The Year of Fog (22 page)

49

I
T’S AFTER
nine in the evening when I get to Jake’s house. He’s in the kitchen filling the recycling bin with envelopes and flyers. When I walk in unannounced, he looks up and blinks slowly, as if emerging from a dark room. “Hi,” he says, attempting a smile.

“Tell me you’re not giving up.”

“Give me another option.”

“We keep looking.”

“I had a plan, Abby,” he says. “The command post, television, radio. I kept giving myself benchmarks to go by. I thought we’d distribute ten thousand flyers, and we’d get a lead that would take us to her. When that didn’t happen, I raised the bar: fifty thousand flyers, seventy-five thousand, a hundred. Every time I raised it, I thought this was what would do it, this time we’d get to her. And the reward money. I started at fifty thousand. Then a hundred fifty, then two hundred, four hundred, half a million. I’ve sold all my stocks, refinanced the house, and approached everyone I know and a hundred I don’t in order to have the biggest cache of reward money possible. Nothing. And the volunteers. At the highest point, we had almost three hundred. Do you know I’ve done one hundred six radio interviews? Forty-two television spots? I’ve talked on the phone with hundreds of police officers all over the country. I’ve done everything. I don’t know what else to do.”

I go into the living room and switch on a lamp. The bulb sputters briefly, then dies out with a soft click. “We could be so close.”

“You’re ignoring the obvious,” he says. He sits on the sofa and picks a book up from the coffee table, sets it down again. Some philosophy textbook, with a ratty cover and Post-it tabs sticking out of the pages. “Her shoe. Her little shoe. I could do a thousand more interviews, send out a million more flyers, and it wouldn’t change the facts.”

I sit down beside him. “You’re making way too much of the shoe. It doesn’t mean anything.”

He leans back and stares at the ceiling. His hand under mine is hot and damp. He smells different, not like himself, and I realize it’s because his clothes have been washed with a different detergent. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s carried with him the faint scent of Surf, but since Emma disappeared he’s been having his clothes laundered at a place on the corner. He once told me that he couldn’t bring himself to do the laundry anymore, because Emma used to help him. She loved separating the whites from the darks and measuring the detergent.

A bus passes on the street. A church bell chimes. The distance between us grows greater by the minute.

“I miss her so much,” he says, “some days I don’t want to get out of bed. A couple of weeks ago at Safeway, I picked up a pack of gummy worms, because she always expects them when I come home from the grocery store. I was at the checkout, and the girl slid the package across the scanner, and it hit me. I started bawling. I couldn’t get myself together enough to take out my money, or even to get out of line. Several people were waiting behind me. The girl called her manager. He came over and asked if I needed help out to the car. I felt like a crazy person.” He squeezes my hand. “There will be a lot of awful days, but we can’t stop living.”

“I don’t want to stop living. I just want to find her.”

“It’s been almost six months,” he says. “Six.”

His breath rattles softly. At this moment, I love him, but a startling possibility reveals itself to me: maybe I love
her
more. There’s a longing so deep it feels as if my body has been emptied out, as if there is nothing at the center of me but cold blank air. During the past six months, Emma has been with me every day. She’s the first thought on my mind when I wake up, the last image I see before I fall asleep. Her face, her name, are with me minute by minute. My life is guided by a single goal—to find her. Jake, meanwhile, has grown less distinct with each passing week, our conversations fewer and farther between, our moments of true connection dwindling to almost nothing.

To love a man is one thing, but to love a child is something else entirely; it is all-consuming. Before Emma, when people talked about the kind of love a child could provoke, I did not believe them. Then Emma came along, and now I can’t imagine living the rest of my life without her. Maybe love is a divining rod that seeks out the people who need you most. When I first began to fall for Jake, I saw Emma as part of the package. Now, she has moved from periphery to center.

The three of us made plans. Paris for her tenth birthday. Prague for her twelfth. At sixteen, when she gets her license, a driving tour of the States. I picture her at the Louvre, standing in front of the
Mona Lisa
, making funny faces. And then, a few years older, in blue jeans and pale pink lipstick, sitting behind the wheel, singing along to the radio, while Jake navigates from the back seat and I check off our list of roadside attractions. Her face is blurred, like a photo shot in low light with the subject moving too fast, but there is enough of her essential being in these images for me to believe in them.

Jake stands and paces. “I want a service,” he says, biting his lip. He goes over to the window, pulls aside the curtain, and looks out at the street, his back to me. For a moment, the room is suffused with a soft yellow light.

“What kind of service?”

“A memorial.” He clears his throat and drops the curtain into place. The room goes dim again. “To say goodbye.”

“Not yet. Just give me a little more time.”

“For what?”

“To look for her.”

“Stop. Please. You’re only making it worse.”

He’s still standing with his back to me when I go upstairs, into Emma’s bedroom. I lie on top of the covers and stare up at the ceiling. The room is beginning to lose Emma’s distinct smell, and I wonder if Jake has noticed this. A year from now, will a visit to her room yield no particular smell at all?

I turn my head on the pillow and see something there, a strand of Emma’s hair. I pick it up and hold it taut between my fingers, this object outside of time. I lay it across my forehead and wish for some jolt of electricity, some telepathic communication from Emma.

We used to sit on the bed together, legs crossed, and she’d lean back while I wove beads into her hair. For days after, she’d pull at the braids, leaving beads all over the house. The house was hers. Every inch of it bore some sign of her—the crayons on the kitchen table, her sandals by the back door, a shoe box of Barbie clothes under the coffee table in the living room. In the morning, she would often wake up before Jake and I did, and the sound of her feet padding down the stairs brought me into the day.

Downstairs, now, heavy footsteps. Down the long hallway, through the kitchen, the dining room, the den, stopping at the foyer. The front door opens. Perhaps he’s thinking of going out. A minute or so later, the door shuts again, but I can still hear him down there. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to do, no way to escape.

50

B
RAIN INJURY
patients often remember childhood in startling detail, but are unable to remember events from more recent years. They talk about friends they haven’t seen in decades as if they’d just seen them hours ago. They may remember presents they received for their fifth birthday, but be unable to read even the simplest book.

Each day I sift through memories like a desperate miner panning for gold. Too many things turn up there—moments from childhood that are no use to me now, names and faces, places I haven’t visited in years. The one thing I’m searching for, the clue that will lead me to Emma, remains buried, irretrievable. Each memory that surfaces distracts me from the task—just so much trash clogging up the brain waves. The memories come to me clearly, complete with sound and motion, even the suggestion of smell. I want nothing to do with this worthless information, but here it is, demanding to be noticed.

Gulf Shores, Alabama. I am nine, at the beach with my family. I remember a woman and a man, lying beside us on bright yellow towels. They were drinking iced tea from plastic cups and reading paperback books. Although they were probably the same age as my parents, they seemed to be blessed with some youthful spirit that my parents had never possessed. He was wearing surf shorts, and she was clad in a tiny black bikini. My own father wore khaki shorts and tennis shoes, my mother an ankle-length sarong and T-shirt. The couple was sitting with a boy my age who kept looking up at me and grinning. His hair was blond with a slight green chlorine tint, and he was very tan. On his nose was a spot of white sunscreen.

While my family sat under the shade of two umbrellas, a small cooler perched at each corner of a king-size sheet, that other, happier family lay glistening in the sun, their legs and arms dusted with sand. The woman had large breasts, dark brown cleavage plunging toward the gold clasp of her bikini. While my mother worked her crossword and my father listened to the Bama game on a transistor radio, and Annabel lay sleeping, I observed the family from behind my Mickey Mouse sunglasses, trying to devise schemes by which I might touch the woman’s magnificent breasts.

The boy scooped sand with a plastic shovel and dumped it on his father’s back.

“Son,” the man said, not glancing up from his book.

The boy tried the same thing with his mother. “Why don’t you go build a sandcastle?” she said. The boy pouted for a second, then picked up his bucket and shovel and went down to the water’s edge. He worked halfheartedly at a sandcastle for a while, then tossed aside the bucket and shovel and stomped into the water. It was a hot, still day, the sun so bright the water was difficult to look at. From the beach the waves looked calm, but wooden signs posted at intervals along the beach said,
Strong Undertow. Swim at Your Own Risk.

The boy ran in and out of the surf. I wanted to go join him, but my parents would not allow it. “Swimming is for swimming pools,” my father was fond of saying. For a few minutes I watched the boy with envy. He kept looking back to see if anyone was paying attention. Once, I waved at him. He grinned, then flopped down on the sand and did a strange wiggling dance, his legs kicked up in the air, his mouth hanging open. After I while I grew bored and turned my attention back to his mother.

I don’t know how many minutes passed before the woman sat up and looked out at the ocean. “Tom,” she said.

The man turned a page of his book. “Hmm.”

“I don’t see Charles.”

She stood up and started walking toward the water. The man dropped his book and followed her. Then they weren’t walking but running, both of them screaming, “Charles!”

My father stood up and rushed down to the water’s edge. Annabel woke, stretched. “What’s happening?”

Suddenly the atmosphere of the beach changed. The panic spread quickly in every direction, so that within minutes every adult on that beach was shouting Charles’s name. The women held tightly to their own children, while the fathers shed shirts and sandals and leapt into the ocean. It was exciting and somewhat circuslike, as the torpor of the day exploded into chaos.

Lifeguards appeared. Fishing boats that had been anchored offshore began moving toward the beach. Before long, a patrol boat crept through the waves, sirens blaring. Charles’s name was broadcast through megaphones. It felt as if time was speeding up.

When we gathered our towels and ice chests later that afternoon, the woman in the black bikini was sitting at the water’s edge, screaming, her hair hanging in matted strings around her face. Her husband sat on his knees opposite her, silent and shaking. Between them, stretched out pale and bluish on the wet sand, was the boy. His eyes were open, his lips parted slightly. A piece of seaweed was tangled around his ankle. He looked beautiful and very clean lying there, perfectly still. I expected him, even then, to wake up—to kick his legs, wink at me, and laugh. A swell joke.

We drove home in silence. My mother wept as my father stared ahead at the road. A blast of thunder shook the car, and it began to rain. The windshield wipers ticked and squealed. At one point my mother turned around in her seat and clutched my and Annabel’s hands. “Girls.” That was all she said; she spoke the word so quietly, she might have been saying a prayer.

I wiped the fogged window and watched the miles of beach roll by, the sand dunes and towering sea grass, the little pink houses on stilts. Lightning flashed over the ocean. My shoulders stung from a slight burn. The car smelled warm and sweet. There was salt on my lips. I was thirsty, but didn’t know how to ask, in that horrible silence, for something to drink. Annabel slept, her legs sprawled on the seat between us, her head titled back at an impossible angle, mouth open wide. I kept glancing over to make sure she was breathing. I rested a hand on her warm foot, just to know she was alive. In those moments I loved her fiercely.

At some point I dozed off. The car hummed over the highway. In my restless sleep, I was vaguely aware of my mother staring at us, an odd light in her eyes, as if we were new and strange and special.

51

D
AY 184
. After the support group, David invites me over to his place for coffee. I follow him to Cole Valley. His home is a restored Victorian on a quiet block. Inside, dark wood floors and utter silence.

He flips a switch in the foyer, and the house is flooded with light and music. “Like it? I rigged it so that this switch controls all the lights in the house, plus the power to the stereo.”

“Impressive.”

“For a second, when I walk in, I can pretend I’m not coming home to an empty house.”

The focal point of the living room is a grand piano. On it rests the sheet music for “Piano Concerto Number Five.” I strike a key, and it lets out a low groaning note. “You play?”

He shakes his head. “My wife does. Did. She was teaching Jonathan. He was pretty good. He had these ridiculously long fingers. I don’t know if that really matters, but Jane thought it was a good sign.”

The mantel and end tables are crowded with framed family photographs—David and Jonathan at the entrance to Disneyland; Jane and Jonathan sitting at a picnic table, a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken on the table between them; the whole family waving from the bow of a ferry, the Statue of Liberty in the background. On one wall is a series of color photos shot inside a studio, against fake backgrounds. In a couple of the photos, Jonathan is playing with a cocker spaniel.

“You have a dog?”

“No.” He laughs. “Never did. The dog’s a prop. Jonathan wouldn’t cooperate with the photographer, so she brought this puppy into the studio.”

“Cute.”

The photo reminds me of those awful Olan Mills sessions my mother used to drag us to. The studio was in a strip mall on Airport Boulevard, and it smelled of Lysol. The photographer always wore a T-shirt bearing the insignia of some fifth-rate college. He’d tell us we had good teeth, then make us lean against a fake wooden fence, smiling broadly and tucking our thumbs in our belt loops, as if life was some pastoral paradise, as if we didn’t live in the suburbs.

“Decaf or regular?”

“Either.”

He leads me into the kitchen. More photos on the walls. When he opens the cabinet to get two mugs, I notice several kiddie-size glasses decorated with Disney characters.

David puts two frozen bear claws in the microwave, hits defrost, and starts a pot of coffee. “I’ll give you the grand tour while it’s brewing. First stop, the guest room.” He leads me upstairs, into a wallpapered room that looks like it came out of one of those Southern home-décor magazines. “I should probably turn it into a study. No one’s slept in here in years. Jane used it for a while before she moved out.”

Above the wrought-iron bed hangs a framed sketch of a boy. The hair is light brown, the chubby contours of the face filled in with peach-colored pencil. “It’s an age-progression sketch,” David explains. “Jonathan at eleven.” There is such detail to the drawing, such expression in the eyes, it’s difficult to believe I’m looking at a picture of a boy who never was. David reaches forward and adjusts the frame. Downstairs, the microwave shuts off and beeps three times.

Next, he leads me into a room with pale blue walls. Clouds have been stenciled onto the ceiling, and model airplanes hang from string all around the room. The twin-size bed is tidily made up with dinosaur sheets. There’s a head-shaped dent in the pillow, as if someone were just sleeping there recently. David reaches up and touches a wing on one of the airplanes. “Jonathan and I made a bunch of these together. He wanted to be a pilot.” He smiles. “He also planned to train dinosaurs for the circus and work weekends as a cowboy.” He tips the wing with his finger, and the plane begins to twirl. “What did Emma want to be?”

I pretend not to notice his use of the past tense. “She has her heart set on masonry. We tried to talk her into architecture instead, since the money’s better, but she likes the actual construction. Last year Jake bought her a toy bricklaying kit. It comes with little plastic bricks, and this powder that you mix with water to make mortar. She started building a wall that she thought would reach all the way to the sky. Her plan was to climb the wall until she reached the moon, where she would build a new house for all of us to live in. She planned to throw lavish parties to which the presidents of all the countries of the world would be invited.”

“Sounds like she could have a future in politics.”

Future. The word sounds almost delusional, too much to hope for. Yet the only thing that keeps me going these days is exactly that—a wavering hope in the possibility of a future—Emma and Jake and me, doing all those things families do, despite the fact that, with each day, the hope decreases by a fraction.

“Great airplanes,” I say. As soon as the words are out of my mouth, they sound stupid, too casual. I wish I could think of something to say that would convey the sympathy I feel.

David surveys the dozen or so models soaring above his dead son’s room. “I have nearly a hundred more down in the basement—747s, Cessnas, fighters, you name it.” His voice wavers. “I just keep waiting for the grief to subside, but it never does. I keep waiting for the morning when I wake up and realize I don’t want him back anymore. But every day, I want him just as badly as I did the day he disappeared.”

He moves closer, puts his hand under my chin, and lifts my face to meet his. I turn my mouth away, so that his kiss lands on my cheek—an old high school trick that feels awkward now, out of place in the adult world. David takes my hand and leads me across the hallway, to another bedroom. In this one there are no photographs, just a bed with white sheets, a wooden dresser, beige walls.

He goes in for the kiss again, and this time I let him. Even as I open my mouth, I know how wrong it is. Feeling David’s tongue on my own, breathing the Ivory soap smell of his skin, I hear Sam Bungo’s voice in my head: “Situation, Participation, Extrication.”

David finds the buttons on the side of my skirt. The skirt falls, I hear the ping of buttons against the hardwood floor. Standing here in sweater, underwear, and shoes, what I feel is not lust, but pity. It occurs to me that perhaps David feels sorry for me as well. Maybe he sees my ongoing search as nothing more than a pathetic attempt to postpone the inevitable.

He kisses me again, slides his hand under my sweater, touches my breast. Then he takes off his clothes, item by item: his shoes, shirt, pants, socks—looking at me uncertainly while he undresses, as if he’s waiting for me to call it off. And I’m telling myself,
Don’t do this
.

David’s chest is thin and hairless, his body pale, with blue veins snaking just beneath the skin. Maybe he deserves at least this small thing, this momentary comfort. He has lost so much, and I don’t know how to say no. Standing there, he looks so insubstantial, more boy than man, except for the erection. My pity gives way to something else, and I can feel something moving through my body—a hot, insistent need. I can’t deny that part of me wants to feel the pushing open, the good and painful pressure, the building toward release. Part of me wants to exit the world in this way. Part of me craves the act that will help me forget for a moment.

He moves closer, his erection pressing against my leg.

“It’s been six months,” I say. I’m not sure if he heard me, so I say it again. “Six months to the day since she disappeared.”

He pushes me toward the bed, sits me down, and gently takes off my shoes. When he goes to turn off the light, I notice a birthmark on his right hip in the shape of an avocado. I think of Ramon, the first man I ever saw naked: his perfect arms, his muscular hips, his long legs and oddly small hands. I never really noticed his hands until I saw him naked, and when I looked at them for the first time, I felt a wave of tenderness for him.

The light goes off, and that’s when I notice his digital clock, projecting the time onto the ceiling in huge red numbers: hour, minutes, seconds. It’s the numbers that bring me back, the thought of Emma out there in the world somewhere, waiting.

“I should go,” I say, standing up.

He moves toward the bed. “Don’t.”

I maneuver into my skirt and slip on my shoes, already hating myself for what almost happened.

David stands inches away, naked, watching me. I’m angry with him for knowing, without asking, just which buttons to push.

“Goodbye,” I say.

“Please,” he says. “Don’t go. Spend the night. Nothing has to happen.”

I walk down the stairs and let myself out. Driving home through the nighttime chill, clouds of mist hovering in front of my headlights, I do not feel entirely solid, entirely alive in the world. I avoid the rearview mirror, the windows that reflect everything in the dark—afraid that, if I were to look closely, I would not recognize myself.