At least, from Compassionate Friends, he had discovered that this bizarre compulsion, by which he was now seized, was not unique to him. It was so common they had a name for it: searching behaviour.
Everybody who lost a loved one engaged in a degree of searching behaviour, although it was more intense for those who lost children. Some grievers suffered it worse than others. Joe had it bad.
Intellectually, he could accept that the dead were gone forever. Emotionally, on a primal level, he remained convinced that he would see them again. At times he expected his wife and daughters to walk through a door or to be on the phone when it rang. Driving, he was occasionally overcome by the certainty that Chrissie and Nina were behind him in the car, and he turned, breathless with excitement, more shocked by the emptiness of the backseat than he would have been to find that the girls were indeed alive again and with him.
Sometimes he saw them on a street. On a playground. In a park. On the beach. They were always at a distance, walking away from him. Sometimes he let them go, but sometimes he was compelled to follow, to see their faces, to say, “Wait for me, wait, I’m coming with you.”
Now he turned away from the Honda. He went to the entrance of the convenience store. Opening the door, he hesitated. He was torturing himself. The inevitable emotional implosion that would ensue when this woman and child proved not to be Michelle and Nina would be like taking a hammer to his own heart.
The events of the day—the encounter with Rose Tucker at the cemetery, her words to him, the shocking message waiting for him at the Post—had been so extraordinary that he discovered a gut-deep faith in uncanny possibilities that surprised him. If Rose could fall more than four miles, smash unchecked into Colorado rock, and walk away… Unreason overruled facts and logic. A brief, sweet madness stripped off the armour of indifference in which he’d clothed himself with so much struggle and determination, and into his heart surged something like hope.
He went into the store.
The cashier’s counter was to his left. A pretty Korean woman in her thirties was clipping packages of Slim Jim sausages to a wire display rack. She smiled and nodded.
A Korean man, perhaps her husband, was at the cash register. He greeted Joe with a comment about the heat.
Ignoring them, Joe passed the first of four aisles, then the second. He saw the auburn-haired woman and the child at the end of the third aisle.
They were standing at a cooler full of soft drinks, their backs to him. He stood for a moment at the head of the aisle, waiting for them to turn toward him.
The woman was in white ankle-tie sandals, white cotton slacks, and a lime-green blouse. Michelle had owned similar sandals, similar slacks. Not the blouse. Not the blouse, that he could recall.
The little girl, Nina’s age, Nina’s size, was in white sandals like her mother’s, pink shorts, and a white T-shirt. She stood with her head cocked to one side, swinging her slender arms, the way Nina sometimes stood.
Nine-ah, neen-ah, have you seen her.
Joe was halfway down the aisle before he realized that he was on the move.
He heard the little girl say, “Please, root beer, please?”
Then he heard himself say, “Nina,” because Nina’s favourite drink had been root beer. “Nina? Michelle?”
The woman and the child turned to him. They were not Nina and Michelle.
He had known they would not be the woman and the girl whom he had loved. He was operating not on reason but on a demented impulse of the heart. He had known, had known. Yet when he saw they were strangers, he felt as though he had been punched in the chest.
Stupidly, he said, “You… I thought… standing there…”
“Yes?” the woman said, puzzled and wary.
“Don’t… don’t let her go,” he told the mother, surprised by the hoarseness of his own voice. “Don’t let her go, out of your sight, on her own, they vanish, they’re gone, unless you keep them close.”