What Remains of Her

by Eric Rickstad

  The best approach to the meeting with Child Welfare, however, would be to simply listen. Her father had said to listen to those who know more than you, let them speak first and the appropriate questions will come. Lucinda was beginning to appreciate the pressure her father must have weathered when Sally and her mother had disappeared. Especially with his friend as the prime suspect for a time. What a nightmare. No wonder it had taken its toll on both men. Especially Jonah. First chance she got at personal time, she needed to get up to see Jonah at his cabin.

  Dale came up from behind, giving her a start.

  “Where’d you come from?” Lucinda said. “You scared me.”

  “Through the back. Private powwow with Kirk?” He nodded through the doorway, to Kirk patronizing the press.

  “We were discussing the girl,” Lucinda said.

  Dale wrapped his arms around her from behind.

  She took his hands from her hips and stepped from his embrace. “I’m working.” Did any man she knew respect the bounds of professionalism?

  “Looked like you were having coffee with him,” Dale said.

  So there it was. Jealousy. She did not have the time for it.

  “I have an interview with Child Welfare,” she said.

  Kirk rambled into the room, locked eyes with Dale.

  “Sneak in the old back door, did we?” he said. “How’s the insurance racket?”

  Dale didn’t correct Kirk, who knew damn well Dale was a realtor, respected by both buyers and sellers, a rarity for the profession.

  “Real estate,” Lucinda said. Lucinda had met Dale two years ago when she’d been looking to buy a small home for herself. He’d not been her agent, but when he’d overheard her speaking to his colleague at the office, he’d said, “I know the perfect place for you.” Lucinda had resisted rolling her eyes. Of course a realtor knew the perfect place. Didn’t they all? It just came in, I haven’t even listed it yet, he’d said. You’re lucky. Lucinda had rolled her eyes then. Yes, lucky me, she’d thought. She’d waited for this agent who claimed to have the perfect place to hoist himself up from his desk and horn in on the sale. Take advantage. Instead, he’d given the agent Lucinda was working with the address and handed over a folder and a set of keys. “If it’s not the one for you,” he’d said, now preoccupied with his computer screen, no longer looking at her, “you’re out of luck in this town.” He’d said this town as if he’d been the one living here his whole life, and Lucinda was a newcomer, instead of the other way around. As if Lucinda hadn’t known the town as well as him.

  The place Dale had suggested hadn’t been perfect. It had been better than that. Perfection didn’t exist, anyway, and its approximation was dull, plastic. However, the house was just right, as Dale had been on his and Lucinda’s first evening of bowling and pizza together after Lucinda had closed the deal on the house and insisted she buy Dale a beer for directing her to a home she had not even known existed in her small hometown.

  “Right. Real estate,” Kirk said now. “Sell the land out from under us locals.”

  “That’s not what I do,” Dale said.

  “Right. Well. This room is for official business only,” Kirk said.

  Dale looked at Lucinda.

  “It is,” she said.

  “Using it for coordination. Lots of coordinating to do,” Kirk said. “Lots of late hours ahead.”

  “I’ll see you at the house,” Lucinda said to Dale.

  “I’d like to help search,” Dale said.

  “Get over to the grange hall then,” Kirk said. “With the rest of the volunteers.”

  “I’ll see you later,” Lucinda said. “I have something I want to talk to you about.”

  Dale made to kiss Lucinda; she offered her cheek. She did not feel comfortable with affection on such a somber case as a missing child.

  “Got it,” Dale said and went out the door.

  “Sensitive,” Kirk said.

  A woman entered the room, fur earmuffs slung around her neck as she plucked a stray hair apparently shed from the frizz of gray hair on her head, her eyeglasses steamed up when she breathed. She reminded Lucinda of a woman she’d known in the past, but Lucinda could not place the woman in her mind.

  Kirk nodded and sauntered out to address the reporters.

  The woman removed her glasses and lowered them on their chain, clasped a binder against her chest.

  “Deputy,” the woman said.

  Lucinda nodded. Yes. She was. Not a crossing guard. A deputy sheriff, working the background of girl who was missing, and quite likely the victim of a serious crime. “And you’re?”

  “Maxine Fields.”

  “Have a seat,” Lucinda said. “I poured coffee.”

  “I refrain from caffeine.”

  As she sat, Fields opened the binder and looked at Lucinda as a mother might look her child in the eye before explaining a hard fact of life. It set Lucinda on edge, made her feel remotely culpable for some vague sin she could not recall committing. To calm herself, she took her notepad out of her jacket pocket and perused it for a solid question to put forth.

  “Let me shed some light,” Fields offered, as if sensing Lucinda’s uncertainty of where to start. “Let’s see. Gretel Elizabeth Atkins. That’s a name given the missing girl by the state. We estimate she is roughly seven years old, though by her physical appearance and her mental and emotional makeup due to trauma, she would pass for perhaps four or five years old. Her date of birth is unknown. Place of birth, New England, as best we can narrow it down. Her biological parents are unknown. She was abandoned outside the hospital Emergency Room in St. Johnsbury at around two weeks old, give or take a month. She weighed five pounds, thirteen ounces. Her parents never turned up. No one ever turned up. There was no record of a regional birth to parents that fit the girl’s stats during a two-month time frame. Child and Family Services checked across the river in New Hampshire. No records there either. Or western Maine. Or eastern upstate New York. She must have been given birth to privately. A teenage mother. Likely. Happens every day. Gretel is a mystery, as if she appeared out of thin air.”

  The information took Lucinda aback. She’d thought with the girl being in foster care there’d be troves of information on her.

  Fields glanced at the binder.

  “Her first foster folks were good people,” she said. “Very good people,” she stressed, as if to make certain Lucinda understood that the parents who subsequently ended up with her were the anomaly, and not the other way around. “But the father lost his job and they had to leave the state. She, Gretel, lost out.

  “After that,” Fields continued, “she was a ward of the state for a time. Then she got taken in by a couple who”—she paused—“who abused the system. The woman proved to be an alcoholic. She blacked out while Gretel, who was eleven months at the time, fell out the open window of the second-story apartment and into the bushes below. Gretel broke both legs. She still has a limp. There was, it seems, brain trauma, though the extent is unknown as she’s still developing. If it’d been a sidewalk she fell onto instead of bushes . . .”

  Lucinda shifted, uncomfortable. The more the woman spoke, the more grateful Lucinda felt for her own parents; and guilty somehow too. How did she deserve such a good home and parents while another child did not? The truth was that “deserve” played no role. It was the luck of the draw. Fate.

  “Aren’t foster parents screened?” Lucinda had told herself she’d refrain from asking questions until Fields was finished but could not help herself. She knew nothing about how the foster system worked. Or failed to work. She assumed many foster parents were loving, generous, well-meaning people. As her own parents had been. Why, then, did she have an instinctive distrust of foster care?

  The woman did not answer Lucinda’s question. “It gets worse, I’m afraid,” she said. “Her next foster situation.” She paused again. This was difficult for her, a personal embarrassment, an affront; it seemed Fields took failings of the system personall
y. “They, unfortunately, passed the girl around,” Fields said.

  “I don’t understand,” Lucinda said.

  “They shared her . . .”

  “But . . . she’s seven,” Lucinda said. She felt as if she might be sick. She thought of Sally, who’d disappeared at about the same age as Gretel. Even when Lucinda had finally understood Sally was likely never coming back, and had become aware of the epidemic of sad crimes against women and children, she’d never imagined Sally in such a situation. She’d always kept Sally safe in her mind, comforted and protected, still with her mother, at least. Or she thought of Sally and her mother as, simply, gone, vanished, as if they had gently, peacefully dissolved. Lucinda shuddered. Coffee acid ate at her stomach.

  Fields flipped a page in the binder. “I’ll spare the details, unless you’d like—”

  “Leave the binder. I’ll dig deeper as necessary. Who does this kind of stuff?”

  “More people than you care to know,” Fields said.

  “How can they fool the system meant to protect the kids they harm?”

  “The system’s made up of people. Well-intentioned, hardworking, overworked, fallible people. Sometimes they, we, I, miss things.”

  Lucinda wanted to be angry with the woman, ask her how anyone could miss things? Yet Lucinda felt no anger toward the woman. Only empathy. Even if Lucinda had been angry, lashing out served no end. Her father had spoken of the need to compartmentalize the viciousness of the world, to keep it locked up and at bay so one could continue with one’s work, one’s life. Lucinda needed to do that now, focus on finding Gretel.

  “I’ve seen worse,” Fields said. “Much worse. Fortunately the likelihood of PTSD for the girl is negligible. That’s the one blessing of acts like this happening so young. The young brain isn’t built to create long-term memories. This type of abuse, however, may stay with certain victims. It seems to almost molecularly alter them. The mind may not remember, but the body does.”

  Fields closed the binder.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Lucinda said.

  “There’s nothing one can say,” Fields said.

  I Live Here

  Jonah parked the truck off the road to the Gore and got out, gasping for breath, trembling. There was no going back now. No one who would understand his justification for keeping the girl. They’d think he’d taken her from her home, they’d believe it like they believed in God.

  Jonah pulled his coat collar up against his cold neck. The temperature had dipped. A wind kicked up. It threshed the treetops, the branches clattering. Vultures arced in the sky over the distant trees over near the cabin.

  A blue jay heckled him from a spruce branch as he scrambled around to the passenger side to retrieve the girl. He had a grip on the truck’s door handle when he heard it.

  An ATV.

  Throttling up the road behind him.

  The girl looked at Jonah through the truck window. He put a finger to his lips, shhhh. Motioned for her to hunker down.

  She did.

  She’d run off for a reason, and she wanted to stay run off. They would leave together. Start fresh. Soon. Very soon.

  The ATV gained on him, the deafening blat of its exhaust and reek of its toxic fumes polluting the still mountain air. The rider was fat, bearded, a slow look in his eyes.

  He brought the ATV to an abrupt stop and slung mud and snow on Jonah.

  Jonah stepped toward the ATV.

  The rider gawked at him. “Hey,” he said.

  Jonah said nothing.

  “Know where there’s trails up here?” the rider said.

  “No trails. Not for those things.”

  “No trails?” The rider torqued the throttle. The engine revved. The tailpipe puked exhaust.

  “That’s right,” Jonah said.

  “Maybe I’ll just make my own trail then.” The rider revved the engine louder and spat a wad of chew into the snow.

  “You don’t want to be doing that,” Jonah said.

  “Why’s that, Pops?”

  “I live up here.”

  “You own the land?” The rider pressed a thumb to the side of one nostril and blew snot out of the other nostril, slung the snot from his fingers. “I don’t think so. We’re gonna log up here. The whole mountain. Come spring. Knock ‘your’ cabin flat with a skidder.”

  The logging company would be relentless, pressuring him. The searchers would find their way here too. No place was safe. He would not be here long anyway.

  “It’s not spring now,” Jonah said. He wished he could see his truck behind him, see if the girl was keeping herself hidden. If she so much as peeked over the edge of the window . . . “And I don’t want to hear those things.”

  “Well, Pops, if you don’t own the land, you don’t have a say now, do you?”

  “Do you own it?” Jonah said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Do you own it?”

  “No.” The rider blew snot out of his other nostril.

  “Then since neither of us owns it, but one of us lives on it, I’d say the one who lives on it has more say than the one who doesn’t. Wouldn’t you say?”

  “Listen, Pops.”

  “I ain’t your fucking Pops.”

  “I ain’t hurting nothing.”

  “You’re hurting my fucking sensibilities.”

  “Your what?”

  “My fucking sensibilities, my aesthetics, my peace of fucking mind.” Jonah’s blood was hot with rage. His teeth ached with it.

  “I don’t know what—”

  Jonah stepped in close to the rider. “Listen to me,” he said. “You listening? I am telling you just once.”

  “Jesus,” the rider said.

  “Jesus doesn’t have a say in this. I did my praying once when it counted most and—I’m telling you this once. Turn that fucking contraption around and do not come back up here. Not ever.”

  “You got no fucking right.”

  “Right? Right don’t matter. Only what I’m about to tell you matters. You come up here again, I will shoot you fucking dead.”

  The rider blinked. “Hey. Listen—”

  “You listen. What I say is the truth. Sure as you sit your fat ass on that fucking thing. You come up here again, I will shoot you dead. But first, I will wound you, so when I come over to you and look you in the eye as you lay on the ground blubbering and confused about how it ever came to this, you’ll know it came to it because you didn’t fucking listen when you should have, pretty much I guess how you’ve lived your whole useless fucking life.”

  The blood sang in Jonah’s veins now. Magma blood. He’d kill the man. He would. He was nearly blind with rage he could not suppress.

  The rider revved the engine.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” Jonah said.

  The rider scowled, but he engaged the ATV and backed up and drove off.

  Jonah watched the ATV ride back down the road out of sight, standing there until he could no longer hear it.

  Then he sagged to his knees with relief, choking for air. The rage had overcome him so swiftly, he’d felt he might black out.

  Only One Option

  He had to get the girl away.

  Jonah paced in the cabin, his thoughts frenetic and conflicted, a kaleidoscope of confusion and doubt. No matter how he worked it, the best thing, for the girl, was to take her away, someplace safe, with him, with someone who understood. But where? He could not afford even a fleabag motel, yet he could not stay here. It would not be long before someone connected the date of his daughter’s disappearance to the date of the disappearance of this girl, or the logger on the ATV came back with more loggers.

  “What are we going to do?” he said.

  The girl pulled the blanket around her.

  He sat in the chair. The warmth of the stove washed over him, a gauzed drowsiness webbed his mind and slackened his jaw. He could never have imagined this is how his life would turn. It did not seem like it was his life at all, as if he had
never, from day one, had any control over it.

  How many lives make up a single life? he wondered.

  She sat blinking at him.

  What were they going to do?

  One step at a time, he thought. The girl had to be starving. He’d start there, by getting food in her belly. She’d need to be well nourished for a journey. And dressed. He could not be taking her around wrapped in a blanket and a grimy shirt.

  He boiled a pot of oatmeal, added evaporated milk to it. He smacked a box of brown sugar gone hard as stone on the edge of the woodstove and stirred the brown sugar chunks into the oats, set the bowl and spoon beside her.

  She didn’t touch it.

  It was hard to get Sally to eat when she’d set her mind against it. By the age of three she knew all the ploys: reverse psychology, games, dares, the claims that eating a certain food meant she was a big girl, or would make her jump higher or run faster; none of them worked.

  “I’m not doing the airplane thing,” he said. “You’re too old for that. If you don’t want it, I’ll eat it.”

  He took her bowl away and began to eat the oatmeal. He was famished. His empty guts churned.

  She frowned.

  He pushed the bowl to her.

  She shoveled the cereal into her mouth with her fingers, ravenous, feral, not taking a breath. Finished, panting, she threw up all over herself and sobbed.

  “Oh,” he said, searching for a towel. “Shhh. Easy. Easy. There’s no need to cry.”

  But, of course, there was every reason to cry.

  So he let her.

  “We’ll clean that right up. It’s nothing we haven’t done before. Then we’ll see about making a plan for getting us out of here,” he said.

  Don’t Touch a Thing

  Lucinda took a deep breath, nervous; she’d never been comfortable in a crowd, let alone speaking in front of one, or leading one. She was distrustful of them, the mob, how the seeming safety and invisibility offered by the crowd could bring out the worst in the individual, even when people gathered for a common good. She had an uncle and aunt who lived in Buffalo who went on guided tours to far-flung destinations, spent weeks with strangers busing from site to site as a tour guide recited the same facts about the locale as the guide had done the day before and would do the day after. Lucinda could think of no worse way to spend time than with strangers holding brochures and wearing headsets, unless said tour was done on Segways.