Emma, Jake, and I came here together once, on a Saturday, for a fly-fishing lesson. It’s part of what makes Jake such a good father—his insistence that Emma constantly experience new things. That day the three huge cement pools were glassy, lit by sun streaming through the conifers. Tonight they are shrouded in mist. I remember how Emma held my hand tightly that day, standing several feet from the pools, and asked, “Is it deep?”
My voice sounds strange in the quiet of this place. I don’t tell Annabel about the large trapdoor at the west end of the pond, how I tried the heavy cover and was surprised to find it unlocked, how I lifted it, aimed my flashlight into the darkness, and cautiously made my way down the damp steps. I don’t tell her that as I lay awake last night, I thought of the ponds, and the trapdoor, and I imagined Emma crouched down below, shivering in the dark, captive to some maniac.
I called her name as I made my way down the steps. My own voice echoed back. I reached bottom, found nothing.
Now I hold in my hand a tiny wooden fly, painted an iridescent purple, with white feathers and strangely luminescent fur. Feeling its faint weight in my palm, I peer into the darkness of the ponds. Would it be possible to conceal a body there?
“I want you to walk back to your car right this minute,” Annabel says. “I’m not letting you off the phone until I know you’re safe.”
I walk past the stone lodge, through the paths of lavender and rosemary. In the distance, the copper dome of the new de Young Museum rises above the tree line, glittering strangely in the moonlight. I get in my car and pull the door shut.
“Is it locked?” Annabel asks.
“You sound like Mom.”
She sighs. “God, you scare me sometimes.”
I start the car and head toward home. I used to love driving through the park at night. In the dark, it seemed less like an urban oasis than some jungle at the edge of the world. Now, it just looks dangerous, like some hideout for misfits and murderers.
“Hey,” Annabel says, “I’ve been wondering. Do you remember Sarah Callahan?”
“Of course. I’d completely forgotten. Then, when all of this happened, she immediately came to mind.”
“I think about her all the time,” Annabel says. “Did I ever mention she used to let me cheat off her paper during math tests? She only did it because she wanted so desperately to be friends. Just a couple of weeks before she disappeared, she invited me to go to a movie to celebrate her birthday. I made up some excuse to get out of it.”
Although I had rarely spoken to Sarah, I remembered her face. We went to a small private girls’ school where everyone knew everyone else. Cliques were clearly defined, and one stuck to one’s own group religiously. What set Sarah apart was that she had no group. As far as I know, she had no one.
“She used to bring this red Tupperware lunch box to school,” Annabel says. “It had smaller pieces of Tupperware inside it. Every day she’d spread the little boxes out on the ground—her sandwich, her chips, her cookies—and take a bite from each item, one after the other, until everything was gone. She wouldn’t have anything to drink until she’d eaten every last crumb.”
One Tuesday toward the beginning of the spring semester, the headmaster came into our classroom and asked if anyone had seen or talked to Sarah on the previous day. No one answered. “Think,” the headmaster said. Still, no answer. “Okay,” he said somberly. “Carry on.”
That afternoon, he went to every classroom and asked the same question, receiving the same blank response. By the end of the day, news had circulated that Mr. and Mrs. Callahan had last seen Sarah early Monday morning, when they both left for work. On Monday night, the Callahans came home late from a dinner party, and Sarah wasn’t there.
The bus driver reported that Sarah hadn’t been at the bus stop on Monday morning. On Tuesday afternoon, two policemen showed up at school, along with Sarah’s parents, and came around asking questions. I don’t remember much about Sarah’s parents, only that her father seemed distracted and her mother was wearing a thick blue scarf, even though it was hot out. All the girls had different theories. Maybe Sarah had been kidnapped by a serial killer. Maybe she had run off with an older guy, someone in his twenties, who was her lover. Maybe she was on a bus bound for New York City, where she would fall into a life of prostitution or become a Broadway star. Maybe her parents knew something they weren’t saying.
In the days following her disappearance, Sarah enjoyed a newfound celebrity. A few weeks later, though, the novelty had worn off. The teachers stopped mentioning her, and the students, over time, pretty much forgot. In April, her body was discovered in a stand of oak trees at Blakeley State Park. The cord that had been used to strangle her was still looped around her throat, and she was naked below the waist. The man who killed her, having left behind telling clues, was quickly arrested. When she was found, not a single teacher at the school said anything about it; perhaps they thought it was better to let her death pass unmentioned. It was as if she had never existed.
“I’ve always wondered if there was something I could have done for her,” Annabel says now. “I remember this policeman on TV a couple of days after she disappeared. He said that with every passing day, the chance of finding her alive dropped drastically. By the time a month had passed, it was as if the police had given up. But when they arrested the guy who did it, he revealed he had kept her alive for seven weeks. We all should have been out there looking.”
Had Sarah been popular, it’s likely the school would have banded together to find her. We would have met at the Delchamps parking lot, with several concerned parents acting as chaperones, and we would have roamed the city in groups, handing out flyers, knocking on doors. We would have held candlelight vigils. We would have cried for her. Instead, Sarah passed quickly from our collective memory, into an even deeper obscurity than when she was among us.
“Why are you telling me this?” I ask.
“Because you can’t make the same mistake we made with Sarah.”
“The police keep pushing their theory that she drowned. Even Jake is beginning to give it some credence.”
“You have to trust your instinct, to hell with what everyone says.”
There’s a child’s voice in the room on the other end of the line. “Alex honey,” Annabel says, “what are you doing up?”
“Must be late there,” I say.
“Say good night to Aunt Abby.”
Alex’s sleepy voice comes on the line. “Night, Abby.”
“Good night.”
Then, as if he’s just remembered something, he says, “When can I meet Emma?”
“Soon,” I say, swallowing hard.
Annabel comes back on the line.
“You haven’t told them?” I say.
“I keep thinking I won’t have to,” she says. “I keep thinking that if I just wait long enough, all of this will be over.”
“Me too.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” she says.
16
ON THE afternoon of the twenty-third day, I walk into Jake’s house unannounced. The house is strangely quiet, except for a teakettle whistling on the stove. I go into the kitchen and turn off the burner.
“Jake?”
No answer.
I walk upstairs. I’m standing in the hallway when I hear a voice, just barely, not a voice in conversation but rather a faint, monotonous chant. I look through the open door into the dimness of Jake’s bedroom. He is kneeling by the bed, his back to me, his elbows moving slightly. The floor creaks under my feet and he turns, startled. His face is wet. He is holding a rosary.
“Oh,” I say. “Excuse me.”
He nods and holds my eyes for a moment, then turns his head and resumes his incantation. I shut the door and stand in the hallway, my back to the wall, startled by the formality of the moment. As long as I’ve known Jake, he has not been a religious man. He grew up Catholic but abandoned the church in his teens when he took a serious interest in philosophy.
I knew exactly what my mother wanted: for me to step away from the pew and walk the long aisle down to the front of the church. She wanted me to take the pastor’s hand, to weep as he put his arm around me and led me to salvation. If I could do that, if I could stand before the congregation and make my profession of faith, she would love me completely. But as much as I desired to hear God’s call, I couldn’t. So I stood there, week after week, year after year, hearing the soft voices of the choir, smelling my mother’s perfume, feeling her hand in the small of my back; yet I did not go. I waited for the Holy Spirit to whisper in my ear, but the longer I went without hearing it, the more certain I became that I never would.
Now, standing outside Jake’s bedroom while he prays and weeps at the foot of the bed where we have made love so often, I feel that old familiar longing, a desire to be touched in some deep place by the mysterious hand of God. No, it is not God I desire so much as the communion faith might bring me—communion not with a higher power, but with the man I love.
Throughout childhood, my inability to hear God’s voice made me separate from my parents; it set between us some high wall that was impossible to scale. Even Annabel had a moment in her youth, before rebelliousness set in, when she walked to the front of the church, held the preacher’s hand, wept and prayed, and was declared saved. No matter what rifts grew between her and my parents—and there were many—I knew they would always think of her as the daughter who had been saved, the daughter for whom there was hope, while I would forever be some alien creature they could not understand.
The next day, Jake persuades me to go to mass. It’s is the last place I want to be, but I don’t have the right to refuse him anything now.
In a cavernous church a few blocks from Ocean Beach, we kneel and stand, kneel and stand, while a man in long strange garb speaks softly. During Communion, Jake touches my elbow, urging me to go. I follow him into the aisle and wait my turn in line. Jake kneels before the priest, makes the sign of the cross, and takes the wafer onto his tongue. The church is cold, the organ is loud. I look at Jake, the pale skin of his bent neck, the sweet dark fringe of hair, and realize I no longer know him.
In turn I kneel, make the cross self-consciously, open my mouth to a stranger’s hand, and taste the salt of the man’s finger. The wafer is dry and bland, the carpet rough beneath my knees. Looking up into the expressionless eyes of the priest, I feel as if I am committing some grave offense. I follow Jake to another priest, who wipes the rim of a heavy silver cup and holds it to my lips. The organ drones on.
Afterward, in the car, Jake says, “I feel it all coming back.”
“It?”
“Faith.”
“Are you sure you’re not just reaching for something that will make things easier?”
“Maybe. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
We come to a red light. A woman crosses in front of us, three children following at her heels. One of the children, a little girl, looks up at us and grins. For a moment, the pale hair turns black, the face becomes familiar, and I am smiling not at a stranger’s child but at Emma. In a fraction of a second, the illusion ends.
“You must have felt something,” Jake says, looking at me hopefully.
“No.”
“It doesn’t happen overnight. Come to mass again next week.”
“It’s a waste of time.”
“It’s only an hour.”
The light changes, we creep forward. I open the glove compartment, close it, just for something to do. “I can’t pretend to believe in something that means nothing to me.”
Jake puts the blinker on and turns left onto Lawton. “We can’t get through this alone.”
“We’re not alone,” I say. “We have each other. What happened to your healthy agnosticism? What happened to philosophy?”
He sighs. “I admit it’s a little weird. Don’t think I haven’t had huge doubts. But I have to figure out a way for this to make sense.”
“Maybe there isn’t a way to make sense of it. The fact is, there are horrible people in the world, one of them has Emma, and it’s up to us to find her.”
He pulls into the driveway. The garage door opens, then rattles shut behind us. As we sit in the darkness of the garage, Jake puts his hands in his lap and stares at the ceiling. “She’s very small. One wave could have done it. That would explain why you didn’t see anyone on the beach, why you didn’t hear anything.”
“There are other explanations.”
“But the police think—”
“I don’t care what the police think.” I fight to control my voice. “She’s not their daughter.”
“She’s not your daughter either.” He opens the car door, gets out, and goes into the house.
I sit for half an hour, maybe more, smelling the spent oil, the musty scent of newspapers stacked in the recycling bin. In my head, seconds are ticking by, the circle of possibility is widening, as some imagined car takes her farther and farther away from us.
Later, in bed, Jake’s fidgeting wakes me. When I put my arm around him, I realize he’s drenched in sweat. I pull the sheet down, baring his shoulders. He wakes up.
“You’re soaked,” I say.
He blinks and runs his hands through his hair. For a moment he looks at me, I swear, as if he doesn’t know me. “I can’t get comfortable,” he says. “I’m going to sleep downstairs.”
“If anyone’s sleeping on the sofa, it’s me.”
“No, no. I will. Just for tonight. Go back to sleep.”
He hugs his pillow to his chest, takes a blanket from the closet, and goes downstairs. I can hear him turning on the lamp, settling on the sofa. Then the muted sounds of the television.
When I go downstairs at six in the morning, he’s already gone. I know he’s wandering the streets as he does every morning. Glancing in the windows of houses and apartments and parked cars, searching. Soon, I will go off in another direction and do the same.
17
NEAR THE end of my first semester at the University of Tennessee, my mother told me a story. We were in the Chevy Impala, pulling a U-Haul packed with books, clothes, everything I had so hopefully carried with me into my new life at the university. My mother had arrived at my apartment the day before and announced she was taking me out of school until the following fall. There was a huge blowup, I refused to go, but she reminded me that I had no money and no job, no way to pay the rent.
What happened was this: she had come across a stash of photographs my boyfriend Ramon had taken of me the previous year. When the photographs were taken, I was sixteen, Ramon was twenty-seven, and the photos were a bold testament to the things we did together. After a long talk with the youth minister at their church, my parents concluded that I suffered from an abnormal sex drive. “We’ve enrolled you in a group,” she said that day when she showed up at my apartment.
“What kind of group?”
“A therapy group for sex addicts.”
“Sex addicts?” I asked, incredulous.
“Your father and I saw the photos, Abby. Those things just aren’t normal.”
“How could you look at those? They were private.”
I was furious. I didn’t want any part of the life she was taking me back to. By that time, Ramon was already gone—killed in a motorcycle accident just a few months before. I could not stand the thought of my parents picking through the remnants of our life together, examining them like some kind of sordid evidence.
We were on the road by noon the next day. We drove
in and out of a storm for several hours, one of those erratic thunderstorms so common in the Deep South. One minute we’d be slogging through a downpour, the windshield wipers on full blast, the road in front of us blurred and dangerous, and the next minute we would emerge into sunlight, onto dry road surrounded by endless miles of green. She kept talking, while I stared out at the vast emptiness rolling by and pretended not to hear.
Near Linden, Alabama, the rain came down so hard our windshield wipers were useless, so my mother inched off the highway and pulled into the parking lot of Stuckey’s. Inside, we bought two coffees and my mother’s all-time favorite snack, the Stuckey’s pecan log. There was no one else in the place except the woman behind the counter and a rough-looking truck driver with three gold crosses in each ear. My mother took the side of the booth facing the trucker, so he couldn’t get a look at me.
The coffee was burnt and there was no cream, just little packets of nondairy creamer so old it had solidified. As we sat there, damp and exhausted, waiting for the storm to clear, I tried to plan a route of escape. When I left for school in August, I had felt that good things were finally happening. Then, when Ramon died in September, it seemed as though every link to my previous life, with the exception of Annabel, had been severed. Sitting in Stuckey’s with my mother, I had the despairing sense of traveling backward in time.
“Do you remember when we went to Gatlinburg?” my mother said, peeling the wrapper off her pecan log.
“No, when was that?”
“You were ten.”
I had been to Gatlinburg once with Girls in Action, but I didn’t remember going with the family. My mother was smiling, though, and the memory seemed to soften her, so I didn’t admit that I had no recollection.
“We had the best time,” she said. “We drove through the night, with you girls sleeping in the back seat, and we got to Gatlinburg early in the morning, remember? Our hotel was beside the Little Pigeon River. We took a chairlift to the top of the mountain and had our photo taken at one of those old-fashioned portrait studios. Then we skied down and had hot chocolate in an old caboose that had been converted into a restaurant. The waiter gave you and Annabel free slices of apple cake.”
The Year of Fog Page 7
