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One thing that they don’t tell you is that fires can’t burn bright forever.
So even though he wanted to keep on going, and even though he did as best he could, David’s fire faded eventually, and somewhere in the booze-soaked third year, he realized he’d spent the last two days in his office working and not out combing the streets o
r organizing another search party or scouring the Internet message boards or calling the police, demanding they do more than they’d done.
It’d hit him very hard.
He hadn’t remembered much about the week that followed, too drunk to function.
And there were others, weren’t there? So many others like him and Phillip, parents, children, brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, so many goddamn people who had someone they loved that one day just disappeared. David and Phillip were shocked by just how many people there were like them, how many people who understood their frantic words, their dead eyes, the way their hands shook. Mothers whose daughters had gone to work and had never come home. Sisters whose brothers had gone hiking and had never been seen again.
They never gave up, they said.
And the fire would always burn.
But it wouldn’t burn as bright has it once had.
And that’s when David first felt it.
He breathed.
He ached.
He lived.
And then there were the deaths. Those daily little deaths where it felt like pieces of himself were just sloughing off as the weeks went by, as it got further and further away from March 22, 2012, and then it was March 22, 2013, and there was a renewed interest, and then it died until March 22, 2014, and it got to the point where he lived for the anniversary, because people would care again, people would take a brief moment to give two shits about his missing little girl who, when she turned seven, had decided that she would like to grow up to work with chimpanzees, because she wanted to marry Jane Goodall and they would live in the forest with the chimps and the apes and the monkeys, and they would be happy.
Each of those memories was a death. A tiny, little death.
Then it came to the point where he said the things he couldn’t take back, accusing Phillip of things that weren’t true at all, and he had said the words, wanting to cut and slice and hurt the man standing before him, even if he hadn’t meant any of it.
“I think,” Phillip had gasped, face wet, breath hitching in his chest, “that you need to go. Please.”
And so he’d gone. Because he’d never been able to resist when Phillip said please.
He’d found a shitty apartment, and he’d moved out, and it’d been fine, or so he’d told himself. It was fine because it gave him more time to do what he needed to bring Alice home, to find her and make everything okay again. Once he did that, he’d told himself, then he could move back home and he and Phillip and Alice would be a family again, and maybe one day they’d look back on this and find the strength to laugh about it, laugh at how scared they’d been, about how they’d almost given up hope.
And it would happen, right? After all, there had been those women in Ohio in 2013 who had been rescued from the home where they’d been held for a decade. Alice could be going through the same thing. It was a parent’s worst nightmare, but at least she’d be alive. At least she would be alive and David could deal with all the rest.
He’d known that all it took was him not giving up hope.
That’s all that it would take.
Because the moment he did, the moment he stopped believing in her, that was the moment she was gone for good and there’d be no one else fighting for her.
So yeah, he’d left when Phillip asked him to.
He lived in a shitty apartment.
He called Detective Harper every Monday.
And some days, when he was feeling his lowest, when he thought maybe the fire was about to go out, he’d get on the train with a single lily in his hand and he’d get off at the Foggy Bottom–GWU Metro stop, climbing those stairs until he was out on the sidewalk. He’d see that Whole Foods, and there’d be those little bushes right near them, and he’d put the lily on the ground right where Digger had found her purse. People would stare at him curiously, watching him kneeling with his head bowed, but he’d ignore them. He’d ignore them and he’d think I am breathing, I am aching, I am living, and even though I die these little deaths, you are my daughter and I will never stop.
The fire would burn a little brighter then.
That was the life of David Greengrass.
That was how he breathed.
