“That’s the baby?” Annabel said, moving my mother’s hand away.
“Yes.”
“It looks like a sea horse,” I said. I was already feeling disappointed about this whole baby thing. I remembered the mail-order sea horses from Everlasting Toys, how they’d turned out to be nothing special.
“That’s just the very beginning,” my mother said, flipping the page. The next picture showed a slightly bigger belly, and this time, inside the sack, there was a little alien-looking thing with a big head and fishlike limbs. The final drawing was of a swaddled newborn. She closed the book and patted our heads. “One day you’ll both have babies of your own.”
“I want to have seven,” Annabel said.
“How many do you want?” my mother asked, tilting my chin up and smiling down at me. I remember feeling privileged, because she wasn’t often affectionate like this. But I also felt sad, as though she and Annabel shared something I didn’t. Babies were sweet and soft, I liked them, but I couldn’t imagine having some strange thing growing inside me, just like I couldn’t imagine doing what apparently came first—the vague, disturbing act she referred to as holy matrimony. I tried to think of the correct answer to her question, something that wouldn’t disappoint her.
“Maybe three?” I said, looking up into her soft eyes. She was wearing tiny gold earrings, and her breath smelled too strongly of coffee. I wondered if she could tell I was lying.
46
TRUCE,” JAKE says. It’s Christmas Eve, and he has shown up at my door bearing tickets to the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus performance at the Castro Theatre. “Will you be my date?”
“Of course,” I say. “Just give me a few minutes to get dressed.”
It’s what we did last year, what Jake has done every year for the last decade. I know he’s trying hard to act normal, trying to act like there is cause for celebration, like Christmas means something to him still. But we’re not good at pretending, and we leave during the intermission. Last year before the show, we took Emma to Cable Car Joe’s for her favorite meal: a hamburger, onion rings, and a milk shake. We ate there so often that Joe knew Emma by name, and before we left he gave her a gift—a five-inch-tall teddy bear wearing a T-shirt with the Cable Car logo.
This year, we just order a couple of sandwiches at A.G. Ferrari across the street from the Castro and take them back to Jake’s place. We eat in the living room, staring at the tree, which has lights but no ornaments.
“My heart just wasn’t in it,” Jake says.
The only reason he even has a tree is that a couple of teachers at his school brought it over one evening and insisted that he accept it. They put the tree in the stand, set it up by the window, found the boxes of Christmas stuff in the garage, and helped him string the lights.
The floor beneath the tree is bare. “We should at least put a couple of gifts under there,” I say.
“I learned my lesson on her birthday. It tears me apart to look at presents she’s never going to open.”
I don’t tell him about my own shopping spree, the dozens of presents wrapped and stuffed into my hall closet, each chosen just for her: a pair of ice skates, because I promised to take her to the outdoor rink at the Embarcadero this year; the pink knit scarf and matching hat; the porcelain doll with a little suitcase and parasol. Things purchased on credit, things I can’t afford. I bought them all in a single day, rushing from one store to the next, grabbing anything I thought she would like. While I was shopping for her, I felt happy, maybe because the physical act of picking things up and carrying them to the checkout allowed me to harbor a ridiculous hope that Emma would be opening the packages on Christmas Day. When I got the presents home and saw them laid out on the floor, the happiness dissipated. I put everything in the closet, vowing to take it all back the next day. That was two weeks ago, and I haven’t been able to force myself to open the closet since.
“Is it all right if I spend the night?” I ask.
“Sure,” Jake says, but he doesn’t move toward me when he says it, and I can tell he’d rather be alone.
“Maybe tomorrow night,” I say. And then, unable to stop myself, I ask about Lisbeth. “She’s not—”
“No,” Jake says, “she’s not in town. She’s spending Christmas on the East Coast with friends.”
“Oh,” I say, feeling stupid and relieved.
Jake takes my hand. “You’ve got nothing to worry about on that front, okay?”
“Okay.” It’s such a relief to hear him say it, to see in his eyes that he means it.
I call him late Christmas morning, but he’s still in bed. “I’d rather just be alone today,” he says. “I’ve got some work to do.”
“But it’s Christmas.”
“It’s easier if I pretend it isn’t.”
David from Parents of Missing Children invited me over to his house for a party, but I made up an excuse not to go. Most of the guests will be from the support group, and I can’t bear the multiplied grief, the inevitable tears, the stories of holidays past. Instead, I spend the day with Nell. All day long, friends of her dead son Stephen stop by to say hello. She gives them eggnog and sugar cookies, and they bring her small gifts perfectly wrapped in expensive paper. By ten p.m., the last visitor has left. “I can’t go home,” I say. “I don’t think I can be alone tonight.”
“Of course not,” Nell says. “Stay here. You wouldn’t believe how comfortable this couch is.”
She fetches blankets and a pillow, and we stay up late into the night, playing gin rummy. I keep score on a legal pad, trying without success to concentrate on the game. At one point, my pen runs out of ink and Nell retrieves a pencil from a mason jar on her kitchen counter. The pencil is wide and flat, and I’m nibbling on the yellow flesh when a memory from childhood comes to me.
“Where’d you get this?” I ask.
“I think I nabbed it from Home Depot.”
“Funny, the smell and taste totally take me back. When I was a kid, my dad was a building contractor, and sometimes I’d visit job sites with him. He had these big, flat pencils, just like this one, that he’d use to make markings on the lumber, and he’d let me entertain myself by drawing on plywood scraps.”
“There’s a name for that, you know,” Nell says. “It’s a Proustian memory, so called because of the madeleine and lime-blossom tea in Swann’s Way. Scientists think olfactory memories are some of our most emotionally powerful ones because smell is the only sense that’s very closely associated with the limbic system, which is the part of the brain responsible for emotion. After Stephen died, I started taking my clothes to his dry cleaner and even having my blouses starched, which I’ve never done in my life, just because the starch they use reminds me of him. If I close my eyes when I’m wearing one of those blouses, I can almost pretend he’s in the same room.” She smiles and plucks a card from the deck. “Pretty nutty, huh?”
“Not really,” I say. “I went shopping for Emma last week. I bought her this Tinkerbell nail polish that she used to wear all the time. When I got home, I put the stuff on. This really awful shade of pink. I put on two coats and drank three glasses of wine and then just let myself drift off, thinking about her, and you know what was really nice? I dreamt about her. I’ve dreamt of her dozens of times since she disappeared, but it’s always a nightmare, where I’m looking for her and can’t find her, or I’m trying to save her from something terrible. This dream was different. We were at the aquarium, the old one in the park before it closed down, and we were looking at the starfish, and we were both happy. It was the best dream, it was like she was right there with me. But then I woke up.”
“That’s the unfortunate thing about dreams,” Nell says. “There’s always the part where you wake up.”
47
THAT DAY on Ocean Beach, Emma wore blue canvas shoes, size three, with a smiling monkey face decorating the sides, her name stitched across the tongue in red.
On Saturday, the third of January, Sherburne calls to
tell us that a single shoe has been discovered by a tourist. It was wedged into a pile of rocks on Baker Beach in the Presidio, about three miles north of Ocean Beach.
“I was clothed, of course,” the man who found it told the police. “Didn’t even know it was a nude beach until I got there, and I figured, what the hell, may as well take a walk, you only live once.”
It’s a short beach. There’s not much walking to do there. You can take pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge, read a book, watch the nude men sunbathing in the cold. Thus starved for activity, one might take in every detail, such as a shoe wedged into a pile of rocks. I imagine the man bending down, tugging the shoe free just to give himself something to do, so as not to give the impression that he is looking at the nude men. He’s about to raise his arm and sail the shoe out into the ocean when he notices the partially embroidered name.
He told the police that he had seen Jake on the Today show, had heard Jake’s description of Emma’s shoes, her clothes. He said he probably would never have remembered were it not for the fact that his granddaughter had a very similar pair of shoes.
What does he feel then? Pity for the father, that distraught and pleading man with the tousled hair and glasses? Or perhaps he experiences a quick lifting of spirit, an excitement at having been the one to find the shoe. All those police, all those volunteers, all that time spent searching, and it is he, a computer salesman from Dallas, who comes up with the clue. Perhaps he even envisions the television interview during which he describes the discovery, his own fifteen minutes of fame.
How easy it would have been for him to look in another direction, to rest his gaze on some distant surfer or seashell or sunbather, rather than on the pile of rocks. I will it to have been so, engaged always in this mental effort to turn back the clock, to rearrange the events of the past.
But the shoe has been found. The police now have a piece of evidence, however circumstantial, to back up their theory that Emma drowned. Worse, Jake has something to believe in, some small proof that it is true.
His first reaction, upon hearing the news from Sherburne, is fearful astonishment. “Are you sure it’s hers?”
I’m standing in the kitchen, stirring a big pot of soup on the stove, privy only to Jake’s half of the conversation.
“What’s hers?” I ask.
Jake covers the mouthpiece, turns to me. “They found a shoe.” He punches the speaker button on the phone, and Sherburne’s voice fills the kitchen.
“We’re pretty certain,” he says. “Of course, you should see it to make sure. I’ll bring it by this afternoon so you can have a look.”
“We’ll come to you,” Jake says.
“It’s all right, I’m in my car just across the park. I’ll be there in ten.”
“Thank you,” Jake says. And then, oddly, “Have you eaten? Abby’s making potato and leek soup for lunch. You should join us.”
I find myself thinking how strange it is that one’s manners remain intact even in the worst circumstances, that during this whole ordeal, as Jake’s world has fallen apart, he has conducted himself with the utmost restraint and comportment. I’ve yet to see him lose his temper or his calm in public. Only in our most private moments has the depth of his fear shown through.
“Thank you,” Sherburne says.
Jake hangs up the phone, goes to the china cabinet, and takes out three of his best bowls. It’s an endearing habit of his—he always uses the fine china for company, no matter how casual or spontaneous the occasion. One of the bowls crashes to the floor. He curses, drops to his knees, and begins picking up the broken pieces with his bare hands.
“You’re bleeding,” I say, bending down to help.
He keeps picking up the shards, oblivious to the blood. “It can’t be hers, can it?”
“We’ll see. Go rinse your hands. I’ll clean this up.”
He makes no move to get up. He kneels there, his hands cupped around the bits of glass, looking at me incredulously. “If it is her shoe,” he says, “what does that mean?”
“It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.” I’m trying to be calm, trying not to let him see my fear. Trying to be the levelheaded one in this moment, even though I feel panic rising in my gut.
I’ve just finished vacuuming up the last of the glass when the doorbell rings. “I’ll get that,” Jake says. His voice sounds off, the whole moment feels off. I think about Sherburne on the other side of the door, holding in his hands the first actual piece of evidence to surface since this whole nightmare began.
From the kitchen I can hear Jake opening the front door. “Come in,” he says.
And Sherburne, playing the polite guest. “Smells delicious.”
I go into the living room, peck Sherburne on the cheek, hear myself chiming in, taking part in the strange game of avoidance. “It’s nothing fancy, just soup. The only thing I know how to make, save for biscuits and gravy.”
The top button on Sherburne’s white oxford shirt is undone, and his tie is slightly askew. I recognize the tie—the same one he was wearing that night when he brought us into the station. He notices me looking at it. “A gift,” he says, lifting the end and holding it up. “From my daughter. She asked me to wear it this morning and I couldn’t say no. She’s got me wrapped around her finger, that one—you know how little girls are.”
This last sentence hangs in the air, and we’re all looking at each other awkwardly, unsure how to proceed.
“I’m sorry,” Sherburne says, blushing. He clears his throat. “We should sit down, I suppose.”
“Of course,” Jake says. Jake and I sit on the sofa, and Sherburne settles in the chair across from us. Jake reaches for my hand, holds it tightly.
Sherburne pulls a plastic bag out of his pocket. The bag is labeled with a white sticker bearing a series of numbers and letters and the word Balfour, handwritten in black ink. He opens the bag, pulls out a little shoe, and lays it on the coffee table in front of us.
The shoe is ragged and smells briny, ripe, like the angel wings Emma used to dig up at Ocean Beach. I came across a jar of them once, unwashed, stashed in a basket beneath her bed. The creatures had died inside their shells, and when I opened the jar her room was invaded by the dank, fishy smell.
I notice the toe of the shoe first, where Emma’s name had been. The stitching is mostly gone, but bits of the E, one m, and the a remain. The red has faded to pink. On the side, there’s a hole where the monkey’s nose should be.
Jake stares at the shoe for several seconds, unmoving. Then he reaches out to touch it, run his fingers over the wrecked fabric. His fingers tremble. He begins, very quietly, to cry. He picks up the shoe and cradles it in both hands.
Sherburne sits silently. I find myself staring at the tie just to keep from looking at Emma’s shoe, Jake’s face.
I have a memory of childhood, a Sunday afternoon in Alabama. I remember the shoes I was wearing—a pair of white sandals with a tiny heel, the first heels I’d ever owned. I must have been about eleven years old. We had just finished lunch, and I was helping my mother with the dishes. I couldn’t stop thinking about something the preacher had said that morning in church. He’d said that everyone has to make choices, and the choices we make determine whether we go to heaven or to hell when we die. My mother was handing me pieces of silverware, one by one. “Wouldn’t it be better not to be born?” I asked.
My mother stopped what she was doing and looked down at me. “What?”
“If you’re born, you might go to hell. Hell is the most terrible thing that could happen to anyone.”
“But you might go to heaven,” my mother said. “And that’s the most wonderful thing that could happen.”
“But if you were never born,” I reasoned, “it wouldn’t matter that you didn’t go to heaven, because you wouldn’t even know about it. I wish I’d never been born.”
Over time, I stopped worrying about hell. Now, for the first time in my adult life, the very basic question of existence presents itsel
f again to me, and I find myself imagining with envy an alternate scenario, one in which I never took my place in the world.
We’re on the sofa, and Jake is lying with his head in my lap. The lights in the living room are off, music softly playing on the stereo. The smell of the uneaten soup permeates the house. In the hours since Sherburne left, we’ve exhausted ourselves with crying and talking, analyzing the possibilities. Our conversation has gone round and round in endless circles. Hours ago, the light faded. Through the front windows we watched the fog rolling up the avenues. At one point, Jake suggested that maybe it was time to close the command post.
“At least now we know she’s not suffering,” he says finally. It has taken him hours to come to this conclusion, to convince himself of its truth. Now that he’s decided upon this version of the story, it is as if he’d been presented with incontrovertible evidence. “At least she’s not scared or in pain.”
In the months since Emma disappeared, there has been such gravity in Jake’s expression, such tension, that he looked less and less like the man I once planned to marry. Today, as the hours wore on, something of his old expression began to emerge—a relaxing of the jaw, a smoothness of the brow. Now, the look in his eyes borders on peaceful.
I don’t share his strange relief. I feel sick. I know that, for the sake of his own sanity, he has to believe she’s dead; it’s easier than accepting the possibility that she’s alive, suffering unspeakable things.
Around ten p.m. he gets up, goes into the kitchen, and puts the soup in the fridge. He goes upstairs and takes a shower, then comes back down in his bathrobe. He stands at the base of the stairs, looking at me. “Spend the night,” he says.
It’s the first time since his visit to the mortuary that he’s issued such an invitation. We don’t make love. We hardly even talk. But it’s good to lie together in bed, our ankles touching. It’s even good, after all this time, to hear him snoring.
The Year of Fog Page 20
