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going to tell Mom then—‘Oh, I heard Mike’s living in Toronto, but it’s too late to bother now?’”
    Grace put a hand on my arm. It was shaking. Or I was. I slowed down so I missed the light, sitting there while cars shot across in front.
    “Of course, after this we’ll never ignore a lead. But then there’ll be a difference: we’ll admit the lead probably isn’t going anywhere. We’ll track
it down, all right, just not with the desperate belief Mike’ll be there. What I mean by the final search is, we pull out all stops, and if we don’t find him, we admit to ourselves Mike’s not coming back.”
    “That he’s . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say it.
    “Dead.”
    “No! I can’t do that. No. I can’t believe you’re saying this. Maybe you didn’t care as much—”
    “Darcy, stop! You’re a Buddhist. You’re supposed to deal with life as it is, with what’s real, not live in your own illusions, right? Mike is where he is. Your being desperate to have him back doesn’t change that. It only screws up your life. Maybe he’s living in Stockholm or Tashkent and he doesn’t intend to come back. Maybe he’s . . . well, any of the places we’ve endlessly considered. And maybe the most likely thing is true, that he didn’t come right home that Thursday because he got killed then. Something happened to make him dead. That’s reality, and we have to deal.”
    The light changed. I focused on traffic, shot through the light as it was turning. Mike had been my buddy. Grace had had Gary; I’d had Mike. The rest of them were all so much older—they’d been teenagers when I was a toddler. Only Mike had been my real family. She didn’t understand. There was no way I could abandon him. “I’ve spent most of my life searching for him. I don’t even know what I’d be without . . .” Without Mike? Without the search? I didn’t even know what I meant. “What does Gary think? You talked to him, right?”
    “It’s taken him three wrecked marriages, but he gets it. He’s got to be able to move on.”
    “And John?” I asked desperately. Surely, John, the cop, wouldn’t close the case on his own brother.
    “I haven’t gone around lobbying for this. But I know how things are for every one of us, and for Mom. Look at her: she still lives in that
ramshackle house; she never goes anywhere for more than a day; she always answers the door no matter how late—because she’s afraid he’ll show up once and then disappear again, and she couldn’t forgive herself for missing him.
    “Darce, Mom’s got a chance now. Her friend Jess has got a timeshare in Hawaii in January—the whole month of January. Mom could go, instead of freezing here.”
    “Wow!”
    “She’s over seventy. She’s spent the last twenty years waiting for a knock on the door that never happens. A chance like this, it may not come again. She can’t give this up to sit home waiting for the call that’s no more than a dream.”
    It was a moment before I could get out the words: “And if we do this and”—I swallowed hard—“the result is . . . bad? Then—”
    “Then . . . then, it’ll be even more important for her to get away, to not sit in that house knowing he’s . . . he’s never coming back.
    “Here’s the thing, Darce: you’re the one who was closest to Mike, the one most destroyed by his disappearance. We all watched you tough through it. You had to wall everyone out; it was the only way you could deal, we knew that. You think no one noticed? We all noticed, especially Mom, but she insisted you had to handle things your own way.”
    I didn’t dare look at her. We’d held back all these years; if we let go—
    “So—” Her voice caught. “So, it’s your call. The final search won’t happen unless you say so.”
    It was a moment before I could say, “And if I do?”
    “It will.”
    We were two blocks from the zendo. I pulled over to the curb, got out, and strode off before she could say anything else.