The Child Finder

by Rene Denfeld

  She was seventeen when she left. Her compulsion had deepened over time, like a hot coal burning in her heart. There was something—or someone—she needed to find. They were over the next curve, along the line of the nearest field.

  If she stayed she would never find the missing part of herself.

  There was the other reason, too, one that was difficult to admit, and it had to do with Jerome.

  So Naomi had packed a rucksack, and on one hot summer day she hugged them both good-bye, Mrs. Cottle wiping tears of worry. For two years she traveled, getting odd jobs on the way, crossing the country, restless, hungry for something she couldn’t name.

  Everywhere she went her eyes searched the edges of fields.

  Eventually she came back to Oregon, settling in the same town as Diane, close enough to Mrs. Cottle and Jerome to visit—but far enough to keep a safe distance from what was unnamed. She got a job in a battered women’s shelter and enrolled in community college, majoring in criminal justice, knowing only that she wanted to do something to help kids like herself.

  One sleepy Sunday a woman came into the battered women’s shelter, distraught about her missing daughter. That was the day Naomi discovered what she was meant to do. Within a few years she was working nonstop. She sought out trainings along the way, from records gathering to crime scene analysis, and became licensed as a private investigator. She met other investigators, discovering they specialized in everything from cheating spouses to white-collar crime to insurance fraud, all the way up to murder cases and exonerating the innocent. Naomi was the only one she knew about who specialized in finding missing children. Soon people began calling her the child finder.

  She made a point of visiting Mrs. Cottle and Jerome as often as she could, but the cases always called her back, another lost child waiting to be found. Then one day she had called, and Mrs. Cottle, sounding suddenly querulous, had let her know. While Naomi was out trying to find children, Jerome had gone to war. He started as a combat soldier. He quickly moved into search and rescue missions, locating hostages. It was, Naomi reflected, similar to her own calling.

  He came back a few years later a war hero with a case of medals, most acclaimed for a mission where he located and saved several hostages. The last medal was a Purple Heart, his valentine good-bye, he joked, for losing his arm. He moved back in with Mrs. Cottle. He said he was returning the favor, but Naomi suspected it was to heal.

  Jerome got the job working as a part-time deputy sheriff in the same brick building Naomi had been taken to years before. He practiced with his left hand until he became a good shot. He had his truck adapted with a steering aid so he could drive with one arm. When he wasn’t working he organized a regional library bookmobile and took food to the increasingly elderly and dwindling rural population. He found a dozen ways to keep busy, even as the town died around him.

  Naomi had visited, regularly, and the unspoken thing between them hovered—like the fat moon at the edge of a field, she thought. She could hear her feet running.

  What was he waiting for? She was afraid that the answer was her.

  Naomi realized she shouldn’t have been surprised at the turnout for Mrs. Cottle’s funeral. The town had been denuded—locusts in the corn—but they came back: men who remembered her late husband, a man with a body as big as a lake, they said, and a thirst to match. He was a good man, they said. But Mary Cottle never got pregnant, and that’s when they started taking in foster kids. After her husband passed Mrs. Cottle kept on.

  Older women clutched Naomi’s elbow and breathed on her to say, “Oh my, how she talked about you.” A dozen or more visitors came bearing witness to the full life Mrs. Cottle had led.

  “She was always most proud of you,” one elderly friend told Naomi, who glanced at Jerome next to her. He had to make a joke of course. “For that I lost my arm,” he whispered in her ear, making her laugh.

  It was a good, warm time. They gathered in the funeral home next to the Opal cemetery on a cold morning when the smell of daphne filled the air. Naomi met a woman who had been a foster child before her and Jerome—she had struggled, she had said, but had come back special for this. “Mrs. Cottle was the only woman who ever loved me,” she said.

  Jerome met an old farmhand who had worked the farm back when there still were cattle. The now bent farmhand said Mrs. Cottle was hella mischievous when she was young—used to chase after her husband in the fields, come lunch. That made Jerome and Naomi laugh, when Naomi felt more like crying.

  In the back of the room stood a tall, thin man in his sixties whom Naomi instantly recognized: the town sheriff who had brought her to Mrs. Cottle. He and Jerome traded friendly nods that suggested to Naomi an unspoken confidence. The sheriff smiled sadly at her.

  At the open casket they all said good-bye, in their own ways. Naomi wanted Mrs. Cottle to understand how thankful she was for her.

  “You had her love,” Jerome reminded her as they were leaving, readying to host the wake back at the farmhouse for those not yet ready to leave.

  “I didn’t return it,” Naomi said.

  “Yes, you did,” he said. “Just look at what you do. You know she was proud of you, don’t you?”

  “No,” Naomi said, because Naomi could never be proud of herself.

  They finished washing the dishes after the gathering and then stood on the farmhouse porch. Naomi felt tired in a sad way—the kind of tired where you want to run and cry at the same time.

  “What will you do now?” she asked Jerome.

  Jerome touched her arm with his one hand. “Come.”

  “Where are we going?”

  He just smiled. “Where do you think? The stones, Naomi, the stones.”

  She laughed.

  The sun was setting as they climbed the ridges. Naomi began running, hands open, and Jerome followed, eyes on her back. Down below them the farmhouse appeared, and the empty fields rolled away.

  They slowed when they came to the place where the cliff opened up and the gems poured out. It was exactly as Naomi remembered. He picked out a piece of red jasper, as ripe as fruit, and polished it on his shirt.

  He put it in her hand, closed his hand over her fist.

  “Naomi,” Jerome whispered.

  Her heart pounded. She could tell, suddenly, in his eyes, what was happening.

  “You know we really aren’t brother and sister.”

  He was about to name something that had always been there, what she had tried to run from.

  “I love you.”

  She felt flooded with emotion. Her entire past came up to strangle her, to tell her that love could be something else—a trap to keep her from escaping.

  “We were—” Naomi began.

  “Foster children taken in by a loving woman. Now we are adults who love each other.”

  He reached for her. She felt his strong left hand behind her head, and felt him bringing her closer.

  They kissed, and it was like it was always meant to be, and in a rush her heart filled with the sound of the winds over the fields, caressing her cheek as she ran—and ran and ran. She could feel a hand in hers and a time when she remembered, when she knew what had happened. But all that was lost now.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Why not?” His finger stroked her cheek.

  “I can’t stay here. I can’t stay anywhere.” She began crying.

  “You can stay with me.”

  She shook her head.

  He held her close.

  It wasn’t until she was on the highway later—alone—that Naomi noticed a red stone on the passenger seat. It was a piece of red jasper sitting on top of a letter.

  The stone looked at her, as if to remind her that she was brave enough to find children but not brave enough to stay for love.

  She stopped by an empty field, the soil abandoned, gone to mustard weed and grass. Lush bundles of crimson clover lined the fence. At the far end was a cluster of trees. As always, her eyes sought movement at the edge of
the woods.

  She opened the letter.

  His script was careful. She remembered him saying after he came back from the war that learning to live with just a left hand was like looking out a different window.

  Dearest Naomi. I want to be with you—you know that now. I think you always have. I understand how you have to move, to seek. That is why I want to come with you. So you will be mine, and I will be yours. Forever. When you are ready to find out who you are I will be right by your side.

  PS: I know how to find people too. I can help.

  Naomi put the letter down and cried, hard, making no sound at all. Around her the fields waited. There was no noise, no affirmation. Nature is never the answer, she thought, only the cure.

  She folded the letter and put it in her bag, started the car, and drove away.

  Diane was on the front porch. Naomi fell into her generous arms.

  “I’m sorry about Mrs. Cottle,” Diane said, hugging her tightly.

  “Is it okay?” She sounded like a young child.

  Diane led her into the living room. “Now, you probably think you are used to death. No one gets used to death. It’s exhausting, that’s the truth! Now. We can go out and eat oodles of pasta, or Mexican, or I can fix you a pot of soup here. You tell me.”

  “Oodles of noodles.”

  “Comfort food.” Diane smiled.

  “Don’t say that!”

  Diane pulled back, her bright green eyes wary. “It’s not just Mrs. Cottle, is it? What was her first name, anyway?”

  “Mary.”

  “You can have noodles after you tell me what it is really about. Or should I guess?”

  Naomi sank into a chair. “Jerome,” she said, her voice sick.

  “What happened?” Diane’s voice was grave.

  Naomi told her. Her throat felt on fire suddenly, as if she were caught. She patted the letter, still in her pocket.

  “I’m scared.”

  “Of course you are scared.” Diane’s smile was so warm, so loving. She reached out and touched Naomi’s cheek, softly, tenderly. “Of course you are.”

  “One day when we were kids I asked Jerome if I could say sorry. He asked why. I said I didn’t know why I just needed to do it.” The words came rushing out. “So he said okay. We went up to the stones—the ridge—and Jerome told me, ‘Now you can say sorry as many times as you want, and I will count.’ So I started saying sorry. I kept saying sorry and sorry and sorry!” Naomi stopped, anguished. “I couldn’t stop! I must have said ‘I’m sorry’ five hundred times. Jerome said later he lost count. I just kept saying, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’”

  “You are afraid of a man that will let you—want you—to do that, aren’t you?”

  “I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop.”

  “The sorry or the love?”

  “Both.”

  Diane nodded, satisfied. She looked at Naomi with pride. “You’re a good egg. Now, let’s go get oodles of noodles. I vote for Alfredo myself.” She patted her ample belly. “You know that saying ‘When I am old I will wear purple’? For me it is purple stretch pants. Glorious purple stretch pants.”

  “Alfredo. From that little Italian place down the street?”

  “Only if you hold my hand on the way there, like we are schoolgirls.”

  They ate plates of pasta and had wine and bread, and a few hours later, stuffed to the gills, they walked back down streets glossy with dark. Naomi yawned. She was too tired to drive back to the mountains tonight.

  “Stay,” Diane said, leading them into the house.

  Naomi brushed with the toothbrush she kept in the upstairs bathroom, washed, and pressed the water off her face with a clean towel. The eyes that stared back in the mirror were the same eyes she had seen in Mrs. Cottle’s mirror. She crawled between the icy, crisp sheets and dreamed of nothing until the smell of bacon woke her in the morning.

  As the electric lines sing and nature talks over wires we will never see, a man known only as B had lain between sheets damp with soil, a blanket worn to softness from never having touched a quill of water, and talked to himself in a language only he knew.

  He had hurt the girl. Again.

  He didn’t know at first he hurt her, until he saw that beckoning O of her mouth and the pain in her eyes. Then he knew she felt pain. He wasn’t sure why he hurt her. It had something to do with the sky, and a clear field of snow, and a little boy struggling in the arms of a man.

  The girl had looked at him at the table, into him, and it was like having someone crawl inside his eyes and down his throat and see the monster sitting in the bottom of his belly, looking up with hateful eyes.

  He crushed his hands against his eyes. If he had a language it was this: hunt and catch and carve. If he had a life it was this: fear and hide and anger. That was how it had been, for an endlessly long time.

  Down below him, in the cave, the girl was lying on her shelf. He knew she was getting up, making pictures on the walls. The pictures delighted him. He wondered if she had found the special one, the one he had left long ago.

  B, he had said. He was B.

  12

  Eventually the snow girl had realized that Mr. B did not know how to take a real bath. That was why, after so many years, he was the color of tree bark. Mr. B splashed off every now and then—that was about it.

  This was her purpose: she was created in the snow to help Mr. B, who seemed to know so much about so many things—and so little about others.

  It made snow girl feel good to teach him.

  But how to help was another question. It wasn’t good to make Mr. B angry. She had to be careful not to make him mad.

  Snow girl waited one day until she knew he was in a good mood. They had been out trapping, and after they returned she played at the table with a stack of limp animal furs, their soft heads still attached, while he cooked the meat.

  After they had eaten and he was dozing in the chair, she very carefully rose and filled the clean pan with snowmelt water.

  Mr. B’s eyes snapped open.

  One. Two. Three. Snow girl put the pan on the woodstove, to heat.

  Four. His eyes were on her, hot and angry.

  She smiled, reassuring.

  He watched, wary.

  The water warmed and steamed.

  Five. Snow girl spread a heavy coyote fur on the cabin floor. She stood on it, next to the stove and the hot water, and began taking off all her clothes.

  Mr. B sat up in his chair. His eyes widened.

  Snow girl stood naked. Her body was as slender as the willow with the bark removed. There was something more naked about her then than in bed. She stood there, as pale as lamplight—as pale as snow—the tiny curve of her tummy, the unformed hips, the pale muscled legs. The tiny cleft that knew no hair. The soft, tender arms; the work-hardened hands; the warm, unlined neck. The only true color in all of her was those brilliant blue eyes.

  He was amazed.

  Moving slowly, snow girl dipped a small fur into the hot water, wishing for soap, and rubbed it carefully over her arms. She scrubbed her pits, the steam rising. She washed below, opening her legs. Turning, as delicate as a dancer. Washing her bottom, the backs of her knees, on down to her feet.

  Scrubbing until all of her was pink and blooming new.

  She finished with her face, washing again and again, feeling the bliss of the hot water against her skin, dripping down her shoulders.

  After a while she felt the floor move: Mr. B was standing next to her on the coyote skin. She smiled encouragingly. He hesitated, removing his pants, his shirt, the ratty, foul-smelling socks, until he was as naked as her.

  And then she passed him the hot cloth.

  She could hear herself, bright laughter in the trees. Running ahead of Mr. B, watching the snow blaze from her snowshoes, the fine dust rising. Seeing him behind her, his mouth open in the shape that said laugher, hooting despite himself—a precious sound that he will never hear.

  Do you know joy? a
sks the snow girl.

  Snow girl knew joy. Every inch of her body breathed it. Every thread of her skin, every silk tassel of her hair, every thin blue vein in her thigh: every single inch of her, through and through.

  Do you know beauty? Do you know that grandest word of all—hope?

  Snow girl did. She whispered it to the furs down in the cellar. She told it to MOM. She even found a way to share it with Mr. B, playing tag in the woods, alive as if he had never played before. What a sad thing that is, a grown man who has never played.

  Snow girl knew.

  She stopped abruptly, on a rise, seeing the sharp white of her breath pillow out. Mr. B stopped behind her, uncertain, waiting, watching. Snow girl was the leader of this game: The game called life. The game called love.

  Are you aware that joy is life and life is love? Snow girl knew: each and every inch of her knew. She ran off, again, silently yelling for joy among the trees, while Mr. B clumsily chased after her.

  Once upon a time there was a girl named Madison who didn’t understand the difference between good and evil.

  Madison went to church. She held the hand of her father as they walked up the steps. Her father said his mother—her grandmother—had been Russian, and very religious.

  In church, Madison smelled the incense, watched the smoke rise. She didn’t know what the robed men were saying. All she knew was the gentleness of the father next to her, smiling when she fidgeted.

  There were no serpents running under the floors. If there was poison there, it was well hidden—and besides, she had her daddy to protect her.

  Madison didn’t understand that people can be good and bad. Not like little-mistakes bad. Like big-mistakes bad. Like go-to-jail bad.

  She didn’t know that when you have that kind of bad inside you, it is not like your goodness is hiding it. It is more like the badness and the goodness are all mixed together.

  Madison didn’t know you can love someone who is bad.

  Detective Winfield insisted on taking Naomi out for lunch before giving her the results. “I got nothing better to do,” he joked, which she was sure was not true.