She had recently screamed, “You have no respect for me or my family!” at Kevin, before storming out of a meeting.
“I can only think this is twenty years of pent-up grief making its way out,” Kevin told a California reporter who had been trailing Linda and had thus witnessed the blowup.
People kept writing to Linda about Amy as August 25 edged nearer. A few days earlier, she had read me some emails aloud, her voice shaky.
“Now, this person wrote me such a long email. It says: Amy’s death shook the ground.” She let out a heavy sigh.
“Does it annoy you?” I asked. I found her opaque; I could never figure out what touched her and what irritated her.
“I don’t know what it does,” she said. “You know, there is no such thing as real closure.”
I woke up early on the 24th, and picked up Aimee-Noel at Rito’s house at eight sharp. We arrived at Gareth’s place an hour later, and he bounded out of the door, wearing his I REGRET NOTHING cap, his boots, and a black T-shirt that displayed an enormous, disembodied mouth sticking out its pierced tongue. He was stone-cold sober.
“Come inside for a second,” Gareth said, excitedly.
Aimee-Noel and I followed after to find Sarah sitting at the table in her dressing gown, face scrubbed bare, just home from her night shift at the hospital. She held a scrap of paper in her hand, all-caps written in ballpoint pen, at an angle:
DANIEL DE VILLIERS 7/5/2009
LOOP STR 8
EDGEMEAD
Below was a phone number. After listening to my conversation with Gareth in the living room, Sarah had been intrigued by my search for Daniel. That night, when she wasn’t dressing wounds or inserting catheters, she had made her way to the records room. She’d opened the patient database. She scrolled through the Ds, one after another, until it popped up, bright text against a black screen: Daniel’s name. He had been a patient at that very hospital, brought in back in 2009. Sarah called Gareth again and again all night, so excited by her discovery.
“But we tried the number all night and day, and it don’t work,” Gareth said. “Plus, it must have been 2010 when I saw him in Kraaifontein, so this address was before then. Must have moved.”
We could always try it, I said. I didn’t want to get my hopes up, but it was an address. Things were going my way, courtesy of an intrepid nurse-cum-detective.
“Ja,” said Gareth. “First, let’s see if he’s at the Shoprite in Kraaifontein. He’s a creature of habit, slips in to do his shopping and slips out. But if he’s there, I’ll recognize him.”
“Because of his hair,” I said.
“The hair!” Gareth exclaimed. He turned to Aimee-Noel. “He had hair of a colored. Nobody could forget his hair! You know, once he dyed it orange, so it was like a bright orange Afro, that’s what I remember.”
Aimee-Noel sat in the back and Gareth hopped in the front. We drove twenty-five miles south to the Kraaifontein Shoprite center, a collection of shops and fast food restaurants organized around the supermarket. Gareth had a plan: I was to park in the front lot of the Shoprite, facing the market. Aimee-Noel and I could scan the pedestrians: Remember to keep an eye out for a red Ford or a terrified-looking freak with the craziest hair you’d ever seen. Meanwhile, Gareth would get out and search for Daniel on foot. He would become Daniel, in a sense, trying to inhabit his cousin’s psychology.
Gareth slipped out of the car and stalked around the parking lot before entering the market. He saw a few old friends and greeted them exuberantly. He patted the hood of my car and leaned on the side. His friends stared at me and Aimee-Noel, confused.
“He’s showing off,” Aimee-Noel muttered from the back.
Gareth smoked and rocked on his heels. He ran into the market and walked the aisles. No Daniel. He stuck his head out to the back parking lot.
“No, he wouldn’t park there,” he reported back. “Blacks are drinking back there, he’d think it was dangerous.”
Aimee-Noel and I surveyed the foot traffic. An elderly white man plodded by, followed by a small black boy, who clutched his hand.
There was a guy with a mullet. “That’s bad, but not steel-wool bad,” Aimee-Noel said.
A man stumbled around, sporting a deep blue bruise around his eye.
“His eye is messed up, but his hair looks unremarkable,” I said.
A gentleman strolled up to a friend to shake hands. He was