Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (7 page)

And I know.

Grace.

 

Chapter 12

“I
S THIS
G
ABRIELLA
G
IOVANNI?”

“Yes.” I bite the word out. I'd recognize the official voice of a cop anywhere. A wave of panic rises into my throat.

“This is Officer Kirkpatrick from the San Francisco Police Department. Is your mother Maria Giovanni?”

“Yes.” At his words, my vision starts to close in on me, an oscillating circle of black. A few years back, I was shopping with my mother when she bought a new wallet. I filled out the little card that came with the wallet, naming myself as my mother's emergency medical contact, never imagining a day would come when it would be used.

I must answer yes, because he keeps talking. “She's being taken to the hospital. It looks like she was attacked, hit in the head, at Ocean Beach.”

“Where's my daughter?”

Silence.

“Answer me, goddamn it. My daughter was with my mother. Where is she now?”

He clears his throat. “The witness who found your mother says she saw a man carrying a little girl up to the street. We're still trying to figure out what's going on, ma'am.”

“Who? Who has her? Where is she now? Where is my daughter?” I'm screaming, and the edges of my vision are red and black and closing in.

“You're going to have to speak to the watch commander here at the scene,” the officer says.

I've slung my bag over my shoulder and am running through the newsroom toward the door to the back parking lot. “Then get me the goddamn officer in charge and quit wasting my time.”

My voice is frantic. So much so that ­people in the newsroom—­who don't blink an eye at someone standing up and screaming “fuck”—­actually look up from their computers and stare. A few ­people have halfway risen from their desks.

As I run, I catch a glimpse of myself reflected in the window. I don't recognize myself at all. I'm wild-­eyed and deranged looking. My heart is thrashing about in my chest and I can barely breathe. I hear some grumbling and other conversation on the other end of the phone that I can't understand, and then a man's voice is on the line.

“Sergeant Don Jackson here.”

“My name is Gabriella Giovanni. My mother is Maria Giovanni and my daughter Grace was with her.” A sob catches in my throat. For once, words fail me.

“Mrs. Giovanni, we are doing everything we can to find your daughter.”

I'm in the parking lot now, racing toward my car. He has to be wrong. My daughter can't be missing. She had to have run and hid when someone attacked my mother. Now it's just a matter of letting her know it's safe to come back out. As I reach my car, I ignore the image that pops into my mind of wide-­open Ocean Beach with nowhere to hide.

“She is hiding. She wouldn't just leave my mother's side like that.” I choke the words out, nearly out of breath from running and hyperventilating.

Not willing
ly she wouldn't
. I push that thought aside, but then I remember what the officer said. A witness saw a man carrying a little girl away from the beach.
No!

I'm starting to see black again on the edge of my vision as I put the key in my ignition.

“Please remain calm,” the sergeant says. “A team of officers is searching Ocean Beach and surrounding streets. We'll find her.”

“What about my mother?”

“Your mother is in an ambulance on the way to San Francisco General.”

“Okay, okay,” I say, trying to calm down. And then what he says next sends me recoiling in fear. He tries to be matter-­of-­fact about it, but I know why he is asking. I throw my car into reverse in the newspaper parking lot. I hop a curb and leave a strip of rubber as I pull onto the main road.

“If you have a picture of your daughter, it might help to bring it to the police station so we have it in case we need to file a missing person's report.”

Oh my God
.

“I'm not going to the police station. I'm on my way to the beach. My daughter is probably just hiding. I'm sure you'll find her before I even get there.” My voice is panicky, frantic. Next he's going to ask for her medical and dental records, isn't he? And her little hairbrush so they can get her DNA off it?
Oh my God. Oh my God
.

I've covered a lot of missing kid cases, so I know too much about what happens when a child disappears. She can't be missing. She has to be somewhere nearby on the beach. Maybe some nice strangers took her somewhere for help.

I screech to a stop at a red light, the nose of my car sticking into the intersection.

“Mrs. Giovanni, you still there?”

So many things run through my mind.
My daughter can't be missing.
You have to find my daughter. Where is Grace?

I grit my words into the phone. “When you find her, call this number immediately. I need to call her father.”

A
S SOON AS
I hang up, I dial Donovan with shaking hands.

“I'm almost there,” he says, his voice jagged in a way I've never heard before. The fear is entangled in his steely words. I don't ask how he's heard.

“Oh God, Donovan . . .”

“Don't go there, Ella. Don't even think about it.” His words are fierce, desperate, and angry.

“It was that guy. From the beach.”

“We don't know that. We don't even know if the witness account of seeing someone with a little girl is right.”

“I know. I know.” But even to my own ears, I don't sound convincing.

“Calm down, Ella.” His voice is so matter-­of-­fact that I'm incredulous. “We've also got to consider that she was taken. That someone hit your mother over the head in order to kidnap Grace.”

“Who would do such a thing?”

“I've been thinking,” he says. I want to tell him to shut up right then. I want to tell him not to finish what he's about to say. If he doesn't say it, it can't be real or true. But I know, deep inside, what he is going to say before the name comes out of his mouth.

“Frank Anderson.”

He's said it out loud. I thought that if I didn't say it, it couldn't be true. If I pushed it down deep inside, I could make it go away, make it impossible. But he's said it out loud now.

There is not enough air in the car. I roll down my window and gulp in the air streaming through my window, blowing my hair in a tangle around my face. Frank Anderson took my sister, and now he's got my daughter.

Donovan and I stay on the phone but don't talk. I cut off a few cars leading up to the bore of the Caldecott Tunnel and cause a cacophony of honking.

“Are you okay to drive?” Donovan finally asks. “Don't kill yourself getting to Ocean Beach. Your mom needs you. Grace needs you, Ella.”

I don't answer. Suddenly, I'm angry at everyone. Donovan. My mom. And especially myself. I'm furious I didn't take off work today to keep Grace safe. And what kind of person doesn't even go to the hospital to check on her mother who was hit on the head? What kind of daughter am I?

With cold calculation I prioritize my love, organize it into little boxes. I know it's monstrous to do so, but I can't help it. There is nothing that will stop me from going to that beach and finding Grace.

“Stay strong, Ella.” Donovan's voice startles me back to the road in front of me. I was driving on autopilot.

“Okay.” But I don't ease up on the gas pedal, snaking in and out of cars in the darkness of the tunnel.

“Hang up and drive.”

“No.”

“Put me on speakerphone,” he says. “Can you at least do that for me?”

“Okay.” I punch the speakerphone button and set the phone on the passenger seat.

“Keep talking to me. It's going to be okay. We'll find her. It's going to be okay.”

I can't tell if he's trying to convince himself or me.

Emerging from the Caldecott Tunnel into Oakland, the sight of the San Francisco skyline across the bay makes a wave of panic rise into my throat and lodge there like a wet dishrag. Ocean Beach is so far away. It will take me forever to get there. I'm punching my steering wheel when I realize they didn't even tell me how serious my mother's injury was, and God forgive me, I didn't ask.

My mother has been my guardian angel for the past five years since I've become a mother myself. She has helped me through the most challenging and difficult days of motherhood.

W
HEN
G
RACE WAS
a newborn, my mother saved my life.

The first few weeks after Grace was born were full of sleepless nights punctuated by nursing every two hours. I was so grateful to have a baby in my arms after suffering a miscarriage previously that I was determined to do it all on my own and soak in every minute of it. My mother kept offering to help or to take Grace for a night so I could get at least four hours of sleep in a row, but I didn't want to leave my baby's side. When I wasn't nursing Grace or rocking her to sleep, I was walking around in a haze where nothing seemed real. I felt like I'd been transported to an isolated planet for new, sleep-­deprived mothers and that there was no escape.

When Grace finally did sleep in fitful chunks of time, I would curl up on our bed near her crib and stare at her chest moving up and down until I drifted off into a light slumber, only to awake at each little grunting animal noise she made. One night, I prayed to God to keep me sane. I knew I was losing it and falling into that special crazy caused by sleep deprivation. After all, a few governments use sleep deprivation as a form of torture and method of interrogation. I remember reading an article about rats who had been kept awake for several weeks and ended up dying.

But at the time, I felt it wasn't my choice not to sleep. I truly
wanted
to sleep, craved sleep, lusted for sleep. But I wasn't willing to forego my motherly duties to do so.

Donovan was at a loss. He wanted to help, but I refused to pump my breast milk at first and said that she “needed” me to be with her at all times. Every attempt to lure me out of the house or away from Grace failed. I refused to be away from her, even for a trip to the market. Going out to dinner with Donovan was not an option. I was convinced I had to be around her to keep her safe. Without me around, something bad would happen.

It was only when I started laughing and crying hysterically one night and talking deliriously that Donovan and my mother plotted my kidnapping. My mother came over with a breast pump and threatened to call my therapist if I didn't use it. So I pumped milk for a few days and agreed to go out to lunch with Donovan on Friday to keep her from calling my shrink.

But I was still walking around on autopilot when Donovan took my arm and led me to his car that Friday afternoon. My mother held Grace and waved from a window as we pulled away. It was only then I noticed my small overnight bag in the backseat.

“What the hell? I thought we were just going to lunch.”

“We're going on a little field trip. Don't argue with me.” He reached over and grasped my hand in his.

I pulled away from him. “I can't leave her. What kind of mother leaves her newborn baby? A shitty mother, that's who.”

He burst into laughter, and I glared at him.

“Ella, you are a wonderful mother. You have to believe me when I say this is not only for your own good, it's good for Grace. She'll be fine.”

We pulled into the big, swooping driveway of the Fairmont Hotel, perched on one of the tallest hills in the city. I hadn't been here since the night I met Mayor Adam Grant. A pang of sadness trickled through me as I remembered his untimely death.

Donovan handed the keys to the valet and grabbed my overnight case out of the backseat as I stood there, numbly, wishing I'd worn something nicer than a black cotton dress that probably had a trail of baby spit-­up splashed down the back.

When we got inside, I found out Donovan had paid for a weekend at the Fairmont Hotel. For me alone.

After he checked me in, we found my room on the tenth floor. Inside the opulent charcoal-­gray-­and-­beige room, Donovan helped me undress as I stood there like a zombie. I stared at him as he helped me change into some new pajamas, men's-­style in pink silk. Then he tucked me into bed, handed me the phone, the remote, and the room ser­vice menu, and told me he'd pick me up at 11:00 a.m. on Sunday.

When I came home, I was a new woman. Grace had survived the weekend without me. And I had survived the weekend without her.

B
UT
I
CAN'T
survive without Grace now. Never. I'm still so lost in memories of that weekend when she was a baby that when traffic slows in front of me, I have to slam on my brakes.

I want to scream as I come to a stop, waiting for cars to merge into the toll lanes to enter the Bay Bridge.

At one point, I scream, “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Please let Grace be there when I get to the beach.”

“Ella?” I had forgotten Donovan was on the other end of the phone.

“Okay.”

“Where are you now?”

“At the tollbooth.”

“I just got off the bridge. I'm a few minutes ahead of you,” he says, sounding like he is panting.

I swerve to avoid the line of cars waiting to pay the toll, then ride on the shoulder until I'm at the express FasTrak lane, cutting off an angry driver who honks in a long, drawn-­out, obnoxious blare.

The tollbooth is a blur as I zip through and then punch the gas, accelerating past all the other cars on the bridge until the path is clear. All the while, I'm screaming inside my head. Every now and then a sob escapes like a loud gasp. But my eyes are dry. I cannot cry. I have to stay strong.

“I'm pulling into the parking lot at the beach now. I'm going to hang up and find our little girl. I'm going to find her. I will call you as soon as I do.”