The Unquiet Bones

by Loreth Anne White

We live in a society that places high value on resolving problems, on finding solutions, on ‘getting over’ things quickly.

They don’t know how to cope with people who are missing loved ones, or with situations that actually have no answers or resolutions.

We should not be forced to chase closure,” she warns. “What we need to find are ways to coexist with our complex feelings, and to always remember t...

She holds the cop’s gaze with eyes she knows are her most arresting feature. Her TV trademark. Angela can draw viewers in simply with her gaze, and she uses this ability to play people, men especially. She feels no qualms doing so. If they want to be driven by their dicks and hormones, that’s their problem. She isn’t going to be young forever—use it before you lose it is her motto.

The power of a woman's gaze. And they say being feminine isn't an advantage

obtaining the legal right to manage her fiancé’s business affairs when he’s neither dead nor alive feels like an insurmountable challenge. There really is no simple solution when someone goes missing.

What she knew could destroy him. What he knew could destroy her. It was the same with the others. Six friends on the cusp of grade eleven bonded that weekend for life. Each with the power to destroy the others. It would be mutually assured destruction if any one of them flipped now, especially now.

News like this—it rips off the old scars and tears open the big yawning chasm of loss

Irrationally and hotly, furiously enraged that some unrelated news about some body has the power to unsettle them all in this way.

“We all lied to the police. But what if we also lied to each other?”

after all, a secret is only a secret if you keep it exclusively to yourself.

hidden. The human mind can play strange games.”

Jane is only beginning to understand just how deeply a wound can slice into the life of someone whose loved one drops out of sight and sound, and how permanent that wound could be, how long one might have to wait, and wait, and wait for a resolution that never comes.

forty-seven years

Damnnn very long cold case

It’s rude, she always says, like you’d rather be somewhere else, like you’re telling present company that someone absent is more important.

While it has all felled Kurt, it has also granted him escape—a relief—in a way that Helen has craved.

But perhaps it’s not an escape at all, she wonders as she regards him, but an imprisonment, because she can never really tell if the memory of it all is still in there, trapped with him inside his head.

It’s the beginning of the end. She almost begins to cry in anticipation of the pending emotional release.

As a mother, you believe you know your own children. You do everything you can to take care of them. Protect them. But sometimes . . . you don’t know them at all.”

I’m convinced the stress fed her cancer and killed her before her time. I just hope this time around there is a fair and equal investigation.”

Convicted Somone even though there was no evidence. ANd that he cant defend himself from the allegations. The effect on their family is worse too. Ppl pitchforked them over it.

Perhaps a part of each one of them has always been locked in the autumn of 1976. In the amber of time. A limbo—or prison—for their lies. Neither heaven nor hell. All waiting in one way or another for that knock to come on their doors. Waiting for justice to finally find them. Fearing it.

How far might they go to keep a secret that could cut everything out from under every one of them?

Did they kill? Would they kill again to guard the truth?

This reunion is not going to coalesce them. It’s going to blow them apart.

When people don’t have answers, they try to make them up, fill the gaps in the brain. And because Darryl was gone, too, it made sense to them. I really don’t know how his parents coped.”

I guess I don’t really know what I believed back then, Jane. I mean, we think we know people, but we can never really be sure, can we?

that villains are more often than not very ordinary people who, for whatever reason, end up doing a bad thing.

sometimes “bad” really does depend on whose point of view you are in.

like bits of debris from an exploding star in space. No gravity can stop things now. No one knows where all the broken pieces will land or what will be damaged in the fallout. The sense of impending doom is thick.

“D’you think people act rationally when they kill someone? Especially if they didn’t mean to? Do you have any idea the kind of terror that comes with something like that? When your hands are full of all that blood and you don’t know what to do?”

He stares at her like he doesn’t know her at all,

Ofc if that did not happen cara wouldnt even be his wife bruh. He might aswelll question everything. Would he even go after daryl if she told the truth. And the fact that his bff was the one his gf is chheating on, was also thesame guy helped him kill .

Sometimes big problems require big sacrifices. She just has to figure which sacrifice to make.

“You knew Darryl had been beaten to death even while his mother and father and baby sister were looking for him, hurting, broken, devastated? You knew where he was the whole time, while law enforcement officers hunted him down like some kidnapper or potential murderer and his family was being shamed by the community? And you couldn’t spare them this pain?”

The need to belong is a basic survival instinct more powerful than logic. Biologically it can override the most rational of thinking. To be cut out of the herd represents danger on some unconscious biological level that drove her teen brain.

You don’t plan things like this, Isaias. They just happen. And then you’re stuck. It’s not like movies or TV. Someone dies and it’s messy and confusing and everyone panics and tells a version of the truth or not. And then the police come around and you’re scared and locked in.”

Isaias was a Darryl. A Darryl she could still save. And love. And nurture. And keep alive. And in so doing Isaias became the man who might help her atone, who allowed her to justify the rest of her life, who allowed her to exist without crippling guilt.

Whether it comes from the law or not, retribution has already found her. It’s found each and every one of them.

The things we do, for our children—to keep them safe, to atone for our own childhood sins, when inside our aging bodies we’re all really just still frightened and bullied children ourselves .

Are her charities all guilt-driven, too? Should she be forgiven? What does forgiveness really mean? And how can he forgive when she is still too gutless to go to Darryl’s family and tell them the truth, or to come here to talk to the cops herself? When she doesn’t have the courage to bring peace to Darryl’s parents because it will upend her nice privileged life and friendships and so-called charity work?

Someone who has lost empathy in her hunt for clicks, for viewers, for fast-food feels.

In the context of ambiguous loss, “closure” is a myth . . . We should not be forced to chase closure. What we need to find are ways to coexist with our complex feelings, and to always remember that our reactions are completely normal. They’re not a sign of personal weakness.

Closure makes a difference to those who find it.

She laughed. She said something to the effect, danger is not so obvious. It’s the danger you can’t see coming that you should really fear. There was danger for Annalise in her own home, inside the walls of that little Linden Street house on the cul-de-sac by the woods. The danger was not lurking outside in the world; it was closer than anyone saw. That was the danger Annalise feared. Her own father.

Putang inaaaaa

“That house has been their prison,” she says. “The Jansen family—trapped by their own making. Appearing to yearn for resolution, but surely, also dreading it might actually come.”

What good could come of exposing our sordid family truths now? What my dad did to my sister was not my mom’s fault—she was a victim. And he never touched me in the end. When Annalise went, everything changed. Then my dad got sick and impotent. And now he’s locked in his own skull along with his regrets. I know he remembers. I know he feels sorry. I can read it all in his eyes even if he can’t express it. So outing the truth wouldn’t touch him any more or less. But it would pain and humiliate my mother, destroy her, and it sure wouldn’t bring my sister back.

Once a secret is told it’s no longer a secret because someone else knows. And when that happens you no longer control the truth. You can no longer guard it for yourself.

“I get what people mean when they say they both want news but also fear news,”

flat-out confrontation and subterfuge are not the only ways to yield information, and that sometimes building bridges rather than burning them can be a prudent long-term strategy.

Nothing is ever truly over. No case should be deemed forgotten. Sometimes years later, people might want to talk, context changes, and there will be new science, and she herself can play a part, breathing life into the dead, the forgotten, the silent, the missing, fleshing them into living characters who are no longer quiet, or forgotten.

“Maternal response to a child’s sexual abuse is critical. A mother’s support for a victim can help stop the abuse and mitigate the immediate psychological effects, plus decrease negative long-term outcomes. Without it, adults who were incestuously abused as children end up as adults presenting with a myriad of psychological problems, including sexual dysfunction, periods of promiscuity, depression, intense guilt, substance abuse, marital difficulties. And they risk emotionally or physically abusing their own children, committing incest themselves.”

“Emotion is not weakness, Jane. Empathy is not soft. It’s what makes us most human. Most strong.”