Sophie Last Seen

by Marlene Adelstein

  The image of her claustrophobic house filled with years’ worth of other people’s junk crept into her thoughts. But all the stuff no longer felt like clues or signs. It was simply a huge mess of overwhelming garbage. Jesse just wanted to crawl into her bed, yank the covers over her head, sleep for a month, and wake up to a clean house.

  She plucked the green stone from the shelf below her dashboard. The stone that had gotten her through more than a few panic attacks. She turned the stone over and over, and slowly, the garbage littering her mind and home fell away. She envisioned the garbage breaking into jagged digital bits like a computer game, falling to the ground, and evaporating to nothingness.

  She kept rubbing the little stone between her fingers, and suddenly, the smoothness made her think of the river rocks lined up on Georgia O’Keefe’s window ledge at her house in New Mexico. A clean, sparse, spacious place where one could breathe. Jesse had had such a golden time in Taos. She thought it was funny how her mind could make crazy leaps from the heavy melancholy of her missing daughter to remembering those soul-nurturing days in New Mexico. She was connecting the dots. The trip to Wellfleet was bringing things into focus for her at last. She felt ready to take the next step, no matter what outcome. Her second chance. Her eyes watered. She let out a big breath, nodded a final farewell to the Barn, and drove on.

  Just as she feared, when she pulled into her driveway, a news crew was waiting for her outside their van. So much for getting help from Detective Jacobs.

  Jesse parked the truck, put on her stone face, and pushed her way through the small group.

  “Did they find Sophie?”

  “We heard the murderer was apprehended.”

  “Can you tell us what you found?”

  She swatted at the camera that was shoved in her face and dashed into the house with Saint Anthony. She went around the house, making sure all the shades and curtains were drawn and all the doors locked, then turned her attention to the dog.

  “Hungry, boy?” she asked, and he followed her into the kitchen. With the circuslike atmosphere swirling around her in Wellfleet and the one at home, she was grateful she had him to care for—a warm, loving creature who needed her. She bent down and hugged him. “What a good boy you are, Brownie.”

  She went to the pantry, scooped his kibble into a bowl, stirred in some water, and set it down for him. He gobbled it up. Suddenly dying of thirst, Jesse ran the water at the sink until it was really cold. She filled a tall glass and drank it all down in a few gulps. Then she filled it again and drank a second glassful, then a third, as if she could flush away everything. The shocking sight of Sophie’s lens caps. The angry shouts from Star. The accusations spoken at the Silvermans’. All the dark thoughts pressing against her brain. She closed her eyes and shook her head. Out of breath, she set the glass down on the counter and went upstairs to Sophie’s room, the dog at her heels.

  She took down the plastic box with the little gifts from the crows. She sat on the bed and picked up the tiny pieces one by one, turning them over in her fingers. She lingered over memories of Sophie and her beloved birds. But they were quickly eclipsed by newer frightening thoughts.

  “Soph, I found the lens caps to your binoculars.” She looked upward, her eyes brimming over. “Dear God, I don’t know what to pray for. Please don’t let her have suffered.” Tears slipped down her face. She kissed the last piece, an oblong red button, then replaced it in its slot. She closed the lid and put the box back up on the shelf.

  Back downstairs, Jesse scanned the living room, thought again of Georgia O’Keefe’s spare house. “This is crazy, Soph. I’ve been out of my mind. Fuck this.” And she grabbed a box of trash bags and walked over to one stack of boxes labeled Miscellaneous. She pulled out a red Keds tennis shoe, child’s size seven, and shoved it into the garbage bag. She plucked a single plastic doll’s arm from the box, along with a broken candle and a page from a girl’s diary, and tossed them all in. The little jolt in her chest—a ripple, a small buoyancy—felt good. She reached for more finds. A broken harmonica. A break-up letter written on the back of an air sickness bag. A yellowed set of dentures. More and more.

  When she had filled three trash bags, it felt like a logjam inside her had loosened. There was movement. It was an unfamiliar feeling, outside her comfort zone. But maybe this is a good thing. Maybe this is what Mom was talking about when she said it’s time to start a new life.

  She gazed around the room again. She’d barely made a dent, but it was a start. She saw the pink T-shirt she’d found in the Blueberry cabin and picked it up off a pile of finds where she’d tossed it just yesterday. She shook it out and held it up.

  “What?” she said aloud, and Saint Anthony turned his head, his ears perked up. “It can’t be,” she said, and the dog came ambling over. The shirt was pink and did have an image of a bird. It did say “tweet,” but it was that damn Twitter bird logo, not the red tanager Sophie had seen and wanted. And the writing was in a different font. Jesse checked the label. It was a large—not Sophie’s size—and it wasn’t even from the Zone.

  Deflated, she said, “It’s not the shirt.” She could have sworn she’d seen the very same shirt Sophie had wanted. She was sure of it. She’d thought the girl would lead her somewhere. She’d had a feeling about her. So many feelings. Her worried look. That watermelon gum. Jesse’s hands fell to her lap. She exhaled then stuffed the shirt into one of the trash bags.

  As she pulled the ties to close the bag, the story that Barnes was trying to tell her the night of the Harvest Fest suddenly came to her. Some Native American tale about grief and how one tribe dealt with it. She had pooh-poohed it then, she was so angry and unwilling to listen. She wished she could remember the details. Something about ritual. If she ever saw him again, she would ask him to tell her the story once more. She picked up a small dirty stuffed animal from one of the boxes—a tiger with a long bendable tail. She turned it over in her hand. She realized now that she had created her own ritual. A wild, crazy, convoluted ritual trying to make sense of the senseless.

  LATER, WHEN JESSE CRAWLED into bed totally exhausted from the last two days, Saint Anthony curled next to her on Cooper’s side, snoring like an old man. Jesse shook her head and smiled. She picked up the phone and dialed Cooper’s number.

  “Jess, hi. Are you okay? Any more news?”

  “No. Not yet. Cooper, it was so bizarre finding the caps to Sophie’s binoculars.” She had felt a tingling in her fingers as if the plastic pieces were alive, speaking to her. And when she had to hand them over to the policeman, she felt as though her heart were being wrenched from her body. She’d brought them to her nose, searching for some remnant of a Sophie smell, but only a musky, earthy scent remained.

  “It’s unbelievable,” he said.

  Talking to Cooper was still a comfort. No one else could understand all the feelings. “They’re going to find her,” Jesse whispered. “We have to prepare ourselves.”

  “We can’t be sure. We’ve been disappointed numerous times before.”

  “No, I feel it. It’s different this time. This is the biggest real clue that’s been found. She’s been leading me there with her journal. I’m sure of it.” She paused, then continued, “Did you ever see a man who slept on the beach near our cottage that summer?”

  There was a long patch of silence. Jesse could hear him breathing.

  “Come to think of it, yeah. I do remember a guy. Long hair. Rode a red bike loaded with plastic bottles. Seemed harmless.” The dates didn’t add up, and his friend had said he was harmless, too. But why were the lens caps to Sophie’s binoculars right next to his grave?

  She couldn’t believe Cooper had seen Paul Bunyan and never mentioned him to her. “Apparently, he was into birds, too.”

  “We have to wait. All we can do now is wait.”

  She realized what she really needed to tell him was the other thing—her secret about the missing two minutes at the Zone and the mean thing she said to Sophie. She opened h
er mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Finally, she said, “Did you know the Zone is gone?”

  “The Zone? That Zone?”

  “Yes, that Zone. They took it away. Putting up a Victoria’s Secret in its place.”

  He lowered his voice. “It’s for the best, Jesse.”

  “I guess,” she said quietly. She felt a swirl of combating emotions. Longing. Regret. Hope. Sadness. She petted Saint Anthony and let her fingers slide over his forehead then down his snout. “Remember how happy Sophie was each time the crows left her a little gift?”

  “Yes. It was amazing how they left her those sparkly little presents.”

  After a moment, Jesse said, “I’ve started to clean up. I’ve got bags of my finds to toss out. I’m doing it.”

  “Good for you, Jess. My offer to help still stands.”

  “Thanks, but I’m good.” Just then Saint Anthony breathed out peacefully and let out a loud snore.

  “Who’s that?” Cooper said.

  She looked over to the snoring hound and smiled. Let him think it’s a man. “That’s Anthony.”

  “Who’s Anthony?”

  It gave her a glimmer of satisfaction to think that maybe, possibly, her ex-husband felt a smidgen of jealousy. Just then, she heard Cooper’s son, Caleb, calling him in the background. “Listen, I better let you go,” she said. She had never been the first to get off the phone with him.

  She hung up then slid Saint Anthony’s heavy sleeping body over a few inches, and he didn’t even stir. She pulled the covers up to her chin, reached over, and turned out the light.

  AT THREE IN THE MORNING, Jesse was still wide awake, abuzz from her trip. She slipped quietly out of bed so as not to wake Saint Anthony. She put on a sweatshirt and headed downstairs. Stopping at her dining room table, still cluttered with her deconstructed finds, she looked at the pieces she’d crafted using the found bits. The vibrant shades and sharp, angled shapes were so different from her old, drab barn paintings. The many textures of the collaged materials were enticing. Interesting. This new stuff was, she realized, art, after all. Just as Star had said. It felt wide open. While she was making them, time didn’t exist. Nothing else mattered.

  Jesse grabbed an armful of her finds off the table. Rusty nails. Scraps of dirty fabric. Old photographs. Shopping lists. She took them out to her studio. She turned on the lights, switched on the heat, and spread the objects out on her long table. Without thinking, she just started working intuitively, cutting up pieces, collaging others, and painting on top. Time dissolved. She applied thick gobs of paint in pulsating reds, bits of ash, and collaged pieces of burnt book pages. Words and letters floated down from a sky, peeking through a hole in the canvas, and one elusive bird flew out of a window. She melted beeswax in an old crock pot, and when it was hot, she painted the wax over the entire canvas. When it dried, she buffed it with a soft rag until the piece had a muted, mysterious, opaque look.

  By dawn, she’d begun three new canvases. She transformed the frightening scenes in her mind into abstract images heavy with emotions, each with a lone bird soaring out of the picture. She was exhausted yet vibrating with ideas she couldn’t wait to try out later. She hadn’t felt so invigorated in years. It reminded her of when she was in college, so fresh and naïve, and full of ideas just spilling out of her. She finally dragged herself back into the house.

  As she lay in bed, all she could think about was her new work. She smiled, and tears came to her eyes. She felt like an artist again.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  After Jesse dropped her off at home, Star hung out in her bedroom, staring at her Lady Gaga poster. She looked super cool with cat-eye makeup. Gaga would have accepted Star the way she was without squealing on her. Star had gone out of her way, lying to her parents, sitting scrunched next to that drooling dog in the truck for hours in search of Paul Bunyan. So maybe he’d been dead for years, but Sophie had been there. At least her lens caps were. Star had listened as Jesse revealed her big secret in the Zone dressing room and even talked her down from the crazy-lady ledge. But when Star spilled her own guts, Jesse snitched her out to her parents.

  When Jesse was in the kitchen talking to her parents, it dawned on Star to use her old trick. Eavesdropping 101. In the old days when she was just a kid, she used to secretly listen in on her parents’ “discussions”—also known as huge fights about money—after she’d supposedly gone to bed.

  So she opened the heat vent and could pretty much hear everything that was being said downstairs. First, her mom was yelling at Jesse for taking her on a dangerous mission to look for a killer without their permission. Star had never heard her mom so pissed before. As usual, Star’s dad, always the peacemaker, tried to calm everyone down.

  “She was drunk at the Harvest Fest,” Mom said. “Maybe she was drunk when she took Star. Who knows what to believe?”

  After the whole trip got rehashed, Star’s mom finally calmed down, then Jesse snitched Star out about the cutting.

  “But that’s not possible. We would have noticed,” Mom said.

  Yeah, right.

  Then Jesse told them about Star’s nighttime visits from Sophie and drinking coffee to stay awake.

  I’m dead meat, Star thought.

  Then Jesse, the traitor, said, “I’m sorry. Star needs help. That’s why I’m here.”

  She left after Star’s parents practically threw her out. Then they came upstairs. They didn’t know how to deal with Star. At first, they were shouting at her locked door, “Star, open up.”

  Then her dad said, “You’re grounded for a week.”

  But her mom shouted, “A month. Three months.”

  After minutes of total silence, Star heard them whispering to each other. They must have decided to change their tactic, because next, her dad was saying softly, “Honey, let’s discuss things quietly. We all make mistakes.”

  Star still didn’t say a word.

  Then her mom sounded so sad, as though she were crying. “Honey, I know you haven’t been yourself lately. Please talk to us.”

  Dad said, “I’m sorry we yelled. We’ll try to understand.”

  Finally, Star opened the door. It was another couple of hours of them asking a million questions about the trip and the cutting and the Sophie ghost. Star barely answered, but she finally agreed to see a shrink just to shut them up. Then her parents went to bed.

  All was quiet, and Star snuck downstairs for mint Milanos. She was about to make some coffee when she saw that, thanks to Jesse, her mom’s Starbucks had been removed. Star was out of her personal stash, so she was in for a long night.

  Now all I need is for the fire inspector’s report to come back. And then the shrink’s. She could see it all. She would be outed on Instagram and YouTube. Everywhere. “The teen cigarette-smoking arsonist.” Put that together with “the teen self-mutilator,” and she would be famous but with a ruined life forever.

  Shit.

  She and Jesse had taken a really cool trip to the Cape, reconnecting like old times and hanging out at OB. Then she had to confide in psycho Jesse about everything. What was I thinking? What a moron.

  With no coffee to keep her awake and the thought of everyone at her school and beyond finding out her secrets, she went for her sewing kit. Something that put her in control. She’d stashed it in her closet behind her clothes and shoes as if that would make it harder for her to get to. She opened the closet door and—

  “Hi, Rats.” Sophie stood in the closet, moving her hand from side to side in a little wave. She was wearing the same outfit, but her binos were missing both lens caps.

  “Jesus, Sophie. You scared the crap out of me.”

  “Sorry. I thought it was time to come out of the closet.” She giggled like she’d made the biggest joke ever.

  Star had thought—well, she’d hoped—that finding Sophie’s lens caps would mean finding her. Then Sophie’s ghost wouldn’t visit her anymore. Wrong again. “Sophie, I’m tired. Let’s not do this tonight.”
r />   “Do what?” She stepped out of the closet.

  “You know.”

  “I’m on your side. My mom ratted you out. Not me. You weren’t careful enough. She did see the cuts on your arm, like she said.”

  “Yeah, I know. But she didn’t have to tell my parents. I was planning on stopping.”

  “Like when?”

  “Like now.”

  “Really?” Sophie pointed to the sewing kit on the floor of the closet. The scissors with the orange handle. The pins with the round colorful heads.

  Star had to take a deep breath to calm herself. Now she’s invading my thoughts, too?

  “Were you looking for this?” Sophie asked, nodding at the sewing kit.

  “No. I told you. I’m stopping.”

  “What makes you think you can?”

  “I can stop anytime. Just like I can get you to stop coming. It’s all mind over matter.” She said it, although she didn’t really believe it.

  “Why would I stop visiting you? It’s fun.”

  “Fun for you. Not me. I didn’t do anything wrong when you were taken or left or whatever.”

  “You broke your promise. You know I hate that.”

  “I was just a kid. I’m sorry I didn’t go with you that day.”

  “What about me? What did I do to get stuck like this?” She pointed at her little-girl body.

  Tears filled Star’s eyes. “Nothing. Not a goddamn thing.”

  “That’s right. It’s not fair!” Sophie shouted and stamped her foot like the ten-year-old she was.

  Star got a sick feeling in her stomach. She hoped she wouldn’t throw up. It was all so confusing. Where was the real Sophie? She covered her ears with her hands and started humming. She didn’t want to hear Sophie buzzing in her ears anymore. She took a deep breath and grabbed the sewing kit. She unzipped it and took out the scissors. Holding them, turning them over and over, she just looked at the scissors. She rubbed her thumb over the pointy part.

  “What’s the matter? I thought you said you were quitting?”