Dark Remembrance

“I’m sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Mathers, but at this point it’s no longer likely we will find your daughter alive.” And with that statement two things ended, the career of one deputy and the search for my little sister.

***

The woods are cold today, even though it is only early Fall. The searchers combed these woods for days. On foot, on horseback, with and without hounds. That’s the trouble when your property abuts a state park. It’s not just one copse for a child to disappear into, it’s miles of forest and rivers and places where any child could fall or be thrown down to die.

Oh, how they searched. My mother wore through three pairs of trainers searching. It wasn’t even about bringing Fifi home safely after a while. It was about having something besides an empty coffin to inter next to our grandparents. It was about closure, something to end the long nights my parents no longer spoke to each other. In the silence, you could hear the echoed screaming.

“You left him to watch her! A child to watch a child!”

“You were too cheap to get a nanny! How could I be in two places at once?”

Blaming each other. Blaming themselves. Blaming whatever monster had snatched and grabbed their beloved Fifi.

Who the hell calls a girl Fifi, like a favored poodle? They never called her Phoebe, just like Phoebe never called me Michael. I was always Mickey.

“Mickey moo.” That meant she wanted milk. And when I gave it to her, she would smile and say, “Ta Mickey Mowmow”.

Mickey Mowmow. Mickey Mouse. I hate that damn rodent to this day. His ears never change direction. Always orbiting around his head instead of attached to it.

I walk further into the woods, about a quarter mile from the house my parents left me. Neither one wanted to stay and stare at these trees, but both were too afraid to be gone the day Fifi toddled back into our lives.

Fifteen years I’ve avoided coming back here. But today is different. Today I remember pacing over every leaf and stone all the way to the property line. I remember the calls. The sound of the helicopter my father chartered. I shiver and gasp, caught in the eddy of forgotten stimuli. I remember officers and volunteers saying Fifi must have been taken in a car, that the hounds would be able to track her scent if she had come through the wood. And then a baying cry. And then another! And a flurry of paws and feet rushing, rushing through the September leaves to find. . .

A pink shoe. Just a little girl’s pink shoe, and nothing more. And that was it. Nothing more was ever found of Fifi. No blood. No body. No answers.

Mom was the second to accept that Fifi was dead. It took vodka and cigarettes and six prescriptions for her to cope. She coped herself right into a fatal car crash on the way back from the liquor store. Funny thing, she was the sober driver. I was at home with my father when it happened. My father . . .

He would never let Fifi die. Every picture on the wall stayed right where it was. Her bed stayed made. And the tea party she had started waited patiently for her take that first sip. Just like I waited for my parents to notice that one of their children was still present, longing for them to care about something outside themselves again.

I became a straight A student after that fall. The school psychologist told my parents I was compensating for Fifi’s loss by being the best of two children. But surely the fact that I could study without making “mac-peas” and “hah-gog” every time my sister was hungry might have helped. Such a simple thing to microwave pasta or a hot dog, but the ritual of it took long enough to make me rush through my work before, leaving careless mistakes. I suppose the death of my sister meant the birth of my careful side.

Now I’ve reached the part of the woods where hunters used to trespass every deer season, until my father became enamored of petty litigation. Some of them we could see moving through the trees if they were stalking a buck, careless in their movements. There was also a rusted-out truck bed hauled up and braced in the fork of a tree – a redneck’s deer stand. I remember climbing up there during the searches, my parents content that I was helping but still out of the way. Out of their way.

Oh, I’m not the first firstborn to raise themselves after the loss of a younger sibling, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. It doesn’t make it love. Just survival until the age of majority on my 18^th birthday. A day, I might add, that also happened to be my graduation day. One-hundred fifty-three students walked the dais that afternoon, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one without a parent present. I made my rounds, shaking hands, smiling in photos, and came home to find my father had started celebrating without me by trying to swallow his gun. Other kids came home to new cars with bright red bows. I came home to the acrid pong of gunpowder and bright red blood spatter. And on the kitchen table was a list of what I needed to do as the inheritor of my father’s estate and beneficiary of my father’s life insurance policies. It’s funny, but did you know that you can still benefit from an insurance policy that has a suicide provision, as long as you’re patient enough to ride out the waiting period? My father did. He left me with everything I needed, including a house I could never sell, because who wants to live in the Death House? Despite how good of a job the restoration crew did, rumors ran down my property value.

So, for fifteen years I faked a social life where no one would come to my house, staring at these woods, caught between wanting to remember and trying to use the anesthetic of retail to forget. But today my feet betrayed me and brought me to a stand of birches that you would never think to notice. I kick the strata of leaves aside, rousting critters and crawlies from lunch table and bed. I keep kicking until I uncover an old slab of concrete, not much for a grown man to move, but hell for a kid. A heft and a heave releases more cleaner crew insects, and a sweetly musky must.

I pull the pink shoe from my pocket, staring down into the dry cistern. I casually toss it in, watching it land on a matching puffy pink coat, its mate lost under a little girl’s stained jeans. I take in the dislocation of the jaw, probably from the fall, and the fracture in the temple like a throbbing vein. How the hounds missed this, I never knew. Must have been luck, but whose?

I stoop to put the capstone back in place, giving Fifi one last look. “Who’s Mickey Mowmow, now?”