The Year of Fog (9 page)

19

D
AY TWENTY-SIX
. The meeting is held in a classroom at City College of San Francisco. I arrive twenty minutes early. To kill time, I walk the loop road that circles the campus. The college is sadly urban—a jumble of angular buildings with too few windows, arranged with no apparent concern for aesthetics. On the front lawn, a cement statue of some Catholic saint extends its hands in blessing to Phelan Avenue.

At seven forty-five p.m., I stand at the entrance to Cloud Hall, willing myself to go in. The air inside is damp and stale. The floors are unadorned cement, the walls institutional green. I climb the stairs to the third floor and locate room 316, where a man is arranging desks in a circle. He smiles and extends his hand. “David.”

“Abby.”

“How long has it been?”

“Three weeks, five days. You?”

“Seven years.”

I do the math. In seven years, Emma will be thirteen, a teenager. She’ll be old enough to get her period, meet boys, go to movies with friends. I can’t imagine seven years of absence. I can’t imagine how this man manages to go on.

“Girl or boy?” he asks.

“A little girl. She’s six. What about you?”

“Jonathan would be twelve. What’s your little girl’s name?”

“Emma.”

He nods. “Of course. I thought you looked familiar. I’ve been following the story.”

I should tell David that I’m not just here for moral support, to bare my soul and cry on somebody’s shoulder. What I’m hoping to find is of a more practical nature. I want someone who’s been there to tell me how to continue the search. I want to know what mistakes to avoid, what these people would have done differently.

David goes over to a table in the corner, scoops coffee from a can into a cone filter. He hands me the coffeepot. “Mind filling this up at the water fountain?”

My steps echo in the long hallway. It’s Wednesday evening and the classrooms are mostly empty. The walls are covered with announcements for English tutors and tae kwon do classes. The water fountain is at the far end of the hall; a piece of chewing gum is stuck to the rim. I’m reminded of an afternoon at the zoo almost a year ago, Jake and Emma and I walking the path beside the tiger cage. The tiger was sunning on a rock. He looked at us and blinked. “I’m thirsty,” Emma said. There was a water fountain a few feet ahead. “Race you to it,” I said. I let her beat me, then lifted her so she could drink. She was wearing a sleeveless top, and the skin under her arms was soft and damp.

I had only met Jake a couple of weeks before, and things were moving so quickly. Holding Emma up to the fountain, I understood that if I was going to fall in love with Jake, I must also fall in love with her. Jake didn’t come unencumbered; he was a package deal. I marveled at the ease with which she had trusted me, how she held out her arms and waited for me to lift her. I was amazed by the unexpected completeness of this child—how she craned her pale neck to drink from the small trickle of water, how she kicked her legs in the air when she was finished to let me know it was time to put her down. I had never really thought of children as people, just as mysterious and needy creatures on their way to something greater. But standing there, holding Emma, I saw a girl who was already forming her own personality, her own ways of looking at and being in the world. I set her down. She ran back to her father. He lifted her in his arms and swung her in a circle. She let out a howl of laughter. Something kicked in my gut—fear, excitement, joy.
My God
, I thought,
I’m falling for them
.

Back in the classroom, I pour water into the coffeemaker and flip the switch. The water begins to gurgle. “How do you manage?” I ask. “How do you keep looking?”

“I don’t. Not anymore. We found Jonathan back in October. He was identified through dental records. Buried on a garlic farm in Gilroy.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I keep coming to these meetings because I need to be around people who know what it’s like. When your child is taken, it feels like you’re living in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language. You open your mouth to say something, and you get the impression that no one understands. The people you knew before—parents of your children’s friends, especially—avoid you. You’re a walking reminder of their worst fear. It seems that everyone you meet can tell that you’re not like them.”

“Maybe we have a certain look,” I say. “Maybe we give off some scent of tragedy.”

“Cream, sugar?” David asks.

“No thanks.”

He hands me a cup of black coffee, then sits down in a wooden desk. I sit across from him in the circle. It feels like high school again—desks too small, the room permanently out of date, the smell of old erasers.

“Funny,” I say. “I’ve taken coffee with cream and sugar all my life. When Emma disappeared, I started taking it black.”

“That’s normal. After Jonathan’s kidnapping, I couldn’t remember to wear a tie to work. My socks never matched. I forgot to trim my fingernails and water the plants and put gas in the car. All the details of daily life become irrelevant.”

He sips his coffee. I look at the clock. It’s five minutes before the meeting is scheduled to begin. How far can she go in five minutes?

“Your wife. Does she ever come to the meetings?”

“We split up two years after Jonathan disappeared.” David spreads his hands out on the desk, stares at them, and folds them into fists. “Everyone in this group is either divorced or separated. Jane and I were the perfect couple, or so we thought. After Jonathan was gone, there was too much pain. We were a constant reminder to each other of what we’d lost. And there’s always the blame.”

“How did it happen?” I ask, finding myself drawn to his story the way others must be drawn to Emma’s.

“Jane was in Minnesota visiting her mother, and I’d taken Jonathan to the Russian River for Father’s Day weekend. We were on a canoe trip with several other fathers and their sons. While I was setting up our tent, I gave Jonathan permission to go look for frogs with a couple of older boys. The kids weren’t gone more than ten, twelve minutes. I was putting in the last stake when the two other boys came running out of the woods, panicked. The moment I saw them, I knew something terrible had happened. They’d been approached by a man with a gun. The man, for some reason, chose my boy.”

“I remember hearing about it. The manhunt went on for weeks.”

“Media frenzy. It’s creepy, the way people get into the story, but you put up with the pushy reporters and the curiosity because you think it might help. With all those people tuning in to your story on the five o’clock news, you think your child will be found.”

My heart sinks, remembering the droves of volunteers who combed the woods with flashlights and walkie-talkies.
America’s Most Wanted
covered the story, as did CNN. There were posters and flyers and candlelight vigils. Even with all that, they couldn’t find his son.

“Jane never forgave me for letting him out of my sight. If she had, it wouldn’t have mattered, because I never forgave myself. Every morning when I wake up, the first thought that comes to my mind is that goddamn tent. If I’d just told Jonathan to wait until I was finished…”

“There was this seal pup,” I say. “It was dead. I obsess about it every minute of every day. What if the seal hadn’t been there? What if I hadn’t had my camera? I looked away from Emma for forty seconds, maybe a minute.”

“We’re all cursed with that—thinking about the seconds.”

“And then there was this funeral procession on the Great Highway,” I say. “I had no business stopping to look, but I couldn’t help myself. I’ve always felt the same way about funeral processions that I feel about terrible car accidents—it’s depressing, it’s morbid, and even though you know the people involved deserve some privacy, it’s impossible not to look.”

David nods, taking it in.

“I’m not her mother,” I explain.

“Yes.”

“I’m engaged to Emma’s father.”

“I know.”

I wonder if this makes me less in his eyes. No matter how much guilt I feel, no matter how much grief, I can’t really understand the suffering of a parent who has lost a child.

“Your fiancé didn’t want to come?” he asks.

“He’s busy. Command post.”

“And?” David says, as if he can read my mind.

“He thinks the support group is a waste of time. I think he’s beginning to consider me a waste of time, too. We used to be so good together, but of course things are different now. And I don’t blame him. I just keep thinking that, when we find her, everything can go back to normal.”

“You know the statistics,” David says softly, reaching for my hand. His hand is cool, slightly damp. “You have to be prepared for the worst.” As he closes his hand over mine, I suddenly regret telling him so much.

A woman appears in the doorway, and David pulls his hand away. The woman’s shirt and pants are crumpled, her eyes tired. There’s something wrong with her hair—thin in some places, thick in others, a bald spot above one ear.

“Sharon,” David says, standing up. He goes to the door and puts an arm around her shoulder, leads her to the desk. She looks at me blankly.

“Hello,” she says.

“Hi.”

I recognize her. Her story was huge for a few weeks a while back before fading into obscurity. I’m ashamed to realize I had forgotten about the high school cheerleader who vanished from a movie theater one Saturday afternoon, leaving behind no clues.

She tugs at her hair. Several strands come out in her fingers, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “Fourteen months, three weeks, two days,” she says without any prompting. “Her name is Tanya. She’ll be fifteen tomorrow.”

20

A
MONG THE
reading material from Nell is a book entitled
Lost Time: The Problem of Forgetting.
The book contains a quote from Aristotle’s essay “On Memory and Reminiscence”: “It often happens that, though a person cannot recollect at the moment, yet by seeking he can do so, and discovers what he seeks.”

Twenty-eight days after Emma’s disappearance, I call Nell at the library and ask for a copy of the Aristotle essay. She brings it to me that night. The search, Aristotle proposes, is best executed in a sequential fashion. “One must get hold of a starting point,” he writes. A person “discovers what he seeks” by attempting to recollect an event from beginning to end, “by setting up many movements, until he finally excites one of a kind which will have for its sequel the fact that he wishes to recollect.”

What I must determine, then, is the “starting point,” the thing that will lead to “the fact” or clue—that which I need to recollect. But this method supposes that the seeker has some idea as to the nature of the fact she’s seeking, and this is where my search comes to a standstill. I don’t know whether I should be attempting to remember the features of a stranger’s face, the license plate on someone’s car, the sound of a voice in the distance, or something else entirely. The only thing I’m certain of is that I lost Emma and I must find her. The only outcome that is acceptable is this: Emma, home, safe. But everything leading up to that desired outcome, the specific steps I should take to get there, remain a mystery to me.

It occurs to me that my starting point may be wrong. All these weeks, I’ve focused on those terrible moments at the beach. But maybe the story begins before that, maybe there’s something I’ve been missing because I’ve been trapped in too small a pocket of time. Perhaps the clue lies somewhere in the days and weeks prior to her actual disappearance. I take out the black notebook in which I’ve been recording every memory, every detail. The pages are clogged with drawings, graphs, names or identifying characteristics of everyone I have contact with on a regular basis, including the clerk at Trader Joe’s, the UPS guy, the woman who walks her Great Dane by Jake’s house every morning.

I turn to a clean page and try again to retrace my steps, one by one, beginning with the day before she disappeared. Every store I visited, every person I spoke to, every lunch, every dinner, every client. Sometime in the middle of the night, I wake with the notebook on my lap, both my legs tucked underneath me. When I try to move them, it feels like thousands of tiny pins piercing my skin. I reread the notes—five days’ worth of dull minutiae—searching in the mundane details for some element of truth. Nothing.

The next evening, I go over to Jake’s house to stuff envelopes. We sit at the dining room table, not speaking. We’ve been sending flyers to radio and television stations across the country, police departments, sheriffs, universities. Today, we’re working on hospitals. Our time together now is always spent this way—silently, engaged in some rote work, keeping our hands busy. When Jake speaks to me, it is only to say that the reward money has increased or there’s been another report of a possible sighting. The reports always lead to dead ends, as do our conversations.

“We should go out,” I say. I’m thinking that if we could get away just for an hour or two, if we could spend just a tiny fragment of time together in some place other than the command post or in this weary house, we might find a way to reconnect, and in doing so we might figure out how to help each other through this.

“What?”

“Just me and you. To dinner. One of our old spots. Park Chow maybe, or Liberty Café.”

“And do what?” he says, looking at me as though I’ve lost my mind.

“Eat something that doesn’t come out of the microwave. Have a drink, relax, talk to each other. We haven’t stopped for a moment since—” I don’t know how to finish this sentence. The word
kidnapped
is too terrible, but somehow,
disappeared
sounds even worse.

“I’m not ready to go out. Not yet.” He peels the sticky strip off the lip of an envelope, seals it, lays the letter in the wire basket.

“At the support group, they say you have to keep up some semblance of normality in your life.”

“Normality?” Jake says, his voice cracking. He picks up the wire basket and dumps the sealed envelopes on the table between us. “Every one of these will be opened by an employee at a hospital, who’s going to compare Emma’s picture with the unidentified corpses they have in the morgue. And we’re supposed to act normal?”

I gather the envelopes and put them back in the basket.

He shakes his head. “I just feel like everything’s unraveling.”

“I’m sorry. I know.”

We return to the silent work of stuffing envelopes. My mind, meanwhile, is somewhere else. I begin where I left off the previous night: five days before Emma’s disappearance. I go through my activities one by one—the places Emma and I went together, the people we talked to. Five days, six, seven.

Eight days before it happened: a meeting with a client at my studio. A bridal shoot at the Presidio. Then Emma’s cello recital and ice cream at Polly Ann’s, where you can either pick your flavor or take your chances by spinning the wheel. Emma, always adventurous, chose to spin, and ended up with Bubblegum Banana. I went with Rocky Road. Emma didn’t like hers and, in typical Emma fashion, insisted that we trade. We had some time to kill before Jake was due home. Where did we go?

“Of course,” I say.

Jake looks up, startled. “What?” There’s no mistaking the look in his eyes: hope.

“Eight days before it happened, I had Emma for a day, remember? You had a meeting at school. Emma and I went to the tourist information center across the street from Ocean Beach so she could look at the murals.”

“The place beneath the Beach Chalet?”

“Yes. I guess I forgot about it because we went there so often, it was no big deal at the time. There was hardly anyone there. Just me and Emma, the kid behind the information desk, and this blonde woman. Thirty-five, forty years old—she looked like she’d had a hard life, smoked a million cigarettes. She was talking to the kid, and she told him she was on vacation with her husband. The only reason I noticed her was that she was talking in an unnaturally loud voice. She was wearing these satin sweatpants that made a swishing sound every time she moved.

“The kid asked her how long they were staying in San Francisco, and she said she didn’t know. It was a road trip, they were just taking things as they came.”

“What does any of this have to do with Emma?” Jake asks.

“She kept tapping her fingers on the desk, shifting her eyes around the room. Once, her eyes focused on Emma for a few seconds, but she never looked at me. That was it. Then she turned and walked out of the building.”

“I don’t understand,” Jake says.

“The woman in the yellow van at Ocean Beach, the one who waved at Emma? I think she was the same woman I saw at the Beach Chalet.”

“Are you sure?”

“I really think so. I mean, I never looked her in the eyes, but there was a very strong resemblance.”

Jake is up from the table immediately, taking the phone from its cradle on the kitchen wall. “I’m calling Detective Sherburne.”

“Are you positive?” Sherburne asks me a minute later. He’s at home, and the TV is going in the background.

“Yes.”

“It’s been a month. It’s a strange thing to remember this late in the game.”

“I really think it was her.”

“I don’t want to be the naysayer, Abby, but one thing I’ve learned in this job, the later someone remembers something after an event, the less likely it is to be accurate.”

“I’m not making this up.”

“That’s not what I meant. I just think your mind might be playing tricks on you. We can make ourselves believe pretty much anything, you know, when we need to.”

“You don’t understand. I can see her clear as day in my mind. Anyway, it’s the best thing we’ve got, isn’t it? Let me come in for a forensic sketch. I can describe both of them—the woman and the surfer from the van.”

“We don’t usually call in a forensic artist unless we have a pretty strong lead.”

I imagine some big ledger hidden away at the police station, where dollars and cents are subtracted each time money is spent. Maybe there’s no room in the budget for a forensic artist in a case like this. Maybe they’re trying to save their funds for surer bets.

“Do you have a better idea?” I ask.

There’s a long pause on the other end. I can hear Sherburne’s wife in the background, talking. Maybe she pities me, maybe she just wants Sherburne to get off the phone, but I’m pretty sure I hear her tell him to humor me.

“Okay. I’ll schedule a meeting for you with our forensic artist, but I don’t want you getting your hopes up.”

“Thank you.”

Before I even hang up the phone, I’ve already started doubting my own story, looking for holes in my memory. There must be dozens of scraggly blonde women of indiscriminate age who pass through Ocean Beach every day, not to mention hundreds of transient surfer guys. What if Sherburne is correct, and my imagination is just filling in the blanks where actual memory left off?

“God, I hope this turns out to be something,” Jake says, putting his arms around me.

It feels good to have him hold me this way; it’s been so long since he did this, so long since he has looked at me with anything resembling tenderness. I wrap my arms around his waist and hold on, breathing in his smell—a mix of fabric starch and something else that is solely him, that sweet, distinctive smell that I used to breathe every night as we fell asleep, my face pressed to the warm skin of his back.