When the Stars Go Dark

“That works for people too. Anyone under your nose just disappears. That’s the danger zone, right next to you. Whoever it is you trust the most.”

Hap, in many ways Anna’s trusted mentor, cautions her about what he calls the “blind spot,” how someone a person most trusts, someone a person allows to be closest, can still at any moment simply and absolutely disappear.

“‘How do we bear them?’ I finally asked. ‘Those impossible things.’ His hand was still and warm on mine, warm and steady and alive. He hadn’t moved an inch from my side. ‘Like this, sweetheart.’”

Loss is woven into the fabric of living, so learning to navigate loss becomes a significant part of our journey. Here, Hap offers reassuring optimism: In the end, after enduring impossible things such loss or betrayal or violence, a person finds someone’s hand to hold onto.

“All life. Everything spun on a constantly moving wheel of birth, growth, and decay; the ocean around us and the Milky Way above, and all the galaxies beyond ours, numberless as the ferns unfurling along the side of the road […] Death wasn’t the end any more than a single shuddering wave […] could stop moving.”

Although the novel recreates with realism the protocols of police investigation, there is around that scientific methodology an urgent feeling of some greater animation. Anna’s adoptive mother, Eden, expresses the constant movement and cycles that define life and death as well as the optimism that defies the grim reality of death.

“If you want to find someone like Cameron, where all the evidence is either absent or invisible, you have to study your victim to find answers. You have to live and breathe her. Dive deep. And then maybe, maybe, she’ll show you where to look for her.”

Anna’s approach to her detective work, particularly her work with missing and abused children, relies not only on diligent police work but on her uncanny ability to channel the feelings of the missing children. It is not a popular approach, judging by her supervisor and by Will. However, here, she describes immersing herself in the spirit and mind of Cameron.

“None of this is your fault.”

The gentle reassurance that Anna offers to Cameron’s best (and only) friend Gray, who thinks to himself that he should have been more attentive to her, is the advice Tally will offer Anna in the closing pages. Being released from guilt and blame allows both Anna and Gray a path forward in their lives.

“It makes me hurt for her, this girl I’ve never met but know. She survived violence, betrayal, and terror, the theft of her soul. She survived the smoking, the buried shame and the silence, and years of forced amnesia. But can she survive what’s happening now, inside and out? Can she survive the remembering?”

As Anna begins to suspect that someone sexually abused Cameron, her intuition here alerts her to the emotional trauma Cameron is enduring. Like Anna was fed into a dysfunctional foster care system, Cameron has survived those confusing emotions and profound anxieties. However, if Cameron was sexually abused, Anna understands the remembering will be itself as traumatic as the original events.

“This is important. Sometimes grown-ups fall down. Your mother was probably in a world of hurt. I don’t know for sure. What happened to your family might be because she felt too much pain, or the world got to be more than she could handle […] But not because of you.”

In addition to the death of her daughter, Anna is sorting through, more than 20 years later, the trauma of her mother’s death by drug overdose. Here, the psychic Tally Hollander reminds Anna that her mother endured pain Anna knew nothing about and that none of her problems were Anna’s fault. Anna eventually learns to let go of her guilt and move on.

“At the edge of the bluff, I look down at the Big River Beach and know immediately that it’s the setting of my nightmare, the one with the girl running through the kelp and driftwood, being chased or hunted.”

Although Sheriff Will Flood is leery of Anna’s reliance on her intuition during the investigation into the two missing girls, Anna reveals how her dream gave her encouragement to join the search for Cameron. As she stands in her dream world, the elements of a murder mystery are infused with the gauzy feel of spirituality.

“I couldn’t take it back. Sorry wouldn’t find her. Sorry was maybe the loneliest feeling of all, I understood, because it only brought you back to yourself.”

Anna has trouble with loss. When a young Anna grieves the death of her loving adoptive mother Eden, she returns home after the memorial service and, without clear logic, impulsively attacks the family’s pet, a raven named Lenore. In her anger, helplessness, and anxiety over losing her mother, she throws the pet into the backyard. She immediately regrets her outburst and tries to find the terrified and wounded bird, but the bird is gone. She has compounded the loss of her mother with the guilt over and loss of the bird.

“What you have is special. It also makes me feel optimistic for Cameron once we bring her home. Meaningful relationships can change outcomes. Can change everything.”

Here, Anna assures Gray that the help he has provided—he first alerted Anna to the reality that Cameron had been sexually abused—will ultimately ensure Cameron’s return to spiritual and emotional health. Seeking connection rather than isolation is what changes the outcomes for both Cameron and Anna.

“What is all the suffering for if not so we can see how alike we are, and not alone? Where will the mercy come from, if not from us?”

Initially, Anna harshly judges and too quickly blames the wealthy Hollywood star Emily for Cameron’s disappearance. Here, she begins to see the insensitivity of such rash judgments—suffering makes us human and makes us part of the same community. This insight marks the beginning of Anna finally forgiving herself for her part in her daughter’s accident.

“My department doesn’t run on feelings, Anna. And this investigation doesn’t either.”

Will’s harsh dismissal of Anna’s investigatory procedures, which have centered on her dreams, her hunches, and her intuition is by-the-book police work. Yet time and again, between Tally and Anna, the investigation does run on such intuitive work. Because Will and Anna cooperate to find the missing girl and solve Jenny’s murder, the novel argues for a balance of police work and intuition.

“Mind. Body. Connection. Which part’s confusing?”

Tally’s free-spirited husband, Sam, invites Anna, who is obviously stressed, to stop by his yoga academy and reanimate the critical ties between mind and body. Sam exudes the serenity and disciplined heart of yoga—he assures Anna that yoga helps troubled souls find resilience and hope.

“It’s not sex that he wants at all, but a lifeline. A raft to keep him afloat in the godforsaken nothingness, or even a single piece of driftwood, as long as the two of us could cling hard to it, together.”

The relationship between lifelong friends Anna and Will is awkward—although both are going through difficult times, both are married and have children. Will obsesses over what happened to Jenny, and Anna struggles with her guilt over Sarah’s accident. What they need is not physical connection but spiritual connection. As Hap told a young Anna, everybody needs a hand to hold on to.

“Maybe the reason we haven’t found Cameron’s body yet is because he thinks she can make everything bad inside him feel right again. Fix the ways the world has hurt him.”

Anna’s theory of the “bat signal” suggests why Caleb abducted and terrorized Cameron but not killed her. Anna believes wounded hearts find their way to other wounded hearts. The pain in Caleb (the murder of her sister and as many as six other girls) makes him believe the pain in Cameron (in her case, the secrets about her sexual abuse) can help ease his pain.

“[I]n real life, people who commit serial murders are typically of average intelligence, and rarely show an obvious degree of mental illness, at least not on the surface. In this case, there’s even more reason to believe our suspect blends easily into his environment.”

As the search widens to include the murder of Shannan Russo, Anna reminds herself of the first rule of any serial killer investigation: remember the perpetrator will not be a “wild-eyed” Charles Manson. Rather the killer most likely will fit in with the surroundings, go to work, raise a family—someone, as it turns out, like Caleb Ford.

“Getting your heart broken is the privilege of being human.”

Eden, with her generous heart and caring soul, cautions Anna before dying from cancer that the greatest expression of the heart is its ability to be shattered by trauma. Each character responds to the heartache inevitable in living—some disastrously, some heroically. To call heartache a privilege suggests that heartache is itself a way to learn, to grow, to change.

“I was thinking about forgiveness today. You know, so many people get confused about what it is, binding it up with guilt […] I don’t believe forgiveness is something we have to kill ourselves to earn. It’s already here, all around us, like rain. We just have to let it in.”

As Tally points out, the bigger something is, in this case Anna’s guilt, the more it needs to move through her so that she can go on living. Forgiveness is all around, she tells the wounded Anna, so take it.

“‘I’m so sorry, honey. I know it hurts, but we never have to do anything alone. I’ve never left your side. Come look at what I brought you.’ I gaze up, and the roof has disappeared. The sky dazzling, boundless, sparks flickering on and off and on again.”

It is Anna’s most intricate dream—she and Hap meet. Even with Anna’s unresolved confusion and anger over Hap’s apparent suicide, here Hap reminds her of the depth and urgency and power of the spiritual, that death is no boundary, that Anna has never been alone. Hap is in the stars, part of the pulsing radiant energy of an animated cosmos that refuses to acknowledge the significance of the death of any one person.

“Shannan isn’t me, or Jenny. She’s not Cameron either, but I can also see how we all line up behind one another, making a version of the same shape in the world. Trying to believe in people or in promises […] Trying […] to unfold.”

Here, Anna echoes the Rilke poem that Cameron copied out in longhand. Unfold here means working up the courage and the fortitude to engage a world of terror and beauty. You cannot hide, you cannot fear the world—you love its agonies and ironies, its joys and sorrows.

“I hate to admit it, but they’re sort of beautiful.”

Anna, despite her horror over what she and Will discover in Caleb’s studio, admires the paintings that reflect his father’s obsession over the carving of Time and the Maiden on top of the bank. There is a kind of completeness, Anna feels, to an obsession that pure, that direct.

“To her, he’s only one of her rescuers, a man strong enough to hold her body weight. That she doesn’t know he’s her brother, somehow makes the thing twice as beautiful.”

That Cameron’s rescuer who carries her to safety when she is found in her woods is her own biological brother Hector provides the novel with one of those fractal moments when accidents, pure chance, and coincidence combine to provide a meaningful moment. The universe, as Tally says, does not do random.

“She shouldn’t have tried to leave me.”

This is Caleb’s explanation for why he strangled his twin sister in high school—the threat of him being left behind, left alone. Loneliness is the novel’s most powerful force—it is responsible for the mayhem, the betrayals, the secrets, the drug use, the deaths.