I miss that game, those long nights of talking. I miss everything about Jake, more than I ever thought possible. In my weaker moments I wonder if I have only wronged him once again by coming to Costa Rica instead of settling down with him. When this happens, I take out my photos of Emma. I look at her face, and I attempt to recall her voice, and I read the names of the missing children recorded in my notebook. More horrifying than the names themselves are the dates, stretching back decades. Where are their parents now, their aunts and uncles and grandparents, the friends who loved these children? Each unsolved case must represent a vast network of despair, numerous lives that stopped dead in their tracks on the day the child disappeared. Each missing child is someone’s most painful memory, someone’s most significant point of reference. For every name there is someone else, unnamed, who waits for a child to come home.
74
WELL?” ANNABEL says.
“She wasn’t there. Of course she wasn’t there. Everyone was right. I was wrong. It’s over.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“You know, I really believed I could find her. Remember my senior year of college, when you came to see my photography show in the student union?”
“Of course,” Annabel says.
“There’s something I never told you. I was the last person in my class to get a show. The very last. Everyone else did one during the fall semester, but my professor thought I wasn’t ready. In the end, the only reason I got to do the show was that I spent every night for three months in the darkroom, long after everyone else was in bed, working my ass off. Then, over time, I built my own business and made it work out of sheer stubbornness. I know I wasn’t blessed with obvious talent. My art has always been something else: hardheaded determination. It always worked for me before. I thought it would work this time, that if I was determined enough, for long enough, I’d find her.”
“You did everything you could,” Annabel says.
“It wasn’t enough.”
“Where are you calling from?”
“Playa Hermosa. I’m packing up.”
No tears now, I can’t find them. Even the anger is gone. All that’s left is a dry, empty space. This longing that will never be satisfied. This guilt.
“Come home,” Annabel says.
“Next week.”
“Do you mean it?”
“Definitely. I’m just going to go down to Manuel Antonio for a couple of days.”
“You shouldn’t be alone. Come on home.”
“It’s supposed to be beautiful. I’d be crazy to come all this way and not even see the country’s major attraction.”
“You can see it some other time.”
“I need to do this. I need to clear my head.”
“We decided on a name,” Annabel says. “If it’s a boy, Miles. If it’s a girl, Margaret.”
“That’s pretty.”
“And with your blessing, we’d like for her middle name to be Emma.”
How to tell her that I can’t give my blessing for that? All these months of trying to remember, and now there’s only one thing I want: to forget.
I have a recurring dream in which I am standing on a hillside, watching a train pass. The train, moving silently over the tracks, seems to have no beginning and no end. Every now and then, I’ll glimpse the interior of the train through a window. Each time I get a glimpse into one of these windows, the person inside is doing some specific thing, in a specific place I have known: my mother, washing dishes at the big double sink in the house where I grew up; Annabel, diving off the bow of the boat into the warm waters off Petit Bois Island.
I haven’t had the dream since Emma’s disappearance. I kept waiting for it, kept hoping to wake with it still vivid in my mind. Through the window I hoped to see a moment on Ocean Beach, some buried memory that would solve the mystery. But I dream instead the most mundane things.
On my last night in Playa Hermosa, the dream returns. I am deep into sleep, the rain battering the tin roof of my cabin. I see the train, the window, and within the frame of the window a girl. A dead girl, lying on a bed, her body partially covered by a sheet. White ankles, white feet, stiff white fingers. Eyes closed. I wake with the sheets soaked, a metallic taste in my mouth. I tell myself it means nothing. It is, after all, just a dream. I go out onto the covered balcony and watch the storm moving over the ocean.
75
THE NEW England patient H.M. was the man for whom time stood still.
When H.M. was twenty-seven, Dr. William Scoville decided that the best way to cure his patient’s epilepsy would be to remove portions of his brain, including most of the hippocampus and the amygdala, the small, almond-shaped bit of tissue where emotional memories are stored. The procedure was a terrible failure. Not only did H.M. continue to suffer epileptic seizures; he also lost the ability to form new memories.
For nearly three decades, Dr. Brenda Milner visited H.M. on a monthly basis. Over the thirty years of Milner’s work, not once did H.M. recognize her if she had been out of his sight for more than a few minutes. “He lives today chained to the past,” Milner said. “You can say his personal history stopped with the operation.”
Many of H.M.’s earliest memories remained intact. He remembered taking swimming lessons at an indoor pool as a child, and spending nights in a big house in the country. He remembered the layout of the country house, the chickens on the wallpaper in the kitchen. He even remembered what type of perfume his mother wore. But he never knew, from one minute to the next, where he was or whom he was speaking to.
H.M. once tried to explain to his doctors what it meant to be deprived of memory: “Every day is alone in itself, whatever enjoyment I’ve had, whatever sorrow I’ve had.”
What a horror, and yet what a gift. To relegate sorrow to the past, a past that is truly behind you. To endure a terrible guilt, and then forget it. To wake each day with a clean emotional slate, and no knowledge of your own mistakes.
76
DAY 332. Early in the morning I meet Sami at the bar. She makes some mimosas, which we carry out to the beach. We watch the sun come up, a bright white light spreading over the soft blue water. Afterward, she walks me to the bus stop.
“That’s all you have?” she asks, glancing at my backpack and shoulder bag.
“I travel light. I threw some stuff away.”
She digs her heel into the sand, squints against the sun. “I’ll see you around?”
“Sure. Call me if you’re ever in San Francisco.”
“I will.”
“When do you plan to head back to Texas?”
“Texas?” she says, grinning. “What’s that?”
When the bus arrives at eight a.m., the town is just beginning to wake up, the surfers heading out to the water one by one. I envy the simplicity of their lives, how their routines are governed by the rhythms of the tide. I envy their perpetual state of forgetting, the way their minds are occupied so fully by the surf that everything else recedes.
If it weren’t for Annabel and the baby, I might stay here. Just go back to my cabin, unpack my things, settle in for the long haul, and learn to surf. It’s an easy place to live, an easy place to leave the rest of the world behind. And isn’t that, in part, what I’ve been doing here? Escaping Jake, his pain, the city that holds so many memories.
An hour into our journey, the bus breaks down. The driver spends half an hour cursing and banging around under the hood, then orders everyone off the bus. We sit on the side of the road for two hours, baking in the heat. By the time another bus arrives, my T-shirt and sarong are soaked through. I probably should have just gone home. If I had gone straight to San José, I could be in my own bed late tonight. I try to imagine walking into my apartment, putting down my things. Showering in my bathroom, eating food in my kitchen. Walking into my darkroom. Beginning life again. I try to imagine it, but the fantasy doesn’t ring true. How will I go back and simply be myself again?
I spend the night in Quepos. The next morn
ing, I take another bus the short distance along the winding road toward Manuel Antonio National Park. I get off at Playa Espadilla, a long, gray-sand beach crowded with sunbathers. I walk west, away from the restaurants and hotels, toward the less populated end of the beach, which backs up to evergreen forest. There is something startling in the juxtaposition of bright blue sea and deep green forest, so close to one another, almost touching. The vast space of the ocean is set against the tangled, dark mass of mangroves and palms.
I picked up a new Holga a few weeks ago at a thrift shop in Tamarindo. Now, I take the camera out of my bag. Pairing a Holga with these colors and this brilliant light is likely to yield something that looks more like a painting than a photograph. Blurred edges, bright colors overlapping. I came to this country to find Emma, but what I will take home is nothing more than this: a photograph of a beautiful Central American beach in summer. Two or three photos of alligators lounging in a murky river. A volcano crater buried in fog.
The beach is teeming with girls of all ages—toddlers and ten-year-olds, teenagers and grown women; brown, dark-haired local girls, and blonde North American girls in various stages of sunburn. Short girls, tall girls, fat girls, thin girls. Laughing girls and quiet girls.
Ticos wander down the beach, selling soft drinks and bottled water from Styrofoam chests. Boys with boogie boards run in and out of the surf. Middle-aged men tote longboards down to the water and dive in, paddling toward the lineup. I mentally note the locals, the waxboys and random standers. I can pick any surfer out of a crowd and know instinctively whether he or she belongs here. My brain is so crowded now with surfing’s strange terminology, I wonder what I’ve forgotten to make way for this new esoterica. A useless knowledge, just so many words that will remind me, always, of my failed search.
I take it all in with my eyes, with my little plastic Holga. The sun is too bright, blinding. Everything is whitewashed by the brilliant sun. I’m parched and walking, clicking the shutter release, advancing the film. Again and again and again. The sound of it soothes me. Click. The sound of my old life. To think it takes so little to transform a passing moment into something resembling permanence. A click—light entering a lens. Later, the chemicals and drying trays. The fixer and stop bath. The glossy paper that reveals a thing we saw once and then forgot entirely.
We take pictures because we can’t accept that everything passes, we can’t accept that the repetition of a moment is an impossibility. We wage a monotonous war against our own impending deaths, against time that turns children into that other, lesser species: adults. We take pictures because we know we will forget. We will forget the week, the day, the hour. We will forget when we were happiest. We take pictures out of pride, a desire to have the best of ourselves preserved. We fear that we will die and others will not know that we lived.
Click. Click. Click.
Just photographs of strangers. A postcard kind of scene. Serene. The beauty of a tropical beach. The smooth brown bodies. The happy children. This is what I will carry home with me: this nothing that is a photograph, this falsity that conveys the simple happiness of a beach scene in summer. A stranger looking at these photographs would see nothing of my guilt, would not begin to guess at the emptiness inside me.
And then. A shape in the sand about fifty feet away. A bright green towel, and on the towel a girl. A movement. A twisting of the hands as the girl leans back on her elbows and raises her face to the sun. A profile.
My heart like a malfunctioning machine, going too fast. A dry, cardboard taste in my mouth.
Yellow sundress, a long ponytail.
The girl’s hand comes up to swat an insect from her face—that motion, the way the fingers are held tightly together when she does this.
Not possible, of course. My sweet dream of some happy ending. She was on her way home, she was giving up, and then, suddenly, at the last minute…
I come closer, telling myself it can’t be true.
When I’m about fifteen feet away, she glances in my direction. Does she see me? This girl who cannot possibly be Emma? Is she looking at me or just looking past me?
A family of five passes between us, carrying ice chests and boogie boards. For a moment, I can’t see her. Then the family is gone, and she’s still there. Yes, looking at me.
Sun in my eyes. There are a hundred girls. A thousand, a million girls. The world is full of girls who could look like Emma. Girls of her approximate age and weight. Girls who could look like the girl you lost. I vowed I would never forget her face, and yet now, I’m not sure.
A cloud intersects the sun, and in the softer light she is looking at me still. Hand lifted to her eyes. Not looking beyond me but at me, right at me. As if she’s seen me before. As if she knows me.
The mind plays tricks. The mind wants to believe that you cannot do this thing to your life and to the life of the man you love, the life of a child in your care. The mind wants to believe that you cannot lose her, and never, ever find her.
The corner of her mouth tips up—not a smile, exactly, just something she does when caught off guard, a facial tic she experiences in moments of confusion. A mirror of her father. I allow myself to think this for a moment, allow myself to believe that the face of the girl is the face of Emma, and that Jake’s genetic code is somehow imprinted there.
But no, of course not. The mind plays tricks. For how many years will I do this—pass through the world with a vague belief simmering somewhere in my subconscious? How many thousands of times will I see a face and think, for a moment, that it is Emma’s?
The girl raises her hand again, swatting at flies, then shields her eyes. She’s looking at me, straight at me; she doesn’t look away.
So close now, just ten feet. Eight. Six. A bright green towel, a girl alone on the beach. Too young to be alone on the beach.
Just four feet between me and this girl. This dream of Emma.
The sun again. A momentary blindness. The mind plays tricks, I know this. I know the mind cannot be trusted.
And then I’m standing beside her, looking down. Her green eyes gazing up at me, and I tell myself: this is Emma. No one else. Not a look-alike, not a mirage, not my imagination. My knees go weak, my heart jumps, my breath leaves me. Emma.
The sun bright and sharp, blinding.
“Emma?”
My voice comes out wrong, not a whisper exactly, but something weak, high-pitched.
She doesn’t respond. She pulls her knees to her chest and hugs them, staring up at me.
I glance around, looking for adults who might be with her, but there are none. Just Emma sitting on a big green towel, alone.
And it is Emma. Isn’t it?
Not a dream of her. Her.
There are two other towels laid out beside her, an empty beer bottle, a plastic bucket and shovel set, a red Igloo ice chest. On top of the chest, a British rock magazine.
I kneel on the sand beside her. “Emma?”
No response.
“Emma?”
Again, nothing.
“Do you remember me?” I say.
For a few seconds she doesn’t move. Then she nods, slowly, her eyebrows forming into a frown.
Relief, confusion, a surge of overwhelming joy. The ground, unsteady beneath my knees. More than anything, I want to touch her, to put my hands on her face and know she’s really here. I reach out carefully and touch her cheek. She flinches.
My heart giving out. No words to say what I’m thinking. No way to believe what I’m seeing.
She’s too thin, her cheekbones too well defined, but her skin is brown and healthy. She has taken on the golden glow of summer children. There is something unfamiliar about her, something in her features that is not as I remember it. I try to place the difference, to name it—is it her eyes, the set of the mouth, a squaring of the jaw? Her hair is long, trailing down her back, almost to the ground. It’s lighter than it used to be, with streaks of auburn. She’s wearing a yellow dress printed with white flowers, too shor
t, not entirely clean.
“We’ve been looking for you,” I say.
I’m trying to control my voice, trying to be calm, trying not to frighten her, but the tears are coming, I can feel them on my face, fast and hot. The tears mingle with my suntan lotion, and my eyes burn.
She presses her lips together. Surprise, confusion, tears welling up in her eyes, too. “I’ve been waiting.”
“What?”
I’m imagining it, I tell myself. I’m imagining that this girl is Emma. And I’m imagining her words. “What did you say?”
“I’ve been waiting, Abby. Where were you? Where’s Daddy?”
Shock. Disbelief. This is Emma, sitting on the sand beside me. I wrap my arms around her, holding on. Sobbing, looking down at her face, Emma’s face, not believing. This little girl limp in my arms. On a beach, thousands of miles from home. I cannot trust in the reality of this moment, because it is too unbelievable to be true. Missing children do not come home. Detective Sherburne told me this. Jake told me this. Everyone told me, but I refused to believe. What comes home when a child goes missing are the remains, found many months or years or decades later. The child does not come home—not alive, not still a child, not with long beautiful hair and a tan. Not staring into your face, saying your name.
There are not so many real surprises in life. There are sudden deaths, of course, and the occasional twist of good fortune. But good surprises of the monumental sort—my mother always told me these things did not happen. And yet, here, now, is the proof: there are surprises, miracles. Emma on a beach in Costa Rica. Emma alive.
I lean back and stare into her face again. To be sure. Am I seeing clearly? Hearing clearly? But it’s her, I’m certain. Not a single doubt now, this is Emma. Impossibly, it is Emma.
I try to regain my composure and devise a plan. Among the nearby faces, no one looks familiar. Would I recognize the couple from the yellow van if I saw them now? Is that even who I should be looking for?
The Year of Fog Page 31
