We talk for a half hour, seated around the coffee table. We have a few questions that Jimmy asks, but mostly we let Martin and Alice tell us about their daughter. Some memories bring smiles and even the occasional laugh, but more often it’s the tears of the soul that pour out with the story.
Lauren is a gentle spirit, always smiling, a good daughter, never in trouble. She has a fiancé and a December wedding to look forward to, and a love of animals so deep that she had saved nearly $20,000 in the hopes of opening a five-star boarding kennel for dogs. She has the whole thing planned out on a five-year timeline and just finished year two ahead of schedule.
Her older brother, Larry, who’s studying to be an architect, helped her design the three-thousand-square-foot building, leaving room for growth down the road. It includes an exercise arena, a playroom, and speakers in every room that play soft, soothing music while the dogs sleep in their people-like beds.
That is Lauren Brouwer—dreams and hope and heart.
Tears follow smiles follow tears.
I find myself holding Alice’s hand, patting her arm.
I think of my own mother, Lovisa. After decades in America, she still speaks with a strong Norwegian accent and gets cross with Jens and me when we mimic her. When we were growing up, she was often stern, demanding, and disciplined. She set the bar high for us and accepted no excuses. But she’s also quick to laugh and to hug, and she leaves no doubt that she loves you with every ounce of her great Norwegian heart.
That’s my mother …
… and it tears me up to think of the hell she would go through if Jens or I were missing or dead. I imagine she would be much like Alice Brouwer and too many mothers before her.
“No one said life is easy—or fair,” she often told us. “Life is life. There’s no scale to weigh out your days and make sure you get your share of the good.” She’s right, of course. We pass our years one yesterday at a time, hoping our days will be many but never knowing. In the end we strive for one thing: to make enough good days to outweigh the bad.
Alice and Lauren and Martin deserve some good days.
But life isn’t easy, nor is it fair.
As we step to the door and say our good-byes, Alice suddenly holds both her hands up. “Can you wait one minute … please?” She turns and hurries down the hall before either of us can reply, and we hear a shuffling noise, drawers opening and closing, and then she’s hurrying back with something in her hand.
Taking my left hand, she turns it palm up and places a silver heart-shaped locket in the center. Slowly, gently, she closes my fingers around it. “Give this to my Lauren when you find her. We gave it to her when she graduated high school. She wore it constantly, but for some reason she wasn’t wearing it the night … the night…” Her eyes go to water. “I just want to see it around her neck when I hug her and hold her.”
“I will.” The words lump in my throat and it’s hard to swallow.
Lauren’s shine glows through the gaps of my fingers.
Pulsing.
Pulsing.
Pulsing.
*
The rest of the day goes as expected; first to Red Bluff some sixty miles north of Oroville and home to Ashley Sprague. Or at least it was her home, until she went missing more than two years ago and hasn’t been seen since.
Unlike the others, Ashley was a feral spirit—wild beyond measure—so it wasn’t uncommon for her to drop off the grid for days or weeks at a time. So feral was her spirit that no one bothered reporting her missing for more than a month.
The report was taken reluctantly.
Red Bluff PD still hesitates to call her missing, believing instead the rumors that she tripped off to Mexico to bartend with some boyfriend in Cabo. Who can blame them? Ashley was the boy who cried wolf, only substitute girl for boy, and partied hard and disappeared often for cried wolf.
By the time she was eighteen—old enough to be booked into the county jail—she had been reported as a runaway fifteen times, had been booked into juvenile detention a dozen times, and had been through rehab three times.
Feral.
Capital F.
Her first stint in the county jail, exactly twenty-three days after her eighteenth birthday, was for DUI. It took her a few days to raise bail, which, as it turns out, wasn’t fast enough. Corrections officers found her bleeding and unconscious next to her bed on the second morning. No one was talking, but the word was she mouthed off to the wrong gangster girl and got a broken jaw and a concussion in return.
After that, Ashley seemed to straighten out. She held a variety of odd jobs, tried community college—it didn’t take—then, when she was twenty-one, she took a course in bartending and seemed to find something that suited her.
She was working her way through the legal maze to get her juvenile record sealed when she disappeared; she thought she’d have a better shot at getting a decent bartending job with better tips in Vegas or Reno if she could leave her juvenile baggage behind.
Every agency has their share of Ashley Spragues; scores and hundreds and even thousands of them, depending on the size of the agency and its jurisdiction. And every time they’re arrested they talk about how they’re going to change their life, how they have this plan, how they don’t need the drugs or the booze or the destructive boyfriend anymore.
Almost none succeed.
Almost none try.
Ashley Sprague did try—and was succeeding—but her juvenile record was hard to shake. Many of the officers and deputies in the city and county knew her on sight and had too much history with her to believe anything she said, so much so that when her coworker reported her missing they glanced through the missing persons report, saw her name, and then disregarded.
Never mind.
It’s just Ashley … again.
There was no search for Ashley Sprague.
No forensic examination of her car or her apartment.
She became one of the invisible missing, landing among the ranks of prostitutes and drug addicts. It wasn’t fair, but life isn’t fair.
There’s my mother in my head again: No one said life is easy—or fair.