The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  Mirabel couldn’t say when the angel had come to pick up her sister.

  Justine had vanished from the shuttle pack without a trace between the curb and the front door.

  More questions would be asked, the detective assured Samarra. Background checks would be done, and the area canvassed for witnesses.

  Word reached Samarra through the detective’s partner that Allan’s mother and father had volunteered to take the other two children, and Allan, with them, and warned that Samarra was not quite right, that she had funny ideas and encouraged the children to think odd things, and they’d never favored the marriage, and the police should investigate Samara’s equally bizarre brother, Reynaldo, and perhaps check to see where the rest of her family was, and if they’d made any sudden trips to the area.

  Samarra couldn’t speak through the ruins of her broken heart when the partner asked how she felt about what the family said. Her own mother and father were no longer around to defend her, and the rest of the family never followed them out of the old country to make a life in the new world. She knew them only as blurry faces from old photographs taken in stark, empty places.

  That night, Samarra read to her children from 1001 Arabian Nights, as if she could keep them with her through the power of simple storytelling. By the time she was done with “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” with its magical door to treasures, Rey and Maribel were both asleep. She kept reading to herself through the night, in the girls’ room, with Rey now in Justine’s bed. Sleep seemed more distant than the magic of djinn, on the other side of a door she could not open.

  Allan’s parents rented a suite at a nearby hotel. He’d heard what they’d said and refused to let them stay in the guest room. They argued during a visit to the house, with Allan standing up to their demands to take the children out of the house. The plainclothes officer assigned to the family during the investigation threatened to report them all to child protection services.

  “It wasn’t Samarra’s fault,” Allan said, pleading for belief.

  “The angel was beautiful,” Mirabel said once, but no more about angels after her grandmother told her to stop. She drew disconnected lines on the bandage covering the wound on her arm, as if completing the picture she’d started on her skin, and mumbled stories Samarra recognized from bedtime readings.

  “Where’s the box?” Rey asked his mother

  “Baby, did you make it? Please, be honest with Mommy. Did you?”

  “No. I want to make one. I have to see it.”

  “Sorry, baby. It’s gone.”

  The last word rang like a bell inside her chest. She grabbed the boy and held him close to make the hollow ringing inside her go away, until he fidgeted and wormed his way free.

  The detective focused on Mirabel as the only witness to what had really happened. He talked about her as the sole survivor of a traumatic incident, and he had a police department child psychologist conduct an interview to see if anything might come of tests performed with pictures and words and games with dolls.

  When they came home from the interviews, Samarra said to them, “We’ll get Justine back.” She squeezed their hands as she took them past the police guard and said, “I won’t let anything happen to you. Not a thing.”

  The children didn’t ask about their sister, what had happened to her, when they’d go back to school, why people were watching the house. They went to their rooms and their own worlds, as if they were only waiting for what they knew was going to happen next.

  Samarra clung desperately to what she thought was their certainty that Justine would be back.

  Three days after Justine’s disappearance, and after a long talk with the lead detective, Allan relented and let his mother have Mirabel for an overnight visit, balancing his concern for both families by asking Reynaldo to pick up Rey.

  “The police don’t think our families are a threat,” Allan said, slowly, carefully, as if still trying to understand everything he’d been told. “They hope a change of scenery might shake something lose for the kids. Maybe they’ll open up to someone besides us and cops. According to that psychologist, it hasn’t quite sunk in for them that Justine is gone.”

  Samarra felt the hole through which Justine had fallen grow wider. “I want them here. With me.”

  “Just for the night,” Allan said, almost touching her hand, but not quite. “There’ll be cops posted. They’ll be safe. They need to get away from the craziness here. And you need the rest.”

  In response to Samarra’s shivering silence, he added, “Anything to get Justine back.”

  As the weight of the house’s emptiness settled over them that night, Allan suggested they take a drive through the neighborhood, just in case. The subtle growl of the car’s engine and the wind’s gentle keening at the windows filled the quiet space between them. Allan drove with his fists clenched around the steering wheel, eyes red, lips pursed. Samarra studied the shadows and alleys, and had Allan stop at every Dumpster so she could look in. Just in case.

  Later, after they’d come home, Samarra sat in the living room alone in darkness, as she’d done every night since Justine was gone. This time, there was no officer sitting in the kitchen, no security car outside. She couldn’t watch her sleeping children from the doorway to their rooms. She listened as always to the latest string of condolences, offers for help, tips, Meg’s update on the boutique, instead of trying to sleep. She heard Rey screaming with laughter in the background when Reynaldo called to say her son was negotiating with the spirits. Mirabel called, whispered, “Don’t be scared, Mommy,” as if she was doing something her grandmother had forbidden. Allan’s father later left a message to say everything was fine and they were watching a movie with animated penguins.

  “No,” Samarra said, “let her tell you a story.”

  The litany of sadness weathered Samarra’s resolve until there was nothing left for her to feel except the raw truth: Justine was gone. Her little girl was all alone, somewhere, with someone who shouldn’t have her. Crying for her mother. Or worse.

  Samarra hungered for one of Justine’s good, truthful dreams. Or a sacred scribble from Mirabel. Even an impossible need from Rey to fulfill. A real and present taste of the miracle that were her children. Her belly and back ached with their missing weight.

  Maybe just Allan holding her for a little while, as a friend, as the father of their children, as the man she loved, would be enough.

  But she couldn’t bring herself to go to him. She had to save herself for her children. Even if she’d let one of them slip away.

  Allan hadn’t come down to her these past nights, perhaps for one of those same reasons. He left her alone this night, as well. She eventually went to bed but couldn’t feel Allan next to her, as if they’d been imprisoned in separate cells of shock and grief.

  The next morning, the detective’s partner came calling to say they were needed at the station.

  Samarra wept for the entire ride, knowing from the official silence that she was going to hear that Justine was dead.

  In a small, badly lit room that smelled faintly like a men’s locker room, the lead detective announced in a small, dead voice that Mirabel had disappeared from the hotel suite Allan’s parents had rented.

  Samarra screamed and for a moment could see or feel nothing, only hear her voice like the alien sound of a demon rising through her to answer for her against the unspeakable.

  When she’d regained her senses, two female police officers were holding her down in a chair. An emergency worker tended to Allan’s bloody face. She babbled, mixing questions with threats and pleas, as if by the force of her words she could change what had been said in the room, or maybe just bring Mirabel back.

  The detective was gone, replaced by a man in a darker, crisper suit who introduced himself with aggressive self-confidence as a federal agent. He assured them Rey had already been picked up from his uncle and was under protective custody. He was being transferred to a safe house used for special federal witnesse
s, and as soon arrangements were in place they’d be taken there to see the boy. As he spoke, fear drained Samarra’s determination to create another, far more sane, reality.

  There was no escaping a world in which two of her children were gone.

  The agent’s voice droned on, asking blunt questions about friends, family, enemies, that they’d already answered. She didn’t get angry when he asked if Allan was really Mirabel’s or Justine’s father. The DNA tests had already been ordered.

  She occupied herself with the calculus of loss, assessing whether or not both she and Allan were now each responsible for the disappearance of one of their children and if this somehow resolved the equation of their lives together.

  Allan didn’t look like himself with all the bandages covering his face.

  After running through his inventory of questions, the agent informed them that the hotel security cameras had not revealed Mirabel leaving her grandparents’ suite or the hotel. The police officer on duty downstairs had not seen anything unusual. The hotel staff was being interviewed and background checks were being performed, but so far, no leads had turned up. All the calls to the house would be reviewed, again.

  He presented them with a plastic bin of Mirabel’s effects: the clothes she’d worn that day, the change of clothes Samarra had packed for tomorrow, a stack of writing and drawings, on tissues, paper, cups and plates, bed sheets and pillow cases, taken from Mirabel’s room.

  Holding her daughter’s old clothes to her face, she smelled the ink, still fresh, from Mirabel’s signs and stories, mingled with her daughter’s scent. Samarra wanted to crawl into the lines Mirabel had left behind to see if they might lead her to where her daughter might be hiding.

  “Once upon a time,” Samarra whispered, as if beginning a story to entertain her children, “I had daughters.”

  Neither she nor Allan found anything that might lead the agent to their other missing daughter.

  “Is it that hard to find a six-year-old girl wandering around in her pajamas?” Samarra asked.

  When they were released, Allan asked to be dropped off at the hospital where his mother had been taken after she discovered Mirabel missing. Samarra went home. Someone would come by later to take them to the safe house to visit Rey.

  When she walked into the still house, everything inside of her twisted, as if a hand had closed around her guts and organs to rip them out.

  Allan never came home. Samarra didn’t care. She sat on the floor of the girls’ room under the blankets from their beds, as if they might crawl out from the folds and rejoin her. The police officer who came to pick her up to visit Rey said her husband had decided to stay with his father, in a different hotel. They’d already visited Rey in the safe house. It was her turn.

  She asked if Reynaldo could come along, and they picked him up on the way. She needed the strength of her own blood to get through so much emptiness. And in the company of her older brother, she could remember what it felt like to be a little girl, and in that resonance be close to her daughters, again.

  “That Fed thinks Allan’s family got something to do with all this,” Reynaldo whispered in the back of the car. He’d already shaken a small, straw figure smelling of sage in the air, “To ward of the electronics,” he’d assured her.

  “Good,” Samarra said. She sat forward, already thinking of things she could tell the agent about the way she’d been treated, about how that family could very well have had the children kidnapped to get them away from her. Could Allan be on it? A bitter drip of tears burned her eyes.

  “You know that’s not right.”

  “Why? How would you know?”

  “You don’t remember,” he said with sadness weighing down his words so they fell like anchors through a sea without currents.

  “What?”

  “Our brothers and sisters.”

  “We don’t have any.” Her brother was not just older, but near enough in age to be a real father to her. He’d always been a little crazy, though fiercely protective and generous. Now eccentricity was apparently slipping into dementia. She should have been paying closer attention; she’d missed this development.

  Another loss. In the depths of her solitude, Samarra felt chilled to the bone. Only Rey was left.

  “I told you I never wanted kids,” Reynaldo said.

  Letting the boy stay with his uncle had been a terrible mistake. She was lucky Rey hadn’t been taken in the night along with Mirabel.

  “I knew something like this would happen.”

  The boy didn’t need any more crazy ideas filling his head. He needed to hang on to the real world. Both of them did. Reynaldo’s spirit dolls and wild stories weren’t going to protect them.

  “Every war has its cost,” Reynaldo said. “Look at what happened to our family. Look at us.”

  Samarra spoke to the officer driving the car. He gave her a sharp glance, spoke quietly into a radio and listened to the scratchy reply, then drove Reynaldo back home.

  “You’re making a mistake,” Reynaldo said, leaning into the back seat while holding the door open.

  Samarra laughed at the echo of her own thoughts and shut the door.

  The blinders the driver had made Samarra put on were removed after the car stopped in front of a small wooden cottage at the end of a dirt road. The sea’s salt tang was sharp in the air, but the surrounding pines hid any trace of a world beyond the silent wall of their shadows.

  Rey was inside sitting at a card table in the middle of the living room, boosted by a couple of phone books so he could examine a pile of electronic parts. A woman sat with him in jeans and a blouse, badge at her hip, displaying a metal component with wires dangling like the arms of a dead squid while explaining its function in surveillance to Rey. The boy stared at each place her finger touched, as if absorbing secrets encoded in the matte black finish. Samarra had to call his name twice before he noticed her.

  “I can make this,” he said, after Samarra finally let him go. He pointed to the kitchen table, where the two other guardian agents sat drinking coffee in front of a few laptops with screens filled with live video feeds and quivering sensor lines. All three agents laughed.

  She stayed longer than her time limit, and sang songs with the boy she’d usually sing with Justine or Mirabel. She told him the stories from his favorite books while sketching the pictures that normally accompanied, as if channeling Mirabel. Then she made one up, about two or seven or twelve brothers and sisters in a far-off land, born to a great destiny, blessed with magical powers, yet lost, waiting for the moment of their purpose. Even the guards looked puzzled as she leapt from one part of the tale to the other, bending and twisting the story until she thought Justine was speaking through her from one of her dreams.

  Samarra gave up, to Rey’s exaggerated relief, and had dinner with him and the guards, and afterwards they watched a cartoon about penguins while she held him on her lap until the driver finally said she needed to go home.

  Reynaldo’s message lay waiting for her on the answering machine: “We were too young to be soldiers,” he said, his voice quavering. “Now we’re too old.”

  She hit the delete button.

  Sleep was a country to which she couldn’t travel. She expected the phone to ring any moment. When it finally did, she couldn’t pick up. A voice on the other end barked through the speaker between rings, telling her something that made her belly convulse again. The phone continued to ring, insisting. She couldn’t tell if it was the police or someone else offering condolences. Then the doorbell rang.

  In the first light of dawn, the agent who’d promised her son’s safety stood in her doorway, pale, visibly shaken, and said Rey was gone.

  So was Reynaldo. His front door had been left open. His keys and wallet were still in the apartment. The lights had been left on. The detective on the scene thought he might have gone out in his slippers.

  She was brought to an office in a glass office building and questioned, coaxed, comforted, threatened. She
answered every question she could, speaking through her tight fists squeezed against her mouth to keep from cursing and lashing out. But she couldn’t tell the agents where Reynaldo might have gone or who would have taken her children. She didn’t know. They asked her why he’d called her before vanishing. Her brother’s final, mad message were the family’s private shame and had no bearing on her lost children. She told them they’d talked about their own parents and the harsh life they’d had in the old country.

  The agents could not explain how their protection had failed Rey.

  The agents kept her through the day and into the night, but nothing they said reached through the fog of loss that had cut her off from the world. She couldn’t trust herself, her husband, or the authorities. There was no one left to help her. No one left, at all.

  In the night, she was released and taken home.

  Allan called. She let the machine take messages. He rambled, exhausted the time limit, called back again and again, leaving snippets of his guilt and anger on the digital machine. He’d spent the day with the agents, as well. He was being followed. Everyone he knew had been questioned. He felt humiliated. Missed the kids. Couldn’t go home. Not to the empty house. Where should he go to look for them, he kept asking. Who took them, he repeated, like another agent sent to besiege her. Why?

  Samarra nearly picked up the phone to tell him the house was not empty. But as her hand settled on the receiver, the lie poisoned her tongue and her fingers slipped from the plastic handset.

  She lay in the dark, heart jumping at every passing car in the street, every creak and knock in the house. She pleaded with the shadows to take her, the bed to swallow her, the walls or floor or closet to open and reveal that secret passage her children and brother had not been able to resist entering, perhaps knowing or hoping she’d be follow.

  When morning came, she was still in her sweat-soaked bed, cold and alone. When she saw herself reflected in the dresser mirror, she closed the drapes and covered every mirror in the house, never wanting to look into her own eyes, again.