“What happens now?” I ask.
“I’ll give these to Detective Sherburne, and he’ll make copies for his FBI liaison, who will distribute them to FBI offices all over the country. You’ll get copies, too, of course.”
That night at my place, unable to sleep, I take a snapshot of Emma from the photo album, sit down on the sofa, and attempt to draw her. I start with the shape of the face—wide and rounded—then move on to the big eyes with their long dark lashes, the upturned nose, the small mouth. I’m working on one of her errant eyebrows when I stop cold, unable to complete another stroke. At two a.m. I take four sleeping pills. When I wake the next morning on the sofa, my legs are cramped, and my head feels swollen and heavy. The sketch lies in my lap, the poorly drawn features so blurred it’s impossible to tell whether the sketch is of a boy or of a girl. It looks nothing at all like Emma. I wonder how long it would take for my memory of her face to fade, how long before I could look at a badly done sketch and not see the inaccuracies.
22
TELL ME something I don’t know,” I once said to Jake. We had been dating for three months. I was in love, but hadn’t yet told him. We were having dinner at Foreign Cinema, sitting outside under the big white canopy, a heat lamp humming over our table. We had started the evening with oysters on the half shell, and were well into a bottle of chardonnay. Last Tango in Paris was playing on the rear wall of the restaurant, a young, confident Marlon Brando dancing in a crowded bar. Emma was at home with the babysitter.
“Long before the Giants, there were the San Francisco Seals,” Jake said. “For a single season in 1914, they played at Ewing Field, west of Masonic. The place was so foggy that, during one game, a mascot had to be sent to the outfield to tell Elmer Zachar, a player for the Oakland Commuters, that the inning was over.”
“Interesting,” I said. “But I meant something about yourself.”
“That’s more difficult.”
“Think.”
“Okay, I was the runner-up in the National Rubik’s Cube Championship, 1984.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“Why haven’t you mentioned this before?”
“What did you expect? Hi, my name is Jake, and twenty years ago I was good with a Rubik’s Cube?”
“If I were you, I’d slip it into conversation every time I got the chance.”
“The cube just requires patience, and a system. Do you know how many possible combinations it has?” Jake wrote a number on his napkin: 43,252,003,274,489,856,000. The digits got smaller at the edge of the napkin where he was running out of space.
“How do you even say that number?”
“Beats me.”
“Then how do you remember it?”
“I don’t remember it as a whole. I remember it by numerical units, each of which has some meaningful association. For example, 43 is the age my father was when he died, 252 is the number of career home runs for Bobby Murcer, and so on.”
“I’ve never solved a Rubik’s Cube. Ever.”
“If I locked you in a room with just a Rubik’s Cube and food and water, you couldn’t help but solve it eventually. It’s simply a matter of mathematic probabilities.”
“The year you were runner-up, how long did it take you?”
“Twenty-six point nine seconds. The world record now is 13.22 seconds. Finnish kid named Anssi Vanhala.” He speared a piece of squid and offered it across the table.
“If you’re so good with math, figure this one out. How many minutes do you think it will take for us to pay the bill and get back to your place?”
“This is only a rough estimate, but I’d say about thirty-four. Plus five to pay the babysitter and get her out the door.” He raised his hand to signal the waiter.
The more I got to know Jake, the more sense it made that he’d been so good at the Rubik’s Cube. He approaches everything in his life as a task that will ultimately be completed, as long as he follows through. Everything is methodical and driven by logic. Maybe his belief that the right amount of persistence and planning will allow him to solve any problem accounts for his confidence. This time, though, his plan is falling apart. Five weeks, twenty thousand flyers, a couple dozen radio interviews, 247 volunteers, two “person of interest” sketches—and still, we are no closer to Emma. Lisbeth has yet to be found, and Jake has all but lost hope that Emma might be with her.
Last night, I went to Jake’s house with my bag packed to stay over. I had just been to Channel 4 with the sketches of the couple from the van, but the producer for the six o’clock news said the program was full. It was my third attempt to get them to run the sketches, to no avail. Though she didn’t say it, I think the producer believes that Emma is old news.
“What’s that?” Jake said, eyeing the bag.
“I haven’t spent the night in a while. I thought—”
“Tonight’s not a good time.”
“There’s not going to be a good time.” I took off my coat and laid it across a chair. “I don’t want to lose you, too,” I said. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew they were the wrong words. I suddenly felt ashamed of the bag, ashamed I’d thought that I could make him forget, for a few minutes at least, how I’d wrecked his life.
“I’m going out,” he said.
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come over to my place later?”
He didn’t say anything, just pulled on a jacket and opened the door.
“Talk to me. I need to know what you’re feeling.”
He was standing in the open door, one foot inside the house, one foot on the porch. “I’m feeling like my life is over,” he said, his back to me. “I’m feeling like I’ve done everything I know to do, and none of it has worked. I’m feeling like, whatever my baby is going through—if she’s even still alive—I can’t do a goddamn thing to help her.”
He turned to face me. “When all of this first started, I couldn’t get one thought out of my head—the thought that when I found who did this, I was going to kill him. I vowed to make him pay. The rage helped keep me going. But now it’s been more than a month, and I don’t have any energy left for rage. I never should have left that weekend, and I never should have given you permission to take her to Ocean Beach. It was a goddamn stupid thing to do, for what? So I could go let some old buddy who’d gotten a divorce cry on my shoulder? And I keep making these crazy speculations, going back further and further in time, thinking of ways it could have been avoided. There was a moment when I even blamed the whole thing on Sean, because he cheated on his wife, which led to her leaving him, which led to my being gone that day. But I’m the one who introduced them in the first place, twenty years ago. It’s this endless cycle of thinking what I could have done differently, and it all comes down to one thing: I should never have left town.”
“You couldn’t have known. No one could anticipate something like this.”
He moved so that his face was in the lamplight, and I realized he had a tan. A very dark tan, the kind construction workers get. I could see the line at the neck of his shirt where the tan ended, giving way to his natural skin color, which was pallid in comparison. There was a split second of disconnect when I couldn’t figure it out, this healthy brown tan that somehow made him look younger, despite the strain and lack of sleep. Then I realized it was because he’d been spending so much time outside, wandering up and down the streets for hours at a shot, searching.
“No,” he said, “but I should have been there. So tell me what I’m supposed to do. Do I kill myself? Or do I keep living like this for the next fifty years, hating myself, envying every parent I see on the street with their kids? Do you know what goes through my mind when I see girls Emma’s age? I think, I wish it had been her instead of Emma. I hate myself so much for thinking it, it makes me physically ill, but I can’t help it. I wish it was any other kid.”
I flinched as his voice rose, felt something deep in my gut tightening.
The Jake I used to know would have never talked this way. But the Jake I used to know was gone, and this terrible transformation was my fault.
“You look horrified,” he said, “and you should. The kids at school, friends’ kids whom I’ve watched grow up. I go to church and pray, and even while I’m praying my mind is engaged in these calculations, wishing it was any other kid, any ten or twenty kids, instead of Emma. What kind of person does that make me?”
He looked at me for a few seconds, then turned and left, slamming the door behind him. The house was quiet and cold; a faint odor of garbage emanated from the kitchen. I pulled the curtain aside and watched him drive away. I waited until his car had rounded the corner, then went up to Emma’s room. She and I used to play this game where we’d sit in her walk-in closet and pretend it was a spaceship. Together, we came up with an elaborate set of rules for the ship: as soon as we closed the door behind us, time came to a standstill; we ceased to age, and we no longer needed food, water, or air. By closing our eyes, we were able to see into the future. In this way we solved mysteries and grew famous throughout the world. I went into the closet, shut the door, and tried our old trick. I closed my eyes and concentrated, imagining myself into a future when Emma would sit there with me. In this future she is the same age as she was on the day she disappeared. In this future she has not changed, nor has Jake. In this future things are just fine, and we are a normal family, leading ordinary lives.
23
DAY FORTY-TWO. It’s late at night and I’m online, answering e-mails at findemma.com, when someone knocks on the door.
For a moment, I allow myself to indulge in the fantasy that it might be Jake, coming to spend the night. But when I look through the peephole, it’s just Nell.
I open the door. She’s in her bathrobe, her hair wet. She smells like mint. “I know it’s late,” she says. “But I thought you might be interested in this article I just found on forensic hypnosis. Did you know that memories retrieved through hypnosis have in some cases been allowed in court?”
“Decaf?” I say.
She nods. “Thanks.”
While I’m pouring the coffee—hers black, mine with a touch of Bailey’s, a habit I’ve picked up in the last few weeks—she opens a file folder and pulls out a photocopied article with accompanying photographs. The male face in the first photo is familiar, but I can’t place it. Below it is the face of a young girl. She’s smiling, looking slightly to the right of the camera. Her hair is styled the same way I wore mine as a little girl in the late seventies—thick, layered bangs swept back from the face.
“Ted Bundy,” Nell says. “His conviction in the Kimberly Leach kidnap and murder”—she taps the girl’s picture with her fingernail—“was largely dependent on testimony provided by the only eyewitness, a man named Clarence Anderson. Anderson came forward five months after the abduction, but he couldn’t remember anything of note. The assistant DA requested that Anderson be put under hypnosis. Afterward, he identified both Bundy and the little girl. He even described their clothing. His testimony was the missing piece that made all the circumstantial evidence come together.”
From the file folder, she produces a business card. “No pressure,” she says, “but this gentleman is a friend of a friend. His office is in North Beach.”
The card is white, with a name, James Rudolph, printed in red block letters. Beneath the name is a single italicized word, hypnotherapist, followed by a phone number and e-mail address.
“I’m pretty much willing to try anything at this point,” I say.
“Why don’t you call him right now?”
I pick up the phone. “If you told me a couple of months ago that I’d be calling a hypnotist, I never would have believed you.” I dial the number, and a woman answers on the first ring. “Hello?”
“Oh,” I say, “maybe I have the wrong number.”
“You looking for Jimmy?” she asks in a thick Boston accent.
“Pardon?”
“Rudolph, Jimmy Rudolph.”
“Yes.”
“One minute.”
There’s some shuffling on the other end, and a man’s voice comes on the line. “Yes?”
“I was calling about the hypnosis.”
“Sure,” he says. “Sorry about the confusion. I’m out of the office today, had my calls forwarded. When are you looking to come in?”
“When are you available?”
“How does tomorrow sound?” he says. “One o’clock sharp?”
“Okay.”
“Wear something comfortable.” The line goes dead.
“Well?” Nell asks.
“I’m not so sure.”
She shrugs. “It’s worth a try, anyway. It’s well known that trauma can impede memories of a given event. Hypnosis is supposed to allow you to bypass your psychological defenses and tap into repressed material.”
She flips through the folder and produces a full-color photocopy of a painting by John William Waterhouse. Two men recline side by side, nearly identical save for their coloring. One is red-haired, pale, brightly lit, slumbering against the other man’s shoulder. The second is dark-haired, olive-skinned, shadowed, draped in a funereal cloth. One is accompanied by flutes, the other by a lyre.
“Hypnos,” she explains, “the Greek god of sleep, shown here with his brother Thanatos, god of death.”
Nell has plenty more to say on the subject of hypnotism—case histories and court precedents, odd ephemera, the two major theories of hypnosis currently in vogue. “Retrieval holds that all of a person’s experiences are stored in a sort of memory bank, and hypnosis helps you access them. Construction, on the other hand, posits that the past is continually remade in the interest of the present, and memories are constructed based on a number of factors.”
I marvel once again at Nell’s capacity for learning, her ability to absorb and process a vast amount of information about any given subject on any given day. I cannot help but wonder if her passion for information has something to do with her son’s death, if the constant consumption of facts is her attempt to fill a never-diminishing void. I imagine her grief as a black hole, never satisfied, that sucks up knowledge with alarming speed. It is the same ever-expanding black hole that has taken hold of my mind and heart in these long weeks of Emma’s absence. While Nell feeds hers with learning, I feed mine with this endless search.
The next afternoon, when I get home, she greets me at the door. “Well?” she asks.
“The guy was a quack. He had me sit in this armchair that looked like it had been rescued from the Salvation Army. The office reeked of cigar smoke. The session was about as relaxing as a trip to Home Depot. After we’d finished, he tried to sell me on some hypnosis seminar he’s conducting next month in Tahoe.”
“That’s unfortunate,” she says. “It seemed like a promising path to try.”
I don’t tell Jake about the hypnosis. Alternative psychology doesn’t fit into his worldview, and I imagine he’d see the whole thing as an absurd charade, a pointless grasping at straws. But the fact is I’ll grasp at anything now, take part in any charade that offers even the most infinitesimal promise. There is no other choice.
24
ONCE, WHEN we were children, Annabel and I saved our allowance for a month, then sent it to the Everlasting Toy Corporation. We had seen an ad in the back of Highlights for miniature sea horses, just $4.95 plus shipping and handling. For several weeks that summer, we sat on the front porch with Kool-Aid and a deck of Uno cards, waiting for the UPS truck to arrive.
But the sea horses did not come via UPS. They came, unceremoniously, in the mail, in a padded manila envelope. When we opened the package, I was disappointed to find that it did not say sea horses, but sea monkeys, and these monkeys weren’t even alive; they were just pale nuggets in a cellophane bag. The aquarium itself was a flimsy plastic number, ten inches tall and six inches wide. The kit came with a little packet of multicolored pebbles, which we scattered in the bottom of the aquarium. Ann
abel and I still had hope. We dropped the monkeys in and waited for something to happen.
Finally, a couple of hours later, one of the nuggets expanded, then began to wiggle and swim. We did not even bother to name it, for it was clear that this was not a sea horse, it was not even a sea monkey, it was just some kind of mutant shrimp. Within a week, all our shrimp were dead. Our mother dumped the grimy water into the toilet and said, “Well, girls, so much for Everlasting Toys.”
It wasn’t until several years later, on a trip to Marine World with Ramon, that I saw actual sea horses. “‘Hippocampus,’” he read, running his finger along the label. “‘From the Greek words for horse, hippos, and sea monster, campus.’” We watched two of them changing colors and performing an elaborate dance. The sign explained that most species of sea horses are monogamous. Each day during pregnancy, the male and female exchange a dance of greeting. After the dance, they separate for the rest of the day.
“Sexy,” Ramon said. The fish transformed before our eyes, their vibrant colors shifting as they moved side to side in graceful pirouettes.
The placard revealed that it is the male sea horse, not the female, who endures pregnancy, fertilizing the eggs in a brood pouch on his abdomen and carrying them to term. Ramon turned me around to face him and playfully pinned my body to the glass. “I’d do that for you,” he said, “if you’d marry me.”
“Ask me again in ten years.”
“By then, it will be too late.” He let me go. I could tell he was upset. He wanted the relationship to move faster, to go places I knew it never would. I knew he was too old for me, and that there were things I wanted to do with my life that didn’t involve him. I could not have imagined how little time we really had together. I could not have known that, in less than a year, he would be dead.
I’m flipping through one of Nell’s books on memory when a drawing catches my eye—a sea horse, in bright blues and greens. The chapter heading is “The Role of the Hippocampus.” The hippocampus is a curved portion of the brain located in the medial temporal lobe, just above the ear. It got its name because early anatomists believed the structure resembled a sea horse. Although the function of the hippocampus remains, in large part, a mystery, neuroscientists do know that it is crucial for learning new facts, remembering recent events, and transferring new information into long-term memory. If the hippocampus is damaged, old memories remain intact, but no new ones are formed.
The Year of Fog Page 10
