The Child Finder

by Rene Denfeld

  The place was packed. The owner greeted Ranger Dave like his cousin.

  There was no menu. The owner brought a carafe of crisp white wine and disappeared behind the curtain covering the kitchen. Naomi looked around and saw the clerk from the hamlet. She waved a hearty hello. She was wearing a bright flowery dress and was sitting with one of the older Murphy brothers, who looked at Naomi suspiciously. He turned and asked the clerk something, and, staring at Naomi, she whispered in his ear.

  Naomi took a sip of wine.

  The owner returned with a platter of chicken, redolent with garlic and lemon, alongside slabs of potatoes. There was a salad and a dish of white beans, and while everything could have been purchased in the local supermarket, it was one of the most delicious meals Naomi had ever eaten.

  “I’m sorry about telling Earl Strikes,” Ranger Dave said. “I went by his store, and he told me you looked none too pleased, as he put it. I had no business telling him.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Are you always this hard?”

  Her eyes dropped. “One man told me I was like a racehorse with blinders on when I am looking for a child.”

  “And I bet you are always looking for a child.”

  “Yes.”

  They ate in silence for a few minutes, Ranger Dave looking increasingly discomfited. Naomi realized that he had probably wanted this to be romantic. He had to be lonely, up there in the station. She felt bad for him. She never felt comfortable with men, except for Jerome. Her mind skipped away from this thought.

  “Tell me about your wife,” she said.

  “Oh.” He stopped eating, wiped his mouth. His eyes saw understanding. His wife was missing—Naomi could relate to that. It was there and nowhere else where her sense of empathy resided, he thought.

  “We had only been married two years,” he said. “We were rangers together—it was beautiful, to tell the truth. We loved climbing and hiking and everything to do with the outdoors. Sarah was brave and smart. You would have liked her.”

  Sarah. Naomi remembered the poster on the wall, the center of the display: the young woman with beautiful eyes who had gone missing ten years before.

  “She had hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, climbed more summits than you could imagine,” he said. “I’ve never known a better ranger.” He stopped, stared at her. “I shouldn’t be talking about my dead wife. This is my first date in ten years.”

  “You said she is dead. The poster said missing.”

  “She’s dead. I know it.” Tears had opened in his eyes. “She had started having the headaches that fall. We drove down to the town, going to the best hospitals, second and third opinions. It was already too late. It was cancer—fast-moving, inoperable, terminal. They said it was just a matter of making her comfortable.”

  “How did you make her comfortable?”

  “She didn’t want to die in the hospital. So we went back to the station, and fixed the apartment up for her. She went downhill fast. But she didn’t wait until she lost all her strength. One day I came back from checking the roads, right before a major storm, and the bed was empty. There was a note. She would not say where she was going and she said not to follow. She said she wanted to die lying on God’s cheek. I never found her.”

  “Is this why you stay on here, to search for the missing?” Naomi asked. Her voice was back to neutral.

  “No.” He speared a piece of lettuce and resumed eating, smiling at her. “I stay here because I love the work. I can remember Sarah here. I am afraid I will forget her if I leave.”

  Naomi thought about that as she returned to her room that night, a chaste peck on her cheek from Ranger Dave. It was funny how when it was time for tomorrow, some people stayed and some people left.

  Naomi was running in her sleep. She could feel her feet pounding the wet black soil. She was leaving the false name behind, ready to discard it like the ratty clothes she was forced to wear, the sick feeling of silk and dirty lace. She was running hard, her breath a hot gasp in her throat. Seeing the woods in front of her. She was in a field. The soft soil yielded under her feet—she could smell manure and goodness.

  They had climbed out of the tunnel and found this: Air. And hope. Run, Naomi had whispered, leading ahead. Run!

  She stopped. The moon was a slender shade on the far side of a dark wood. A distant smell that was intensely familiar and yet forgotten.

  Wood smoke.

  A smoke meant fire outside and fire outside meant people. People meant help!

  She stopped. She turned and reached her hand and—

  Naomi awoke with a howl. She heard it ring in the room before she could call it back to her throat. From an adjoining room she heard a curse and a shout. “What was that?” someone called.

  Just me, Naomi thought, wiping her face with her hands, feeling the puddle of sweat around her still scissoring legs.

  Just me: having the biggest dream of them all.

  “If you can’t remember before, how do you know your name is Naomi?” Jerome would ask her with the directness of youth.

  “I just know,” Naomi would say, frowning, as they did their chores—work, really, which Naomi savored—repairing unused fences for a day the cattle might actually return, cleaning gutters, harvesting baskets of apples from the gnarled trees in the pasture, helping cook and can gallons of apple butter, apple sauce, apple pie filling.

  “Sure you can’t remember?” Jerome asked later as they chased after the wild pony that had escaped some farm and lived in the hills, as feral as any boar.

  The years passed and always Jerome asked the same question. “I just know it is my name,” she had said the year they were thirteen and had returned from camping in the woods. Later, looking at her face in the mirror above Mrs. Cottle’s vanity, Naomi could see the hazel of her eyes and her clear skin. Who are you, Naomi No-Name?

  “I think it’s a pretty name,” Jerome said as they passed through high school, all in the same white barn of a community school they had always attended, and as they studied together for tests. Naomi couldn’t help but notice that Jerome never had a girlfriend. Just as she never even looked at other boys.

  “It just feels right,” Naomi said the summer they were fourteen as they held hands and jumped off the high rocks above the swimming hole at the creek, feeling the water billow their shorts, Jerome growing quickly taller than her, seeing his muscular thighs under the water, touching like silk her own. Feeling his arms around her from the back, clowning, the warmth—

  “Do you know what it means?” he asked months later, studying his driver’s manual for the early farm license you can get to drive a tractor, his hands suddenly manly on the rough paper.

  “Why does my name matter so much to you?” she asked.

  “Because it’s your name, silly.”

  “Mrs. Cottle says it’s a name from the Bible,” he said the year they were sixteen, leaning over a fence while she handed him a jar of fresh lemonade flavored with raspberry leaves.

  “It means ‘my delight,’” Jerome had added later, as they visited the stones, and he picked one for her, his eyes loving.

  “I still can’t remember more,” Naomi said.

  “Probably someone was very happy to have you.”

  Eventually, Naomi discovered, you have a legal name, even if you don’t know who you are. She became an official foster child, and since she had no legal name she became—on the books—Naomi Cottle.

  But she didn’t become this full name, and felt ashamed. There was another name; she knew this at the back of her mind. What it was she did not know.

  Naomi knew of orphans who took to their new names like fish to water, finally breathing right. One time, uncovering a child pornography ring, she had found a girl that no one had ever identified. Number 9, the police called her, because she was the ninth nameless child they had found over the years. Newspaper ads, television news segments: no one stepped forward to claim her.

  Naomi had followed Number 9, as she did
all her children. She was taken in by a kindly set of foster parents, not unlike Mrs. Cottle. The first year they had her, they told Naomi sadly, they had to keep her in overalls pinned on backwards. Because otherwise she took off her clothes for every strange man she saw. The pride in their eyes told her that she had eventually learned different. When she was adopted, Number 9 had chosen her name out of an astrology book the foster mom kept. “I am Libra,” she kept insisting, and so she became Libra Jones, a euphonious name if Naomi had ever heard one.

  Libra Jones had died a few years back. Not of grief, or its attendant suicide—Naomi had seen more than one of those—but of the vagaries of life. She had developed acute leukemia. Naomi had visited her at the end. Her face was glowing, if pale. Her large eyes landed on her rescuer. Her adoptive parents were there, the mom clutching the silly astrology book. “I am Libra,” she had told her family quietly, with fierce pride, before she died. Naomi could not understand the emptiness she felt at that moment. She walked out of the room more broken than ever.

  But now, lying in her damp bed, she realized the big dream was bringing back fragments of her memory. Before she had only vague clues; now they were taking shape. She wondered if this was happening because of Jerome, and the promise of answers in his eyes. Or perhaps it was because of Madison, a little girl like herself, running alone in the miraculous woods.

  Once, years before the girl had come, B had watched a car pull out of the snowy lot at the store. He had stared as a family—a mother, a father, and a young son in the back—had pulled out. The boy in the rear window went flying away never to be seen again. B didn’t know why he felt so sad. Then the girl came and all was not lost. He, too, was like a boy again: wild and free and full of hope.

  The moon, B had noticed, awakened the dawn, and so the two—like pale cousins—never saw each other. Even on the most hopeful of days the moon could only peep, from a distant sky, at the sun.

  That was how B thought of himself. A secret part of him longed for the sun. But he was the moon, peeping from a distance. Both rose and dipped, rose and dipped, never to meet, only to stare longingly from afar. The sweet passage of days did not tell anything different. They told him it would always be the same.

  In the summer the snow cleared alarmingly in the lower reaches, but up high the firs remained deadly and alone, capped with ice mounds. The cedar shook its branches. In rare pockets there were nut trees. The very oil of the nut meats warmed the air, causing the grass beneath to blush.

  All of these things had existed before the girl came. But now they were real.

  9

  Snow girl had wanted a wedding. You have to have a wedding to get married, don’t you? By her second snow girl year, things were good with Mr. B. He was wise and kind when he wasn’t angry with her. He taught her all about the animals of the forest. He showed her how they used the tufts of their ears and sprinkles of whiskers to feel in the dark. The world was a beautiful place, with Mr. B in the lead.

  In the silent depths of winter the elk were motionless under the trees, their own antlers like branches. The deer shook snow off their rumps as they fed. She wondered why Mr. B didn’t get a gun and shoot these animals. They could eat for a long time off one deer. She decided it had to do with noise. He didn’t want to feel the noise the same way he didn’t like her making shapes with her mouth. It ruined the silence.

  There was something else, too. Snow girl understood it in a way that maybe even Mr. B did not. One could trap animals here silently for centuries and no one would ever know. But a single gunshot might reveal them to the world. Strangers might come, and it was important they did not. Mr. B didn’t want any outsiders coming to the land where she had been created. She was too special for that.

  The snow fell endlessly that winter, and sometimes blizzards kept them indoors for days. Though it was her true weather, snow girl felt an unmasked sorrow. When the snows ended, Mr. B led her, with ceremony, outside. He stopped not far from their cabin, and pointed at a small, perfectly formed baby fir tree. Then he showed her a handsaw tucked into his belt. She didn’t understand why, but she felt like crying.

  They dragged the tree back to the cabin. Mr. B hammered two branches on the bottom to make it stand up. He propped it right there, in the middle of the room.

  The snow girl made a present. She drew a picture on a piece of cedar bark with a bit of old pencil she had found under the sink. She decorated the tree: red berries from the forest, bits of cloth she found around the cabin. Mr. B got that scared-angry look, like he wanted to whale on her. She put her hand on his chest to calm him down. He smiled and made a big stew of the rabbits they had caught. Blood ran over the cutting board, and she put her hand on it, and when he saw, he licked her fingers clean.

  Do you know numbers? Snow girl knew numbers.

  Number one was like this: 1. See the snowcap on his head? That means one. Number two was like this: 2. If you draw him the fancy way, with a curl on the bottom, he has two points, one at the top, one at the bottom.

  Three, the same thing, only he is like a tall man who doesn’t end: 3. You can count his points, too, and they add up the same. Three.

  Four. Look at that! 4. Count his points. An open four points to the sky but even a closed four has the same four star points. One, two, three, four.

  Five. It goes on the same: 5. You have to add a star on his belly for a point, and then you have five.

  Deep in her cave, where she was locked while Mr. B was gone, snow girl drew numbers, counting in ecstasy. One, two, three, four, five. On the figure called MOM she drew a rope, and stood on the mud and jumped. One, two, three, four, five.

  A nursery rhyme started in her head, and she heard it as bright as music, as clear as voices on the playground: Apple on a stick makes me sick, makes my heart go two forty six.

  Echoes on a playground, the older girls singing about—mysterious—things you hunger for. Braids and skin all with legs bent, lifting—

  Not because I’m dirty, not because I’m clean, just because I know the places in between.

  Snow girl jumped, her hands moving, an invisible rope going higher, higher.

  Hey, boys, how ’bout a fight? Here comes snow girl with her pants on tight. She can wibble, she can wobble, she can do the splits. Bet she can’t count up to six.

  And snow girl counted, and snow girl jumped.

  The historical museum inside the town hall wasn’t much bigger than a dime: a square made of moveable walls set up in one corner, near the office of land management. A table sat out front, covered with a careful, untouched array of pamphlets. Next to it was a large white cardboard box. Charity box—don’t steal this one, someone had written in marker on the side.

  Inside, the museum was empty except for the displays: a model of a steam donkey, a small sluicing box—Naomi thought of poor Robert Claymore with a pang—old-fashioned wood saws and hunting traps and a roll of old newspapers hanging off a reel. There was a small microfiche reader with a dinky chair in front of it, next to it a metal cabinet neatly labeled with alphabet strings. The flimsy walls were hung with crooked pictures. Everything was in serious need of a dusting.

  Naomi studied the photographs on the walls. They were black-and-white, as if historians had forgotten the region by the time color film came along. There was an early explorer inside a glacier ice cave, a group of loggers who looked tiny standing at the base of a monster cedar. Some of the early settlers were represented, including the Murphy clan, looking destitute and prolific outside their sprawling shanty.

  She stopped in front of a photograph of a tall, iron-backed man with a frowning face and long black beard, standing in front of a newly built store. desmond strikes, read the caption. Next to it was another photograph. fur trade days, read the caption. It was the same store, a good decade later. A man in a suit and hat was standing outside the store. He was surrounded by heaps of furs. A buyer, no doubt. Trappers stood around, some smoking.

  Naomi had done her homework: as the clerk had t
old her, the fur trade, though dead and dying in most of the country, was still active in Oregon. There was a demand for Oregon furs in Russia—enough that trapping here was regulated. Some animals, like nutria, were considered almost worthless, but others, like the beautiful martens, desirable, and endangered.

  There was very little oversight. The state was too big, the forests too wild, for a few wildlife officers to catch most poachers. She thought about the bundles of furs in the Strikes store.

  One trapper in the photo stood in the background. Naomi’s eyes rested on him with a sharp feeling of recognition: Oh. There you are, again.

  Naomi couldn’t remember the years she was captive—entire years blank as an empty sky—and yet that was not the same as not having memories.

  Memory was incongruous. It was the feeling of a touch you had forgotten that somehow came back to you in the shape of an apple. It was the scent of walking by a stranger’s home when dinner is cooking that suddenly floods you with yearning.

  For the longest time she thought she should remember. But one time, curled in Diane’s house following a bad cold, she had confessed her worries, and Diane had said, “You will remember when you’re ready.”

  Naomi, drinking lemony tea through an aching throat, had asked, “What if I am never ready?”

  “Then that is okay, too,” Diane had said. “Stop thinking that you have to know everything to understand it.”

  Naomi had tried to find peace in that. If what had happened to her was too horrifying to remember, then that was how God wanted it—He would store those artifacts in heaven for her, for delivery to hell.

  But still, she knew that someplace under the deep weeds of her life she did remember, and this tormented her. One time, lifting a three-year-old girl-child from the dead arms of the pedophile who had kept her, Naomi had been hit with a sudden sensation. The sweet smell of the girl’s hair, the feeling of her warm skin, the way she turned and wiggled into Naomi as if seeking comfort of the most unnatural kind, all made Naomi feel as if she had fallen into a vortex and was rushing back in time. She had to sit down, holding the girl, until she recovered.