Erased From Memory (32 page)

Stanton’s Mill offers an unusual combination of redwood trees, gully, and ocean. Most of the houses hug the sides of a redwood-shrouded gulch that winds around in back of Conestoga and cuts down to the sea. Conestoga people don’t go down into Stanton’s Mill much because there are no facilities there. The only store is a co-op, and you have to be a member before you can buy things in it.

“So everybody lined up for a consultation,” I suggest.

“Believe me. And the place was littered with indigo literature. All kinds of pamphlets with purple jackets. And would you believe it, special glasses for seeing that indigo whatzit—sort of haze—around you? Whatzit called, darlin’?”

“Aura.”

“Yes, darlin’ Carla. That’s why I need you. I can never remember facts like that.”

One of Cherie’s ways of controlling a situation is to appear dumb. When she is not.

“And the reason,” she says, “we are hightailing it over there now is, there is this little blossom named Tamina. Who is only fifteen, but thinks she is Joan of Arc. She called me and said she had something important to impart. That was the word she used. Impart. The child is too bright for ordinary events.

“When the atmosphere here in Stanton’s Mill is disturbed, she tends to go to the edge of this big rock they have here and wobble around and make speeches. The rock is a collecting place where the Stanton’s Mill people get together to argue. And I’m afraid little Tamina will be there arguing back at them. Trying to impart.

“It has to do with these damn purple babies,” Cherie adds.

“So you can see why I need you. Hysteria accumulates fast in a place like this.”

 
We zip through Conestoga and head up a small rocky side road behind the hospital. This side road is steep and dusty; after six perpendicular miles, delivered complaining by Cherie’s lumbering official vehicle, we arrive at the crest, where we pause, pointing toward an overwhelming view of sky and trees. Below us, tucked into the wooded creases, lies Stanton’s Mill. There are white-painted houses and cedar-shingle houses and picket-fenced gardens and magnificent tall trees with fraying furry bark. The smell of redwood and eucalyptus is intense.

There’s a creek. The ocean throbs half a mile away.

I know that this gulch is actually cold and damp, with serious septic tank problems, but as we pause above it, looking down, it flickers up an image of the ideal town.

“You can’t believe how they fight with each other,” Cherie says reflectively, putting the official vehicle into third gear for the descent.

“And,” Cherie says, “this disappearing baby stuff is all a bunch of the most absolute crap. As far as I can make out, it’s a total of three babies at most, and when I investigate each case, there turns out to be some story about the baby being off to see some auntie or grandma or something, but then the minute I turn my back and go back to Conestoga the rumor has started up again. Separated couples do that. They fight like mad.”

She’s silent long enough for me to hear a distant agitated crowd. Something muffled and anxious, like a preview of the French Revolution.

“Yeah,” Cherie says, “listen.” We descend, our wheels kicking aside roadway rocks and twigs, and the crowd murmur increases, gets to be a hunk of basic rhubarb-rhubarb movie noise: “Listen,” “Watch it,” “Something is going to happen.” We wheel into the co-op parking lot, but the crowd isn’t here. It’s somewhere over to our right.

Cherie noses the car against the building and sets the brake. She and I scramble out and scuff to an unfenced drop, where we stare down. She says, “Oh, hell.”

A voice behind us says, “Darlings, surely not.” It’s Susie, arriving on foot from her house, which is somewhere down the hill. She has my father in tow, looking puzzled; he doesn’t acknowledge my greeting.

This parking lot overhangs the gully. To our right and also jutting over the gully is a big spur of rock with a flat tennis court-sized top; that’s where the crowd murmur is happening. That scene is slightly below us, clearly displayed and arranged as if on a stage: people milling back and forth; a figure apparently making speeches and doing gymnastics at the mesa edge; other shapes dodging around it. Wisps of protesting sound drift over: “No, no.” “Hey, right on.” “Listen, cool it.”

“How in hell do we get over there?” Cherie asks, and I say, “Down some steps and over to the path and up some other steps; it’s complicated.” We start out.

Cherie is an elegant, fit woman, but she’s over fifty and wears high-heeled slingbacks. I am twenty-seven and have Adidas on. I hold her hand for the way down and push her on the way up. She doesn’t weigh much.

The steps up to the Rock, which is what the Stanton’s Millers call it, are homemade redwood; there’s a splintery, sagging rail. Cherie swears.

My father never fails to amaze me. He is eighty-seven years old but in excellent physical condition, and for a long time he made his living as an archaeologist by climbing up things and hiding under things and scampering down them. And that’s what he does now. While Cherie and I are struggling with the redwood steps he passes us, lickety-split, and is triumphantly on the platform and diving into the middle of the crowd.

Cherie and I are closer to the crowd scene now, but the noise remains muffled. Muffled noise is not a good sign. It means that someone, or several someones, think sudden outbursts might upset the situation. So there is quiet, which is sporadic and punctuated by upheavals: “Stand back,” and “Hey, Tammy, we get it,” and “For God’s sake.”

I’m pushing Cherie as fast as I can but it’s still too slow; the scene is delivered to me in slices between the stair treads, which are at eye level. What I see are feet, skirts, blue jean bottoms. Maybe up ahead are little Tamina’s feet—those rainbow-striped flip-flops. And that’s the edge, where she’s flip-flopping. Maybe she’s doing a minuet step. Graceful, sort of. Other feet are in the way. I move more sharply, pushing Cherie.

We’re still on the steps when the noise escalates to become screeches: “Tammy, for Christ’s sake!” “Jesus, girl, watch it!” And then, high, delirious, in piercing ultrasound, “Stop it, stop, stop!” What kind of a voice is that? Male or female? I shove Cherie to one side and stumble up, scraping my knees, launching myself desperately along the remaining six steps.

And so I and my narrative are at the point where Tamina falls seventeen feet into the creek bed. From my place on the steps, at eye level with the platform, I watch her flip-flopped feet go over.

There’s a tangle of arms and legs in my view, someone tries to run; someone else scrambles on hands and knees; voices squawk. I reach the top step and dive underneath some shapes and over some others and get to the edge of the drop-off.

There are too many people jostling.

But they’re jostling quietly. Some stand with their toes right at the edge. All of these edge huggers are being careful. Everybody is looking down. The yelling has stopped; for a moment it’s pin-drop still. I come closer and feel dizzy. If you stand too close to a precipice, you fantasize about letting go.

The view is down to the creek, which trickles gently, exposing uneven terrain. Half in the water and half out, a small figure spreads, arms outflung. Blond hair is splashed out and partly floating. The figure wears pants and a T-shirt. One of its feet is entangled with a flip-flop; the other foot pokes awkwardly up, ankle turned and sole exposed.

 
I am the one who turns Tamina’s head, because I am afraid she is drowning with her face in the creek.

And my father, arriving behind me, is the one who sits beside her and says Egyptian poetry at her.

She says Egyptian poetry back. Even though there is blood coming out of her ears. Words like
sun-disc
and
purity
. She looks up at my father, with her strange blue eyes glazed. Her chest heaves and a stone pendant shaped like a tree slides back and forth there.

Cherie calls for an ambulance and a first-aid crew. She tells them to hurry.

Then she kneels beside the girl and calls her honey lamb and sweetie pie and asks her if she was pushed. Which Tamina does not answer.

Tamina is mostly in the creek, which means that Cherie is mostly there, too, with the trousers of her green silk suit and her slingback sandals becoming sodden. And my father is sitting with his butt in the stream, holding the girl’s hand.

After a while Cherie gets up and goes to the creek bank. She tells me that this situation is out of hand. “I am the sheriff here,” she says, and she fills up the time until the ambulance crew arrives by becoming Sheriff Inflexible Ghent and getting all the viewers off the viewing point above and down to the creek bank, where she makes them sit while she yells orders. “All right, shape up; I got the power to arrest you, y’know. Now, I want everybody to try an’ remember. Just a moment of silence while you think, and then I’ll begin with the person farthest to my left . . .”

She gets out a notepad and a pencil. What was Tamina saying before she fell?

There’s a clamor. “Like, she had something important . . .” “No, no, something of import, that was what she said.” “Something that would turn out to be important.” “Didn’t she say vital? Hey, dude, I think
vital
was in there.”

“What happened?” Cherie asks. “Why did she fall?”

A woman in a flowered muu-muu says, “She was pushed.” No, she doesn’t know who pushed her; she didn’t see; she just knows. This gets noted, plus the informant’s name. And the names of those who agree with the lady’s remark. Plus the name of the man who yells that she is crazy. Plus somebody who says Cherie should follow standard procedure.

Plus a cluster of other ideas. “No way that girl would jump.” “Mano; she was enticed.” “Enticed? I know when somebody’s high on pot . . .”

Cherie say in my ear,” A good start, right?”

I shrug. All this is blatantly counter to standard rules about questioning and is probably dangerous. But right now it’s producing something. Maybe the wrong something.

“You are not,” Cherie intones with commanding venom, “to all talk at once.”

I’m still thinking about this as the emergency crew arrives, a sure-footed bunch, three guys and a woman, jack-rabbiting down with a canvas litter, backpacks, and canisters. Cherie clears everyone off by threatening jail. She tells the crowd she has all their names. “And I got a real good memory.”

“Cool it, darlin’,” I warn her. That Southern charm is easy to pick up.

My dear friend Susie has joined us and has stayed unusually quiet. Now she emits a little sob, like a hiccup, and gestures at Tamina, being fitted with a plastic collar. “This lovely child. And so bright. She and Ed will do wonderful things.”

I’m wondering if Tamina’s future includes doing anything at all. She has achieved that paler shade of white, the one the manuals say goes with serious shock. A
dead white
, they call it.