I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t refer to my daughter as simply a body, a pile of remains or dust scattered by the wind and wild animals.
“No,” Ryan said. “She’s alive. This girl is alive, and we need you to come down to the station right away. Now, can you drive yourself or do you need me to send that car?”
“Alive . . . Caitlin? Are you serious?”
“No joke, Tom. This girl is alive.”
I closed the phone and spoke at the same time.
“I’m on my way.”
My hands shook. I gripped the wheel tight to steady them, and the pressure I exerted made my knuckles ache. I thought they might crack open and bleed. My speed crept too high, so I overcompensated and drove so slow other drivers came within inches of my bumper. My heart thumped at twice its normal pace, and my extremities felt numb, as though they’d been severed from the rest of my body.
When I reached the station, I parked my car at a crazy angle and barely managed to shut the door before running inside.
She’s here. She’s here. This is it. She’s here.
I was two steps inside when Ryan intercepted me.
“Where is she? Where?”
“Come with me.”
He clamped his big hand on my biceps and led me down a short hallway to the familiar conference room. He guided me inside. My eyes darted around the room. It was empty.
Ryan closed the door behind us.
“Where is she?” I asked. “Are you bringing her in here?”
“Sit down.”
“I want to see her.”
“You will. But sit down first.”
“I don’t want to sit down. I want to see my daughter.”
I started past him, my right arm brushing against his left. Ryan took hold of me again, but this time I shook loose and reached for the door. Ryan grabbed me from behind like a wrestler and pressed his mouth close to my ear. I felt his hot breath as he spoke.
“Not yet,” he said. “You need to sit down.”
His voice was steady but laced with steel. His arms encircled me, dug into my rib cage. I couldn’t get loose. He was too big, too strong. Surprisingly so. I struggled a little more, but we both knew it was futile.
“Are you going to sit?” he asked, his voice practically inside my head.
I nodded, went limp. “Sure, sure.”
He didn’t really let go, but with less force turned me away from the door and back toward the conference table.
“Sit here,” he said.
I sat, straightening the collar of my jacket, which had shoved up under my chin during our struggle.
“We need to talk about a few things before this goes any further,” Ryan said.
“Is it her?” I asked. “Is it really her?”
Ryan nodded. “We think it is. Caitlin wrecked her bike when she was little, right? It left a pretty distinctive round scar.”
“Yes, of course. She got eight stitches.”
“This young woman allowed a female police officer to look at her knee. She rolled her pant leg up. The scar is there. We’ve gone ahead and fingerprinted her in order to make a comparison with the prints that were taken when she was little. That will take a few hours, but I don’t have any doubt, looking at her and comparing her to the pictures of your child. This is your daughter. It’s Caitlin.”
I felt the sharp pain in my chest, the same one I’d felt in Caitlin’s closet. My heart swelled like a balloon, expanding until it reached my throat and choked off the passage of air. I put my head in my hands, closed my eyes. I squeezed them tight until I saw firework patterns on my eyelids, great starbursts of red and green. Caitlin. Here.
Alive.
Ryan’s hand landed on my shoulder. I let go of everything—the runaway theories, the unreturned calls, the suspicions. I stood up and wrapped my arms around him.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you.” I squeezed him tighter, a reversal of our little struggle from a few minutes earlier. He smelled like shaving cream, and I felt his own gentle but awkwardly delivered man-pats against my back.
“It’s okay. We have some things to talk about, Tom. Just sit down. Go ahead there. It’s okay.”
I ended up back in the chair, my vision blurred by tears. I wiped them away with the backs of my hands. Ryan handed me a box of tissues. I don’t know where he found them, but I took one and continued wiping at my eyes.
“Do you want some water?” Ryan asked.
“No, I’m fine. What happened?” I asked. “What the fuck happened?”
Before Ryan could tell me, someone knocked on the conference room door. I looked up.
“Is that her?” I asked.
Ryan went to the door, but it opened before he reached it. Abby stepped into the room, the whites of her eyes prominent, the corners of her mouth turned down. She took short, tentative steps across the carpet and didn’t look up or make eye contact with anyone.
“Who invited her?”
Ryan’s head turned toward me. “I called her, Tom. She’s Caitlin’s mother.”
“She hasn’t acted like it. A mother wouldn’t give up on her child.” I stood up. “You were wrong, Abby. You and Pastor Chris. She’s alive. She’s right here, alive, and you were dead fucking wrong about it.”