“I can’t help worrying,” Zan says.
“Of course not. I will ring up people and make inquiries.”
“Thank you.”
“We will begin with the hotel where Mrs. Nordhoc was staying and go from there. We will talk as well with the birth-family of your daughter. Can you give me their names? Or we have records that I can check, if you don’t have them.”
Zan hands over a list with the names of Sheba’s aunt, grandmother and father. He’s gone back and forth in his mind whether to include the father’s. “The last thing I want,” he says, “or that I know my wife wants, is to cause problems for Sheba’s . . . Zema’s father or family. I think Viv is distraught at the prospect that trying to find and help the girl’s birth-mother has created trouble.”
“It was a natural impulse,” the ambassador says.
“It’s just that someday Sheba will want to know. Zema.”
The ambassador laughs. “Sheba.”
“It’s . . . just a nickname,” explains Zan.
“Of course. She has a royal presence,” he jokes.
“Very headstrong,” Zan agrees, “a ‘professional,’ she would say.”
“Later on this will serve her well.”
“That’s what we keep telling ourselves. Uh . . . also . . . ”
“Yes?”
Zan points at the list of names. “We’ve sent some money to her family in Addis when we can manage it financially. Only recently have we realized this could be construed the wrong way. It’s only been to help them out.”
“Of course,” answers the ambassador. “I assure you that no reasonable person could see this as anything but an act of generosity, the same generosity that led you to open up your home to your daughter in the first place.”
“Thank you. I hope so.”
As the ambassador walks the father and son to the door, Zan presents him with a gift. “I hope it doesn’t seem completely vain,” Zan mutters, “it’s . . . ”
“Yes!” the ambassador exclaims appreciatively, examining the book. “Mr. Brown told me that you are a novelist of repute.”
“Uh, well, ill repute maybe. I used to be a novelist, fourteen years ago . . . ”
“But you have written a novel,” the other man protests, “therefore that makes you a novelist.”
Zan smiles. “That’s what my wife says.”
“I shall let you know what I learn, Mr. Nordhoc.”
“I’m extremely grateful for all your time and trouble.”
“I know that you are worried but I believe it shall be for naught and all will be well. And by the way, congratulations!”
“Oh . . . ” Zan thinks he’s referring to the book. “It was fourteen—”
“Yes!” the ambassador exclaims. “For what is happening in your country! Its great new adventure!” but to Zan, the election already is beginning to seem a long time ago.
Across Kensington Road, Sheba and Molly are nowhere to be found in the park. It is, as Molly noted, a big park, so Zan and Parker spend the better part of an hour south of the Serpentine searching everywhere. Zan remembers that the last time he was in this park, almost thirty years ago, an IRA blast killed eight people. “Probably,” Parker suggests to his father, “they went back to the hotel.”
“Yes, I’m sure you’re right,” Zan answers uneasily. The two head east along the edge of the park, crossing Carriage Row. Bloomsbury is a half-hour walk. For all the Tube’s gleaming futurism, Parker still hates places close and dark; but a growing dark seed in Zan trumps the boy’s protests and they catch the Piccadilly line at the Knightsbridge underground. By the time they ascend—as evening falls and their neighborhood comes alive with light and people—and arrive at the hotel, Zan almost persuades himself that the woman and girl will be there.
Zan is overwhelmed by people vanishing. He’s angry at himself for not having bought Molly a cheap, temporary cell phone even though he doesn’t have the money. Everything now tumbles into the realm of scenarios that make no sense; in the clamor of Bloomsbury, he’s having a hard time focusing or thinking clearly. He convinces himself of increasingly unlikely outcomes. When there’s no sign of Sheba and Molly in the hotel lobby, he asks Parker, “Did I give Molly the key?” and sensing in his father a looming panic, the boy doesn’t answer.
Standing in the small hotel room gazing around them, as though within its few square meters the girl and woman could possibly be undetected, with revulsion Zan realizes that he struggles for composure, realizes that in front of his twelve-year-old son he’s on the edge of breaking down from everything, Viv gone, no money, no prospects and now his missing daughter. As the evening passes, Zan waits for a knock at the door as sudden and without warning as the first time Molly appeared and Sheba answered, staring up at her in a silence that for the small girl was as uncommon then as it seems foreboding now.
Zan and Parker have a fight about going out for food. “I’m hungry,” Parker says.
“I’ll run down to the corner,” Zan mutters, “get us some fish and chips.” Parker wants to go to a sushi place a few blocks away, where little dishes circulate the restaurant on a conveyor belt and diners pick out what they want, but the boy realizes this isn’t going to happen tonight. “I want to go with you,” he says instead.
“Stay here. In case—”
“I want to go with you,” the boy insists.
“You need to stay. Someone needs to be here.”
“I want to go!” yells Parker, and Zan realizes the boy is scared too of how at loose ends everything in his young life has come to feel. Zan puts his head in his hands. “Then we’re staying,” he says, immediately ashamed of how petulant it is, punishing his son by making him go hungry. After a while Zan writes a note and sticks it in the door and the two make a mad dash for the grocery store around the corner, buying sandwiches and sodas.
That night Zan barely sleeps. His head explodes; along with everything else, his doctor back in Los Angeles holds hostage, over an unpaid bill, a refill of Zan’s migraine medication, and now he’s down to only a few pills. Parker prowls the internet on Zan’s laptop until finally collapsing into his own restless unconsciousness.
They remain in the room the next morning waiting. Zan calls J. Willkie Brown and gets a voice-mailbox, disconnects without leaving a message, calls back again, leaves a message. Around lunchtime he leaves his cell number with the woman at the hotel’s front desk who asked on the day they checked in if he was Alexander Nordhoc the novelist; and then the father and son walk to the police station at Russell Square ten minutes away. Past a door next to the underground, the police bureau is down a long white hall that might be mistaken for a hospital or asylum.
Taking Zan’s information, the constable’s manner disavows empathy. “But you say,” he asks, trying to get it straight, “that your wife has gone missing as well.”
“My wife is missing in Africa,” Zan explains as calmly as he can manage, “and now my daughter—”
“You best need to speak with the consulate general of the country where your wife—”
“I’m not here about my wife. I’m explaining how the situation came about . . . ”
“Sorry?”
“How the situation came about. My daughter has gone missing with her nanny.”
“I see,” says the officer. Zan may be imagining the tone of accusation, but given his own sense of guilt and accountability it doesn’t matter: If I just had talked Viv out of . . . out of . . . what? Going to Ethiopia? Hiring someone to find Sheba’s mother? and he’s swept by nausea, certain he’s going to be ill in the middle of the station. He looks at Parker in the chair next to him, slumping as though to disappear down whatever hole might open up underneath and deliver him from this situation. “It happened yesterday,” says Zan.
“And you chose not to report it before now?” the officer says.
“I keep thinking she’ll come back.”
“Perhaps she will.”
“I just made a report yeste
rday to the Ethiopian embassy concerning my wife—”
“Mind, Mr. Nordhoc, we’re not the Ethiopian embassy.”
“I know that,” Zan says, breathing as deeply as possible, “I’m trying to explain why . . . what my . . . state of mind . . . ”
“State of mind?”
“What my thinking was . . . that she might come back—”
“What’s your business in London, if I may ask?”
“I gave a lecture at the university.”
“Can you describe the girl?”
Zan blurts, “She’s black.” Not “She’s wearing this or that,” not “Her body transmits music from far-flung stations of the universe.” He goes on, “She’s four. Years old.”
“Mrs. Nordhoc is black as well, then, I take it?”
“No,” but since the constable has made it clear that Viv isn’t the London police’s concern, Zan isn’t sure why this question is relevant. He explains, “We adopted Sheba. Zema.”
“Zema?”
“Her name’s not really Sheba.”
“Is it Sheba or Zema?”
“Uh . . . ”
“You last saw her yesterday in Hyde Park near Kensington.”
“Yes.”
“It was Hyde Park proper rather than Kensington Gardens?”
“What?”
“It was Hyde Park proper rather th—”
“I don’t know. It was the park. She was with her mother, they were supposed to wait for us to come back from seeing the Ethiopian ambassador.”
The officer frowns. “Her mother?”
“What?”
“Her mother?”
“What about her mother?”
“You said she was with her mother. Your daughter was with her mother?”
“I said she was with her nanny. They were waiting—”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Nordhoc. But I assure you that you said her mother.”
“Are we,” Zan says angrily, “going to start arguing about what we said, like I have to do with the bank? My wife is missing. My daughter is missing. Why do I have to argue with everyone about what they said?”
“We’re not arguing about what I said, are we?” the officer answers calmly. “We’re arguing about what you said.”
“Dad,” Parker says quietly from his seat, “you said mother. Sorry.”
Helpless, Zan and Parker return to the hotel. Now everywhere Zan goes, every corner he turns, he hopes against hope that Sheba will appear before him. He feels himself sinking. His son watches him and whispers, It will be O.K., and Zan thinks, I should be telling him it will be O.K. Glancing at his cell, he notes that he’s missed another call from Brown, whose message is brief: “Alexander. James here. Ring me when you can,” but when Zan returns the call he once again gets Brown’s voice-mail.
Parker is on the laptop and Zan stands at the hotel window still thinking any moment he’ll see Sheba coming up the road, with the nanny or without her, when his son says, “The heck? Zan.”
“What?” says the father.
“Look at this.”
Zan surveys the website on the laptop where Viv’s name appears. “I don’t know what it means,” he says.
“It means,” Parker explains, “Mom has posted a message.”
Zan says, “It’s an email?”
“It’s a posting,” says the boy, “nobody emails anymore.”
“Mom sent us a message?”
“Not exactly a message, not exactly to us.”
“Parker,” the father quietly implores, “I don’t understand.”
“It’s for anyone who sees it.” In place of text is a photo. In the background of the photo is a monumental structure, six columns—though there are more corresponding columns behind the six—capped with a massive stone ledge. On top is the sculpture of a chariot, drawn by four horses and driven by a winged woman carrying a long scepter. At the end of the scepter is an Iron Cross, and above that a mighty bird spreads its own wings.
Zan knows he’s seen this structure. Out of it pours into the foreground of the photo a wide boulevard dotted with passers-by, one of whom, at the image’s forefront, is a woman disappearing off to the side of the photo. Though she’s slightly blurred, Parker says, “It’s Viv!”
Zan nods. “It does look like her.”
“But who’s taking the photo?” says Parker.
Zan says nothing, brooding over the image.
“Is that Ethiopia?” asks Parker. “Those people don’t look like Ethiopians.” He means they’re white.
“It’s not Ethiopia. I’ve seen this.” He points at the photo. “I don’t mean just pictures of it.”
“It’s London!” Parker exclaims. “Didn’t we see this the first or second day here, when we went to that über-creepy place below ground that wasn’t below ground and then that other creepy place they cut off the heads? Mom is here in London!”
In Zan, a flash of exhilaration wars with confusion, and loses. “We know it’s from Viv?” he says. He shakes his head trying to make sense of it when it hits him. “That’s not London,” he says, “that’s the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.”
Zan collapses onto the bed. On his back he stares at the ceiling. “Where’s Berlin?” says Parker.
“Germany,” says Zan.
“Germany’s its own country, right?”
“Yes.”
“Why’s Mom there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why would she post a photo?”
“I...well, she’s a photographer . . . ”
“Dad!”
“I don’t know.”
“If she’s not in Ethiopia, why doesn’t she call? Why doesn’t she—?”
“Stop, Parker,” the father says, covering his face with his hands.
Parker says, “Do you want to answer?”
“What?” says Zan.
“Comment? On Viv’s photo? Post a reply?”
“You can do that?” and his son sighs deeply. The photo feels to Zan like a bulletin, a flare shot into cyberspace—“like,” Zan says not really to Parker but out loud, “I’m supposed to go get her.”
“How far is Germany?”
“I’ll take the train,” Zan is thinking out loud, “I don’t have the money for a plane ticket . . . ”
“I, I, I,” says Parker, “what, you think you’re leaving me here?” because momentarily Zan has forgotten he doesn’t have a nanny: and then he realizes, But what about Sheba? This cannot be, he silently prays to the choice before him. He can’t leave his daughter who already has been passed off three times in her short life and feels herself stranded whenever anyone exits whatever room she’s in. You left me in London, he already hears someday’s cry of betrayal.
Viv never would want him to leave their daughter here. If I go find her, Zan thinks, she’ll hate me for leaving the girl; he remembers a talk they once had shortly before Sheba came—wasn’t it before?—when a fire threatened the canyon: If ever there was a decision to be made for either mother or father to save each other or their son, they would save their son. It was the easiest thing they ever agreed on.
But Viv doesn’t know Sheba is missing, and now the choice doesn’t seem so easy. Zan can’t ignore what’s plainly a message from his wife, and—reminding himself that he still has Sheba’s passport and no one can take her from the country—never in the previous twenty-four hours has he believed the girl to be in danger.
Of course this leads to the next thought which finally it’s time to express if only to himself. With the sound in Zan’s ears of the lost Sheba constantly calling Molly’s name in the Hampton maze, and with the scene playing out in his mind’s eye of Sheba turning to Molly in the maze and racing into the woman’s arms, finally it’s time to say the crazy thing that’s been in his head since the moment Molly appeared at that door–Zan looks at the door now–and stepped inside.
In no way does it make sense, and in every way does it feel true; and who’s to say no to it? And if it is true, then w
ho’s to say Molly shouldn’t have her? Who’s to say that at this moment Sheba isn’t reunited with the very person in search of whom Viv has vanished in the first place? Zan thinks, When there’s no other obvious option, sometimes you can only follow the signs. They can ignore Viv’s posting and continue waiting for her while they try to search London, and a month from now be exactly where they are at this moment with not a thing different. Sometimes life calls for a catalytic instant.
Father and son spend the next day packing. Zan moves by rote; he can barely think at all. He arranges with the front desk to leave their bags behind; he has no idea how to explain that he can’t settle the bill. Ruling out the clandestine escape in the night, nonetheless he can’t stand the prospect of humiliating himself before his son.
The woman at the desk says, “Yes, Mr. Nordhoc, it’s taken care of.”
“What?” says Zan.
She looks at the computer. “Mr. Brown has taken care of it,” and Zan is too relieved to feel bruised. Well, you’re all right then, James, he thinks to himself; maybe this is the first sign of straits at their most dire, when pride dies.
Their last night in London, Zan and Parker return to the pub that used to be the Ad Lib, where everything began with Molly, in one last hope Sheba will be there. Stepping inside, Zan closes his eyes thinking he’ll hear the girl and woman in front of him; but in the dark of his eyelids he knows the pub’s music isn’t theirs.
They take the table by the window through which Sheba saw Molly the first time. On the tabletop Zan counts his money before he orders a sandwich for his son: “You haven’t,” he struggles to ask the bartender, “seen a woman and small girl, have you? Today or yesterday, or the day before.”
These Dreams of You Page 12
