by Anna North
“You got to have a pass.” He took a step to the right and swayed a little—Darcy realized he might be high. She felt frustration whirring inside her like insects beneath her skin.
“How do I get one?” she asked.
“You got to request an application by mail. Then you fill it out, then they consider it for four to six weeks or so. Then they let you know.”
“I don’t have time for that. Isn’t there a quicker way?”
The guard rubbed his eyes, then looked over his shoulder and held out his right hand. Darcy checked the pockets of her jumpsuit. All she found was five dollars, just enough for the bus ride home. If she gave it up she’d have to walk all the way back, and it would take her at least three hours. Still, she didn’t know what else to do, so she offered him the money. The guard looked at her like she’d made an especially stupid joke. He pointed to her neck.
“What about that?” he asked.
Her hand went up reflexively to clutch the necklace. She hadn’t thought about her attachment to it before—she hadn’t known her grandmother, and her mother hadn’t presented it to her as anything with any value. In fact she couldn’t remember her mother saying anything about it, after the initial explanation. Her own feelings for it were nonverbal—she had a visceral desire not to give it up.
“I can get more money for you later,” she said, “if you let me in now.”
The guard didn’t even bother to respond—he just raised an eyebrow to show he wasn’t buying it.
Darcy held the charm in her hand. She resisted the urge to suck on it. What was she afraid of? She would find her mother soon, and they would laugh about it—her hesitation over something so silly. She unclasped the necklace and handed it to the guard—his fingers were clammy as they brushed along hers. He undid the rusty latch, and the gate swung open with a sound like crying.
The path to the building was made of ground-up mainland trash, leftovers from the landfill project that had built out the coastline when the first-boaters came. The pieces were timeworn and rain-winnowed, and they shifted under her feet like pebbles in a stream. Here and there she saw a red or bright blue flash, bits of pigment left over from a time when no one had yet imagined this place, this road.
The Persephone Pearls office was silent except for the breathing of a single woman sitting at a desk. On the wall hung a chart with names and tally marks—the number of pearls found that week maybe, or that month. Her mother had the most tally marks of anyone. Next to the chart was a window that looked out at the ocher sea. The patrol boats sat on the horizon, their outlines furred by the rain.
“I’m looking for Sarah Pern,” Darcy said.
The woman didn’t look at Darcy. She was staring at a map. Her desk also held a slide rule, a pencil, and a drawing of a broad-faced child. The woman made a mark on the map with the pencil. Then she looked up for a second.
“Sorry?” she said.
“I’m looking for Sarah Pern.” Darcy started to explain why, but she felt tears roughening up her throat. “Did she come to work yesterday?”
The woman looked down at the map again. It showed the eastern coast, with a big orange area drawn around it—solvent contamination. The woman made another mark just outside this area.
“Excuse me,” Darcy said.
“Just a minute,” the woman answered. She stared at the orange area until Darcy couldn’t believe she was still staring, until she felt like she had fallen down a hole in time at the bottom of which was this woman, ignoring her forever. Then she lifted the map, looked at a list underneath it, and said, “She was here yesterday.”
She put the map back down, erased the second mark and made a new one slightly to the left.
“Do you know if her dives went okay?”
“No.”
Panic poured from the edges of Darcy’s brain into the center again.
“What happened?” she asked.
“No, I don’t know if her dives went okay. I don’t have that information available.”
Darcy’s hands were shaking. She felt the tears building behind her eyes.
“Well, could you check? It’s important.”
The woman was writing on the map again. Darcy wanted to hurt her. She wanted to open her lips and yank words out of her throat, like pieces of lodged food.
“Please?” she said.
“I don’t have that information available.”
A membrane broke inside Darcy and she began to sob. Her breath was shaking up through her throat and her eyes were running and the inside of her nose was getting wet. In school she had seen other girls cry and get what they wanted—a passing grade in the class, a citation for solvent huffing reluctantly torn up. They must have known some secret, some way to make sympathy where none existed before. This woman should want to help her, Darcy thought. She had to.
“Please,” Darcy said again. “My mom is missing. I don’t know where she is.”
“Look,” the woman said. “I have to code a hundred of these pearl maps every day, and if I’m even one short I get fired. I don’t have time to talk to you, or anyone. Other people have problems too, okay?”
Darcy didn’t move. She looked at the drawing of the child and knew that the woman probably had to work hard to feed him, but she didn’t have any room to sympathize with anyone else. After she had stood in one spot crying long enough that she began to choke, the woman’s face softened.
“Go ask the divers,” she said. “They might know something.”
Darcy walked out onto the dock. The Seaboard was soggy with rainwater and gave a little under her feet; she left half-inch-deep prints on the boards behind her. Four cleats, made of rusted salvage metal, poked out of the dock surface. On both sides of the dock lapped the burnt-orange, sour-smelling sea. About fifty feet out, where the waves turned blue and safe again, a little diving dinghy was anchored. A spotter in a yellow rain hat and slicker was crouching in the prow. Darcy waved at her, and she seemed to shade her eyes and look at Darcy through the rain, but then she turned away and the dinghy didn’t move. Darcy shouted, and waved some more, and her shouts grew ragged and panicky, but the spotter showed her the back of her rain hat, and didn’t budge.
Darcy sat down on the dock. Rain sluiced over the bridge of her nose and pooled in her lap. Her jumpsuit was completely waterlogged. Darcy wondered what it felt like when her mother wore her wet suit. Did it feel clammy like this? Or was it like being invincible, like walking through fire without getting burned? Was she wearing her wet suit now?
Then something moved close to the horizon, something at first like a bug crawling on the sea, and then like a mouse, and then fast and gray and oblong: another boat. It slowed as it passed the dinghy, and the man at the wheel seemed to speak with the spotter. Then it sped up again, and cut through the rain-pocked water, and pulled up to the dock in the middle of a phlegmy wake. It was a good boat, with a steering wheel and a Seaboard roof over the front. The man wore a green Seaguard’s uniform. He was young, pale and pink-lipped. Darcy called out to him before he cut the motor, and she had to call again to make herself heard.
“Yeah, I know Sarah,” he said. “She’s practically the only diver who’s ever nice to me.”
He stepped out onto the dock and opened a green Seafiber umbrella over the two of them. Darcy felt the reprieve from rain like taking off an uncomfortable shirt.
“Did you see her yesterday?”
“Yesterday?” he said. “God, I can’t remember. The last couple of days have been so crazy.”
“Crazy how?”
He gave her a petulant look.
“The attack,” he said, “obviously.”
“Right, sorry.”
“That is so typical,” he said. “The one time—the one time—I actually do something, people just forget right away. You know what the divers call us? Fish-watchers! It’s not even funny. It doesn’t even make sense. They’re the ones who are down there looking at fish. I’m trying to protect the island, and when I finally g
et a chance to show how totally necessary and important that is, people ignore it. Sarah’s the only one who cares. Where is she, anyway? They said she’s not diving today.”
She was so happy to find someone who actually cared about her mother that she could overlook his whining, his insistence that people take him seriously for a job he did once every ten years. The Seaguards got paid more than any of the other guards—more even than the members of the personal force that guarded the wall between Tyson’s headquarters and the north edge of Manhattanville.
“Actually, I’m trying to find her. She’s my mom. Can you try to remember if you saw her yesterday?”
“Let’s see,” he said. “Usually I say hi to her when I’m done with my shift, around now, but when the attack happened, I didn’t see anyone until almost dark, and all the divers were waiting for us on the dock—at least this one time they actually congratulated us, but you could tell they didn’t like it. They were pissed that we were actually heroes. There was July, and Elena, and Lisbet, and the new one, Icestorm or something, I forget, and Sarah was there, she was asking me questions like always, she wanted to know what it was like. And I told her it was just like they said it would be in training, everything was just like that. Except the boat was maybe a little smaller than in the drawings. But it just came out of nowhere, going really fast. Or pretty fast anyway. The Japs probably wanted to surprise us by coming around and attacking the east side. But we were ready—before they even got a shot off it was ‘Fire main torpedo, fire secondary torpedo, fire cluster bomb,’ and they were gone. Nothing but scrap metal. It’ll be another ten years before they try that again.”
He paused for a moment, considering.
“Except you can never be sure, obviously. They could come again tomorrow, we don’t know.”
“Wait,” Darcy said, “but that was two days ago. Did you see Sarah yesterday?”
“I’m getting to that,” he said. “Ordinarily I come in at eight a.m., but yesterday we had a debriefing in the morning and I came in at ten a.m., and July and Elena ignored me as usual, like I didn’t just save their asses the day before, and then, yeah, Sarah said hi to me as I was heading out, nothing big, but you could tell she was grateful.”
“Did she say anything else?” Darcy asked. “Did she mention going anywhere?”
He put his hand to his chin, childlike.
“Nothing like that,” he said, “but she did seem nervous. Or more like really energetic, like she was extra excited to be at work that day.”
“Thanks,” Darcy said. “If you think of anything else, will you send me a letter?”
“Sure,” the guard said. “I hope she comes back soon. You should ask the land guards about her. They’re not as smart as us, but they still might help you.”
“You mean like the guy at the gate?” Darcy asked.
“No, that guy’s a solve-head. Go to the Eighteenth and Avenida station. Some of the guys there are halfway decent.”
He turned to walk down the dock.
“Wait,” Darcy said, “do you have something to write down my address?”
“Don’t worry,” the guard said, “we have everyone’s address. I can just look you up.”
The guard station at Eighteenth and Avenida was next to a taco stand. Every time the wind changed, the gamy, artificial smell of imitation goat washed over the people squatting in the packed waiting room, and the women waved their hands in front of their faces and the children pinched their noses and the men looked out the little windows at the rushing late-afternoon street. Every few minutes someone new came in—occasionally a convict with plastic handcuffs and a guard at his back, but more often a visitor or supplicant like Darcy, face shivering with brittle hope, shoulders squared into a shape of long waiting. The line made space for each arrival—men scooted closer to one another along the mousegray Seaboard wall, women offered GreenValley Picante Snacks from yellow bags, children adjusted their play to the new shape of the crowd. Over and around Darcy ran the intertwining skeins of group conversation, a long braided murmur of worry. The walls of the room were covered with fresh Seafiber flyers explaining protocols for future attacks—evacuate the beaches, head for designated inland safe houses—but no one seemed to be talking about them. Most of these people were here about a son or daughter or sister or brother who had gotten into trouble, some young person stuck to the flypaper of the criminal justice system. Darcy had snorted solvent and stolen razor blades like any Little Los Angeles teenager, and she had even worked for a dealer for a little while, but she’d never been arrested. Once you were, even if they released you, you were never really out. You’d never get a legit job again, and the guards would haul you in every time anything bad happened in your neighborhood, whether you’d done anything or not.
A man in a blue land-guard uniform came down the line and all the people stopped their conversations and put on their official faces. He passed over an old lady with a small child, a man chewing seaweed tobacco, and a boy no older than twelve who began shouting about his sister. Then he motioned to Darcy to follow and she walked out of the waiting room. A collective grumble of injustice filled the space where she had been. The guard was young and broad and tall, with a smooth open face and wide hands. Darcy followed him down a narrow hallway with lots of doors. She heard a yelp like an animal being kicked. Then they went down a set of stairs, and another set of stairs, and the guard led her into a private room. He handed her a box of soft Seafiber tissues.
“Would you like coffee or anything?” he asked her.
He had a posh accent, second-boat lilt mixed with sharp Manhattanville consonants. Darcy imagined his family’s nice apartment, the antique photos on the walls, the separate beds for everyone. The kids Darcy went to school with all said the guards were useless, preppy not-quite-rich kids who just wanted to bust you for solvent or keep you from hanging out in the nice neighborhoods. But she liked this man’s easy calm. Someone with nothing will never help someone else with nothing, but he had money and power and information and security—surely he could spare some of that for her.
“No thanks,” she said. “I just want to find out about my mom. Her name is Sarah Pern. Has anyone seen her?”
“I’m going to find that out for you,” he said. “First we’ll take your statement, then we’ll cross-reference it with all the reports we’ve gotten since she went missing. We should have some information for you very soon.”
He pulled out a folding chair for her at a little rickety table. The walls were lined with bookcases full of bound records. One small high window let in the view of the rain.
“Thanks,” she said. “Nobody’s really been able to help me.”
“That’s what we’re here for.” He smiled. He had nice, white teeth. “Now, can you tell me when your mother went missing?”
“She didn’t come home last night. I woke up this morning and she wasn’t there.”
“And did she say anything? Anywhere she might’ve been going?”
“Nowhere,” Darcy said. “Where would she go?”
He nodded seriously and wrote something down on a pad.
“Had she been behaving unusually lately? Any signs of depression?”
“What do you mean?” Darcy said. The yellow walls came down again. She had not noticed that they were gone. “Do you mean do I think she killed herself? She didn’t kill herself.”
“Of course not.”
He shifted his chair closer to her and spoke in a lower voice.
“It’s just important for us to know about any mood changes. It will help the investigation.”
The yellow faded slightly. Darcy wondered if she would know if her mother was depressed. Sometimes she saw flyers at the bus stop, in English and Spanish, with a drawing of a sad woman in bluish ink, and a number you could call. But often the flyers had rude things scrawled on them, and Darcy didn’t know anyone who had called the number. The only people she knew who even used the word “depressed” were the nurses at World Experiences
, referring to the patients who stared at the wall all day—to earn the word, you had to be able to afford someone to look after you.
She did know people who had killed themselves—DJ Lopez had jumped out the window of his family’s apartment building in eighth grade, while high on solvent, and Joelle Thompson, who had come to school with bruises all up and down her neck and face every week after she turned thirteen, had slit her wrists the following year. But Sarah didn’t do solvent, and nobody was hitting her. And if the life seemed to leave her eyes sometimes and go somewhere Darcy couldn’t reach, it always came back again.
“She seemed fine to me,” Darcy said.
He wrote on the pad.
“Did anything unusual happen in the days before her disappearance?”
“Well, there was the attack I guess. And a woman came over,” Darcy said. “I’d never seen her before.”
The guard wrote several lines.
“That’s very interesting,” he said. “That will be very helpful. Now, the most important thing you can do is be calm. When something like this happens, people often feel very isolated, very alone. But we are here to help you. Just leave everything to us.”
Darcy was confused. Why wasn’t he asking her more about the woman? She wanted to spend hours here, telling him everything about her mother. She wanted to give him so much information that he couldn’t help but find her.
“The woman had a round face,” Darcy went on. “It looked kind of puffy. Her hands shook.”
“Sure,” the guard said, “just leave everything to us.”
He was smiling, and past his shoulder Darcy saw a pair of shoes pass by the window; it must be just above the level of the street. Someone would have to lie down on the sidewalk to look in. The guard scooted closer to her and began rubbing her back with one of his large hands. Darcy looked at the pad in front of him and saw that it was full of doodles and squiggles, no writing at all. The yellow walls came down hard and she heard a ringing in her ears. He leaned over and began to kiss her. His mouth was smooth. His breath tasted like mint powder. He was trying to put his tongue between her lips. Her thoughts split apart and began to run along parallel tracks. One track wanted to push him away, wanted no one and nothing to touch her until she found her mother, and especially not this man, who should be helping her, who should not be invading the salty private space of her mouth with his slick mint tongue like a bar of soap.
