Sophie Last Seen

by Marlene Adelstein

  If she wasn’t careful, Star could get sucked into the rabbit hole of the missing. There was one scary website after the next. Missingkids.com, Childfindofamerican.com, Pollyklaas.org and on and on. She imagined all the never-found missing kids floating around in some in-between universe, like virtual ghosts all tethered together, although lots of them would have already become never-found adults. She used to think it was rare for someone to disappear, but reading about so many kids made it clear, it happened all the time.

  She clicked on the faces of other smiling kids, and as their profiles flashed before her eyes, she skimmed some of the disparate facts:

  Missing since 1971, 1999, September 8, 2012.

  Last seen in their home, exiting a Greyhound bus accompanied by a grandparent, at a Zone clothing store.

  A book bag recovered, their abandoned car found, a rainbow backpack left behind.

  Has a butterfly tattoo on her shoulder, a birthmark on his thigh, wearing binoculars around her neck.

  Reward of $25,000 offered, needs medical attention, believed to be in imminent danger.

  Last seen. Last seen. Last. Seen.

  It was draining, all the sad stories. She thought about Ophelia. The girl sure had some crazy romantic ideas about life. Smiling angels with white wings. Running into Sophie at the Olive Garden. Yeah, right. Star just didn’t want Ophelia to end up on one of these websites like Sophie. Another depressing statistic.

  She stepped away from her computer, checked the locks of her windows, and turned on all the lights—the hallway and bathroom nightlights, the overhead bedroom, closet light, and desk lamp, too. She couldn’t remember exactly when she’d become afraid of the dark.

  She tiptoed down the hall and peered through the keyhole of her parents’ bedroom, as she did each night. They were still there, sleeping. She let out a breath. She thought about asking to sleep with them in their bed like she had when she was little, before Sophie went missing, when it was just for fun. But she knew they wouldn’t go for that. She’d asked once the year before, and they’d looked at each other worriedly. “You’re too old for that, honey,” her mother had said in a pathetic voice.

  Suck it up, she’d thought. So she’d taught herself to put on a mask and pretend she was someone else, the tough girl who wasn’t scared. The exact opposite of how she really felt.

  For a while after Sophie disappeared, her presence was always hovering nearby, like a mild earache. But Star learned to ignore it and went about her life. She went ice skating at the new Canaan rink. Birthday parties at the lake. Piano lessons. Homework. She was a regular kid who had moved on from a tragedy. Then little by little, as the years went by, Sophie started whispering in her ear. Then the whisper became a normal voice. Then a shout. The earache wasn’t so easy to ignore anymore.

  It was late, and Star was getting tired and definitely didn’t want to fall asleep. Ever since she’d read about what had happened to those three Cleveland girls, she’d kept having nightmares. So she made extra-strength coffee and drank lots of it, heavy on the sugar. It was all she could think of to stay awake and fend off the bad dreams. Lately, everyone had been on her case about being sleepy at school, missing classes, and failing tests. She’d been doing this nightly routine for a couple of months, and she was whipped, feeling like a total zombie. She looked like one, too. Hell, she was only sixteen and had freaking black circles under her eyes. She’d started to lose weight and was swimming in her clothes. Whenever she smelled grilled meat, what she now called “missing person food,” it made her gag. She had diarrhea, so she secretly guzzled that gross pink stuff and didn’t feel like eating.

  The last time she remembered looking at the clock, it’d read 3:13, and she could barely keep her eyes open in spite of the fact she’d drunk about three atomic coffees. She felt a pull, like a magnetic force that took her whole body slowly under as if she were drowning, but she couldn’t do anything about it. She couldn’t shout, cry, or even talk. Not being in control was frightening, but it was also kind of relaxing to be taken, to finally let it all go and not fight it anymore, like a warm, heavy blanket was being tucked around her.

  “Hey, Rats.” It was Sophie’s nickname for her—Star spelled backward. Sophie sat on Star’s bed, legs dangling over the side. She still looked the way Star remembered her. A ten-year-old girl. She wore stone-washed jeans with her “Life’s a Beach” T-shirt and her black clogs with orange socks, the same outfit she’d worn the day she disappeared. Her long dark hair hung loose down her back, the way she usually wore it. She was still little, hadn’t grown an inch. Still had her freckles. And her binos, as usual, were hanging around her neck.

  Star jumped when she saw her. “Jesus, Sophie, you scared me. What are you doing here?”

  “Just visiting my BFF.” Sophie hopped off the bed, walked over to the desk, and looked at photos of Star and her friends pinned to her bulletin board. There were some of Ruby and Star with their arms around each other, smiling broadly.

  Sophie gazed at them and turned back to Star. “No pictures of me?”

  Star shrugged.

  “That sucks.”

  Star didn’t tell her she’d put them in a cigar box under her bed with other mementoes from their times together and that they creeped her out to look at them, just like seeing Sophie did now.

  “How come you haven’t gotten older?” Star said.

  Sophie gestured to herself. “This is what Limboland looks like.”

  “I heard your mom thinks she gets signs from you. Is that really you sending her stuff?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

  “You don’t talk like a ten-year-old. You sound different.”

  “Some things make you grow up fast. Besides, this is your dream, not mine.”

  Am I dreaming? Star wondered. Or is this really Sophie’s ghost? She’d never really thought about ghosts before. Didn’t they like show up because of unfinished business or something?

  Dream Sophie or Ghost Sophie was rifling through Star’s stuff on her desk: her journal, papers and books. Then she saw a Beanie Baby, a little dog, sitting on a bookshelf, and she turned to Star. “Really? George?”

  The doll had been Sophie’s. A week after she’d been missing, the Albrights’ house was so chaotic, strangers bustling in and out of the place, that Star had just walked into Sophie’s room, ducking under the yellow police tape without anyone noticing. She could have taken anything, but the little dog had seemed to call out to her. So she’d just slid it into her pocket. Star sometimes held it in her hand in bed at night.

  “I don’t get you, Sophie. What do you want from me?”

  Sophie nodded toward Star. “You must want to see me. You Google stalk me, like, every day.”

  Oh, that. “So what? What do you really want?”

  “Patience, Star. Remember, birding takes patience.”

  “What does that mean? You’re not a bird.”

  “Tweet, tweet. And I don’t mean Twitter.” She laughed. “I thought we were best friends? Blood sisters,” she said and wiggled her index finger at Star.

  They had done a blood pact when they were nine. Best friends forever. No matter what. They’d pricked their fingers with a safety pin. It hurt, but Star remembered they’d both laughed as they pressed their index fingers together, their blood mingling into one new shade of cherry juice.

  “Maybe you should stop coming here.”

  Sophie looked up at the ceiling as if thinking about it. “No, I think I’ll keep coming.”

  Suddenly, Star felt so tired, she had to prop her head up with her hands. “I need some sleep.”

  “Who’s stopping you?”

  “Maybe you should go visit your mom. Or your dad.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Sophie...”

  “What?” She had brought her binos up to her eyes and was pointing them right at Star.

  “When are you going to stop coming to me?”

  She pulled them down from her face an
d giggled. “Never.”

  SUDDENLY, STAR BOLTED upright in bed. She looked around the room. No one was there. Her heart was racing. Her tank top was drenched in sweat. She opened her bottom desk drawer and pulled out her little sewing kit in a clear plastic zippered pouch. The scissors that came with it were small, with orange plastic handles, and they were surprisingly sharp. Her mom had given her the kit two years ago. Star didn’t sew, and she didn’t intend to start, but it was filled with lots of perfect tools—rows of shiny straight pins that had small colored balls on their heads and a sharp seam ripper, too. Star had discovered a new purpose for the kit last month after a really bad visit from Sophie.

  She shoved her left sleeve up past her elbow, took the scissors, and scratched a two-inch line down her forearm. Winter was coming, so she would have months to wear long sleeves and cover up. It hurt but not that much, which meant she hadn’t pressed hard enough. She went over the scratch and pressed harder. The first burst was always a surprise. Not like the tiny pin prick from her blood pact with Sophie. This was dark and thick like crimson syrup. It kept coming and made her think of maple tree sap. When she was in elementary school, her class went on a field trip every March to the Norton Farm. The kids helped collect sap in metal buckets and watched the sugaring in the little wooden shacks. Star’s sap ran down her arm and dripped into a pile of paper towels she kept in the same drawer as the sewing kit. She wiped off the scissor blades and used one of the points to make another deeper cut next to the first one. More syrup came, and she heard pounding in her ears. The cut hurt, but the pain was what she needed. It put Sophie in her place. It put Star in control.

  “You think you can get me to stop coming by doing that?” Sophie was back.

  Star just shrugged. Sophie couldn’t bother her anymore.

  “That’s pathetic.”

  “Maybe so, but it works.”

  “Not this time. I’m still here.”

  She cut into a new spot on her arm near the inside of the elbow. More sap. More syrup. “I can’t hear you.”

  Usually, it took about fifteen minutes. She could never be sure because she’d go into a sort of trance while cutting. Everything disappeared. All sounds and smells. She would slip into another place where there were no missing girls harassing her. Where she didn’t have to put on an act.

  When she was done, she had to press really hard with Kleenex to stop the dripping. Sometimes she licked the little drips, and it even tasted like maple syrup. Then she dabbed all the cuts with alcohol, which stung like hell. She wiped up any stray blood drops. She’d gotten good at her ritual and was pretty neat about it. She retrieved her stash of Band-Aids hidden in the back of her closet. Gazing at the ugly cut, it came to her. Today’s journal entry.

  She took out her old digital camera from her desk drawer and turned it on. It came to life with a whooshing sound as the lens slid out. She pointed it at her arm, on the fresh red line, and zoomed in close. Jagged and raw, it looked abstract, like a zigzagging road from far away. The road to nowhere, she thought with a chuckle. That would be the caption. She hit the button, and it flashed. She would print it out and paste it in her journal later. Next, she put on a Band-Aid, the big square kind, nice and tight. Then she dropped the syrupy Kleenex down the toilet. Star was so tired, she crawled into bed with her clothes on and fell asleep with the lights ablaze.

  Chapter Six

  Jesse got in bed with her iPad and a bottle of wine, and before she knew it, hours had melted away while she made the rounds of the numerous missing person sites. The horrifying, frightening truth of kidnapping, human trafficking, child pornography rings, prostitution, abuse, brainwashing, and even organ harvesting was really more than she could bear. Not being able to protect her daughter was her torture. But if she stayed away from the websites for too long, she worried she might miss a piece of news, some obscure clue about Sophie. So as painful as it was, she always went back.

  She then turned to snooping on Cooper, a favorite pastime. She went to Google Street View and swiped up and down his block, looking for what exactly, she wasn’t sure. She tried to enlarge the view, look in windows, and zoom into the back yard. To find clues of his new life. But she could never see more than just the outside of the house. It was a brick townhouse style on a cobblestoned street in a pricey neighborhood. She’d scoped it out on Realtor.com, too. It was worth more money than her house. She’d tried to imagine living there but couldn’t. She preferred her rural, small-town Canaan. But if she were being honest, she supposed what she wanted was simply her old life back. The way things used to be, even if it wasn’t perfect.

  When she was sure she’d seen all she could, she picked up the phone, punched in a number, and waited. After the fourth ring, a groggy man’s voice answered, “Hello, Jess.”

  She felt around under the covers near her feet and pulled Mr. Bear onto her lap. Sophie’s dingy, stuffed polar bear was missing a black button eye. Lila Teller had called it a “transference object.” Jesse didn’t care what it was called. She needed to hold it in order to fall asleep.

  She gulped down some wine, picturing Cooper in bed. He had always slept naked, two scrunched-up feather pillows behind his head. When she was last with him, a small patch of his chest hair had started to turn gray. She looked to the left side of the bed, Cooper’s old side, and touched what had been his pillow then let her hand slide down to the empty space next to her. She ran her hand over the sheet. She couldn’t recall how or when she’d told Cooper what happened That Day. She had long ago blocked that out, plus the meds she’d been given then dulled her memory. But she could remember one of the last times they made love when it was still good. From the start, they’d had a strong chemistry. Only during the last years they were together, had they seemed out of sync. She’d wondered then if it was just the normal ebb and flow of a marriage. Of passion.

  But that one Sunday, it had been like old times. Sophie was off with Star, and Jesse and Cooper had the house to themselves, a rare occurrence. They kept being interrupted—a phone call and a neighbor stopping by—then the power went out in a windstorm. Jesse went with Cooper to the basement and held a flashlight while he messed with the fuse box, naked. They went back to bed, laughing about the coitus interruptus, then their bodies came together again. She wondered what had brought the heated excitement to that time. Did I do something differently? Been sexier, somehow? Maybe we felt freer without Sophie in the house?

  “Jess, it’s late,” Cooper said in a whisper. “You know we get up early.”

  Even after so many years, hearing his voice put her at ease. When she and Cooper were together, Jesse had helped him start Country Hikers, a touring company with excursions in the Northeast, hikes in beautiful settings and overnight stays in charming B and Bs. Cooper had led the hikes. He loved being outdoors and meeting new people. He could be charming and was knowledgeable about the area. Jesse had done the office work and kept the books until being a mom became too time-consuming. It’d been a small business, and they had struggled to stay afloat, but Jesse thought he was happy. But once he remarried, he sold the business, went back to school, and got a law degree. He wore suits every day and worked at a big law firm. The old Cooper had vanished along with Sophie. At least he could afford to pay her alimony.

  Cindy, Cooper’s second wife, had worked with him in the Country Hikers office after Jesse quit. She was eight years younger than him and skinny, with big boobs that Jesse was sure weren’t real. She didn’t like to read books, garden, have discussions, go to museums, or stay home to cook or bake, like Jesse. She couldn’t sew a Halloween costume for a child. She liked to shop and work out. Period. And Jesse would be the first to admit that Cindy was a very good shopper. And always ready with a recommendation for a trendy vacation spot or a new restaurant.

  Cooper claimed the stress and strain of their tragedy had pushed him into the affair with Cindy, but Jesse thought it might have started before Sophie disappeared. Sophie had been a demanding child who needed stru
cture and routine. And if Jesse or Cooper failed to follow it, Sophie would fly into wild tantrums. Raising her had placed a strain on their marriage.

  After Cooper and Cindy married, they moved out of the sleepy hill town to Newburyport, closer to Boston, where the shopping was better. Their son was born. Cindy stayed home and took care of Caleb, who was now four years old.

  Jesse never understood how Cooper could end up with Cindy. An affair, yes, sure, that was a no-brainer. She was younger and attractive. Sexy, for sure. But marriage? A child? All Jesse could come up with was that the sex must be amazing. She used to think the sex she and Cooper had was amazing. Clearly, Jesse knew nothing about anything.

  “I’ve been thinking about our last conversation,” she said.

  “That’s good. Did you contact a realtor?”

  “Not yet. I’ll need more time. A month is crazy.”

  “Because of the junk? Rent a roll-off. Or hire someone to get rid of it, haul it all away.”

  She wasn’t going to start that conversation. He never got it that Sophie was leading her. She wasn’t ready to let go of the finds. Not yet. She was getting close; she felt it. Never stop looking.

  “Not just that. The house needs work. You know that. You want to get the most money you can, right? It needs to show well. It needs a paint job. The downstairs bath is so dated. And the kitchen is a wreck. Plus, we’ll need to stage the place.”

  Jesse felt numb, disconnected, as if she were floating in an ocean, cut off from her old life, which she watched as it drifted away, getting smaller and smaller. She’d been operating that way for such a long time. It was nearly inconceivable that the number of years that she had waited and searched for Sophie was approaching the amount of time she had actually spent with her.

  “I don’t know, Jess. A paint job, fine. Call Ray. He’ll do it for a good price. But remodeling? No way. There’s no money for that. Someone will want it the way it is. They’ll fix it up themselves to their liking.”