Carrick Doesn't Come Home
I'd slept fitfully for an hour or two at most. At 6 a.m., I shook my wife, Deirdre.
“We've got to get rolling,” I said.
Deirdre asked what I intended to do. I said that I was going to New York City to look for Carrick, our seventeen-year-old daughter, who had not returned home the night before. About midnight, we had called Carrick's friend Vanessa and learned that they'd gone down to the East Village the previous afternoon, a Sunday, against our wishes. Vanessa had last seen Carrick about 9 P.M. at Grand Central Terminal, when she had boarded a train home to Bronxville. The small village where we'd lived for fourteen years, Hastings-on-Hudson, is on a different line than Bronxville and the train departs twenty minutes later.
“Carrick seemed fine,” Vanessa told us. “I thought she was getting the next train home.”
Deirdre said that she would call some of Carrick's other friends as I headed downtown. This was not the first time Carrick had disappeared. I tried to sound confident as I told Deirdre that wherever she was, I was sure nothing bad had happened to her. The words just hung in the air as I kissed her and walked out the door.
It was Nov. 5, 2001. At 10 a.m., Carrick was due at the headquarters for the Students for a Free Tibet on East Ninth St. between Avenues B and C in Manhattan, where she had been volunteering for the past month. Community service is a part of the curriculum at Walkabout Program, an alternative public high school for seniors who, like Carrick, have had difficulties in traditional settings. Since she was in eighth grade, Carrick had attended several programs for kids who have educational, emotional, psychological, or substance-abuse problems, all of which had afflicted our daughter.
I got the 7:49 express train that arrived at Grand Central terminal thirty-five minutes later. Positioning myself in front of the gate from which the next train to Hastings, the 9:20, would depart, I tried to convince myself that after a night of carousing, Carrick would stride up and say something blithe: “Hey, Pops, whazzup?” We'd board the train and return to Hastings, another misadventure navigated. We'd trudge up the steep hill from the station, I'd press the unlocked latch on the front door, and Deirdre and the dog and a cat or two would scurry to greet us. After some hugs and tears, we'd try to figure out, once more, what was going on in Carrick's life.