The Year of Fog (14 page)

It’s after seven when I reach my car. There’s hardly anyone on the road fronting the park, just a young couple making out in a Honda Accord and a guy alone in a Jeep Cherokee eating a sandwich and listening to Johnny Cash. It’s that Kris Kristofferson song—“on the sleepin’ city sidewalks, Sunday mornin’ coming down.”

Driving home, I call Jake and tell him what Goofy said about the rip current.

“You don’t know Ocean Beach,” he says. “That’s what I keep trying to make you understand. Even on its mildest day, Ocean Beach is a monster. When my dad was playing for the 49ers, one of the defensive linemen waded out a little too far and got pulled out to sea. I’m talking about a huge, strong guy. The only reason he survived was that he managed to swim for three miles with the current before a fishing boat picked him up.”

“Can’t you see this is good news?” I ask.

“I’m just trying to be realistic.”

I call Detective Sherburne, and his reaction is even less enthusiastic than Jake’s. “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” he says. “We know about the wave conditions that day. We covered that base with the Coast Guard at the very beginning.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because it’s a red herring, Abby. You’ve got to look at the facts. We still don’t have a single solid piece of evidence to suggest a kidnapping.”

He’s so convinced of Emma’s drowning, so certain his theory is correct. Add to that the fact that Lisbeth passed the polygraph, and everything about her story checked out. “Most kidnappings are by family members, and a huge percentage are noncustodial mothers,” he reminded me after the results of the polygraph came in. “Lisbeth was our best hope.”

Sherburne would never admit it—neither would Jake—but I know that both of them are close to giving up.

30

N
ELL STOPS
by with a new stack of books a few days later. She stands in the doorway, glancing over my shoulder, and I know she’s looking at the cello on its stand in the center of the room, the rich mahogany I’ve polished to a reddish gleam.

“Emma only had four lessons,” I say.

“Oh, hon,” Nell says, looking me up and down. She must be wondering about my blue sequined gown, my upswept hair, my costume jewelry. It’s ten o’clock on a Monday night; she must think I’m losing my mind. And maybe she’s right. I rarely sleep. I eat just enough to keep going. I spend hours alone, day and night, week after week, walking the streets like a vagrant, riding Muni, accosting strangers with my stacks of flyers. Often, I find myself talking aloud to no one, running through the possibilities.

Before all this happened, I thought I was well prepared for traumatic situations. I believed I had some source of inner strength, some deep well of sanity from which to draw. If things got bad in my personal life, I always had my work to turn to. But I can’t concentrate on work. Although I’ve finally lined up a few jobs, my business is falling apart, and Annabel is still paying the rent.

“Emma was planning to do a concert for me that weekend,” I say. “She insisted on packing her black velvet Christmas dress and patent leather shoes, and she wanted me to wear this old dress—it’s from Mardi Gras in Mobile ages ago.”

Nell steps inside my door, lays the books on a table, and reaches out her arms in such a big and motherly way that I lean into her and fall apart.

“You’re going to make it,” she says, stroking my back. Then she rearranges the straps of my ridiculous dress, as if I have some business wearing it. “That’s a real pretty fit.” She taps a pink fingernail on the stack of books. “Read these, hon. You never know what might surface.”

“Thanks, Nell.”

“You just come knock on my door, anytime, day or night, you hear?”

“I’ll do that.”

Then she’s gone, and I’m alone with the overwhelming space of my loft, which once seemed airy and open and now just feels cavernous and drafty. And there, in the center of it, awash in lamplight and swirling dust motes, Emma’s cello. The absence of sound, those cracked, sweet notes that Emma coaxed so earnestly from the instrument, which hid her almost entirely from view when she sat behind it. Of all the instruments she could have chosen, she wanted the cello.

Last spring, Jake and I took her to a San Francisco Symphony concert at Stern Grove. We sat on a big yellow sheet in the grass, and she sipped Coke and munched on pretzel sticks for a solid hour while the symphony played. Afterward, as we were walking to the car, she asked, “What’s the really big guitar called?”

“You mean the cello?”

“The one you play with a stick.”

“Yep, that’s the cello.”

“I want to play that.”

The next week Jake found a small version of the instrument, one-fourth the size of a regular cello, at the music store on Haight, and signed Emma up for lessons in Noe Valley. He brought the cello home and laid the case on her bed—a surprise. When she walked in and saw it, she got so excited she wet her pants.

“That’s the great thing about kids,” he said, relating the story to me over the phone. “I mean, when was the last time you were so excited about something you actually wet your pants?”

That’s one of the things that drew me to Jake—the sheer delight he took in fatherhood. His ability to see the world through Emma’s eyes made him seem almost innocent in a way that few men do. When I told Annabel about how good he was with Emma, she said, “Hold on to him. A happy kid is like a big stamp of approval across a guy’s forehead.”

I was so flattered by the fact that he was willing to share her with me; it made his love seem bigger somehow, his commitment greater. He once told me that, after Lisbeth left, he worried he’d never find someone who was right for both him and Emma. “And then you came along,” he said. “I fell in love with you for a dozen reasons, and only one of them is that you’re so good with Emma.”

“What are the other eleven?” I asked.

“Number one is that trick you do with your tongue,” he teased. “Number two would have to be your biscuits and gravy. As for the other nine, I’ll just keep you guessing.”

What I miss most, more than Jake’s hands and his chest and the taste of him, more than his generosity to waitresses and his rule of never sitting down on Muni if it meant someone else had to stand, more than his passion for the Giants and key lime pie, is the fun we had together. The way he’d come up to me in the bedroom, lift me off my feet, throw me on the bed, and tell dumb jokes until I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt. His dead-on impersonations of Dwight Yoakam and Richard Nixon. Now, all that is gone, and I hate knowing that I’m responsible for this change.

It’s close to midnight, and I’m still wearing my sequined gown. I’ve been thumbing through Emma’s
My First Cello
book. The book has scales, line drawings of children holding cellos, diagrams that tell you where to place your fingers. I have my dress hiked above my knees, the cello pressed between my thighs, and I’m trying to find C major. There’s a bottle of Maker’s Mark on the coffee table. I opened the bottle after Nell left, and I’m halfway down the label. My fingers won’t work on the strings. I don’t know how to hold the bow. I try to make music, but all I can muster are painful sounds like a squawking seal, a dying whale. The phone rings.

“Abby?” Jake says.

“Hi.”

“You sound strange. Have you been drinking?”

“No.” My answer is too emphatic, like a cartoon drunk with a bubble over her head, a NO in capital letters.

“You’re drunk.”

“I just had a little.”

I’m embarrassed for him to hear me this way. I know this is no way to cope, that this is yet another test I’m failing.

“You’ve got to stop this,” he says. “It isn’t helping.”

“It helps a little.”

Long pause. This is not a comfortable silence, not like the ones we used to have, when we could let a minute or two pass between us on the phone without a word, and I was comforted just to know he was there, on the other end of the line. “I’m sorry,” I say after a while, knowing that the words are inadequate, that this is more proof that I am not the woman he thought I was when he asked me to marry him. What does it matter that I could stage private cello concerts and make sock monkeys if I could lose Emma after a few minutes on the beach? Motherhood requires so much more than devotion, much more than simply love.

31

N.
WAS THE
man who could not remember.

In December of 1960, while living in an Air Force dormitory, his roommate, practicing with a miniature fencing foil, accidentally stabbed N. through the right nostril; the tip of the foil lodged in the left side of his brain. What N. would recall in years to come were the details of his life before the accident. For example, he remembered a road trip across the U.S. in an old Cadillac, a trip he took two years before the accident occurred. But he would never again enjoy watching a movie, because halfway through he wouldn’t be able to remember the opening scenes.

Imagine, in that amnesiac state, trying to do something as simple as preparing a meal. Because your short-term memory is intact up to a few minutes, you’re able to put a pot of water on the stove, wash the tomatoes, dice a clove of garlic, set the table. But by the time the water begins to boil you won’t remember what you had planned to make, or who you were making it for. Only by the details—the untouched dishes, the empty feeling in your stomach—will you know that you haven’t already eaten. Only when the doorbell rings and you open it to find your sister standing before you will you know that she is your dinner guest. You are like a computer with a full hard drive; anything typed onto the screen will be lost the moment the file is closed, because there is no way to store the file, no way to save it for future reference. Fundamentally, you are a person with a past but no present. You will never form another emotional attachment, because you cannot remember what you like about any new person you meet. A few minutes after the best orgasm of your life, you won’t even know you had one.

You exist, each moment, as if waking from a dream, with no awareness of where you are or how you got there, no knowledge of what, or who, might be waiting for you in the next room. Each thing you perceive has no more significance than a random snapshot in a stranger’s photo album. A life without memory is a life without meaning.

32

D
AVID FROM
Parents of Missing Children has been calling me. Once a day, twice, sometimes more. His phone calls are life preservers, holding my head above water. He doesn’t offer me God or praise the healing powers of meditation. He understands that getting up and showering, pouring cereal for breakfast—the most mundane things—cease to be routine, the smallest tasks require impossible concentration. One’s clothes must be washed, one’s hair must be brushed, one’s dishes must be done. The tank must be filled with gas, the bills paid, the trash taken out, the mail brought in.

Some days, even dressing is an effort: the buttons, the zippers, the shoelaces. To force the round disk through the hole, to fit the tiny metal stay into the zipper pull, to form the loop and fasten it tightly. It’s impossible to do these mindless things; some mornings I end up sitting on the edge of the bed, staring down at my open blouse, unable to navigate the row of glaring buttons.

When I feel I can’t make it through the day, it’s not Jake I call, but David.

“What’s wrong?” he says.

“I don’t know what to do, where to start.”

“Go in the kitchen,” he instructs. “Run water into the coffeepot. Take the coffee out of the fridge. Measure three scoops into the filter.”

While the coffee is brewing, he tells me to get a pencil and a notepad, make a list. He begins with the simple things—pay the gas bill, take out the recycling—then moves on to more difficult items, such as calling Detective Sherburne, making my daily trek to the beach, stuffing envelopes, visiting the command post, raising money to add to the growing reward—$300,000 and counting. Task by task, he revives me, until I’m ready to hang up the phone and get on with my day alone.

“But the uselessness,” I say one night. “How do you handle that?”

It’s past midnight, day eighty-four. Down on the street a police cruiser’s lights are flashing. Someone’s car alarm is going off. I never sleep at Jake’s house these days. Our bodies no longer seem to fit together.

“Think back,” he says. “Before this happened, what did you do when you felt things falling apart? How did you wind down?”

“I’d go into the darkroom and work.”

“Do that.”

“How can I waste time in the darkroom when Emma’s still out there?”

“Force yourself. You’re going to have to do it at some point.”

The darkroom. That small space where I once spent hours every day, losing myself the way some people lose themselves in books or movies. That room where I could be alone, nothing but me and the red glow of the light, the slick feel of the paper when it comes out of the fluid. The solid mass of the enlarger, the heft of the arm as it locks into place. The methodical precision of fastening the negative to the tray. I’ve barely entered the darkroom since that one time in July, the second night after she disappeared, when I developed the roll of film from the Holga. The clients for the shoot at the restaurant wanted only color photos, so I took the film to a processor rather than doing it myself.

“Now?” I say.

“Yes, now.”

I hang up the phone, climb the stairs to the darkroom, and shut the door. I take the apron off its hook, slip it over my head, and tie the strings around my waist. For several minutes I just stand, not knowing what to do. Finally, the old familiar rhythms take over. First I prepare the chemicals, the basin of cool water. Then I take down some negatives that I left drying a few days before she disappeared, cut the negatives into strips, place them on the light board, and make my selections. One by one, I expose the negatives to the light, then guide the photo paper through the chemicals. At the end of an hour, the water bath is full of prints, floating one on top of the other.

The photos are from a wedding I shot months ago. These are the prints I didn’t make for the happy couple’s memory album, the ones the clients wouldn’t want to see. Over the years I’ve been collecting these candid wedding shots, hoping to bring them together one day in some sort of meaningful sequence. I imagine a solo show that tells the grim truth about weddings, the kind of show that would make the viewers laugh uncomfortably.

This roll is from late in the evening, when everyone was already two sheets to the wind. The bride’s dress is askew, the groom’s paper party hat wilting. Around ten o’clock, the mother of the bride told me to go home. “I’d rather not have this part of the night captured for posterity,” she said, fingering the pearls around her neck.

“Nonsense,” the drunken bride said to me. “You’re staying.”

So I did. There’s the bride with her mouth open wide, her carefully constructed hairdo toppled, making a toast to her husband. And there’s the maid of honor, a teenager in a miniskirt, dancing inappropriately with the father of the groom. Somebody’s great-aunt with a martini in hand, demonstrating saucy maneuvers for the honeymoon.

The photos have a grainy, documentary quality. It’s my thing, it’s what people hire me for. Couples come to me when they want the candid shots, not the carefully posed groupings of the wedding party on the lawn and the polite still life of the wedding cake.

I suspect these people don’t know just what they’re getting into, and for this reason I rarely show my clients all the contact sheets. Would the groom, for example, want to see his father’s meaty hand groping the maid of honor while they danced? Wouldn’t the bride prefer to forget shouting at the florist? Weddings bring out the worst in people. Perhaps the air of new and hopeful love inspires cynicism and drives law-abiding citizens to debauchery. Maybe drunkenness and general bad behavior are everyone’s way of thumbing their nose at the idea of a perfect future, their way of saying “till death do us part” is really just so much fluff.

You’d think attending so many weddings as the impartial observer would have turned me off to having my own. The fact is, it only made me want it more. A wedding is still, despite its flaws, a demonstration of optimism, one couple’s brazen pronouncement that they’re going to make it. Underlying every wedding is the bold assumption that the divorce statistics don’t count, that this couple will beat the odds.

The date for our wedding came and went. It was to have happened last Saturday, at a small chapel in Yosemite. The reception was to be held at the Wawona, a rustic hotel on the edge of the park. When Jake and I saw each other at the command post that day, neither one of us brought it up. The wedding now seems like a moot point, a frivolity that doesn’t make sense in the context of our radically changed lives.

The last shot on this roll is of the bride and groom standing on the street, waiting for the valet to bring their car around. His tie hangs loosely around his neck, and she’s holding her shoes in one hand. She’s standing in front of him, and he’s got both arms around her waist. Her mascara is smeared, her lipstick gone, and the padding of her bra peeks up from the low neckline of her dress. His head is bent and he’s whispering something in her ear. The expression on her face is impossible to read.

One by one, I hang the prints up to dry. It feels good to be back in this room beneath the red glow of the lamp. The chemical smell returns me to the deep dark of that tiny darkroom in Alabama, returns me, unexpectedly, to Ramon. The bulb cast a strange red glow over his hands as he shepherded the photographs through the bins. In one hand he held the tongs, swishing the glossy paper back and forth in the developing fluid. The other hand was cupped between my legs, and he was telling me to come.

Come where? I thought. He said it again, more urgently. I wasn’t sure what he meant; I had some idea, but
come
seemed like such a strange word, so out of touch with what we were doing. I wanted him to define it for me, but it seemed like a bad time to ask, and I didn’t want him to know how inexperienced I was.

I was sixteen years old. He was twenty-seven. I dug my fingernails into the soft leather of his belt. On the photo paper, shapes began to emerge: the silhouette of my sleeping face, the curve of my naked calf, the bell-shaped slope of a lampshade. He pushed his finger inside me, whispering into my ear, and I thought of the secluded beach near the Fairhope pier where he took me for the very first time.
Took.
At sixteen, I knew what that word meant. I knew Ramon had no business dating a girl my age.

The fluid sloshed over the paper and the image became clearer—the striped print of the man’s shirt that just reached the tops of my thighs, the small star dangling from my charm bracelet, a big hand intersecting the frame of the photo and resting on my ankle.

He lifted the photo from the developing fluid and slid it into the stop solution. Then he went down on his knees in front of me, held my denim skirt around my waist, and slid his tongue inside. I did not think that I loved him, or even that I would know him for very long. I considered him an instructor of sorts—more interesting and adept than boys my own age, who lacked skill and grace. Despite my youth and inexperience, I could still discern from some inflection in his voice when he said my name, and the way his body shifted and his stance softened when I walked into a room, that for him things were not so simple or so temporary.

We met in February of my eleventh-grade year. Eighteen months later I left Mobile for college in Knoxville, Tennessee. I refused to let him follow me. He called me every night for three weeks, begging me to reconsider. In mid-September, I got a phone call from Annabel. When I picked up the phone, she wasn’t her usual nonchalant self. The sarcasm was gone from her voice, and I knew something was wrong. “It’s Ramon,” she said.

“What?”

“There was an accident.”

I was standing in the kitchen of my apartment in Sunsphere Suites. I leaned against the counter. I had just made a fresh pot of coffee, and the smell was suddenly too strong.

“And?”

“On his motorcycle. He didn’t—”

She couldn’t say it, but I knew what she meant. What she meant was he didn’t make it. What she meant was, he was gone. It turned out he had been drinking. He had called me early that morning, and I had let the machine pick up. “I know you’re there,” his message said. “You’ve got to talk to me.”

Maybe it was partly in homage to Ramon that I became a photographer. I had planned to be a journalist, write for newspapers, take pictures only as a hobby. But a couple of semesters later, I declared my major as photography.

Later, I was saddened to realize that I didn’t have a single photograph of Ramon. He was always behind the camera, a perpetual watcher—always seeing, never seen. I tried to imagine that he maintained his vision after death, that he would always be an astute eye, hovering, taking things in. But even with my Southern Baptist background, I could not bring myself to believe that any part of him survived after his body’s physical death. I knew, deep down, that he was simply gone.