by Amanda Stern
In the car on the way back she sits on my lap. I cuddle her, but then I notice that as we drive away, she starts panting, like she’s taking a brisk walk. Her nails dig through my jeans and her dry tongue hangs out the side of her stunned, open mouth. My lap looks like a bamboo doormat—shit, I didn’t even think about shedding. As she hyperventilates, my own chest tightens, and I, too, start struggling for air. A dread creeps through me then, in the backseat of that car. The reason for her familiarity dawns on me. What have I done?
In my apartment Pilot takes a lazy jump onto the first chair she sees, and then she lies there—mouth open, tongue out, stress-panting, depressed and listless—for hours, then days. She won’t move to eat, or drink water, or sleep in her bed. Toys don’t interest her. Neither do treats. I spend a lot of time at her side, running my hand through her fur, talking to her, trying to soothe and calm her. I know what she feels. She’s me at my dad’s house; she’s me as a child. After several days in the chair she finally gets down, only to shadow me. When I’m sitting, she stands on her hind legs and keeps her paws on me. It’s incredibly sweet, and everyone thinks she must feel rescued, but I know it’s not relief that’s driving her to cling to me; it’s her lack of relief, her uncertainty is what’s drawing her so close, and this fills me with anxiety, and a deep unbridled sadness. When I get into bed, she needs to sleep so close that she practically burrows her way into my body, and this makes me want to cry. No matter how near she is, I know she feels like she can’t get close enough. Instead of feeling needed, I feel only her existential anguish of needing.
Soon I will have to leave her alone, and I know she won’t know whether or not I’ll ever return; I know she’ll feel I’ve left her to die. Her anxiety fills my body, which is already filled with my own. I cannot tell whether I am me or the dog.
I go to therapy; I’m gone for an hour and a half. On my way home I have a terrible image: Pilot, sprawled dead on Cumberland Street, having jumped out the window, trying to race after me. The image feels so real that when I don’t see her lifeless body on the sidewalk I am genuinely surprised. At home, she’s at the door, jumping up on me and grabbing at my legs just the way I used to do with my mother.
In the living room it takes a minute for me to register the overturned shelves, the books scattered across the floor. The window curtains have been pulled down, and above my desk there is a tear in the window screen the size of her body. It’s a miracle she didn’t fall out, four floors down. I am chilled by my earlier vision. Later I find dog scratches down the back of the front door. She was trying to get out of the apartment when I wasn’t there. I burst into tears and worry that the former boyfriend from whom I’d inherited this apartment really did curse it. The day he’d moved out after we broke up I discovered toppled furniture, books and broken wine bottles flung across the floor, and the words “I HOPE YOU HATE IT HERE” scrawled across the hall mirror in Sharpie.
I call the rescue people who sound bewildered. The dog didn’t have separation anxiety at their house.
“That’s because at your house there were other dogs, here she’s all alone when I leave,” I say.
“Oh, we never thought of that,” the rescue woman says.
She tells me to crate Pilot when I leave and not make a big deal out of coming and going. I tell her I don’t think putting anyone with anxiety in an enclosed space is a good idea.
“Trust me,” she says. “If you crate her, she’ll get over this in no time.”
I take her word for it. Shy of hanging posters of boy bands, I decorate Pilot’s crate like a preteen’s bedroom. I keep the door open so she can come and go as she pleases. Still, the idea of a crate doesn’t sit well with me, but most of the world’s ways strike me as counterintuitive, and this is probably one of them. I put food in the crate, leave the radio on, shut the crate door, go about my business at home, and ignore her when I leave.
When I get home, the crate is ten feet from where I left it, and it’s filled with the white cotton innards of the crate cushion. Blankets have been pulled through the mesh and shredded. She’s biting the bars in a full-scale panic attack. I rush to let her out, wrecked that the person who’s supposed to protect her from her fears instead actively conjured this mental anguish. She has torn bits of fur off her own body.
As weeks pass, things get worse for her, and for me. I absorb her depression and panic. I cry, that I’ve taken her from her home where she was secure and am keeping her in a place she fears. Her harrowing, unendurable fear echoes as my own. Now I know something else, something I couldn’t ever know—the helplessness of being a parent whose every effort to solve and fix their child falls short. I’ve failed both her and myself.
I have to make a choice. I can meet my own longing for connection by keeping her, guaranteeing her helpless misery, or I can sacrifice my own needs for hers. Pilot needs what I haven’t yet been able to find for myself: a family. I have to find Pilot a new home. While liberating her was my attempt to rescue myself and give us both a family, I am not enough for her. I am not cut out to have a baby.
The rescue place finds a family in the country, away from cars and honking, away from skateboards. Before I hand her over, I bend down and sob into her face. We are the same, and I worry I’m giving up on us both.
Intelligence Test: Maze Tracing
See this little girl in the middle here? She wants to get out to the street and go home. Here is her home. You have to show me how she would get home without getting stuck. You see, she would get stuck if she took this turn. She cannot walk through a wall, can she? How should she go to get home? Make sure she doesn’t get stuck.
This little girl is all by herself. All the way over there is her family. The little girl has to get to her family. You must find the shortest way there without falling off the sidewalk. If you fall off the sidewalk, the little girl has to start again. Don’t get lost. Time is running out. Hurry, hurry. You only get three tries.
See if you can get out of this one. Start with your pencil here and find your way out without going up any blind alleys or crossing any lines. Do you understand? Do not lift your pencil until you have finished. If you fall off, you can’t get back on. Find your way out. Are you lost? Look, you’re stuck in a blind alley, see? You can’t get out now.
You ran out of tries.
Oh How We Glowed
All my efforts to stay home from camp have failed. Even when I explain to my mom that Etan needs me to keep looking for him, she says I have to go.
The bus to camp leaves from a cemetery, which is not a good omen. We take a taxi all the way up to Grant’s Tomb, which is on 122nd Street—122 blocks away from our house; 127 blocks from Etan Patz’s house. Ever since Etan disappeared thirty days ago, I’ve noticed that adults don’t watch their kids as well as we watch our adults, and they make bad decisions, like sending us away for two months with grown-ups who are strangers. Just because they call it “camp” doesn’t mean it’s safe. My mom doesn’t worry about the same things I do, and neither do the police, which makes them all bad watchers. If they worried as much as I do, they’d have found him by now. I’m one of the best watchers because I worry about everything. The newspaper said Etan’s sister had a birthday party, but no one showed up because everyone is scared of them now. I’m not scared of them. I would have shown up.
When the policeman rang our doorbell, Deep Countdown for camp had just started, but the longer Etan stays missing, the more the news creates a new countdown I’ve never had before—Empty Countdown. This is the worst countdown possible. My other countdowns were about not knowing what’s going to happen, but Empty Countdown is fearing what I now know does happen. Before Empty Countdown, I worried adults didn’t know how to take care of themselves or of us, that they’d misplace us or get lost, but everyone said that was crazy. Now I know I’m right.
Empty Countdown cuts your breath in half and closes your throat tight every time you swallow. When I try to explain it to my mom, she gives me Dimetapp, or wonde
rs if I have asthma like Kara. Empty Countdown doesn’t let you get the same amount of air as everyone else, and what little air it gives you is frightened air, made from fire alarms that won’t turn off, and smoke that never clears.
I’ve been in Empty Countdown for one month, half the time I’ll be away. I cannot go. Even before Etan disappeared, I wasn’t ready to leave, but now I know the world doesn’t always return what it takes. How can all these parents, who are suddenly so afraid of having their kids go missing, choose to make us go missing? They’re pushing us toward the very people they’ve been warning us away from—strangers.
If I leave now, when I should be here keeping track of everyone, people will die. Something very horrible is going to happen. I need to stay home and be the adult and stop the bad things from happening, but I keep getting moved forward, like a plastic game piece, toward Vermont.
It takes seven hours to get to Vermont. Seven hours is an entire day of school, three back-to-back movies, or an airplane ride to California. Seven is almost nine, which is how old I am, and also the same amount of hours that passed before anyone knew Etan Patz was missing, and that’s a bad omen, too.
Kids and parents are sprawled on the greenery, laughing and hugging, like they don’t see the two big buses waiting to kidnap us all away. The air carries the first-day sounds of a new school: children laughing, high-fiving, and neato-ing new haircuts, sneakers, and braces. Eddie and Kara whip out of the cab. A teenage boy takes our duffels. I have no control over what’s happening. My body is moving past a blur of stripes: thick and thin bands of blue, yellow, and maroon tube socks pulled to the kneecaps. The boy throws our duffel bags down the throat of the bus, which I didn’t know would happen. It is so far away. I hope the doors of the bus never open. Kara huddles in a circle with her friends, showing off her new unicorn earrings. What if Kara’s bunk is too far from mine? A group of boys stand over Eddie and his new guitar. His red hair is orange in the sun and flops over his eyes. Not once have Kara or Eddie looked back to see if I’m okay. At home, when their friends are over, they ignore me. My stomach crumples. Will I exist to them at camp?
Inside my duffel are things I’ve never used on my own, like bug spray, a canteen, a penknife, and laundry detergent. My mom addressed all the envelopes for me and put the stamps where they belong so I could write home. I also don’t know how to use sleeping bag straps, or what parcel post is, or how to call home collect. My mom does everything for me that I don’t know how to do, but what will I do at camp when she’s not there? She said people will do things for me if I don’t know. I don’t want to do this; I can’t do this. I’m going to get everything wrong, and then everyone will see something is wrong with me and I’ll die.
The bus is running; the engine is a countdown we can all hear. I am afraid my body will open and explode in front of everyone when it hears the bus doors open. My mom hugs a parent, and my nerves swing up. When no one else is afraid, I am truly alone. Everyone’s backs are to my face, and I feel like the Egyptian vase I made in ceramics, with a handle too high, a spout too low, and an uneven, tilting base. The only way to keep it straight was to lean it against Imogen’s. Imogen and Melissa are with their families this summer. They’re so lucky. Why didn’t Jimmy Alcatraz see where Etan Patz went?
I grip my mother’s hand and stand as close to her as possible, pressing into her arm, hoping I might pass through her skin and make my way back inside her body where I belong.
“Manda, you’re pushing me,” my mom complains, stepping away.
Some other new girls nearby are talking to each other, which means they are not afraid. The space between them and me widens.
My mother inches me forward, urging me to interact with the others. Why does she want me to leave her? Isn’t she afraid she’ll die when her kids are away, just the way Jimmy’s first wife died when their kids went to camp? What if my mom does die and Jimmy doesn’t tell us until after we come home? We’ll have spent the whole summer not knowing we should have felt dead.
My mom lets go of my hand. “You’re Athena, right?” my mom asks the girl who has just appeared before me. Athena nods her head. When her lower lip trembles, I am soothed by her fear. “This is Amanda,” my mom says.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi,” Athena says.
“Do you have anyone to sit with on the bus, Athena?” my mom asks. Athena shakes her head. “Great, you can be seatmates!”
Athena takes a deep breath and nods, which rolls calmness through me.
“Perfect. Why don’t you get to know each other a little and I’ll be right back,” my mom says, turning back to her friend. Athena and I stand there silently. My mom tilts her chin at me, which means, Say something.
“Which one’s your mom?” I ask her. I feel like I am two selves. One self is talking to protect the other self, who is mute and unable to function or understand the world.
“She left already.” Her voice cracks.
“Oh,” I say. Her mom sounds like the meanest person alive. “I’m sorry.”
Athena swallows and nods.
Then a woman with blond frizzy curls stands on an apple crate at the foot of the bus and the world suddenly fast-forwards around me. My lips go numb. The woman shouts instructions at us, but I can’t hear them because the world has compressed and condensed, nestled and screaming, right inside my forehead. Things change fast; people are moving, greetings are over, and as the bus doors open, the sounds in the air turn mechanical and urgent. Athena pulls me. I turn and see that my mom is having a conversation, not paying attention to the fact she might never see me again.
I am in a line of disappearing children being devoured by the bus. I am the littlest; I might get trampled. I watch my own sneakers take the three steep black-treaded steps before I finally hear my mom behind me shouting, “I LOVE YOU!” but someone pushes me down the aisle. I slip into a window seat on the mom side of the bus. Athena slides in next to me.
My mother is looking for me, but the windows are too dark and she can’t see. I stand and press my hands against the window and knock. I want off. She walks to the back of the bus, but I am in the middle. She walks to the front, but still I am in the middle. She’s waving to someone else’s child, not her own, and I start crying and want to freeze all the leaking flavors of emotion by stashing my fingers in my mouth, but I know I can’t. Nine is too old to suck your fingers. The bus rolls away and I watch my mom, waving still to someone who isn’t me. If she can’t even find me on the bus, how will she find me if I’m being kidnapped?
I slump back down to my seat. I can’t let anyone know how scared I am. My mouth makes small talk. Kara and Eddie are on a different bus and I didn’t know that would happen. Out the window, the city world I know turns into a tree world I don’t. The roads flatten wide and trees appear, thickening up the sides of the roads until they’re a forest. Etan’s mom was on TV asking that if a family took him to be their own child, to please send him back. What if he’s here, in the woods, where they don’t even have TV?
Eventually, the counselor and kids start singing camp songs. The music pushes up my heart and I begin to feel better, but Athena is just staring at the back of the bus seat, not swaying even just a bit. She is not a music person; we will not be friends. We don’t say any more words for a long time.
Seven hours later, we arrive to green fields and log cabins painted orange-red. If camp were a person, cabin 4, where I am, would be the face, which feels too far away from Kara and Eddie, whose cabins are the knees and feet. I am given a bottom bunk that’s pressed against a wall. This means I can sleep on my left side for two months and secretly suck my fingers without anyone seeing. The cabin smells unfamiliar, of mothballs, grass, and old wood. There are two doors to the cabin, a screen door and a proper wooden door. The screen door creaks loudly when it opens, which is a good sign. That means if someone comes to murder us, the squeaking door will give the murderer away.
Our counselor is a tomboy blonde named Sally. “All ri
ght, girls. We’re going to make our beds and put things away, but we can’t do that without doing this!” she says, bending over a cassette player. First we don’t hear anything, but then a slow guitar build I recognize from the street side of our house comes out. In her Chuck Taylor sneakers, blue sweat jacket, and torn jean shorts, she starts singing, dancing a walk-strut with her eyes closed. “…‘hey honey, take a walk on the wild side’…unzip your duffels!” she sings to us. We do. “Find your sheets!” She plays the song over and over until we’re all moved in, and then we have a cabin meeting.
“Chicks, it’s us against the world. Got it?”
We nod. My belly untightens. Sally is tough and warm at the same time. Even better, she’s capable and safe. I can’t wait to tell Imogen and Melissa about her. Some girls sneak looks at one another like they think Sally’s weird. Maybe they’ll think I’m weird, too, because I like her.
“We’re gonna stick together as a team until we all find our place. Right on?”
We nod again.
“By the end of this summer, if you don’t know every last word of ‘Walk on the Wild Side,’ then I’m a disgrace. Let’s go get some bug juice!”
We walk as a clump down to the main house. No one knows what “walk on the wild side” means.
“Woodshop,” Sally calls, pointing to a small cabin on the right. “Bike shed. Infirmary. Cargo net. Baseball field. Office. Bell. Main house. Seeger house.” We follow Sally to a table lined with red plastic cups filled with something called bug juice, which is cold and tastes like Kool-Aid. A cloud passes over and covers the sun and my homesick hits me deep. I wish Kara’s cabin were right next to mine.
The first few nights are like jail. I’m too homesick to speak and the asthma in my chest grows. At night when we walk through the dark back to our cabin, I wipe away free-falling tears that no one can see. In bed I face the wall, fingers in my mouth, and cry myself to sleep. I know others can hear me because sometimes I cry so hard I can’t breathe, but every morning I wake up amazed that I made it through another night away from my mother. When we reach eight nights, I forget to keep counting.
