Where I Lost Her

by T. Greenwood

  I look up at her. She’s the closest thing I have to a sister. She will know if I am lying.

  “What’s going on?” Effie asks, reaching for my hand. “I mean, other than this.”

  “He’s sleeping with a girl at work,” I say. Though this is not what is going on in my mind at all. This is not what is making my skin crawl, making my heart race and my head pound.

  Effie takes a deep breath and looks at the road again. Her eyes well up with tears.

  It takes me aback. This is not what I expected. I expected her to get angry. To say, What the fuck? That asshole.

  But instead, there are tears in her eyes.

  And something about seeing her crying, about how completely blindsided I am by her response, makes me want to cry too. She scoots across the seat, and puts her arms around me. I feel my body tremble and then the tears come. It feels like a dam has broken. And for some reason I think of that woman Effie told me about. The woman whose house was swept away in the raging river during the hurricane. I worry that if I’m not careful, I might be carried away as well. That I might just get caught up in this awful current. That I could drown.

  And so I pull back, wave my hands in front of my face, swatting away the tears.

  “It’s fine,” I say. As if words are enough to make that true. But it’s not fine. None of this is fine.

  “What are you going to do?” she asks. “Are you going to leave him?”

  It feels like someone has just sat on my chest. All of the air goes out of me.

  Jake and I have been together for almost twenty years. I barely remember who I was before I met him. In the last three weeks I have imagined a thousand scenarios about how all of this would play out, but in none of them did I imagine me leaving him. Where would I go? I’m afraid I don’t remember who I am outside of this anymore, outside of us.

  “God damn it,” she says then, wiping at her own tears with the back of her hand. And then she shakes her head, and gives me exactly what I need. “What the fuck, Tess? What an asshole. How did you find out? Did he tell you?”

  And I am so grateful for this, I feel myself starting to cry again.

  We go together into town. I am not ready to deal with Jake and the police and the media again yet. I just want to see the girls, to go get ice cream with Zu-Zu and Plum. To sit at a picnic table and ask them about their lives. I think about the rain boots, about my mistake. How could I have thought a ten-year-old’s boots belonged to a toddler? I want to study Plum, to know what ten looks like.

  Watching her grow up has been agonizing. Because of the girls, maintaining my friendship with Effie has demanded more from me than I knew I had. We had dreams, she and I. About our children, about watching them grow up together. I came here, not long after we received the referral from the adoption agency, proudly clutching the photo just as Effie had held on to the sonograms of her daughters. How was this different? It’s all dreaming then, isn’t it? It’s all imagining until it’s not anymore.

  We sat at the kitchen nook, and I unfolded the photo, pressed the worn creases flat with my fingers. We studied her, peered into her face, dreamed what her skin would look like. Zu-Zu was five at the time, but Plum was two. The same age as Esperanza. A living, breathing two.

  We would have shared everything, we promised. At exactly the same age, they would have been like sisters. They would have learned to ride a bike at the same time, how to tie their shoes, how to read. We would have taken them swimming in the lake with plastic floaties on their arms. They would have learned to climb the ladder to the tree house together, scurrying tentatively behind Zu-Zu, who would have loved Esperanza like a little sister. She might have held her hand. I thought about when they were older, when Plum would come to visit us in New York. How I would buy them matching dresses and take them to the Met to see the ballet. Effie and I joked that they would be Country Mouse and City Mouse. Esperanza would teach Plum how to ride the subway, the trick of the turnstile. She would teach her how to hail a cab and how to sleep in the sticky heat of our house, with the sounds of sirens and honking horns outside the window. She and Plum would grow up together the way Effie and I had.

  But then, one day I woke from the dream. And Plum became a ghost to me, the remembrance of what was lost. Of what should have been.

  We go to pick up Zu-Zu first. She takes ballet lessons at the same place where my mother sent me when I was little: Miss Gracie’s Dance Studio. Miss Gracie had little patience for me and my flailing limbs though; I didn’t make it through even the first year. This is where Effie’s sister, Colette, learned to dance as well. It’s a little converted garage off of Gracie’s house. Gracie’s oldest daughter, Sara, has taken over the studio now. Sara worked as a professional dancer for many years before coming home to help her mother.

  We stand at the window and watch as Sara adjusts Zu-Zu’s hips, gently turns her heel forward, her knee out. Taps her butt and then her stomach. Holds Zu-Zu’s head and tilts it a fraction of an inch. Sara motions for her to go to the center of the floor and searches for the music on her iPad. And then Zu-Zu is dancing the variation she’s been working on: the Lilac Fairy from Sleeping Beauty.

  She is thirteen years old, but her entire body seems to have a wisdom that far exceeds those years. Every muscle is informed by the music. I shake my head. She is not only perfect, flawless, and precise, but there is also such tender emotion imbued in every gesture, though it is nuanced. Controlled. If her movements were words, I’d describe them as articulate, but the prose of her limbs and spine are also, somehow, luminous.

  I turn to Effie and watch her watching her daughter. There is a moment when I realize that Effie doesn’t even remember that I’m here; she is so focused on this beauty before her. And it isn’t pride exactly that I see, but wonder.

  She turns to me, refocusing. As though she’s just woken up.

  I shake my head. “I had no idea,” I say.

  She shakes her head as well in disbelief.

  “I have to let her go, don’t I?” she asks.

  I nod. And then I remember why we are here. Jake and I have come to visit and then to bring Zu-Zu with us to New York. To deliver her to the teachers who will take this talent that is somehow both raw and refined and shape it further. We are going back to New York. Back to our house in Prospect Heights. Jake is going to go back to his job. Back to our lives.

  It feels far away now. So much has happened since I found the texts, since we loaded up the trunk with our suitcases and the treats for Effie and Devin’s girls. Since we drove in silence for three hundred miles. Since we sat outside under the twinkling lights strung in the trees, drinking wine, pretending nothing had changed when, in fact, nothing was the same. Between the time before the girl wandered out of the woods and disappeared back into them.

  What do we do now? How do we go on? It seems like my entire life has been a series of these strange moments, which have changed the entire trajectory of my life. A pinball in a machine, trying so hard to simply get from one place to the next, but at the mercy of the flippers and spinners and slingshots.

  Zu-Zu finishes the variation and then notices us in the window. She smiles, sweat beading up on her hairline. She motions for us to come in. Sara sees us and smiles as well, turns off the music, and opens the door.

  While Effie and Sara chat, Zu-Zu flops down on the floor to remove her pointe shoes. She slips them off and tosses them into her dance bag. She peels off her filthy toe pads, and wiggles her damaged toes at me.

  “Aren’t my feet pretty?” And she is thirteen again.

  I smile. “That is disgusting,” I say.

  Her feet in the shoes were beautiful, but now they look disfigured. Damaged. Boney-looking bunions, and pulsing veins. Her toes are callused and blistered. The nails cut short and one toe caked with dried blood.

  “I’ll see you in September,” Sara says, hugging her. “Remember, don’t be afraid of the Russian teachers. They just seem scary. Text me some pictures. And have fun.”

>   And then we are in the bookmobile again, all piled into the front seat.

  “Did they find her yet?” Zu-Zu asks, leaning her head against my shoulder as we pull out of the small parking lot. I turn and kiss her forehead. Her skin is salty.

  “No,” I say.

  “She must be really scared,” she says.

  She is old enough to understand all of the terrible things that could happen to the girl, and I can only imagine what she is thinking as she gazes out the window as we drive to the library.

  We drop off the bookmobile, get Effie’s car, and go to pick up Plum at her friend Maddy’s. They’ve been playing in the sprinkler. She is wet and muddy when she throws her whole body around me.

  “Can we please get ice cream?”

  And I am grateful she isn’t thinking about the little girl. That she is so easily distracted.

  Back at Gormlaith, I have Effie leave me at the search site. “I can drop off the girls at home and come back here,” Effie says.

  “No,” I say, turning and smiling at Plum, who has fallen asleep in the backseat of Effie’s car. She leans against Zu-Zu’s shoulder. Zu-Zu looks out the window, studies the yellow tape.

  “Stay with them. It looks like Devin’s still here.” I motion to his truck, which is parked down the road. “I’ll get a ride back with him and Jake.”

  There are only two police cruisers now. The news vans are still here though. A Fish and Game guy sitting in his truck. A fire truck and a half dozen cars I assume belong to the volunteers are parked on the edges of the road. I can hear the distant sound of leaves crushing under their feet, imagine them traipsing through the forest, looking under rocks, inside hollowed trees. The officer who spoke to the volunteers said that the search should start within a small perimeter and slowly grow wider. Imagine a pebble thrown in the water, he’d said. Start with the small circle and then span out in ripples.

  I get out of Effie’s car and stand in the road, aimless. The air is swarming with black flies. I swat them away, wish I’d worn spray. I remember noticing a rusty can of Off! on the windowsill in the guest cottage.

  Effie leans out of her open window. “You sure you don’t want to come back with us? We could go for a swim. Cool off a little? It keeps the black flies away anyway.”

  “I’m making brownies!” Zu-Zu says.

  I go to the passenger side, and she rolls down her window.

  “I’ll see you back at home in just a little bit,” I say. “Will you save me a corner piece?”

  Zu-Zu nods. I can see her eyes are glassy with tears.

  “Do you think they’ll find her?” she asks.

  I nod.

  “What if they don’t?” Plum says sleepily, rubbing her eyes. Yawning.

  My chest constricts. “We’ll all keep looking until we do. I promise.”

  This time, when I scramble down the embankment I am careful not to step into the little creek. No one seems to notice me as I slip into the woods. I follow what I think I remember as the path I took through the trees last night.

  It’s like I am now in a different place entirely though. And I wonder if I am somehow mistaken. Maybe this is not the spot at all. I look at the moss-covered log and can’t recall seeing it before. The area I stand in is not at all familiar. Even the strong smell of the woods seems different than it did last night. Was it really here?

  I close my eyes and try to visualize where I would go if I were a scared little girl. Where would I run? I try to imagine being four and terrified, alone. And something about this very act of imagining makes my heart begin to race. I feel sick. I wonder if this is some delayed nausea from the wine last night, my body only now remembering it ought to be hungover.

  I come to a small clearing where it looks like someone has recently had a campfire. There is a clumsy circle of rocks, the charred remains of a couple of logs in the center. Beer cans, cigarette butts. The air smells charred, feels charged. I don’t know which is worse: thinking that she is alone out here in the woods or that she isn’t.

  Panic informs every muscle of my body, and I feel like I might pass out. I sit down on the ground, feel the dampness from the needles and leaves seeping through the fabric of my shorts.

  I put my head in my hands, feel my blood pulsing in my temples.

  Then I see something on the ground, obscured by pine needles. Orange tip, plastic cylinder. I kick at it, uncovering it, and suck in my breath.

  It’s a syringe. What the fuck?

  And for one confused moment, I think of the needles. Of Jake, of that old futile ritual. But then I realize how absurd this is.

  I look around, as though whomever it belongs to might still be there. But I am surrounded by trees. Jesus Christ. I’ve seen discarded needles in New York, but here? What is wrong with people? I try to figure out how to pick it up, to dispose of it, without pricking myself. I think about the girl again, wandering around out here. Could whoever left it here have seen her?

  Then, as I bend over to pick it up, something touches my shoulder.

  “Jesus!” I say, sitting up, pressing my hand against my chest.

  It’s the psychic.

  “You okay?” she asks softly.

  I nod, gesture at the syringe on the ground. “Nice, huh?”

  “Shit,” she says, then rolls her eyes and shakes her head. She sits down on the moss-covered log next to me and stretches out her stubby legs.

  I swat at a mosquito that buzzes near my ankle.

  She reaches into a fanny pack she’s wearing and hands me something that looks like ChapStick. “It’s citronella oil and lavender. Put this on your wrists, and the bugs will leave you alone,” she says.

  I do as she says and hand it back to her. She smells powdery. Like church, I think strangely.

  “So have you, um . . .” I start, not having the vocabulary for this. “Seen anything? Like visions or whatever?”

  She smiles. “It doesn’t really work like that.”

  “Then how does it work?”

  She tilts her head, as if she is deciding whether or not she can trust me. I smile weakly. A poor assurance.

  “I’m mostly an empath,” she says. Her voice is deep, somber. “Which means that I am able to sense both the missing person’s emotions and bodily states. But I am also a psychometrist.”

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “That’s why I asked if you kept anything from her. I can gather information from objects. Things in the physical world. They can lead me to the person they belonged to.”

  I think of the sweater I left by the road. The tutu and boots. But there is nothing. I have nothing.

  “So if you don’t have an object, then how do you find her?”

  “Have you ever had déjà vu?” she asks.

  I nod. “Sure.”

  “It’s like that. Like a sensation. A vague feeling, but also sort of specific. Like trying to remember a dream.”

  “How does that help anybody?” I ask.

  “Well, dreams slip away; they get fuzzier and fuzzier the more you wake up. I’ve taught myself how to stay in that dream state long enough to hold on. To remember.”

  “Have you remembered anything then?” I ask.

  “A little. I see red, and water. I have the feeling of something being underground. But there’s a word I keep hearing too. Sharp.”

  “What does that mean?” And I think of the cut on her hand. The blood. The red could be blood?

  “I don’t know. It’s confusing. I also feel hunger and fear. I think she’s very afraid.”

  My eyes sting. This woman is a crackpot, but she’s all I’ve got.

  “Then you think she’s alive?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she says, and stands up, brushes the leaves from her ample bottom.

  “What are we supposed to do?” I ask, choking back tears now, feeling gullible and stupid.

  She shakes her head. “I guess just keep looking,” she says, bending over and gingerly picking up the syringe, which she seals inside
her fanny pack.

  We leave the woods together, make our way through the trees. Strickland is standing at the edge of the tree line, as if he’s been waiting for us.

  “There’s a campsite,” I say, a little breathless. “In the woods. Somebody’s been out there. We found beer cans . . .”

  “Yeah, lots of teenagers party in the woods here. No place else for them to go.”

  “We found a syringe,” I say.

  His eyebrow rises nearly imperceptibly, but then he just shrugs. “Drug of choice these days,” he says. “Listen, the lieutenant needs to speak with you.”

  When we fully emerge from the woods, I sense right away that something is very, very wrong.

  Then I realize what it is. It’s the silence. The helicopter has disappeared. The constant whir and buzz that I have grown oddly accustomed to since last night is gone, and the absence of sound feels like a hole. As I strain to hear, I realize that the wild sound of the dogs, the jangling of their tags, their insistent breath, has also faded.

  I feel anxious, panicked. My entire body is filled with a new, horrific fear.

  Even before I see Lieutenant Andrews motioning for me to join him at the edge of the road, I know what has happened.

  “Where is the helicopter?” I ask. “The dogs?”

  “We’re scaling back the search, ma’am,” he says.

  “What does that mean?” I say, and my voice sounds foreign to me, strange. Almost childlike. “You’re not looking for her anymore? It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours.”

  “I didn’t say that, ma’am,” he says, and smiles condescendingly. “I said we are scaling back the search. We’ve still got officers out. We’ve got divers scheduled at the lake tomorrow. But if I’m going to be honest with you, the story just doesn’t hold water.”

  Water. I think of the psychic. At least she believes me.

  “How so?” I say.

  “Any trouble going on with you at home?” the lieutenant asks.

  My eyes widen. I think of her, Jess, of her voice on the other end of the line. I shake my head. And I wonder if the lieutenant is some sort of empath too. “What the hell do you mean by that?”