“No,” they all said. “We haven’t seen her. I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay.” I smiled mechanically, not wanting people to worry unnecessarily. “But would you call my mother if you see her? Do you have our number?”
“I hope she’s all right,” Tracy Shaw’s mother said.
“She’s probably just out playing somewhere and lost track of time,” I said easily. “We’ll find her.”
I went from house to house this way, knocking on every door in the neighborhood where I knew a girl anywhere near Fiona’s age lived. But by five o’clock I had exhausted every possibility I could think of, so I went home, walking in through the kitchen.
“Did she come home?” I said. “Mom?”
Hannah was on the telephone. She held a finger up, as if to put me on pause. “Thank you,” she was saying. “I’ll wait.” She looked at me. The snakes under the skin on her face had hardened, and now she had a permanent look of surprise. “I’m calling the police,” she said. It’s a look she would never quite lose.
I sat down at the kitchen table, exhausted, starving. I hadn’t eaten anything since last night’s potato chips.
“Oh, thank you,” my mother said into the kitchen phone. “Yes, I want to talk to you about my daughter. She’s, well, we can’t find her, that is. We can’t find her anywhere.” She twisted the white cord around her wrist. “She’s seven years old,” she said. “Yes. No, we checked everywhere, all her friends, all the neighbors. Please, can you send someone over? Thank you. Yes. Only seven years old. Thank you very much. Good-bye.” Hannah put the phone down in the cradle. “They’re sending someone,” she informed me.
I looked at her. I tried to give my mother a look that would seem reassuring. But I only wanted to throw up. “We’ll find her,” I said. “She’s probably just out playing somewhere and lost track of time.” I waited and watched her pour another cup of tea before I said, “I’m really hungry.”
Hannah sighed. “Well, get yourself some cereal or something.”
“All right.”
Then Eric and my father walked in, and I could smell the earth on their feet. “Did she come home?” Dad said.
We didn’t answer.
“I called the police. They’re sending someone.”
“You called the police?”
“Yes.”
“What the hell can they do about it?”
“What if she—”
“Hannah.”
“I swear to God, Jim.”
Eric looked at me and I saw all the murderous hatred of his threats inside his eyes. I sifted some cornflakes out of a box. I felt like I shouldn’t be eating, but I was hungry. At the same time that I wanted to throw up, I was hungry. My hands were trembling, in fact, I was so incredibly hungry. I remember, anyway, that my hands were trembling. I remember that clearly.
Upstairs in my blue-and-red race-car bedroom I had the lights off. I had the radio on, and I was listening to the American Top 40 with Casey Kasem. And when I heard my name called to come downstairs, I understood exactly what I would be asked. For some reason, I could hardly move off the bed.
In our dining room, at the table where we sat only for holidays, there was a black man, with eyes that saw through walls, it seemed, they held so long on a single object. He wore a suit made of odd, thick material, and he smelled strongly of pipe tobacco. He had a little notebook out on the table and a stubby pencil. His name was Detective Cleveland, I learned later. “When did you first notice Fiona missing?” he was saying to my parents.
Our father pinched his eyes. “This morning,” he said. He ran his hand through his short, dark hair. “It was—”
“It was early this afternoon,” our mother corrected. “We had a party last night and didn’t get out of bed until after one o’clock.” She shot our father a look, as if to say Pay attention. “It wasn’t this morning.”
“Okay.” Cleveland smiled. “This afternoon. Can you tell me when you last saw her?”
“Last night,” I said.
Our parents nodded.
Eric folded his arms over his chest. “Early last night,” he said, “for me, anyway.”
“You didn’t check on her before you went to bed?” Cleveland asked my parents.
My father said, “No.”
My mother looked down.
“That’s all right. Your kids are pretty independent, I guess. They all are these days.”
“There were a lot of people here,” our father told him. “A big party. We were distracted.”
“You say you’ve checked all the houses around here where she likes to play? And you’ve looked out back in the woods and in all the playgrounds in the area?” Detective Cleveland’s voice was quiet, with a trace of raspiness to it, like he had a sore throat.
“We checked everywhere.”
“You looked in the woods out back, all along that highway?”
“Fiona won’t go in the woods,” I told him. “And there aren’t really any playgrounds.”
“What’s that, son?”
I repeated it.
“Why’s that?”
“She’s afraid.”
“Is she a fearful girl?” Cleveland looked around the room, his eyes settling on each member of our family.
“No,” Dad said when Cleveland looked at him.
“Yes,” I said when he looked at me.
Hannah put her hand on my shoulder, which meant that Cleveland should ignore me, that I didn’t know what I was talking about.
“Okay,” Cleveland said. He made a note. “When you all saw her at the party last night, do you remember what she was doing, was there anything unusual?”
“She’s a seven-year-old,” our mother said.
“I know that, ma’am, it’s just that I have to—”
“She was sitting on a man’s lap,” I broke in.
“What man?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He was blond. He had a mustache. He had a shiny shirt.”
“Why didn’t you say anything about this before?” my mother said.
“You saw him, too.”
“Who was he?”
My father’s eyes started to move quickly around the room. “Blond? With a mustache?”
Eric said, “Did he look weird?”
I shrugged. “I guess, weird,” I said. “Weird, I guess.”
My mother said, “Bryce.”
“Who?”
“Bryce Telliman. He’s a physical therapist, from the hospital.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Airie,” Cleveland said, “would it be possible for me to discuss this with you alone?”
Our father said, “You two go upstairs for a few minutes.”
Eric and I left the room and went to the foot of the stairs in the hallway. We stopped there so we could listen to what was happening in the dining room. I could hear Cleveland’s voice, low and raspy.
“Where is she?” I whispered to Eric.
He looked at me with lasers. “She’s dead.”
I felt my face getting hot. “What do you mean?”
“That blond motherfucker physical therapist took her away from the party and he raped her and killed her, and we’re going to find her body somewhere all horrible and hacked up into little pieces.”
I felt my eyes starting to burn.
“You’re lucky,” Eric said, “you’re just lucky that it didn’t happen to you. Because they like little boys better.”
Detective Cleveland had asked, “What did she look like?” and when he said that, I knew I would never see my sister again.
I see her in still pictures.
I remember Fiona in the mornings before she went to school. I remember her hand on the banister that led to the front door. I can see her tiny seven-year-old fingers just touching it, so high up for her, the way her hair looked, the color of sand, and her shiny white boots. I can see her hand clutching the brown bag lunch that she had packed herself the night before.
I can see Fiona’s red jacket w
ith the pattern of little stars and flowers on it, her green corduroy pants.
All I really know about Fiona is here in these mental images. What can a nine-year-old boy know of his seven-year-old sister? That she liked candy? That she had a million Barbie dolls but loved only one? That she hated guns? That she loved to watch football? What is there to know about any seven-year-old? Fiona ate butterscotch pudding mix directly from the package. She found documentary news programs mesmerizing. She hated animals, was afraid of cats and dogs, and mostly, she hated the woods, and would never go in there alone.
I carry this picture inside my head now.
I see Fiona’s hand in another hand, a larger one. I see her standing at the edge of her bed, and she is pulling this hand backwards, her head shaking no, she doesn’t want to go. Voices are being carried over the water of the pool and into the house. A flash of light is glancing off the window. I can see that her head is turned slightly toward the window, and that her eyes are desperate with fear. This is the picture I carry with me in my head. This is the image I see whenever I close my eyes. She is wearing only her red bathing suit and her red high-tops, floppy and untied on her feet. She has been told it will only be a little while, that they will be back soon, that there is nothing at all to worry about, everything is fine, Fiona, everything is all right and will always be all right and there will never be anything wrong or anyone to hurt you in your entire life.
“What did she look like?” Cleveland asked.
And I knew.
Our mother went to get a picture of Fiona that she kept on a small table in the living room. In those days, there were pictures of all of us there. This one was a year old, and already Fiona had grown larger, her face broader, more coarse. “She’s older than this now,” our mother said. It was a photograph Eric had taken in the backyard. It was just her face, a little girl’s smiling, enormous, jagged-toothed face. It was framed in wood.
“Thank you,” Detective Cleveland said. “This will do just fine for now.” He opened the back of the frame and removed the picture from the glass, peeling it away. “I’ve already got two patrol cars in the area keeping an eye out, and I’m going back to the station right now with this picture so we can check things more thoroughly. I’m going to have to ask one of you to stay here and call me if she turns up.” The detective got up and turned toward the door. “I’ll go ahead and let myself out.”
“Thank you,” our father said.
“Does this happen often?” Hannah broke in.
“What’s that?”
“Do little, do children disappear like this very often around here?”
“Not so often, Mrs. Airie, and when they do they always turn up, you know—they were off playing somewhere or fell asleep or something and they didn’t know what time it was. It’s possible that she wandered into another neighborhood and got lost. Don’t you worry too much. I know this is nerve-racking, but we’ll find her.”
Our mother nodded. Detective Cleveland backed out the door.
I ran upstairs and took one of her shoes from inside the plastic Wonderbread bag and put it under my shirt. Then I ran out the kitchen door, across the yard, and across the tree line. I already had that still image in my head, her hand in someone else’s. I walked into the trees, following the sound of voices.
I heard them high in the treetops, first as just a whispering of my name. And as I moved slowly beyond the tree line, I came to understand the voices were arguing about me. I followed them. I’d lose them at times and have to step through the soft forest earth concentrating with my ears. I followed paths I had never seen before. I knew these woods perfectly, but suddenly it was as if I had never been in them before. I could hear the voices now, moving ahead of me through the trees, ducking around branches, fighting together in the leaves. They couldn’t decide on me. They had already made a determination, I thought. And when they led me into the dark thicket of underbrush into a tangle of branches, I followed. And when they led me under a fallen log and through a drainage ditch, I followed. And when they ordered me out into a clearing of tall grasses and stinging nettles, I walked out and placed Fiona’s red shoe upright and perfect in the middle of a patch of nothing, and the voices announced something important to me by rising into a cacophony of shrill screams and indecisiveness.
This was my sister’s shoe in the middle of the woods, where she would never come by herself, where she couldn’t be dragged in kicking and screaming. I saw her, her small hand in the larger one, her head turned toward the window, that look in her eyes—
I still see it.
This is the story I have been telling myself:
It was as if it had been placed there—a red canvas high-top rimmed with white rubber. I knelt down beside it. Detective Cleveland, I understood, would regard this as an important clue. I knew the voices wanted me to hide it, bury it somewhere beneath a fallen log, throw it away, bring it back to the house and pretend I had never seen it, evidence of her arrival in these woods, proof of the existence of her seven-year-old foot stepping on the wet, black earth like an astronaut onto the moon, holding the hand, no doubt, of the person who would kill her. And when the voices ordered me to hide the shoe, I became defiant. And when the voices said in a flurry of contention that they would get me, I set my teeth together in a straight line. And they told me that this would happen to me, that I would be led out here into the middle of these woods one day myself and live through my sister’s experience, and I knew that I had to deliver this shoe to Detective Cleveland.
Light left me and I started to run. I ran through the underbrush and felt, as I would years later, the stinging of the tree branches across my face. I knew the uncertainty of each placement of my feet in the darkness, but I ran, full out, my arms wide, Fiona’s shoe in my hand, and I think I was screaming. And when I exited into what I thought was the yard of my parents’ house, I was somewhere I had never been before. There was a house so white in the suburban dark that it was hard to see. There was a pool so blue in the torchlight I thought it was filled with broken glass.
It would have to be drained.
I held the shoe and as I called out I realized that I had lost the English language. I moved toward this place. This was my house but it was entirely unfamiliar. All the lights had been turned on. The torches from the party were lit. I could not speak. There was a woman on the flagstones, her arms out to me. I saw that it was Hannah, my mother, I saw that it was her but at the same time I understood that it was not her.
“There is no time for this, Pilot.”
As I stepped across the flagstones I held the shoe out to her.
“What is it?” she said.
I moved forward.
“What do you have?”
And when I handed her my sister’s shoe, her voice became shrill in the dark air above the house, a strange house, an alien place. I had become a wolf boy, and among these humans I was destined to be misunderstood.
“Where did you find this, Pilot?”
I was dumb.
“Pilot, where was this? Where did you find this?”
She took the shoe from my hands.
“Pilot, if you don’t tell me right now where—”
“What is it, Hannah?” My father came out of the kitchen door.
“He found Fiona’s shoe, her shoe.”
“Where?”
“Pilot, you have to tell me, you have to tell me where you found that shoe.” Her voice was desperate, screechy. “You have to, have to tell me. Now.”
I knew these were my parents, and I knew I was supposed to help them. I overcame my muteness and put the wolf boy away. “In, in, in the woods,” I stammered, pointing to where I had come from. “Back, back there.”
“Can you find it again?” my father said.
“Pilot,” my mother said, “Pilot, do you know where Fiona is? Have you been lying to us?”
I shook my head.
“I’m getting a flashlight,” my father announced, “and we’re going out there
, and I want you to show me exactly where you found that fucking sneaker, do you understand?”
My mother put her arms around me and pulled me toward her. “You have to find Fiona,” she said. “I can’t take this. I can’t.”
“Call Cleveland,” my father said. “Call that stupid cop.”
But I was lying. But I have been lying for years. I was not becoming the wolf boy; I was becoming my brother.
I have been lying for years.
When I stepped into the woods behind my parents’ house and heard those voices arguing about how they would kill me, it was not to look for Fiona, it was not even that year. It was to rescue my mother, to rescue Hannah, who was seeing ghosts by the highway. And it was only me, the wolf boy, starved for the taste of blood, and bleeding, who could save her.
Only me.
And Eric was on his way.
Time folding over like a sheet. Its corners touching.
And this is the truth:
I had gone into my room and reached into the plastic Wonderbread bag containing the two red shoes and the bloody hunting knife, and I had removed one of the shoes. I had taken it out and put it inside my shirt, holding it close to me so no one could see, and when I got out there, into the middle of the darkness, of the trees, nine years old, I placed this red sneaker in the middle of a small patch of light, light that came from the moon, I guess, and I walked away, and I returned a few minutes later, as if I had discovered it there.
There were no voices.
A few minutes later, I stood in the backyard of an alien house and spoke.
“In, in, in the woods,” I stammered, pointing to where I had come from. “Back, back there.”
“Can you find it again?” my father said.
“Pilot,” my mother said, “Pilot, do you know where Fiona is? Have you been lying to us?”
For some reason, she was nervous. For some reason, her hands were shaking, just slightly. “Dr. Lennox,” Katherine asked at his door, knuckles poised to knock, “can I speak with you, please?”
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