The Year of Fog (13 page)

“What are you doing here?” I ask. It seems, at the moment, like the only logical thing to say to this woman who has simply appeared from out of the blue.

She sips her coffee. “Pardon?”

“What do you want from him?”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“You walked out on him. Worse, you walked out on Emma. Hardly a word from you since you cleared out. Then you cozy up to the cameras like the heartbroken mother.”

She sets her mug on the end table and crosses her legs. Her dress slides up her calf, revealing a large oval birthmark just below her knee. “You think I have no feelings? You think I don’t love that little girl?”

Her eyes are deep green, pretty—Emma’s eyes. She leans forward, rolls up her sleeves and stretches out her arms, palms up. Her skin is wrecked, a road map of needle marks and wasted veins. Instinctively I look away.

“No mother who gave a damn would stick around in that condition,” she says, rolling her sleeves down. “If you’d ever been addicted, you’d know. You can’t raise a kid like that.”

Part of me wants to believe her, but this impulse only lasts a moment. Why can’t I feel the same sympathy for her that I feel every time I see a junkie panhandling in the Tenderloin? Why do I feel this hardness, this anger, when I look at her? I struggle to keep my voice calm. “You never even called to see how she was. Not so much as a birthday card.”

“My life was shit,” she says. “I had to get my act together first.”

“But you had to have known she was missing. How could you not have known?”

“I don’t watch TV,” she says. “I don’t keep up with the news. A friend told me about the
Today
show bit.”

“Right.”

Jake returns from the kitchen and hands me a cup of coffee. In the old days, when we played off each other like a couple in a comedy routine, I would have made some crack about what a rotten host he was, leaving the two of us alone to fight it out. But there’s nothing funny here, no way to save the party.

“Jake was just telling me where the investigation stands,” Lisbeth says coolly, as if our whole ugly exchange never happened.

He sits down on the sofa beside her. They look like a couple, sitting there, and a history unfolds before me, a family portrait I’ve never had to confront before. There are no pictures of Lisbeth in the house, no snapshots of Jake, Lisbeth, and Emma together. Jake rarely speaks of her. As long as I’ve known him, it has been just Jake and Emma, happy together, but not entirely whole. I always had the sense that something was missing from that small family, but it never struck me as a thing that had been there before. Instead, there was a space open and waiting, and I was the right one to fill it. I had relished the idea of entering their family, completing the picture. Now, observing Jake and Lisbeth together, I recognize something natural in the pairing, something that makes sense. Even though they haven’t seen each other in years, there’s an ease between them—in the way he leans back into the sofa beside her, the way she reaches over to extract a bit of dress caught beneath his leg.

He closes his eyes. He looks so tired, sapped of strength. I want to go over there and hold him, put his head in my lap and stroke his hair, the way I used to do after he’d had a bad day at work. I want to reclaim that good thing we used to share. But Lisbeth reaches over and squeezes his hand. And I’m not imagining this: Jake squeezes back.

Later, after she’s gone, I can’t help asking what seems to me the most obvious question. “So Lisbeth suddenly cares about Emma?”

I feel it again, that possessive streak running through me. I know Emma isn’t my daughter, but the love I feel for her isn’t small and tidy, it doesn’t take into account the proper semantics of our relationship. There is nothing of
stepmother
or
stepdaughter
in this love, nothing so manageable that I can simply stash it away when her biological mother walks into the picture. When Jake and I decided to get married, he broached the subject of adoption. “Not right away,” he said. “It’s just something we might want to think about in the future.” I was startled but then elated by the possibility, and I stood there in stunned silence, trying to burn the moment into my memory. Now, I don’t know how to process this new information, the fact of Lisbeth’s presence.

“She really is concerned,” Jake says. “It’s not an act.”

“Come on, Jake. Think about it. She had to have known about Emma from the beginning if she’s been living in Morro Bay. So why did she wait until two months after the fact to make her appearance? It’s obvious, isn’t it? She showed up now because she didn’t have a choice. Her picture was on national TV. She knew someone would recognize her. This sudden appearance isn’t about Emma—it’s about
her
, Lisbeth. You’re the one who told me she never thinks about anyone other than herself.”

“I’m not condoning her actions, Abby. I’ve never pretended to understand why Lisbeth does the things she does. To be honest, I think she’s on another planet. She—” He doesn’t finish his sentence, looks away.

“She what?”

“She actually had the audacity to ask if we had a chance.”

“What chance? What do you mean?”

“Me and her, if—when—Emma comes back. She wanted to know if we could give it another go, try to make a family.”

I’m trying not to succumb to this feeling of the ground sliding beneath my feet. It’s a physical sensation, like the tremors after an earthquake, that sense of unsteadiness, that feeling of being entirely at the mercy of forces beyond my control. “That’s insane,” I say.

He bites his lower lip, a gesture that takes me back to the first moment I met him, in the auditorium of his high school. “It is.”

But I can tell there’s a part of him, just the tiniest part, that doesn’t think it’s such a crazy idea. That’s Jake’s albatross: he’s forgiving to a fault. He has even tried, I know he has tried, to forgive me.

28

T
HE NEXT
day, on the way to the restaurant shoot, I’m worried I won’t be able to pull it off. Especially now, with the image of Lisbeth fixed in my brain, her words running through my head on continuous loop—“I am her mother, after all.”

When I arrive at the restaurant, it’s already packed. I’m often astonished, on a job, how much of San Francisco seems to be made up of the young and beautiful, the rich and carefree, the perfectly coiffed and tastefully clad. When I moved here in the early nineties, the city was still a little dirty, a little ragged around the edges. It still had, in some ways, the feel of a Western outpost, where artists and writers rented shabby apartments, two to a bedroom, and got their social fix at dive bars in the Mission and the Lower Haight. To be honest, I liked it better the old way, before every bar had a wine list and every twenty-something had stock options.

As I work the crowd, I remember the grand ideas I started with. I planned to take raw, honest photos of illegal immigrants and the urban poor, aging sex workers, single mothers scraping by on minimum wage. After finishing my degree in documentary photography at the University of Tennessee, I moved to San Francisco and rented a studio apartment with bad plumbing and peeling paint in the heart of the Mission. I turned my bathroom into a darkroom, took a job waiting tables at a tapas bar, and spent my free time wandering the streets with my camera. I thought my photos would make a difference, would help people to
see
one another. Back then, if someone had told me I would end up photographing posh restaurants and corporate Christmas parties, I would have laughed. But it didn’t take me long to realize that the kind of pictures I wanted to take didn’t pay the bills.

The first few shots are almost impossible, but eventually, I get into a rhythm. I’m little more than a machine, identifying the appropriate scenes, framing the shots, checking the light, focusing, pressing the shutter release. Afterward, driving home through patches of fast-moving fog, I wonder if Emma could forgive me for this: for doing something as mundane as working, taking pictures at a party, when she’s still out there, waiting.

29

D
AY SEVENTY
. Bright sun and wild, crashing waves. The highway has been closed for erosion control. Sand is spread across its four lanes, and the traffic lights are blinking red. Jake once told me that, when he was a kid, the Great Highway was a long stretch of smooth ocean road where teenagers would drag race. Now, with the sand moving in thin sheets across the pocked surface, it looks abandoned. A major American city on a Friday afternoon, and on its western edge lies this deserted road, this no-man’s-land.

I pull up beside Sutro Heights Park and climb to the top of the parapet, which is all that remains of the grand old Sutro House. From here I have a perfect view of Ocean Beach. It’s nothing like the day Emma disappeared. Then, the fog was white and clean-looking, so dense it was impossible to see. Today, I can see down the length of the beach, which stretches three miles south to Daly City. While most of the country is preparing for fall, San Francisco is heating up. This is our true summer, September to October. Telltale black spots bob up and down in the surf along the coastline—wet suits. When I first moved to San Francisco, I met a man who surfed. Sometimes I’d tag along with him for the drive to Pacifica or Bolinas, where the waves are calmer and a beginner can try his luck; or we’d pick up sandwiches at Joe’s Deli and take them down to Ocean Beach, where we’d sit on a blanket and watch more-intrepid surfers battling the wild breaks at Kelly’s Cove. My friend could not conceal his awe.

“Unbelievable,” he’d say, watching some veteran gracefully catch an overhead wave. “I’d give anything to be able to do that.” Anytime a surf flick was playing at the Red Vic, he’d make a point to get tickets to the first showing, and he had copies of
September Sessions
and
Step into Liquid
that had gone blurry and dim from being played so many times. About a year after I met him, he moved back to the East Coast, but not before his admiration for the surfing life rubbed off on me. I never got up the nerve to try the sport myself—something about the speed, and the sharks, and the freezing Pacific. I’d always thought the ocean in this part of the country seemed beautiful but terrifying.

On foot, I head down toward Louis’s Diner and the Cliff House, and stand for a minute in front of the empty storefront where the Musée Mécanique used to be. The arcade housed elaborate coin-operated mechanical games dating back to the 1880s. I brought Emma here a few times. She loved the miniature carnival, with its rides that lit up and started moving when you dropped the nickels in. And the Mighty Wurlitzer, with its player piano and mandolin rail, bass drum, and flute pipes. But her favorite was Laughing Sal, a life-size redheaded woman ensconced in glass. Emma would put her quarters in the slot and watch openmouthed as Sal rolled her eyes and nodded her head, passing her fingers over an array of colorful cards, before a printed fortune was dispensed through a little slot. Emma kept the fortune cards on a bulletin board in her room. They’re still there:
You will travel to far-off lands. A handsome stranger will bring surprising news
.

The smell of burgers wafts downhill from Louis’s, and I realize I haven’t eaten since yesterday. I walk the steep hill down to Kelly’s Cove and head south, surprised once again by the day-to-day flux of this stretch of sand I’ve walked hundreds of times since Emma’s disappearance. The beach today is littered with dead fish, a man’s drenched sock, an empty toothpaste tube, clumps of seaweed, a broken tennis racket, and rotting driftwood. Every few hundred feet there’s another abandoned fire pit, some of the embers still smoking. They’re a nightly ritual here, the bonfires around which teenagers drink beer and surfer girls dance and homeless people heat their tins of food. While the Richmond district caters to Russians, the Mission to Mexicans, Pacific Heights to the obscenely wealthy, and Bernal Heights to the granola set, Ocean Beach defies the boundaries of San Francisco’s neighborhoods. Everyone comes here, rubbing elbows in the wind and fog.

Today, there isn’t a sand dollar to be found amid the natural and man-made detritus. Sticky black patches dot the sand, and the air smells of tar.

About half a mile down the beach I come upon two girls, sisters, about ten and eleven years old, gathering shells by the water’s edge. They’re barefoot, laughing, jeans rolled above their ankles.

“Where are your parents?” I ask. “You’re not here alone, are you?”

The taller girl grabs her sister’s hand. They stop laughing and walk away, eyeing me with mistrust. I look around but see no adults. Who would allow them to be out here alone?

At the intersection of Judah and the Great Highway, I cross the two-lane highway and go into the public restroom, the same restroom I searched that day in the frantic moments after I noticed Emma missing. A homeless woman is washing up at the sink. Spread on the floor beside her is a makeshift toilette—plastic comb, sliver of soap, new lipstick tube, and a small plastic container of blush. By force of habit, I pull a flyer out of my pocket.

“I’m looking for a little girl,” I say.

She takes a quick glance and hands the flyer back to me. “No offense,” she says, “but who isn’t?”

I cross La Playa, navigate the circular bit of road where the electric buses of the N-Judah line curl together like a gigantic centipede, turning around for their return trips inland. The wind blowing off the ocean drives sand into the bare skin of my neck. I can hear the roar of the waves, smell the sweet saltiness of the ocean before a rain. Boxy houses in ruined pastels present their haggard faces to the wind. The outdoor tables at Java Beach are empty except for an elderly man with a thick gray beard reading a battered paperback copy of
The Charm School
. The right side of his face is marred by a dark growth the circumference of a silver dollar. Inside, I order an Americano from a towering guy named Darwin with a bald head and a yellow piece of yarn tied around his wrist. “For my brother in Iraq,” he explained to me once. Darwin has taken my order so many times I suspect he lives at Java Beach.

“Any good news yet?” he asks, punching up my purchase.

I shake my head. “I have more flyers,” I say, setting them on the counter. It’s the ninth stack of flyers I’ve brought to Java Beach—one a week for the past two and a half months.

I follow Forty-eighth Avenue down the alphabetized streets—Kirkham, Lawton, Moraga, Noriega, Ortega, Pacheco, Quintara, Rivera, Santiago. I’ve always loved the streets of the Sunset district, the elegant procession of names that roll easily off the tongue. I turn left on Taraval and walk up the avenues toward Dean’s Foggy Surf Shop, fingering the manila envelope tucked inside my jacket. I used to come here with my surfer friend what seems like ages ago—he came not to shop so much as to chat, run his hands over the custom boards, see the old-timers and listen to their stories about surfing in nothing but swimming trunks back in the fifties and sixties. There’s something vaguely frightening about the young guys who are always lurking out front in blue jeans and flip-flops. They speak their own language, they don’t meet your eyes, they look out of place on land. Even in this foggy outback they manage to stay sleek and sun-tanned, their hair saltwater stiff with a kind of Jon Bon Jovi flair. A quarter of them look like off-duty models, and 97 percent of them look like they have rowdy sex on a regular basis.

Inside, behind the counter, there’s a petite girl with long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. She’s wearing a
Chicks Who Rip
T-shirt, the neck stretched wide. Her nose is pierced with a tiny blue stud. She puts her hands on her hips and smiles at me when I approach. “Hey.”

I wonder how old she is. Eighteen? Nineteen? I’ve never been good with age, have always judged incorrectly, maybe basing it on size rather than years. This girl’s punky and compact.

“Hi.”

I take the manila envelope out of my jacket, slide the two sketches out, and lay them side by side on the counter. “I was wondering if you’d seen these folks.”

“Wow,” she says. “Are you some kind of special agent?”

“Not exactly. Do they look familiar?”

She looks at the sketches for several seconds. “No. Who are they?”

“The guy’s a surfer, he was at Ocean Beach a little over two months ago. He’s traveling with this woman. I was hoping maybe you could post these in the store, ask around.”

“I’ll be happy to,” she says. She’s not eighteen, I realize. She’s more like twenty-three or twenty-four. When she smiles, she has the slightest beginning of crow’s feet. She has a little mole on the tip of her ring finger, just above the nail.

“I’m Tina, by the way,” she says. “But people just call me Goofy.”

I smile as if I understand, but she can tell I don’t.

“’Cause I surf goofy foot,” she says.

I nod, and she laughs. “You don’t have a clue, do you?” She holds her arms out like she’s surfing and squares her legs, leading with the right. “You know, right foot first, like Frieda Zamba, my idol.”

“Oh.”

Goofy is pretty in an unnerving way, with this one front tooth that’s a little crooked, situated at a weird angle to the others.

“So what’s all this detective shit?” she says.

“I’m looking for a little girl.”

I tell her about Emma. I tell her about the day at the beach, how I got distracted and looked away—not for long, but long enough.

“God,” Goofy says. “That’s awful.” She pauses, then says, “I remember that day.”

“Pardon?”

“That day. I remember. I saw the news that night, and I remember thinking how weird it was, them saying that the little girl probably drowned.”

“Weird why?”

“Because the water was calm, just these little mushy waves. Barely an undertow. That never happens at Ocean Beach.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just that it seemed strange for a kid to drown on that day. That morning I went down to the beach with Tina D. from the shop,” Goofy says. “We call her Tina D. on account of my name being Tina, too, even though I go by Goofy. Go figure. So Tina D. and me, we went out into the water for a while, and we just sat there on our boards waiting for a wave that never came. We must’ve sat there for a couple of hours. Summer’s not prime surfing season around here. Occasionally, you know, you get out there and you know your chance of catching a wave is slim. The thing is, that happens all the time at places like Rockaway and Año Nuevo, but not so much at Ocean Beach. So we’re just sitting there, not talking, letting the waves lift us up and down, up and down, and it’s this strange, calm day, and I was thinking about the water at my apartment, which had just been cut off because I hadn’t paid the bill, and I was about to ask Tina D. if I could come over later and take a shower.

“Then all of the sudden I heard sirens, and I looked back at the beach and saw cruiser lights spinning in the fog. It was weird. I figured maybe it was a drug bust or something, just some kids caught holding in the parking lot. But before long the Coast Guard boat showed up, and that’s when Tina D. and me paddled back in. A cop asked us if we’d seen anything, and we told him we hadn’t, and then he asked Tina D. out for a date, which was pretty tasteless, considering.” Goofy tugs her hair out of her ponytail, then pulls it back again and says, “Of course, I’m no expert.”

“But you know the water.”

She looks down at my hands. I realize I’ve been picking at my cuticles, and now my thumb is bleeding. She plucks a tissue out of a box behind the counter, reaches over, and presses it against my thumb. “You’re hurting yourself.”

“Nervous habit.”

“You’re right,” she says. “I know the water. And for what it’s worth, I think it’s not the most likely scenario. I mean, sure, Ocean Beach is always hairy, but usually when you hear about a drowning, there’s been a wicked rip current. Usually, it makes sense. That day, I remember sitting on Tina D.’s couch and thinking it didn’t.”

“That’s the best news I’ve heard in so long,” I say. “I’ve never believed that she drowned, but I can’t seem to convince anyone that I’m right. Maybe this will help.”

“I hope you find her,” she says. She smiles, exposing that errant tooth. “Hey, where are you headed now?”

“Toward the park.”

“I’ll walk with you. My lunch break started five minutes ago, and I’m going to the Bashful Bull 2. You ever been there?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, you’d remember. Let me grab my jacket and I’ll meet you outside.”

It feels good not to be alone, just to have someone next to me, walking. These days, I do everything alone, and I wonder whether I’m slowly losing the ability to have normal conversations. My tunnel vision has made me into the kind of person I hate to be around. “How long have you been surfing?” I ask, and it feels good to ask it, to engage in a give-and-take with someone like Goofy, who doesn’t judge me at all, who doesn’t look at me and automatically see someone who made a fatal, unforgivable error.

“Since I was eight,” she says. “My dad taught me, before he ran off.” She looks me up and down. “You should let me teach you. I bet you could learn. You’ve got a good surfer’s body—strong legs, small on top. But you better not wait too long. There’s a statute of limitations on this offer. I’m going to college.”

“When?”

“Oh, I’m not, like, enrolled or anything. But it has to be soon.” She moves with a little dance in her step, like there’s some tune playing in her head that only she can hear. “I woke up a few weeks ago and realized I’m pushing twenty-five.”

“What do you want to study?”

“Marine biology. I’d like to go to the University of Hawaii. I figure I can put myself through school teaching tourists how to surf.” Then we reach Noriega, and she’s patting me on the shoulder, saying, “This is my stop. Want to join me for lunch?”

“Thanks, but I’ve got some stuff to do. You’ll call me if you hear anything?”

“Sure. And you’ll have to drop by again. Next time, come before noon. The Bashful Bull 2 has a breakfast special. Eggs, bacon, hash browns, and coffee for three-fifty.”

“It’s a deal.”

In the park, I follow the winding path past the lake where Emma and I used to feed the ducks, past the casting pools and the bison corral and the golf course, past a second lake where the mossy trees are draped with mosquito traps tracking West Nile virus. By the time I emerge on Fulton, the sky has gone dark. The young driver of a black Mercedes catches my eye before gunning through the yellow light. Across the road, an elderly man is leaning on a stick, watching the light as it changes from red to green to red again. I head left on Balboa, toward the beach. For years I’ve been meaning to bring my camera out here and photograph the odd businesses that make their home in the Richmond: the Archery Store, Scissor Man, the typewriter and vacuum cleaner repair shop, Hockey Haven, Gus’s Bait & Tackle. Out here, it’s like a different city, no hip nightclubs or bookstores, no clothing boutiques or trendy restaurants.