she asked. “Who can give me some information about my husband’s death?” The man in the dark suit spoke immediately. “For the record, m’am, we do not know for sure if this man,” he gestured slightly with his head, “is your husband.”
He paused, and then spoke quickly and officially. “One of our officers was on foot patrol near City Park last night. He saw a vehicle that appeared to be abandoned: one of the car doors was left open. He went to investigate and found this man,” again, a gesture of the head toward the covered body, lying beside the vehicle, not breathing.He called for back-up immediately, and tried to administer some emergency medical treatments, but there was no response.”
As he spoke, Hamel’s wife fixed her gaze on the sheet covering the body in front of her, steeling herself for the moment that was to come.
The man in the dark suit gestured to the man in the blue scrubs who moved to the head of the table and gathered the edge of the covering sheet. “M’am,” said the man in the dark suit, “I’m sorry, but I must ask you officially, is this your husband?”
Hamel’s wife fixed her gaze, not blinking, as the sheet was folded back. She stared into the face of a stranger.
“It’s not . . . ” she hesitated, her voice shaking slightly. “It’s not Hamel. It’s not my husband.”
Hamel’s wife looked around at the men, expecting somehow that they would share in her emotion. They did not. She glanced back again to the cold face before her, saw the resemblance between this man and her husband, understood how such a mistake could be made. “I’m sorry,” she apologized, “it’s not Hamel.”
She did not know what else to say, and almost expected that the man in the blue suit would challenge her, ask her to look again, ask her if she was sure.
He did not. The three men glanced at each other. The man in scrubs replaced the sheet. Then the man in the blue suit apologized for taking up her time. Followed by the man with the Coroner Office badge saying, “I’ll walk you to the lobby, m’am.” He turned, took her elbow, started to steer her toward the door.
Hamel’s wife pulled away, politely, and looked directly at the man in the blue suit. “Excuse me, please. What about Hamel? What about my husband?”
She knew her question made no sense at all: how could this misidentified dead man in front of her provide information to authorities about her husband gone missing?
“It’s been three months,” she said evenly, “and I know nothing. Nothing at all. People don’t just disappear. They leave a trail. Some kind of a trail. Clues. Something . . . ”
Hamel’s wife heard her own voice trail off into a murmur. The helpless feelings
of the past three months returned, full force. She wanted to be challenging but she simply felt defeated. Over the past thirteen weeks, she had come to believe one thing: The system was the system and it did not give a fig about a middle-aged woman whose husband was missing.
The man in the blue suit started to say something, but Hamel’s wife overrode him. “Please,” she said, “if all you are going to do is tell me that your department is still actively working on finding out what happened to Hamel – and that you will call me with new information the minute you learn it, well, don’t bother.” She spoke bitterly: “I don’t believe you.”
Hamel’s wife took one more look at the sheet covered body, felt a surge of despair course through her. Then she steeled herself, walked to the door and spoke over her shoulder without looking back. “I can find my own way, thank you.” She did not expect a response and she received none.
Standing outside the hospital at the bus stop, Hamel’s wife thought again about the last day she’d seen her husband.
Monday, January 11, 2010
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