Every Moment Since
“Every Moment Since is a neatly crafted story about lives connected and changed by one night.”
When a boy’s jacket is found in Wynotte, North Carolina, Sheriff Pete Lancaster finds himself on the verge of solving a decades-old missing child case. Every Moment Since, by Marybeth Mayhew Whalen, tells this tragic story through the eyes of multiple characters, both in the past and the present.
On a chilly October evening in 1985 11-year-old Davy Malcor and his older brother Thaddeus (TJ) ride their bikes to meet friends in a farmer’s field not far from their home in Wynotte. Having his little brother tag along was his parents’ idea, not his, so when he and Davy set out for the field that night TJ is annoyed. The moment he arrives at the farm TJ hurries off to meet his friends in the cover of the nearby woods, leaving Davy behind, alone in the dusk. That is the last time he ever sees Davy.
“Davy stops his bike and watches his brother run away from him without so much as a backward glance. He is uncertain what to do now. He thought they were both going to play the games together. But that was stupid. Sometimes he forgets that TJ is different now. They might still be brothers, but they don’t know each other anymore.”
TJ, (a.k.a. Thaddeus,) becomes successful when, years later, he writes a book (Every Moment Since: A Memoir) detailing his brother’s disappearance, the aftermath, and the ways in which it, understandably, altered his own life. Consumed by loss and guilt Thaddeus uses his writing to channel his grief and, perhaps, to find redemption.
“I am ashamed to admit it now, but I didn’t watch him go. I quickly turned to find my own friends, eager for fun, for an adventure. It was just an ordinary moment in time: two brothers riding their bikes to meet their friends to play games in the dark. On any given night we could’ve gone to that field, then come right back home again, dirty, tired and happy. But that’s not what happened that night. And I’ve lived with it every moment since.”
Whalen’s strategy of inserting excerpts of Thaddeus’s memoir works well to add layers of insight into Thaddeus and let the reader know what he is thinking and feeling on a deeper level.
There are four key characters in Every Moment Since and each has alternating chapters dedicated to their points of view: Thaddeus; his mother Tabitha (Tabby), a police department employee with a long-held secret; Anissa; and Gordon Swift, a local artist who was the initial suspect at the time of Davy’s disappearance and who has lived life ever since under a cloud of suspicion.
Though the format of multiple points of view and flashbacks from the present to the past works well to keep the story moving, it does become a bit repetitive as we keep hearing the same information, albeit from different voices. The story also wanders into relationships . . . Thaddeus and his neighbor Larkin . . . Anissa and her boyfriend Seth . . . that seem only to take up space and distract from the heart of the book.
By far, the most engaging chapters are the ones from October 12, 1985, the night Davy Malcor goes missing. Unlike other chapters, where there is a lot of mundane minutiae, the telling of that October night provides imagery and circumstances that are more vivid:
“They run until they are sure the night has hidden them, then stop to catch their breath, listening carefully for any sound of the man chasing them, but it’s hard to hear anything over their ragged panting. As their breathing slows, the only sounds they can hear are the critters in the woods singing their nighttime songs and, away in the distance, the children they left behind, still playing their games.
“Without a word, they begin the long march back to where they came from, the darkness ahead of them a gauntlet to cross.”
In spite of less information where there could have been more, and more information where there could have been less, Every Moment Since is a neatly crafted story about lives connected and changed by one night.