I hung up. I might have thanked him first.
Looking back, I see a weird coincidence and wonder what to make of it. Just the year before, while working on a similar search, I sent a résumé to Trey and he passed on it. I emailed the candidate and told him the position was “not a good fit” but that I would keep an eye out for him for future opportunities. A few days later, Trey called to ask me if I’d heard the news about this banker. I hadn’t. Apparently, he’d left a long, rambling message on Trey’s voice mail and then shot himself. A forty-year-old with a wife and two young kids.
“Andy, you’ve got to start letting your candidates down a little easier,” he said.
Of all of the phone calls I might have gotten at that particular moment, why was it Trey on the other end of the line? Was there some meaning in it, some cosmic message that was lost on me?
I might have thought that sharing our grief would somehow lighten our load, distribute the burden, but instead it seemed to multiply, the words landing with dull thuds, disbelief, then detonation. Every phone call made me feel worse. I’m sure it was no picnic to be on the receiving end either.
Soon it was time to go to the staging area. Staging for what? I wondered. I didn’t know what we were supposed to do when we got there, but I never considered not going. Maybe I should have. With some effort I finally abandoned my post in the kitchen. It was much lighter in the bedroom now. The fan still whirred, the air purifier still hummed, the blinds were still drawn, but the window now lay in full sun.
This is where I was, I thought, when she died. If I go back to bed, will she be alive again?
My arms and legs felt heavy and numb as I went into the closet to change. I grabbed a polo shirt and khaki shorts, the first things I saw that looked reasonably presentable, feeling all the while like a condemned man preparing to walk down death row. In my mind I could clearly see the weather-beaten row of wooden planking at the marina leading down to the water, no doubt glistening in the late August sun. Death row, I thought.
It should have been me. Why her and not me? I’d have given anything to trade places with her. I imagined Alison lying on that planking. I didn’t want to, but that’s how intrusive thoughts work.
For weeks afterward, every time I stopped for even a moment, I found myself imagining her death. At the same time, I genuinely felt that if I saw it, if I ever saw the video I’d learned there was of it, I wouldn’t be able to handle it. I wouldn’t necessarily die. I would just end. I would cease to be.
They say that sharks swim even while they’re asleep, because if they stop swimming, the water stops flowing over their gills and they drown. Like a shark, I couldn’t stop. Even then, even on the day Alison was killed, I knew that I needed to channel all of the emotions coursing through my veins into something bigger than myself. I needed to pick a fight. It didn’t really matter with whom. It was the only thing I could think to do, the only way I thought I’d be able to survive.
And I needed to survive. I needed to do it for Alison. If she was really gone, then her death had to mean something. Then and there, standing at the closet and picking out a polo shirt, I vowed I would make her death mean something.
Barbara must have been changing right alongside me, but I don’t remember it. The next thing I knew, we were sitting in our new charcoal-gray Honda CR-V heading north on Route 220 toward Roanoke, Barbara with her hair pulled back under a khaki Nantahala Outdoor Center ball cap the way she always did when she wanted to look presentable but didn’t have the time or energy to make a big show of it.
The staging area was about forty-five minutes away. For the first half hour it was virtually silent inside the car. We didn’t turn on the radio, didn’t play any music, didn’t say a word. There was no sound aside from the wind whipping past the windows and the tires on the road. Route 220 winds through the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the road surrounded on either side by a dense wall of evergreen trees. At the top of a hill we rounded a bend and the landscape opened up in front of us. From the crest of the ridge, the rolling wooded hills lay spread before us under a deep blue sky, the sun shining through fluffy white clouds. The scene was picture-perfect, like something off of a postcard. Scenes like that are the reason people move to Virginia, why the colonials settled here in the first place, why the Confederates fought and died over the land. Barbara and I had raised our family here because we loved this land too. As I stared out into that ethereal blue, I realized that that’s where Alison was now. She was no longer on this earth. Her soul was out mingling somewhere in the vast expanse before me. And in that moment, the dam burst. Feeling finally returned to my body. I wept uncontrollably for the remainder of the drive.
For the first five minutes or so, Barbara reached over and held my right hand while I drove with my left. Then the tears picked up and I needed to wipe my eyes, so she moved her hand to my knee. All morning I had felt numb. Now as I felt pressed back into myself, I felt a heaviness settling over me like an astronaut might feel while being launched into a brave new world. Barbara asked a few times if she needed to drive, but I was not going to pull over. I couldn’t stop.
Barbara has always been my rock. Even in the depths of her unfathomable sorrow, her incredible pain, she was stoic. She did not weep. In contrast, I was a wreck. All I could think about was how Alison was gone and I had failed her. I hadn’t been there to protect her when she had needed me most. Certainly, there had been no God to protect her—as T. C. Boyle wrote: “We are powerless. We are bereft. And the gods—all the gods of all the ages combined—are nothing but a rumor.”
I wondered what she had thought about at the end, whether she had thought of me, had wished for me, had called for me. I felt like I was going to throw up, simply erupt like a volcano, but I wasn’t sure whether I was about to spew grief or sadness or stomach bile or red-hot molten rage or some combination. I wished again that I could have been there for her, that I could have gone in her place. Had any sort of supernatural being appeared to make the offer, “Devil and Daniel Webster”-style, I would have gone at a moment’s notice.
I still would, if anyone’s listening.
The staging area turned out to be a small church parking lot cordoned off and monitored by a middle-aged officer sporting a khaki sheriff’s uniform and a crew cut, squinting behind aviator glasses in the glare of the late summer sun. He might have been a dad himself. He didn’t know us, though, and when he asked who we were, it set me off.
“We’re Alison’s parents, goddammit!”
I regretted it as soon as the words left my mouth. He didn’t know any better. He was just doing his job.
It was my first—but sure as hell not my last—angry outburst since it happened, even as I was still having a hard time saying what “it” was, even just to myself. It was only 10 a.m., but it was already oppressively hot. I could feel the heat rolling in through the open car window and rising into my face. I imagined one of those elementary school volcano diagrams, the lava merely a surface manifestation of deeper turmoil below the surface, turmoil touched off by a tectonic shift that threatened to topple all structures and all lives on this suddenly unstable terrain; lava that would rise and explode to incinerate everything it touched, buildings and bridges alike, leaving nothing but ash. Just like the diagrams, I felt the burning lava rise in my throat, molten anger that erupted from me in the form of vicious words I had little control over.
The officer winced, took a step back, put his hand to his mouth as if to protect his face. Chagrined, he apologized and waved us into the lot. We quickly spotted Mike Bell, the program, promotions, and operations director at WDBJ. I had met Mike the previous spring at the Franklin County Moonshine Festival. Barbara and I had met Alison and Chris there and they’d introduced us to Mike. His wife, Nancy, worked in the Henry County school system and Barbara knew her quite well. Mike was a kindly, professorial man with a salt-and-pepper vandyke beard, a shock of unruly hair more heavily salted than peppered, and dark-tinted glasses. He had a dry wit and habitually