing in the back and they aren’t quick to move out of my way. As I press my way through, I pass the small stained glass windows of Jesus’s life, flickering kind of eerily in the candlelight. And I know it’s the crowd and the heat and my imagination, but when I pass Lazarus I swear I feel his undead eyes on me.
Nick told me to find him after, so I wait. I stay half-hidden, sitting on the stone bench by the peace garden the youth group planted last spring on the side of the church. I can see people as they pour out the front doors but they can’t really see me.
They come in waves—the strangers first, stopping to talk to the reporters that wait in the lot. Then the people who live here in Pineview but don’t go to our church, like Cal from the hardware store, who pauses outside the doors and puts his hands in the pockets of his khaki pants, glancing around before descending the steps and going off to his car. Last to emerge are the members, lingering out front and hugging each other. The Hathaways come out and I can tell they’re looking for me so I start to get up, but then I see Mr. and Mrs. Shaw, along with my dad, who’s holding his hand out to the reporters that scurry toward them.
Next out is Erin. She’s pretty, in a simple cotton dress that’s kind of fifties style. I keep my eyes on her, trying to see if she’s looking at my dad and if she is, what kind of look it might be.
Then I stop watching Erin because Nick comes out. He’s with Dorrie Clark, and they’re holding hands, and Dorrie’s hair is beautifully strawberry blond and hanging over one eye in a way that makes her seem not like a teen girl but like a woman. I watch how she tucks a strand of it behind her ear and leans in close to Nick. I watch how he ducks his head to hear what she says. How he puts one arm around her protectively.
“There you are!” Vanessa sits next to me on the bench. I quickly take my eyes off Nick and Dorrie and anything in their vicinity. “Are you okay?”
“I think so. I just needed air.”
“Your dad was looking for you.”
“He was?” I stretch to see the church steps again, but the Shaws and my dad are gone now.
“Yeah, but then he kind of got mobbed by everyone, and we didn’t know where you were, so…”
“It’s okay,” I say, standing up. “If he really wanted to find me, he could.”
She spots her parents and waves to them. “My dad’s going to bring the car around. Let’s go.”
10:00 NEWS
It was a scene seldom witnessed in Pineview, hundreds of people—neighbors and strangers alike—united in hope at tonight’s vigil for Jody Shaw, the local teen missing nearly a week. Despite six days of fruitless searching, the Shaw family has not given up hope that Jody will come home. Expressing her thanks to the community, Trish Shaw told the crowd that it’s her faith that’s keeping her strong during this difficult time. Frustrated investigators say that this is not the time to grow complacent, and urge the community to continue its vigilance. Here at KPXU we’ve had an unconfirmed report that several members of Jody’s family, and two unidentified Pineview residents, have agreed to take polygraphs over the coming days. We’ll keep you updated as we know more.
Troy? Any sign of this heat wave breaking?
Vanessa and I are in her room, in the dark. She’s in her bed, and I’m on an air mattress, which is made of rubber, and even with two sheets it’s making my back hot and sweaty.
I’m trying to not think about Nick and Dorrie by thinking about my dad, and how to get him to let me come home, but then I start to worry about Erin again and think of what I want to do with the yard instead—I need more rocks—then go back to thinking about Nick and Dorrie, and how perfect they looked together on the church steps.
“Are you awake?” Vanessa asks.
After a second, I say, “Yeah.”
“I want to ask you something. And be honest.”
“Okay.”
“You know what Jody’s mom said tonight? About how she knows Jody’s still alive? Do you think she’s still alive?”
I roll over; my rubber mattress squeaks. All the statistics say that Jody’s probably not alive. Even after forty-eight hours, they said on the news that the chances go down to practically nothing. And now it’s been nearly a week. But I don’t want to say, or believe, that Jody is dead.
“If it were you that disappeared,” I say, “the way Jody did, just into thin air, it would be hard to believe… or accept… that you weren’t alive, somewhere. Unless I saw for myself that you weren’t.”
“Like a body,” Vanessa whispers.
“Yeah.”
“Even if there was a probability that I wasn’t?”
We’re on the slippery edge of hopelessness, and I don’t want to be the one to send us over. “I’d need proof. I’d need proof one way or the other.”
“But there’s a lot of stuff we believe in without proof.”
I roll over again, onto my back, and stare into the dark.
“Not this.”