Little Girl Gone

by Alexandra Burt

  ‘My ear, did that happen during the accident?’

  ‘They recovered a gun in the car. They are not sure how the injury came about, if someone shot you or you shot yourself. Hopefully you’ll remember soon.’

  Bullet. Was shot or I did I shoot myself? That explains the police officer sitting outside my door and I wonder if he’s guarding me or if he’s guarding someone from me. This talk of bullets and guns and ravines, my missing ear. I’m blank, completely blank. Except …

  ‘I remembered something.’

  The words come spilling out and take on a life of their own.

  ‘I need to know if what I see … I … I think I remember bits and pieces, but it’s not like a memory, it’s more like fragments.’ It’s like flipping through a photo album not knowing if it’s mine or someone else’s life. Blood. So much blood.

  ‘It’s a humpty dumpty kind of a situation, maybe you just can’t put it back together. You may not be able to remember minute by minute, but you’ll be able to generally connect the dots at some point.’

  All the king’s horses and all the king’s men. Wild horses. I make a decision. The blood was just an illusion. A figment.

  ‘I’m very tired,’ I say and feel relieved.

  ‘Let the nurse know if there’s anybody you want us to call. Don’t forget the spirometer – every two hours …’

  He points at something behind me. ‘Behind you is a PCA pump. It delivers small amounts of pain medication. If you need more,’ he puts a small box with a red button in my hand, ‘just push the red button and you’ll get one additional dose of morphine. The safety feature only allows for a maximum amount during a certain timed interval. Any questions?’

  I have learned my lesson from earlier and barely shake my head.

  I watch him leave the room and immediately a nurse enters and I try to concentrate on her explaining the yellow contraption to me. I’m supposed to breathe into the tubing until a ball moves up, and I have to breathe continuously to try to keep the ball suspended as long as possible. Because there’s fluids in my lungs.

  I have amnesia. My ear is gone. I feel … I feel as if I’m not connecting like I should. I should yell and scream, raise bloody hell, but Dr Baker’s explanations of my lack of emotions, ‘blunted affect’ he called it, seems logical. Logic I can handle, it’s the emotions that remain elusive.

  There’s something they’re not telling me. Maybe because they don’t subject injured people – especially those who’ve been shot, who lost an ear, who were that close – to any additional bad news. That must be it. Maybe the police will tell me, or Jack, once he gets here. They already told me I’ve been robbed of hours of my life, how much worse can it get?

  I hold the spirometer in my right hand. I blow into the tube and allow my mind to go blank while I watch the red ball go up. It lingers for whatever amount of time I manage to keep it suspended. I pinch my eyes shut to will the ball to maintain its suspension. Suddenly bits and pieces of images come into focus – the empty crib, the missing bottles – as if they are captured on the back of my eyelids. My mind explodes. It disintegrates, breaks into tiny particles.

  Mia isn’t with Jack. She’s gone.

  The realization occurs so abruptly and is so powerful that the wires connected to my chest seem to tremble and the machines behind me pick up on it. The beeps speed up like the hooves of a horse, walking, then trotting, then breaking into a full blown gallop. Mia’s disappearance is a fact, yet it is disconnected from whatever consequences it entails, there’s a part I can’t connect with. An empty crib. Missing clothes, her missing bottles and diapers, everything was gone. I looked for her and couldn’t find her. I went to the police and then there’s a dark hole.

  Like a jigsaw puzzle I study the pieces, connect them, tear them apart and start all over again. I remember going to the police precinct but after that it gets blurry – hazy, like a childhood memory. My mind plays a game of ‘Chinese whispers,’ thoughts relaying messages, then retelling them skewed. Easily misinterpreted, embellished, unreliable.

  Every time I watch the spirometer ball move upwards, more images form; a bathroom stall, a mop, a stairwell, pigeons, the smell of fresh paint. Then a picture fades in, as if someone has turned up a light dimmer: fragments of celestial bodies; a sun, a moon, and stars. So many stars.

  Why was I in Dover? Where is my daughter and why is no one talking about her?

  As I lie in the hospital bed, I am aware of time passing, a fleeting glimpse of light outside, day turning into night, and back into day. I long for … a tidbit of my childhood, a morsel of memory, of how my mother cared for me when I was sick, in bed with the flu or some childhood disease, like measles or chickenpox. But then I recall having been a robust child, a child that was hardy and resistant to viruses, to strep throats and pink eyes.

  I don’t know what to tell Jack once he shows up. They told him Mia is missing and he will question me. Jack will return from Chicago, he will ask questions, many questions. He will want to know about the day Mia disappeared. About the morning I found her crib empty. Amnesia is just another shortcoming of a long list of my other countless inadequacies. Shortfall after shortfall.

  I must be insane, for the only explanation I can come up with is of my daughter and my ear, together in the same place. And above them, floating suspended like a mobile, the sun, the moon, and the stars. Bright as bright can be, surrounded by darkness. A chaotic universe illuminated by heavenly bodies.

  I rest my hands on my lap. My body stills, comes to a halt. I was in an accident. I was shot or tried to harm myself. My ear is gone. There’s a hole that’s draining fluids.

  I don’t care about any of that. Mia’s gone. I can’t even bear the thought of her. I want the pain to stop yet her image remains. I raise my finger to push the red PCA button, longing for the lulled state the medicine provides. I hesitate, then I put the box down. I have to think, start somewhere. The empty crib. The dots. I have to connect the dots.

  Chapter 3

  After Mia was born I relived her birth every single night; her first gasp triggered by the cold birthing room, that gasp turning into a deep breath, then a desperate cry escaping her lips, her attempt to negotiate the inevitable transition between my womb and the outside world.

  And every morning I realized that her actual cries reached me deep in my dreams and I woke up feeling like a million tiny bombs exploded inside my head. Then my muscle memory kicked in. Wake up, get up, feed her, change her, bathe her, rock her, hold her. Feeding and changing and bathing and rocking and holding.

  I had stopped keeping track of time, the date or even the days of the week. I was unaware of whatever events might be gripping the rest of the world and I hadn’t picked up a book or a magazine in months. My life was reduced to a process of consolidating motor tasks into memory, loop-like days and repetitive responsibilities performed without any conscious effort.

  As I rose from the couch, the world spun and then stilled. I listened for the echoes of Mia’s colicky morning cries, by then seven months after her birth, hundredfold replicas of her initial primal moment that visited me in my dreams. Lately her cries had been reaching me time delayed, distorted almost, as if communicating a certain distance between us.

  That morning, I listened, yet the house remained silent. A sense of normality enveloped me, an image of a round-cheeked child pressed against the mattress manifested itself, an elfin body heavy with peaceful sleep. I had been waiting for this moment when Mia would wake up and not begin to scream before she even opened her eyes. Maybe today was the day, the end of her colic, the end of her constant crying?

  I debated rolling over, going back to sleep, but something irked me. Shouldn’t there be cooing, babbling strung-together sounds? Usually by this time, Mia was attempting to pull herself up by the bars of the crib, her eyes rimmed with tears and rage.

  Barefoot down the hallway I went and paused by her door, still ajar. I had forgotten to take my watch off the night prior and the
band had left an imprint as if I had been tied up all night. It was just before nine and I’d been asleep for an unprecedented continuous six hours.

  Mia’s door was cracked just as I had left it hours ago. Opening it wide enough to pass through, I entered the room. Something jabbed at me, made my heart stumble.

  The Tinker Bell mobile overhead, unbalanced and lopsided, somehow imperfect, and disturbed. The room, barely lit by the sunlight spilling through the window, soundless. Her crib in front of the window. Silent and abandoned. Not so much as an imprint of her body on the sheets.

  Pyrotechnics went off in my brain. I was trapped in the twilight zone, something that cannot be, I’m clearly looking at it. How can she be gone? My molars pulsated as I inspected the windows and rattled the cast-iron bars. I searched the entire apartment, rechecked every window twice. Not a trace of her.

  I ran to the front door. The locks were intact, the metal still scratched, the paint still chipped, signs of my clumsy attempt to install a deadbolt. All locks were engaged and everything was where and how it was supposed to be. Except Mia.

  There was no proof that anyone had been here − no footprints on the floor, no items left behind − nothing was disturbed, yet this peculiar energy hovered around me. The apartment seemed physically undisturbed, but felt ransacked at the same time.

  I realized the contradiction of the moment: Mia was gone, yet there was no evidence, no clue, that someone had taken her. No shards on the floor, no gaping doors, no curtains blowing in the breeze of a window left ajar. No haphazardly bunched-up sheet, no pacifier, no toy discarded on the floor.

  9-1-1.

  I ran to the kitchen, took the receiver off the wall mount, and stopped dead in my tracks. The dish rack was empty. No bottle, no collar, no nipple. No formula can, no measuring cup.

  I rushed to the trash. Surely her soiled diapers must still be in there. The can was empty, even the plastic liner was gone.

  I ripped open the fridge. All the prefilled formula bottles I had prepared the night before were gone.

  Back in her room, the shelves of the changing table, usually stacked with diapers and blankets, were empty. The closet door was wide open, not a hanger dangling, not a shoe left on the closet floor.

  I pulled the dresser drawers open. All her clothes were gone. Every single drawer of the dresser empty. Not a button or a tag tucked in a corner. The basket on top of the dresser, where I kept the diapers and the ointment, was empty. Nothing but empty pieces of furniture.

  I checked every inch of her room, every drawer, every corner of her closet. My heart dropped into my intestines. Not only was Mia gone, but so was every trace of her.

  The 70th Precinct on Lawrence Avenue in Brooklyn was a five-minute walk from North Dandry. As I passed through the building’s glass doors, the front desk clerk lifted his index finger, pointed at the earpiece, indicating he was talking on the phone.

  A janitor pushed a neon yellow bucket and a scraggly mop across the floor. He wore blue overalls and clear booties over his white sneakers. I watched him as he wheeled the bucket across the linoleum, mopping in circular motions, dipping the mop in the wringer and squeezing out the water.

  I studied my reflection in the glass door and saw a woman rocking back and forth with the movement of the mop, cotton strings slithering over the floor, wipe, dip, wring, wipe, dip, wring.

  Standing there, it was just me and the sound of my beating heart. I had rehearsed this moment countless times. What I was going to say, which words I was going to use – missing implied a moment of inattention, kidnapped was all wrong because I didn’t see anyone snatch her – I can’t find my daughter the perfect choice of words.

  Footsteps jerked me back into reality. Behind me, simultaneously a door opened and a phone rang. A detective in slacks and a light-blue shirt, his tie tucked into his waistband, walked up to the counter. He was holding a short, skinny man by his tattooed upper arm. The man was almost catatonic. The detective gave him a shove to move him along, making the man’s chest hit the edge of the counter. The man had a crooked smile on his face and seemed indifferent, as if he had been through this too many times to care.

  ‘Get an officer to take him to booking,’ the detective said to the clerk. ‘I don’t want to see his face again until he’s sobered up.’

  ‘I need to speak to someone.’ My voice was loud, so loud it made the clerk look up from the phone. ‘Please, I need help.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ the detective said. ‘I’ll be with you as soon as I can.’ He was too far away for me to make out his name on the tag clipped to his shirt pocket. He seemed young, maybe too young. Will he understand me, is he a father, has he worked with missing children before? I wonder if I should ask for a more experienced detective.

  ‘I need to talk to someone,’ I repeated, even louder than before.

  He stepped closer, reluctantly. ‘How can I help you?’

  Words sped through my mind, then images of locks emerged, doors secured with bolts, hasps and locksets.

  HELP, I screamed in my mind. I opened my mouth but no words emerged. I swallowed hard, the gulp in my throat echoed through the silent precinct hallways. I wanted to confess to whatever it was I had done, must have done, for no one disappears through locked doors or walls, especially not a baby.

  Nausea overcame me. I welcomed the strangled retching, wanted to let go of the words, the confession of what I must have done. I refused to fight the heaviness in my throat. Saliva collected in my mouth and instinctively I pinched my nose to keep the vomit from ejecting through my nostrils.

  He stepped backward, as if I was a contagious leper. ‘There’s a bathroom right over there,’ the detective pointed towards a door less than ten feet away.

  The bathroom was vacant. I knelt in the stall and on all fours I convulsed with spasms. Ripples shook my body, my cold skin was covered in a layer of sweat. As I studied my reflection in the mirror, I rummaged through my mind for an explanation, never lifting my gaze off the stranger that stared back at me. I felt fury for the woman in the mirror, a woman with unwashed hair, her eyes sunken in and sad, the woman who had replaced the real me. I willed myself to leave the bathroom and to do what I had come here for; ask for help to find Mia.

  Back in the hallway, the detective was waiting for me. ‘Ma’am?’ He seemed impatient, as if dealing with someone who had no real police business after all.

  I didn’t know what to tell the detective anymore. Had someone walked through brick walls, had some ill-fated Houdini act occurred while I was sleeping? When a magician pulls an endless scarf out of a hat, everybody knows it’s a simple trick, but this was real. And I didn’t know if I was a victim or if I was guilty. A crime has been committed. But what kind of crime?

  I don’t know where my daughter is.

  An all-encompassing statement, implicating everything possible but not implying anything specific. No fault, no crime, no blame. Just a fact.

  I don’t know where my daughter is.

  I couldn’t fathom a single logical way of explaining how Mia had disappeared.

  Say it, I kept telling myself, say it. JUST SAY IT. I pushed myself to speak but the woman I had become didn’t comply. There was nothing anyone could do for her.

  No one can help me. No one can help me. No one can help me.

  Like an oath, I repeated it three times, hoping the reiteration would conjure up some sort of sense and logic.

  As I looked past the detective, down the hallway, the tattooed man from earlier darted for the front door. The detective’s eyes followed him and then he ran after him. The tattooed man, unsteady on his feet, had reached the glass door by the time the detective got a hold of him.

  I focused on the floor and the tiny specks in the blue linoleum. I felt my knees weakening, I had to keep moving, keep the blood circulating through my body.

  No one can help me.

  I exited the precinct and kept on walking. I felt numb inside, anesthetized, yet somehow purged, ready to accep
t the facts. The numbness dissolved long enough to allow the gravity of what I must have done to sink in. As I passed a store window, out of the corner of my eye I saw a woman studying her hands as if she hadn’t seen them in a long time.

  In that brief yet gruesome moment of clarity I realized those hands might just be the hands of a monster.

  Chapter 4

  Jack arrives and he’s all business; his suit, his posture, his demeanor. The thing that strikes me is how in control he is. I used to crave his attention, his company. But not only am I disgusted by him, I can’t even conceive of ever having had feelings for him.

  My hands shake at first, then my whole body trembles. Whether with fear or anger I don’t know. I fix my gaze on his anxious face. He whispers, yet his words pierce through me.

  ‘I came straight from the airport. I can’t even wrap my mind around this. What the hell happened?’

  His comment feels familiar. Not the words, but the feeling it evokes. I’ve been belittled so many times. So many faux pas committed by me – little ones first, then major ones.

  ‘Someone took her, Jack.’

  ‘What do you mean someone took her? Where were you?’ He slides his briefcase across the nightstand sending a plastic cup tumbling over the edge and to the ground. ‘What the hell is going on?’

  ‘Jack, I—’

  He swipes his hand through the air as if to dismiss me when I open my mouth. ‘Who loses a baby, Estelle? Who? Tell me who loses a baby?’

  I press my lips together.

  ‘I leave for a couple of weeks and you get in an accident in … Dover? That’s hours from here! What were you doing there?’