But once the idea of a gun had been seeded, it grew. For protection, I’d told myself, a small handgun. The true, darker reason I had admitted only to myself. I would need it when I found the person who killed Lucy. It would have to be unregistered. Untraceable. According to news reports, there were thousands of illegal guns floating around. How hard could it be to get just one? In the end, it had proved easier than you would have imagined. A trip to Portsmouth. A visit to a pawnshop. A number scribbled on a paper. A hurried meeting in—at another earlier time I might have laughed at the irony—the parking lot of a white-steepled church. Methodist I think, if I am remembering the sign in front correctly. Cash exchanged for a weapon. Extra for the ammo. The entire exchange took no more than five furtive minutes, no questions asked. When I took the bag, I had expected it to be heavier, the weight reflecting what it contained. Ironic doesn’t begin to cover that moment. One of the few petitions I had ever signed was one to ban assault weapons. By the time I’d driven out of the lot, I couldn’t remember what the man had even looked like, only the thin, hyped-up sound of his voice that made me suspect he was high on something. At home, I’d taken the brown bag up to the attic studio and after locking the door had practiced loading it, weighing the cold metal shells in my palm. Finally I stashed it beneath a paint-stained rag on a shelf behind my worktable, where Sophie wouldn’t ever look but where it would still be handy.
In October, when I began these walks, I’d drop by the police station. At first, the duty officers manning the front desk were cordial, offering me coffee, their voices, if not warm, at least neutral, but gradually their tones became less sympathetic, more guarded. “Go home, Mr. Light,” they’d say. They had nothing new to tell me. The case was still active and open. Let them do their jobs. They would call. I really didn’t expect them to call. I knew the odds, the dark statistics of these things. With each month that passed it became less likely that there would be any development or resolution. To find who killed our daughter and make him pay. Once I’d shown up at the station intoxicated—not just tipsy but drunk to near incapacitation—and they’d threatened to put me in protective custody, for my own safety they’d said, but in the end one of the cops on patrol had driven me home.
On those autumn evenings and well into the winter, I would prowl, as I now knew the police did, restless and vigilant, searching faces for what lurked beneath the human masks. A teenager on a skateboard. The jogger with a blue neoprene sleeve on his knee. A man in a gray topcoat. The police recruit on bike patrol along Main Street. Or the burly young man walking a Gordon setter. It could be anyone, I would think. Anyone could have killed Lucy. I knew that if I could look into the face of the person who had murdered her, I would know it absolutely. Of course now the irony of this slays me, and I wonder if those I passed—the dog walker, the recruit on patrol, the jogger, any of them—would see, on looking at me would glimpse the rage, the need for revenge, the slumbering violence of which I was capable or even if I, on looking into the bathroom mirror as I shaved, if even I was blind to the depth of what I was capable of. And so I walked and searched the faces of the people I saw for the stain of guilt. It had to be someone, I’d think. Anyone.
In the early spring, before she moved out, I had shared my thoughts with Sophie, believing she would understand, but instead she warned me I was growing cynical. No, I told her. Not cynical. Realistic.
“What about you?” I’d said in defense. “You haven’t changed?” I pictured her in a fighting stance, her kickboxing class, her taut body.
“Of course I’ve changed, Will. But what would you have me do? Isolate like you? Sit around and cry? Well, I’ve done that. It doesn’t help. It’s just that—we can’t let our hearts grow hard.”
“And you think you haven’t done that?” I’d thought of her talking to reporters, spouting numbers about the thousands of dead children.
“No,” she said. “I haven’t.”
“Right.”
“It’s possible to be an activist, you know, to believe it’s possible to change things, and to still have an open heart.”
“The voice of our murdered children,” I’d said, unable to strip my voice of sarcasm.
“Oh, Will,” she’d said. Her look of pity had made me shiver. “Can’t you see? We can’t afford to grow cynical. If we do that, they’ve won.”
“That’s cheap sentiment,” I’d said. “Like what people said after 9-11.” The truth was they had won. And we had lost our daughter.
And still that spring, I searched faces. The person who killed our child—again and again the image of her blood-soaked tote, the annihilated cell phone, her broken body, would cloud my vision—this person was walking in the world undetected. Laughing. Eating a burrito. Buying a six-pack. Or a bottle of booze. Or a pair of new shoes. Planting a lawn. Tossing a Frisbee to a retriever. Watching a ball game. Having sex. Going on. Unpunished. Undetected and not likely to be detected. Unless he made a mistake. Unless there was another child.
Seven months.
That evening I wandered aimlessly for a bit. I headed toward the playground, but as I approached I saw a group of boys shooting hoops in the growing shadows, serious go-for-broke, smack-talking ball, their voices breaking open the quiet of the night. Despite the chill of early evening, they had stripped to the waist and sweat glistened on the skin of their chests, their naked backs. The air seemed to shimmer around them—a force field. On a bench at the far side of the playground, a boy sat alone, his concentration focused on the electronic device he held. He was thin, and there was in his posture a vulnerability, someone others would bully, the kind who would try to will himself invisible. I had a vague recollection of the boy as someone Lucy had known, but I wasn’t sure. I turned away and continued over to Stacy Boulevard. There were more dog walkers there, out for a last stroll before heading home for the evening. A wind blew in off the water, the blue expanse broken by chevrons of white. I buttoned my jacket against the chill. It was only May. I should have worn something warmer.
Seven months.
I pictured Lucy back in October on the last morning of her life, her quick, banana-scented kiss and “Bye, Da,” as she flew out the door, innocent of what lay ahead, and I was burdened by every month, every week and day and hour that had passed since, the bleak horrors of Thanksgiving and Christmas, the seasons melting from fall to winter and now spring, edging into summer, the mornings when I woke and for one cruel nanosecond life seemed normal and then memory cut like a lash and with it the impossible grief, the actual physical pain of it, and the knowledge that nothing would ever again be the same.
Seven months of this with no indication that it would ever ease.
Does my grief tire you? Do you want me to get on with my life? Try to understand how impossible that is. Try to imagine what it is like to have your daughter, your beautiful, kind child, murdered and then tell me to get on with my life. Seven months and here is what I imagined as I walked and searched for the face of her killer. I pictured what she suffered before she died. And I imagined her fear at the end. Wondered how the end had actually come and hoped it had at least been swift, a single small mercy. Had she pled? It didn’t bear thinking. And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about it, ruminating on the horror of it. And truth be told, if it happened to you, I don’t think you would either, and I hope you never have to find out. So this was what I was left with. This was what had led to my new self—an angry man who drank too much and had an illegal handgun hidden in his attic studio against the day when he found his daughter’s killer.