Paola Santiago and the River of Tears

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  Her heart sank. If there were police at her house, that meant Emma still hadn’t been found. Pao’s brain calculated quickly. It was seven thirty, which meant Emma had been missing for thirteen hours and forty-five minutes. A car could have traveled almost a thousand miles by now….

  But Pao didn’t even know if Emma was in a car. She didn’t know anything. The variables were too many—and multiplying exponentially every additional moment her friend stayed missing.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have any cream,” Pao’s mom was saying. She wore a silky robe over a camisole and striped pajama pants. “But you’re all welcome to coffee.” Pao noticed that the mug her mom clutched was shaking slightly.

  Normally, Pao would have stood beside her for support, or at least given her a look across the room to make sure she knew they were in this together. But this morning, Pao’s mom avoided her gaze, the tension between them too great even with all these other people around.

  “Is this Ms. Santiago?” asked one of the officers. Neither of them was the cop she’d met at the station, and Pao wasn’t sure if that made her feel better or worse. At least she knew what to expect from Mustache Man.

  “I’m Pao,” she said, not offering her hand.

  “Officer James.” This guy was all business, with none of the sneering prejudice of the man from the night before, but still Pao didn’t trust him. Bigotry wore a lot of different faces—she knew that well, even though she hadn’t started seventh grade yet.

  “This is Officer Tyler,” the first cop said, introducing his partner. “We’ve discussed things extensively with Mr. and Mrs. Lockwood, but what we need from you two”—he gestured between Pao and Dante—“is to show us exactly where your meeting place was. We’d like to search the area, and canvass the route between there and the Lockwoods’ house to see if anyone saw the girl.”

  “Have you found anything?” Dante asked before Pao could.

  Señora Mata looked chastisingly at Dante, and Pao could almost hear her thinking that children should be seen and not heard.

  Officer Tyler, on the other hand, considered him speculatively. “Last night’s patrol didn’t turn up any clues. We’re hoping daylight will improve our chances.”

  “What are we waiting for?” Pao asked, marching toward the door without bothering to get dressed.

  Señora Mata hung back, clearly not up for the mile-and-a-half trek across the desert, and Pao thawed a little when her mom said, “No se preocupe, Carmela. You go on upstairs. I’ll look after Dante.” Pao felt a rush of gratitude toward her mom for hurrying the process along, but then of course she delayed them by insisting on getting dressed first.

  Two steps forward, one step back, Pao thought.

  Finally, they set out for the river, the officers asking Pao and Dante questions about their normal route and if anyone else knew about their gatherings.

  She and Dante answered as honestly as they could, but Pao didn’t think they were telling the police anything very useful. Her restlessness was back, feeling like little robotic insects skittering up and down her bones.

  No one was hurrying enough, and Pao couldn’t reveal the reason for her urgency: The nebulous connection her nightmare had drawn between the figure they’d seen and the Mesa kidnapper.

  “You okay?” Dante asked, snapping Pao out of dreamland.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Well, no. But yeah. You?”

  “Same,” Dante said. “Just…” He swiped a hand over his face. “What if we don’t find her?”

  “We will,” Pao said with conviction, even though she had no facts to back it up. They needed to believe right now.

  “This is it,” Dante announced to the adults when they reached their usual spot. The water lapped gently against the bank, and not far in the distance loomed the cactus field—a place that kids always pretended was haunted.

  They didn’t have to conjure up any monsters today, though. They were in a real, living nightmare.

  The officers asked for details: how far the trio normally strayed from this spot, what time they were supposed to meet, how long they waited, why they hadn’t called Emma or her parents sooner.

  “The Lockwoods mentioned you were supposed to meet them at the station,” Officer Tyler remarked, looking at his notes. “Why didn’t you come?”

  “We did!” Pao said, instantly heated. “But that cop with the mustache threw us out! He said we were telling ghost stories.”

  Tyler’s eyes widened, and he conferred with James in whispers.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Tyler finally said. “O’Brien can be a little…overzealous.”

  Pao thought racist pig was probably a better way to describe him, but she had learned enough from her mom to keep that particular opinion to herself.

  Tyler and James excused themselves to take photos of the scene. Trying to cool her temper, Pao took a few steps away, the memory of her dream taking hold as she moved closer to the water. She knew it was her imagination getting the better of her, but the riverbank felt sinister even in the light of morning. Pao could swear there was a remnant of a green glow. She imagined she could see the mysterious guy with the pixelated face, light spilling from his hands….

  Her mom peered at her sharply, and Pao shook herself. It was just water and sand and the overactive imagination of a girl who was raised on bedtime stories about drowned children.

  In the sandy earth, Pao could see the imprint of the picnic blanket from last night and the footprints where she and Dante had paced their worries into the ground. Their trio had spent so many evenings here, Emma redoing Pao’s messy braids with her patient hands, the three of them taking turns gazing through the telescope while Emma made up her own names for the constellations and Pao corrected her with the real ones.

  Would they ever sit there again? Would Pao get to confide in her best girl friend about her changing feelings toward her mom?

  Tears pricked her eyes, but Pao refused to let them fall. They would find Emma. They just had to.

  “How often do you come here?” asked Officer James, finally pulling out a notepad and a pen.

  Pao and Dante glanced at each other guiltily. “Once a week or so,” Pao said. “We never go in the water, though!” she added hastily when her mom scowled.

  “They’re not allowed near the river,” Pao’s mom said to the officers. “I had no idea—”

  “It’s the best place to see the stars,” Pao explained, trying her best not to sound whiny. “And it’s so hot everywhere else….”

  “Has Emma ever expressed interest in swimming in the river?” Officer James asked, getting back to the subject at hand.

  “No!” Pao said emphatically. “We all remember what happened to Marisa. We know it’s too dangerous. Emma would never have gone in.”

  Pao’s eyes drifted to the riverbank again. She’d seen the silhouette just over there. Had he—

  “That’s all we need for now,” the officer said.

  “Wait!” Pao said, feeling her anger reignite. “Don’t you want to check out where the guy was?”

  “What guy?” Tyler asked.

  “Last night I told the cop—O’Brien—that we saw someone,” Pao said. “Right over there.” She pointed.

  Tyler shifted toward his partner, flipping through his notebook. “I don’t have anything about that,” he muttered to James, but Pao heard him anyway.

  “Because he cut me off before I could finish,” she said, her temper flaring again. The officers’ expressions were neutral, so Pao couldn’t tell if they believed her or not. “I did see a guy, I swear,” she continued, wishing she were wearing something more grown-up than space pajamas. “In the reeds by the river.” She gestured in the general direction, but neither officer even turned.

  “Did he speak to you?” Tyler asked.

  “Well, no,” Pao said. “I don’t think he saw us.”

  “And you didn’t think to ask him if he’d seen your friend?”

  “I’m sorry,” Pao’s mom interjected.
“Did you just ask a twelve-year-old girl why she didn’t approach a strange man at night? The answer is pretty obvious.”

  The look on the officer’s face heated Pao’s anger to red-hot. He was clearly trying to decide if her mom was stupid, or dangerous, or both. Even though Pao and her mom weren’t exactly seeing eye to eye right now, she couldn’t stand for that.

  “Dante and I wanted to get home and call Emma,” she said, drawing attention away from her mom, her heart fluttering like a hummingbird in her chest. “We still didn’t know she was missing then. Just that she didn’t show up.”

  “Can you describe the man in more detail?” James asked, though he wasn’t taking any notes.

  “He was short—about my mom’s height—but I didn’t see much else.” The dream screamed from her subconscious, demanding that she make the connection. But she couldn’t.

  “Skin color? Hair color? Any identifying marks or tattoos?”

  Pao tried to remember. “His hair was longish? He was in silhouette, so—”

  Tyler cut her off. “We could try to find and question him,” he said, “if you could remember what he looked like.”

  But Pao knew he was just being polite. He didn’t believe the man had really been there.

  “I saw him, too!” Dante said, tearing his haunted gaze away from the water and stepping up beside Pao, his fists clenched at his sides. “You have to believe us. Do you even want to find Emma?”

  “I suppose you can’t identify this mystery figure, either?” Tyler asked, narrowing his eyes when Dante didn’t answer. “This isn’t a cop show, kid. We need evidence. Facts. We can’t just go knocking on doors asking if anyone with longish hair took a totally legal stroll by the river last night.”

  As infuriating as it was, Pao knew he was right. Dante remained silent. Without a description, their information was useless.

  The restless buzzing she’d felt last night was back, the same sensation that had made her go all supernova and break her mom’s velita. Without waiting for permission, or for anyone to follow, Pao stomped toward the reeds opposite the spot she’d seen the silhouette, feeling her mom’s eyes on her like a tractor beam preventing her from going too far.

  She ignored their pull. Maybe she’d find some footprints—something to prove she hadn’t made it all up. Real evidence that the person she’d seen wasn’t one of her mother’s ghosts.

  There was nothing.

  Pao yanked on a piece of river grass in frustration, wincing when its razor-sharp edge sliced her hand. It stung, and suddenly Pao wanted to lie down on the sandy bank and cry herself to sleep like a child.

  Blood trickled out of the cut, dotting her palm like a string of beads. Her bright red blood and dark brown skin blurred together as her eyes filled with tears. But when she blinked and refocused, she spotted something red by her feet, too.

  Pao felt her heart kick into high gear.

  It isn’t blood, she thought, almost deliriously. Any drops would have soaked right into the ground. Pao bent down to investigate, and it was like the dream’s current had caught her again….

  Because there, in the sand, lay Emma’s ruby ring.

  The police got very tight-lipped after Pao turned over the ring. She tried her million-questions routine, but it was clear she and Dante had reached the limit of their usefulness as far as the grown-ups were concerned. They didn’t tell her a thing.

  What does this mean? she asked herself. Had there been something to her dream after all? Pao’s subconscious making a connection she couldn’t prove with facts?

  It happens, she told herself. It’s neuroscience, not magic.

  But dream science was still frustratingly nebulous, as Pao had learned in her years of reading about nightmares. There was nothing she could say about her dream that wouldn’t make her sound totally batty.

  So she didn’t mention it to anyone. Even though it continued to nag at her.

  The police left to go back to the station, where they said they would get their resources together to begin an organized search. They told her reassuring things they couldn’t back up. Pao knew the truth: The police didn’t know any more than she did.

  Pao’s mom was due at the bar by noon, to work a double shift. “Would you rather I stay home today?” she asked Pao. “I could call in sick.” But Pao saw the lines around her mother’s eyes grow more pronounced as she offered—probably at the thought of losing out on tips.

  “I’ll be fine, Mom.”

  “Pao can hang with me and my abuela until you’re back,” Dante chimed in as the polite tiptoeing between mother and daughter threatened to become awkward.

  “Aren’t you supposed to play soccer at the park?” Pao asked him, trying to keep the bitterness out of her tone.

  Dante gave her a look that said Don’t be ridiculous, and even in the midst of the world’s worst circumstances, Pao felt a tiny ray of light break through the clouds.

  “Oh, thank you,” Pao’s mom said, also reading Dante’s expression. She hugged him impulsively. “And thank your grandma for me, too.”

  As glad as Pao was not to be alone, once they were back in Dante’s room, she could barely breathe. The PlayStation stayed off, and the ceiling fan uselessly stirred the sultry afternoon air. The last thing Pao wanted to do was sit there doing nothing.

  Ignoring the pile of as-yet-to-be-folded laundry on the floor and the milk crates of comics stacked everywhere, she paced the room as Dante threw a mini basketball against the wall again and again. The pounding was driving her crazy, but she didn’t have the heart to tell him to stop—not after he’d given up his soccer game to stay with her.

  Everything changed when I found the ring, she thought. Pao’s discovery of hard evidence that Emma had been at the riverbank—a precious belonging she never would have left behind voluntarily—made her friend’s disappearance real.

  And serious. Pao was well acquainted with the looks adults gave kids when they didn’t think they could handle something, and today, after the ring, she’d seen it on three faces at once.

  “I had a dream,” Pao finally blurted out. Dante stopped throwing the ball and looked at her. She’d never told him about her nightmares before. But this felt too important to keep to herself, and who could she trust besides Dante?

  “Okayyy…”

  “Before Emma disappeared, I dreamed about a hand coming out of the river, and it had her ring on it,” Pao said, the words bumping into one another as she spat them out too fast. “And then, last night, I dreamed that the guy we saw by the river was the same one from the news. You know…the Mesa kidnapper.”

  Dante’s eyes were wide by the time she finished. He didn’t say anything at first.

  “It’s probably a coincidence, right?” Pao asked. “I mean, dreams are just electrical impulses that take things from our memories. It’s nonsense. I shouldn’t have—”

  “You gotta admit it’s kind of weird, though,” Dante cut in, looking even more worried now.

  “Yeah,” said Pao, biting her fingernails. “I guess.”

  Silence fell between them. Pao so intensely regretted bringing up her dreams, it was like a physical sensation. She might as well have quoted her mom: Dreams are visions that have a purpose in our greater journey. It was so unscientific. Dante probably thought she was an idiot.

  When he mentioned lunch, Pao wasn’t hungry at all, but she dragged her feet across the root-beer-brown carpet anyway just for something to do, dreading the pitying looks of another grown-up who wouldn’t tell them anything important. Not to mention having to sit across from Dante while he regretted skipping soccer with his cool friends to hang out with the town weirdo.

  But Dante’s abuela wasn’t in the kitchen. True to form, Señora Mata had left the TV blaring and food out on the “dining room” table. But when Dante called, “Abuela?” there was no answer from her bedroom.

  He shrugged, but Pao could tell he was nervous. Everything felt off today. His abuela rarely left the apartment—only to go shoppi
ng at the grocery down the block and to play ¡Bingo en español! every Saturday at the community center.

  They were picking at their reheated chicken enchiladas, when the local news jingle played from the television. Pao’s heart raced. Would they report on Emma’s disappearance? Pao snapped to attention, appreciating Dante’s silence as the anchor began to speak.

  “Silver Springs is reeling today over the disappearance of a twelve-year-old girl,” came the first sentence, and the blood pounding in Pao’s ears made the voice sound far away. Pao felt rather than saw Dante move his chair next to hers. His presence was comforting, despite her embarrassment over confessing her dreams.

  “Emma Lockwood was last seen by her parents, Connor and Karen Lockwood, yesterday evening, when she left home to meet two school friends near the notoriously dangerous Gila River, the site of a drowning just last year.”

  The scene cut to a shot of the Gila, which looked more ominous than ever, dark and agitated in the late-afternoon light, while the anchor told of the many drownings that had taken place in town since its founding a hundred years ago.

  Pao took another bite of her enchilada, but it felt like she was chewing cardboard.

  “Police spent the morning investigating the possible site of Ms. Lockwood’s disappearance, and a personal item of jewelry was discovered there….”

  “Yeah! By me!” Pao yelled at the TV, standing up too quickly, her knee colliding with the table. Dante grabbed her hand to pull her back down, and when she sat, he kept holding it. If her heart had been racing before, it now felt like it was trying to escape her rib cage.

  But she didn’t take her hand away. Even though his was kind of sweaty.

  “Those of you following the recent disappearances in Mesa may recognize a pattern. Each of the five victims—all under the age of thirteen—was wearing expensive jewelry at the time of their abduction. There hasn’t been any word yet from the Silver Springs police about a possible connection, but Maricopa County sheriffs plan to take over the local investigation starting tomorrow….”

  “Pao…” Dante said, pointedly not looking at their hands, which were still linked between their chairs. “Did you know that, about the victims and jewelry? Maybe that’s why you saw the ring in your dream….”