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I already know what I’m going to do. I just wish I understood why.
These days, I don’t recognize the person I see peering back at me from the mirror. Who is this too-thin woman with her hollowed-out cheeks, bruised eyes, and creased forehead? She looks strung out. Exhausted. Haunted.
She looks like an addict.
When I first started investigating missing persons, it was on a whim. A woman in my AA group’s adult daughter had disappeared, and given the girl’s history with drug abuse, the police couldn’t be bothered. Sitting in a room surrounded by twelve-steppers, I felt the swell of mutual indignation that we should be dismissed based on our worst moments, thrown away because of our disease.
So I took it upon myself to search. And I found the girl, eventually, though it wasn’t a happy ending. But my AA friend still thanked me. One way or another, I’d brought her baby home.
Which got me reading about more cases and visiting online forums and soon becoming aware of an entire world where hundreds of thousands of people went missing each year, and particularly if their skin color was anything other than white, a person of color, most likely no one had bothered to start looking.
I felt empowered by my outrage, vindicated for all the hours I now poured into my new hobby, while I drifted further and further away from Paul and his genuine conviction that a good life involved a house, a steady job, and eventually, hopefully, a child. Didn’t I want a good life, too?
I never said no. I just stopped saying yes.
Paul accused me of being a dry drunk, of substituting my desperate need for alcohol with an urgent need to save the world. My obsessive nature was driving the bus, and like all obsessions, it would only lead to destruction in the end.
We fought about it bitterly right up until I left, raging that he didn’t know me at all. It was good to have mission and purpose. It gave me focus, kept me from drinking. Not to mention the walls were closing in, and the longer I stayed, the more I didn’t understand how people could get up and do the same thing day after day. Same house, same job, same commute, hobby, restaurant, friends. I felt like I was losing my mind, and then I truly did want a beer.
I felt liberated leaving Paul. Terrified and heartbroken, but still… I was going to stand on my own two feet. I was going to be me! A woman who fought for the world’s forgotten.
And I did. And I did not.
Like most recovering alcoholics, I stumbled. I walked into a liquor store one night, thinking, Just one bottle. It had been so long. What could a little tequila hurt? At the last minute, I came to my senses long enough to call Paul. And even though he was happily married now, he came. At the same time as a kid wielding a loaded gun.
Paul died in my arms, his hands cradling his blood-soaked stomach, a look of total surprise on his face. Sometimes I still dream of our beginning, the feel of his fingertips rippling through my hair. The way his lips dancing upon my neck could ignite my entire body.
But mostly, I have nightmares involving blood and gunpowder and the last words he whispered in my ear.
How did I look when he died? Like a self-righteous soldier with smooth features, bright eyes, and softly rounded cheeks? Or had I already begun transitioning to the thinner, harsher woman who haunts my reflection now?
It’s so hard to know, and there’s no one to ask.
My parents’ deaths erased my childhood. My drunk self I don’t remember. And my twenty-something freshly sober version, the one who fell madly and passionately in love with Paul, who spent entire weekends rolling around in bed, with just short breaks for takeout before we flung ourselves at each other again…
Those days feel like moments that happened to someone else. A movie I watched, a story I read, a witness’s recollection I heard. My memories have grown so much darker since.
I had parents once. I loved a man once. And now… I’m just a shadow passing through other people’s lives. One time there was this crazy woman who asked a lot of questions. You don’t remember her? Me neither.
I want to be seen again. Not in pieces and not as a shadow. I want to be really, truly seen. All of me. The lonely child, the grieving lover, the struggling alcoholic. The adult who still feels like an outsider in every room. The person who now cries when it rains. The woman who still longs for the feel of a man’s fingertips sliding down her body.
I want someone to know me. At least enough to miss me when I’m gone.
And yet, I will never allow it to happen. Forget self-sabotage. I’m now roaring full speed ahead toward total death and destruction, with the pedal to the metal and both hands on the wheel.
I don’t know any other way to live.
My ten minutes are up. I rise to my feet and exit my cabin with absolutely nothing in my hands, just as I knew I would.
My name is Frankie Elkin. I go where I’m needed most, but I never stay. I’m an excellent listener, but a terrible sharer. I’ve run from bullets. I’ve held total strangers while they died. I’ve fought to save people I barely knew. And I’ve sobbed hysterically when I failed in that mission.
I miss a detective in Boston. I mourn a man in Wyoming.
One day, much as Paul predicted, my current obsession probably will kill me.
And then I will be the one who vanishes without a trace.
CHAPTER 29
