Ready to cross that fine line...

Only the young believe that you have to experience the lows to appreciate the highs in life. It's not my experience. Maybe the personal lows that exist mostly in your own mind, maybe the naturally paced lows of losing a parent or leaving school, or even divorce. But the real lows in life that are wrenched from your soul and leave scars? What on earth subverts that? I used to hope people didn't know what I meant about things like this. Now, I'd rather more people understood exactly how miserable life is, really, under all the Disney bunting. Because if you understand that, you will not be so quick to visit your sick, miserable need to prettify life with easy lies that destroy the lives of other people who made the mistake of being victims even once. Those lies that make you feel good about your (stupid by definition) world view -- because if you have a world view, it's stupid, trust me. Or don't take my word for it. Wait until your ridiculous suppositions and assumptions leave you open to a good side-winding punch in the gut. Then dress that mess up and dance in it. Fucker. Oh, I'm sorry, did I hurt your feelings? Sorry. Sorry sorry sorry. It's better if I let life hurt them for you, I suppose. You've been warned. Be offended at me, but remember, life is still out there.

And notice I didn't say death, exactly. Life and death are the same thing. Do you see that yet? There is no life without death. You will either lose everything and everyone before you die, or lose it all afterward. You think life is all good and death is bad; but you're wrong. Do you think abusive husbands have two sides, because they don't. The "good" side is the mask that leaves you vulnerable to the bad. I shouldn't even use those childhood terms, good and bad. Life is what causes you to die. Love is what causes you to suffer. The Buddhists won't tell you this directly. But they don't deny it. They just narrow the definition of love until all it means is a form of desire. I want my son. I want my mother. I want to live. It is desire that causes suffering. You must desire to live in order to stay alive. Suffering is life. But that's not what they tell you. No one enjoys life more than the sadist or the serial killer. Like children their world is about pleasure in life, in the suffering (that is, the life)  of other people. Why do you doubt me? You know people who enjoy watching you suffer, and who feel better about themselves when your life turns to shit. You may not admit that you know this about them, but that doesn't make their victory over you any less pleasant to them. And yes, the sadists and serial killers and children in grown bodies are lying to themselves. They are subject to every misery you encounter, with even fewer tools than you to survive them. They get theirs, you see. You may not enjoy that, though. You may wish that on no one, not even your worst enemy. Not even on yourself.

If you don't know what I mean, just wait. It's waiting for you, just like it waited for her.

how it works

so we couldn't see really what the smell was. We hung over the guard rail and parted the screen of branches and there was nothing down there. The smell at that vantage was more like old garbage than death, and we cut ourselves some slack, no need to go verify that this was either runoff from Mount Rumpke, the local landfill operation, or someone's idea of a compost heap.

We spent the next few days coming up with new places to search, meeting up with other unofficial search teams, roaming around contracting poison ivy and chiggers, mostly. There was literally nothing to find. We saw parts of this town that I hadn't found in16 years of living there and looking for places to hide from everyone else who lived there, including my parents. At one point, my sister and I were poking around the woodsy banks of yet another dry creek bed, another party spot hidden under the arched brush, I told her I wished I'd known about all these places when I was a kid. And then I thought-- maybe it's better that I never did.

We stayed for over a week, till my mom was sick of looking at us, till we had run out of places to look, till we couldn't stand another minute of walking eyes to the ground, wondering what exactly we could possibly be looking for. There was nothing. We would run into other searchers, one the family of some kids I'd gone to school with-- their mother had been at my mother's birthday the year before. "I grew up walking up and down this creek," one said, of the run that intersected Groh lane.  He had been friends with my brother, but I hadn't seen him since he was 11 or 12. It was hard to accept that that burnt brown, skinny little boy with the mop of dark hair was the same person as this 45 year old dad with the greying goatee.  I guess because it meant I was old. I couldn't afford to be old. Not yet.

clues

My sister and I had continued up the river road a bit from the cars. We checked every gap in the underbrush. I saw hidden places in the woods off the road that I wish I'd known when I was 16, ready to escape this tiny town. They're all empty though. No one's even had a beer back here in at least a month. We pass the woods, moving up the road to a small clearing. In the middle of it is  a sign. On the other side it says "Welcome to Fairfield."  On our side, it's just brown paint and wheel marks in the grass around a little planting of flowers that someone's been watering. We feel the same shot of dread and look at each other, then go for the perimeter. No new breaks in the weeds. Reach the next road, cross the river road, check that side as we head back to the cars. There's an abandoned van in a yard, with a cage door behind the front seats. But you can tell from the weeds, and the dirt on the door handles that it's been sitting there untouched for years. The woods behind it seems dense and overgrown, even in this humid drought. A few steps down the road from the van, along a small wooded ravine, we smell the sharp sweet scent of decay.

This undiscovered corner of life.

Until a loved one is missing, no one considers how strange it is to talk about their loved one in the present tense. They text all the time, she wants to do x, he is excited about y... I mean, how would you know? But if you say they "were" then everyone jumps on that as a sign you have no hope or some complicity.

There is no tense for the abducted.

Search

It's difficult to imagine the sang froid with which you can walk a dry creek bed looking for the body of someone you love, until you actually do it. The three of us who'd grown up here knew we'd have to go to this spot. It's wild, untravelled, overgrown, and close enough to her house that someone could have made it here with her unseen after midnight in the first hours of Sunday. We hike down the embankment from the river road into the ravine. I'm drawn to look under the bridge. The others begin walking the other way, toward the preserve.

It's hot and humid in this river valley town. Our clothes are drenched with sweat. The walk is slippery and the rocks wobble where the last of the water has collected. Here and there the stream pops into being, babbles over broken rock, fills a pool deep enough to swim. The ghost shadows of minnows race up and back along the last of the flow.

As we walk, we all look down at the gravel, sand and flat rock that line the nameless creek. Our conversation, before we split up, consists of deciding which direction looks like the more obvious way you'd drag a body or force someone to walk who is possibly barefoot. We look for bent grass and weeds, broken branches, anything that could indicate human passage along the creek bed, and into the woods on either side. I find a bootprint, and can recognize from the pattern that it's got a Vibram sole.  My sister and my husband continue in the other direction, my brother, my niece, my son and I walk past the bridge, toward the river we already know has been searched by helicopter and on foot.

Suddenly there's a man standing near us. Are you guys looking for something? And then he says, is this about that girl who's missing? I'm from out of state, but I read about it. Yes, I tell him, we're family members. He says he's sorry, can't imagine what we're going through, the usual things people say when your life looks like hell from the outside. I check his boots to make sure they're not Vibram soles. He says he's writing a book about this little lick of water, that it used to be the mill race for a nearby town. He says he is rewriting the history of this area. It sounds so silly when he says it. But I'm sure to him it's a big deal. He's following this part of it back to the river, and walks on downstream, disappearing around a bend.

None of us cry,  but we don't shout her name either. If she's here she probably can't hear us. We are looking for things we think she was wearing when she disappeared. A grey t shirt. A gold engagement ring. A red cellphone. And there's a grey t shirt tangled in the hanging roots of a tree. I take a photo of it, but it looks as if it washed into the roots during a storm. And I hope it's been there for longer than five days. Then my brother says, "What color was her cellphone?" And we all turn. There in the wet sand, he's probing at a red cellphone. We call my sister. She thinks it had some kind of lanyard or fob hanging off it, like a kid would have. That's how Kate was, nothing left unpersonalized. But it's not the right kind of cellphone. We photograph its location, then my brother picks it up to bring to the police station after we're done.

My son finds an abandoned camp site, with clothes and burn marks, but there's moss growing on the clothes. She's only been missing for a few days. He heads back down to the creek bed, but I step a little deeper into the woods, and find a trail. Ahead, there are branches hanging down and dying weeds that prove no one's walked this way in months, so I turn and hike back a ways toward the road and bridge, just in case. There's nothing. My family has moved down toward the river.

It feels odd to be alone in this abandoned place. I try calling out to the others and only my son responds-- by texting me to ask if I had said something.  He and my brother and niece are at the river already. The historian has found some more bootprints, pointed them out, and then headed back. I never even heard him pass, from a few feet up the bank. When we meet at the cars, we plot out the next place to look, walking along the overgrown stretches, making sure there are no new breaks in the brush that would indicate someone might have been tossed back there recently. Then we drive back to clean up, because there's a vigil at a local church for her later tonight. And after that, we turn on the local news, and we're on every channel.