The Year of Fog

by Michelle Richmond

  While my family sat under the shade of two umbrellas, a small cooler perched at each corner of a king-size sheet, that other, happier family lay glistening in the sun, their legs and arms dusted with sand. The woman had large breasts, dark brown cleavage plunging toward the gold clasp of her bikini. While my mother worked her crossword and my father listened to the Bama game on a transistor radio, and Annabel lay sleeping, I observed the family from behind my Mickey Mouse sunglasses, trying to devise schemes by which I might touch the woman’s magnificent breasts.

  The boy scooped sand with a plastic shovel and dumped it on his father’s back.

  “Son,” the man said, not glancing up from his book.

  The boy tried the same thing with his mother. “Why don’t you go build a sandcastle?” she said. The boy pouted for a second, then picked up his bucket and shovel and went down to the water’s edge. He worked halfheartedly at a sandcastle for a while, then tossed aside the bucket and shovel and stomped into the water. It was a hot, still day, the sun so bright the water was difficult to look at. From the beach the waves looked calm, but wooden signs posted at intervals along the beach said, Strong Undertow. Swim at Your Own Risk.

  The boy ran in and out of the surf. I wanted to go join him, but my parents would not allow it. “Swimming is for swimming pools,” my father was fond of saying. For a few minutes I watched the boy with envy. He kept looking back to see if anyone was paying attention. Once, I waved at him. He grinned, then flopped down on the sand and did a strange wiggling dance, his legs kicked up in the air, his mouth hanging open. After I while I grew bored and turned my attention back to his mother.

  I don’t know how many minutes passed before the woman sat up and looked out at the ocean. “Tom,” she said.

  The man turned a page of his book. “Hmm.”

  “I don’t see Charles.”

  She stood up and started walking toward the water. The man dropped his book and followed her. Then they weren’t walking but running, both of them screaming, “Charles!”

  My father stood up and rushed down to the water’s edge. Annabel woke, stretched. “What’s happening?”

  Suddenly the atmosphere of the beach changed. The panic spread quickly in every direction, so that within minutes every adult on that beach was shouting Charles’s name. The women held tightly to their own children, while the fathers shed shirts and sandals and leapt into the ocean. It was exciting and somewhat circuslike, as the torpor of the day exploded into chaos.

  Lifeguards appeared. Fishing boats that had been anchored offshore began moving toward the beach. Before long, a patrol boat crept through the waves, sirens blaring. Charles’s name was broadcast through megaphones. It felt as if time was speeding up.

  When we gathered our towels and ice chests later that afternoon, the woman in the black bikini was sitting at the water’s edge, screaming, her hair hanging in matted strings around her face. Her husband sat on his knees opposite her, silent and shaking. Between them, stretched out pale and bluish on the wet sand, was the boy. His eyes were open, his lips parted slightly. A piece of seaweed was tangled around his ankle. He looked beautiful and very clean lying there, perfectly still. I expected him, even then, to wake up—to kick his legs, wink at me, and laugh. A swell joke.

  We drove home in silence. My mother wept as my father stared ahead at the road. A blast of thunder shook the car, and it began to rain. The windshield wipers ticked and squealed. At one point my mother turned around in her seat and clutched my and Annabel’s hands. “Girls.” That was all she said; she spoke the word so quietly, she might have been saying a prayer.

  I wiped the fogged window and watched the miles of beach roll by, the sand dunes and towering sea grass, the little pink houses on stilts. Lightning flashed over the ocean. My shoulders stung from a slight burn. The car smelled warm and sweet. There was salt on my lips. I was thirsty, but didn’t know how to ask, in that horrible silence, for something to drink. Annabel slept, her legs sprawled on the seat between us, her head titled back at an impossible angle, mouth open wide. I kept glancing over to make sure she was breathing. I rested a hand on her warm foot, just to know she was alive. In those moments I loved her fiercely.

  At some point I dozed off. The car hummed over the highway. In my restless sleep, I was vaguely aware of my mother staring at us, an odd light in her eyes, as if we were new and strange and special.

  51

  DAY 184. After the support group, David invites me over to his place for coffee. I follow him to Cole Valley. His home is a restored Victorian on a quiet block. Inside, dark wood floors and utter silence.

  He flips a switch in the foyer, and the house is flooded with light and music. “Like it? I rigged it so that this switch controls all the lights in the house, plus the power to the stereo.”

  “Impressive.”

  “For a second, when I walk in, I can pretend I’m not coming home to an empty house.”

  The focal point of the living room is a grand piano. On it rests the sheet music for “Piano Concerto Number Five.” I strike a key, and it lets out a low groaning note. “You play?”

  He shakes his head. “My wife does. Did. She was teaching Jonathan. He was pretty good. He had these ridiculously long fingers. I don’t know if that really matters, but Jane thought it was a good sign.”

  The mantel and end tables are crowded with framed family photographs—David and Jonathan at the entrance to Disneyland; Jane and Jonathan sitting at a picnic table, a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken on the table between them; the whole family waving from the bow of a ferry, the Statue of Liberty in the background. On one wall is a series of color photos shot inside a studio, against fake backgrounds. In a couple of the photos, Jonathan is playing with a cocker spaniel.

  “You have a dog?”

  “No.” He laughs. “Never did. The dog’s a prop. Jonathan wouldn’t cooperate with the photographer, so she brought this puppy into the studio.”

  “Cute.”

  The photo reminds me of those awful Olan Mills sessions my mother used to drag us to. The studio was in a strip mall on Airport Boulevard, and it smelled of Lysol. The photographer always wore a T-shirt bearing the insignia of some fifth-rate college. He’d tell us we had good teeth, then make us lean against a fake wooden fence, smiling broadly and tucking our thumbs in our belt loops, as if life was some pastoral paradise, as if we didn’t live in the suburbs.

  “Decaf or regular?”

  “Either.”

  He leads me into the kitchen. More photos on the walls. When he opens the cabinet to get two mugs, I notice several kiddie-size glasses decorated with Disney characters.

  David puts two frozen bear claws in the microwave, hits defrost, and starts a pot of coffee. “I’ll give you the grand tour while it’s brewing. First stop, the guest room.” He leads me upstairs, into a wallpapered room that looks like it came out of one of those Southern home-décor magazines. “I should probably turn it into a study. No one’s slept in here in years. Jane used it for a while before she moved out.”

  Above the wrought-iron bed hangs a framed sketch of a boy. The hair is light brown, the chubby contours of the face filled in with peach-colored pencil. “It’s an age-progression sketch,” David explains. “Jonathan at eleven.” There is such detail to the drawing, such expression in the eyes, it’s difficult to believe I’m looking at a picture of a boy who never was. David reaches forward and adjusts the frame. Downstairs, the microwave shuts off and beeps three times.

  Next, he leads me into a room with pale blue walls. Clouds have been stenciled onto the ceiling, and model airplanes hang from string all around the room. The twin-size bed is tidily made up with dinosaur sheets. There’s a head-shaped dent in the pillow, as if someone were just sleeping there recently. David reaches up and touches a wing on one of the airplanes. “Jonathan and I made a bunch of these together. He wanted to be a pilot.” He smiles. “He also planned to train dinosaurs for the circus and work weekends as a cowboy.” He tips the w
ing with his finger, and the plane begins to twirl. “What did Emma want to be?”

  I pretend not to notice his use of the past tense. “She has her heart set on masonry. We tried to talk her into architecture instead, since the money’s better, but she likes the actual construction. Last year Jake bought her a toy bricklaying kit. It comes with little plastic bricks, and this powder that you mix with water to make mortar. She started building a wall that she thought would reach all the way to the sky. Her plan was to climb the wall until she reached the moon, where she would build a new house for all of us to live in. She planned to throw lavish parties to which the presidents of all the countries of the world would be invited.”

  “Sounds like she could have a future in politics.”

  Future. The word sounds almost delusional, too much to hope for. Yet the only thing that keeps me going these days is exactly that—a wavering hope in the possibility of a future—Emma and Jake and me, doing all those things families do, despite the fact that, with each day, the hope decreases by a fraction.

  “Great airplanes,” I say. As soon as the words are out of my mouth, they sound stupid, too casual. I wish I could think of something to say that would convey the sympathy I feel.

  David surveys the dozen or so models soaring above his dead son’s room. “I have nearly a hundred more down in the basement—747s, Cessnas, fighters, you name it.” His voice wavers. “I just keep waiting for the grief to subside, but it never does. I keep waiting for the morning when I wake up and realize I don’t want him back anymore. But every day, I want him just as badly as I did the day he disappeared.”

  He moves closer, puts his hand under my chin, and lifts my face to meet his. I turn my mouth away, so that his kiss lands on my cheek—an old high school trick that feels awkward now, out of place in the adult world. David takes my hand and leads me across the hallway, to another bedroom. In this one there are no photographs, just a bed with white sheets, a wooden dresser, beige walls.

  He goes in for the kiss again, and this time I let him. Even as I open my mouth, I know how wrong it is. Feeling David’s tongue on my own, breathing the Ivory soap smell of his skin, I hear Sam Bungo’s voice in my head: “Situation, Participation, Extrication.”

  David finds the buttons on the side of my skirt. The skirt falls, I hear the ping of buttons against the hardwood floor. Standing here in sweater, underwear, and shoes, what I feel is not lust, but pity. It occurs to me that perhaps David feels sorry for me as well. Maybe he sees my ongoing search as nothing more than a pathetic attempt to postpone the inevitable.

  He kisses me again, slides his hand under my sweater, touches my breast. Then he takes off his clothes, item by item: his shoes, shirt, pants, socks—looking at me uncertainly while he undresses, as if he’s waiting for me to call it off. And I’m telling myself, Don’t do this.

  David’s chest is thin and hairless, his body pale, with blue veins snaking just beneath the skin. Maybe he deserves at least this small thing, this momentary comfort. He has lost so much, and I don’t know how to say no. Standing there, he looks so insubstantial, more boy than man, except for the erection. My pity gives way to something else, and I can feel something moving through my body—a hot, insistent need. I can’t deny that part of me wants to feel the pushing open, the good and painful pressure, the building toward release. Part of me wants to exit the world in this way. Part of me craves the act that will help me forget for a moment.

  He moves closer, his erection pressing against my leg.

  “It’s been six months,” I say. I’m not sure if he heard me, so I say it again. “Six months to the day since she disappeared.”

  He pushes me toward the bed, sits me down, and gently takes off my shoes. When he goes to turn off the light, I notice a birthmark on his right hip in the shape of an avocado. I think of Ramon, the first man I ever saw naked: his perfect arms, his muscular hips, his long legs and oddly small hands. I never really noticed his hands until I saw him naked, and when I looked at them for the first time, I felt a wave of tenderness for him.

  The light goes off, and that’s when I notice his digital clock, projecting the time onto the ceiling in huge red numbers: hour, minutes, seconds. It’s the numbers that bring me back, the thought of Emma out there in the world somewhere, waiting.

  “I should go,” I say, standing up.

  He moves toward the bed. “Don’t.”

  I maneuver into my skirt and slip on my shoes, already hating myself for what almost happened.

  David stands inches away, naked, watching me. I’m angry with him for knowing, without asking, just which buttons to push.

  “Goodbye,” I say.

  “Please,” he says. “Don’t go. Spend the night. Nothing has to happen.”

  I walk down the stairs and let myself out. Driving home through the nighttime chill, clouds of mist hovering in front of my headlights, I do not feel entirely solid, entirely alive in the world. I avoid the rearview mirror, the windows that reflect everything in the dark—afraid that, if I were to look closely, I would not recognize myself.

  52

  PHOTOGRAPHY IS all about light. The word photography comes from the Greek words photos, meaning light, and graphein, meaning writing. Every time you take a picture, you are writing in light.

  The function of a camera lens is to bend light. The function of film is to record the pattern of light transmitted through the lens. Film is just a piece of plastic containing light-sensitive grains, which undergo a chemical reaction when exposed to light. If you allow too much light through the lens, too many grains will react, and the picture will appear washed out. If you don’t let enough light hit the film, too few grains will react, and the picture will be too dark.

  Light is not only essential to the photographer’s trade; it is also the photographer’s greatest enemy. This is why a darkroom must be completely sealed off. Every darkroom has at least one safelight, usually a red or amber light that does not cause a visible change to light-sensitive materials. The safelight is used while transferring images from negatives to print paper and moving the prints through the chemicals.

  There is a period, however, when every photographer is in total dark: when the unprocessed film is removed from the cassette and wound around the developing reel. This must be done precisely—making sure to get the film tight, and to touch only the edges. One slip of the fingers can ruin the entire roll.

  The photographer relies completely on her eyes. She relates to the world through image, through the visual, what she can see. But for those few minutes, alone in the pitch-black darkroom, everything must be done by touch, by instinct, without sight.

  What is a search if not an exercise in blindness?

  In the hours after Emma’s disappearance, I imagined the search area as a circle that expanded as the minutes and hours passed. Now, six months into the search, the area of possibility is nightmarishly large. The fact is, there is no limit to this particular search. Emma could be anywhere: in California, New York, London, Madrid. She could be in Alaska or Alabama.

  From the beginning, I have been blindly groping in the dark.

  The problem with a safelight is that it is never entirely sufficient for the task. You would always like to see more. You would like to be able to judge with absolute precision the density of the grain, the precision of focus. Yet, in the darkroom, you are immensely grateful for the safelight. Its vague illumination, after the experience of total dark, comes as a great relief. What I would give now for a safelight. Some small thing to guide me.

  53

  And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,

  Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.

  —T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

  JAKE HAS been talking to a therapist. “Closure,” the therapist says, “requires a ritual acknowledgment of her death.” Thus the casket. I went with Jake to pick it out. A funeral home on Geary, plush carpet and hushed rooms, next door to a burger joint. A man in a pin-striped suit led
us down a long hallway to a set of double doors, beyond which an office was set up to look like someone’s parlor. Grandmotherly, Victorian, with a curvy mauve sofa and three tall upholstered chairs. With one long, pale finger, the funeral director turned the pages of a leather-bound book containing photographs and ad copy. He tried to sell us something made especially for little girls, shiny white with hand-painted angels and flowers, satin lining in Pepto-Bismol pink.

  “You can have something special inscribed on the casket,” he said, and proceeded to read us a rhyming poem written by Anonymous. The director gave a disapproving look when Jake went with the simple oak casket, no gaudy brass fittings or filigreed handles, no poem.

  That was three days ago. The memorial service will be held today at eleven. “I want you to be there,” Jake says now over the phone, his voice sounding extraordinarily tired. Coffee is percolating in the background.

  It has been 198 days. This morning I did the math:

  4,752 hours.

  285,120 minutes.

  17,107,200 seconds.

  “Well?” He waits, breathing into the phone.

  In truth, I don’t have the right to deny him anything. Because I was not careful, because I looked away, because some maternal instinct in me faltered for a matter of seconds, because I chose the wrong direction in those crucial moments, Emma is gone. It is my guilt that has made this gathering necessary, my unspeakable failure that will bring these mourners together.