“The giant Pacific octopus exhibit was awesome,” Marty blathers on. Then I hear all about San Francisco, the aquarium, Pier 39, and his misadventures with the panhandlers. He didn’t make it to Chinatown or Alcatraz, but that doesn’t seem to dampen his enthusiasm.
Les and Marty are switching places today, so I’m sure Jimmy and I will have plenty of time to hear more about Marty’s trip on the plane. Yay. The Cessna is loud, but it’s equipped with headphones for both the pilot and passengers. I’m not sure if they have a mute button.
Oroville, 9:23 A.M.
Burgundy.
It’s a great color, deep and rich and regal. Not like other shades of red that can be too bright, begging for unnecessary attention like a spoiled toddler throwing a temper tantrum. No, burgundy speaks of the wine for which it’s named, dark and luxurious. It looks great on Lauren Brouwer’s 2004 Chrysler 300, a car that itself is dark and luxurious.
I always liked the styling of the 300 series. It looks like the offspring of an unnatural pairing between a Bentley and an English bulldog—beefy, yet elegant. An hors d’oeuvre of class and power and style wrapped up nicely in Detroit steel and garnished with leather.
Lauren loves her car.
I say loves, because her shine tells me she’s still alive … somewhere. I know she loves her car because she posted more than a dozen pictures of it on Facebook when she bought it six months ago.
Someone else loves the car.
Or perhaps it’s just that they love Lauren.
I know this because the car has been washed recently, and probably often. Where dust from the gravel driveway and the nearby fields has settled on the other cars in the driveway, Lauren’s stands apart, clean and gleaming in the morning sun.
Loving hands have treated the tires, polished the wheels, and cleaned the windows to a squeaky shine. The pristine gem waits for Lauren’s return; a sad vigil, a hard vigil, a hopeful vigil. A vigil shared by her parents, who wait for us inside the house.
When Lauren went missing, the Chrysler 300 was found parked at the grocery store where she worked swing shift. Neither Oroville PD nor the Butte County Sheriff’s Office deemed it worthy of impounding because there was no indication it was involved in Lauren’s disappearance.
A quick walk around without my glasses reveals no sign of Sad Face. No shine on the door, the seat, or the steering wheel; no sad-face image traced out on a window or trunk or bumper; no face print on the back window.
Sad Face didn’t touch the car.
I catch up to Jimmy as he’s ringing the doorbell.
“Anything?”
“No,” I say. “It’s clean.”
Footsteps approach the door and I get the sense that someone’s looking through the peephole. A lock clicks and a grim man pulls the door wide. The lines on his face belong to a man much older and there’s a tic at the corner of his eye that probably wasn’t there two months ago.
“Good morning, sir,” Jimmy says gently, extending his hand in greeting. “I’m Special Agent James Donovan and this is Operations Specialist Magnus Craig.”
“Martin Brouwer,” the man says, shaking Jimmy’s hand. As I step forward and extend my hand, our eyes meet and I see that same haunted, sleepless, vacant look that I’ve seen too often.
Souls bleed.
They bleed through the eyes, for it’s in the eyes that you see the wound. Small wounds, great wounds, and sometimes terrible wounds that rip the soul asunder, some so awful they change the soul—and the eyes—forever.
It’s the eyes that bleed out such sorrow; the sorrow of a parent wondering every minute of every day where their daughter is and what’s happening to her—and at the same time not wanting to know, because the thought of it leaves them hollow and broken. It’s the eyes that reveal the rents and gashes in the soul, the cracks along the edge, the empty hole where part of the soul has died and turned to shadow.
The blood of the soul is the teardrop.
Aside from tears and hopelessness and grief and desperation, there’s something else in Martin Brouwer’s eyes: gratitude. This, too, I’ve seen before, and it always surprises me that there’s still room for it, that it hasn’t been pushed out and discarded.
It’s hard to imagine how gratitude could survive within the hostile, acidic environment of angst and sorrow and dread, but there it is. As long as there is hope, there is gratitude. It’s easy to understand such an emotion when we find someone alive, but so many times it’s the other way around. Yet, there’s still gratitude, gratitude that we brought a loved one home, even dead. It’s gratitude for the effort, gratitude that we tried, even if we failed. And in those cases, like Lauren’s, where someone is still missing, and has been for too long, there is gratitude that someone is still looking.
Hope and Gratitude: the resilient sisters.
Martin’s fingers twitch ever so slightly as he takes my hand and holds it for a long moment. His eyes. He’s a beaten man, but not yet broken. Not yet.
Hope and Gratitude; they feed him.
I want to tell him right then that Lauren is alive, that I see her shine pulsing and vibrating with the rhythm of life. She’s just lost and we’re going to find her. But I can’t give him that hope if there’s any chance that Lauren won’t come home; that would break him by parts and finish him whole. It’s enough to tell him we’re going to pour our hearts and souls into finding his daughter, and that we’re the best at what we do.
I say the words, but they crumble as they fall from my tongue.
Martin has heard them before … again and again.
He just nods. Polite. Grateful.
Alice Brouwer greets us in the living room, a small mouse of a woman with big frail eyes and brown hair. She has a perspiring ice-cold pitcher of pink lemonade and a small plate of cinnamon rolls sliced in halves that she places on the coffee table before greeting us with a tepid smile and a handshake.