For Alison. Andy Parker
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of evening, the bottle tree backlit against the setting sun, the empty bird feeder aglow.
Was Alison still alive when Barbara and I sat in these very same seats not twelve hours ago? Or was it a lifetime ago? It was definitely a life ago. Maybe if we sat here long enough, I thought, this awful day would end and we’d wake up and she’d still be alive and we could try it again. Maybe it would come out better if we had a day to practice, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.
Of all the days in my life to live over, this would be the worst hands down. There was no competition. I was tired of it already and the day wasn’t even over yet. I certainly didn’t want to live it over and over again. But at the same time, every day that passed would take me one day further away from her—one more day since I’d seen her, since I’d heard her voice and held her in my arms and told her how much I loved her, how much she meant to me. I would have happily died to spare her even an ounce of pain.
I’ve been told that each day is a day closer to “healing,” but I knew that day that I’d never be healed, never be whole again. There is no getting over it, there is no getting past it, there is only getting through it. Each day a constant struggle not to be overwhelmed by all the little things that remind me of her, of what I’ve lost, of what she’s lost.
Wherever I am and whatever I’m doing, I stop to think where Alison would have been, what she would have been doing, what she would have done in the interim between August 26, 2015, and that moment. And then I’m left with the miserable math, all too familiar to those who have lost loved ones: how old would she be now? How many days have gone by?
It never gets easier. It just gets more familiar. The pain doesn’t go away, you just learn to live with it.
Chris was in pain too, it was easy to see. Chris has always reminded me of Opie from The Andy Griffith Show. He’s got the ginger hair, the big bright eyes, the cherubic smile. That he would show up at a time like this, I thought, even just to sit and drink boxed wine with us . . . well, that made him a stand-up guy in my book. We knew that Alison admired his character, his demeanor, his intellect, his compassion. But this—this was why she loved him. I don’t remember what anyone talked about. It wasn’t much, just idle chitchat in fits and starts, small talk whenever the silence started to weigh on us too heavily. I just remember sitting there next to Chris and staring out the window and watching the sun set on a whole new world. I put my arm around him and gripped his shoulder and we traded one of those clenched-jaw, tough-guy smiles even though we were both falling apart inside.
My phone buzzed again. In truth, it had been buzzing more or less all afternoon and into the evening, but since I’d returned from the dam I’d mostly ignored it. It was Ian Shapira, following up just as he’d promised. He’d posted the article. I read it. He nailed it. I lost it. Ian’s article was thoughtful and compassionate and it was exactly the balm I needed to face this new world.
The rest of my in-box was filled with an avalanche of media requests. One name stood out: Megyn Kelly. Ordinarily I disdained Fox News and everything they stood for, but this was right after her public dust-up with Donald Trump at the first Republican presidential debate and she’d gained some credibility in my eyes. Of the invitations I’d received, her program was certainly the highest-profile. If I wanted to send a message, her pulpit would carry it a long way. And as the enemy of my enemy . . .
“What do you guys think of this?” I asked the room.
“Fox News?” Barbara scoffed. “Are you sure?”
I explained my reasoning. “Chris, what do you think? I think we should do it. Both of us.”
If I was going to survive this, what was going to get me through it was channeling all of my grief, all of my frustration, all of my anger into something productive. Even lava doesn’t stay red-hot forever. It cools, it hardens, and if you haven’t shaped it into something useful before it does, then it’s just a dumb inert rock. I had to channel my rage, I told them, shape it into something useful. This was the start of what would become my life’s work, or at least, the work of the rest of my life. I’d found my fight and I was going to fight it for Alison.
Chris took a big swig of his wine. “Fuck it,” he said, “let’s do it.”
I wrote back to accept Megyn Kelly’s invitation. As a producer was texting me the address in Franklin County where we were supposed to meet, I got another text from a CBS producer. I don’t know how they got my number, but I was already drained, too tired to be surprised by anything at that point. Since CBS was “our” network, the WDBJ affiliate, I texted back to say that Chris and I would be available after our Fox News appearance and asked where we should meet him. He said he’d find us. I wasn’t sure how he planned to accomplish that, but I didn’t push him. I didn’t even pull up the address on Google. I figured it was going to be right off Route 220 in Rocky Mount, so I plugged it into my phone and off we went.
3
The Night
It was dark by the time we set off toward the interview with Megyn Kelly. I hadn’t eaten anything all day and I’d been drinking for hours. I had no business being behind the wheel of a car, but that thought never crossed my mind at that moment. I even had a “to-go” kit: a red Solo cup full of wine.
Chris and I didn’t say two words to each other the whole way, just stared ahead into the black as the road twisted and turned through the mountains. It was the same road Barbara and I had driven earlier, but we were going much farther (or so we thought), and somehow it felt much more desolate. I sped the whole way. Chris told me later that I crossed the double yellow line a handful of times and almost hit a semi head-on. He said he was thinking, Well, if I die, at this point I don’t give a shit. At that point, I obviously didn’t either.
The map showed that we were approaching our destination, but I still didn’t know exactly where we were going. It was pitch black. Then we rounded a bend and everything was lit up like Times Square. I instantly knew where we were.
We were right across from the marina. Every major network was there; their trucks parked hither and yon, thick cables snaking across asphalt parking lots, satellite dishes mushrooming upward toward a thin sliver of moon. The media had set up a tent city, each network with its own little enclave. The whole surreal scene was set ablaze by every watt they could find in Southwestern Virginia and probably more trucked in from miles away.
I couldn’t believe we were at the marina.
I couldn’t believe they had brought us to the marina and that no one thought to tell us where we were going. I wouldn’t have come if I’d known.
I was furious.
Across the street, the marina was deserted. Once upon a time I had loved that marina. Less than twenty-four hours earlier I had loved that marina. I had so many happy memories there, and for a split-second I saw her, the TV trucks and the news crews fading away and my darling pigtailed little Scooter skipping her way toward the boat we no longer had.
Now I didn’t have her either. I had nothing. I had nothing, emptiness, a void, a hole, a hole in my heart, my heart that was somehow still beating even though a big piece of it was gone, irretrievably gone, gone forever, but I also had Chris and Chris understood because Chris had suffered the same loss; our losses were one and the same, and now Chris had the same aching hole in his heart and in both of our hearts the hole was shaped like Alison, the one thing we didn’t have, either of us, and would never have again, the one thing that could have filled the hole and made our lives complete once more.
As long as I had that hole, I knew I would never come back to the marina. I was a leaky vessel and I knew I would sink under the weight of my grief.
In the darkness, the marina looked sinister, downright evil, a terrible place where my brilliant, beautiful daughter had lain dead on the planking for hours until she’d been photographed and fingerprinted and identified, until she’d been searched and tagged and bagged, until she’d become not a she but an it, not a person but a body, not Alison but evidence. She had lain there for hours, her precious