The Year of Fog (15 page)

33

A
T FOUR-THIRTY
in the afternoon on the twenty-eighth of October, Detective Sherburne pays a house call. When I open the door, he thrusts a white cake box into my hand. He must notice the alarm on my face, because he says quickly, “Nothing’s happened. I was just in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d drop by and see how you are.”

“I’m good,” I lie.

“It’s chocolate,” he says, pointing to the box. “Arizmendi Bakery, my favorite. I went in to buy some cookies and I saw the cake. It seemed to be calling your name.”

“Thank you. I never say no to chocolate.” The words sound blank, ridiculous. Everything sounds ridiculous. Every ordinary thing has ceased to make sense. It has been three months and six days. Three months and six days without a sign of her.

“I just made coffee,” I say. “Cream and sugar?”

“Please.”

“Have a seat.”

He looks out of place here, in his dark suit and bright tie, his perfectly combed hair, his air of reliability. “Nice place,” he says, sitting on the edge of the sofa, elbows on his knees.

“I used to keep it cleaner. Before—”

I bring him a cup of coffee and sit across from him in the small leather chair that Emma used to love. She would curl up here with a cup of hot chocolate, a blanket over her lap, and watch Disney movies. There’s a mark on the left arm where she cut into the leather with a pair of scissors several months ago. She’d asked to watch some PG-13 cheerleading movie, and I had refused. When I came out of the kitchen a few minutes later, I saw an inch-long line where the stuffing showed through. I confronted her and she denied having done it, despite the fact that the scissors were on the table in front of her. Because I didn’t know what else to do, I pretended to believe her. I remember thinking at that moment that I wasn’t cut out for discipline.

“I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am,” Sherburne says, staring into his coffee. “I keep thinking there might have been something we could have done differently, I don’t know what.”

“You’ve done everything you can.”

He leans back and looks me in the eyes. “I don’t know how to say this, Abby.”

“Go ahead.”

“Three months. You need to prepare yourself. You need to think about the fact that she might not be coming back. It’s a terrible thing to have to say, but when this much time passes—”

He nervously sips his coffee, and I think of his children at home, doing the things children do—watching cartoons, doing homework, sneaking sweets from the kitchen before dinner.

“She’s not dead, I know it. How can we find her if you don’t believe there’s a reason to look for her?”

“That’s not what I said. I just want you to be prepared.”

I lean forward in my chair. “If it was one of yours, would you be prepared?”

He shifts his leg, looks away.

“Would you?”

“I don’t want to fight with you.”

“This isn’t a fight. I just want you to know that nothing you say will convince me to stop looking.”

Sherburne stands up. “I understand, I do.” I wonder how many times he has done this, how many times he has shown up at someone’s door to deliver the news that they have to give up hope. Where is he going now? I imagine him stopping at some other house, delivering a somber speech to the family of some other victim.

I follow him to the door. “I don’t want you to think I’m not grateful. You’ve been wonderful to us through all of this. But you can’t give up on Emma yet. You just can’t.”

He puts his hands in his pockets and looks at the ground. “I’ve talked to Jake. I know that you’re not sleeping. I can look at you and tell you’re not eating. Life goes on, it has to. You can’t keep searching at this frantic pace forever. At some point you have to get back to the routines of your life. If you don’t, then you’ll be lost, too.”

He pats me on the shoulder and closes the door behind him. I can hear the echo of his shoes on the stairs. And I’m thinking that he’s wrong. Despite all his experience, he’s simply incorrect. Life does not go on. Everything stops, and there’s no way to make it start again.

34

T
HE NEXT
morning, I drive to Stonestown Mall. This isn’t the first time I’ve searched Stonestown, and it may not be the last. I can’t bring myself to do nothing, can’t bring myself to believe, as Sherburne does, that it’s time to give up.

In the food court, among the tables, I search for a child of Emma’s approximate height and weight; she could be blonde, I remind myself, she could be wearing boys’ clothing, she could be barely recognizable. I search every shop, checking behind racks, in dressing rooms.

In the restrooms, I go from stall to stall, opening doors. Then I stand by the sink and wait for the occupied stalls to empty. There is the odor of diapers and Lysol. Pearly pink soap drips from dispensers lined up like IV bags along the wall. Muzak emanates from invisible speakers. Behind each closed door, hope. So my search for Emma has been reduced to a bathroom version of
Let’s Make a Deal
: choose door A and you get the girl, choose door B and you go home empty-handed. With each flush of the toilet, each rattling of a lock, I hold my breath and wait for the door to swing open, for Emma to emerge. She will walk out into the bright light of the restroom, approach the sink to wash her hands; then, looking up, she will see me. For a moment, confusion, and then my presence will register. She will run into my arms. I will whisk her out of the bathroom and into the bright chaos of the mall. Hand in hand, we will make our escape. I will kidnap her from the kidnapper.

One by one the stalls empty out, until I’m standing alone in the restroom, staring into a row of open doors, nine identical toilets, thin white paper spilling from silver rollers onto the floor.

On 280, driving south toward Tanforan, I’m thinking about what separates the logical from the irrational, the sane from those who are mentally lost. A logical person bases her hopes and actions upon facts, statistics, well-reasoned probabilities. For the irrational mind, mere possibility is sufficient. I tell myself that I cannot be losing my mind, because a person who is truly insane is unaware of her downward spiral. I tell myself that as long as I can question my own logic, as long as I can pinpoint the ticks in my mental process, I’m still in control.

Tanforan takes two hours. Then I do Stanford Mall, Hillsdale, and Serramonte.

It’s nearly midnight when I get home. I call Jake and ask him if I can spend the night, even though I know what his answer will be. “You shouldn’t be alone so much,” I say, feeling somewhat dishonest. I’m the one who doesn’t want to be alone, I’m the one who can’t face my empty loft.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Not tonight.”

Unable to sleep, I settle in front of the television. USA is showing
Total Recall,
in which Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a construction worker haunted by dreams of Mars, a planet to which he has never traveled. The premise of the movie is that Schwarzenegger, unbeknownst to himself, was once a secret agent on Mars. Thus his dreams are not mere dreams at all, but actual memories. I tune in just as a psychic mutant, drenched in phlegm, asks Schwarzenegger what he wants.

“The same as you,” the hero says. “To remember.”

“But why?” the mutant asks.

“To be myself again.”

35

I
’VE TAKEN
another job, this time in Marin. It’s a garden party for a couple’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. The couple has five grown children, all of whom are in attendance, accompanied by children of their own. Everything is perfect: the calla lilies flanking the patio, the silent caterers dressed in black and white, the violinists wandering among the guests, playing something forgettable but soothing. I’m the odd one out with my clumsy camera bag and comfortable shoes, my messy hair. I barely make it through the cake cutting, then duck into the house and find an upstairs bathroom, where I try to compose myself. My hands are shaking, and I can’t get my mind to focus. From the bathroom window I can see the crowd below, milling about the garden in the fading sunlight. The children have organized a game of hide-and-seek. I open the bathroom window and begin to press the shutter release, knowing, even as I struggle to keep my hands still, that these are the pictures the clients will love: the barefoot girl peeking from behind the tree while her brother creeps up behind her; the tiny boy concealing himself behind a rosebush; the little girl who is “it,” in wrecked linen dress and scuffed shoes, standing in the center of the garden, hands on her hips, scouting out the possibilities.

In a couple of weeks, I know, the clients will come over and select their favorite shots. The photos will go on the mantel, will be distributed to friends, copied, and sent out as Christmas cards. And the clients will be content in the belief that their anniversary has been saved for posterity, that this moment will last forever; the security of my profession rests on this false notion.

A painting can last for centuries, even millennia. The Sistine Chapel, the
Mona Lisa
, and the Mayan cave drawings are proof of this. But a photograph is, by its nature, a transient work of art. The moment a photograph is transferred to paper, the slow process of erasure begins. The purpose of photography is to stop time, but time inevitably erodes. Not only are photos easily damaged by heat, humidity, and handling; every photograph is light-sensitive, its delicate chemical balance constantly altered by exposure to light.

Color photos printed on Kodak paper, which are advertised to “last a lifetime,” actually begin to fade in a decade. Even the most resilient prints, grayscale images processed on archival quality paper, don’t survive much longer than one hundred years.

Photographs represent our endless battle against time, our determination to preserve a moment: the sweet baby girl before she becomes a difficult teenager; the handsome young man before his body is won over by baldness and fat; the honeymoon trip to Hawaii, before the happy couple become two strangers, living angrily under the same roof. I have a hunch that our obsession with photography arises from an unspoken pessimism: it is in our nature to believe that the good things will not last.

We put such faith in this flimsy mnemonic device, a moment written in light. But photos provide a false sense of security. Like our own flawed memory, they are guaranteed to fade. Over time, the contrasts within a photo diminish, the contours soften, the details blur. We take photographs in order to remember, but it is in the nature of a photograph to forget.

36

O
CEAN BEACH
, day 105, 10:43 in the morning. A postman is sitting on a concrete wall, looking at the sea, eating a sausage biscuit. On the wall beside him, a McDonald’s cup. Perhaps it is the way he flicks the crumbs off his lap with two fingers—delicately, precisely—or perhaps it is the tilt of his body as he stares out to sea. Maybe it is the way one ankle is crossed over the other, each sock a slightly different shade of white. His feet don’t touch the ground. I can’t pinpoint the exact mannerism, but something about him is familiar. Like the driver of the postal truck I saw in the parking lot the day Emma disappeared, he is Chinese American. Could it be the same man?

I sit in my car for some time, watching him, debating. After so many days of visiting the beach, I am as nervous about being right as I am about being disappointed. After half an hour he folds the napkin into little squares, puts it inside the cup, gets down from the wall, and deposits the trash into a wastebasket. Then he gets into his postal cart and sits listening to music on his iPod.

I approach his cart, smile up at him.

“May I help you?” he asks, removing his earphones.

“Have you heard about her?” I say, handing him the flyer bearing Emma’s picture.

“This is the little girl who disappeared around here a while back.”

“I was wondering if you saw anything that day.”

“Pardon?”

“You were here on July 22nd, the day she disappeared. I remember seeing your truck in the parking lot.”

“Sorry, it wasn’t me. I just started this route in September.”

“Do you know who had it before you?”

“Fellow named Smith, real nice guy, family man. In the hospital now. Lung cancer.”

“What about them?” I ask, handing him the sketches of the couple from the yellow van. “Do they look familiar?”

He looks at the sketches for several seconds, scratches his head, then hands them back. “Wish I could help you, miss, but I’ve never seen them before.”

I wait another half hour in my car, watching, then drive home. It has begun to rain. On the sidewalk in front of my building, someone has drawn a hopscotch grid in blue chalk; only a vague outline of the grid remains. A soggy beanbag lies on the topmost square.

In the evening, I call Detective Sherburne. His wife answers, and I don’t even have to identify myself. “Abby Mason’s on the phone,” she says.

“Evening,” he says a few seconds later.

“Sorry to bother you at home again. Just wondering if there’s any news.”

“Sorry,” he says. “Nothing.” A child is fussing in the background.

“How’s the little one?” I ask.

“Two hands full, but he’s more than worth it.”

“Dinner’s ready,” his wife calls. “Have you finished setting the table?”

“Almost,” he says. Then, to me, “How are you holding up?”

“So-so.”

There’s a pause, and I can hear commotion on his end—silverware, plates, children running. “Listen, Abby, you know I’ll call if we come up with anything.”

“Okay. Sorry to bother you.”

I hang up, feeling foolish, thinking of the family picture again: Sherburne, his wife, their little daughter, and the toddler, sitting down to dinner. The simplest tableau, repeated in thousands of homes across the city. To think that we might have formed a similar picture—Jake and Emma and me—if only I hadn’t looked away. In some parallel version of events, some alternate universe in which a few seconds months ago played out in an entirely different way, none of this is happening. In that alternate world, we are simply a family, sitting down to dinner. Emma is safe, and Jake and I are married, and tomorrow we will get up and have breakfast together before I take her to school.

I call Jake. The phone rings four times, the machine picks up, his voice crackles like a bad record. “I’m home for the night,” I say. “Call me.”

I put a miniature frozen pizza in the oven, then pick at it in front of the television, just to hear the comfort of voices in my empty loft. One of my favorite movies,
Wall Street,
is playing on A&E. Charlie Sheen, unkempt and crazed-looking in crumpled suit and loosened tie, argues with Michael Douglas in Central Park. The camera circles above them, swooping in and out, birdlike, as the corrupted boy and the corrupting man enact a verbal sparring match in the shadows of midtown Manhattan. Meanwhile, I’m planning dialogues in my mind, rehearsing the things I’ll say to Emma when she is returned to us. First I’ll tell her I love her, then ask her forgiveness, and finally tell her there’s nothing I want more than to be her mother.

In the dark, with the credits rolling and cars’ headlights shining on the wet pavement beneath my window, I almost believe my own story. I almost believe a day will come when Detective Sherburne will appear at my door, hand in hand with Emma. “She’s home,” he’ll say, and Emma will step across the threshold, into my waiting arms.