The Year of Fog

by Michelle Richmond

  I lie awake thinking of the shoe, unable to believe it is conclusive, unable to accept that it means anything at all. Surely any number of explanations could account for its presence on Baker Beach. Emma, for example, wanted to take off her shoes, but I would not allow it, as Ocean Beach is littered with broken glass. Maybe, after walking ahead of me, she simply disobeyed. Or maybe the kidnapper gained her trust by encouraging her to do so, after I had forbidden it. Perhaps the kidnapping was planned in detail and the perpetrator had a change of clothing so that Emma would not be spotted, in which case he would have disposed of the clothes she was wearing.

  Why only one shoe, instead of two? And what of a body? Unless we see a body, we can never know for certain. Add to that the sightings—thousands of calls to the command post, hundreds of messages posted to the website. Just two days ago, a San Francisco woman vacationing in Florida called to say she’d seen a girl who fit Emma’s description in Fort Walton Beach. The lead went nowhere, but the fact is there are still leads. If even one is correct, then Emma might still be alive.

  Sherburne has argued many times that Emma may have accidentally strayed too close to the water, but he says this because he doesn’t know her. In my mind, I’ve gone over the possibilities countless times—could she have miscalculated the distance of the water because of the fog? Could she have seen one of those perfect sand dollars and, for a moment, forgotten her fear? I keep coming back to the same answer, which has more to do with conviction than with scientific probability: she could not have drowned, because that would mean she is dead. It would mean there’s no reason to keep looking.

  I once read an article about a wild elephant whose cub was stillborn. A photographer looked on in horror while the mother kicked the lifeless body, over and over, for three hours. Then something happened: the baby stirred. His mother had literally kicked him to life by stimulating his heart. Only instinct could drive her to do this.

  While memory is the flimsy stuff of image, easily influenced by external suggestions, instinct is utterly internal. Memory may impose incorrect clues into my waking dream of that day at the beach with Emma, false images, dead ends. I’m willing to accept that memory fails me. But instinct—that firmer, truer thing—tells me she is alive. Not possibly alive. Not hopefully alive. There are times when instinct speaks only in terms of absolutes. Emma is alive, and she is waiting for me.

  48

  THE NEXT morning I drive out to Baker Beach. The twin arches of the Golden Gate Bridge peek above the fog. There are no sunbathers out today—too cold—just a teenage couple eating bagels and sipping coffee on a picnic bench. He’s facing the table and she’s facing him, legs wrapped around his waist. Seeing them together like that, so blissfully oblivious to the world, reminds me of those early days with Ramon, how I’d suffer through class waiting. When the lunch bell rang, I’d sling my backpack over my shoulder and run out to the curb, where he’d be waiting for me in his beat-up Jeep Wrangler. Sometimes we’d drive to the Dew Drop Inn for catfish fillets and shakes; more often we’d just go to his place. Then there would be the rush to get out of our clothes and into bed, knowing I had to be back to school in time for Mrs. Truly’s French class. The sex was so good I remember it still, but sometimes I wonder if nostalgia paints those days a different, better color. Maybe the reason he seemed like such a phenomenal lover was simply that I had no basis for comparison.

  I wander north along the beach and pick my way among the rocks, searching for something the tourist might have missed, but find only the usual trash—empty beer cans, a baseball cap, a worn silver guilder that seems out of place and out of time, like loot from some sunken ship. I imagine Emma here, shoved up against these rocks, a stranger’s hands on her. I can’t shake the image. Maybe Jake’s way is better, after all.

  On the way home I stop by his house, but he’s not there. The phone at the command post rings twelve times; not even an answering machine picks up. At my loft, I spend a couple of hours answering e-mail from findemma.com and making the usual phone calls. I have a list of every hospital in the country. Over the last few months I’ve called every facility at least once, and now I’m making my way through a second round of calls. It’s always the same story—a bored switchboard operator who connects me to admissions, a series of hurried administrative personnel, my description of Emma, finally an impatiently uttered “There’s no one here by that name or description.”

  It’s almost noon when I leave my place on foot. It’s sunny here, the main benefit of living in noisy Potrero Hill. When Jake and I first decided to get married, we briefly considered selling his two-bedroom house in the foggy Sunset and buying one out here, but by then the dot-com boom had already driven the prices prohibitively high. Before everything happened with Emma, I’d been thinking how much I was going to miss this neighborhood, its slightly dirty industrial charm, the crumbling Victorians with their tidy flower boxes and optimistic gardens, the ever-present hum of freeway traffic. I used to love walking in my neighborhood, could kill whole weekends drinking coffee at Farley’s or browsing the shelves at Christopher’s Books, eating barbecue at Bottom of the Hill. Now, all my old haunts have a picture of Emma in the window, and I can hardly remember a time before she was gone, before this horrific unknowing gnawed at my edges every minute of every day.

  By the time I get to the Castro, my T-shirt and jeans are damp with sweat. I push through the omnipresent crowd, make my way to the command post. Looking through the window, I find myself face-to-face with Brian, who is peeling tape off the glass. The pictures of Emma are gone. The telephones, tables, chairs, and radio have disappeared. Inside, where a few days ago there were half a dozen volunteers, there is only Brian.

  “What’s this?” I say. “Where is everyone?”

  Brian steps down from his stool. “Don’t you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “Mr. Balfour called this morning and told me to close up shop.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The cops are officially closing the investigation.”

  “That’s not possible. Jake would have told me.”

  Brian shrugs. “I’m as shocked as you are.”

  “They can’t do this.” I grab one of the flyers he’s just taken down and tape it to the window.

  “Abby,” he says gently, “they’ll just get taken down again.”

  One of Sam Bungo’s slogans rattles through my mind. “Every night, every day, strive to keep up your PMA!” PMA stood for positive mental attitude. Sam believed that with a PMA, anything was possible.

  “We could be this close,” I say. “We could be hours away from finding her.”

  “I know,” he says. “I didn’t think it would end this way. I met her once, you know. Mr. Balfour brought her by the school one Saturday. I was painting posters for our food drive, and I asked Emma if she wanted to help. Somehow she got her feet into the paint. She left little red footprints all down the hallway.” He wads up a ball of tape and tosses it into the trash can. “It’s crazy, that a sweet kid like that can go missing. Makes you think the world is just completely fucked up.”

  A paralyzing despair sets in. How is it possible that I’m the only one who holds out any hope for her?

  I step outside onto the crowded street. It’s Sunday, and the Castro is teeming with tourists and teenagers, young men who’ve made the pilgrimage from the East Bay and Marin and Antioch to the lively gay mecca beneath the giant rainbow flag. A line of eager young guys has formed on Eighteenth Street, at the door to The Badlands. Outside Daddy’s, graying men in black leather congregate. Each bar has its theme, its regular clientele. The mingled scent of smoke and something else—a cloyingly sweet, sexual smell—saturates the air. A crowd gathers outside the Castro Theatre. Today’s film: a revival of Barbarella, and a Jane Fonda look-alike contest.

  A hand brushes my leg, and I look down to see a homeless teenager sitting on the sidewalk, gazing up through bloodshot eyes. He has a ring on every finger. “H
ey,” he says, “I’ll read you a poem for a quarter.”

  I drop some change into his cup, push through the crowds, descend beneath Market Street, and step onto the outbound Muni platform just as the doors close on the K-Ingleside. In the second car there is a girl, nose pressed to the window, black hair spilling over her shoulders. As the train begins moving I rush forward and bang my fists on the glass. The girl jumps back, terrified. In a twitch of her face, a movement of her hand as she reaches for the woman beside her, I realize I don’t know her. Something at the center of me deflates.

  “You okay?” a man asks. On the crowded platform, everyone is staring. “No,” I say. “I’m sorry. I thought it was someone I knew.”

  On the street again, in the too-brilliant sunlight, I begin walking. I don’t know where I’m going. I walk through the afternoon and into evening—down Market Street, onto Montgomery, up Columbus, down Broadway. As the sun sets I find myself over in South Beach, standing beneath the Bay Bridge, looking up at the steel arcs. Cars rumble across. The cold gray waters of the bay lap against the edge of the city. The fog is rolling in, softening the angles of the buildings. The headlights of oncoming cars hover yellowish in the mist. The sheer number of cars is overwhelming. All those vehicles, by the millions, in which a kidnapper might make his escape. All those trunks in which a child might be hidden. All the bridges a car might cross en route to somewhere else. There is a girl. Her name is Emma. She is walking on a beach. There is a girl. There is a girl. I feel the brittle threads of my sanity unraveling. The bay waters seem to be darkening, coming closer. It would be so easy to fall forward, so easy to simply forget. Up ahead, the stadium lights of PacBell Park glow bluish in the fog; a moment later I hear the roar of the crowd.

  49

  IT’S AFTER nine in the evening when I get to Jake’s house. He’s in the kitchen filling the recycling bin with envelopes and flyers. When I walk in unannounced, he looks up and blinks slowly, as if emerging from a dark room. “Hi,” he says, attempting a smile.

  “Tell me you’re not giving up.”

  “Give me another option.”

  “We keep looking.”

  “I had a plan, Abby,” he says. “The command post, television, radio. I kept giving myself benchmarks to go by. I thought we’d distribute ten thousand flyers, and we’d get a lead that would take us to her. When that didn’t happen, I raised the bar: fifty thousand flyers, seventy-five thousand, a hundred. Every time I raised it, I thought this was what would do it, this time we’d get to her. And the reward money. I started at fifty thousand. Then a hundred fifty, then two hundred, four hundred, half a million. I’ve sold all my stocks, refinanced the house, and approached everyone I know and a hundred I don’t in order to have the biggest cache of reward money possible. Nothing. And the volunteers. At the highest point, we had almost three hundred. Do you know I’ve done one hundred six radio interviews? Forty-two television spots? I’ve talked on the phone with hundreds of police officers all over the country. I’ve done everything. I don’t know what else to do.”

  I go into the living room and switch on a lamp. The bulb sputters briefly, then dies out with a soft click. “We could be so close.”

  “You’re ignoring the obvious,” he says. He sits on the sofa and picks a book up from the coffee table, sets it down again. Some philosophy textbook, with a ratty cover and Post-it tabs sticking out of the pages. “Her shoe. Her little shoe. I could do a thousand more interviews, send out a million more flyers, and it wouldn’t change the facts.”

  I sit down beside him. “You’re making way too much of the shoe. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  He leans back and stares at the ceiling. His hand under mine is hot and damp. He smells different, not like himself, and I realize it’s because his clothes have been washed with a different detergent. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s carried with him the faint scent of Surf, but since Emma disappeared he’s been having his clothes laundered at a place on the corner. He once told me that he couldn’t bring himself to do the laundry anymore, because Emma used to help him. She loved separating the whites from the darks and measuring the detergent.

  A bus passes on the street. A church bell chimes. The distance between us grows greater by the minute.

  “I miss her so much,” he says, “some days I don’t want to get out of bed. A couple of weeks ago at Safeway, I picked up a pack of gummy worms, because she always expects them when I come home from the grocery store. I was at the checkout, and the girl slid the package across the scanner, and it hit me. I started bawling. I couldn’t get myself together enough to take out my money, or even to get out of line. Several people were waiting behind me. The girl called her manager. He came over and asked if I needed help out to the car. I felt like a crazy person.” He squeezes my hand. “There will be a lot of awful days, but we can’t stop living.”

  “I don’t want to stop living. I just want to find her.”

  “It’s been almost six months,” he says. “Six.”

  His breath rattles softly. At this moment, I love him, but a startling possibility reveals itself to me: maybe I love her more. There’s a longing so deep it feels as if my body has been emptied out, as if there is nothing at the center of me but cold blank air. During the past six months, Emma has been with me every day. She’s the first thought on my mind when I wake up, the last image I see before I fall asleep. Her face, her name, are with me minute by minute. My life is guided by a single goal—to find her. Jake, meanwhile, has grown less distinct with each passing week, our conversations fewer and farther between, our moments of true connection dwindling to almost nothing.

  To love a man is one thing, but to love a child is something else entirely; it is all-consuming. Before Emma, when people talked about the kind of love a child could provoke, I did not believe them. Then Emma came along, and now I can’t imagine living the rest of my life without her. Maybe love is a divining rod that seeks out the people who need you most. When I first began to fall for Jake, I saw Emma as part of the package. Now, she has moved from periphery to center.

  The three of us made plans. Paris for her tenth birthday. Prague for her twelfth. At sixteen, when she gets her license, a driving tour of the States. I picture her at the Louvre, standing in front of the Mona Lisa, making funny faces. And then, a few years older, in blue jeans and pale pink lipstick, sitting behind the wheel, singing along to the radio, while Jake navigates from the back seat and I check off our list of roadside attractions. Her face is blurred, like a photo shot in low light with the subject moving too fast, but there is enough of her essential being in these images for me to believe in them.

  Jake stands and paces. “I want a service,” he says, biting his lip. He goes over to the window, pulls aside the curtain, and looks out at the street, his back to me. For a moment, the room is suffused with a soft yellow light.

  “What kind of service?”

  “A memorial.” He clears his throat and drops the curtain into place. The room goes dim again. “To say goodbye.”

  “Not yet. Just give me a little more time.”

  “For what?”

  “To look for her.”

  “Stop. Please. You’re only making it worse.”

  He’s still standing with his back to me when I go upstairs, into Emma’s bedroom. I lie on top of the covers and stare up at the ceiling. The room is beginning to lose Emma’s distinct smell, and I wonder if Jake has noticed this. A year from now, will a visit to her room yield no particular smell at all?

  I turn my head on the pillow and see something there, a strand of Emma’s hair. I pick it up and hold it taut between my fingers, this object outside of time. I lay it across my forehead and wish for some jolt of electricity, some telepathic communication from Emma.

  We used to sit on the bed together, legs crossed, and she’d lean back while I wove beads into her hair. For days after, she’d pull at the braids, leaving beads all over the house. The house was hers. Every inch of it bore some sign of her�
��the crayons on the kitchen table, her sandals by the back door, a shoe box of Barbie clothes under the coffee table in the living room. In the morning, she would often wake up before Jake and I did, and the sound of her feet padding down the stairs brought me into the day.

  Downstairs, now, heavy footsteps. Down the long hallway, through the kitchen, the dining room, the den, stopping at the foyer. The front door opens. Perhaps he’s thinking of going out. A minute or so later, the door shuts again, but I can still hear him down there. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to do, no way to escape.

  50

  BRAIN INJURY patients often remember childhood in startling detail, but are unable to remember events from more recent years. They talk about friends they haven’t seen in decades as if they’d just seen them hours ago. They may remember presents they received for their fifth birthday, but be unable to read even the simplest book.

  Each day I sift through memories like a desperate miner panning for gold. Too many things turn up there—moments from childhood that are no use to me now, names and faces, places I haven’t visited in years. The one thing I’m searching for, the clue that will lead me to Emma, remains buried, irretrievable. Each memory that surfaces distracts me from the task—just so much trash clogging up the brain waves. The memories come to me clearly, complete with sound and motion, even the suggestion of smell. I want nothing to do with this worthless information, but here it is, demanding to be noticed.

  Gulf Shores, Alabama. I am nine, at the beach with my family. I remember a woman and a man, lying beside us on bright yellow towels. They were drinking iced tea from plastic cups and reading paperback books. Although they were probably the same age as my parents, they seemed to be blessed with some youthful spirit that my parents had never possessed. He was wearing surf shorts, and she was clad in a tiny black bikini. My own father wore khaki shorts and tennis shoes, my mother an ankle-length sarong and T-shirt. The couple was sitting with a boy my age who kept looking up at me and grinning. His hair was blond with a slight green chlorine tint, and he was very tan. On his nose was a spot of white sunscreen.