“I saw him. It was him.”
Andi snaps her head up. She gives me a look of utter confusion while Sasha’s expression is something closer to pity.
“You freaked out because you saw some guy who looked like him after I pointed it out. A lot of guys have sandy hair and square jaws. It was dark, Regan. Come on,” Andi says.
And then before I can defend my position, Sandy Milroy starts speaking into a bullhorn to get everyone’s attention. She’s Tia’s aunt, I think, or maybe just her mother’s friend, I’m not sure, but her name has been all over the organization materials as a contact. We stop talking and begin moving closer to the fountain, where everyone is beginning to congregate in order to listen. She thanks everyone and gives some safety instructions, and then she explains the search. The lake is just underten miles around. Folks are assigned to a side, and I see Roxie and Drew purposefully walk over to the side away from us, which I guess is a teenager thing to do, but it still strikes me as a little odd. Then she gives us printouts of maps of the woods and the route to take so we can spread out correctly and ensure the dense wooded areas that span for miles in some places have a cutoff point. We’re mostly just focusing on the manageable portion that’s more residential and meets the houses and lake. That way, nobody can get lost.
Andi says she wants to take the west side so she can end at her house because she has a meeting this afternoon, so we grab our walking sticks and whistles from the supplies table that Sandy has neatly put together and begin our descent into Bramble Thicket, the three of us together.
The air is heavy with a mist that threatens to turn into rain, and it makes everything more unsettling—more eerie—as we make our way through the hazy air, poking at wet leaves and branches with our sticks and listening to the hum of melancholy conversations from the groups in the distance.
“There are black bears out here. Why would she jog these trails? Does she carry pepper spray or anything?” Sasha asks. She’s probably just filling the dead air and at the same time trying to make sense of what we’re doing, but Andi snaps.
“How would I know?” We both look over at her, but she keeps her gaze away, tapping a tree with her walking stick and letting out an exasperated sigh, as if she’s inconvenienced that her whacking didn’t yield Tia to somehow materialize. She looks almost like a teenage boy with her small frame swimming in a vintage hoodie and no makeup on.
“So who was the man?” Andi asks, taking the focus off herself.
I don’t respond. I suddenly feel pathetic telling them something that sounds so outrageous, and it’s not the time anyway. Maybe I’m starting to doubt it myself. I was there, of course. In the front row of the church, which was so cold that day. My mother wrapped her coat around my shoulders. She had to help me stand up from the pew when it was time to go. I remember it in nightmarish fragments and blurs—the reception held at Grady Watkins’s house—everyone was drinking scotch and singing along to Jack’s favorite Van Halen songs because “that’s what he would have wanted,” but it all felt wrong. I drank tepid coffee out of a small white mug in an armchair in a corner and stared at the wall, still in utter shock and denial. I wouldn’t talk to anyone. I remember it like yesterday. It’s when the darkness started to set in, and I’ve never been the same since.
So now, the voice telling me to be rational, telling me that the funeral was real and Jack is dead... is just a little bit quieter than the voice screaming at me that I saw him with my own eyes boarding a train to Windsor Locks. It makes me feel crazy. Andi’s and Sasha’s reactions make me feel deranged. Maybe I can’t trust myself. Maybe the pain is still too blinding to see it all clearly and I’m just seeing what I want.
“Holy shit.” Andi stops cold and of course so do Sasha and I, at first thinking she found something, but she’s looking at me with a hand on her hip. “You legit, like, really think it was him,” she says.
“Let’s just keep walking,” I say. I’m freezing.
“Like, you weren’t just traumatized or something because you saw a guy who looks like him and it brought it all back... You think it reallywashim?”
We’ve all stopped now and are standing by an ancient fallentree that smells like damp earth. Sasha puts her hand on my shoulder.
“Is that what happened?” she says with so much compassion, I think I’ll burst into tears.
“You’re the one who pointed it out,” I say to Andi. “You thought it was him, too.”
“I didn’t understand at first, though,” she says. “I mean, for a second that’s what I thought, and I just reacted and texted you... but of course I thought about it for two more seconds and felt terrible that I even said anything. It was just a shock. I...”
“What photo?” Sasha asks, looking from Andi to me. I pull out my phone.
“You never met Jack. You can be the judge. The selfie we took last night,” I say, opening my photo app and turning the screen around to show her. She squints at it.
“Okay,” she says, not knowing what she’s looking for.
I point to the figure in the background. “That man,” I say, then I quickly scroll to a photo of Jack from a few weeks before he died. One of my favorites. We’re in Martha’s Vineyard sitting at a seaside restaurant and he has Hallie on his lap. They are both wearing lobster bibs and smiling for the camera. I turn the phone around to show Sasha.
“I know the theater photo is dark, but I know what I saw. I know my husband,” I say, my voice cracking ever so slightly. Then I see something very unexpected. Sasha’s reaction. She tries to hide it, but I see her squint at the image and look very perplexed for a moment. She studies it and then shakes her head ever so slightly.
“What?” I say, snapping back the phone from her hand. She looks up like she’s just been snapped out of a trance.
“Nothing,” she says.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she says again, shaking her head and taking a deep breath. “It’s just—I’m very sorry for... your loss is all.”
Andi cuts her off. “Well, half the women in the Cloverhill Elementary Facebook group have already told the story about how you ran out of the theater calling after someone, but nobody saw a man.”
“But you see him. There.” I stab my finger at the photo.
“It looks a lot like him,” Sasha says.
