Good as Gone (15 page)

I check the time and wonder when Tom will be getting home. He used to go to the support group for parents of missing children on Sunday evenings, but does he still, now that Julie is home? Is he allowed? What would it be like to be surrounded by the faces of those whose children are still and always missing after your own prayers have been answered?

Then I remember.

Ask Alma if anybody knows what hers looks like.

It was the billboards. The last night I ever went to the support group with Tom, they turned on us, on me, about the billboards.

“Your girl is everywhere,” a woman—Connie, I think her name was—said that final evening. “I see her face every time I run out to the corner store. When was the last time you saw my girl Shawnna’s face? Do you even know what she looks like?” She turned from side to side, staring down the people sitting near her. “That’s right. I guess you know she’s black, that’s about it. Fourteen-year-old black girl, probably just ran away, right? Nobody gives a shit. Ask Alma if anybody knows what hers looks like.”

In my memory, Alma has downcast eyes, dark lashes, hair in a tight, tucked-under French braid.

The group leader said something about the importance of each focusing on our own feelings, and Connie said, “Pissed off,” and a mumble started up around the circle among the parents of kids who had been abducted in more ordinary ways: picked up from school by an ex-husband and whisked across state lines, like Alma’s daughter, or talked into driving off in an older boyfriend’s truck. Kids who were too poor or too brown, too old or too badly behaved to wind up on the news night after night for weeks and months after they were gone.

Julie’s wide-eyed innocence, however, seemed made for TV. She was a character in a comic-book crime: one of America’s pink-cheeked, golden-haired daughters, stalked by a psycho and stolen at knifepoint from under her very own roof. That round face with the flat upper lip that made her look childish in precisely the way adult women are supposed to try to look childish; her ice-blue eyes, the limp, pale flag of her hair. I used to look at the stubby eyelashes that were dark near the roots and that vanished toward the tips and think,
When this girl puts on makeup, we will all be doomed
. Of course, we didn’t have to wait that long.

One by one, the group members’ faces turned toward us with envy, even hatred. As if our worst nightmare had been orchestrated to steal the spotlight from theirs. As if we were lucky to have had our daughter stolen by a true psychopath.

I say
we
, but I’m the mother. They stared at me, and I felt myself turn to stone.

“I’m so glad we’re talking about the anger we feel,” the group leader said. “I’m so glad we’re sharing these feelings.”

She’s just as dead as all of yours,
I wanted to say. But instead I walked out and never came back, leaving Tom behind to give conciliatory speeches. I never asked how he got home at the end of the night.

Suddenly I feel sure it was Alma who gave him a ride.

’s seventeenth birthday party consisted of three people: Karen and Melinda and Bob McGinty.

“Happy birthday,” Melinda said, handing her a cardboard box. Melinda’s iron-gray cap of hair was as smooth and prim as ever, but she wore earrings that bobbed against her turtleneck, and her large teeth were visible through a stretched-open smile. Even Bob looked pleased.

Karen opened the little box. In it lay a necklace with a horse charm.

The riding thing was how Karen survived public school in Red Bluff, California, a wasteland of baseball-playing thugs dating girls with faces like sour milk. Because she rode, she didn’t have to take gym, and she had a social status independent of what she wore. That was fortunate, because dressed in the skirts and tights and sweaters the McGintys bought her—and some of it wasn’t even bought but handed down from a niece who’d dropped out of high school fifteen years ago and was roughly her size—Karen looked awkward at best. Melinda and Bob didn’t have a daughter of their own, although they’d tried, and their son hadn’t been home since he was eighteen. Whatever it was he was off doing in New York, if he was still there, it was nothing he wanted to tell his parents about. They got a postcard every year or so, Melinda told her, adding, “So we know he’s still alive,” in a matter-of-fact way that suggested a lot of tears had already gone into that phrase.

Karen had heard all this, or some version of it, before. She’d stopped being surprised when foster parents told her the story of why they were fostering. It happened so often she almost always knew exactly for whom she was substituting: a child never born but longed for, begged for, and finally given up on; a dead child; a missing child; an older brother or sister who drove away on a motorcycle forty years ago and never came back. She learned to distrust the big families, where the real siblings presented a united front against her, tolerating her in front of the parents but ignoring her behind their backs. (“Don’t worry about learning all our names, you won’t be here long.”) The parents might act like they had too much love and needed to keep giving it away, but there was, of course, the money. She didn’t blame them, but she wouldn’t thank them either.

Whatever role Karen was playing for her temporary parents, she was never interested in playing it well. She knew she was just killing time before aging out. Fostering with a family had risks, but it was usually safer than the streets. And when it got unsafe, when a father walked in on her changing and lingered a moment too long before backing out and shutting the door, when a cousin came into her room during the family barbecue—well, she had calibrated the precise moment past which she could no longer measure out her body’s worth in string cheese and Snack Packs. At that point, she would run away, taking something small with her.

Nothing valuable; she didn’t want to end up in juvie. She aimed for sentiment instead. Things that wouldn’t be missed for some time but would spill tears when they were. Two years in foster care had left her with a small collection of these trophies, including a Precious Moments figurine with an onion head and teary eyes clutching a teddy bear whose ear had chipped off in her backpack; a souvenir thimble from Niagara Falls she had found in the drawer of a foster mom’s bedside table; a finger painting, yellowed with age,
Deacon, 4 yr.,
in a preschool teacher’s handwriting in the corner. She’d hesitated over the last one, remembering the sick little boy, but then she remembered what Deacon’s older brother had done to her and the hard smack Deacon’s mom had given her when she ratted him out. She kept it folded up in quarters so she wouldn’t see the messy swipes of red and blue paint.

But the McGintys were different. They gave her plenty of space, because they themselves liked a lot of space. They were both retired, but Melinda volunteered at the library every morning, as if constant pillow-straightening and counter-wiping were not enough of an outlet for her precision. At first Karen thought she’d been brought in to babysit Bob during Melinda’s library shifts. Each morning after Melinda drove off, Karen had waited for his perversion to emerge, but Bob only nursed his coffee for an hour or two before heading out to his woodshop to putter away the day. She’d go upstairs, close her door, and lie on her bed for hours at a time, staring up at the light fixture, gripped with a suffocating feeling she couldn’t understand, like a hand wrapped around her throat. It had been a long time since she’d been bored.

Horse camp saved her from certain desperate acts of vandalism she was beginning to contemplate. Melinda signed her up for eight weeks at a ranch run by an old friend of hers just down the road. Karen assumed it was a favor between friends, because although two months of camp sounded expensive, Melinda didn’t seem to care whether she went or not. “Bob’ll take you if you want to go,” she said. “Or you can walk half an hour down the FM 229, that’ll get you there. Starts at ten in the morning every weekday.” Karen was noncommittal, but when the time came, after Melinda left for the library and Bob folded his paper and wandered off to the woodshop, and she saw they really weren’t going to push it, she decided a walk sounded better than another morning alone with the wallpaper. Besides, she had a kind of distant curiosity about horses. As a child, she’d had fantasies of a silvery-white steed invisible to everyone but her who galloped the horizon silently as a cloud, watching her from afar.

When she first entered the stables, the sweaty, rank, shiver-skinned reality of horses made her ashamed of the fairy-tale version she’d envisioned. They frightened her, all twitching muscles and rolling eyes and hooves that hit the earth with a shudder she could feel through her sneakers. But as a rule, Karen showed fear only when it helped minimize damage, and she could tell right away that cringing wouldn’t get her anywhere with animals this powerful. Besides, the half a dozen other kids at the camp, many of whom were already accomplished riders, were years younger than her. The youngest was nine. When Karen petted the giant head of a chestnut mare on her first visit to the stables, she made sure the instructor, the nine-year-old, and anyone else watching saw that her hand didn’t tremble.

She went back the next day, and the next, and over eight weeks, she got pretty good at being around horses—riding them, taking care of them, cleaning up after them. Not great, but comfortable. At the end of the summer, Melinda left the library early every day to watch her ride, and as much as being on the back of a strong, fast animal meant to Karen, watching Karen seemed to mean even more to Melinda.

It was the horse charm that made Karen understand how much, though. Looking down at the flimsy charm, she thought that nobody had given one like it to Melinda and that she must have wanted one, probably from someone in particular.

“We want to get a real one for you someday,” Melinda said. “A horse, I mean. Our finances just aren’t in order this year, but it’ll happen sometime.” The McGintys occasionally referred to a distant, more prosperous past in which they’d owned horses, but this was the first they’d ever mentioned buying one.

“Wow, thanks,” Karen said.

“You’ve made good grades this year,” Melinda continued. “We’re proud of you.” Bob nodded agreement. “Anyway, we’d like to talk about taking the next step. We want to adopt you, Karen.”

My name isn’t Karen
was the first thought that came into her mind. “I love the necklace” is what she said. “Thank you so much.” She meant it. The charm on the thin gold chain was cheap, one side flat and the other sculpted to look three-dimensional. But the horse was running.

“You don’t have to decide right now,” Melinda said. “We just wanted you to know that we consider you our daughter.”

What Melinda wasn’t saying but Karen heard in her words was the concern over her aging out. Karen had listened to the stories in the group home. She thought of the Petes with a shudder.

She weighed her memories of them against Melinda’s long, strong face, which was more than plain, almost ugly. Strong, bitter lines cut a path from the corners of her mouth to the underside of her chin—that son—but a smile softened her eyes to a watery gray. Karen’s future with Melinda and Bob might involve horses, but it would also involve community college, a job in Red Bluff or Redding or even Sacramento. More: A baseball thug of her own, maybe a walk down a church aisle trimmed with ribbons and foldout bells made of tissue paper. And then, one day, this house with the clapboard siding and peaked roof would be hers, and she would sleep in the master suite that faced the wooded mountains and take her own children to the coast once a year. Snug as a fork in a drawer.

“This is the best birthday I’ve ever had,” Karen said. It was close enough to the truth, even if it wasn’t really her birthday, just a random date that happened to stick.

The next time she was out riding at the stables, she imagined leaning forward just a little more, urging the powerful creature to a trot, then a gallop, until it looked like the horse charm on her necklace. Leaping over the low wooden fence and cantering through pastures and woods and then up into the mountains. That was sheer fantasy, of course, another version of the silvery-white steed; she didn’t know how to jump, would kill herself and maybe the horse too trying. Horses didn’t do well in mountains, and neither would she. Anyway, how far could a girl get on a horse these days?

So she started thinking bus routes. It was time to head to Portland, where she’d heard there were more strip clubs per capita than in any other city in the U.S. That sounded like cash waiting to be made with no strings attached. When the time came, after Melinda left for the library and Bob folded his paper and wandered off to the woodshop and Karen set off down her usual path, she was surprised and relieved at how natural it felt to turn in the wrong direction on FM 229 and just walk away. She’d wrapped the necklace chain twice around her ankle, and the little gold charm clicked against her anklebone as she walked. Every eighth step or so, the charm slid into her shoe and got trapped against her skin for a second, then it popped out with a thwack, worked its way around her ankle, and slithered down again. The rhythm was nice, like the tiny horse was galloping away, and she was riding it out of town instead of a Greyhound bus.

“You think he’s cheating?” Alex Mercado says, casual but interested, like someone discussing odds in a race he’s not betting on.

“No. I don’t know. I just—” A shadow passes the narrow, frosted window outside my office door, and I shift the phone to my other ear. There’s always someone lurking around the department, even on the weekends.

“You want me to find out if he’s cheating,” he rephrases. “I’m happy to follow him, find out where he goes.”
It’ll cost you
runs the unspoken part of the sentence.

“Would you just look into something—someone—for me instead?” I say, lowering my voice. “Alma Josefina Ruiz.”

“Basic background?” he says. “Or follow her?”

“Background,” I say hurriedly. “She’s a trustee for our donation fund. The fund administrator, actually.”