2
They carried the walkie-talkies and they carried their phones and they remembered a show they’d once watched about a girl locked in an underground bunker texting her mother (remembered their own daughter sitting between them, a thin and budding girl of twelve in summer pajamas, bare knees drawn to her chest, smelling of her bath, riveted), and they played and replayed the one message from Caitlin, the last one, her voice breaking on the single word. The sound of an engine in the background and the sound of wind and then a sound like the phone dropping and then the silence.
Daddy, she’d said—but they had not heard her. Had not heard the call. They’d been in bed. They’d been fucking.
In those first days, those early disbelieving days in the mountains, they did not hold each other and they did not weep in bed at night. They spoke of what had been done that day and what must be done the next and who was going to do it—who would sit with Sean at the hospital and who would take sandwiches to the volunteers and who would get more posters printed and who would contact the school back home and who would meet with the sheriff or the FBI men or the reporters again and who would go to the Laundromat, a grotesque feverdream of the domestic, and when they had talked themselves to exhaustion, when sleep was coming at last, Angela would pull them back to pray. She would pray aloud and she wanted Grant to pray aloud too, and he would, in those early days, though it made him nearly sick, the sound of his own voice, the sound of those words in the cheap little room.
Days into weeks. Grant wheeled Sean out of the hospital and the three of them took two rooms on the ground floor of the motel and those rooms were now home and headquarters—papers and supplies and lists and maps on every surface. In town, when a poster came down, Angela somehow knew, and the poster was restored. Weeks into months. In early November Sean turned sixteen; they remembered two days later and went out for pizza. Angela’s calls began to be returned less promptly and sometimes not at all, and when she called the sheriff she was no longer put right through but had to speak to a deputy first, and often the sheriff was not in, nor was he up in the mountains searching some unsearched quadrant of forest. Such helicopters that sounded overhead—the sound of urgency itself in those throbbing blades, of all-out human and mechanical response, massively adept—beat across the sky toward some other purpose.
It may not be just a case of a needle in a haystack, the sheriff told Grant. It may not even be the right haystack.
How do you mean?
I mean a smart man don’t steal a pony from his neighbor. Pardon the analogy.
You mean he might not be local. This man.
I mean a man might drive quite a ways looking for just the right pony.
They’d come to the Rockies thinking it was a place like any other they might have chosen: chronicled, mapped, finite. A fully known American somewhere. Now Grant understood that, like the desert, like the ocean, the mountains were a vast and pitiless nowhere. Who would bring his family—his children—to such a place?
He returned to the motel and checked with Sean in front of the TV, and then stepped into the other room and shut the door and went to her where she sat at the desk staring at the laptop.
Angie. He needs to go home.
What do you mean?
He needs better care for his leg. He needs to be back in school. Back with his friends.
She turned to look up at him. What are you saying?
I’m saying it’s no good for him, keeping him here.
Are you sure you’re talking about him?
Grant didn’t answer.
We can’t go back now, Grant. You see what’s happening here. You see what’s going on.
One of us can go back with him. For a little while.
You mean I can go back. You mean me.
I can keep things going here. I can keep Sheriff Joe going.
And who will keep you going?
He stared at her, and she turned away, and she began to shake.
Angie. He put his hands on her shoulders. He raised her to her feet and pressed her to his chest. He held her as her legs gave out, then moved her to the bed and eased her down and held her. After a while she stopped shaking and he swept the hair from her eyes and kissed the tears up from her cheeks and he kissed her lips and she kissed him back and then she kissed him truly and something broke in his chest and, kissing her, he put his hand between her legs, and at first she let him, but then suddenly her thighs tightened and—No, stop it!—she shoved at him and fled into the bathroom and slammed the door and he could hear her in there moaning into a towel.
Dad . . . ?
He got up and opened the connecting door, banging it into the footrest of the wheelchair. I’m sorry, did I hurt you?
Is Mom all right?
Yes.
What happened?
Nothing, Sean. We had an argument.
What about?
Grant shut the door and went around the wheelchair and sat on the bed. Nothing. Just an argument.
She woke up that night clutching at him. It’s all right, he said, it’s all right.
No, she said, her eyes bright in the dark. I was driving a dark road. Just me, and she came out of the trees, into my lights. She was naked and covered in dirt. Like she’d been buried alive. But she got out. Oh God. She got out and she was trying to come home.
He held his wife until she slept again, then he lay with his eyes on the ceiling thinking about that girl in the bunker, the one who texted her mother. Her abductor thought she was just playing games on his phone. He’d kept several girls down there, eventually burying them all nearby. One girl, he said, he kept for two years; they were like husband and wife, he said. People wanted to know why. Mothers in ruin begged it of him. The man shook his head. He looked to the courtroom ceiling as a man would to God. It won’t help you, he told them. I’m sorry, but it won’t.
He looked like any other man, this man: glasses, blue eyes, halfway bald. In prison now, this man, way back in there, where none of the fathers could touch him.