The Dark at the Bottom of the Stair

The Indiana sky was a brilliant azure without a single cloud to mar the dome of heaven. Birds were singing in the boughs among the new leaves that were opening, and the crocuses, narcissus and daffodils were in bloom. It seemed that all of nature had joined in some baneful plot to mock my sorrow.

I got in the backseat of my son's car, and we slowly pulled out of the cemetery. Sally turned around in her seat to look at me sympathetically. She reached her arm over the seat and clasped my hand. "It was a beautiful ceremony, Mr. Moore. I know Madeline would have loved it."

I didn't say anything. Maddy had been a happy person, one who loved nature. Or at least she had before Grace left.

Terry glanced back at me, and I could see his eyes were red too, but he tried to be supportive. "Sally's right, Dad, Mom would have wanted it to be just like it was today."

I knew they were right. Spring was Maddy's favorite time of year. I guess if she had to go, this would have been the time she would have chosen. Still, that's little consolation when you've just buried the wife you loved for thirty-five years.

Terry parked in front of our house, and he and Sally walked with me into the house. I sat down heavily on the couch. They looked at me anxiously.

"Did you ever hear anything from Grace?" I asked.

Terry looked down at the floor. "No, not a word."

I nodded. I had been certain of the answer, but I couldn't stop myself from asking.

In the silence, Terry shifted uneasily and then asked, "Are you going to be okay, Dad?"

"How do you answer that?" I asked myself. "Nothing is ever going to be okay again, but I can't say that to my son. It would only increase his anxiety about me, and he has his own grief to deal with."

"I'll be okay," I told him. "It's going to be pretty strange living here without her, but I plan to keep busy, and that will help."

"That's good, Dad," Terry responded. "Listen, we've got to go pick up Lance from the babysitter now. But if you need anything – anything at all – please call me."

Rising to see them off, I nodded. "You two take good care of my grandson," I told them.

After they had gone, I stood there and looked around at the home Maddy and I had shared for so many years. It was filled with memories, some good, some not so good. But it had always been filled with life, and now, well, not so much. The day was still bright outside, but the light coming through the windows seemed to lose its intensity as it entered.

I sat back down and began to remember.

My thoughts drifted back to when we bought the house all those years ago. In truth, it had been too big and too expensive for a young couple like us, just getting started. But we fell in love with the place the moment we saw it, and nowhere else would do. So we pulled all of our savings out of the bank, and my father loaned me enough in addition to make the down payment.

Even then, the monthly payment was more than I could comfortably handle, so Maddy went out looking for a job. She was fortunate enough to find one in the development office of the city's art museum. She was always good at communications, both written and oral, and with her love for art, it was a perfect fit.

I guess you'd say we were "house poor": each month we had very little money left over after paying the mortgage and utilities. But we didn't care, we were madly in love and on our way to the American Dream. We might not have been able to go out to dinner and the movies, but we compensated by making love in every room in the house. Maddy always had a strong libido, and she'd get in the mood at the drop of the hat. Sometimes she nearly killed me, but what a way to go!

With all the sex we had, it wasn't surprising that Maddy got pregnant with Terry the second year after we were settled into our new home. It was a difficult delivery -- Maddy was in labor for eighteen hours – but then we had this wonderful new life in our arms and suddenly everything was perfect.

Terry had been a good baby, sleeping through the night within six weeks, no colic, none of the problems so many newborns have. As he grew, he continued to display that same good health and happy disposition, so much so that Maddy felt comfortable about going back to work when Terry was nine months old. The museum thought so highly of her that they had held her job, so we made that transition with remarkably few difficulties.

Having an infant in the house curtailed our love life, of course, but only somewhat. We still managed to make love frequently once Terry began sleeping through the night. And whenever Maddy would have to travel on one of her fund-raising trips to other cities, she'd come home in a frenzy. I knew I would get little sleep the first night she returned.

Terry had come pretty early in our marriage, but it was five years before our next one. Maddy wanted to wait. Part of her decision was based on the success she was enjoying in her work. By then she had been named to head the development department, and she loved every part of it: schmoozing with fat-cat donors, planning fundraising events and holding the annual membership campaign. But I also think that the delivery of Terry had been daunting enough that she just wasn't ready to undergo that again anytime soon.

In truth, we weren't even trying when Maddy became pregnant. But as every gynecologist knows, babies have a way of sprouting when they want to, regardless of the intent of their parents. And so Grace arrived almost exactly five years after Terry. But unlike her brother and despite her name, Grace was a trial from the moment she arrived. She cried when she was born and it seemed she never stopped, except when she was sleeping, which happened sporadically and only for short periods of time.

We had secretly prided ourselves on how well Terry had done and what an easy baby he was. Grace humbled us. She cried, she spit up, she had diarrhea, and then she cried some more. Many times we were at our wits' end, but somehow we came through it with our sanity and marriage intact. I think it was harder on Maddy than it was on me. Somehow, Grace seemed to be on her better (never best) behavior when I held her, fed or changed her. But when Maddy took her, little Grace fought and cried and was generally on her worst behavior. She was almost nine months old before she began sleeping through the night.

The pediatrician told us that some babies are just more difficult than others. If so, then Grace must have been the model of a difficult baby.

As she grew older, we could tell that her personality was very different from her brother's. Where Terry was calm and quick to become absorbed in his activities, Grace was constantly active, frequently shifting her attention from one thing to the next, needing attention and demanding to be diverted by something different.

When she reached her second birthday, we learned the true meaning of the "Terrible Two's." Worse, she didn't seem to grow out of that stage, even when she hit three and beyond. "No" became her favorite word, and she proved to be both willful and unbending. "Are you sure we brought the right baby home from the hospital?" Maddy would ask me some nights when Grace had proved unusually difficult.

Another striking difference between our two children was their performance in school. Right from the beginning, Terry displayed the need to achieve that often characterizes first-born children. As my father would say, he took to school like a pig to mud. He was not a genius, but he was a good student who always worked hard, and all his teachers praised him when we went to parent-teacher conferences.

Grace, in contrast, was an indifferent student. That's not to say she was slow; in fact she was highly intelligent, perhaps in some ways even more so than Terry. If a subject interested her, she would throw herself into it without reservation, often making the top grade in her class. But she had no interest in nor patience for subjects that did not appeal to her, and it was virtually impossible to motivate her to put any time or effort into them. As a result, she would excel in certain areas but fail in all the rest, bringing her overall grades down dramatically.

Maddy and I were dreading the time when Grace reached her teenage years, and our fears proved well founded. The rebellion and independent streak that had burned within her as a youngster became a raging conflagration when she hit thirteen, and it got worse from there. She was impudent, insolent and frequently disobedient. When we grounded her one time when she was sixteen, she snuck out of her room, took one of our cars without permission, and went out drinking and dancing with her friends. When she came home at three in the morning, she was so drunk she could hardly stand, yet she somehow managed to get the car and herself home in one piece. I guess the Lord really does watch over drunks, fools and children.

Despite everything, Grace made it through to graduation, and while she certainly didn't distinguish herself academically, she did earn her high school diploma. Her transcript wasn't going to get her into Harvard, but at least she had the possibility of going to community college and maybe transferring to a better school after her sophomore year. At least, that was our plan.

But her achievement had lulled us into a false sense of optimism. Shortly after her graduation, Grace and her mother had a huge fight. I wasn't there when it started, so I don't know who threw the first verbal punch, but I heard the yelling and walked into the room just in time to hear Maddy shout, "I am your mother, and I will not accept that kind of lack of respect from you, young lady!" To which my daughter replied in decibels every bit as high, "You're not my mother, you're a bitch!" Both Maddy and I were stunned, but before either of us could react, Grace burst into tears and ran up the stairs to her room. I heard the door slam, and when I tried the handle, it was locked. I knew I could open her door with the master key, but I decided a cooling-off period was better than forcing an immediate confrontation. I wish now that I'd taken the other option.

We didn't see Grace the rest of the afternoon, which was just as well because Maddy was almost hysterical. I had to devote all my energy to consoling and calming her as best I could.

Grace didn't come down for dinner, and we figure she was on her phone with her girlfriends bemoaning how badly her parents treated her. After the episode with the stolen car, I had made it a point to keep all the car keys in our room, and I checked them before I went to bed. I didn't sleep well, and twice got up during the night just to be sure that Grace was still there. Sometime after midnight, I fell into a troubled sleep.

When I finally woke up the next morning, the first thing I did was to walk down the hall to check Grace's room. I was relieved to see her door was still closed, and turned to go back to our bedroom. But something made me double-check, and when I tried the doorknob, the door swung open. Her room was as chaotic as always, but Grace wasn't in her bed. I quickly ran downstairs and checked the rest of the house. No Grace.

Then I went out to the garage just to make sure the cars were still there. They were. I came back in the house, planning to go wake Maddy and tell her what I'd discovered, when I noticed my wallet sitting on the breakfast room table. I was sure I'd left it on my dresser the night before. When I opened it, I noticed two things. I'd gotten five hundred dollars out of the bank earlier in the week; now it was gone. Then I saw the note folded up where the bills had been. I recognized Grace's scrawl: "Sorry, Daddy, I took the money. I'll pay you back some day."

I quickly grabbed the telephone and called the police. "I want to report a missing person," I told the desk sergeant. He wanted to know her age and how long she had been missing. When I told him she was eighteen and that she'd only been gone a few hours, he wearily explained that a) she was an adult and could come and go as she pleased, and b) in any case she couldn't be considered missing until she had been gone more than twenty-four hours, unless there was evidence of a crime. I decided not to mention the money Grace had taken.

Maddy had come downstairs sometime in the middle of my conversation, and as she picked up on the gist of the discussion, she began frantically tugging at my sleeve to find out what was going on. I pulled out the note from Grace and handed it to her. She began to weep when she read it.

I turned back to the phone. "Look, Sergeant, I don't know whether you have a kid or not, but if you did and he or she ran away like this, what would you do?"

There was a pause and his voice lost all its boredom and became human. "The first thing I'd do would be to call all her friends and see if any of them know where she might be headed. If that doesn't turn up anything, I'd check the bus terminal to see if she might have caught one. A lot of runaways do because it's cheap and there's no hassle at the gate. And if you haven't done so already, try to call her on her phone. If she doesn't answer, leave a message for her. That's what I'd do."

I thanked him and hung up. I wondered if he might have a kid Grace's age.

I called Grace's cellphone; it went straight to voicemail. "Grace," I said, as calmly as I could under the circumstances, "please come home. I'm so scared for you, baby. If you can't get home, I'll come get you wherever you are. If you don't want to come home, at least call and let us know you're all right. Please, baby. Mom and I love you so much, and we're so scared, baby. Please."

Maddy and I began calling every friend of Grace's we could remember. No one knew where she might be going, or, if they did, no one would admit it. We called Terry, who by then had graduated from college and had a wife of his own, but he hadn't heard from her either. Terry and Grace weren't real close, but they were closer to each other than she was with us. He promised to let us know immediately if he had any word.

Then we drove down to the bus depot, hoping against hope that she might still be there. She wasn't, and none of the people at the ticket windows remembered selling a one-way ticket to an eighteen-year-old girl.

The next few days were a nightmare. After the requisite twenty-four hours, we officially reported Grace as missing. The police warned us that they couldn't make her come home since she was legally an adult, but they promised to search for her nevertheless.

We learned about the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and registered Grace with them. We learned about support groups consisting of parents of missing children. We were horrified to learn that some 850,000 new names are added to the missing persons list each year, almost two-thirds of which are twenty or under. But we also found that a nearly equal number of entries are cleared each year as individuals return home or are otherwise removed from the list. That gave us hope.

I contacted a detective agency to see if they could help. The agent I spoke to was very sympathetic, but not very encouraging. "Indianapolis is surrounded by major cities within a few hundred miles in all directions, and every one of them has a sizable population of runaways and the homeless where she could disappear. Even if we knew where she'd gone, we'd have a hard time tracking her down if she doesn't want to be found."

"I'll be honest with you: we don't like to take cases like this because it's so rare that we have any luck. If I were you, I'd keep doing what you're doing now. You're just as likely to find her that was as with us."

I left his office an anxious and discouraged man.

About two months after Grace disappeared, I was working in the office one day when my cellphone rang. "Hello," I answered, only to hear a quavery female voice: "Daddy?"

"Grace," I yelled, "where are you, baby? Are you OK?"

"I'm fine, Daddy," she replied. "I'm in a safe place. I just don't want you to worry about me."

"Come home, Grace," I pleaded. "Or tell me where you are and I'll come get you."

"No, I can't, Daddy," she said. "It's all too weird. I'm going to stay where I am."

"Oh, baby, please come home. Mom and I miss you so badly."

"I'm sorry, Daddy, I can't. Listen, I just wanted you to know I'm alright and you don't have to worry about me. I'll call you again when I can."

And with that she was gone.

I left work and drove over to the museum to see Maddy; I didn't trust myself to tell her over the phone. When I walked into her office, Maddy saw me and put her hand to her mouth, her eyes widening in fear.

"No, it's good news," I said hastily. "I just had a call from Grace."

With that, Maddy dropped her head to her desk and began to sob. I walked around to hold her. When she regained control, I told her what had happened and what Grace had said.

"But when's she coming home?" Maddy demanded. "She's got to come home."

I sighed. "Honey, she said she was in a safe place and she's going to stay there for now. She said it's too weird for her to come back home right now."

Maddy began to cry again. "She hates me," she sobbed. "I drove her away and now she's punishing me."

"No, honey, no. She's confused and unhappy, and neither of us knows what's really going on with her. You've got to stop beating yourself up. That argument you and she had wasn't the cause of her leaving, it was just a symptom of all her confusion. You've got to believe that."

I don't think Maddy bought my hypothesis, but she did calm down, and the two of us were able to take some comfort in knowing our daughter was alive and seemed to be okay.

That set the pattern for how our lives continued: every few months I'd get a call from Grace reassuring me that she was alright. She never asked for money, she never told me where she was, and she would never agree to come home, no matter how I begged. Occasionally, Terry would let me know she had called him, always with a similar message. But she never called Maddy, and although I tried to downplay the obvious, I knew it always hurt Maddy that her daughter wouldn't speak to her.

We were never at peace with the situation, but after several years went by, we did achieve a measure of acceptance. Our daughter didn't want us in her life, and there was nothing we could do about it. We still worried about her, especially when the interval between calls would stretch out longer than normal, but wherever she was and whatever she was doing, she seemed to be safe as far as we could tell, and we clung to that belief for our own mental health.

But our comparative peace didn't last long; a new threat arose.

Maddy came home from one day from a routine mammogram with the worrisome news that the doctor had found a lump. "He wants me to have a biopsy," she told me.

I felt a clammy sweat break out on me, even as I tried to soothe her. "It's probably nothing, honey. These days, they have to test everything for defensive reasons. You'll see," I told her as I held her. But I don't think she believed my words any more than I did. Somehow, Maddy and I had become characters in some ancient Greek tragedy, and the gods seemed in a particularly vengeful mood.

My sense of doom was heightened when we got the results from the pathology lab. The lump was malignant, with poorly differentiated cancer cells. Further testing revealed that the cancer had spread to the lymphatic system.

I was devastated, but I knew I had to be strong for Maddy because she would need all the strength she could get. "We're going to fight this thing," I told her. "It's not a death sentence; lots of women come through it and live long, happy lives."

Maddy's oncologist was a no-nonsense type. "We're going to treat this aggressively," he told us. "I don't want to take a gradual approach and run the risk of this thing getting away from us."