The Elementals (2 page)

“The charm,” I whispered, instead.

When we got to the dorm I unsuccessfully attempted to swallow the latest lump of sand in my throat. It was just a tall, bleak-looking building with high windows that would have delighted any suicidal freshman but the thing that made my throat close was this: it looked exactly like the one in which Jeni had stayed. In fact, they faced each other. The camera in the lobby was no comfort, more of a threat, a reminder. I paused in front of it, remembering the staticky image the detective showed me of the girl in the striped T-shirt slipping away.

My room was a cubicle with twin beds, two desks, two closets and two chests of drawers. My roommate hadn’t arrived yet. I’d never shared a room with anyone in my whole life; it was hard to imagine spending every night for the next nine months with a complete stranger.

“Let’s eat, ladies,” said my dad when we were through unpacking. He was trying to sound cheerful but I could tell he was distracted. He kept shooting glances at my mom when she wasn’t looking, like he was checking to make sure she was still there. She was busy, moving even more quickly than usual, fussing over the bed corners and making sure the Degas and Arthur Rackham posters were evenly hung.

“It’s important,” she said when my dad told her I could do that later. “It’ll make you feel more at home, baby.”

We went to dinner at a famous restaurant on the north side of campus, a little wooden two-story house with candlelit tables and nasturtiums in vases. My father ordered gazpacho, salad, goat cheese pizza, figs and prosciutto, grilled salmon and a bottle of pinot but I couldn’t stomach much. It was supposed to be festive but no one felt that way. I was secretly wishing that my parents would stay the night. We’d get a hotel room and I’d sleep on a cot at the foot of their bed.

When I was a baby, my mom found me convulsing in my crib from fever. Meningitis. She stayed with me in the hospital the whole night, nursing me in the narrow bed among a tangle of I.V.s. The doctors had told her she couldn’t stay but she insisted. She lay on her side all night, my dad told me, with her breast in my mouth.

Her breast where something now grew.

I felt some wine burn back up in my throat.

As we drove to the dorm under a fat white moon wallowing low, we passed the homeless; so many more than we saw in the San Fernando Valley. They drifted like ghosts through air smelling sharply of burnt cheese and rotting fruit. There was a large woman with pale eyes, dancing in circles wearing a pair of children’s torn gauze and glitter fairy wings. A small person of unidentifiable gender held the train of her long dress. One man with dreadlocks stood on a corner, prophesying to himself. I tried to make out the words.

They were something like this: “The daimons exist everywhere. If you deny them they will appear in your head! Arise!”

We were stopped at a light and he seemed to be looking right through the dirt-streaked car window at me. I turned my head away to look out the other window and saw another man, a huge man—he must have been close to seven feet tall, even hunched over. He limped along the other side of the street, swaddled in rags, then slowly turned his head so that I saw his eyes watching from under his protruding brow. When he raised his hands up I could see; each one was the size of my head.

I glanced over at my mother; she looked pale and exhausted, small vertical lines showing around her lips. My parents might have allowed me to go, now, but they were still afraid; I could see the night in their eyes.

When we got back to the dorm my roommate was there. Lauren Barnes. A very blond, tan girl in a low-cut T-shirt, tight jeans and diamond studs. I was suddenly conscious of my pale skin, my frayed, mousy hair, shabby vintage sundress and beat-up cowboy boots. The baby bracelet on my wrist that spelled my missing best friend’s name.

Lauren took one look at me and my posters. “How did they manage to match us up?”

I didn’t know what to say but she laughed and hugged me, a little too hard. “J.K. Just kidding. I think it will be great to expand my horizons.” Then she went back to putting away her cashmere sweaters.

My mom fussed around the room some more, straightening the sheets and plumping pillows until my dad made her stop, and then we said good-bye. They were going to get a hotel somewhere along the way back home, they said. I was the one to pull away first when they hugged me. I watched them walk to the parking lot from the ninth-story window of my room. They looked tiny and scared, holding onto each other.

I went down the hall to the coed bathroom, hoping no boys were there yet. I washed my face and brushed my teeth as fast as I could. It seemed unnecessarily cruel not to have separate men’s and women’s restrooms but my parents had chosen the cheapest option, plus I think they reasoned that I’d be safer with nice young men around. I went back to the room and put on my pajamas while Lauren sat on her bed reading a
Cosmo
magazine. I couldn’t imagine getting used to changing in front of her but it was better than trying to do it in the bathroom stalls with boys shuffling by. I got into bed, flicked on the reading light my mom had bought me and stared at my book of Baudelaire’s poetry without actually registering a single word. It didn’t matter; I knew them by heart anyway—and this was my favorite poem, the one about the capricious moon overtaking the pale green-eyed child in her bed, “tenderly crushing” her throat so that she always longed to cry.

Finally my eyelids got too heavy and I marked the book with Jeni’s postcard, rested my head on the pillow and turned off the light.

As I was drifting off, I thought of how, when I was a little sleepless girl, my mom would come in my bed with me and curl up at the bottom.

“I love you,” I’d say. “You’re the best mommy in the world.” And she’d say, “I love you more.” We went on like that back and forth. One night she added, “Someday I hope you meet a man who loves you as much as I do. Because every girl deserves that much love.” I reached out and took her hand and that was how I had been able to sleep.

There were no nightmares then, not real ones, no malignancies, no missing girls.

3. The residue of lonely

I almost went on that school trip with Jeni, and the other students and the chaperone Mr. Kragen, but I got the flu at the last minute. I wonder if I’d gone, would she still be here? She would never have wandered off alone. I’d have been by her side the whole time. After what happened I wanted to go to Berkeley even more. I wanted to be where she had been—to find something, to find myself. Since she’d been gone, I’d gone missing, too.

I woke early to avoid the boys. For the first few days I managed it but at the end of the week I came out of the shower stall and saw three massive males shaving at the sinks. They were all completely naked. One of them winked at me in the mirror and I felt my face redden as I ran out. They grunted with laughter. My embarrassment wasn’t just that I’d seen them; it was that it had excited me as much as it made me feel sick to my stomach. Not that I wanted them, but I was curious, my body was curious. I was seventeen but I couldn’t remember ever seeing a penis before. Jeni and I looked at pictures on the Internet (the nude Nureyev by Avedon was our favorite) but that was it and I’d lost interest, even in the most beautiful ballet dancer in the world, after she wasn’t there. The three naked bodies were meaty and hairy, bodies of men who could do harm if they wanted.

They were all football players—Todd Hamlin, Jake Glendorf and Will Merrell. Lauren knew everyone’s name and talked constantly—that’s how I found out. I started getting up even earlier after that.

I went down to breakfast in the cafeteria, where I always ate alone; no one asked to sit with me and I was too shy to introduce myself. People seemed to divide up into the usual groups right away, just like in high school—preppy kids, jocks, tech nerds, artsy and Lauren Barnes and her friends Kelly Wentworth and Jodi Bale who looked like sorority girls with their shiny hair and perfect clothes. I didn’t fit in with any of the groups and I guess I didn’t really try. In high school it didn’t matter that much because I had my mom and dad and Jeni. If she were with me everything would be different, I told myself. We’d have been roommates and eaten every meal together and taken the train to San Francisco on the weekends to see all the places we dreamed about. We would have shared iPod speakers listening to our favorite band, Halloween Hotel, and talked about indie boys and music, antique books and vintage clothes, late into the night until one of us crashed out. The other girl would have smiled to herself in the darkness as her last question went unanswered; she would be eager for morning.

*   *   *

I didn’t mind school; it wasn’t obvious, in class, that I was alone, that parts of me were gone. I could get lost in the books and the lectures and I could forget, if only for a little while, about my mom and Jeni and the way it felt to walk around that big campus by myself, like some kind of ghost.

There were times it would have been good to really be a ghost, though. Like when I had to face the naked football players in the bathroom or run into one of them on campus where they would wink at me and wolf whistle and then laugh. My face would always flame up, reminding me, and not in a good way, that I wasn’t a bloodless ghost at all.

After school I went on runs through Strawberry Canyon or the amphitheater-shaped Berkeley rose garden, now barren of blooms. Then I got an early dinner at the dorms, where the food was always terrible—overcooked vegetables and “mystery meat” in brown sauce. I missed my mom’s lasagnas, paellas and enchiladas so much it made me want to cry into the plate of iceberg lettuce with cold tofu that was all I could stomach. I grabbed an energy bar from the care package my mom sent, got a coffee on the way and went to Doe Library to study.

On the weekends everything was basically the same—reading, writing and running. My big treat was dinner on Saturday night—a colossal frozen yogurt that made my stomach hurt and my hands feel like ice sculptures. If there was a party in the dorm I went just to get the free alcohol and then left.

I talked to my parents then, too, but not usually during the week, which was strange since I had basically at least spoken to, if not seen, my mom every day for my entire life.

I did all of these things, the things every freshman does, but there was something else I did, too, those first two months in the city of her disappearance. I searched for clues.

Dressed in baggy jeans, striped T-shirts and sneakers, my hair in a ponytail, just like her. Hoping to lure anyone who might have wanted Jeni. But I didn’t have those dimples or those lashes, half the magic.

The dorm across from mine could have been the same building. Every day after school I wandered those halls. I even went to the room where she had stayed and knocked on the door and asked if I could look around. Two girls wrinkled their noses at me. They were identical in stature (slight), hairstyle (bangs), even outfits, and for a moment my chest squeezed with longing for a companion, not a phantom twin. They let me look inside but it could have been any freshman dorm room, though I wanted to get on my knees and press my face into the mattress. I left and walked down the stairs, out the front door, imagining I was Jeni. Where would she have gone?

Everywhere I went I imagined she was walking with me. I tried to see things through her eyes; it wasn’t hard. I knew how she thought. The faces she would find beautiful or interesting, the scruffy and disabled dogs she would stop to pet, the jewelry she would lift from black velvet on the street vendor’s table, examining to see how it was made, the buildings she would want to live in. I recorded anything that seemed important in the notebook I always carried. Sometimes I wrote stories trying to understand more about a world that made no sense to me.

Once I took BART into the city, to the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park because that was the photo on the postcard she had sent me.
Miss you. See you soon.
The postcard had been sent from a Berkeley post office the day she disappeared and it arrived after we already knew she was gone. She hadn’t chosen a Berkeley image but a San Francisco one.
We should live here someday.
I wasn’t sure if she meant the city or the actual building of the conservatory; the lacy white wood-and-glass Victorian greenhouse looked like a fairy palace. I wandered around under the dome, among the orchids and across the lawn outside and even handed out a few flyers but I felt helpless and lost in the fog so I went back to Berkeley where at least there was evidence she had once been.

Sometimes when I saw the campus police or passed the station I wondered to myself what I would say to them.

“I want her back,” I would say. “Can you help me find her?”

*   *   *

So instead of making a fool of myself with the police, I did it with everyone else; wherever I went, that late summer and early fall, I carried a stack of flyers in my backpack. I tried to hand them out, asking if anyone had seen her face. Most people looked at me strangely and wouldn’t even talk to me. In Berkeley you learn to build a wall around yourself, to protect yourself from the onslaught of flyers and petitions and upturned palms and catcalls and insults. I did it, too. So I understood why I was being ignored but I didn’t give up. Maybe I seemed insane—paranoid, schizoid, obsessive-compulsive—padding after people, holding up the photo of the girl with the dimples and huge, dark eyes. Maybe I was.

It didn’t matter.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Excuse me, have you seen her?”

There was one person in my dorm—a classic goth girl with powder skin and bottle-black hair—who seemed interested in the picture.

“Who is this?” she asked, taking a flyer and tapping it with bitten black nails.

“My best friend.”

“What happened?” Her pale face seemed to grow smaller behind her cat-eye glasses. “She looks familiar.”

A tremor of dumb hope and shrewd fear traveled along my spine. “She was visiting here summer before last.”

“It was in the papers,” the girl said. “I remember. I collect that stuff.”