The Disappeared Girl

by Martin J. Smith

  Her blood sample, safely packed in dry ice in its sturdy foam shipping container, was now in the capable hands of the people at DHL. In three days, it would be in Buenos Aires, where her essence again would be broken down into genetic markers, reassembled into a scientific language she didn’t pretend to understand, and compared to blood information gathered from the surviving relatives of Julia Limon, a woman she’d imagined a million different ways over the years but whose actual name she’d heard for the first time less than twenty-four hours before. Within a few weeks, she might know, finally, who she was, and if anything in her family’s medical history would force her to make the toughest choice of her life.

  The bus roared away in a cloud of exhaust, and she coughed twice as she crossed Fifth in its wake. God, she was tired. It was all she could to put one foot in front of the other. With Brenna and the kids out for the day, at least she’d have the house to herself. She could close the blinds in her bedroom and sleep until dinner. Her dad probably planned to do the same as soon as he got back from Beatriz Vargas’s apartment. Maybe he was home and asleep already?

  She turned onto Howe Street. Both her dad’s Explorer and Brenna’s Legend were gone from the parking spots in front of the house, so she dug into her purse for her key. Her rummaging and the sound of her footsteps seemed louder than usual—the neighborhood was strangely quiet for a midsummer morning. No kids playing. No dogs barking. Just the whisper of warm wind in the overhanging trees. Maybe the world was operated by a giant remote control, Melissa thought, and someone, somewhere, had hit the pause button?

  A crazy, exhausted idea, but wouldn’t that be nice? Things were moving scary-fast, and the thought of pausing it all made her smile. Or maybe it was better just to keep rushing forward? Maybe the truths she was digging up would be more terrifying if she had time to truly absorb their meaning?

  She climbed the three steps onto their front porch with fresh resolve. She intended to pee, wash her face, and bury herself in the covers. Her dreams would probably be haunted by what she now knew, but at this point she’d welcome even a restless sleep.

  When she slid the key into the lock, the front door creaked open. It swung into the entryway and stopped. Someone hadn’t locked it—not unusual in a house open to the endless parade of Annie, Taylor, and their neighborhood friends. But it did give her a moment’s pause.

  “I’m home,” she called, testing. “Anybody around?” The only answer was a muted echo, so she pushed inside and closed the door behind her.

  Chapter 53

  “Everything?”

  Christensen got the question out just as his entire body went numb. He was resisting his brother-in-law’s implication with all his might. Michael Dorsey had just confessed to fathering a child in Argentina. Five years later, he’d smuggled a five-year-old into the United States.

  Dorsey repeated the word: “Everything.”

  “So this woman, the mother—Michael, was her name Julia Limon?”

  Dorsey flinched at the sound of it. It was all the response Christensen needed.

  “So that baby—”

  “Yes.”

  Carole Dorsey, curled into a chair facing her husband, unfolded her legs and set them on the floor. Her entire body was quaking as she stood and spoke. “Somebody tell me what the fuck is going on.”

  Christensen felt like he was falling, falling. If he opened his mouth, nothing would come out but the desperate wail of a man hurtling toward unforgiving pavement. Dorsey looked at the floor.

  “Melissa is my daughter,” he whispered.

  Carole stopped shaking and sat back onto the edge of the chair, joining Christensen in shock. Nothing in the room moved after that, and the three of them sat for at least a minute, frozen in a tableau of stunned silence. Christensen hit bottom, and he felt the impact rearrange every bone, muscle, and molecule of his body. Never once had he imagined that Michael Dorsey could be his daughter’s biological father.

  “You’ve heard the worst of it, at least as far as you’re both concerned,” Dorsey said at last. “I’ll tell you everything, if you want.”

  Christensen and his sister looked at one another, bound suddenly by a strange and powerful grief. He’d forced this revelation on Carole, and he mouthed the words, “I’m so sorry.” As he did, though, his sister seemed to recognize in him a pain no less devastating. She answered as if her husband wasn’t in the room, seated just six feet away, as if he were dead.

  “He had no right to do this to you, Jim,” she said, brushing away the tears rolling down the side of her face. “Then or now.”

  “I had to know,” Christensen managed. “I pushed it.”

  “But he had no right to lie to you, to both of us, for all these years.” Carole turned, finally, to the man sitting like an overlarge schoolboy on the principal’s couch. “Yes, Michael. Let’s hear the rest of your secrets.”

  Dorsey reached for his glass. “All of it?”

  “What the hell,” his wife said through gritted teeth.

  Dorsey sat back, closed his eyes, and began to talk. “I met Julia during my first visit to Buenos Aires, in 1977. She was older than me, working for Timerman’s paper as a columnist. That’s how it was that she came to the embassy for some function, and I met her there. We got involved shortly after I took the posting. Right away, she got pregnant. She told me it couldn’t happen, but it did.”

  “Spare me those details, Michael, if you don’t mind.” Carole’s voice was corrosive.

  “To this day, I still don’t know how—whether it was an accident, or what. Like I said, she was older, the biological clock ticking, all that.”

  Christensen held his tongue, thinking of Vargas’s journal and the news report he’d heard about the hole the coroner had found in the skull in the C-130’s sunken fuselage—a fontanel. There’d been an infant on board. Melissa might have been an accident. But there’d been a second child.

  “So then you’re the victim here, Michael?” Carole said. “I see.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “Just stick to the story,” Carole said. “Save the rationalizations for yourself or someone who cares.”

  Dorsey set his glass back down on the coffee table. “The baby was born in 1978. Julia named her Sonia, after her mother.”

  “But you’re talking about Melissa?” Christensen said.

  Dorsey nodded. “I’m the one who changed her name on the paperwork, much later. But by 1979, my two-year posting to Buenos Aires had become a four-year assignment. I took it—Carole insisted that I take it—even though she was dug in back here in the house in Falls Church. We figured we could make it work for a couple more years.”

  “And, oops!” Carole mocked. “You started a family in South America!”

  “Don’t make this any harder than it is,” Dorsey pleaded.

  “Fuck you, Michael.”

  Christensen slid into therapist mode. “Carole, you need to let him talk. I know it’s hard—”

  “Fine,” she said, and turned away from her husband. “Please do finish this lovely little story.”

  “The thing I never intended, see, was falling in love,” Dorsey said. “With Julia. With the baby. Carole, I—it’s hard to explain, how it’s possible to love you and her at once, but it was like I was leading parallel lives. I knew those lines would never cross.”

  “But at some point—I mean, you must have known you’d have to choose someday,” Christensen said.

  “Maybe on some level I knew. But back then, hell, I was young and invincible, like I said. I wasn’t thinking in those terms. We were apart almost five years. I was going to let it play out as long as I could.”

  “Meaning?”

  Dorsey drew a long breath. “Julia got pregnant again.”

  “Oh Christ,” Carole said.

  “In 1982. She wanted another child, and I agreed.”

  Christensen said what he knew was on his sister’s mind: “So, then, I’m guessing you’d decided to stay with this woma
n?”

  Dorsey shrugged. “I’d considered it.”

  “But you also considered leaving her behind, her and two children?”

  “I don’t know, Jim. I just—I don’t know.”

  Carole turned to face her husband. “Charming.”

  “As it turned out—the choice was made for me.”

  Dorsey’s voice dropped almost below register. Christensen and his sister listened, hyperaware that another shock was coming.

  “You know Rosa Parks? Jackie Robinson?” Dorsey said. “Change—and I mean change in difficult times—doesn’t just happen. It’s planned, carefully. Rosa Parks was chosen because she was just the right symbol for the bus boycott. Jackie Robinson was chosen to break baseball’s color barrier because of who he was and how he’d handle the pressure.”

  Where was this going?

  “In 1982, understand, the things Argentina needed most were people to speak out. The Dirty War, it was like this, this … stealth thing. They gave it this sanitized name, the ‘Processo.’ The process. It was a goddamned genocide against anyone they saw as subversive. Anyone. Even when the goon squads came in broad daylight—the grupos de tareas, they called them, the task forces—hell, they hauled people off in front of their neighbors, and no one was talking about it. No one. It was bizarre. There was a phrase people used, Spanish. It meant, ‘They must have done something.’ That was the attitude back then. The whole goddamned country was looking the other way, just like the people who lived near Auschwitz or Treblinka.”

  The implication drifted into the room like a storm cloud. “You said Julia Limon was a newspaper columnist?” Christensen said.

  “Extremely popular. Extremely public. And pregnant. She’d written about the baby, keeping my name out of it, but everyone knew she was expecting.”

  Carole brushed away another tear and waved with mock cheeriness. “Except me,” she said. “I didn’t.”

  It was a desperate emotional hand grenade, one Christensen decided to ignore. He knew his sister’s pain was festering, but he could think of nothing besides getting the story out of Dorsey.

  “So Julia Limon was chosen to—what?”

  “Timerman wanted someone at the paper to break the silence, in print, to write a protest column, or at least be willing to sign their name to a column that laid the whole thing bare. It was long overdue, but you have to understand the political climate at the time. He needed the right person, someone who, if the junta struck back, it would be so appalling and outrageous that, you know, there’d be a backlash. Julia, see—she volunteered. She was so visible, and so publicly pregnant. Plus, she was leaving the paper to have the baby, so she was going to be off for a while.”

  “So she wrote a column?”

  “A scorcher,” Dorsey said. “She laid it out. She called the military on every one of its sins. ‘Pathetic bullying by small men desperate for respect’—that’s what she called it. And Timerman printed every word, just as she wrote it. A calculated risk—they both knew that going in.” He paused and looked away. “They both miscalculated.”

  Dorsey closed his eyes, and his face calcified into a mask that betrayed nothing. It was as if his face had suddenly gone numb. “She disappeared the day after it ran. The apartment was empty when I got there. She was expecting me for dinner. But when I got back from the embassy, she was gone. Sonia—Melissa—gone too. Jesus, Jim. The table was set. There was a chicken in the goddamned oven.”

  Dorsey smacked his hands together. He was crying now, too. “Desaparecido.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “The neighbors, the people in the apartments on either side—nobody saw a thing. The people on the street outside—same thing. ‘The Falcons came, si,’ they said. ‘So they took her?’ I said. ‘Oh, you know, we didn’t see what happened.’ They were working on their car, or in their garden, or they went inside and the Falcons were gone when they came back out. That’s the way things went back then. She was just … gone.”

  Dorsey stood suddenly and crossed the room to a window overlooking the garden. His broad shoulders shuddered, his pain as real and fresh as if all this had happened yesterday. Even Carole seemed to soften. She reached for Christensen’s hand.

  “I’ll get through this,” she said. “You get what you need from him.”

  “Carole—”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  Christensen turned toward his brother-in-law, who seemed no longer able to face them. Dorsey’s shoulders heaved as he sobbed again. He would tell the rest, Christensen was sure, and he would tell it honestly. But Dorsey apparently was revealing the truth for the first time, and Christensen didn’t want to push his brother-in-law at this psychologically delicate stage. It might backfire; Dorsey might shut down. The man needed space and time, and Christensen was trying hard to give it to him.

  He checked his wristwatch as he waited. It was well past noon, hours since he’d dropped Melissa in Oakland. She surely was done by now, maybe even home and in bed. In that thought he found a welcome moment of comfort.

  Chapter 54

  Melissa stepped out of her robe and let it fall to the bathroom floor. Hot water was still roaring into the deep tub through the house’s arthritic pipes, and she bent to test its temperature with her fingers. She’d considered going straight to bed, but knew a good soak before might calm her enough to sleep well.

  As she stood, she noticed her reflection in the mirror on the back of the door. Her breasts were starting to swell, and for the first time her board-flat tummy was pooching out, just a little. Her jeans stopped fitting weeks ago, but now she could actually see the changes that pregnancy was having on her body. She noticed, too, that the track of stitches on her wrist, once angry red, was now a muted pink. The wound was healing, and for the first time she imagined living the rest of her life with a faded scar.

  After tipping a bottle of lavender bath oil into the roiling water, Melissa took a moment to savor the smell as it rose. When she twisted the knobs to shut off the water, the pipes in the wall thumped and clanged. Without hesitating, she stepped over the tub’s edge and slid into the water’s amniotic embrace. She felt warm and safe and, literally, full of life.

  Sometime later—hard to say when; she may have been sleeping—she heard the familiar creak of weight as someone stepped onto the first of their fourteen wooden stairs.

  “Dad?”

  Melissa listened as her voice ricocheted around the small bathroom. She called again, and again no one answered. She flipped the tub’s drain valve with her toe, toweled off, and pulled on her robe. She cinched it loosely at the waist, slid open the new deadbolt, and stepped into the upstairs hall.

  “Hello?”

  She went to the top of the stairs and checked, but no one was there. She went to the landing, halfway down, and called again. Nothing. At the bottom, she brushed a fallen strand of hair from her face, tucked it behind one ear, and shrugged. Weird, she thought. Maybe she’d been dreaming.

  Chapter 55

  Michael Dorsey told the rest of his story in a dull monotone. Christensen listened, repulsed but unable to leave the room, unable to deny. He interrupted Dorsey’s narrative with occasional questions, but only to clarify. He already was getting more truth than he’d bargained for.

  “So this friend, this doctor, he was on the inside? Part of the junta?”

  Dorsey absorbed the question without acknowledging it. “I didn’t know him well, but I knew he was working with the military. I needed someone working back-channel. There was no other way to find them. No other way.”

  Dorsey ran a fat finger around the rim of his empty glass. He started to get up—to fetch another fortifying drink, Christensen guessed—but surrendered to the effort of rising from the deep sofa.

  “Took him a few weeks, but he came through,” Dorsey said. “You have to understand, when people disappeared there—it was like they were sucked into another dimension. Nobody knew it then, but years later, during the Sabato Commission investigation, the
truth came out. The desaparecidos were being ‘processed’ all over Argentina. There were 350-odd torture centers, and they moved the prisoners around a lot, on purpose.”

  “But this doctor, he found them, Julia Limon and, and”—Christensen was still trying this new reality on for size. It wasn’t a comfortable fit—“her daughter? Melissa?”

  Dorsey winced. “They’d been separated right away. Can you imagine? Taking a child from her mother?” His face twitched with fresh pain as he struggled for control. “What he found out, eventually, was where they were being held.”

  “Was there an orphanage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Melissa remembers it. The rows of beds. A few other details. She’s talked to me about it. What about her mother?”

  Dorsey bit his trembling lower lip. “There was a facility in Buenos Aires.”

  “The Navy’s mechanical school?”

  He nodded. “At the Campo de Mayo Military Hospital. But by then it was too late. She’d had the baby.”

  Christensen understood the implication, but he had to ask. “Do you think they killed her at that point?”

  “I have no proof, but that’s what was going on. We know that now. They were stealing babies as gifts for military people who wanted children but couldn’t have them. The mothers’ bodies would turn up in the Rio de la Plata, or the Atlantic, eventually one of the morgues. The police surgeon there classified them as ‘N.N.’ No name. They buried them all together in unmarked graves.”

  Despite his loathing for his brother-in-law, despite Dorsey’s two decades of lies and hypocrisy, Christensen could now see the man’s profound and unrelenting pain. Carole could see it, too, and she watched in wounded silence as the man she had loved for so long quietly turned himself inside out to reveal the black center of his soul.

  She leaned forward, just a bit. “Michael, I—”

  “‘Subversives breed subversives,”’ Dorsey said. “It wasn’t just a slogan for them, see. It was a policy initiative. This operation was their way of breaking that cycle, to have those children raised by people more sympathetic to the cause.”