Chapter 44
Now
amy
On my good days, I imagine Nicky’s dead. Everyone has their own mechanisms for self-protection, and for me, this is better than the alternative.
Because the alternative is that my son doesn’t want to be found.
He told me that night he’d never forgive me for what I did.
How can I blame him? I’ll never forgive myself.
When I realised Nicky wasn’t just lost but missing, when I first understood he was gone, I thought I’d die too; and the fact I didn’t seemed like a second cruelty.
After you lose someone you love, you think you’ll never recover.
You think you’ll literally die from the grief; it seems impossible that your body can continue to function when you’re experiencing what seems like multiple organ failure.
It hurts to breathe, as if your ribs are crushing your heart.
Your skin is so tender, so sensitive to touch, you can wear only the softest clothes. You think it’ll always be like this.
And then one day you realise you’ve dressed yourself without thinking. Your grief has changed shape, become less jagged; the stone pressing on your chest has lifted.
You think you’ve turned a corner.
And then a day, or a week, or a month later you’ll see a pair of trainers tossed in a corner, the backs trodden down in a particular way.
Hear a familiar chord in a song you banged out together on the steering wheel.
Smell a hot dog or the pungent scent of weed wafting from an open car window.
And you’ll be swamped by a tidal wave of pain so intense, it takes your breath away.
And yet life goes on, no matter how much of an insult that feels.
Somehow you learn to live in the spaces around your grief.
At some point, acceptance creeps up on you while you’re looking the other way.
Your pain is still present, but it no longer consumes you.
Your loss isn’t the first thing you think of when you wake in the morning, but the second.
You feel horribly disloyal, but it gets easier.
You accept it, the way you accept the aches and pains as you age, the scars and grey hairs and lines.
But Nicky isn’t dead: he’s missing. There’s no memorial cross for my son in the park outside City Hall. He isn’t included in the number of dead, even though we all know the chance he’s alive is infinitesimally small.
I’m still tormented by hope.
And hope means there’s no healing, no acceptance.
No end to my suffering – and perhaps I don’t deserve it.
The hunt for my son was one of the most thorough and complex ever mounted in this country.
Lake Champlain has almost five hundred square miles of water across multiple jurisdictions.
The search involved the New York State Police, the Stowebury Police and Fire Departments, the US Coast Guard and even US Customs and Border Protection, using boats, helicopters and aircraft.
When that failed, and it became a “recovery” mission instead of a rescue, the Vermont State Police Marine Unit and Dive Team used sonar to try to find Nicky’s body.
And after they finally called off the search after more than a week, when our friends and neighbours fell away, when even the amateur sleuths and volunteer divers and armchair conspiracists drawn by the media coverage tired of our drama and moved on to the next big story; when Mac left me, exhausted by my refusal to give up, and fled out West, I still kept looking for my son.
Every patch of shrub, every culvert and inlet and ditch. There are boats and even airplanes in Lake Champlain that haven’t been located after more than half a century missing. Nicky’s body could be down there, too.
Six hundred miles of shoreline, and I’ve searched every single one.
Iris and I were plucked from the lake together by one of the flotilla of local boats who’d gone out to rescue survivors when the alarm was finally raised. They’d taken us to the marina, where we’d found Rose, pale with shock and unable to speak, wrapped in a crocheted blanket someone had given her.
My sister and I had searched the marina in the dark for our boys, and then, as the rescue boats had started to come back empty and the unthinkable became impossible to ignore, we’d left the marina and scoured the shore ourselves.
Together we’d found Jenna Lincoln, who by some miracle was clinging to an inflatable child’s paddling pool the storm had washed into the lake.
We’d discovered Kate, half-naked, wandering the beach in a state of shock, unable to remember her own name.
We’d found Ashley Lincoln, unconscious on the shore.
But there was no sign of Finn or Nicky.
Not amid the living.
And so, finally, we’d looked for our boys among the dead.
In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, in those first unbearable few hours when the enormity of our losses became clear, we were all united in our grief. We sat huddled on the shore together as the rescue services brought us one cold, dead child, and then another, and another.
And we all prayed, as each body was carried onto the sand in a body bag, not my child. Not my child. Please let it be theirs. Or theirs.
Any child but mine.
They lined them up in a hastily erected tent on the beach, out of sight of the journalists already beginning to gather.
Finn was the last.
Twenty-one body bags.
Twenty-one lives ended before they’d scarcely had a chance to begin.
But Nicky wasn’t among them.
The terrible pact Iris and I had made on the Lady fractured there, on a shore that’d become a charnel house.
Finn was dead. And Nicky was . . .
. . . gone.