There were too many people call and too few who wanted to take the responsibility to do so. James was of the mind not to tell anyone. He wanted to be selfish for the first time in his life. He wanted to swallow the information and keep it inside; he didn’t want to deal with anyone else’s sorrow. As far as he was concerned, they had no right to feel such things in front of him. Shanice was of a different mind. She talked to him from the mouth of a tunnel that only grew longer and darker, tried to convince him that it needed to be done as soon as possible. He listened with a blank look on his face, replaying the phone call, likely less than ten minutes total, that had ruined his life.

Upon hearing his daughter’s name on the other end of the line, he’d been unable to stop himself. The coroner, who hadn’t yet had the opportunity to identify himself as such, waited patiently as James went into every detail about his daughter’s appearance. He’d described the exact shade of Patience’s skin -chestnut brown - the fullness of her lips and about how far apart her eyes were, was in the process of describing her laugh - loud when she meant it, kind of cut up and breathy when she didn’t - when he came out with it: “Mr. Theisen, when the police located your daughter, she was already deceased.”

He’d known, but that didn’t make it hurt any less. Back and forth, they traded questions; why had it taken them so long to contact him? Her picture had been making its rounds through missing persons posters, word of mouth and had even made its way across the internet via Isaiah’s social media accounts. It had been months.

They spoke to him with the delicacy of a drunken deer. Did James know why his daughter would be in Chicago? He didn’t, but he didn’t tell them that. Why had it taken them so long to contact him? They acted as if he hadn’t spoken at all. Was Patience involved with or associated with any gang members or drug dealers? He demanded to know what they were implying. Why had it taken them so long to contact him? He shouted it the last time and was told to calm down. They needed him to come identify the body and he couldn’t do that if he couldn’t get it together.

For two sun ups and three sundowns, he held the information close to his chest, reluctant to share anything with anyone, even if there hadn’t been much to share. Even so, the spread was slow and steady, passing from mouth to mouth in hushed whispers as if if they spoke too loudly the wind would hear and snatch up their words, carrying them back to himself and his wife. The chill swept through every house within a ten-mile radius from the epicenter that was her home.

Y’all heard about Jamie’s daughter?

Wasn’t she in college? What she get caught up in to end up like that?

Po’ baby. That’s a damn shame.

The latter was only true because they didn’t know what she got up to in her free time and only because of this, her parents were given an almost overwhelming outpouring of support in the form of collard greens, homemade cakes, chitlins and everything in between, courtesy of the gaggle of church women that found themselves at his door every day now. He accepted the dishes but refused to allow them to stay in his house for more than half an hour before he tossed it into the garbage and immediately took the bag out to the dumpster that lived in the alley way all the way down the street.

“These old ladies ain’t finna stink up my house,” He half heartedly joked to his wife, the first words he’d spoken directly to her since he’d started sleeping under the same roof again. The sight of the food disturbed him for reasons he could not vocalize, and whenever he opened the door to another face with hands full of tin foil wrapped plates, he would give a tight lipped smile and say thank you only to honor the mother that had raised him with manners.

Shanice sniffed, her nose wrinkling at the aroma that the chitlins gave off.

That was the extent of their most recent interaction; with a plateful of Kelly Young’s macaroni and cheese salad and Pat Johnson’s watery mashed potatoes, he fled the kitchen before the silence took hold of them. Silence was never left alone for long; desolation often trailed behind it, and he couldn’t bring himself to sit in that soup with Shanice. A stranger woke up beside him most mornings, dry, earthy brown pits looking through him wearily. It had been that way since they’d found out.

The conversation of their daughter’s fate had been a swift one immediately following his phone call with the Chicago Police Department. He had returned home heavy; each foot felt as if it weighed a thousand pounds each. The only thing he derived the strength to lift them from was the constant reminder to himself that he had a wife, someone to share the load with.

She was right there as soon as he entered the house, her legs tucked underneath her body on the couch in the front room. He remembered that there was someone else there, but their face was nothing but a blur in his mind. Their existence was as inconsequential as the mouse that had made a home behind the fridge in the kitchen, only revealing itself in the early hours of the morning when it came out to scavenge for crumbs; it faded away altogether as he dropped to his knees in front of his wife, unable to hold himself tall any longer. His brain rattled in his head.

“They found her,” He heard himself talking but was unable to feel the words passing through his lips. “They found her.”

She gave him a strange look. “Okay? So why you actin’ like that? Ain’t that a good thing?”

The numbness spread from his fingertips, traveling through the veins in his arms, his shoulders, his neck, attacking the muscles in his face until his expression fell flat. “She dead, Shanice.” The sentence had all the impact of a close-range shotgun blast, directed at the center of his chest. He’d said it, and so now it was made real.

Her hand flew to her mouth. When he returned to the memory, he wished that he could remember if her friend had departed before then. It was obviously a private moment, and for someone else to witness him as he was in that moment made him want to hit something.

Shanice did none of what he expected her to; she didn’t sink to the floor with him, didn’t fall to pieces for him to pick up. She expressed seemingly no need to pull him close, though he wanted nothing more than to press her face into her shoulder and assure her that everything would be okay because he needed to remind himself that she was solid, that this was real life. There, in the front room where his daughter had once toddled about screaming with both laughter and distress, she seemed to cry only the necessary number of tears to make it seem that she was grieving; a voice in the back of his mind told him that she drew from a shallow well that would run dry within a finite amount of time. He hadn’t seen her cry since.

Was it all for show? He wondered.

His own reaction in comparison instilled him with a mixture of shame for himself and disgust for her.

The phone had trembled in his hand as the officer told him that a body they found matched the description he’d given. He had known it was his daughter even before he began the torturous five-hour drive the very next day, even as he clung to the doomed optimism that Patience was still out there. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he remembered that Miss Keyshia was out grocery shopping and so he didn’t attempt to hide. The moment he allowed the anguish to take hold of him, his legs buckled. Suddenly he was sitting on the floor without any recollection of having done so, his lungs threatening to collapse from a lack of oxygen. His heart constricted in his chest and he had grabbed at it, gripping the flesh beneath his shirt with the intent of tearing it out. That was the last night he stayed at Miss Keyshia’s. He laid himself down and pretended to sleep when she returned home so that he wouldn’t have to answer any questions, guilt eating at him as he listened to her move about the kitchen. Patience was almost as much hers as she was his.

He used the time to steel himself to bear not only his pain, but his wife’s as well. Before the sun came up the next morning, he was sitting at the foot of his own bed, unable to muster the strength to turn and wake his wife. She was close enough that he could easily grab her foot, squeeze her toes until she woke up and acknowledged him, but at the same time, she was farther than he could ever remember her being.

Prior to their conversation, there hadn’t been a single reservation in his mind about taking Shanice with him to identify Patience. After, he had decided she didn’t have the right and she hadn’t fought him on it. More and more he was sure it was the right decision. She hadn’t ever really even wanted kids; for all he knew, she was glad that one of them, little more than strings that tied her to a decaying marriage, was gone.

Somewhere between her third grade teacher’s efforts to shift her large, blocky print writing into neat, flowing cursive and Reverend Kidd’s attempts to get her to practice her prayers along the dotted lines in her workbooks, Patience fell in love with the way her words looked on paper. At the very start of it all, she could remember collecting words like the kids her mother told her to stay away from collected bugs, taking the words her teacher gave to the class during spelling tests and writing the definitions on the inside of her arms with Sharpie in the blocky, jagged writing of a child.

As far as she was concerned, she had no discernible talents, nothing outwardly fantastical or extraordinary like her classmates; she couldn’t run very fast like Paul Rudger, who was slim and nimble with translucently white skin that turned the color of ham after so much as fifteen minutes of recess out in the direct sunlight. Her fingers were clumsy and unresponsive when she asked them to hold down the strings of a violin during Suzuki or to stretch and flex to press the correct keys on a piano. Right away she knew that she would never be special in the same way that Tony Zhang was, the boy with hair the color of ink and black pools for eyes who seemed to slip into a trance when placed in front of a piano. He’d even been asked to play at the start of a school assembly. All that she had were her speech classes, set twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays that carried her well through the fifth grade. There, in a classroom only slightly bigger than a closet that always stank of rubber cement and ranch dressing, a plump woman who wore her glasses on top of her thinning straw blond hair more than she did on her face corrected Patience’s grammar and attempted to straighten out the curve of her dialect that made her pronounce things like fair as fur. It was different on paper. On paper, there was no gray area. On paper, she could not discern the difference between her mother’s spelling and the teacher’s as she could with the language the two used. On paper, the teacher had commented, she was gifted, a word Patience latched onto and stuck in the pocket of her jacket to take home and pull out whenever this same teacher interrupted her to correct her speech. For the first time, she felt as if it were within her grasp to be good at something, and a yearning like a black hole opened in the back of her mind.

She managed her archive for all of two days before her mother noticed; had she been paying attention, she would’ve seen how her mother’s eyes caught her wrist as she entered the house, but she instead focused on words that she hadn’t had room for, the ones that swam between the spaces of her fingers, held captive there until she could find somewhere else to store them. One moment, she was shrugging her backpack off of her shoulders. The next, her wrist was gripped tight in Shanice’s fist, the other hand shoving Patience’s sleeve up her arm as if she were peeling the bark away from a branch. Her skin was scrubbed until it was a raw, irritated pink and only phantoms of the words remained; hot tears collected in the corners of her eyes as she watched the inky soap mixture swirl down the drain, her wrist pulsing long after her mother had released her.

The notebook was waiting for her after school a few days later. It was the same kind that her teacher had handed out at the beginning of the year for the class to practice their cursive in, except she had gotten it in a red the same shade as her favorite flavor of Kool-aid. Placed delicately on top of her pillow was a packet of four gel pens that she was sure would make her writing appear more grown up, though they consisted of more glitter than ink.

She deliberated over what to name the notebook for at least a week before she ever put a pen to its first page; it was important to her that the name was realistic but not boring, interesting but not so much so that her mother would take interest and wonder if she were writing to a secret pen pal. Whenever she touched the cover, she imagined herself coming back to it years later, mesmerized by the intellectual thoughts that even the younger Patience harbored in comparison to her classmates.

In the end, she’d chosen the obvious choice - God. Her grandmother claimed that he was always listening anyway, so it only made sense that he would appreciate her attempts at a real, genuine conversation rather than the countless prayers He probably received daily, asking for this or that.

The sense of terror that she felt upon watching her father lift this book into his hands was a peculiar thing. She’d forgotten the notebook when she’d moved to college, stuffing it into the mouth that time had worn away into the side of her mattress. She reached out for it, thought better of it, and returned her hand to her lap. It wasn’t as if she would have had to answer for what she’d written, but that was a part of the problem – she couldn’t.

The bed sank as he took a seat next to her, glancing around. The room was only a faint echo of his daughter, for she had only slept in it for five days before she’d left for Chicago. Most of her books, posters and clothes remained at her dorm and would need to be retrieved, but there were a few shirts that she had tried on and decided against that had at one point been strewn about the floor. Someone, likely Shanice, had been in and folded the shirts, leaving them folded on one of the decorative pillows. The pile tipped and spilled, filling the room with her stale scent as he sat and got to flipping through the journal, a wistful twist to his mouth.

She read along with him and remembered nights pouring over the notebook in the darkness, scribbling her secrets within its thin pages.

Dear God,

You can’t tell mama, but I found two dollars in the couch and I’m gonna spend it on those cookies from the school store.

All of the impolite things that her mother would have slapped out of her mouth before she could finish saying them. These were some of the more innocent pages.

Dear God,

Granny always calls that one lady sister, but she got hair on her face just like my daddy. Mama said she was surprised she let herself walk out the house like that.

Reverend Kidd, whom had been reading over her shoulder, had tried - and failed - to hide a snort at this. She’d hardly understood what was so funny, and although he’d chastised her afterward, it lacked it’s typical bite.

Dear God,
Mr. Shaw visited our class today right before PE. It wasn’t even that hot but he smelled like daddy when he doesn’t shower at night. Mama calls him musty. Mr. Musty.

This one got a cough of a laugh.

A bit of the glitter transferred from the page to his fingertips. He stared at it. It still smelled faintly of sugar. He thought about when she’d left for college; the day had been full of impatience, teasing, laughter and silent pride mixed with dolefulness, a bittersweet concoction that he knew he was lucky to feel. His kid had made it out, would go on to do something with herself; she wasn’t gone, just elsewhere.

His heart stuttered and he leaned forward onto his knees, pulling a breath through his teeth. The hopelessness of it all sat on his chest, convinced him to close the journal before the writing shifted from the clunky lettering of a child to the calculated scrawl of a teenager. Before the pages became laden with all of the questions that she wasn’t meant to ask.

Had his mother been there, he knew that she would have made it all better. “Sometimes you just got to give it to God and let him take care of it, baby.” She would have pulled his head into her lap, stroked his head, a kiss still glistening wetly on his temple. He was ashamed when he found that he could hardly even think of the phrase, let alone sink to his knees to pray.

No matter how hard he wanted to believe, for him to accept that God was real and that he had stolen his daughter away so callously in the same thought was an impossibility.

Next Chapter: 14