The Unquiet Bones: A Novel

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table. —W. H. Auden

NOTE TO THE READER

The Unquiet Bones touches on themes around generational trauma that might be triggering for some readers.

THE UNEARTHING

April 2023

A steady rain falls as Benjamin and Raphael Duvalier work their excavator alongside a dark lake on the misted flanks of Hemlock Mountain. The brothers are digging up the concrete foundations of an old and tiny wooden A-frame chapel. The chapel is located at the Hemlock Ski Resort area base and is being moved higher into the alpine to make way for an expansion. It’s barely dawn, and the temperature hovers around freezing. Behind them the forest creeps down the mountain and wraiths of mist finger between the trees. Empty lift chairs hang motionless on cables that disappear into the low clouds.

Benjamin claps his gloved hands together, trying to get blood to flow into his frozen fingers. This wet cold is far worse than dryer temperatures well below freezing. His brother is at least warmer inside the excavator cab. Raphael pulls the hydraulic control and scoops up another load of concrete and damp earth. He swivels the bucket out over the bed of a waiting truck and dumps its contents inside. The big vehicle sinks a little under the fresh weight.

Using the back of his glove, Benjamin swipes rain from his face and then points to the ground, showing his brother where to dig next. The excavator bucket swings back. Raphael moves the lever. The bucket lowers to the ground, and the teeth dig into black soil. He moves his controls again and begins to scoop.

The bucket’s teeth hook something and jerk it free of the earth. Benjamin’s heart jumps. He hurriedly steps forward in an effort to process what he’s seeing.

“Whoa! Whoa. Stop!” he screams, shooting his hand into the air and making a slicing motion across his neck.

Raphael halts the excavator arm. He hops down from the cab and runs over to where Benjamin has crouched. Benjamin carefully brushes damp soil off the long object that has been pulled up in the dirt. His heart hammers. He glances at Raphael. They have hooked two big, long bones.

Benjamin knows they are not from a large animal because the thing hanging off the end of them is a boot.

A woman’s boot with a platform heel.

JANE

Sergeant Jane Munro forces herself to concentrate on the words coming out the mouth of the emaciated blonde seated across from her in the church basement semicircle.

“I’m exhausted,” the woman laments. “To the core of my bones. All. Of. The. Time.”

Her name is Stephanie. She’s a mom. Or was. What do you call a mother whose child is missing, simply gone?

“My friends say I should return to work, but I can’t.” Stephanie fidgets with a tattered tissue in her lap. Her body matches her voice: ragged, reedy, broken. Her eyes are red-rimmed and puffy. That’s the thing about support groups: lots of crying. It makes Jane tense. She’s a cop. Not just any cop—a veteran homicide investigator. She’s trained her entire adult life to not cry, or at least not in public, and her body and mind are at war in this church basement because while she is sympathetic to Stephanie’s plight, feeling too much empathy threatens Jane’s grip on her own emotions. She can’t afford to crack. She’d split open, and her guts would spill all over the place—she’s not sure she’d ever be able to gather the parts back into her skin if she did.

“I’m afraid to leave the house because what if Jason comes home?” Stephanie asks. “He won’t know where to find me.” She blows her nose with that damp, ragged tissue while the group murmurs in agreement.

Jason is Stephanie’s eight-year-old son. He vanished one afternoon fourteen months ago, never to be seen or heard from again.

There are seven other similarly afflicted souls seated with Jane on orange plastic chairs that have been arranged in a semicircle to face a therapist who volunteers her time. They’re gathered downstairs in the community center attached to the Our Lady of the Bay Church. A chill spring rain falls outside, and the sky is low with gunmetal-gray clouds. But down here, beneath overly bright and institutional fluorescent lights, it’s too warm and the room stinks of stale coffee and the sugary smell of deep-fried donuts. The group members come from different walks of life and vary in age, but they all have one terrible thing in common. They’re all struggling to cope with the strange grief that attaches when a loved one goes missing.

Not dead.

Simply gone.

One day they are going about ordinary life, the next they are absent. Vanished as if into thin air, leaving a thrumming, pulsing, living, breathing hole that won’t die. Or live. It’s a hellish kind of limbo, this not knowing. This waiting with no fixed end point. Most people who have not gone through this trauma find it impossible to understand.

“I totally get you,” says a father seated to Stephanie’s right. His name is Christopher—the members are on first-name terms only, sharing just as much as they are comfortable with. Jane is not comfortable. Not with any of it. Christopher has clearly come straight from some kind of construction or road work. He wears heavy-weight jeans, and his steel-toed boots are covered with mud. His hands are rough and chapped. Like Jane, he’s probably taken a late lunch in order to attend group. Christopher mentioned earlier that he recently turned fifty-five, but to Jane he looks at least ten years older. Two years ago, his eighteen-year-old daughter went to a nightclub downtown with friends. She never came home. Christopher and his wife still have no answers. They’ve since divorced. As Stephanie has. This purgatory takes a toll in so many subversive ways. It sparks fissures through even the most solid of families. It carves off friends. Erodes confidence. Shatters a sense of self. Sabotages one’s job.

Jane is intimate with the job-sabotage aspect. After a recent “episode” at work that almost cost a high-profile homicide case, she has been temporarily relegated to a cold case—or “special investigations”—unit of essentially one. Her boss at first suggested taking time off work, or perhaps starting her maternity leave early. But Jane can’t take time off. She’s terrified of being home alone with her thoughts. She needs to work. Her boss then suggested counseling. Which is why she’s here now, sitting against her will in an orange plastic chair in an overly hot church basement listening to people like Stephanie and Christopher who have not managed to solve anything and will be of no help to her.

“It’s like you can’t even grieve,” Christopher says. “Grieving feels like a betrayal, like you’ve given up. Meanwhile the whole world just starts to move on without you.” He glances down at his chapped hands and says quietly, “Sometimes I feel like a glob of old blue toothpaste stuck in the basin that just won’t wash down the drain. Stuck there and drying out.”

Jane swallows. She knows the stats. She’s keenly aware that the odds of him ever seeing his daughter again are nil. Christopher and his ex-wife will be lucky to just locate her remains one day, to have a chance to say a proper goodbye via a burial or cremation. Same with Stephanie and her little boy. Same with all of them. Her eyes suddenly burn, and her gaze darts to the basement window, seeking escape. She clenches her fists, fixates on the grimy pane streaked with rain and mud as she fights to hold in tears. Just get through this. Survive one meeting. Preferably without saying anything. Don’t cry. Get angry. Angry is easier. Stay angry.

“I just want to know what happened to my baby. That’s all. Even if I can’t have him back.” Stephanie dabs her red nose with the snotted tissue.

Jane’s blood pressure peaks. There’s a whole goddamn box of fresh Kleenex on the low table in front of Stephanie. Why in heaven’s name can’t the miserable woman take a clean tissue? Can’t she see them? Perspiration prickles above Jane’s lip. Panic tickles in her stomach. It’s the start of a claustrophobia attack—she’s going to be buried alive. She’s never going to escape this hot basement, these sorry people, the stink of stale coffee.

“Closure,” says someone else. “We all just need closure. Either a license to properly grieve, or to have them come home.”

Stephanie nods and tries to reopen her tattered tissue.

The therapist leans forward and shoves the Kleenex box closer to Stephanie, who finally—thank heaven—takes a fresh tissue.

The therapist says, “This physical and psychological exhaustion is completely normal. When a loved one disappears, either in body or—in some cases, as with dementia—in mind, it can be the most stressful type of loss. A type that lacks answers. Unclear, indeterminate. No boundaries or resolution. It manifests in ways similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. And you’re all correct, it’s not properly acknowledged by society in general. As you’ve all noted, there’s this perception that the world is moving on, yet you are unable to move with it, and this creates feelings of dissonance and isolation. Which is why groups like this are important. To share. To know we are not alone. It really does help to identify with others who understand what you’re going through. And it’s important to know this type of loss has a name. Ambiguous loss. Or grief limbo.” The facilitator looks directly at Jane. “Would anyone else like to share today?”

Jane casts her eyes down and focuses on a spot on her knee. She feels the heat of everyone’s attention turn to her.

“Jane?” asks the therapist.

Jane clears her throat but continues to stare intently at her knee.

“Jane?”

She glances up sharply. “Look, we all know the stats. We have the highest number of missing persons reports per capita in our province. In BC alone, well over thirteen thousand adults and five thousand kids go missing each year. To be realistic, most of those are never—”

“Jane,” the facilitator says in a warning tone. “Perhaps you’d like to start with what brought you here?”

“No, I—I’m good. Thanks.”

They all stare at her.

She failed.

She planned to sit through one session and not say a thing. Now she’s opened her damn mouth, and her emotions are already simmering right at the surface. Her sinuses are thick with it. Her throat aches from the tension of holding it in. Her head pounds. She knows that if she dares to speak Matt’s name out loud, she’ll crumple into a sodden heap like Stephanie’s tissue.

She draws in a deep, slow, steadying breath, and very quietly, she says, “I’m not quite ready.”

“That’s fine. Perfectly fine,” says the therapist.

The slender and well-dressed dark-haired man sitting to Jane’s right leans forward. He meets Jane’s gaze with a gentle but commanding presence. The kind of presence Jane can relate to.

“It took me a while to be able to voice my loss,” he says. “It’s been fourteen months now, since my wife vanished. I still shop for her at the grocery store. I’m always searching for her in crowds. Sometimes I even think I see her on the SkyTrain, and my heart races before my brain can even engage. I still jump like a live wire every time my cell rings. And—” He heaves out a big sigh. “Anger. I am so quick to enrage, and I take it out on people who are only trying to help. But no one can ever say the right thing, can they?” He pauses, holding Jane’s attention. “Because there is no right thing to say.”

“Closure,” Stephanie murmurs again. “We all just need some closure.”

I don’t need closure. I’m going to find Matt. Alive. He’s not gone, he can’t be. I’m not prepared to capitulate. I believe with all my heart he’s out there somewhere.

The therapist says, “We need to bear in mind that in the context of ambiguous loss, ‘closure’ is a myth. It’s easy to succumb to intense societal pressure to ‘find closure,’ and this message is drummed home by the media, reinforced in movies and in novels. It’s echoed in comments from friends and family. We live in a society that places high value on resolving problems, on finding solutions, on ‘getting over’ things quickly. But when society is faced with people who are missing, there’s a disconnect, a discomfort. They don’t know how to cope with people who are missing loved ones, or with situations that actually have no answers or resolutions. We should not be forced to chase closure,” she warns. “What we need to find are ways to coexist with our complex feelings, and to always remember that our reactions are completely normal.” She glances at Jane. “They’re not a sign of personal weakness.”

This does not sit at all well with Jane. She’s a fixer. She solves and resolves. Takes action. Gets answers. Finds bad guys. Closes cases. Punishes perpetrators.

Her phone vibrates on silent in her pocket. She considers ignoring it. The group rule states no phones. It vibrates again. It promises escape. Jane opens her blazer pocket and awkwardly peers at her mobile’s screen. Her pulse quickens. It’s a text from her boss.