Nicole M. Taylor - Reconstructed

L ast night, I dreamt of Isaiah again.

I didnt remember the dreamI never dobut I knew the familiar, queasy, low feeling I had upon waking. It was what I imagined an astronaut would feel when touching back down on terra firma after being up there amongst the stars. My gravity had shifted, but only for a little while, and now I had to come back down, to feel the ordinary weight of living again.

Id only ever told one person about the dreamsmy grandfatherwho had suggested that maybe it was Isaiahs way of saying goodbye to me. If so, he had been saying goodbye for ten years now and showed no signs of stopping. When I was fifteen and my grandfather died, I half-expected him to come visiting some night but he never did. It was only Isaiah who still had something to say to me, I suppose.

My phone said 3:22 a.m. I rolled over and fished my laptop out of my comforter. In the silvery glow of the laptop screen, I could see my roommate in the loft bed across from me, still asleep with half a dozen pillows piled on top of her head like some weird, soft cairn.

I propped the laptop up on my chest and flicked through my e-mail, discarding a number of promotional e-mails and some replies on a chain discussion in my sociology class. I saved but did not read an e-mail from my mother (the headline said emergency, but I knew that was her code for you havent called in four days). Finally, I clicked on a message from Detective Peterson at the police department. He had another project for me.

The projects had started about a year ago with an internship in the Mt. Clare police department offices. It had been pretty boring at firstturns out college sophomores arent qualified to do much in a police precinct besides run things through the copier and hit up the Starbucks. I started redrawing the age-progressed posters of missing kids, mostly to combat my own boredom. Some of the original sketches were downright awfulwonky noses, weird teeth, eyes unevenly spaced. They hung helpless on the walls and cork boards, almost begging for someone to fix them.

I had always liked art, portraiture in particular. When I was still in high school, Dad even tried to convince me to go to art school rather than study criminologyprobably the first time in history a parent tried to talk their kid into an arts degree. He thought criminal justice would be too much of an uphill climb for a black girl of modest means. Itll be so hard, he told me, in ways you wont even expect. In the end, though, he had supported my decision because we both knew why Id made it.

Eventually, my internship time became mostly devoted to drawing. I filled up a pad with the imagined adult faces of girls and boys who would never really grow up. One day, Detective Peterson noticed my work and suggested that I submit it for placement on the police departments cold case website. He was my supervisor, technically, but that mostly meant he had to take time out of his day to find busywork for me. I think he was a little relieved to find something for me to do that was actually useful. And my drawings were useful, or useful enough that he was still sending me case files on occasion, even though my internship had ended five months ago.

This one was labeled UID J-65921, and it wasnt an age-progression, but a reconstruction. We have some morgue photos and a digital recon based on skull measurements, Peterson wrote, but we are hoping you can give him a little more life. Work your magic.

I clicked the attached image and felt an incredible jolt of adrenaline, a shock and a fear that moved through me from my lungs to my fingertips. I managed not to cry out, but only barely.

It was Isaiah.

Or rather, it was a digital recreation of Isaiah, somewhat clumsily and impersonally done. But there were his big, almond-shaped eyes, long, girlish lashes, and his fine eyebrows that always made him look a little curious, a little bewildered. And there was his silly grin that made a deep dimple on one side of his mouth. It was the same way he looked in all my memories, all of my dreams.

I paused and forced myself to take a breath. It hurt as though I had been running hard, and I felt streaks of wetness on my cheeks. I closed my eyes and counted to thirty.

When I opened my eyes again, the boy on my computer screen seemed somehow different, though the image had surely not changed in any meaningful way. I noticed now that the boy actually had twin dimples on either side of his mouth and that his lips were longer than Isaiahs. We both got Moms small, round moutha rosebud mouth, she always called it. Most distinctly, though, the boy in the picture had a deformity on one ear. The top was pinched into a soft point instead of rounded like the other. It gave him the look of a disheveled baby elf.

At a second glance, the boy didnt really look much like Isaiah at all. Maybe it was the dim light, the lingering hangover from the dream, or just a moment of insanity. Isaiah was hardly the only lost little boy in the world.

I clicked the other attachments in the e-mail, a short dossier on the boy and some grim morgue photos, which someone had used to create the digital composite. There was always a little disparity, where someone had adapted or altered a real photo into a colorful digital painting, like a collage where the edges were always just a bit visible. It gave the image a strange unseemliness, like a creature that moves almost-but-not-quite like a person. My ex-boyfriend, Sammy, loved Chinese vampire movies, and it reminded me a little of the way those monsters got around. It sounded funny to me at firsthopping vampires?but actually seeing it was unsettling in a strange way, just like looking at this picture of a dead boy, his eyes digitally propped open, an artificial sweater drawn on him.

According to the dossier, the boy was estimated to be between nine and eleven years old, about sixty-five pounds, and fifty-three inches tall. He was well nourished, his teeth were in good repair, and he was originally discovered less than twenty-four hours after his death. He had languished, however, in the files of the Sherwin County Police Department, and they had just now gotten around to placing him on the state cold cases website.