All the Things We Never Knew (28 page)

I picked up the photo of Sophie. She was seven, standing tall on David's shoulders, mouth open and arms up, skimming the ceiling of our home, her face full of excitement. “Tall girl,” I heard myself say.

“Tall girl” was a game they'd played nearly every evening in our home, until Sophie had become too big for David to walk around with her on his shoulders. I held the pictures to my heart as it heaved up and down. “David, please, please for Sophie's sake, please, no,” I whispered.

The sense of knowing made it impossible to breathe, to speak. “David, please say you didn't,” I repeated to myself again and
again, scrambling on my hands and knees from the driver's seat to the glove compartment. Inside, his wallet, containing four crumpled dollars.

His debit card was gone. I dug further. A bottle of aspirin, some old papers, a cleaning bill, a receipt.

I stopped searching. The road was empty; the gorge was still.
Remember this,
I told myself.
October 25. One day you will want to remember the temperature, the way the air smells, how the day was clear, with amber sunlight shining down. One of the most beautiful places in the world.
The road, with its curves and spectacular vistas, was empty. I picked up David's coat, hearing the echoes of so many cops at so many crime scenes I'd covered, rattling on about the “moron who touched this or that.” David's coat, the prints on his vodka bottle. It was all evidence now.

I had so many photos of him wearing that coat; he wore it everywhere once it turned cold. He never lost it, never left it behind. He loved that coat.

I ran up his girlfriend's gravel driveway and then reminded myself she was gone. Back to his truck. I screamed, “Somebody, please help!” I recognized my own panic; the uselessness of my cries for help—intuition told me it was all for nothing.

I sat back in the driver's seat of his car and hugged the cold steering wheel. My body shook; I wore only a Patagonia shell. “David,” I cried. “Jesus Christ, David.”

I knew he had come to finish something he'd started six weeks earlier. Everything in between—the diagnosis, the drugs, the weeks incarcerated with bad food, broken crayons, and empty bookshelves—had only made him more determined to carry out his plan. It would not be like David to leave a note. He never wrote letters. His penmanship sucked.

I left his coat and his truck and everything he'd left behind just as I found it. I got back in my car and drove away from the certainty of his death. I would pick up his mother. We would figure out what to do next.

I don't know how fast I was driving. I do not know how I navigated the turns; I do not remember whether I listened to the radio. I do not remember the other cars on the highway that morning with me. The Columbia must have been running wild—on any other day, I would have noticed.

I do remember sobbing as I passed the exit by Sophie's school, imagining her working away on her report on Sequoia trees or African elephants, opening up her lunch and either being delighted or disappointed, picking out the food she didn't like and setting it aside on a paper towel. I remember wishing I'd be pulled over so I could tell a cop what had happened and they would take me, sedated, to a hospital.

I somehow found my way to Sophie's school, winding in and out of the side roads as if it was all new terrain. I recognized the signs of shock in myself and went to Sophie anyway. She was waiting for me on a bench in the hallway. Her hands were quiet in her lap, carefully holding a freshly painted picture. It was a giant Sequoia tree, the tree we'd studied together, marveling over its place in American culture, a sturdy tree that could survive nature, but not man. It was endangered now—and Sophie had chosen it for that reason. Her fingers were slender, delicate, holding onto the parts that weren't wet, careful not to smear the paint. I noticed how sturdy and straight she'd painted the trunk, a strong base for branches that looked like gnarled fingers. David would have raved over it, clearing the front of the fridge to make more room for another masterpiece. “It's perfect,” I said, before hugging her close to my chest.

Later, Colin picked Sophie up from our house and took her and
his girls to dinner. “I'll take good care of her,” he promised. “Please, don't worry. We'll get through this.” I hugged him, wishing I could stay and avoid the inevitable.

Two hours later, Alice and I were back at Diedra's mountain property, uncomfortably sitting in the living room, shivering. The cabin was small but elegant. My eyes wandered, imagining David's life here. There was the loft where they slept together, covered in Pendleton blankets. There were the architectural plans and the Indian dream catchers and all the reasons he came here when he felt so alone. David had always traveled—away from us, not closer.

“We should call the police,” I said to Alice, who sat in a rocking chair with a blue-and-red blanket over her knees. “They can help us.”

“I'd rather he be dead,” she said, “than captured again like a common criminal. I will not see him returned to that place.” She'd hated the hospital as much as I had. But how could she possibly believe that? Was it because she'd come so close to her own death after feeling such despair? Was she crazy?

I started to argue and then stopped. She looked so confused, her face twisted in pain, a sweater hanging around her bony shoulders. Her pupils were dilated, the whites of her eyes bloodshot. She wasn't making sense. Maybe she was in shock, babbling, in denial.

Diedra's face was puffy and blotchy from crying. “Would you like to look for him?” she asked me.

We stood on her porch. I was at least a foot taller than she. Her property was thick with trees and lush fields and acres of places to hide. I tried to think like David might. “Did you two ever walk together?”

She nodded, pointing to the left. “Yes. This way.”

We walked down the gravel driveway, past his truck, another five hundred yards or so to an open meadow, with long grasses and oversized sunflowers slowly dying after a long summer run. “He told me you were in an open marriage,” she blurted. “That you'd both decided to stay together for Sophie, but you weren't together any longer.” I bit my tongue. There was enough truth in that version
that I could imagine David promoting it. None of it mattered anymore—somehow I knew he was gone. I could feel loss as thick and heavy as each breath I took.

I was out of my own body, shivering from the shock of what I believed. I stepped over a log. I watched myself make this awkward walk with a woman I didn't know and listened to her talk about a man I thought I knew so well but realized I barely understood. I stepped over another log and then under a rusty barbed-wired fence. What would we do if we found him? I couldn't come up with a plan. We continued walking, confused, shocked—two strangers who had once fallen for the same man.

Into the gulley. Up again, down again, through another barbed-wire fence into another meadow. This land went on forever, thousands of acres of wilderness. He could be anywhere.

“He was just so lonely,” Diedra said. “He told me how much he loved you. That he'd screwed it up. That he couldn't start over. He'd done too much damage.”

I turned to look at her but didn't speak. Over her shoulder, a view of the Columbia Gorge opened up that took my breath. The river cut through the gorge with a line so jagged and perfect only nature could have made it. The shadows cast down from the deep canyons were vast. There were at least six different shades of green, gold, and red before me. I imagined David looking out at this view, his arms folded across his chest, at rest.

“I'm glad he found you, then,” I said. “I'm glad he found this place.”

Her face softened, some of the grief released or at least tempered. “Thank you,” she whispered. “I don't know why you are being so nice to me.”

“Because you helped him,” I said. “Can you show me where he was that first night?”

We walked to the abandoned home where the police had found David's bloodstains the night he was admitted to the hospital. It was a 1920s house, long abandoned. Vandals had spray-painted the side of the home and chopped away portions of the wood exterior.

I pulled back yellow crime scene tape and squeezed myself through the broken door to get inside. It was dark and dank; the sour smell of methamphetamine permeated the wood walls.

The home was destroyed; it now looked more like a barn, or a clubhouse for wayward bikers. I imagined the drunken demolition parties people had thrown here. The dirty floor was littered with bottles and broken glass.

“This is where he tried to cut his wrists,” she said, pointing to dried blood on the dirt floor. There was barely enough light to see. A white wooden chair—the chair where David had sat alone with a rusty razor blade—looked like a bad prop for a horror movie. I imagined him alone that night, sawing away at himself with another dirty, rusted razor blade—angry at his own incompetence for not being able to get the job done, disgusted by himself and his surroundings, all the while reveling in the dark drama.

My eyes stung from the smell and my tears, and I could not breathe in this sickness anymore.

I ran as fast as I could out the door, past the crime scene tape, out past the long yard that had been abandoned years earlier. I stood in the center of the road looking back at this stranger of a woman walking calmly toward me. I did not know if I would ever wake up from this horrible nightmare. “I'm going for help,” I said. “I don't care what Alice says. We've got to find him. We've got to get help.”

Alice stayed with Diedra. I jumped in my car and drove as fast as I could toward Portland. And I called Pat Kelly, a detective I'd known for years.

 

THE CONTINUUM OF MENTAL HEALTH

Think back on your own mental health history. Have you experienced a divorce, the death of a loved one, a financial setback such as the loss of a job? Have you moved several times or experienced physical disability? All of these stressors can have a significant impact on mental health. We may move from feeling quite optimistic and forward thinking to a period in our lives when we are anxiety ridden, unable to concentrate, and less willing to spend time with friends and family.

A friend asked me the other day, “Do you think anyone can get a mental illness?”

“Yes,” I answered. “In the same way anyone can get liver disease from drinking too much.” Our brains are a living organ, which need to be cared for just like our hearts, our kidneys, and our livers. Providing early education on keeping our brains healthy is one of the most important steps we can take in acknowledging the continuum of mental health. As one doctor told me, “Putting the head back on the body where it belongs.”

In 2013, Tom Insel, the director of the National Institute for Mental Health, told a TED audience,
“Thanks to early detection, there are 63 percent fewer deaths from heart disease than there were just a few decades go. Could we do the same for depression and schizophrenia? The first step in this new avenue of research is a crucial reframing for us to stop thinking about mental disorders and start understanding them as brain disorders.”

Just as we all fall somewhere along the heart health continuum, so do we fall on the mental health continuum. The promising recognition of that reality allows this question: “How is my own brain health, and where am I along the continuum?”

Chapter Twenty

Pat Kelly was a middle-aged Portland police officer who had risen through the ranks of his division to become commander of the Sex Crimes Task Force.

We'd met when I was a reporter for the local television station. He'd helped me on several stories, giving me the inside scoop on which ones would break big and which would fizzle.

Pat guided me through the maze of politics at the “cop shop” and chatted with me whenever our paths crossed, at parades or crime scenes. But the bulk of our relationship had been spent on the phone with one another, to talk news and city gossip, and later to talk about our families and friends. I supposed we were kindred souls, and both of us found comfort in knowing we cared about one another.

His heart was almost too tender for his current job: he investigated the worst kind of crimes against children. Sometimes after a particularly rough case, he would call me from his police car and say, “I just needed to hear your cheery voice.”