Sharon, in the Snow
Another story in a series about mysterious, powerful women who disappeared
How shall we sing of Sharon Callahan
Belle of the working class
Who drove away on a dark sad night
And in the snowy woods was lost?
- S. Taylor Danton
Sing muse, sing as Danton did of Sharon Callahan, the belle of the working class, who went into the snow. And how shall we sing of her? We will sing first of her homeland, because she was Irish and of the Irish. She was heir to the millions who sailed away from famine and history. Who disembarked in this odd nation, a nation founded by the hated English. A nation that wanted them only for their limbs to work the great machines of industry that brought forth the new empire of liberty. And there was liberty in the new America, freedom from the bitch-goddess of time, plantation, and war. It was strange, but it was only here, on an amputated limb of the British Empire, that the Irish would find the first real freedom they had ever known. It was perhaps the only real freedom they would ever know, because Ireland has remained a prisoner of history. But in America, history had been erased in a single Declaration of Independence, and what a mighty, free land had emerged out of this breach in time. Here, and not in Cork or Belfast, the sons of Erin would make their stand.
But the stand would be a quiet one, especially for Sharon. In the Kingstown neighborhood of Lowell, Massachusetts, where Sharon was born and lived her life, there was no history. People lived as they were, without change. Days and times passed with the summers and winters, life revolved and things stayed the same. From time to time, there was a death, but the departed were always elderly and infirm, their end had been long in coming, and since everyone knew everyone, everyone had a long time to prepare for it. And above all, there were rituals. No nation has ever been as Catholic as the Irish, and when death came, there was the Church. The Church with its prayers, processions, open caskets, and invocations of eternal life. And along with solemnity, the wake at which drink and song would dispel mourning. The wake that cultivated that particular mood, the atmosphere, at which the Irish excel — a species of strident melancholy suffused with irony and alcohol. This was the elixir that, for a moment, could vanquish death. It may be Sharon’s greatest tragedy that, with no body to display or passage confirmed, her loved ones could never be sure if she had truly departed. Thus, they could never summon up the rites that might have salved, to some degree, her absence.
The Kingstown Irish lived modest lives. There was money — more than there would have been had they not taken to the ships — but not much of it. They were poor by the standards of a rich country, which are quite different from those of a poor country. They lived mostly in two-story houses so close one to the other that they almost touched. A few square feet of backyard and a driveway just wide enough for the one car the families owned, usually several years old and in need of maintenance, completed the architecture of the neighborhood. There were fences for the sake of division, but they were not high, and made of rusted chain-link. Inside, those houses were immaculate. Not a trace of dust was ever found on the old and polished furniture. The shelves were laden with mementos, heirlooms, and icons. On the walls, there were pictures of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and John F. Kennedy. They were a pagan society, and this was the trinity they worshipped.
And then, it must be admitted, there was the drink. It is a slur upon the Irish that they drink more than others. Certainly, they drink less than, say, the Russians and the Japanese; and the Jamaicans’ intake of marijuana far exceeds an Irishman’s intake of whiskey. Nonetheless, there is no need to deny that the Irish enjoy their spirits. Black beer has been a comfort and a solace to them for centuries, even as it destroyed their bodies, clouded their minds, and left them helpless before all the depredations of Albion. Blessing and curse, life and death, this was the black beer of the Irish. It was what they consumed to forget their need to consume things, and it was thus no less important in the new, golden land, which was, even when they first arrived, a nation dedicated to consumption.
Sharon too liked the drink. She would have been a fool not to, as it was a requirement upon almost every occasion. In her world, the teetotaler was an object of suspicion, if not a total outcast. All through her young life, the drink was there. And on that night, it was there too on the floor of the car, easily within reach of the driver. Cans were opened, others were empty, drink had without question been consumed. But this is not sufficient evidence to blame drink for what happened. Drink alone cannot explain the long flight north. Drink alone cannot induce the primal desire for escape, such as directs the whale to beach itself and return to the land its primordial ancestors abandoned. Sharon was not going somewhere, nor did she wish to. She wanted to leave somewhere, and for good reason. That is a rational and not an intoxicated decision.
She was running away, of course, from certain specific things: from Chet Williamson, from her transgressions against him, from the life she had jury-rigged for herself in the midst of her troubles, and perhaps from interior forces as unknown and uncertain as her fate. After all, it was not such a strange time to run. By the 1990s, the island of the Irish in Kingstown had long been in a state of decay. Yes, the baptisms and weddings and funerals and wakes continued, but the vacuum of the monoglot America that surrounded them drew everything toward it. The void of the vast consumerist regime swallowed the old country, until each death marked another moment when some piece of Ireland sank into the sea. The nation, the Church, the Kennedys, not necessarily in that order, were giving way to an era of amnesia.
Sharon would have seen this in the shape of things around her. Once, the men of Kingstown had worked in the factories, the police department, and various forms of manual labor. Now, the factories were gone, the tradition of police benevolence was fading into the past, and the children of the neighborhood studied hard, went to college, and melted away into suburbia. Or they stayed, got pregnant young, disappeared into narcotics, and grew old. Even the chain-link fences that demarcated each man’s sacred ground began to rust. Things were no longer done the way they had once been done. This was not because of any conscious rebellion, but because the way things were done had been forgotten. Time, the universal solvent, had dismantled the fragile architectures of place. There were few indeed who remembered the republic. Those who did remember and sought to remind the rest failed, because no one listened to them. By the time Sharon was a young woman, she was living in a place where memory had become memory. In which people recalled only that there was something they had forgotten. What it was, they could not say. And this was painful to them, a source of silent anguish that they seldom acknowledged.
This set the Kingstown Irish apart from their fellow citizens, most of whom had forgotten that they had forgotten. Nor did they care one way or the other. To them, the ‘90s were a golden age, an orgy of abundance whose duration was eternal and horizons illimitable. It was the last interregnum, a rare moment of peace and silence between the end of one war and the start of another. It was the space between two collapses: that of the barrier that divided Europe for 50 years, and that of Manhattan’s twin monuments to commerce. In between those two event horizons of history, from which light could not escape, a strange homeostasis was achieved. People turned to the cultivation of wealth and the refinements of pleasure. Many got rich, and those who did not borrowed enough to act as if they were rich. So, the ethos of money exercised dominion over all others — including the ancient ways of Kingstown. People accepted that to have money was good and not to have it was bad, which was not unprecedented — especially among the poor — but they added the belief that there was nothing better than to have money. They cannot be blamed. Peace was breaking out all over, not because any great conflicts had been resolved, but because no one had any better ideas. There seemed to be nothing to fight about anymore. It was not that no one wanted to fight — violence remained endemic to the species — but they could think of no reason to do so, and attention spans were now quite short, so everyone moved on. This was, of course, illusory. There were men in mountainous deserts and icy wastes who knew exactly why they wanted to fight, and even a few militants in the vast Midwestern spaces of America felt the same way. But they were irruptions in the decisive zeitgeist. All the great ideologies were dead or futile. What was left but to be comfortable and seek to be more comfortable?
The Kingstown Irish were no exception. The great struggle for their homeland’s independence was long over, and most were too young even to remember it, let alone its labyrinthine loyalties and rivalries. Even the PIRA, which held such an obsessive hold over them for two decades, had given up its arms. Ireland itself meant less and less to them, except during the grand Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations, during which all Ireland seemed to have decamped en masse for American soil in a haze of green and beer. For the youngest generation, of which Sharon was a part, there was only America. And what would be their place in it? And did it even matter in an age of such profound indifference? From a very early age, Sharon did not appear to believe that it did.
It was a time in which an enormous number of children grew up without fathers, but Sharon grew up without a mother. Mary Callahan succumbed to breast cancer at the age of only 35, the same age her great-grandmother had been carried off by the same disease. As a result, sole parenthood fell to Sharon’s father Frank Callahan, who, though he was not by nature suited to the role, made the best of it. Sharon was never without the proper attention and affection. Mary had gifted Frank only with girls: Siobhan, the oldest; Tess, the middle child; and Sharon, the youngest. The age gap between them was miniscule — a bare 13 months between Siobhan and Tess — but they assumed the natural roles assigned to them: Siobhan the patient and responsible, Tess the mischievous and playful, and Sharon the coddled princess.
Frank did not lament that he was the father of daughters, but it did complicate the situation once he became a widower. Like most men, he knew nothing whatsoever about women, and now had to raise three of them. In particular, Frank dreaded the onset of adolescence, and when Siobhan turned 11, Frank swore his sister Mimi into confidence, and both agreed that, when the girls began to menstruate, it would be Mimi who would handle the technical details. This relieved Frank’s anxiety and embarrassment somewhat, but he knew that, in accordance with tribal law, the duty to safeguard his girls’ virginity still fell to him and him alone. He lived in fear of what the implications of this might be, particularly given the way we live now. He was a child of the Church, after all, and though he was as lapsed as the next man, a part of him, perhaps several parts, or more, still believed it his duty to save his girls from mortal sin. The thought that one of his girls could be rumored about town or, God forbid, accompanied to the abortionist, was almost more than he could stand. He knew that these were the mores of a world that no longer existed; that our mad age, for the most part — at least in this part of the country — no longer cared. The Church was an old church, very old, the world was filled with new people, and these people, by and large, did not believe in old things. Even among the pious, Frank knew, there were a great many — including, sometimes, himself — who took communion when they should not have done so. But no one cared about that either. Even worse was when he pondered his own youth, a time when the world was not indifferent to the laws of his faith and his nation. At such moments, his blood ran cold, because while he was a boy, and thus somewhat insulated from consequence, he had been doing things with girls. Today, he knew, the same things and a great deal more were being done by boys and girls. The thought that his daughters might soon be among those girls horrified him.
It may have been because of these anxieties that Frank became determined to give his daughters the most idyllic childhood possible. Romance or remarriage ceased to interest him, and his life became his job as a union delegate and his family in the small two-floor on Saltanstall Street. And indeed, in its way, life was idyllic. The ethics of the home were proletarian, but within those constraints, the Callahan girls —Sharon in particular — wanted for very little. It is difficult to conceive of a more banal childhood than the one Sharon enjoyed. There was play in the streets, or at least on the sidewalks; picnics and barbeques; trees and presents on Christmas and fireworks on July 4; neighborhood-wide events such as Easter Egg Hunts and Christmas carols; Sundays bright and early at Church and weekdays bright and early at Saint Anne’s Preparatory, tuition paid by the Vatican; movies, always wholesome, in the theater and then on videotape; a much-loved pet dog that died to the sadness of all involved, as well as pet turtles, fish, hamsters, and at least one white mouse, all of which, in various circumstances, also died; visits to neighbors, friends, and relatives; the revolution of the Earth through silent black space, from the short summer to the long winter and back again; from frigid to warm to hot to cold to frigid; the leaves that turned green to brown to green; the soil that softened and then froze; the days short and the nights long, always reversing upon themselves on each solstice in pagan orbit. There was nothing whatsoever unusual about Sharon’s world.
This was how it seemed from afar, but within the house itself, there was a more chaotic and unorthodox existence, if only because of the ever-present absence of Mary Callahan. The girls had no mother, and since Frank Callahan was a man’s man, with all the virtues and vices inherent in the breed, certain tasks fell to the girls. House cleaning, laundry, and cooking, which for centuries past have been women’s work, were all done by the sisters, if only to ensure that they would be done at all. Even childrearing fell upon the children themselves, especially Siobhan, as she was the first-born. In effect, Siobhan became mother to Tess, and they both became mother to Sharon. It was they who accompanied her everywhere, remonstrated over her troubles, punished her misbehavior, kept her to her studies, and tried to instill her with that moral sense demanded by class, religion, and state at that particular time in that particular corner of America.
It could be said, with some sadness, that of the three girls only Sharon had a genuine childhood. Siobhan and Tess to a lesser extent were forced to become half-adults, matriarchs burdened with the worries and responsibilities from which children are meant to be free, though in truth they rarely are. It was Sharon who was permitted to be foolish, irresponsible, and heedless of consequences. She grew up with that particular sensation young children often have, which is that the world does not touch them. The Earth stands at a remove and can be observed without fear. So long as such children are kept close to home, this is not dangerous, and Sharon was kept close to home. She was never without the supervision of one of her sisters, and it was rare for her and the family in general to venture out of their small neighborhood. And why should they have done so? Everything, more or less, was already there.
It is not the American way for people to remain in the “old neighborhood.” People are expected to grow up, move out, go to college, get a fine Anglo-Saxon job in banking or the law, and settle elsewhere, often thousands of miles away. This is seen as a fine and healthy thing, the way of the world. One is meant to separate from one’s parents and siblings, and venture out into the great bazaar of late-model capitalism, where all things are possible, where all the riches and freedoms of a free and rich society are to be found. To remain in the place where one began is to be unrealized, stagnant, dependent; one of those who have not “made good” and “made something” of oneself. One might even be that worst of all possible creatures: a “loser,” which in America is the lowest form of life. Even murderers and child molesters are admired in silence if they are good at what they do, but the loser — usually a person without a great deal of money or success at something — is less than an object of macabre contempt. The loser exists only as a totem, an untouchable, a Dalit, a model of what one should never do and never become. And yet, in a strange way, America needs its losers; because without them, how could it know who the winners are?
If one is fair-minded, of course, one must admit that there is a certain amount of truth in the prevailing ideology. Small communities and closed societies can be confining and oppressive, and a family can be a tyranny. It is good thing for people to have their own lives, free of the encumbrances of ancient traditions they may not wish to embrace. But this is not always the case, and it was not the case with Sharon Callahan. It is likely that, had she remained in the old neighborhood, she would have been alright.
Sharon was 13 when she went on the St. Anne’s trip to New York City to attend a papal appearance at Shea Stadium. She and a dozen other young women, just young enough to be women, boarded buses and made their way south, where they stayed in a Church facility presided over by a group of well-tempered nuns and a handful of priests. They spent some time shopping and seeing the tourist sites, joined thousands of their peers from around the world to hear the Supreme Pontiff, and then made their way home the next morning. The entire thing took all of 48 hours. But while nothing untoward was mentioned by Sharon or any of the other participants, it is reasonable to conclude that something happened to Sharon during that trip. Precisely what and when, we do not know. It is almost certain that we will never know. What we do know is that, when she returned, a certain change came over Sharon. It was subtle at first, and slow to take hold, so it was not understood as such until much later. But there is no doubt that Sharon’s old ebullience, the beautiful carelessness with which she met the world, left her for good. She became, at first, quiet. She refused to speak about the trip in anything other than vague generalities, and after some months stopped talking about anything in any great depth or seriousness. A dark cloud seemed to have descended upon her. Her demeanor coarsened and soured, punctuated by bursts of anger at her father and sisters. The sisters, in particular, who were used to Sharon’s confidence on anything and everything, were stunned by this development. Sharon, so far as they could remember, had never been angry before. Frank put it down to what he had always feared: the arrival of adolescence. But Siobhan and Tess were less convinced, and began to wonder if they had somehow done a horrible thing to their sister.
Their concern only increased when, after she turned 14, Sharon began to sequester herself in her room and, her sisters discovered, sneak out at night. Only they knew about these nocturnal excursions. They still felt responsible for their youngest sibling, and knew that if their father found out about Sharon’s disappearances, the reaction would be harsh and — though not violent — punitive. They did not note the irony that here, for the first time, the duty Frank had devolved upon them to guard Sharon at all costs had turned against him. The sisters kept silent. They hoped that as summer waned and the harsh Massachusetts fall and winter set in, Sharon would want to remain home on cold nights, and no action would be required of them. As is almost always the case when inaction in chosen, this proved not to be the case.
Siobhan and Tess knew about Penobscot Quarry, a deep circular rent in the earth named for an Indian tribe long since exterminated and forgotten. It had once choked forth minerals for the uses of man, but like so much of the area’s ancient industry, it had been abandoned for over a decade. It filled up with rainwater and, due to its convenient proximity to the city — just close enough and just far enough away — became a favorite nocturnal meeting spot for recalcitrant teenagers. Over time, the more capable among them drive off the homeless and drug addicts who inhabited the site, much as the Puritans had done to the Penobscot several centuries before. Large metal trash cans were procured in which fires were lit with newspaper, gasoline, and stray branches from the nearby woods, so the local adolescents now had a source of heat and illumination that allowed for year-round attendance. This place, Siobhan and Tess soon discovered from schoolyard gossip, was Sharon’s regular nocturnal destination.
There are numerous reasons why teenagers enjoy celebration. Some take pleasure in intoxication, others want to stave off the boredom of American bourgeoise life, still others want to be uninhibited with members of the opposite sex — there is no way to ascertain what combination of these and other factors are at work in any individual case. But there are some, perhaps many, perhaps most, who are there to live out Samuel Johnson’s maxim: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Sharon, it seems, wanted to get rid of the pain of being Sharon. Why being Sharon should have caused her such pain is the great mystery. It is clear, however, that neither Siobhan nor Tess could understand it. Or perhaps they could, but could not admit it even to themselves. They chose instead to remain mystified. For a while, they lived with it, though it began to take its toll on them. Siobhan had trouble sleeping and Tess suffered a sudden and severe outbreak of acne — the price, no doubt, of the enormous energies required to convince themselves that nothing was wrong.
It is strange that snow should play such a prominent role in the upheavals of Sharon’s life. In a manner that was almost psychopompic, the great snows that fall across New England every winter recur again and again in this weird and disturbing story. The storms of pure white that emerge out of the black sky of deep winter seem to whirl, fully formed, out of Sharon’s silent and unknown agony. Perhaps it could not have been otherwise. The snows of New England are not lovely, dark, and deep. There is nothing picturesque about them. Their great white is a chthonic force. It erupts out of the underworld, swirls in wreaths of luminescent clouds on moonlit nights, colors everything the same monochromatic hue, and fills the air until one can no longer differentiate between the heavens and the firmament. On such nights, the snow is not serene, but a genuine threat. It can drown streets and bury highways, collapse roofs, stop up chimneys and exhaust pipes, trap vehicles on impassable roads, and render emergency aid impossible. The snow brings death.
Siobhan and Tess knew this, and it was what at last moved them to act. In February 1995, a blizzard struck northeastern Massachusetts on a Friday night and enveloped Lowell. The sisters, watching the storm gather strength, knew that Sharon had escaped her bedroom several hours before, with Penobscot Quarry as her destination. For some time, they were content to worry. They hoped that the weather would deter Sharon from her pleasures and she would soon return home. The sisters clung to optimism until midnight. By then the television news had reported several closed streets, fallen trees, car accidents, and power outages. Some basic quasi-maternal urge took over, and without giving it much thought, the sisters decided on a rescue.
Siobhan was the only one old enough to drive, so she piloted the storm, with Tess in the passenger seat to navigate. They moved at a bare 10 miles an hour through the heart of the tempest. The winds were high enough to shake the car from side to side and, illuminated by the high beams, the flakes seemed to fly at the windshield like thousands of fingers reaching for them out of the night. Twice, they saw the flash of red and blue lights that signaled the scene of an accident, and once had to take a detour around a fallen tree of immense size that blocked both lanes of the highway. As they emerged from the city and entered its wooded outskirts, without light to aid them, visibility fell to almost zero, and Siobhan’s foot barely touched the gas pedal as they crawled on through the white. Though neither spoke out loud, both girls prayed that the transmission, which emitted strange noises, would stay operational long enough for them to complete the rescue. Both knew, moreover, that if it failed, it would mean a long night buried by the snow and tortured by the cold, without hope of immediate aid. And what would that mean for Sharon, who was the point of the entire enterprise?
In the end, the machine functioned as well as could be expected under the circumstances, and their prayers for the mechanism were rewarded. At the heart of the labyrinth of snow, they saw loom out of the darkness five gouts of flame like the eyes of nocturnal creatures. They were the burning garbage cans, pressed into service as a bulwark against the elements. The sisters exited the car clad in their enormous hooded parkas and found over a dozen teenagers in various states of intoxication. Some clutched beer bottles, others smoked cannabis, a few seemed to be under the influence of mysterious unknown substances, or perhaps they were simply mad. None were capable of effective communication, nor did it matter, because the wind was so intense that its roar drowned out anything short of an impassioned scream. So, ever practical, the sisters went from fire to fire in search of Sharon. Tess shone an industrial flashlight into the faces of the revelers, one after another without success, until they came to the farthest inferno, near the tree-line of the primeval woods.
Several young people sat on the ground and stared up at the flames, which lit the swirl of snow a hellish orange like the fire hail of the seventh plague. From face to empty face went the light until it fell upon a shadowed form that was not quite human, because it was two humans caught in an embrace, and one of them was their sister. Sharon lay on her side. Her coat was open, her sweater and shirt pulled up and one cup of her bra pulled down, revealing a single red and inflamed nipple. The boy who lay next to her was also on his side, facing her, with belt and pants undone. Sharon held his erect penis in her hand.
Siobhan and Tess said nothing. They put their arms under Sharon’s shoulders, dragged her to her feet, pulled up her bra, pulled down her shirt, and zipped up her coat. She made only a few mumbling noises in response. The boy protested, but was in no state to resist. Sharon, who seemed at best semi-conscious, allowed her sisters to lead her away from the circle of fire and back to the car. Tess laid her across the back seat and covered her with a blanket, and then the sisters made their slow and cautious way back home through a storm that seemed to have only intensified. Sharon made no sound the entire way, even when they had to stop short to allow an ambulance to go by as its red and blue lights seared the darkness with neon technicolor brilliance. At certain points, the sisters grew worried enough to glance back to make sure Sharon was still breathing, and each time discovered, to their relief, that she was. They continued to roll forward at a few miles an hour. The wheels slipped this way or that and aroused fears of the dreaded “black ice.” The wind struck hard enough to rock them in their seats. And the sisters drifted into their own world. There seemed to be nothing in the entire known universe except Sharon, the car, themselves, and the storm. All that was or ever would be was contained in that tiny vehicle, and nothing would or could interrupt this pleasant dream, for both sisters were certain that these steel trusses and panes of glass, this radiator and these headlights, would now protect them from the evils without — the terrible white void just beyond the frosted windows — and they in turn could protect Sharon, and all would be well. The world would be all dreams forever, because there would never be a need to awake. But then the journey came to an end, and they knew they would have to wake, and the world, in all its horror, would have to be faced once again.
Siobhan went into the house to ascertain whether their father was asleep, and found that he was. Tess dragged Sharon from the car, and the two girls, in deliberate silence, supporting her under each shoulder, walked Sharon into the house, up the carpeted stairs, and into her room. Throughout, Sharon said not a word, and gave little sign that she understood what was happening to her at all. Her sisters made no attempt to force her from her silence. They undressed her and put her to bed, and Siobhan noted several scratch marks on her inner thigh. Tess obtained an extra blanket from the hall closet, which they laid on top of Sharon as they had once done when she was a child and they were concerned she might catch a chill despite the central heating. Siobhan examined Sharon’s fingers and toes one by one in search of frostbite and found none, so the sisters let Sharon sleep. Each went to her own room. They stopped only for a brief moment in the hallway, where it was possible that one of them might have said something, but neither could think of anything to say. They stood in silence for a few seconds and then parted. Siobhan and Tess would later come to regret this moment, though they never spoke of it to each other. They believed that if they had said something, anything, it might have made all the difference. But what was there to say? Sharon, they must have known, or at least suspected, had made her choice. This was how it was going to be from now on. How many more times, the sisters wondered, would they be forced to make such a voyage, or something like it, again? And they knew that, if called upon, they would do it. They would venture out into the blizzard, into the demonic white, and play the role Sharon would have them play. Theirs was a conscious and intelligent despair. They looked back and saw the inexplicable. They looked forward and saw only endless toil. Part of them longed to know why, and another part knew full well that Sharon would not tell them, would rather die than tell them, and they could not force her to do so.
Sharon slept through the night, and by the next morning had developed a high fever. For three days, she remained in bed. Sometimes she muttered incomprehensible phrases to herself; at other times she saw and heard things that were not there. Her sisters ministered to her through the long nights, and hoped that somehow the fire raging inside Sharon might burn away the poisons inside her. They had decided against persuasion and threats, so they pinned their hopes on disease. And for a time, the disease appeared to comply. Sharon’s fever broke on the fourth day, and the day after that she was back at St. Anne’s Preparatory. Several months passed during which the sisters kept up a dedicated if discreet watch over her, but she showed no signs that she would return to her previous behavior. She went to school, came home, and stayed there. Each night at midnight, when one of her sisters tiptoed down the hall and peeked in her door, she was asleep in her own bed. Siobhan and Tess allowed themselves a brief moment of hope. Their decision to choose rescue followed by silence over more drastic measures seemed to have been vindicated, and they were content to leave it at that.
This strategy, so often employed by troubled families, had its advantages. It was effective in the short term, required a minimum of effort, and above all extinguished the inherent terror of change. Faced with terrible implications, it comforted the sisters to simply ignore them. Most things are, after all, survivable. The method’s fatal flaw, however, was that the devil you know is still the devil, and the devil is never content to sit idle. Siobhan and Tess, much too late, would be made to understand this. Despite all their hopes, they, like everybody else, would be subjected to the brute logic of the world, and this would be the occasion of great bitterness, regret, and recrimination. They would choose each on her own to blame herself rather than the other, but both would know that they were each innocent and guilty. The tragedy was not of their own making, in that they had not engineered it. But it was not true that they had done “everything they could” to ameliorate it. In the supreme moment, though it had not felt ominous at the time, they had done nothing. Their only comfort in later years was the thought that, even if they had done something, it would have made no difference. This may well have been true. Perhaps fate is a sealed thing, and we are determined beings for whom choice and action are the merest, if sweet and welcome, delusions. It is possible. But the sisters would and could never know this for sure.
Later, when they began to compose a crude historical narrative in their own minds, they would divide the thing into two phases. The first began with Sharon’s trip to New York City and ended the night they rescued her from the blizzard. The second began with Chet Williamson. They were never able to ascertain where the two met. Since Williamson was a student at UMass Lowell, it could not have been at St. Anne’s or related institutions or events. The sisters would presume that the initial encounter took place on one of those nights at Penobscot Quarry, for over time that place had coalesced into the dark center of their universe. They began to ascribe to the Quarry a certain malevolent presence, and for them it became a dreamtime disembodied from its corporeal existence as a site. Sharon and Chet must have met there, because there was nowhere else sufficient to the evil therein.
What Siobhan and Tess did know for certain was that early in Sharon’s sophomore year at St. Anne’s, rumors began to circulate that Sharon was a seeing a college boy. This proved to be less than a secret. Chet Williamson, tall, blond, and rich, drove a white BMW always kept immaculately clean and polished — at considerable expense — that was not the type to escape notice in a working class, non-WASP enclave like Kingstown. Before long, Siobhan and Tess knew that he picked Sharon up from school on a regular basis, and soon the neighbors spotted him as he dropped her off around the corner next to the Shamrock Liquor Mart, where, the sisters learned, he often purchased twelve-packs of execrable American light beer, and that information alone aroused the locals’ contempt.
Soon, the winter arrived and with it omens and portents. In early November, Tess checked Sharon’s room at midnight for the first time in months and discovered that she was gone. A discreet canvas of local insomniacs confirmed that a white BMW had been spotted in the neighborhood around 11:30 pm that night. Tess and Siobhan remonstrated together for some time, but concluded that forbearance was not an option, if only because it would likely drive them both mad. So, the next night, when they found Sharon gone a second time, the sisters took their father’s car and made their way to Penobscot Quarry once again, this time on a still and clear autumn night, with a fire-red eldritch moon that hung massive over the horizon. At the Quarry, they found the usual revelers, as well as some unknown younger ones — the next generation of decadents — but there was no sign of Sharon. When asked, those who were comprehensible replied that they had not seen Sharon at the Quarry in months, and the rumor was that she had moved on to a more elevated style of bacchanal at UMass Lowell.
Siobhan and Tess abandoned their search, and sat alone in the car for some time as the engine rumbled and noxious fumes spilled out into the headlight beams. Their options were limited. To comb through every student party at UMass Lowell looking for signs of Sharon was out of the question. Sharon was not yet 16, which meant it was possible to involve the police, but the idea of dragging Sharon against her will through a statutory rape case terrified them. They knew that Sharon would never forgive them for it, and this would sever the last fragile bond that still held them to their sister. That, above all, they could not bear. They would not save Sharon from herself at any cost. It would be as if they had never saved her at all. In that moment, to the vibration of the engines, the whir of the heater, and the stillness of the night, the sisters finally despaired. There was, they both realized, without a word exchanged, absolutely nothing they could do.
It was in the deepest darkness that they drove home that night. The blackness around them seemed, for the first time, to be not mere absence of light, but a tangible presence. The sisters had nothing left, and even when they finally found themselves back in the old neighborhood with its familiar streetlights and neon signs, they did not feel at home. The world was alien to them now, and it had laws, rules, morals, and punishments they did not understand. The only prudent course was to withdraw from it, to hide, to escape the encroachment of time and stillness. For three days afterwards, Siobhan and Tess did not speak to each other, because language itself had failed them.
Over the next several months, as the winter deepened and the snows came, the signs accumulated. Sharon would not attend school, would not even return home for days on end. School officials came and spoke with Frank, but he did nothing, as he had always done where Sharon was concerned. He could not bear to sully his princess, let alone believe that she was already sullied. Sharon’s few friends complained to Siobhan and Tess that they had not heard from her in months. She would not contact them, nor respond when they tried to contact her. One night when Sharon did come home, she refused to remove a pair of sunglasses, though it was long past dusk. Sometime later, Tess caught a glimpse of her without them in a bathroom mirror, and saw what appeared to be a very black and wide bruise over her left eye, where a right-handed man would have hit her. Later that night, Siobhan heard Sharon weeping in her darkened bedroom. Two weeks after that, Sharon spent almost an hour in the bathroom. An hour or two later, Tess found flecks of blood in the upper left corner of the sink. She told herself Sharon had her period, but the truth is that Tess had no doubt that those crimson spots indicated something far more sinister. In late January, Sharon did not come home for a week and a half, and in a spasm of despair, Siobhan and Tess searched her room. They found nothing untoward except a handful of thongs — which Frank had forbidden his girls to wear — a pack of condoms, and a small amount of marijuana hidden in the back of a drawer. Given the mores and morals of the time, the sisters knew this was all more or less benign. It was not enough to justify a confrontation. They put everything back in its place, turned off the light, and closed the door behind them.
That night, the most powerful blizzard of that winter struck Massachusetts. Hurricane-force winds were reported in Gloucester and Cape Cod, with substantial coastal flooding, major highways were shut down, several counties lost power for over five hours, some 2,500 trees were felled by the drifts, and five people were killed — two by falling trees, two of exposure, one electrocuted by a downed power line, and one suffocated by exhaust fumes in a snowbound car. The governor declared a state of emergency, schools were closed statewide, and the president offered federal assistance, which was refused.
For Siobhan and Tess, it was a sleepless night. They sat on Siobhan’s bed as the wind rattled the windows and the snow battered against the panes, the flakes lit slate grey by the desk lamp that alone illuminated the room. The sisters did not speak much, and when they did, it was only of banalities. They did not articulate the fear that bored its way through their bodies and out their fingertips and filled the abhorrent vacuum around them. Sharon, they felt with terrible immensity, was not there. But this time they had not the slightest idea where she might be, and thus they could not rescue her. All their long silence, they felt, all the nothing they had done, all the great effort they had put into the belief that the disease might cure itself, had proved futile.
Sometime just before dawn, Siobhan and Tess fell asleep, Siobhan propped up on pillows at the head of the bed, and Tess perched sideways at the foot, her back against the wall, a single cushion in the small of her back. When the police called around 7:30 am, the snow had stopped, and one of Massachusetts’ winter suns hung incendiary in the pale blue. It belied the desperate cold that froze the crystalline lattices of the two-to-three-foot snow drifts into solid ice. When the call came, neither sister was surprised or shocked. Perhaps, in a sense, they had already grieved. They had gone past horror, and entered something for which there is not really a name, as it was not mourning or acceptance. It was simple recognition that the thing had happened.
The sisters understood the full implications of the call, even though in and of itself it was not ominous. The police asked to speak to Sharon, and when Frank ascended the stairs in search of her, and found she was not there, it was an awkward moment between himself and his two older daughters, who had done so much to conceal so much from him. The police were told Sharon was absent. They expressed their thanks and hung up. An hour later, two uniformed officers appeared at the door before a shocked Frank and a sober Siobhan and Tess, and certain facts were revealed: the night before, Sharon and Chet had a violent argument. This was not unusual for them, though this argument was notable for its violence, or at least its volume. At the height of the exchange, Chet left, perhaps to a avoid a physical altercation — though Tess doubted this, as she remembered the specks of blood in the sink. Chet then walked across campus to a party held at his fraternity house and stayed there for several hours. When he returned to his dormitory, he found that his room had been destroyed. Everything not nailed, glued, or welded to something else had been hurled to the floor or against the wall and smashed to pieces. An expensive laptop computer had been driven into the wall with such violence that it left a noticeable indentation. Faced with this unexpected and unprecedented mayhem, Chet was first astounded and then incensed. As a child of money, he was used to obtaining things, not losing them. This sudden assertion of his inherent vulnerability was not welcome. Nor was the destruction of his property, which, as those of his class do, Chet valued above all other things. Chet was the things he owned, and now the things he owned were gone.
Determined to have his revenge, Chet called the police. The officers who responded took note of the situation and assumed Sharon was by now long gone. They asked Chet if he wanted to come to the station and press charges. He replied in the affirmative and went to get his car from the campus garage. There, he suffered the most grievous blow of the evening, because his car was nowhere to be found. Chet knew without a doubt that Sharon had stolen it with the help of the extra set of keys in a drawer of his now overturned desk, and this threw him into the wildest rage of his life. The ride to the police station consisted of little more than a single long string of obscenities that streamed from his mouth, and the officers contemplated various pretexts to shut him up, which included an arrest for disorderly conduct. Nevertheless, they arrived at the station without incident. The officers wrote up their report and filed the charges, took a statement, and put out an alert for the car’s license number that covered Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Officers were instructed to arrest Sharon on the spot for grand theft auto — then, as now, a serious felony. Chet, now despised by everyone present, was refused a ride back to his dormitory and was forced to order a taxi. After he left, the officers joked that they might cancel the bulletin and hope for Sharon’s quick escape to Canada, though they did not do so. It was then that, on the off chance that Sharon had driven home in Chet’s car, they placed the initial call to the Callahans.
At this point, as Frank stared at them open-mouthed in shock, and Siobhan and Tess maintained a resigned silence, the officers’ voices lowered and they revealed their final secret: at around 8:15 am, a report came from the Pelham, New Hampshire police that Chet’s car had been found. It had crashed into a snowdrift, and was discovered, with the doors open and engine still running, on a side road off Route 126 just south of Pelham, on the edge of the national forest known as Dunwich Wood. The car appeared to have hit a patch of the dreaded “black ice” and gone into a skid, after which the driver lost control and plowed into a massive drift of snow and ice. The impact shattered the front windshield and headlights, and left the bumper badly distended. At this, Frank’s face went pale. He attempted to whisper something, but only vague, incomprehensible syllables came out. The officers quickly reassured him: no one, living or dead, had been found in the car. There was, however a six pack of beer, half-drunk, under the front passenger seat. Given the open doors, there was every reason to think that an intoxicated Sharon, who feared arrest for both the theft and driving under the influence, had fled the scene of the accident and was still somewhere in the vicinity. Moreover, Chet had sobered up and calmed down somewhat from last night’s rage. The officers believed that, once she was found, the matter could be resolved without Sharon facing serious criminal charges. Of course, the sooner she was found, the more likely such an outcome would be. Did the family have any idea where she was?
Frank and his daughters were forced to admit that they did not. The officers reassured them again. As soon as the shock wore off and her situation became clear to her, they were certain that Sharon would contact them in hope of rescue. When she did so, the officers urged, they should persuade her to turn herself in, and tell her that, while there would be consequences, they would not be severe. Sharon would suffer no more than a steep fine and a stern warning. It was imperative, however, to secure her compliance. If she were arrested and proved intractable, they did not know what the outcome of the case might be.
Frank only nodded in response to this, but Siobhan and Tess shuddered inside, because they knew that, while Sharon was many things, she was not compliant. She fought, and if caught and cornered, as she was now, that fight would be to the death. She would do all she could to wriggle her way out of whatever disaster she had engineered, but she would not submit. Both sisters were certain that there would be no call from Sharon, and she would not turn herself in. She would run until the police caught up with her, and when they did, Sharon would do nothing in aid of herself. She would either go silent or lie, but never admit to or apologize for anything. The charges would not be dropped, the problem would not go away, and what came after would be wreckage.
The sisters’ faith that Sharon would not surrender proved well-founded, but their fear that Sharon would soon be captured and face draconian punishment did not. Sharon was not captured, because Sharon was not found. When Frank called the Lowell police the next day, they had nothing to report, and nothing the day after that or the day after that, for the better part of a week and a half. The bulletins were out, police in Massachusetts and New Hampshire had Sharon’s description, bus stations were checked, officers canvassed nearby businesses — in fact, no more than a few gas stations and a Wall-Mart — and considered a partial search of Dunwich Wood, but there was no trace of Sharon.
Two weeks later, the situation had not improved, so the authorities decided to search the Wood. Those with little experience of New England may not grasp the full gravity of this decision. To outsiders, a “wood” is a picturesque collection of trees, suitable for a day’s outing. The woods are benign, even sublime. But in New England, and most of all in New Hampshire, the woods are not like that. One reason is their vast scale. Dunwich Wood alone measured over 500 square miles. It had almost no formal trails, and those that did exist were useless in winter. The undergrowth was thick, tangled, and rocky, and snow could pile to heights of three to four feet. The forest canopy concealed most sunlight, even in winter when the trees were bare. At night, navigation, even with a flashlight, was all but impossible. The unpredictable terrain soared up into high hills and dropped off into deep valleys and riverbeds. Every year, at least three people died there in spring, summer, and fall, and another five in winter, which in New Hampshire is even longer and crueler than in Massachusetts. When the authorities turned to the Wood, it meant that they had begun to consider worst-case scenarios. On a night such as the one on which Sharon disappeared, pounded by a blizzard and with visibility down to zero, no one could have gone into the woods and survived.
There was something else that caused a silent shudder to pass through almost all those who would be involved in the search. It was simply this: in New England, the woods are not merely vast and lonesome places; they are also haunted places. They possess some peculiar quality of the uncanny that is unique to them alone. A strange eldritch pall hangs over the woods of New England. It does not exist in the great forests of Colorado or Wyoming, and no one knows why. Perhaps it is the memories of long-vanished Indians, or an inheritance from the superstitions of the first puritan settlers. No one who has ventured into the region’s great forests has not felt it. It is the terrible sensation that, all around you, something else is alive. It is as vast as the wood itself, it possesses a fearful enormity, and it is not benevolent. It hates intruders, whom it regards as infidels. It does not like to have its sleep disturbed, and in winter its sleep is very deep. Those who ventured into Dunwich Wood to search for Sharon knew they were not wanted there, and they also knew that if Sharon had entered the woods that night, she had not been wanted either.
The Callahans traveled to New Hampshire for the first time in their lives to take part in the search. Upon arrival, they were surprised by the size of the search party, which numbered more than three dozen people, most of them local volunteers. Some, no doubt, came for somewhat ghoulish reasons, but many appeared to be motivated by that odd American sense of private charity that belies an often-ruthless nation. When the Callahans saw where Chet’s car had been found, each was struck by a certain atmosphere of bleakness to the site. It was a gray day, gray as only New England in winter can be, with a sky the color of slate that drained and denuded the brilliant hues of the world. All the trees were dead, and their bare branches interwove beneath the sky in intricate skeletal patterns. It was an atmosphere of dead things, of a tiny corner of the world that had come to an end. Later, Siobhan and Tess discovered that both had exactly the same thought: that if there was a nowhere, this was it.
It was fortunate that there was work to be done. The Callahans lined up with the other volunteers and, each five feet apart from the other, began to trudge through the snow and wind in search of Sharon or a sign of Sharon. They wanted some proof that she had been there in the dark woods, that she had existed after the accident, and had not simply dissolved into the earth. In this, they were frustrated. Although they spent six hours walking through foot-high drifts, up hills and down valleys, over rocks and fallen trees, and sometimes ankle deep in creeks half-hidden by the snow, nothing whatsoever was found — not a single indication that Sharon was there or had been there or might be anywhere.
The searchers trekked back to the road dejected and exhausted. Many expressed their condolences to the Callahans, which was the family’s first indication that people — at least some of them — had begun to give up. These people sought not to encourage hope, but to comfort the bereaved. And so, for the first time, and in silence, the Callahans began to admit to themselves that it was possible Sharon was dead. The police attempted to express some optimism. It was far too early to give up hope, they said. The forest was a big place, filled with scavengers and other wildlife that could have destroyed evidence of Sharon’s passing. And, after all, she might not have gone into the woods in the first place. Then, in a lower voice, cognizant of its import, the police remarked that, after the spring thaw, more evidence might come to light.
A second search was scheduled for the next weekend, and before they left, the Callahans gave their first interview to the media — one television station from New Hampshire and another from Boston. The reporters were respectful and asked general questions about Sharon and the family’s feelings about her disappearance. Frank made a passionate plea to Sharon to return home and assured her that whatever problems existed, legal or otherwise, they could be worked out. Then there was the long drive home, past endless monotonous vistas of trees and rock, down the long highways of a continent with too much space and too many people, and no one spoke a word during those hours. The spiny wood, the great forest they had traversed in vain, now darkened their world. If Sharon had gone into the woods, they now knew, she would never come out. The hope that remained was now centered on the possibility of knowledge. In the woods, they hoped, perhaps not to be found until spring, might be Sharon’s mortal remains; and then, at least, they would know.
But this hope was tempered, because now they all knew that none of them had ever known Sharon. For Siobhan and Tess, of course, the illusion of knowledge had been shattered some time ago. But for Frank, it was a fresh hell, because he really had believed that he knew his daughter, and that she was not difficult to know. She was one of his children, but now he had to face the fact that Sharon was not a child, and perhaps worse, had never been a child. So, all his pretensions of omniscience were simply that, and for over a decade and a half, he had deceived himself.
That night, the Callahans saw themselves on television for the first time. Their interview appeared on the eleven o’clock news, and while it was heavily edited, it was comprehensive enough, and the overall tone was sympathetic. It ended with a photograph of Sharon that Frank had given the police, along with a plea for information from the public. Afterwards, the Callahans went to bed. Siobhan and Tess, too exhausted for inner turmoil, slept immediately, but Frank remained awake for several long hours. He tried to read, but distraction only intensified his suffering. He tried to think of other things, but found there was nothing else to think about. He wondered if weeping might help, but the tears would not come. An hour before dawn, he finally lapsed into unconsciousness.
The family would remember little of those days, but the mechanics of life went on. Siobhan began to apply to colleges, Tess returned to school, Frank spent hours in front of the television. Neighbors would greet them as they had before, though there was something between sympathy and cruelty in their voices, depending on the person in question. Letters arrived at the rate of a dozen a day, and for a week the family opened and read them. Some moved and even comforted them, most made no impression at all, and a few were so horrific that they handed them over to the police. After that, the endeavor seemed pointless, and the letters were consigned unopen to the trash can.
They went to New Hampshire again for the second search. It was no more successful than the first, and the police made no mention of a third attempt. They had apparently made a quiet decision to wait for whatever the spring thaw might reveal. The family spoke with the local media again and returned home. Later that evening, the head priest of St. Anne’s came to the door and asked for Frank, who refused to see him.
A week after that, to the family’s surprise, the Boston television station WCBX announced that it would broadcast a special report on what it called The Callahan Disappearance that Friday. Wondering why the family had not been informed, Siobhan made efforts to contact the station, but was rebuffed, and began to worry. When she sat the family down in front of the television Friday night, she knew more or less what was coming, and as if by some osmosis, the atmosphere of dread infected her father and her sister. Siobhan’s forebodings proved justified. The report opened with an almost bucolic portrayal of Kingstown and Sharon’s early life, with brief clips from the interviews the family had given, in which they described Sharon and her many virtues. “But all was not what it seemed with Sharon Callahan,” said the anchor, a formidable woman in heavy makeup and what appeared to be a platinum blond wig. What followed was a slow and relentless evisceration of all that remained of Sharon. It contained interviews with Chet, friends high and low who were complete strangers to the family, and an expert psychologist who diagnosed Sharon sight unseen with borderline personality disorder. The report then detailed Sharon’s flagrant truancy, drug use, and promiscuity; scandalous attraction to older men; propensity for intemperate outbursts and occasional violence; and the multiple felonies she had committed on the night she disappeared. The report ended by asking whether all this malfeasance lay behind the disappearance of Sharon Callahan, and concluded that this remained as unknown as her current whereabouts.
As the last images faded away and the commercials began, Frank got up and left the room. Tess wept. Siobhan stared at the carpet. As she did so, she realized that it was not enough for Sharon to disappear. The world had decided to torture her absence, and if she was dead, to torture her corpse. Perhaps for the first time, Siobhan felt herself taking Sharon’s part. Her earnest neutrality in all things Sharon, which had accepted her sister’s existence and her duty to it, fell away. Siobhan began to believe that Sharon had, must have had, her reasons. Those reasons, Siobhan realized, were unknown to her, and perhaps would remain unknown. But they had once existed, as Sharon had once existed, and might still exist. Siobhan decided in that moment that she would uphold Sharon’s right to those reasons, and would not accept the world’s conclusion that her sister was all wildness and troubles. No one, Siobhan felt, was ever truly responsible for anything, a conviction that went against all the teachings of her Church, her class, and her country. But she believed it now, if only out of defiance. No doubt the torturers of the dead and disappeared had their reasons too, but they were not good enough.
Siobhan’s decision did not lead to any spectacular action, as there was almost nothing she could do. Sharon was not there, after all, and there was thus no one to defend. She tried contacting WCBX to communicate her objections, but received no replies to her complaints. When, at long last, she managed to speak to someone on the news team, she was told that the story was played out, and there would not be a follow-up that might allow for a rebuttal. Unless, of course, there were new developments — by which, Siobhan knew, they meant a body — in which case they would be happy to revisit the case. Siobhan decided, in the face of this, that the only way to take Sharon’s part was to become strong. She quit college and went to work in the municipal records office, which was at least a union job with some measure of security. She turned to the care of her father and her sister. She kept Tess yoked to her studies and admonished her to improve academically, which would lead to Tess’ acceptance to Syracuse University. Frank began to drift away, and sometimes refused to leave his room for days on end, so Siobhan took over the family finances. All of this, she felt, was done for Sharon, so they would all still be here when she returned or, failing that, when her fate became known. Sharon would know, in this world or the next, that they had not shattered, and whatever damage she had done was only to herself — and that was long since forgiven.
The winter, as it always does, gave way to spring, and the long-anticipated search of Dunwich Wood was conducted, this time with the collaboration of the Forest Service. Siobhan made sure the family attended, and once again they marched through the woods, now all mud and damp and green, though the sky was the same terrible slate grey it had been before. By the time the searchers returned empty-handed, a light rain was falling, and the crowd of police, rangers, and volunteers seemed to dissolve away beneath it. Siobhan drove back this time, and as she looked into the rearview mirror as she pulled away, she thought: there’s nothing there. Absolutely nothing. It was only after they arrived home that she realized the media had not been present. They too were not interested anymore.
No further searches were or ever would be conducted. In the late summer, Frank ceased to call the police twice a month for updates, because there were none. The police told him the investigation was ongoing, and he would be informed if there were any developments. The end of the calls marked the end of whatever vivacity Frank was still able to muster. As autumn came and the trees began to die again, Siobhan watched him miss more and more work, wander about the house, and let his friends fall away one by one. At one point, she realized she had not seen him smile for six months. Siobhan understood that he had lost hope, and she knew what this meant, because she had lost hope long ago, and learned to live with it. But Frank had not, and could not, because he was a man, and men are weak. Women are gifted with endurance, and can survive what a man cannot. Moreover, Frank was a father, so part of whatever future might remain for him after death was wrapped up in what Sharon might become. But now Sharon would become nothing at all.
Frank took early retirement a year later, but this only formalized the situation. He never went out, watched hours of television to which he appeared to pay no attention, and more often than not took to his bed. He did not take to drink, however, as Siobhan feared he might. But to become an alcoholic would have required a certain application of will. He would have had to make an effort toward self- destruction, but he now appeared to possess no will whatsoever. He was content to live, but no more than that. Some vital principle had abandoned him — gone, perhaps, with Sharon — and so long as she remained unfound, it would not return. After another year had passed with no change, Siobhan began to wonder if she should put him on psychiatric medication, but decided against it. She chose to allow Frank the integrity of his grief. It was the reaction, after all, of an honest man; a realistic appraisal of a situation that admitted of few other possibilities; and she wondered sometimes, as she went about the strange rituals of life, whether it was not Frank who was the sane one and she the mad. The truth was that neither of them were sane or mad, because they were now both natives of an unknown planet, separate but equal to the rest of the world, and this is not a sane place. So, however they acted, it was as legitimate as any other, and neither could be blamed.
Two years later, Tess received her undergraduate degree and a full scholarship to study law at Georgetown University. Siobhan and Frank attended the ceremony, and for a moment Frank seemed to emerge out of the miasma of grief, as he smiled and spoke with pride about his accomplished daughter. But all three remaining Callahans nonetheless knew that the ghost of Sharon hung over the proceedings, and that it was not a happy ghost, because Sharon should have been there, and was not. So, they returned home again, and that autumn Tess went to Georgetown, and things continued much as they had before — without Sharon.
There were, on occasion, glimpses of hope, or at least of answers, that were quickly extinguished. A child playing in Dunwich Wood wandered from her parents one summer and found a silver cross on a chain in a creek bed. The police presented it to the Callahan family, but they did not recognize it as Sharon’s.
Other artifacts were yielded up by the Wood — a torn blue windbreaker, a few bones that proved not to be human, a discarded shoe of uncertain provenance — all useless. Then, five years after Sharon disappeared, an incarcerated serial killer named Morton Haskell, who had raped and murdered seven women over ten years in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine, confessed to killing Sharon. He described in lascivious detail how he had picked her up on the shoulder of Route 128 at three o’clock in the morning, drove her to his house near Manchester, and raped and sodomized her multiple times over the course of three days. Then, Haskell claimed, he strangled her, dismembered her corpse, and disposed of the remains in a wood chipper. Siobhan and Tess chose not to inform their father of Haskell’s confession until it was confirmed, as they feared he might, at long last, shatter from the knowledge that his daughter’s last moments were the stuff of the inferno. As for themselves, their thoughts were schizophrenic, because Haskell’s confession seemed to demand that they both rejoice that an answer had been found and, at the same time, despair that their sister’s end had been so horrific. In the end, it didn’t matter, as the police ascertained beyond doubt that Haskell had been in upstate New York the night Sharon disappeared. The confession had been, at best, a ghoulish joke; and the sisters found that they were, in some ways, relieved.
Seven years after Sharon disappeared, Frank began to suffer from severe abdominal pains, and urinated blood. An examination found that a large tumor had encircled itself around the main artery and several internal organs. The doctors diagnosed inoperable pancreatic cancer and gave him six months to live. Chemotherapy, however, might extend that to a year, with luck. Frank seemed almost calmed by the prognosis, and professed skepticism as to treatment, as he knew the suffering it would entail. But the idea of more time had great appeal to his loved ones, and Siobhan and Tess gave tacit support to the idea of treatment, if for no other reason than that, if Frank were given more time, that meant more time during which some great discovery might be made. It was possible that he could die with the knowledge of Sharon’s fate or even, should a miracle occur, with Sharon herself by his side. In the face of such insistence, Frank agreed to treatment. The result was predictable: wrenching nausea, total hair loss, withered body weight, and in the end a total inability to walk unassisted. Worst of all, Frank’s skin turned a pasty, almost translucent white that terrified Siobhan, and made her dread the afternoons when she drove him to the treatment center, convinced she had brought her father to a torture chamber. Tess visited every weekend, and while she was kind and attentive while there, her eagerness to escape was obvious. For the first time in years, however, the Callahans’ thoughts were not monopolized by Sharon.
In the end, all of Frank’s suffering proved pointless. Two months after his diagnosis, he suffered a massive embolism, induced by the chemotherapy, and died in his sleep. No miracle had occurred, and he died with Sharon’s fate still unknown. The girls were aware of the irony: the cure had killed him before the disease did. Frank had bought less time, not more. With some bitterness, Siobhan regretted that she had not assented to her father’s wish to just return home and die. Only one thing consoled her: she knew that his desire to forgo treatment meant that he needed no more time, because he had resigned himself. Resigned himself to the fact that he would never see Sharon again, and would never know how or why that was so. Somehow, he, who had lost all will, found the will do this, while the others — including Siobhan herself — had not. And yet, in his supreme act of sacrificial love, he decided to submit to a calvary of his own in order to allow his daughters to persist in their illusion. It was at this point, at this realization, that Siobhan, at long last, finally wept.
The wake was solemn, quiet, and attended by almost no one. The undertakers had done a passable job at making Frank presentable, but there was no covering up the ravages the cure had wrought on him. There was none of the rambunctious song and drink that sometimes occur on such occasions, but the event did possess that sadness peculiar to the Irish, which is pained and acute, but not morose. People spoke in soft tones to one another, embraced here and there, and even talked about Sharon; doing so, perhaps for the first time, without pity; because, after all, she had been spared at least this much.
At the funeral, the priest gave a eulogy that pointed out the tragedies Frank had suffered and endured — the loss of a wife and a daughter — and contemplated the inscrutability of suffering; though all suffering, he emphasized, was redeemed by Christ’s suffering, and so on. Ironically, it was during this eulogy that Siobhan finally abandoned her last vestige of faith. No, she thought, suffering was not inscrutable. It made perfect sense: in a world of particles that swirled and smashed into one another, some would be smashed more and some less, and that was all. The Callahans had been smashed more, but this was a result of the law of large numbers. It had no moral significance whatsoever. It simply was. Nothing else, Siobhan thought, was bearable. The only alternative was a god who was either mad or bad, who slaughtered the innocent for the sake of the absurd or for his own sadistic amusement. This, Siobhan refused to believe.
The burial took place in a light rain, the few mourners hunched under umbrellas as the priest intoned the liturgy. Siobhan and Tess returned to a home that had grown too large for the two of them. They drank coffee in the kitchen and watched television in the living room. From time to time, Tess retreated to her bedroom and wept. Siobhan did not. Tess left the next day, and Siobhan waited until the weekend to pack up her father’s room and move the detritus of his life to the basement. She was surprised by how little there was: three drawers of clothes, a closet that contained two jackets and a coat, some photo albums she did not look at, and a few other miscellaneous items like his watch and a box of letters she did not read. Siobhan drove downtown the next day and gave the coat to the Salvation Army.
A few months passed, and in early February another blizzard struck New England. Tess called from her new apartment in Los Angeles to make sure Siobhan was safe and prepared for it, which she was. They talked for a few minutes, and neither mentioned the obvious reason for Tess’ concern: which was that it had been on a night like this that they lost Sharon. After Tess hung up, Siobhan sat by the window with the lights off, watched the snow billow around the streetlights, and found herself thinking more deeply than she ever had before in her life. She realized that she was nearing thirty, had never married, had no children, few friends, little education, and a job that meant drudgery for a lifetime. Yes, she had sustained her father and enabled her sister’s success, but she had paid a heavy price for it, because nothing in life comes free, as the poor know better than anyone. She had thought that, in taking Sharon’s part, she was doing a noble thing, and so she was. And yet, Sharon was still vanished, while Siobhan sat surrounded by the snow and wondered. It was then that Siobhan realized that she, and she alone, was Sharon’s last prisoner.
Check out Benjamin Kerstein’s previous stories in this ongoing series of short fictions:
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