When Hayley was little, she thought her father was Atticus Finch from the movie To Kill a Mockingbird. They’d taken her to see it and when Gregory Peck walked into the kitchen in the first part of the movie, Hayley had disrupted the whole theater pointing at him and crying, “Daddy, Daddy.”
Duncan Norman looked a little like Gregory Peck, he’d always supposed. Dark hair, thick eyebrows, a carved face, tall, thin lips more accustomed to frowns and severe looks than smiles. He had always thought that’s where the resemblance lay, in the facial expressions, not the structure. Atticus Finch was a man who stood his ground for his principles, just like Duncan Norman stood his ground for his spiritual ones. Both men were willing to fight for what they believed in, were not cowed by opposition.
Both men adored their little girls.
Duncan heard a sound come from his throat, a kind of strangled sob he didn’t even recognize as his own, though it must have been.
He thought about Atticus reading to Scout when she was little so often she had learned to read before she entered first grade, and had gotten in trouble for it. He had read to Hayley, too, when she was little. Every night. Bible stories and Grimms’ Fairy Tales and The Hobbit. She hadn’t gotten in trouble because of it but she had gotten a bald spot.
His eyes swam with tears at the memory of the little thing — pale and thin, with all manner of congenital digestive issues that made processing food a challenge — and no hair on the top of her head. He and Miriam and the doctors were convinced it was yet another manifestation of the malfunctioning gall bladder or pancreas or liver. She was hospitalized. Batteries of tests turned up only the usual suspects that would eventually doom her to a life of obesity. Nothing indicated a cause for her hair falling out.
Then Duncan figured it out one night as she sat in his lap in the platform rocker, so still, her breathing so slow and even that he often thought she had fallen asleep. But she was absolutely alert, heard every word as he read to her … resting his chin on the top of her head. His chin with the day’s growth of beard. Which was systematically sanding off her thin growth of blonde hair.
They’d all laughed about it.
He even teased her about it now, sometimes, asking if she’d checked the top of her head for hair lately.
The image of the little girl with a bald spot was overlaid by the image of the … the …
Why hadn’t he listened to Sam Sheridan? She’d warned him, told him not to go barreling down to the funeral home, rushing to his daughter’s side.
He remembered her words distinctly and the intensity with which she said them.
“Your daughter is the girl whose picture you carry in your wallet. That’s Hayley. That’s the Hayley you want to remember. Please, please don’t spoil that image forever by—”
But he wouldn’t listen. Stubborn. Defiant. Since he was always right — and the Reverend Duncan Norman was, after all, always right — he didn’t listen to the warning, gave in to the horror of need in his chest to be with his little girl, to see her—
And he had seen.
He hadn’t let Miriam go in. Thank God for that. He had made her wait in the car.
There was no face on the head of the person lying bloated and stinky on the metal tray.
No face. Her head bashed in on both sides.
A body, battered and bruised and broken.
He felt something wet in his hand and opened his clenched fist to see blood on his palms. He had squeezed his fingers into such a tight fist that his fingernails had cut into his flesh.
But there was no pain. Didn’t feel a thing.
The pain in his chest, his belly, his heart, his whole soul was so great that he could have cut off his hand and he would have felt nothing at all.
“Duncan …?”
The words came in a soft voice from behind him. It was Miriam. There was such need in that lone word he wanted to turn and run away from her. Felt as if she were sucking all of who he was, his whole being out of himself with the power of her need to be comforted in her loss. Their loss.
But he was only able right now to feel his own loss. Maybe someday he would care about Miriam’s but not right now.
“Later,” he managed to croak. “I need to be alone now with the Lord.”
He was standing by himself on the back porch, the murmur of voices coming from inside the house muted. But Duncan wasn’t with the Lord. Not in that sense. Not in the sense of communing with the Almighty, basking in the joy of being a child of God. He was “with the Lord’ only because the Lord was everywhere. But he was not in any kind of communion with the great I Am.
Right now, if he had come face to face with the great God Jehovah, he’d have screamed obscenities at Him.
His baby girl was dead. She had killed herself — flung herself off the Scott’s Ridge Overlook onto the jagged rocks in the Rolling Fork River! Why? What had been so horribly wrong, so devastating that she would rather die than face it? He desperately wanted to know the answer to that question, would find out why if he had to search for the reason every day for the rest of his life!
But not now. Not today. Right now, he was so full of grief it shoved every other thought and intention out of his heart and mind.
God had taken his precious child.
On some level, Duncan Norman realized he was not the first father who had ever lost a daughter, that he was in no way unique and special in his pain, that he had no more right than any other mortal to question the will of the Almighty and His absolute right to exercise His will in whatever way suited Him.
He knew that. Understood it. But the cold, hard reality was that he flat-out didn’t care. Didn’t care about anything “spiritual” after Sam Sheridan and that other woman — Charlie something, the daughter of Sylvia Ryan, he thought — came to his door. He’d invited them in, the pain in Sam’s eyes only mildly frightening him at first. After all, people came to see him all the time in pain, needing his comfort, needing the comfort of God that he could assure was theirs for the asking.
Then Sam had said Hayley’s name.
Just said her name, and Duncan knew she was dead.
Only her name.
Miriam had not picked up on it, though, had rushed forward in the bit of awkward silence that followed Sam’s statement that, “we have found Hayley.” Miriam had relaxed in a heap, collapsed on the arm of the chair in the parlor, her body a study in relief.
“Thank you, Jesus!” she’d said. “We have been worried sick, imagining all kinds of horrible things. Thank you, Sam, for finding her. Where is she?”
And then Sam had said the words Duncan knew she’d say but that confused Miriam.
“Bascum’s.”
“What’s Hayley doing at Bascum’s? Why—?”
And when realization landed on Miriam, she backed up from it, cried out no, put her hands out in front of her as if she could physically hold back the reality of it. Then she went from zero to sixty on the hysteria scale, screaming “no, no, no!” and shaking her head frantically, absolutely refusing to hear the words that came after.
Hayley was at Bascum’s because she was dead. Skeeter Burkett had found her body in the river.
Sam had paused then, in the profound silence that had fallen when he and Miriam were so shocked and horrified they were incapable of sound. “It appears she died Saturday night.”
And then Miriam dissolved in a puddle.
Hayley had been dead for two days. All that time, all those minutes and hours in between then and now, when they were looking for her so frantically, turning over every stone, calling her friends …
She had been in the river. Her cold, dead body had been in the river.
“Duncan … please.”
Such need in Miriam’s voice, it tore out his chest.
When he turned to her, he flashed on the movie, on Hayley crying out “Daddy,” and he knew he must right now look like Atticus Finch had looked in the courtroom scene when he was cross-examining the redneck farmer who’d charged his client with rape.
“I said to leave me alone.”
Harsh and cruel, the words sounded harsh and cruel. Because they were. But he didn’t have anything in him to give. His faith, his belief, his hope, everything he had and was about had drained out of him when he learned his baby girl was dead. Now, when he needed faith, needed strength, needed the hope of his years of closeness to God, there was nowhere to go. He could do nothing but scrape at the bottom of an empty bucket. The sound the cup made on the metal at the bottom ground into his soul.
Duncan Norman turned then from his desperate, shattered wife and strode past her back into the kitchen, past people who spoke to him, he supposed, through the kitchen and living room to the stairs. He took them two at a time, up to Hayley’s room.
Suddenly, if he didn’t get to Hayley’s room, if he didn’t go there where her essence was—
The face. Gone. Smashed in. Crushed in.
Your little girl is the face you have in your wallet.
He should have listened. Dear God, how he wished he had listened.
He opened her door, stepped into the room, closed it behind him and leaned against it, panting. He was crying, too, he supposed. He couldn’t tell. He could feel that his cheeks were wet and his shoulders were shaking, but there was no sound.
He sat down on the edge of her bed — it was unmade. He’d made Miriam leave it that way because there was something terrifyingly final about making up the bed before the child came home.
And — oh, God, forgive him! — he’d wanted Hayley to make it up when she got home. It was her job, after all, and he was determined to teach her to be responsible, to honor her obligations.
The bedspread that was half off the bed, hanging on the floor, was the bright red of the University of Louisville, with the insignia of the U of L cardinal — looking mean — emblazoned on the front.
There was never any doubt what Hayley Norman would be “when she grew up.” She had never wavered. She had kept her dolls so wrapped up in bandages and Band-Aids they all looked like survivors of an earthquake.
Someday, Hayley Norman would be a doctor, she’d announced proudly when she couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old. Now, at sixteen, almost seventeen, she’d walked that ambition back. She and her mother had already started pouring over University of Louisville Nursing School brochures and checking into the availability of financial aid.
Duncan Norman was a minister. His salary was barely enough to put food on the table and he had never been able to put a dime aside for Hayley’s education.
Now, there’d be no education to pay for. Now … he needed to begin considering how he was going to pay for her funeral.
He did cry then, put his head in his hands and sobbed. Cried until his sides ached and his throat was raw.
And that’s why he found it. He reached out to pull tissues from the box of them on Hayley’s bedside table and only one tissue came out in his hand. The box wasn’t full as it seemed to be. The lone tissue on the top rested on something else in the box. Hid something else in the box. He lifted the box and looked through the hole on the top. Inside was a narrow book with a leather cover. He had never seen the book before, had no idea where Hayley had gotten it. But it was obvious what it was. Printed in swirling cursive letters on the cover were the words: My Diary. Which explained why she’d hidden it in the tissue box. Bound within the pages of that book were his little girl’s most private thoughts, her hopes and dreams and sorrows.
He pulled the volume almost reverently out of the box. What lay inside was private. He would never have dreamed of intruding on that privacy if Hayley had been alive. But now, he held in his hand the intimate thoughts of the little girl who would never be able to speak them, share them with her daddy.
His fingers trembled when he opened the book and began to read.