13 Stolen Girls (4 page)

She finally made it to the proper office, situated in a big blocky building that looked like a Rubik's Cube with smoked windows.

There Dixie learned that she didn't exist.

Inside, the place was slow-motion anarchy. Lots of people waited in a snail's-pace line, getting served one every twenty minutes.

“City's so screwed up because rich folks don't pay no taxes,” explained her new best friend, a cool guy in line in front of her. He told her that he was filing papers to legally change his name to Resident.

“That way, I figure I'll get a lot of mail.”

He gave a cackling laugh. Dixie didn't ask him why he wanted to receive junk mail when everyone else in the world was trying to stop it from coming. Resident told her the reason anyway—that he'd rigged up a stove in his room and he could burn mail-order catalogs to cook his rice and beans. Dixie foresaw tragedy, but she didn't mention that.

It took her a full hour and a half to get through the line and be able to speak to a clerk. The little plastic nametag thingie the woman wore spelled out “S. Juhn.”

Here's how it worked when you were adopted, a process Dixie had written down under her list “Learn My Rights as an Adopted Person.” When birth parents abandon their legal connection to their baby, the original birth certificate becomes “null and void”—words she had underlined three times in her notebook. The government issues an amended birth certificate, which names the adoptive parents rather than the biological parents. The amended one was Dixie's only legitimate birth certificate. In the eyes of the State of California, the original had been “rendered illegitimate.” Underlined, underlined, underlined.

What she was looking for from S. Juhn was the original birth certificate, the one that listed her biological parents. Dixie took the B.C. she got from Sheila out of the baggie and slid it across the counter.

Setback.

S. Juhn slowly examined the paper through a set of half-glasses she had propped on the end of her nose. She swiveled her chair a few inches, typed on a keyboard for a few minutes and examined the monitor in front of her, all without saying a word. Then she turned back to Dixie.

“Miss, what you've given me here isn't a legal document.”

“What? What does that mean?”

“It means it wasn't issued by an official agency.”

Dixie felt a flush of dread. “It says ‘Certificate of Birth' right there.”

“You're not in the system. This here, I don't know what it is, but it's not an official birth certificate. There's no imprimatur, no date stamp, nothing. It's not even the form we use here at County Clerk. The paper's wrong. We didn't issue it.”

“Listen, I'm adopted. I am almost eighteen years of age. I am within my legal rights to request my original birth certificate.”

S. Juhn nodded. “All that may be true. But you aren't going to find out anything using this.”

She pushed the bogus birth certificate back toward Dixie.

“Please,” Dixie said. She felt as though she might cry.

S. Juhn took up the paper again, peering at it through her half-glasses. “What's this business here?”

Under “issuing agency,” the line was filled out with typewritten words, smeared by age. “G. A. Services, 3903 W. Manchester Blvd., Englewood Park, CA.”

“Get in touch with them, maybe they can help you,” the clerk said.

I don't exist
. The words echoed in Dixie's brain as she rode the train back to Reseda. Reexamining the birth certificate, she saw how cheap and fake it looked, like something someone had rigged up and printed in a home office. Why hadn't she seen through it before?

Dixie had already tried to track down G. A. Services. No such entity could be found. There wasn't even an “Englewood,” not in California. There was an Inglewood, in South Central Los Angeles, where a Manchester Avenue was one of the main thoroughfares. But who would misspell the name of their own town?

The Metrolink rocked northward, through neighborhoods made newly ugly by Dixie's disappointment. She felt like President Obama, without a real birth certificate.

She started a new list in her notebook, “How to Deal with Setbacks.” Dixie stared at the words for a long time. She couldn't think of a thing to write down.

Brandi Henegar drove home from the missing-persons task-force event at the Grand Olympic pretty much gutted from exhaustion. In the past month, since Merilee had been missing, tiredness had gone so deep and become so lasting that it resembled a new state of being. Or nonbeing. Heartbroken. Frustrated. Angry. Or tired, which meant not being able to muster any of those other feelings.

“I'm not made for this,” she said out loud, her voice hardly audible above the drone of freeway tires. In former days she'd loved blasting home at top speed late at night, rocketing up the 110 amid the glittering towers of downtown. She always thought of the Wicked Witch zooming through Emerald City. What a buzz-thrill!

That was Before. Now, tonight, nothing. Brandi had joined the ranks of those humans for whom there was a before and an after.

The clock on the dashboard of Brandi's Honda moved to a minute past 9
P.M.
She always marked the hour. It was like those flip-number clocks from her youth. You could watch the minute change. This particular moment, nine o'clock at night, always flipped with an ominous crash. One minute it was one time, the next minute it wasn't. Now it had become twenty-five days ago, not twenty-four, that Merilee Henegar left her home in Agoura Hills and didn't return.

In another sense, time hadn't budged since 9
P.M.
twenty-five days ago. It was always September 17th for Brandi, and she was still coming home from work. Calling upstairs to her daughter.

No, Brandi corrected herself. That's not how it had gone down.

Coming home from work. First getting herself a glass of white wine from the fridge.
Then
calling out.

“Meri?”

Hearing a muffled “Hi, Mom” shout from her daughter's bedroom.

That night Brandi had taken her wine into the living room and slumped down on the flower-print sofa. She turned on the television. The TV! Watching some stupid news show (KTLA, a report about a woman giving birth immediately after taking off on a flight from LAX) and falling asleep.

Really? Napping? Had she been unconscious while her own daughter was…what? Being kidnapped? Disappearing? Already vanished? How could a mother sleep while that was happening?

She woke later to a
Two and a Half Men
repeat on TV. She marked the time, 9
P.M.
After realizing that Merilee had gone out, Brandi went into the kitchen for her phone. Not getting her daughter, but not leaving a message, knowing that the call from Mom would register on Merilee's cell.

Then, then, then. Waiting. Still unconcerned.

Every moment of that evening had become etched in acid. Memorialized by guilt. Later on, Brandi had called around to her daughter's friends—Melissa, Dana, Katrine. Even Merliee's old boyfriend, Donny. Dropping back into a restless doze right there on the couch. Unremembered dreams. Asleep once again! With her child gone! What kind of mother was she?

Then, finally, only the next morning—
finally,
for Chrissakes—calling the police.

When Merilee had been twenty days gone, Brandi had started going to a support group for loved ones of missing persons. Most of the people there were from NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Brandi still didn't know if the group was right for her. Merilee was sane, or at least, what passed for sanity in a sixteen-year-old girl.

The dozen troubled souls gathered in a dingy windowless room at the Community Center on Malibu Hills Drive. Most of the building was taken up by athletic facilities. The support-group members could hear the pounding of basketballs from next door. They sat in a circle and talked about ghosts. The vanished ones were zombies, the undead, not exactly alive but not dead, either.

“I keep thinking about whether it would've been better if Jason went missing when I wasn't there,” said Jason's sad-eyed father, who had lost his son in a crowd after a college football game. “Would I somehow feel less guilty? I don't know.”

“What difference does it make?” snarled the sister of a disappeared schizophrenic. “If they're gone, they're gone, am I right?”

Brandi felt herself losing it, as if she were fading into a shadow. What part had she played in her daughter's disappearance? Would things really have been so different if Brandi had come home that night to find Merilee already gone? And maybe her daughter really had not been there. What if Brandi had only imagined that she heard that ghostly “Hi, Mom” from upstairs?

The immediate aftermath of Merilee's disappearance was a blur. Brandi had seen enough Lifetime movies to know what should happen when a child went missing. After an initial period of infuriating official resistance (always dramatic), the police eventually rumbled into action. Neighbors and friends rallied around. Everyone gathered in a nearby church basement to make flyers and work the phones.

The teary mother of the missing one was always the center of attention. She was coddled. She was consoled. She was promised that it would all be all right.

None of that happened to Brandi Henegar. The police were open and helpful right from the start. Open and helpful, but ultimately ineffective. Brandi didn't know her neighbors in the Holmes Canyon area, where she and her daughter lived. The Henegars belonged to no congregation. Nobody bustled around setting up a “Merilee Henegar Action Center.” No one rallied. Brandi composed, printed and plastered up flyers herself. She was like a bird fluttering around in a glass jar with the oxygen slowly running out.

Merilee. What a beautiful child she had been. Everyone said so. Her father, Michael Henegar, only left because…Well, because Michael was Michael. The two of them, Brandi and Merilee, soldiered on alone.

Then something happened. When Merilee was twelve, during the first month after they had moved to Holmes Canyon, she was riding her bike on Valley Circle Boulevard, near the high school. An SUV making a right turn off Ventura ran her completely over. It was a total horror. Merilee was lucky she survived. For the next seven months, Brandi's daughter was locked in a succession of full-body casts, one after another. She telecommuted to her new school from a monitor beside her bed.

After that, Merilee changed. Well, yes, of course she did. Anything that traumatic was bound to change you. But this was on a whole different level. Brandi swore that her child's entire personality transformed. The accident made Merilee into a different person. From the easiest daughter in the world, she became the most difficult. Irritated all the time. Secretive. Mean, even. There was early trouble with boys.

The doctors showed Brandi the brain scans. They told her that Merilee's moods and tantrums would get better. But they didn't.

Brandi returned home from the LACTFOMEY meet thinking the night hadn't been a total waste. She liked the detective, Layla Remington. The task-force lawyer, on the other hand, had been a pill, so handsome that it was almost offensive. He mixed up Brandi's name with her daughter's, not once but twice.

But Layla—the detective had asked Brandi to call her Layla, and Brandi had said, “Like the song?” and she had said, “Yeah, like the song,” as though she got that all the time, but was still nice about it—Layla was something different. For the first time, Brandi had met a police officer who didn't send her climbing the walls from frustration. Layla Remington
listened
.

“LACTFOMEY,” Brandi had said. “It sounds like something you put on a cappuccino.” They laughed about it. Then there came the hitch that always happened when Brandi laughed nowadays, realizing that her daughter was gone, and what was she doing laughing?

The house Brandi now returned to was empty, of course. It smelled bad. She hadn't been keeping up with housework. She put her car keys down on the little walnut table beside the door. She stood in the hall for a long minute. She had stopped going to the refrigerator automatically to get herself a white wine when she got home. Because that was what she had done on the night of Merilee's disappearance. Through the door to the living room, Brandi could see the couch where she had sat to watch the news and had fallen asleep.

She called out as she had done that night. “Meri?”

Echoing silence.

With a weariness that felt as though she were made of lead, Brandi climbed the stairs. The second-floor hallway loomed ahead of her, carpeted in rose pink, a color Merilee had chosen before her accident, when they were redecorating their new home.

Brandi took a ritual detour into her daughter's bedroom every night before she went into her own. She told herself that she could break off the habit anytime. The nightly visit was precious to her, the only few seconds the mother felt alive. She would trick herself into imagining that Merilee was asleep in her own bed, returned unharmed from wherever she had been. And Brandi would be able to walk over and touch her awake.

Tonight…
Don't do it, Brandi
.
Don't go in again
.
You're just wallowing
.

Like a sleepwalker, she pushed open the door. The musty smell was stronger in Merilee's room, making Brandi think that she really ought to air it out more often. The walls were covered in posters for heavy-metal bands. In the years after her accident, the childhood teddy-bear wallpaper had been obliterated by Merilee, who had attacked the Pooh bears with slashes of black paint.

And then Brandi realized…She really
had
fallen into a dream.

It had to be a dream, because there she was, Merilee, her dear ruined missing daughter, the child Brandi loved more than her own life. Safe in bed after all. The mother's heart in her swelled and burst with pure joy. It was just like her fantasy.