Bright Young Women(100)

“You must understand how difficult this was for me,” Dr. Donnelly says as she goes over to the infirmary door, where my purse hangs from a coat hook. “To write to you. I could be accused of breaking my HIPAA oath—credibly.” Dr. Donnelly hands me my trilling, seizing phone. “You put your husband as your emergency contact, but his assistant couldn’t get ahold of him, so she gave me your daughter’s number.”

I hurry to hit the green button with the pad of my thumb. “Hi, sweetheart,” I say soothingly, for her.

“Mom? Are you okay? You’re in Florida?” Allison sounds hurt that she didn’t know this, and my chest swells with a little bit of warmth and a lot of guilt. I tell my daughter most things, the boomerang effect of having a mother who shut me out. But I know that I made just as many mistakes. I raised a worrier, and while I have a lot of remorse over that, I also have compassion for my own mother in a way I didn’t before I became one myself, so there is a strange fairness, an empathetic balancing of the scales, that comes out in other ways, and that is good for the world at large. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.

“It was very last-minute,” I tell her.

“Did something happen?” Allison asks in a smushed voice. She has her phone balanced against her shoulder, and I can hear the smattering of her keyboard. Allison designs graphic props for film and television, often hand-making objects for productions so they are accurate to the time period in which the story is set. She is fascinated with period pieces—she doesn’t like to work in anything contemporary, and sometimes I feel bad about this too, especially when she refers to herself as an old soul. Old souls are just people who had to fend for themselves ahead of their time. I’ve spent most of my life fuming over the Colorado officials who, had they just done their jobs, could have prevented The Defendant’s last murderous spree. But who am I to point the finger when I had a job to do too?

“Everyone is okay,” I assure her. “There is someone down here who may know something about what happened to Ruth. I came down to talk to him.”

The typing stops abruptly. Breathlessly, Allison says, “Really?”

“Please don’t mention anything to Tina,” I say. “I don’t want to get her hopes up if it turns out to be a false alarm.” When Allison was in middle school, she used to spend the summers with her godmother at her house on Vashon Island; Tina was also on her summer break. Since 2000, Tina’s class at the University of Washington has been known to fill up within minutes of going live on registration day. The name sounds like the title of a soupy self-help book, which it is, and which Tina always addresses on the first day of “Finding Possibility in Impossible Grief,” from the wood-paneled stage of Kane Hall. You can roll your eyes, she’s been telling a sea of rubbernecking college students since 2000, when the university’s new president invited her to create the curriculum. I know I did when my publisher first suggested the title.

The students are drawn to the course for an insider’s account of her time hunting their hometown serial killer, on the campus where he once briefly matriculated as a psychology student himself, but many come up to her on the last day of the semester, asking her in tight, shy voices if it’s all right to give her a hug.

Over the years, Tina worked with her mentor, Frances, to adapt the concept of complex grief into its current iteration—impossible grief applies to cases where the grief-processing mechanism has been obstructed, like a clog in a drain. Family members of people who were in the towers the day they fell, who were never given remains to bury. Women who were assaulted by a classmate, a boyfriend, a friend, who are told by almost everyone that what they experienced does not qualify as assault. Impossible grief is grief that does not adhere to a social contract of justice or human rituals that have existed since the dawn of time. A death with no body, a violation by someone who is not seen as the transgressor. A woman whose relationship wasn’t recognized as legitimate at the time she lost her partner. Tina teaches people how to snare the obstruction so that grief can make its way through the proper channels unencumbered. It’s always running in your veins, but better that than a life-threatening clot.

“Tina has wanted this for close to half a century,” Allison says headily.

I am looking at Dr. Donnelly when I say, “I don’t want you to get your hopes up either. I’m doing my best to get to the bottom of things, though.”

We hang up, and Dr. Donnelly reaches for her umbrella. Out the window, it is still sunny, but bruised clouds are barreling in. She offers me her arm, and I stand with her assistance.

“If the hospital clears you,” she says as we make our way carefully to the parking lot, “we will try again tomorrow. I’d hate for this to be for nothing. It takes a lot for me to break the rules—I’m certain you understand.”

I do. More than anyone. I thank her profusely as we get into her car and head for the same hospital where Denise was legally declared dead, something that close to half a century later, still cannot be said of Ruth.





RUTH


Issaquah

Summer 1974

You could not spin the dial on the radio station without hearing about the gathering heat wave poised to detonate Seattle on Sunday, July 14. Tina and I had been planning on spending the day at Lake Sammamish all week, and we weren’t the only ones. We had to go to three different hardware stores to find one that wasn’t sold out of coolers. Summer is the most beautiful time of year in Seattle, but temperatures tend to be mild. Bona fide beach days were rare, and that one would fall over the weekend was rarer still. We woke early, and I set to work making lunch while Tina packed the car with lawn chairs and towels and sunscreen.