The phone rang as I was curled up on Colin’s couch, in front of a fire, prepping for an interview I would do the next day. My laptop was on my lap as I scanned previous interviews with General Wesley Clark, who would be coming into the studio to talk about the Iraq war.
“Thanks, thanks for all you’ve done,” David said over the phone, his clear, strong voice giving way to emotion. “Really, Sheila, there’s a place in heaven for you.”
Odd. David didn’t believe in heaven. Or hell. “Thank you, D. Was it good to see Sophie again?” I said. “Are you feeling okay about being home? Did you make yourself a fire?”
He avoided the questions. “You and Sophie. You’re very tight now, aren’t you? This has really brought you closer, hasn’t it? You love her so much. You are such a good mom.”
I sat upright. He’d never spoken to me so kindly, so intimately, especially on the phone. He hated phones. Sophie and I had always been tight. I struggled to make sense of what he was trying to say. I asked tentatively, “David, are you okay?”
I imagined him sitting in his chair in the living room, looking out at the huge deck he’d rebuilt around the pool. He liked looking at reflections in the water, so he lit the deck for dramatic effect. He’d even strung a zip line so that Sophie and her pals could scream from the top of the house to the pool. I’d hoped he’d built a fire; it was his thing, a fire every night after October 1. He paused a long while before answering.
“You know you’re going to be okay, no matter what,” he said. “Sophie and you will be fine.”
“We can all get through this, David,” I said. “Please give Sophie a big kiss for me tonight, would you?”
“I will. I promise. Thank you, Sheila, thank you for everything.”
The conversation struck me as odd. It was intimate, personal, and so calm, his tone filled with forgiveness and understanding. I should check on him. No, he’s fine. His family wanted me to leave him alone. Give him his space. Yes, he’ll be fine. But I couldn’t shake the tone of his voice—Why did he sound so different? Maybe the medications had changed him.
The next morning, I tiptoed out of Colin’s home around five thirty to make the drive home to see Sophie. The day was off to a glorious beginning: there was crispness in the air and red and gold color in dying leaves. Fall. My favorite season for change. I took the familiar winding turns leading up to my house and saw the usual early morning rumblings. Our neighbors, the Shillers, were early risers. Lights and TVs were already on in their house. I imagined Debbie hard at work on her StairMaster before waking up her daughter for school. Patty Benson was on her morning walk. I thought of Sophie, still sleeping, how she liked to be awakened by someone (preferably me) lightly scratching her back. I’d pack her favorite lunch of salami and Brie, with flat crackers, cut-up apples, and kosher pickles, all in separate bags. I’d caught up on the laundry—there would be matching socks to offer her.
Slowly, I was patching our life back together. I took the last curve and had the same reaction I’d had ten years earlier, when I had come home to find my car stolen. David’s white work truck was not where it had been parked the night before. I inhaled, held my breath. We’d taken the keys to his car from him, and his employees had the only other set of keys to the truck. Where was he? My jaw tightened; my senses sharpened; the exhale never came. I sprinted from the garage to David’s mother’s bedroom, panicked.
“What is it?” she said, startled, sitting upright.
“Where’s David?”
She looked around the room, confused, not yet sure of why I was asking. “He’s upstairs, asleep,” she said.
“Then who has his truck?” I asked. Get on the road, track him down. Find him. Everything I’d ever learned from reporting on child kidnappings ran through my mind. The first hour is the most important. Somehow, those lessons seemed applicable now.
Alice’s face lost its color. She looked thin and drawn in her flannel pajamas. I saw the realization come over her, and it hurt. “Oh no,” she whispered. “One of his workers brought back the keys to the truck last night. I didn’t think . . .” Her voice trailed off in a distant direction, to a place she had been just a few months before.
I pushed down my worst fear, my instinct. The gun, I thought to myself as I skipped three steps on the way upstairs into Sophie’s room. He knows where the gun is.
I stopped myself outside her room and stabilized my breath. “Good morning, sweetheart.” I kissed her on her head.
She opened her eyes and gazed at me, sleepy. “Hi, Mama, why are you waking me up so early?”
“Sweetheart, I’ll need Alice to take you to school, if that’s okay. I’ve got to find Daddy.”
She sat up in her bed, now wide awake, filled with a dread I knew too well. Her long blonde hair was tangled, and she had sleep in the corners of her eyes. “Is everything okay?” she asked, knowing the answer wasn’t yes.
I hugged her tight to my chest. “He’s not here right now. It looks like he took his truck out. But I promise, I promise, Sophie, we will find him.”
She leapt from her bed, opening drawers and pulling out one sock with monkeys on it and another with bright yellow smiley faces. She grabbed Bear from the bed—she was getting ready to come with me.
“Baby,” I said, sitting her down on her powder pink and lime green comforter, “I need to go alone.”
“But I want to go with you,” she said, her lip quivering, the oddly matched socks hanging from her hands, Bear tucked carefully under her arm. “He didn’t even say goodbye.”
I knew. I knew where he was. Back to the beauty and stillness of the Columbia Gorge. Larch Mountain, where Diedra lived. I’d been polite, even nice to her because she loved David, too. I answered her calls when she was crying. I encouraged her to keep searching for the gun David had hidden.
I’d already taken the I-84 exit toward the gorge when Diedra called my cell. She sounded hysterical—a neighbor had found David’s white Toyota work truck several hundred yards from her driveway.
“I’m out riding my horse,” she said. “They told me the windows of his truck are bashed out. Something’s wrong.” She dissolved into tears, then loud, long sobs.
“I’m fifteen minutes away from Larch Mountain,” I said. “Give me the directions to your home.” I was certain I could find him. I knew him better than anyone. Of course, I could find him. I had to. I felt responsible for David’s well-being in a way that no one understood. Perhaps it was driven by guilt, or my own false sense of importance in David’s life. I’d never stopped loving him.
The road leading to Larch Mountain is a scenic route: it’s a narrow, two-lane road that once was the old highway. The road winds along above the Columbia River and a massive gorge, carved out 15,000 years ago by the floods and melting of the Ice Age. Cyclists and hikers from all over the world come here to see an area untouched by McDonald’s or Walmart. Officer Rodale had told me people come here to disappear. The closer I got to Diedra’s home, the heavier my heart felt inside my body. Now I dreaded the idea that I might find David.
David’s work truck was parked haphazardly on the side of the road not far from Diedra’s house—a style of parking I’d seen from him more frequently in the past few years. Sometimes he’d be so distracted, he’d leave the driver’s door open, his briefcase inside. Other times, I’d find the lights on, the engine still running.
I pulled off the side of the road and sprinted from my car to his truck. Glass littered the side of the road. Both windows were busted, gone—it looked like someone had rifled through his dirty tool compartment to find nothing.
There was a liter of vodka on the front seat, half empty.
The keys were in the ignition.
His red Columbia Sportswear jacket I’d bought him several Christmases earlier was on the passenger seat. He loved that jacket. It was too cold to be outside without a coat. I lifted the coat. Underneath, lying on the seat resting flat and wrinkled side by side, were two photos of Sophie and me. He’d fished them out of photo books years ago and carried them everywhere, even once retrieving them—along his drenched wallet—from the Columbia River. The pictures were worn, ruined in my eyes, but he’d told me he liked them best. I wore no makeup in that shot. Just me, caught reading a book, smiling up at him.
I picked up the photo of Sophie. She was seven, standing tall on David’s shoulders, mouth open and arms up, skimming the ceiling of our home, her face full of excitement. “Tall girl,” I heard myself say.
“Tall girl” was a game they’d played nearly every evening in our home, until Sophie had become too big for David to walk around with her on his shoulders. I held the pictures to my heart as it heaved up and down. “David, please, please for Sophie’s sake, please, no,” I whispered.
The sense of knowing made it impossible to breathe, to speak. “David, please say you didn’t,” I repeated to myself again and again, scrambling on my hands and knees from the driver’s seat to the glove compartment. Inside, his wallet, containing four crumpled dollars.
His debit card was gone. I dug further. A bottle of aspirin, some old papers, a cleaning bill, a receipt.
I stopped searching. The road was empty; the gorge was still. Remember this, I told myself. October 25. One day you will want to remember the temperature, the way the air smells, how the day was clear, with amber sunlight shining down. One of the most beautiful places in the world. The road, with its curves and spectacular vistas, was empty. I picked up David’s coat, hearing the echoes of so many cops at so many crime scenes I’d covered, rattling on about the “moron who touched this or that.” David’s coat, the prints on his vodka bottle. It was all evidence now.
I had so many photos of him wearing that coat; he wore it everywhere once it turned cold. He never lost it, never left it behind. He loved that coat.
I ran up his girlfriend’s gravel driveway and then reminded myself she was gone. Back to his truck. I screamed, “Somebody, please help!” I recognized my own panic; the uselessness of my cries for help—intuition told me it was all for nothing.
I sat back in the driver’s seat of his car and hugged the cold steering wheel. My body shook; I wore only a Patagonia shell. “David,” I cried. “Jesus Christ, David.”
I knew he had come to finish something he’d started six weeks earlier. Everything in between—the diagnosis, the drugs, the weeks incarcerated with bad food, broken crayons, and empty bookshelves—had only made him more determined to carry out his plan. It would not be like David to leave a note. He never wrote letters. His penmanship sucked.
I left his coat and his truck and everything he’d left behind just as I found it. I got back in my car and drove away from the certainty of his death. I would pick up his mother. We would figure out what to do next.
I don’t know how fast I was driving. I do not know how I navigated the turns; I do not remember whether I listened to the radio. I do not remember the other cars on the highway that morning with me. The Columbia must have been running wild—on any other day, I would have noticed.
I do remember sobbing as I passed the exit by Sophie’s school, imagining her working away on her report on Sequoia trees or African elephants, opening up her lunch and either being delighted or disappointed, picking out the food she didn’t like and setting it aside on a paper towel. I remember wishing I’d be pulled over so I could tell a cop what had happened and they would take me, sedated, to a hospital.
I somehow found my way to Sophie’s school, winding in and out of the side roads as if it was all new terrain. I recognized the signs of shock in myself and went to Sophie anyway. She was waiting for me on a bench in the hallway. Her hands were quiet in her lap, carefully holding a freshly painted picture. It was a giant Sequoia tree, the tree we’d studied together, marveling over its place in American culture, a sturdy tree that could survive nature, but not man. It was endangered now—and Sophie had chosen it for that reason. Her fingers were slender, delicate, holding onto the parts that weren’t wet, careful not to smear the paint. I noticed how sturdy and straight she’d painted the trunk, a strong base for branches that looked like gnarled fingers. David would have raved over it, clearing the front of the fridge to make more room for another masterpiece. “It’s perfect,” I said, before hugging her close to my chest.
Later, Colin picked Sophie up from our house and took her and his girls to dinner. “I’ll take good care of her,” he promised. “Please, don’t worry. We’ll get through this.” I hugged him, wishing I could stay and avoid the inevitable.
Two hours later, Alice and I were back at Diedra’s mountain property, uncomfortably sitting in the living room, shivering. The cabin was small but elegant. My eyes wandered, imagining David’s life here. There was the loft where they slept together, covered in Pendleton blankets. There were the architectural plans and the Indian dream catchers and all the reasons he came here when he felt so alone. David had always traveled—away from us, not closer.
“We should call the police,” I said to Alice, who sat in a rocking chair with a blue-and-red blanket over her knees. “They can help us.”
“I’d rather he be dead,” she said, “than captured again like a common criminal. I will not see him returned to that place.” She’d hated the hospital as much as I had. But how could she possibly believe that? Was it because she’d come so close to her own death after feeling such despair? Was she crazy?
I started to argue and then stopped. She looked so confused, her face twisted in pain, a sweater hanging around her bony shoulders. Her pupils were dilated, the whites of her eyes bloodshot. She wasn’t making sense. Maybe she was in shock, babbling, in denial.
Diedra’s face was puffy and blotchy from crying. “Would you like to look for him?” she asked me.
We stood on her porch. I was at least a foot taller than she. Her property was thick with trees and lush fields and acres of places to hide. I tried to think like David might. “Did you two ever walk together?”
She nodded, pointing to the left. “Yes. This way.”
We walked down the gravel driveway, past his truck, another five hundred yards or so to an open meadow, with long grasses and oversized sunflowers slowly dying after a long summer run. “He told me you were in an open marriage,” she blurted. “That you’d both decided to stay together for Sophie, but you weren’t together any longer.” I bit my tongue. There was enough truth in that version that I could imagine David promoting it. None of it mattered anymore—somehow I knew he was gone. I could feel loss as thick and heavy as each breath I took.
I was out of my own body, shivering from the shock of what I believed. I stepped over a log. I watched myself make this awkward walk with a woman I didn’t know and listened to her talk about a man I thought I knew so well but realized I barely understood. I stepped over another log and then under a rusty barbed-wired fence. What would we do if we found him? I couldn’t come up with a plan. We continued walking, confused, shocked—two strangers who had once fallen for the same man.
Into the gulley. Up again, down again, through another barbed-wire fence into another meadow. This land went on forever, thousands of acres of wilderness. He could be anywhere.
“He was just so lonely,” Diedra said. “He told me how much he loved you. That he’d screwed it up. That he couldn’t start over. He’d done too much damage.”
I turned to look at her but didn’t speak. Over her shoulder, a view of the Columbia Gorge opened up that took my breath. The river cut through the gorge with a line so jagged and perfect only nature could have made it. The shadows cast down from the deep canyons were vast. There were at least six different shades of green, gold, and red before me. I imagined David looking out at this view, his arms folded across his chest, at rest.
“I’m glad he found you, then,” I said. “I’m glad he found this place.”
Her face softened, some of the grief released or at least tempered. “Thank you,” she whispered. “I don’t know why you are being so nice to me.”
“Because you helped him,” I said. “Can you show me where he was that first night?”
We walked to the abandoned home where the police had found David’s bloodstains the night he was admitted to the hospital. It was a 1920s house, long abandoned. Vandals had spray-painted the side of the home and chopped away portions of the wood exterior.
I pulled back yellow crime scene tape and squeezed myself through the broken door to get inside. It was dark and dank; the sour smell of methamphetamine permeated the wood walls.
The home was destroyed; it now looked more like a barn, or a clubhouse for wayward bikers. I imagined the drunken demolition parties people had thrown here. The dirty floor was littered with bottles and broken glass.
“This is where he tried to cut his wrists,” she said, pointing to dried blood on the dirt floor. There was barely enough light to see. A white wooden chair—the chair where David had sat alone with a rusty razor blade—looked like a bad prop for a horror movie. I imagined him alone that night, sawing away at himself with another dirty, rusted razor blade—angry at his own incompetence for not being able to get the job done, disgusted by himself and his surroundings, all the while reveling in the dark drama.
My eyes stung from the smell and my tears, and I could not breathe in this sickness anymore.
I ran as fast as I could out the door, past the crime scene tape, out past the long yard that had been abandoned years earlier. I stood in the center of the road looking back at this stranger of a woman walking calmly toward me. I did not know if I would ever wake up from this horrible nightmare. “I’m going for help,” I said. “I don’t care what Alice says. We’ve got to find him. We’ve got to get help.”
Alice stayed with Diedra. I jumped in my car and drove as fast as I could toward Portland. And I called Pat Kelly, a detective I’d known for years.
THE CONTINUUM OF MENTAL HEALTH
Think back on your own mental health history. Have you experienced a divorce, the death of a loved one, a financial setback such as the loss of a job? Have you moved several times or experienced physical disability? All of these stressors can have a significant impact on mental health. We may move from feeling quite optimistic and forward thinking to a period in our lives when we are anxiety ridden, unable to concentrate, and less willing to spend time with friends and family.
A friend asked me the other day, “Do you think anyone can get a mental illness?”
“Yes,” I answered. “In the same way anyone can get liver disease from drinking too much.” Our brains are a living organ, which need to be cared for just like our hearts, our kidneys, and our livers. Providing early education on keeping our brains healthy is one of the most important steps we can take in acknowledging the continuum of mental health. As one doctor told me, “Putting the head back on the body where it belongs.”
In 2013, Tom Insel, the director of the National Institute for Mental Health, told a TED audience, “Thanks to early detection, there are 63 percent fewer deaths from heart disease than there were just a few decades go. Could we do the same for depression and schizophrenia? The first step in this new avenue of research is a crucial reframing for us to stop thinking about mental disorders and start understanding them as brain disorders.”
Just as we all fall somewhere along the heart health continuum, so do we fall on the mental health continuum. The promising recognition of that reality allows this question: “How is my own brain health, and where am I along the continuum?”