It was six weeks past the solstice, and the distinctly brighter light shining from higher in the sky during the sunny trip down from Chicago granted him the hope of eventual summer. But the sun had dropped low in the sky by the time he arrived in the old and well-worn city district near the Ohio River. The winter chill enveloped him as he emerged from his car. There appeared a distinctly Bohemian quaintness to the wooden houses along the street. “Need a marrying minister?” queried a makeshift sign in front of one of them. “Inquire here.” Brightly painted quarter moons adorned another. Others shown colorful pastels like those in the social realist murals of Diego Rivera. A sign across the street next to the chiseled stone and mortar of a church read, “Jesus is Alive!’ but it just made him add, “So is Esme.”
He was surprised that the doors to the tavern where the benefit to raise money for the memorial to her kind and gentle nature would be held were not locked, because it was two hours prior to the start time, and there appeared to be no one there. He sat on a bar stool and let the seconds tick away in the eerie silence.
Silent auction contributors and display organizers began to show up by means of the back door. Knots of early arrivers mingled in corners. Within time, the benefit was in full swing. More than 500 well wishers and supporters of the cause were packed into the back room before the stage. Local vocalists and instrumentalists were gracious and generous in their outpouring of lively, tuneful reverie for this sainted child’s insuppressible spirit. “Yes, Esme lives,” he thought.
Feeling like a votary in veneration, he got his play bill for the event autographed by the sculptor of the memorial that would eventually hang in the new school for the creative and performing arts where Esme had attended. She knew Esme when a baby.
Of the silent auction’s offerings, only one stood out in its explicit expression of her name. “For Esme” had been carved as part of the wooden block print by a lion of the local arts community. It depicted a bedeviled pilgrim with the air of a medieval crusader who ascends a path that spirals to the top of a pointy mountain with a cloud hovering around it. With mischievous disdain, a cocky figure beating on a snare drum comes down the spiral path in an eventual juxtaposition of inexorable intent and futile resistance. Which figure represented which attitude was unclear, but he identified with the pilgrim. He wrote his name on the form that would claim a $250 copy of the print, one of four. Mission achieved, he returned for the last set of the gig for Esme.
Afterwards, he pointed out to Esme’s mom how the spiral path up the mountain in the print is identical to the way a silver wire spirals up around a quartz crystal and explodes into a tightly coiled sun in the pendent he had won at auction to help fund a scholarship in Esme’s name for an arts program at a Ohio university and had given to her. “I see it as a sign,” he told her.
The music ended, but the party went on. He went out for some air. When he returned, he ran into a relative of Esme's. Polite greetings over, the relative fastened onto him, eyes riveted onto his only inches away. The relative's steely question, “Why are you here,” reiterated his very own question, which had resounded deep within for months. The question was a fair one. The visitor was not a local. He had not known Esme, her kin, or her acquaintances before she had been murdered while jogging near her home the previous March. He was, ultimately, a stranger. His presence could easily be mistaken as an interloper, an awestruck rubbernecker in the company of legitimate mourners in the community that was reaching out to embrace the grieving family and celebrate the extraordinary young person who had been one of their own.
He mutely stood there for the longest time searching for an answer. Later he would recall a weary, sorrowful comment the narrator in the movie Titanic makes regarding the yearnings of survivors in forlorn life boats bobbing on the high seas on the morning after the sinking, “They waited for an absolution that would never come.”
He tried to list plausible reasons but finally replied that none of the listed credentials mattered. That he might be a sympathizer angered by the loss of an only child in so cruel a manner, a teacher in an arts academy similar to the one she had attended who was trained to understand the vicissitudes of emerging adolescence in a young artist like Esme, a father of a daughter of his own who could theoretically experience a similar fate, a believer who had come to face the threat her death was having on his faith, did not matter at all. He was just simply there. He was forced to admit that he had nothing to offer the relative that could help members of this community mourn the loss of Esme except that he too loved her. The steely look slowly began to soften. “I get that,” the relative replied, especially when seeing tears appear in the visitor's eyes. The relative reached out to embrace him.
It was two in the morning. The chill air outside the closing tavern told him it was in the teens or lower. The full moon’s light bathed the city. He had come prepared to endure the night in his car, wrapped in a sleeping bag. The only question was where, probably in some church’s parking lot. He drove around looking for one. The road climbed the hill that held the woods behind the reservoir where Esme had been slain. Something overcame him, and he had to stop. He found a place to put the car and hiked into the woods. It was a bramble of silhouettes in the stark moonlight. It was also his ground zero. Holding onto a tree to keep from collapsing, he bawled out loud at the moon, his glasses fogging from the water in his eyes that quickly vaporized in the bitter cold. “There are people, don’t you see?” he just about screamed, “people who matter here, whom you love, who have lost the dearest thing they had.” He stopped to remove the frosted over glasses. “For some there is nothing left. What are you doing!?” came more words. He shuddered, sank down onto the snow-frozen ground, and curled up at the base of a tree. He sat there for the longest time. The stone cold quiet made a deafening impression in his ears. “Just one more resurrection,” he pleaded. “Just one more…She’s cold. I will take her home where it’s warm, which is just over there,” he murmured deliriously. He glanced behind him hoping that there might be a rustle made by someone in the dead, snow-covered leaves. Then he sank into more silence. He felt no chill, probably because of the alcohol in the blood of his arteries and feverish brain. He thought of those back home who figured that this was some kind of personal pilgrimage he was on, one he hoped would hurt no one. Very spiritual people, they had given him permission to ask boldly. But he really hadn’t planned on this.
The hours sublimated into the silence. The moon made a slow wink each time it slid past another branch above his eye. He realized that it was exactly one month since the last full moon, at which time he had been put up after a birthday party to sleep in Esme’s room a few hundred meters away. Being in Esme’s room that night, consecrated by her things left the way they were last March, had been the most moving event he had ever experienced. He had hardly slept because of waking up to what he felt had been Esme’s presence. He had spoken to her, he remembered. Feeling humbled, he had crawled from his sleeping bag on the floor where her bare feet had trodden over many years to the round window where the reflected light of the full moon shone through, a circle of light in a circle of window. But he felt no presence of Esme this time. Not here, not in this place. Good comes paired with evil, and only God, if anyone other than evil, would be found here. Attempting more prayer, he prayed what they had sung that night, that hard times not come around here anymore.
“Are you all right?” the man asked, his long hair falling from behind his head when he stooped forward in the frigid morning air. The man he questioned had just begun to emerge from the car in the parking lot of a nursery. “Can’t figure out how you made it in this frightful cold. The insides of yer windows are all frozen over,” he said. “But I see you gotcher sleeping bag, so there, I reckon.” Pulling on his boots, the crasher in the car apologized for the man’s concern and replied that he was fine. “Just on a road trip, is all,” he said. “Part of the journey.”
Dedicated to Corey on this eleventh month anniversary of Esme’s passing.
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