I opened my eyes, and I walked. And I walked… feeling as if I were heading to my own death.
And then, I stopped.
There it was, my son’s lifeless body lying against an abandoned lopsided cabin shrouded with dead trees that reached towards the bleak sky like skinny black limbs pointing an accusatory finger at an invisible God. His skin was still fresh and alive—preserved from the dropping temperatures and blizzard we’d recently had. But his eyes… My God, those eyes. They were wide open pools of azure ocean. His anguish was frozen in time. He was looking straight ahead, past me, as if trying to imprint the last thing he saw before his soul departed, while his arms wrapped tightly around himself. Balled up like a roll of rope. He was a cocoon. I looked into the depths of rigid remorse and rigor mortis, and experienced deep dejection. My throat burned.
I didn’t realize I was screaming until hard chunks of snow dropped around me from the cabin’s gutter. The racket must’ve shaken it loose, turning me into an abominable snowman. I yelled my anguish in a foreign tongue, and yet, I didn’t recall uttering a single word. I stood there for a long while, forcing spiteful acceptance into my veins like drugs from a dirty needle. My heart and mind followed suit, then I fell to my knees in front of him.
“Chad, I’m so sorry I didn’t find you in time.” My voice cranked broken syllables, the frayed words plummeting from between dry lips.
The wind had been knocked out of me. It felt as if I were suddenly stripped naked by a violent force, down to the flesh and then the bare bones, and the glacial air devoured what was left of my human self, picking me apart like a vulture’s decaying prey. Dead man kneeling.
At that moment, I was forever different. The change in me would last for as long as I lived. I knew that instantly. Something had shot me in the back and shattered my world. It reached inside the fresh wound, ripped my heart out, and flung it on the icy ground. Poisoning my mind with never-ending sadness, it consumed me like a brain-eating disease. A shot of despondency rocked me to the point that I wished for death, too. I singed with rage as my hot blood poured from the emotional lesion. Not a real bullet or blow had been the catalyst, but something far more deadly. It was my shaky hold on that tiny shred of bullshit called hope.
He. Was. Gone.
With a slow hand, I patted my boy’s cheek. It was hard as cement. Pale like a porcelain doll’s. Then, I bowed and kissed the top of his head. I looked at him for a long while. Ice clung to his thick lashes. My lower lip quivered, and my eyes blurred and burned. A movie of my mind’s own making played as the haziness of tears intensified, and the whip of sub-zero wind through my hair yanked me back into reality. I couldn’t blink this certainty away. I couldn’t stop walking and pretend it hadn’t happened or wash it up as a bad dream. As I looked at my boy, I knew right then and there that I’d never forget the expression on his face.
What am I going to tell your mother, Chad? This’ll kill her.
My brain was taking pictures and videos of it all, memorizing the tragedy, etching it in blood then plastering the images inside my psyche. I was an elephant—stomping around, trying to pounce and flatten my grief, yet destined to remember it all. My mourning transformed. It flew upwards to the heavens like a phoenix and turned into unalloyed wrath. My mouth watered from the scent of freshly cooked vengeance. It was so near, yet so far.
There’s a lot I won’t forget…
Like how the police wasted precious time, and said Chad was a legal adult so there was nothing they could do about it right now, and it was too soon to call him a missing person. They tried to tell me that he was probably out binge-drinking as he welcomed in the new year. I wouldn’t forget how some of the locals said they saw him in Fairbanks living it up. He was never there. His friends had stated he was at their favorite watering hole, Green Bear, then vanished into the night without a trace.
No one disappears into thin air. I knew better. Besides, I taught my boy all that I knew. Chad wouldn’t just go away, and he was too smart to be caught without ways to survive a night or two even if he’d gotten lost on one of the trails. He knew how to survive in the elements. He was my one and only child. I understood him so well, I could finish his thoughts. I knew his next move, and he could never get one past me. We were far too much alike. That drove him crazy.