Where I Lost Her (6 page)

I
wake with a start, sweating, my heart pounding, and sit up, disoriented. I don't know where I am. The pale curtains in the window are aglow with the morning sun. The bed is empty. Jake is not here.

Overhead I hear the helicopter, feel the way it makes the walls of the cottage shudder and hum, and suddenly I remember. I feel crushed by the realization of what has happened, of what I found last night. Of what I lost. I take comfort in the sound of the helicopter though, because it means they are still searching.

I am drenched in sweat. I pluck the wet cotton of my T-shirt from my skin. Brush the damp hair away from my face and twist it into a ponytail. My neck feels clammy. I look at my watch. It is 9
A.M.
I open up the little Dutch door of the cottage to a bright June morning.

There are sounds coming from the camp. A television? Voices. I slip on my sneakers; they are still wet from my plunge into the little stream at the edge of the road. They squish and squeak as I make my way back up the path to the camp.

Inside, the girls are sitting in the kitchen nook eating leftover blueberry muffins and bacon. Zu-Zu's hair is pulled back into a tight bun. She is wearing her leotard and tights, a thin cotton blouse that reveals one knobby shoulder. She is sitting on the bench, one leg curled under her, a pair of purple warm-up booties on her feet. Plum is still in her pajamas. I notice a smear of blueberry on her cheek and resist the urge to lick my thumb and wipe it away.

“I heard the helicopters last night,” Plum says, her mouth full. She motions upward. “It sounded like they were right over our room!”

I don't know how much Effie has told them, and so I just nod. “I know. It's loud.”

In the living room, Jake and Devin are watching the TV. The news is on, and they are talking about the girl, showing the clip of me talking to the reporter.

“You're up.” Jake turns to me, smiles. It feels like an apology. Every gesture of kindness he offers lately a small and futile recompense.

I sit down next to him on the couch, an unspoken acknowledgment of his effort. But when he reaches and puts his hand on my knee, it is too much, and so I move away. Lean forward, study the TV.

“Officers say that there have been no reports of a missing child and no other witnesses. But the search will continue. For this lost little girl,” the reporter says, shaking her head.

Wait. How could I have forgotten this? How could I have failed to tell this to the police?

“There
was
somebody,” I say. “I saw this guy at Hudson's. And then he drove past after I saw her.”

“What are you talking about?” Jake says.

I walk to the TV and shut it off.

“There was a man at Hudson's who drove past me after I saw the girl. He blew past me on the road. She was already gone, but maybe he saw something.”

Devin scowls. “Do you remember what was he driving?”

“It was a big white pickup truck. I remember there were a lot of lawn bags in the bed of the truck. And Massachusetts plates.”

“That's odd,” Devin says.

“It seemed like he might be a landscaper or something,” I say.

“From out of state?”

That is strange.

“He was buying beer, and he paid for gas.” And for some reason this reminds me of the Reese's Cups I picked up for the girls. I forgot to put them on their pillows. I shake my head. Everything feels thick. Confused. “His dog was growling at me. A pit bull, I think. It had clipped ears.”

“Did you get his license-plate number?” Jake asks.

I look at him in disbelief. “No,” I say.

“Do they have security cameras at Hudson's?” Jake asks Devin. “Maybe there's some footage of him.”

Devin snorts.

“You should tell the cops what you saw,” he says. “It shouldn't be too hard to track down somebody with out-of-state plates if he's still close. Maybe he's got a camp up here. Could be he's just getting it ready for the summer.”

“I've got Lieutenant Andrews's number,” I say, digging in the pocket of my jeans. He'd given me his business card before we left the site. “But I won't be able to get through on the cell number if he's still down the road. Do you think he's still down there?”

“I don't know,” Devin says. “My plan is to help get things set up for the volunteers at Hudson's. Effie is taking the girls into town. Jake, why don't you and Tess take your car and stop by and see if Andrews is still there. And then you can both meet me at Hudson's?”

Jake sits wringing his hands. “I
hope
somebody else saw her too. It seems like with only one witness, there's just not enough concrete evidence. To keep a full-blown search going, I mean.”

“You don't believe me?” I ask, feeling anger welling up. “You think I'm making this up?”

He shakes his head and scowls. “I didn't say that. I'm just saying that guy Andrews seems like he thinks maybe you were confused. That maybe it was an animal or something.”

“It wasn't a goddamned animal,” I say. “Jesus Christ. I know the difference between a little girl and an animal.”

“Hey,” he says, his hands up in mock surrender.

“I know exactly what I saw,” I say.

“Let's just calm down,” he says. “Seriously.”

And my eyes widen. “Don't tell me to calm down,” I say in that soft, awful language we speak. “Don't ever tell me to calm down.”

J
ake and I get in the car.

“What is that smell?” he asks. “God.” He covers his face with his T-shirt.

I remember the broken wine bottle.

“Hold on,” I say, and pull the drenched floor mat out of the car, toss it on the grass. I will rinse it out with the hose later. Let it soak in a bucket of soapy water.

He backs up and drives us down the road.

She is with us in the car.
Jess
.
Jessica?
Her scent is stronger than the acrid wine. More potent than the silence between us.

She's nobody I know. Just one of his assistants (one of a million who come and go). And while I've never met her, I know
exactly
who she is: a bright-eyed girl from Brandeis or Wesleyan or Vassar. It doesn't matter. She's young and hungry. She's come to New York with her diploma and her aspirations and her work ethic. She survives on ramen noodles and Two-Buck Chuck, but she lives in an apartment paid for by her parents and shared with another Vassar grad whose rent she takes and deposits into a checking account whose balance she never bothers to check. She's probably had an eating disorder and overcome it. Or, more likely these days, she's a girl who embraces her curves. Not swayed by societal demands, by media (she most certainly does not have cable, though she does subscribe to Netflix, to
Vogue
). She has dark hair, because she is serious. She drinks too much at parties. She is not fascinating but wishes she were. She wants and wants and wants something she is not yet able to articulate. And so when Jake, her boss, the guy whose phone she answers all day long, asks her to get a drink after work, she has to stop herself from saying yes too quickly. It is her job to remain elusive and aloof. She makes him wait three days before she agrees.

That night, in that claw-foot tub, that sulfurous bath, she shaves her legs and rubs them with scented oil. Wonders if she should shave her pubic hair; she still isn't exactly sure what she's supposed to do about that.

When she sleeps with him, in that shabby apartment that costs more every month than she and her roommate make together, she tells herself that she wouldn't be doing this if he had children. If he were a family man. Assures herself that this is somehow less despicable because there are no children involved. She sets aside her father's own indiscretions. Separates herself from those women, those home-wrecking women who didn't know that you don't sleep with men who have little girls at home. Who have families.

And she is able to do this because she is young, and when you are young the world is a big and remarkable thing, and your actions don't seem to have consequences that extend beyond your own fingertips. And because there are no children involved. He is only a husband, not a father. Because while one can quickly cease being a husband, it is nearly impossible to cease being a dad.

No children involved
. This is what she thinks. Because she doesn't know. (And I forgive her this. I forgive her stupidity and shortsightedness and the simplicity with which she sees the world). Because she cannot possibly know what happened in Guatemala.

 

Jake pulls over to the side of the road behind a row of police cars.

“I'll wait here,” he says.

“Okay,” I say. “It'll just be a minute.”

What felt private, personal last night now seems to have become public. This little girl with her tangled hair and transparent skin belongs to the world now. She is the lead story on every news station. Everyone who lives within a twenty-mile radius has a theory about where she came from, and where she has gone. Everyone is looking for her, staking claim. But
I
am the one who found her, the one who knelt down and tried to help her. I am the one who lost her too. She belongs to
me
.

And yet, here is a man riding a horse like some medieval knight. He has arranged for a whole group of men on horseback to comb the woods, to seek her out. The horses swish their tails, and fat green flies buzz and plunder in their wake. One horse lifts its tail and shits in a steaming pile. The other rears its head. They huff and grunt, their noses dripping snot on the dirt road. Everything smells like horseshit. My nose tickles and burns.

I walk toward Lieutenant Andrews, who is standing near the edge of the woods where the yellow tape is woven in and out of the trees like a ribbon in a child's hair, talking to a woman I assume is a neighbor. She is in her fifties, short, dressed in a powder-blue cardigan and a straight black skirt, wearing the kind of sensible black shoes you see on waitresses.

It becomes clear rather quickly that she's not a neighbor at all, rather some sort of psychic who has come from Burlington to try to help find the girl.
To commune with her spirit,
I overhear her say to Andrews.

Jesus Christ
.

I have the inexplicable, childlike impulse to kick her in her shins, which are knotted with varicose veins. Yet Andrews listens, nods. It pisses me off that he is more attentive to her, less dismissive of her, this quack, than he was of me last night.

“Okay then, let's take a little walk. See what you pick up,” Andrews says.

“I'm sorry,” she says, pressing her palm against the air in front of her. “I need to be alone. Undistracted. If the area's contaminated, I won't be able to get a good read. There are too many people here.” She is shaking her head.

I approach, ready to tell Andrews about the man in the truck, when the woman reaches out and touches my arm, startling me. I pull my arm away.

“Did you keep anything?” she asks.

“Excuse me?”

I don't know what she's talking about. For a moment, I am confused and think of the jacaranda. I recall the purple petals, how I kept finding them later in my luggage, in my hair, their scent nauseating and pure all at once. How six months after we left Central America, when I came here to see Effie, to get as far away as I could from Guatemala, from Jake, the sight of fallen lilac petals nearly brought me to my knees.

Her oddly coiffed hair does not move when she tilts her head and studies me. Her glasses are smudged. Her black bangs are speckled with dandruff.

“From the little girl?” the woman insists. “Did she leave anything behind?”

I have no idea how she knows I was the one who found her, that she is mine. It renders me speechless, and I shake my head,
no, no
.

“I saw you on the news,” she says, answering my unasked question.

She clutches a tattered hanky. And I wonder if this is some odd talisman she carries, or perhaps just some sort of prop. Then she sneezes loudly, violently into it, and I realize that it's neither. “Allergies,” she explains.

“Lieutenant?” I say, shaking my head as if to clear it. “I was hoping I could talk to you for a minute?” I am trying to be polite, trying the honey-versus-vinegar approach with this particular fly.

“Sure, what is it?”

“Has anyone called in about her yet? Her mom and dad?” I ask.

He looks at me and shakes his head. “No MPR,” he says.

Every time he speaks to me, he seems increasingly more leery and frustrated.

“We'll keep looking, but if a report of a missing kid doesn't come in soon, if we don't pick up on something, we're going to have to assume the report was false.”

“False?”

“That you were mistaken, ma'am. About what you saw.”

“I
saw
her,” I say. “Jesus.”

I look around for support. For someone to help me out. But Jake is in the car, nose buried in a manuscript.

“
They
believe me,” I say, motioning to the crowd of people in the road, to the army of horses and neighbors and even to the psychic who is still blowing her nose. “If you give up on this, they'll be furious with you. With the entire police department.”

“Or,” he says. “They will be furious with
you
. Out-of-towner getting the locals upset with a false report.” He is threatening me.

“I'm
from
here,” I repeat. “I grew up here. This is my home too.”

“Well,” he says snidely. “Welcome home.”

I look to the group of neighbors in the road as though they will rally behind me. As if I can summon them, evoke an uprising with a single glance. But they are strangers. They don't know me. To them I
am
just some flatlander. What they care about is the little girl. She is one of them, she belongs to
them
now.

I remember why I came then, but just as I'm about to tell him about the guy in the landscaping truck, the radio at his hip goes off.

Again, the muffled scratchy voices speak in code.

“Excuse me,” he says before I get a chance to speak, and he walks away, leaving me with the psychic.

“I see water,” she says, her eyes closed.

I roll my eyes. I see water too. There's a freaking lake right in front of us.

“There's so much red,” she says ominously, eyes fluttering. And then her eyes shoot open wide. “
Underground
.”

“I'm sorry,” I say. “I need to go.”

Andrews is sitting inside his cruiser now, speaking into his radio. I think about interrupting, tapping on his glass. But I can already imagine how pissed off he'd be at me for disturbing him. Better to stay on his good side. I'll just come back later. I'm pretty sure the guy in the truck didn't see anything anyway. She'd already slipped into the woods by the time he blew past me.

I walk back to the car. Jake has stopped reading the manuscript he brought with him and is thumbing through Charlie's file. He's got at least a half a dozen editors who are vying for Charlie's book. It could be the biggest deal he's made in his career. He barely notices as I get in the passenger side and sit down. My presence barely registers. Sometimes, lately, I feel like I am only a ghost.