It sounded so sweet and homey. Gradually, the memory returned to me. As the rain beat down outside and the trucker hummed softly to himself, I traded reminiscences with my mother. It was the first civil conversation we’d had in months. “The water was freezing,” I said, remembering how I had waded in the Little Pigeon River, where the broad stones were topped with snow.
“Remember taking the luge ride with your father?” she asked.
Of course. I sat in the front of the sled with his arms wrapped around me, and we sped down the mountain, wind rushing past. “And I got an Indian girl doll at a souvenir shop,” I said, remembering stiff braids, a tiny beaded headdress, eyes that blinked, and the smell of plastic.
The rain stopped. My mom popped the last bit of pecan log into her mouth, and we went out to the car. “I’ll drive,” I said. To my shock she let me, and I thought things might be different between us now. I thought that, a day or two after we got home, I could convince her to forget the nonsense about the sex addiction classes and let me go back to school. But as we pulled onto the freeway, she clutched the dashboard and sucked her breath through her teeth and said, “Watch where you’re going.” The spell was broken.
We didn’t speak for the rest of the ride, and she didn’t forget her reasons for bringing me home. As it turned out, I would spend the next several months sitting in a cramped room with a creepy Christian counselor named Sam Bungo and a dozen sex addicts. In my mother’s defense, she could not have foreseen that my sexual education would begin in earnest in Sam Bungo’s class, that the students would get together on weekends in parked cars and dingy motel rooms. In truth, my sex drive up to that point had been average, nothing special. Then, suddenly, I was spending time with these people who had sex on the brain round the clock. I was like a weekend poker player forced to hang out at a high-stakes table in Vegas.
A few years after that conversation at Stuckey’s, Annabel used her spring break vacation to visit me in San Francisco. One afternoon, I mentioned the trip to Gatlinburg.
“Where was I?” Annabel asked.
“What do you mean? You were there.”
“I’ve never been to Gatlinburg.”
“That’s impossible. We wouldn’t have taken a family vacation without you.”
“I’m calling Mom,” she said. “I swear you’re making this up.”
She dialed Mom’s number and put her on speakerphone. Annabel didn’t let on to the fact that she was with me.
“Where was I when you took the trip to Gatlinburg?” Annabel asked.
“What trip?”
“Abby says that when she was ten, we all went on vacation. But I’m sure I’ve never been there.”
There was a long pause. Then my mother said, “Oh, that. She brought that up? Listen, honey, how’s school?”
“School’s fine. You’re changing the subject.”
“That was years ago. I don’t remember.”
“Mom. Why didn’t I go?”
I could hear my mother eating on the other end of the line. It sounded like popcorn. She had always been bone thin, but every time I talked to her on the phone, she was eating. We didn’t know then that the cancer had already taken root, a little cluster of angry cells multiplying beneath the skin.
Mom took a drink of something and chewed on the ice. “Can you keep a secret?”
Annabel looked at me and grinned. I turned up the volume on the speakerphone. “Sure.”
“We never went to Gatlinburg.”
“But Abby said—”
“I know. Swear you won’t tell her, but I made it up.”
“Why the hell would you do that?” Annabel asked.
“You may not remember this, but your sister was a very difficult teenager. She thought I was Mommie Dearest or something. I wanted her to have at least one good memory of childhood.”
“So you lied?”
“You make it sound so sinister. I just wanted her to have something happy to look back on, especially after the mess with that child molester, Raul.”
That’s when I chimed in. “It’s Ramon, and he wasn’t a child molester. He was my boyfriend.”
“What are you doing there?” Mom said. “You tricked me.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” I argued. “I remember the caboose restaurant and the Little Pigeon River and the chairlift.”
“You must be thinking of your Girls in Action trip.” It was just like her to be so nonchalant after getting caught red-handed in a lie.
“That’s impossible. I couldn’t have remembered everything wrong.”
“Well, we never went, and that’s the truth. But you have to admit it was a good story.”
Later, I took Annabel for drinks at Sadie’s. She was perfectly at ease, ordering a vodka martini with a twist like a seasoned barfly and making eyes with some guy in leather pants. “It’s pretty funny when you think about it,” she said. “I wonder what else she told us that wasn’t true.”
That night, I couldn’t sleep. Annabel had gone to a party with the guy in leather pants, and I was alone in my studio in the Mission, the noise of motorcycles and rap music throbbing beneath my window. I lay awake staring at the ceiling for a long time, recalling other moments that were part of my version of my life, things I remembered with great clarity: riding a green bicycle through a new subdivision where all the homes were unoccupied, picking pecans with Annabel on our grandparents’ land in rural Alabama, steering the boat while my father coached me on a family outing to Petit Bois Island. I wondered how much of it was true. I knew I should take my mother’s deception in stride, should just let it be a funny story I’d tell to prove how off-kilter my family was, but instead, I felt tricked. I couldn’t trust my mother; worse, I couldn’t trust my own memory.
Maybe that’s one reason I’m drawn to the medium of photography. Unless a photo has been doctored, if something appears in a photo, it was really there. It’s a version of history you can trust, even if it’s just history as seen through one person’s eyes. Despite the inevitable element of distortion, despite the difference between what the eye sees and what the camera records, a photograph is still evidence, a historical record, a frozen moment whose physical veracity is more accurate than memory.
Even photographs, however, are prone to human error. Again and again, I look at the photographs from that day on Ocean Beach. The last few frames, taken by the young couple in the parking lot about forty-five minutes after Emma disappeared, reveal nothing. When I handed them the camera, I failed to tell them about one of the Holga’s quirky features. Whereas most cameras are designed to prevent multiple exposures, the Holga allows you to click the shutter release button as many times as you want without advancing the film. The van does not appear in the photographs, nor does the orange Chevelle, the postal truck, the motorcycle. Instead there are the foggy outlines of cars and blurred faces of strangers, layered one atop the other. In every picture, there is also a finger in the frame, a strand of someone’s hair.
18
HERE IS one piece of the truth, one thing I know: there was a yellow Volkswagen van, gone to rust in places. In the windows hung gauzy blue curtains, pulled to one side. A woman was looking through the window, her face deeply tanned, her blonde hair cut short. She waved at Emma. Emma waved back. Something in the woman’s gesture—a tilt of her head, the lifting of her chin as she smiled—struck me as familiar. I felt I had seen her somewhere before.
We were in the parking lot above the beach. It was cold. Waves thundered onto shore. The beach was nearly empty—just a few joggers, people with dogs, the resident homeless, and a couple of tourists in bright orange sweatshirts boasting I Survived Alcatraz. Emma was holding my hand and I was feeling extraordinarily well, as if life had, at the age of thirty-two, finally begun. I loved this cold, this salty smell, the foggy gray of a summer morning. I loved this child.
The driver’s side door of the van was open. A man was standing there, wearing a navy blue wet suit peeled down to the waist. On his hair
less chest was a tattoo of a breaking wave; the wave curled over his right nipple. He was waxing a longboard, which was propped against the van beside him. The board was a faded shade of red with some sort of symbol at the center. The surfer’s biceps flexed as he moved the wax in slow circles over the board. He was maddeningly good-looking, even though he clearly could use a bath. His tan was deep and golden, his blond hair badly in need of combing.
“Hello, ladies,” he said. When he smiled, three dimples showed—one on each cheek, one below his left eye.
“Hi,” I said.
He winked at Emma, and she looked to me for direction; she knew, after all, not to be friendly with strange men. I squeezed her hand.
“Hey,” she said to him, flashing that Emma smile, the right side of her mouth raised slightly higher than the left. And then we were out of the parking lot and on the beach. This entire exchange took twenty seconds at the most.
I told these things to Detective Sherburne at the police station the night of Emma’s disappearance. I left out the fact that, as Emma and I were walking down the steps to the beach, I imagined how the surfer’s hair would smell up close, like salt and sun.
Sherburne nodded, arms folded across his narrow chest. Occasionally he unfolded his arms and scratched something on a yellow pad.
“Difficult to find a vehicle with no license plate,” he said.
“It was yellow. Rusty. Blue curtains in the windows. There was something odd about this couple, I can’t put my finger on it. And when I got back to the parking lot after Emma went missing, the van was gone.”
“The Chevelle?”
“Gone. And the postal worker who’d been sitting there, he was gone, too. So was the motorcycle.”
Repeating it for the umpteenth time, I began to question my own narrative—the sequence of events, the minute details. What if, through repetition, my story had been slightly altered, the order changing, one detail replaced by another? Would this be reason enough for the police to discount it entirely? I’d seen this happen before. The parents say one thing one day, something slightly different another, and suddenly the investigation grinds to a halt. All energy is focused on the family, while other leads go untended. I knew the search for Emma would depend on memory, an imprecise art. Her life depended on my getting every detail right, every time.
Sherburne nodded to a photo of Emma that was tacked to a bulletin board. “Listen, she’s a cute kid. People are friendly to cute kids. That doesn’t mean they’re kidnappers.”
The board covered half of one wall and featured hundreds of faces of children captured in some casual moment—school photos, picnics, playgrounds. The far right side of the board was reserved for the newer cases, those children who had disappeared within the last six months. Each photo had a date scrawled beneath it in thick black ink. Emma’s picture was at the top of this section. I was startled to realize that in this sea of faces, hers did not stand out; on the board she looked like just another victim, another missing child.
The far left was reserved for successes—each picture had the word FOUND stamped across it in red block letters. There were also thankful notes from parents, newspaper clippings with headlines like San Rafael Girl Found. But most of the faces took up the big middle space—all of the children who had disappeared in California in the last five years whose cases had not been solved. Some of the photos were accompanied by age progression sketches—the hair slightly longer or shorter, the temples broader, the lips thinner. In these sketches, the eyes all had a haunted, waiting look. I wondered where the pictures went after five years had passed. I imagined a huge filing cabinet in some basement room, thousands of photos fading in manila folders, never to be viewed again.
19
DAY TWENTY-SIX. The meeting is held in a classroom at City College of San Francisco. I arrive twenty minutes early. To kill time, I walk the loop road that circles the campus. The college is sadly urban—a jumble of angular buildings with too few windows, arranged with no apparent concern for aesthetics. On the front lawn, a cement statue of some Catholic saint extends its hands in blessing to Phelan Avenue.
At seven forty-five p.m., I stand at the entrance to Cloud Hall, willing myself to go in. The air inside is damp and stale. The floors are unadorned cement, the walls institutional green. I climb the stairs to the third floor and locate room 316, where a man is arranging desks in a circle. He smiles and extends his hand. “David.”
“Abby.”
“How long has it been?”
“Three weeks, five days. You?”
“Seven years.”
I do the math. In seven years, Emma will be thirteen, a teenager. She’ll be old enough to get her period, meet boys, go to movies with friends. I can’t imagine seven years of absence. I can’t imagine how this man manages to go on.
“Girl or boy?” he asks.
“A little girl. She’s six. What about you?”
“Jonathan would be twelve. What’s your little girl’s name?”
“Emma.”
He nods. “Of course. I thought you looked familiar. I’ve been following the story.”
I should tell David that I’m not just here for moral support, to bare my soul and cry on somebody’s shoulder. What I’m hoping to find is of a more practical nature. I want someone who’s been there to tell me how to continue the search. I want to know what mistakes to avoid, what these people would have done differently.
David goes over to a table in the corner, scoops coffee from a can into a cone filter. He hands me the coffeepot. “Mind filling this up at the water fountain?”
My steps echo in the long hallway. It’s Wednesday evening and the classrooms are mostly empty. The walls are covered with announcements for English tutors and tae kwon do classes. The water fountain is at the far end of the hall; a piece of chewing gum is stuck to the rim. I’m reminded of an afternoon at the zoo almost a year ago, Jake and Emma and I walking the path beside the tiger cage. The tiger was sunning on a rock. He looked at us and blinked. “I’m thirsty,” Emma said. There was a water fountain a few feet ahead. “Race you to it,” I said. I let her beat me, then lifted her so she could drink. She was wearing a sleeveless top, and the skin under her arms was soft and damp.
I had only met Jake a couple of weeks before, and things were moving so quickly. Holding Emma up to the fountain, I understood that if I was going to fall in love with Jake, I must also fall in love with her. Jake didn’t come unencumbered; he was a package deal. I marveled at the ease with which she had trusted me, how she held out her arms and waited for me to lift her. I was amazed by the unexpected completeness of this child—how she craned her pale neck to drink from the small trickle of water, how she kicked her legs in the air when she was finished to let me know it was time to put her down. I had never really thought of children as people, just as mysterious and needy creatures on their way to something greater. But standing there, holding Emma, I saw a girl who was already forming her own personality, her own ways of looking at and being in the world. I set her down. She ran back to her father. He lifted her in his arms and swung her in a circle. She let out a howl of laughter. Something kicked in my gut—fear, excitement, joy. My God, I thought, I’m falling for them.
Back in the classroom, I pour water into the coffeemaker and flip the switch. The water begins to gurgle. “How do you manage?” I ask. “How do you keep looking?”
“I don’t. Not anymore. We found Jonathan back in October. He was identified through dental records. Buried on a garlic farm in Gilroy.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I keep coming to these meetings because I need to be around people who know what it’s like. When your child is taken, it feels like you’re living in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language. You open your mouth to say something, and you get the impression that no one understands. The people you knew before—parents of your children’s friends, especially—avoid you. You’re a walking reminder of their worst fear. It seems that everyone you me
et can tell that you’re not like them.”
“Maybe we have a certain look,” I say. “Maybe we give off some scent of tragedy.”
“Cream, sugar?” David asks.
“No thanks.”
He hands me a cup of black coffee, then sits down in a wooden desk. I sit across from him in the circle. It feels like high school again—desks too small, the room permanently out of date, the smell of old erasers.
“Funny,” I say. “I’ve taken coffee with cream and sugar all my life. When Emma disappeared, I started taking it black.”
“That’s normal. After Jonathan’s kidnapping, I couldn’t remember to wear a tie to work. My socks never matched. I forgot to trim my fingernails and water the plants and put gas in the car. All the details of daily life become irrelevant.”
He sips his coffee. I look at the clock. It’s five minutes before the meeting is scheduled to begin. How far can she go in five minutes?
“Your wife. Does she ever come to the meetings?”
“We split up two years after Jonathan disappeared.” David spreads his hands out on the desk, stares at them, and folds them into fists. “Everyone in this group is either divorced or separated. Jane and I were the perfect couple, or so we thought. After Jonathan was gone, there was too much pain. We were a constant reminder to each other of what we’d lost. And there’s always the blame.”
“How did it happen?” I ask, finding myself drawn to his story the way others must be drawn to Emma’s.
“Jane was in Minnesota visiting her mother, and I’d taken Jonathan to the Russian River for Father’s Day weekend. We were on a canoe trip with several other fathers and their sons. While I was setting up our tent, I gave Jonathan permission to go look for frogs with a couple of older boys. The kids weren’t gone more than ten, twelve minutes. I was putting in the last stake when the two other boys came running out of the woods, panicked. The moment I saw them, I knew something terrible had happened. They’d been approached by a man with a gun. The man, for some reason, chose my boy.”
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