Liz sat on Susan’s bed, clutching Milo - the stuffed giraffe Susie had owned since she was little. Milo occupied a space amongst Susie’s pillows until she was well into her teens. Around fifteen, Susie began to slip the plush toy into her bedside drawer, as if she didn’t want her girlfriends to see him.
Milo’s horns had long ago been rubbed off; its spots faded. Liz liked to think it smelled of her daughter, but she was no longer sure.
It was Christmas eve. The first Christmas without Susie.
Along the street, houses were lit with Christmas lights. Liz saw Christmas trees glowing through people’s picture windows. In the house across the street, she could see the bright red and green of presents wrapped and stacked near the tree. The image made her feel hollow, terribly empty.
She closed her eyes and smelled the giraffe, conjuring a memory of Susan holding the stuffed animal on Christmas morning, wearing footie pajamas and hopping up and down when she opened the doll house Jerry had bought her. She’d fallen in love with the house months before, when she spotted it in Milliken’s Department Store in Traverse City. Jerry had driven down the weekend before and bought it. Susan was seven. Her blue eyes sparkled in her soft, round face. Her hair was already long, nearly to her butt. Liz had braided it the night before. The doll house overshadowed her other presents. Each time she unwrapped another gift, her eyes wandered back to the gingerbread trim and the heart-shaped windows.
Susan barely left the dollhouse that Christmas day. The promise of chocolate pudding brought her to the dinner table. Otherwise, she would have happily played into the night without so much as a drink of water.
Tears poured over Liz’s cheeks and soaked the giraffe. She’d been careful in the beginning about tainting the stuffed animal, avoiding anything that might remove its scent. Now she didn’t care. She hugged it constantly, slept with it, cried into it. She’d spilled a cup of coffee on it the other morning.
Downstairs, Jerry was putting lights on the Christmas tree he’d arrived with that afternoon. He’d burst through the door, grinning, dragging the tree behind him. He had expected Liz to be happy. She saw the hope in his expression, which drained when he saw despair rather than joy on his wife’s face.
In stony silence, Liz had walked upstairs and closed herself in Susie’s room.
She heard Jerry downstairs, pulling Christmas boxes from the closet. He would string the lights and hang a few bulbs.
Why? Liz wanted to scream. She wanted to drag the tree into the snowy yard and stomp the bulbs into red dust. She wanted to run down the street and rip lights from people’s porches.
Instead, she sat perfectly still, lest the grief catch hold and send her spinning into the black.
She had never imagined a Christmas without Susan. In the days, weeks, and months since that fateful August day, Liz found that she could live nowhere but in the moment. Thoughts of the past wrecked her with spasms of grief, the good times with her beautiful daughter like knives slicing and poking her psyche. Thoughts of the future, the futureless nothing, left her breathless, raw and exposed, hopeless.
But now, one such future had rushed up to meet her. The first Christmas without her child. It loomed, a blanket of heavy despair, a cold sweeping shadow that turned Christmas lights into the shining red eyes of a monster lurking in the darkness.
A knock sounded on the door downstairs, and Liz froze.
What if…? That was the thought every time the door opened or the phone rang. What if it’s Susie? What if the person who took her decided to let her go? It was Christmas, after all. For a split second, the possibility, the all-encompassing joy of that possibility, sent her shooting from the bed. She pounded down the stairs as Jerry opened the door.
Detective Hansen stood on their stoop, his face grim.
Liz shook her head and walked backwards.
“It’s not that,” he said quickly at the look of terror on Liz’s face. Jerry looked similarly horror-struck.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have,” the detective stammered, pulling off his knit cap and scrunching it in his hands.
“No, come in.” Jerry stepped back. He moved to Liz’s side but didn’t touch her. Touching had become hard between them, more and more rare, until even brushing against one another in the hallway felt like an electric shock.
“I was going to wait until after Christmas, but I thought you’d want to know right away.”
“What is it?” Liz asked, squeezing the giraffe so tight her fingers hurt.
The detective held up a single tennis shoe. It was unremarkable, though clearly weathered. What had once been white now looked gray.
“Some kids found it. They were building a snow fort in the woods off Turner Street.”
The woods off Turner Street were just blocks away. They were filled with bike trails and foot paths.
Sometimes Susie jogged in the woods on especially hot, sunny days - like the day she disappeared.
They had searched those woods.
Liz didn’t speak, only continued to stare at the shoe.
The detective sighed, turned it so the heel faced them, and peeled back the tongue. The initials S.M., in blurred purple marker, appeared.
S.M. for Susan Miner.
Chapter 5
Orla
Much like good deeds, Orla believed that no gift goes unpunished.
Though “gift” was a subjective term coined by her Aunt Effie who believed that, yes, Orla had a gift. Her father, on the other hand, called it a curse, and her mother pretended it did not exist at all. Any time Orla divulged a secret related to her “gift,” her mother fluttered her hands, laughed shrilly and hurried from the room.
Orla learned quickly to be careful in disclosing the gift - which was not always easy.
Take, for instance, her second year in elementary school. She was skipping rope in the play yard with her best friend, Carrie, when a rock came whizzing from a tree and struck Carrie square in the forehead. Her skin split open and blood sprayed down her dress. She fell sobbing to the grass, clutching at her torn face. Without a thought, Orla bent over and picked up the rock. In an instant, she saw Marcus Riley, his buck teeth biting hard on his lower lip as he cocked his arm back and threw the rock. It wasn’t Carrie he intended to hit, but Jessica, who stood a few feet away picking dandelions. Jessica had bested Marcus in the spelling bee three days before. As Carrie sobbed, and teachers rushed to her aid, Orla got the first sickening sense of knowing the truth and not revealing it. She wanted to. She desperately wanted to, for the sake of her distressed friend who still, more than ten years later, bore the scar.
Despite her silence, Orla did not sit idly by. A week after the rock-throwing incident, Orla spotted Marcus swimming naked in a forest pond. She stole his clothes and flung them into a high tree. At school on Monday, the cafeteria was abuzz with sightings of a naked Marcus as he darted down the street, holding a bushel of leaves in front of his privates.
In middle school, her mother sewed her a pair of beautiful white gloves to block the sensations. They weren’t Orla’s style. She liked bright, flowery things. Within two days, she’d soiled them black. Her mother fretted and tried black gloves, but Orla’s mother hated black. The Irish Catholic in her viewed black as funerals and death, and she grimaced every time she saw Orla in the gloves.
Eventually, nude gloves appeared, and Orla attempted to keep them clean. After all, they blended in almost perfectly with her skin, so she could wear them discreetly. She didn’t wear them all the time. Many things she touched barely left an impression. Some things created a spark Orla could ignore, like the sound of traffic on a busy street.