Good as Gone (17 page)

She nodded. Group.

“It’ll only be temporary, but I just want to prepare you for that. Are you sure there’s not a friend or family member you could stay with? Somewhere you’ll be safe? Think.”

She thought, hard this time. All the places she could go, she’d need to be a kid, and she wasn’t a kid anymore. Kids didn’t go to dirty apartments and have babies scraped out of them. Kids didn’t do with Petes what she’d done with Petes. Kids didn’t do to other kids what she’d done to the girl in the basement.

She didn’t know what she was.

“I’ll go to group,” she said.

As the two of them left the police station, she said, “What about my things?” But even before Wanda opened her mouth to say the words, Charlotte knew the stolen knife was gone forever.

It didn’t matter, because in group, only the biggest kids got to have knives. They hid them in their mattresses or taped them to the bottoms of drawers. Nobody stole them and nobody told on the kids. One of the scrawny little boys tried making his own out of a plastic butter knife that he snapped in half. He showed it around, bragging, until one of the big kids took it away in the night and did something to him that didn’t show.

Because of obvious rules like that, group was easier than she’d thought it would be. In her mind she called the biggest kids Enforcers. She herself tried to be an Invisible, obviously the safest course of action.

Her roommate Beth was an Eager. Eagers played along with whatever the counselors asked, volunteering in group sessions and earning gold stars and sparkly toothbrushes and puffy stickers for good behavior. The stars and puffy stickers were worse than pointless; too permanent, they left a hard, sticky gum behind that ruined clothes and had to be scrubbed off skin with a scouring pad. The undersides of the chairs and the walls behind the beds were lousy with them.

Toothbrushes were different. She’d lived without one before, and the flimsy plastic stick they handed her when she first arrived was better than nothing, but its thin row of stiff, hard bristles hurt her gums. One day she picked up Beth’s toothbrush and flipped it over, looking into the pink translucent depths of the sparkly plastic, letting her eyes slide along the buried bubbles and shimmering threads that caught the light as she turned it from side to side.

“Hey, put that down. That’s mine,” said Beth from the doorway.

“It’s nice,” said Charlotte, but she didn’t put the toothbrush down. She waited to see what Beth would do. Beth, who was only eleven, wriggled uncomfortably. “It’s pretty,” Charlotte added encouragingly.

“Thanks,” said Beth. After a brief interior struggle, her wide eyes almost filling with tears, she said, “You can have it.” Her teeth dragging on every syllable.

Charlotte put it down with a thwack. “That’s gross. I don’t want your used toothbrush.”

But later on, she took it anyway.

Monday afternoon, I get in the car and head to the Gate.

Ironic, isn’t it? I’ve been telling Tom for two weeks I’m going to work, and Julie’s been telling us she’s going to therapy, and now we’re both lying to go the same place. I turn into the parking lot, where new construction shields the former Astrodome from the neighboring NRG Stadium, and take note of the aerial walkway between the two buildings. The Gate must get a healthy amount of foot traffic during playoff season. As if on cue, the digital marquee flashes—
WITH GOD, ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE
—and I give an anxious snort of laughter.

There are a hundred or so vehicles clustered around the entrance. It’s not Julie’s therapy day, so I know she doesn’t have a car, but I still feel nervous that I might see her, or she might, at this moment, be seeing me. The parking terrain is vast and includes a five-level garage that looks empty from here. I park and approach the modern, streamlined, steeple-and-stone façade that has been added to the gargantuan inverted bowl in an unsuccessful attempt to bring it down to human scale. I open one giant glass door and enter a lobby as airy and clean as an airport VIP lounge. Screens hang from the ceiling at regular intervals, their resting faces the church’s glowing-gate logo. The sea-green carpet is dotted with pristine rugs of white shag across which clean-lined chairs face one another in decorous intimacy. Very soft music is being piped in over invisible speakers, and off in the corner of the vast lobby, a vacuum cleaner drones. Monday must be a slow day.

There’s a mounted map of the church just to the right of the entrance, and a brief consultation points me in the direction of a corridor with the word
FAITH
hanging over it in brushed steel. The room number I’m looking for is 19F, and I find a moment to wonder whether there’s a
LOVE
wing where all the room numbers have
L
s in them. The vacuum cleaner shuts off, and, looking back, I see my tracks, a line of slightly darker sea-green footprints trailing across the sea-green carpet.
That must be where God carried me,
I think. I’ve always had trouble taking religion seriously, but this place seems like a massive joke.

The heavy wooden door to 19F is closed and windowless, and after only a moment of hesitation, I push the door open on one end of a room the size of a high-school gymnasium. A hundred or so people stand hand in hand in a flattened-out oval that runs the length of the room, eyes closed, heads bowed, some rocking back and forth rhythmically, others stock-still. I enter and close the door softly behind me, and the low murmuring of the circle enfolds me. I had imagined chairs or somewhere to sit and observe, but there is no room for anything in the windowless hall except the humming, breathing circle. Without opening their eyes or looking at me, the two supplicants nearest the door release each other’s hands and take a half step outward, opening the circle and extending their arms. My stomach turns over. This feels much more real than I was expecting and at the same time embarrassingly fake. When I step forward and grasp the hands on either side of me—one the dry, rough, thick-jointed hand of an old man, the other the horrifyingly moist and malleable hand of a teenage boy—I am officially an impostor.

At first I can’t tell where the murmuring is coming from; amplified around me on all sides and in all keys, it doesn’t appear to originate from any one place. I keep my eyes open and run them over as many members of the circle as I can see, but if there’s a starting point for the praying, it must be somewhere close to the other end of the oval, the part hidden by its longer side. Looking around, all I see is an endless train of sweatshirted senior citizens, pimpled teenagers, and ponytailed women in yoga pants, all echoing one another’s words. I close my eyes, and after a moment one of the voices seems to separate itself from the muddled sea of noise it’s been swimming in and rise a few inches above. It’s an ordinary man’s voice, the vowels pinched by that indefinable Houston accent. Nevertheless, I can hear the words, crystal clear, as if they were being spoken directly into my ear.

“Found.” The word drops like a stone into the pool of murmurs. “What was lost has been found. Furthermore, it was never lost.”

“Furthermore, it was never lost,” echoes the rest of the circle.

“Do you look to your Heavenly Father, who offers you armfuls of blessings, and ask for a single favor? If you are handed a plate of food at a wedding, do you beg the giver for a bite? You have what you need right in front of you. Do the lilies of the field cast their faces down in supplication? Do the sparrows moan to the heavens in despair? No. The lilies raise their faces to the Lord in awe and delight. The sparrows lift their voices in songs of praise. They decorate God’s creation with their thanks. Does a grateful daughter clothe herself in rags? No—she shows the world her father loves her. She is thankful for his love. What was lost has been found. It was never lost. What was lost has been found. It was never lost. What was lost has been found. It was never lost.”

“What was lost has been found. It was never lost.” Some of them continue to chant the phrase while others move on with him, repeating his words just a few seconds after he says them, as clumsily as wet sand on a beach casting itself in the image of the waves that roll over it.

“What you need is already in your life,” the speaker goes on. “Christ was wounded forever that we might be whole.”

Some of the chanters change their mantra at this. One begins weeping loudly.

“Our Lord has a hole in His side so that we can be whole inside.”

At this abjectly dumb wordplay I stifle a snicker, but as the phrase ripples through the circle, taken up by the chorus of voices, the suppressed hiccup undergoes some kind of emotional alchemy in my stomach. Unbelievably, I feel my eyes start to prickle.

“We are whole in every aspect of our lives. Do you want a new job? You’re already doing it. A spouse? You’re already married, but neither of you know it yet. Relief from a debt? It has been paid, now and forever. A release from pain? There is no pain except in your mind.”

A second weeper has begun, this one gasping for air in between sobs. Every sob that rings out is immediately encircled and washed away in the mumbling tide, so that the next one feels entirely new, as if it’s from a different planet.

“Rejoice! What was lost has been found. It was never lost. It was you who were lost. The son who was dead is now living again; he who was lost is found. But he was never truly dead; he was never really lost.”

I can’t take much more of this. I snap my eyes open. Nobody notices. Then I spot someone across the circle from me. An elderly woman sitting in a wheelchair, wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt.

I yank my hands away and grab blindly for the door, my sweaty fingers slipping on the handle as I heave it open and run, run, back across the sea-green carpet, where my tracks have already been vacuumed away.

Back in my office, I dial the number and the phone rings and rings, but Alex Mercado isn’t picking up, so I’ll have to find what I’m looking for on my own. I type the damning words into the search engine and wait for the most recent news story to come up:
BOMB SHELTER REMAINS BELONG TO 13-YEAR-OLD GIRL, EXPERTS SAY.

The lead photo shows a one-story brick bungalow in River Oaks, an old central neighborhood shaded by massive trees and, these days, condos crowded onto too-small plots. The house in the photo was being leveled to make way for one more condo when bulldozers uncovered extra pipelines going to a bomb shelter buried in ten feet of concrete in the backyard. Another photo shows twisted pipes leading to a broken concrete shell. There are no pictures of what they found inside. I keep digging: The house was seized in 2008 from the owner, nursing-home resident Nadine Reynolds, for delinquent property-tax payments. Sold at auction to an out-of-town investor who rented it for years without crossing the threshold, it changed hands several times before being picked up in 2015 by the most recent developer, who decided it would make more money as condos.

But it’s the photo that’s important, not the house. I wind up on the Texas DPS website, where there’s a statewide database of missing persons, over three hundred listings. So many missing; so many unidentified bodies, each one corresponding to a lost daughter or husband or wife or son, like a massive jigsaw puzzle with pieces scattered all over the globe.

I click through the most recent Harris County listings and see the thumbnails of male faces with eyes closed, oddly dignified and brutally sad. Then a head-shaped outline with a question mark. The death date is indeterminate, 2008 or 2009, the approximate time all of our lives fell apart. I hold my breath and click, and the photo that has been haunting me pops up, the horrifying details cropped in order to focus on a single rotted scrap of faded black cloth shaped like two circles connected by a partially eroded isthmus of faded black.

I can see why I didn’t recognize it at first. After all, it’s been eaten by the air in the bomb shelter for eight years. No one could have recognized it right away, not even someone who’s been carrying around the memory of her daughter’s nightshirt for eight years. A nightshirt now reduced to a pair of Mickey Mouse ears.

I just want the body,
I once said in the support group, before I left forever.
I just want something to bury.
The chorus of police voices and therapist voices and media voices chanting in tandem—
The first three hours, the first three days—
made it hard to conceive of a world in which my daughter was living. Now I feel a strange numbness settle over me at the thought that she hasn’t been. That she isn’t. I didn’t recognize it right away, because I didn’t want to. I didn’t want Mercado to be right about Julie being dead. I didn’t want him to be right about
anything
that had to do with my daughter. I wanted to be the one who knew her better than anyone.

My cell phone is ringing; it’s Alex, calling me back. I hit the green icon to pick up, ready to make a full confession. But I never get a chance.

“I have some bad news,” Alex says.

is what she called them, even the ones who bought the pills and weed she’d stolen from the shopping cart under the bridge without even asking her to suck their dicks or let them shove them inside her. She’d learned to spit in her hand and wrap it around fast, so there was a chance they’d forget about putting it inside her if she moved quick enough. And if they remembered, it’d go a little easier, be over a little faster.

By the time she got to San Francisco, she’d lost track of the men who got her there, but at least she remembered their names. Their names were Pete. Two Petes in the bus station. A Pete in the bathroom of a Diamond Shamrock gas station. One Pete on the bus she’d tried to fight off with the knife, but then she’d let it go and took his wallet instead. He sat next to her the whole way to Sacramento with his dirty fingers interlaced with hers, like they were girlfriend and boyfriend. She turned fourteen between Petes, but she wasn’t sure when exactly the day passed, and anyway, to Petes she was sixteen, to police, eighteen. She had the birth year for eighteen memorized, and when asked to move along—
How old are you, young lady, aren’t you supposed to be home at this hour? Oh, really, what’s your birthday?
—she gave random dates from that year, once accidentally saying that day’s date without realizing it. That policeman said, “Happy birthday,” and made a face.