Chapter 1
The two neighborhood boys had pointed in that direction, so my father switched on the comically large flashlight, stepped off the path, and set off into the woods. It had only turned dark a few hours before, but the trees already looked stark and intimidating, their bare bark drawing sharp vertical lines of contrast against the blackness of the ravine. I tensed a few muscles in my throat, which was unusually dry, and followed with my mother close behind. I can't remember which of us had the shovel, but I think the newly unpackaged garbage bag belonged to me, its black plastic beginning to unfurl from the rubbing of my thumb and forefinger. It felt criminal, the three of us marching into the empty forest, the crunch of dead leaves giving away our progress to no one in particular. I imagined a flood of light and sirens and noise filling the night, a glaring beam of attention arresting a small Asian family mid-step, their mouths frozen open in shock, their terrified minds racing to articulate a reasonable explanation as to what they were doing with grave digging implements in the middle of the local park at night. I laughed out loud.
My mother gave me a stern look. Her face was obscured and shadowed in the night, but the thinness of her lips and the hardness in her eyes communicated enough. We hesitantly picked our way over dry branches and rotting trees, our eyes scanning the textured and confusing landscape for clues and signs. In retrospect, the whole situation seemed absurd. I was straining my senses to look for something black at night, for something we could identify easily, inconspicuously, and perhaps less hazardously in the daytime. But there are certain people at certain times who can occupy that space of sorrow and desperation. They can understand why waiting would be the insensible thing to do, why traipsing off into the dark suburban, autumnal wilderness could be the only logical and unquestionably right course of action.
The three of us carefully crawled down into the creek bed, taking care not to slip on the smooth and loose rocks. I hadn't done this in years, since I was a child running through the more tame areas of the same neighborhood park. My mother forbade me from playing in the creek because it wasn't safe or supervised, and the memory of that made our whispered questions and commands all the more surreal.
My father's flashlight swept back and forth, scanning the ground, leading us on. "Is that it?" we would occasionally ask, stopping to poke at soggy messes of leaves with branches and our shoes. When we decided "it" was nothing important, I would breathe a mixed sigh of relief and disappointment and move on.
Something caught my eye, and I knew immediately that we had found it. "There. Give me the flashlight," I said.
"No, that can't be it," my dad declared.
"Yeah, it is." I swapped the light for a shovel and began clearing away the surrounding leaves.
"No, it isn't. That's just a branch, Dave," my dad insisted.
"Dad, I know what bone looks like. This is it. See? It's a rib." I was frustrated and proud at the same time. Frustrated because of my father's tone of dismissiveness, and proud because I knew I was right. I had done it. I had found Ruthie, my sister's beloved and missing dog, the dog she still didn't know had died. I had identified the long rotted remains, and only because I knew what a ribcage looked like, having sawed one open on a human cadaver the week before.
That was the first real life application I had of anything I learned in medical school. That was the first time I knew things had changed permanently, if only subtly.
