Little Girl Lost

by Wendy Corsi Staub

“Then there’s your answer.”

  When Eddie turned sixteen, he had no interest in learning to drive. Kevin thought his parents might see the light now that there would only be three people vying for the Buick instead of four, but his mother said, “Eddie’s right. You boys can wait a few more years.”

  “He said that?”

  “Yes. Driving is too dangerous at your age.”

  “Dangerous! That’s crazy!”

  “No means no,” his father said.

  For almost two years now, every time Kevin sees the car just sitting there, he wants to scream.

  Instead, he runs—fast and far away, Walkman volume turned as high as it can go.

  His feet hit the pavement with satisfying slaps in time to the music as he heads down the block lined with houses identical and puny as Monopoly game pieces. He stays in the middle of the street, well away from parked cars and piles of wet leaves spilling from curbs to gutters. There’s no traffic at this hour on the side streets, and very little on the main drag when he crosses it toward the uphill stretch closer to the Hudson River.

  “Whoa . . . we’re halfway there,” Bon Jovi sings in his ear.

  He turns up one narrow block after another, same route every day.

  There’s a car behind him. He didn’t hear it approach over the music, but headlights illuminate the misty street rising ahead of him. He jogs toward the right shoulder to let it pass, but it doesn’t. Turning into the glare of high beams, he wonders why the car is just sitting there, swaddled in fog, idling in the middle of the road a few yards back.

  Maybe it’s a cop. Maybe he thinks Kevin committed some crime and is running away. Maybe he’s shouting at Kevin out the window, telling him to stop. He pulls the headphones from his ears just in time to hear the engine race as the car barrels at him.

  He jumps toward the curb to get out of the way. Too late. The last thing he sees is a blinding flash of headlights before the world goes black.

  “This your first?”

  Barnes looks up from the foam cup of coffee he’s just pulled from the vending machine in the lounge across from the nurses’ station.

  “Second,” he tells the stranger who just dropped into an uncomfortable vinyl-upholstered chair. “I think. Or maybe my third. Guess I lost count.”

  “You lost count? Day-um, brother. That’s cold.”

  “Yeah, it’s not great—in fact, it pretty much sucks,” he adds, after pausing to take a sip of brew that’s more lukewarm than cold. “So if you were thinking of trying it . . .”

  “Oh, I’m past the thinkin’ and moved onto the doin’. Where were you nine months ago when my ladyfriend and everyone else was telling me how great it was gonna be?”

  “Nine months . . .” Barnes breaks into a grin, holding up his white cup. “We’re not talking about this, are we.”

  “Huh?”

  “I thought you were asking me about the coffee. I’ve had three cups—pretty sure it’s three—and yeah, it sucks and it’s cold. But you were talking about kids.”

  The guy laughs, hard. Slaps his knee. He’s wearing wire-framed glasses, gold chains, an oversized hooded sweatshirt that reads Public Enemy, and . . .

  “Are those Nike Air Max?” Barnes asks, admiring the red, white, and gray sneakers as the guy crosses a foot over his knee.

  “Hell, yeah, brother. So this is your first one?”

  “It’s . . . yeah.”

  “Same here.” The guy extends a hand. “Name’s Rob.”

  “First or last?”

  “Neither. Just a reminder of something that happened. Something I never want to happen again. You?”

  “Barnes.”

  “First or last?”

  “Only one I use.” He settles into a chair, tapping his dwindling pack of cigarettes on his knee and glaring at the No Smoking sign on the wall.

  “They’ve got a lotta nerve,” he tells Rob. “If there’s any place a guy should be able to light up, this is it. You a smoker?”

  “Just weed. And stogies. Check these out.” He pulls a packet out of his sweatshirt pocket and shows Barnes a dozen cigars. Half of them have blue It’s a Boy bands, half pink It’s a Girl.

  “You having twins?”

  “Lord, I hope not. But I figured I better cover all my bases, you know what I’m sayin’? I wasn’t ready for this. I thought she was using protection. How about you?”

  “I thought the same thing,” Barnes admits, and it occurs to him that they might both be talking about Delia.

  “This was some splurge, I’m tellin’ you,” the guy goes on, talking about the cigars. “They’re Cubans. Got them in Havana, man.”

  “You went to Havana? How’d you get there?”

  “The long way. But I had to see it, you know? I got Cuban blood.”

  “Me, too.” Barnes’s paternal grandmother had left before Castro’s regime. Abuela couldn’t revisit her homeland in her lifetime, and died hoping her grandson might visit in his.

  Rob puts away his cigars. “Hey, you notice we’re the only two people in here? That’s ’cause those other fools, they’re all down the hall listening to that screamin’ and cursin’. Now that’s not for me. She wanted me in there with her, but I said, ‘girl, I ain’t no Florence Nightgown,’ you know what I’m sayin’?”

  Barnes nods, pretty sure he does. “Nightingale.”

  “Yeah, I ain’t no nightingale, I ain’t no nurse, I ain’t no doctor. I told her I don’t want to see no blood, I don’t want to cut no cord. You just push the damn thing out and when it’s all cleaned up nice, you tell someone to come and get me. You hear me, brother?”

  “I hear you. Is your ladyfriend’s name Delia, by any chance?”

  “No, why?”

  “Mine is,” he says, as if he’d been expecting a coincidence.

  Rob takes that in stride. “She try to get you in there, too?”

  “No, she has a friend in there with her.”

  Beyond the plate glass window, the sky goes from pink to gray to pale blue as he and his new friend talk about everything but fatherhood. Rob’s hundred-dollar sneakers, fast food, subway woes, music . . .

  Rob works for a record label. Barnes is impressed.

  “What do you do?”

  “NYPD. I’m a detective.”

  “Hey, I was only foolin’ about the weed, you know. I didn’t—”

  “Don’t worry.” Barnes grins. “Your secrets are safe with me.”

  “Cool. You got a badge and shit? You got a gun?”

  “Mr. Barnes?”

  He looks up to see a nurse in the doorway, surgical mask dangling around her neck.

  “Would you like to meet your daughter?”

  The Port Authority failed to eat Amelia alive as her cold-eyed friend had predicted. Having made it through the night—without sleep, but still—she has to endure only twenty more minutes until the ticket window opens. The first bus to Ithaca leaves in an hour, and she’s going to be on it.

  She stands and stretches, and a painfully full bladder makes itself known. She didn’t dare venture into the ladies’ room in the night, watching a steady parade of unsavory characters—male and female—pass through the doors. Now she has no choice.

  She hauls her suitcase into the bathroom. It’s filthy, and a thick stench hangs over the place—no surprise there. Toilets have overflowed to soak the garbage strewn on the floors. There’s no soap, no running water at the sinks, and several stalls have no doors.

  Amelia waits for one that does, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, on a line that could pass for a police lineup of seedy suspects. Streetwalkers in blue eye shadow, short shorts, and platform heels, disheveled bag ladies, teenaged junkies, a tiny, vacant-eyed woman who repeats everything everyone else says, and a good-natured transvestite in gold lamé from chic veiled chapeau to pointy stilettos. She—he?—knows many of the others by name, calls Amelia “Doll,” compliments her on her jacket, and asks if her—his?—eye makeup is smeared.

  �
��No, it looks good,” she says, grateful to have finally met a decent human being in this hellhole.

  “Looks good,” parrots the tiny woman.

  “Thanks, doll.”

  “Thanks, doll.”

  Amelia is reluctant to say anything else, but manners are manners, so she mutters a quick, “You’re welcome.”

  The tiny woman’s “You’re welcome” is just as clenched. It might have struck Amelia as funny at some other time, in some other place, but she doubts anything could amuse her right now.

  At last, she makes it to the head of the line, and a stall door opens.

  “I’ll watch your bag,” an emaciated teenaged girl says, a few spots behind Amelia, “and then you can watch mine.”

  Hers is a torn Duane Reade shopping bag filled with what appears to be nothing more than additional crumpled plastic bags.

  “Don’t do it, doll. Leave her alone, Gloria.”

  “Mind your own business, Ronnette,” the girl shoots back, and the drag queen rolls his—her?—eyes.

  Jaw set, Amelia drags her suitcase across the filthy tile to the stall, making a mental note to wipe down the bag as soon as she gets to a place where there are paper towels and water and—oh, Lord, disinfectant. She herself should bathe in it, after this experience.

  She wrestles the bag inside and with some maneuvering manages to close the door, not sure, and not caring, how she’s going to make her exit.

  No toilet paper. No surprise.

  Fishing for a tissue in her backpack, she drops a pen on the floor. It rolls on into the next stall. She doesn’t necessarily want it back. Then again, it’s the only pen she has, and when she meets Silas Moss, she might want to write something down.

  Hoping the pen landed on a relatively clean patch of tile, she stoops and sees that it did not. No longer interested in retrieving it, she sees Ronnette’s gilded stilettos facing the toilet a few stalls down, and just beyond, another familiar pair of shoes. Her heart stops.

  “Marceline?”

  A toilet flushes. The red leather booties shuffle and exit the stall.

  “Marceline, wait! It’s Amelia! I need to talk to you! I’m going to Ithaca to meet Silas Moss, and he—”

  “You all right, doll?” Ronnette calls from her stall.

  Frantic to catch her friend, she fumbles with the tissue, fumbles with her jeans, fumbles with her suitcase and the door. By the time she wedges herself from the stall, there’s no sign of the red booties or the woman attached to them.

  “Did you see her?” she asks the others on the line. “The woman who just walked out of that stall? The one in red shoes?”

  No response, other than a, “Yo, you tripping?”

  She pushes past them, out the door. The terminal is stirring to life as employees and travelers trickle in, and she scans the area for Marceline.

  No sign of her, nor of anyone wearing red shoes, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t there. Corridors branch in every direction. She could have disappeared down any one of them.

  Maybe she didn’t hear you calling her.

  Maybe it wasn’t even her.

  Maybe you dreamed the whole thing.

  She shuffles to her seat by the ticket window.

  No. Marceline was here, and now she’s vanished in a mystical poof, like the spirits she talks about.

  The ticket window opens with a snap of the shade.

  Amelia thrusts Marceline from her thoughts and steps forward, hoping she has enough money for a ticket out of this place.

  The young female clerk looks at her without greeting, mere seconds into her workday and already burdened by on-the-job boredom.

  “Um, how much is a ticket to Ithaca?”

  “You a student?”

  “You mean . . . there?”

  “Anywhere.”

  “I go to Hunter.”

  “Eight one way, sixteen round-trip.”

  Amelia pulls Calvin’s twenty out of her pocket and puts it in the grooved slot beneath the window.

  “Round-trip?”

  She hesitates and then shakes her head.

  “No. One way.”

  Back in New York City before dawn, Red hands two dollars to the too-friendly man in the Whitestone Bridge tollbooth.

  “How are you this morning?”

  “Fine.”

  “Everything okay?” He seems to be peering into the car.

  Why would he do that? Why would he ask that question? Did someone tip him off? White would never, but Black? What if he found out about the—

  No. Even if he realized it was missing, he wouldn’t have put two and two together so quickly.

  Ignoring the attendant’s question, Red drives on, following a string of taillights crawling through the fog across the span and then south on the Van Wyck.

  “Leave the rental car at JFK in the long-term lot,” White had said last night. “That way, it’ll be nearby when you need it. But not so close that if anyone finds it, they’ll find you.”

  “Anyone . . . like who?”

  “Who do you think? If the cops look for the car and find it at an airport, they’ll assume you hopped a plane.”

  Uneasy, Red asked, “Why would they be looking for it?”

  “They won’t if you do your job right,” Wayland—Black—had to butt in as usual.

  “Don’t worry. It’s just a precaution,” White said. “To throw them off your trail in case anyone sees anything.”

  The only people who’d seen anything in Boston or Westchester are gone from this earth. It might be days before anyone finds Tara and Emily. The first person to drive by Kevin Donaldson’s broken body is going to call the cops for sure, but they’ll assume it was an accident, or a random hit and run. That’s why Red had resisted the impulse to jump out with the knife after running over the kid. It would have felt good to jab him a few times, just to make sure he was dead. Just to experience, one more time, the seductive thrust of rigid blade into soft flesh.

  It hadn’t been nearly as satisfying to back up and run him over again for good measure.

  In retrospect that wasn’t a good move. If the police take a good look at the tire tracks, they might figure out that it wasn’t an accident.

  Relax. It’s still not going to lead anyone to you.

  Red pockets the rental car key alongside the knife and lighter, grabs the McDonald’s bag, and gets out of the car.

  Oh.

  Oh, no.

  That’s why the toll-taker was concerned. The whole front end is dented. There are smears of blood in the crumpled metal.

  It’s okay. He probably thought you hit a deer.

  Shaken, Red bolts for the Pan Am arrivals terminal and finds a line of yellow cabs waiting.

  “Where to?” the ebony-skinned driver, wearing a dashiki and woven Muslim prayer kufi, asks in accented English. The bulletproof safety partition between the seats is open.

  “Manhattan. Corner of Ninth Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street.”

  “No luggage?”

  “Lost.”

  “That’s too bad.” He sets the meter and steers away from the curb. “Hope the trip was worth it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Timbuktu.”

  The driver glances over his shoulder in surprise. “I am from Mali! The capitol city, Bamako. It is only one thousand kilometers away from Timbuktu!”

  What are the odds? What are the freaking odds?

  Pretty damned high, perhaps, given the African garb and accent.

  You should have been paying attention. You shouldn’t just blurt things without thinking. If the cops ever come looking for you, questioning cab drivers . . . and toll attendants . . .

  “Before I come to America last year, I fight there, in the Christmas War on the Agacher Strip, not far from Timbuktu. You were there last week when Sankara was assassinated in Burkina Faso coup d’etat, yes?”

  What the hell is he talking about?

  “No.”

  �
��No?”

  “No.”

  Blessed silence for a few moments. Then, “I miss Bamako so very much. You flew from there?”

  “No.”

  “Then how you—”

  “I need to rest. I’ve been up for days.”

  Red pulls the safety partition closed, cutting off the driver’s disappointed apology.

  Believe me, it’s better for both of us if we cut this conversation short right now.

  Feigning sleep, Red thinks about Kevin Donaldson’s body. By now, they must have found it. They might even be canvassing the neighborhood to see if anyone saw what had happened.

  No one had. The suburban side streets had been deserted, just like in Boston. Not a witness in sight.

  Not a witness anywhere—until now.

  Timbuktu.

  That homesick chatty cabbie doesn’t know how lucky he is to be on the other side of that safety partition.

  Chatty cabbie . . .

  Jesus.

  “There she is,” the nurse tells Barnes, stopping in front of the glass-walled nursery. “Front and center.”

  Yes. Oh, yes.

  There she is.

  Wrapped in a delicate white blanket and crowned by a pink beanie, she’s lying in a transparent cradle like a tiny, perfect princess.

  Clutching the pink-banded Cuban his new pal Rob gave him, along with a hearty congratulatory handshake, Barnes edges closer on wobbly legs.

  “Isn’t she precious?” the nurse asks from far, far away.

  Mesmerized, Barnes nods. She is precious. The most precious thing he’s ever seen in his life.

  “Awwwww . . . here you go.” The nurse pulls something from her stork-printed apron pocket and hands it to him. “I always have tissues. There are a lot of happy tears around here.”

  Not mine.

  Barnes bows his head and wipes his eyes, struggling to hold back a heaving, sorrowful sob because now that he’s seen this child, he knows he’ll do anything within his power to protect her from all the horrible things in this world that might hurt her . . .

  That includes your old man.

  His tiny, perfect daughter will never even know he was here today. She won’t know who he is, or where he is, or that there was a moment—fleeting, crazy—when he saw her and thought maybe, just maybe . . .

  But no. No way.