The Year of Fog (4 page)

“I don’t know.” Jake paused. “I didn’t hear from her for several months after she left, then there was a rash of phone calls asking for money. About six months ago, she called in the middle of the night all weepy and apologetic. She claimed she was clean, the guy was out of the picture, she missed me, she wanted to try again. The sad thing was that she never once asked about Emma. I think Lisbeth always thought of motherhood as a burden, something that held her back.”

“What did you do?”

“I told her to stay away, that we were doing just fine without her. By then I’d told Emma that her mother wasn’t coming back. Maybe I hadn’t completely gotten over Lisbeth at that point—I’m not sure you ever entirely get over someone you really love—but I knew she wasn’t good for Emma, and I didn’t want her in our lives.”

He smiled then, a shy smile that stood in contrast to the side of him I’d seen that night. “You know, I actually haven’t dated much since she left. Have I scared you off?”

As we stood there, his hands on my shoulders, the chocolate-and-coffee taste of his kiss lingering in my mouth, I realized this was not the casual date I set out on a few hours earlier. I touched the faint scar on his chin. “How did you get this?”

“Mike Potter. I was nine. Vicious playground battle.”

I stood on my tiptoes and kissed the scar, then took a deep breath. I’d never before dated a man with a child. I wasn’t sure what the rules were. “When can I meet her?”

“Soon.”

Two weeks later, on a warm Saturday, there were burritos at Pancho Villa, followed by a kids’ movie at the Balboa. Emma sat between us, a giant bucket of popcorn on her lap. Several times I reached into the bucket and my hand collided with Emma’s, or Jake’s. Each time he touched me, I felt a warm sensation spread through my bones, some hard thing inside me breaking apart. At one point, Emma leaned forward in her seat and Jake reached over, put his hand on the back of my neck, and pulled me to him. We kissed fast and hard, like teenagers whose parents were just around the corner.

In the weeks to follow, it became a routine, those Saturday movies with Emma sitting between us, the fast kisses that overwhelmed me. Jake would drape his arm over the back of Emma’s seat, place his hand on my neck, and leave it there for the entire movie. By the time the credits began to roll, my neck would be hot, my vision blurred, my body weak with longing. Jake would press his thumb into the groove above my top vertebra, or slide his hand beneath my collar, or trace patterns on my skin with his finger, and I would lose track of the movie’s plot, forget the characters’ names, miss key conversations that revealed important backstories. It would be hours before I could have him, hours before we’d be back at his place, Emma asleep in her room, Jake and I undressing quietly, climbing into bed and making love under layers of blankets while, outside, the foghorn moaned in its lonely, animal way.

Months later, after the Saturday movies had dwindled to once every three or four weeks, and nighttime had become a comfortable sleep with a familiar body rather than an occasion for passionate lovemaking, I once woke in the middle of the night to find Jake awake, lying on his side, watching me.

“Can’t sleep?” I said.

“I’m observing you.”

“Why?”

“I’m waiting for you to talk in your sleep and reveal your deepest, darkest secrets.”

“You already know them.”

I was lying on my stomach, my head turned toward him. He reached over and touched my neck. “I’ve memorized the skin on the back of your neck,” he said. “You could blindfold me and line up a hundred necks, and I’d know when I got to yours.”

I moved closer and kissed him. We made love in the slow, easy way I had always imagined married people do. We were both tired and at some point, before we finished, we fell asleep, with me lying on top of him, my head resting on his chest. Some time later, I was awakened by floorboards creaking. I looked up to see Emma in the hallway. The bathroom light was on, and she was standing in a pool of pale light, staring at the floor, not moving. I put on my robe and went to her, took her hand, and led her back to bed.

She looked confused. “You were sleepwalking,” I said, tucking her in.

“I was?”

“Yes. Go back to sleep.”

“Stay with me?” she asked.

“Of course.” I sat on the edge of her bed until she fell asleep. In some way, I already wished she was mine.

8

T
HE POLICE
are interested in facts: the movement of the tide, the angle of the sun, the direction of the wind, exact times and locations. From these facts they construct scenarios, from these scenarios they extract a series of possibilities, and the possibilities themselves are arranged in a distinct hierarchy of probability. Each search takes its focus from a clear set of general rules which must be applied with precision to the specific case. Leads must be considered, then discarded or followed to their logical end. The orderliness of the search is paramount.

“The key to any mystery,” one energetic young policeman tells me, “lies in deconstruction. The sum must be dismantled to uncover its individual parts. The parts, therefore, are more meaningful than the sum.” Of course, I know this to be false. The sum itself is all-encompassing. The sum is Emma, and she is gone.

There isn’t a minute in the day that I don’t go there in my mind, to that place on the beach, that fog-bound maze, the very moment when I realized she was missing. With each return to this moment there is a deeper clarity, a slowing and stoppage of time, a new detail presenting itself as if in bas-relief against the flat gray surface of memory: a brown paper bag whirling upward in the wind, three plastic straws lying side by side in the sand, a bottle cap, upturned, with the words
Sorry, Try Again
. It is in this slow-motion presentation, this continual reconstruction, that I hope to find the clue that will lead me to her. But I cannot help but wonder whether the details that emerge each time I journey into my subconscious are the stuff of buried memory, or of imagination. The task is in separating fact from desire.

I want her to come back, and in this wanting, substance is created from nothingness. I remember how I stepped behind the cement wall, certain that I would find her there. I wanted it so badly that I constructed an image, and the image shuddered with life: Emma, crouched and waiting behind the wall, holding the yellow bucket between her knees. When I rounded the wall and behind it there was no Emma, I felt reality like a whiplash across my face, and with reality, a terror so intense it bent me over, my insides heaving.

I gazed up toward the cement steps leading to the sidewalk, the parking lot, and beyond it the Great Highway. She wouldn’t have gone that direction. She’d been begging me to take her to the beach all week; the sand was what interested her, not the city beyond it. That left three directions—north, south, and west. A multidirectional task butted against the linear restrictions of movement. A human body can move in only one direction at any given time, and the eyes’ capacity for detecting motion is limited to 180 degrees, while the most important tasks require a spreading out, a 360-degree vision.

Had I remembered at that crucial moment the orange Chevelle, the man sitting in the front seat alone, partially hidden by his newspaper, perhaps I would have chosen differently; he seemed oblivious to us but in hindsight he could have been watching, waiting for the moment to strike. Or maybe the yellow van held the answer, the handsome surfer standing by the driver’s door, waxing his board, the woman behind the parted curtains, waving to Emma. Had I thought of them, I might have raced back toward the parking lot immediately, it might have been my first choice. Had I arrived at the parking lot quickly enough, I might have found the surfer lifting Emma into the van. Or what of the postman, perched on the retaining wall, eating his sandwich? I could have forced my way into the mail truck, sent packages flying as I searched for her in the small dark space.

Instead, I searched the restrooms, then headed north toward Seal Rocks. Sometimes Emma and I would stand on the beach beneath the Cliff House and listen to the seals; she liked their high-pitched barking, the way they craned their necks and lolled over each other like lazy sunbathers. But I got to the end of the beach and she wasn’t there. That’s when I remembered the first lesson of being lost, the one thing children are always taught to do: stay in one place until someone finds you. Only then did I think of the parking lot, my car, Emma’s highly logical nature. She is not the kind of child to panic. Of course, I thought, she would have gone back to the car to wait for me. I ran.

I’m not sure how many minutes passed before I climbed the embankment toward the parking lot, a new hope surging up in me. Of course Emma would be there, standing by the car, a little upset with me for having lost sight of her. Maybe she’d be crying, or, more likely, pouting. Or maybe she’d be sitting on the hood, sifting through her bucket of sand dollars. She would be there, I was certain. This girl whom I had come to love would not be lost. Tragedy, in its full and life-altering form, happened to other people. Girls like Emma did not disappear. They didn’t drown or fall victim to kidnappers. My panic was unfounded. And later, I thought, when the danger had passed, I would tell the story to Jake. We would sit around the table, a threesome, a family, and Jake and I would look at one another without speaking, filled with wonder, feeling grateful, never acknowledging aloud just how close we had come to the unspeakable.

It only took seconds to locate my car, a heart-wrenching instant to see that she wasn’t there, another to realize I’d left my cell phone at home. That’s when I headed toward the nearest building, the Beach Chalet, furious with myself for not making the call from the Cliff House.

Now I know that a few crucial moments could have changed everything. But those decisions are lost to me forever. The simple fact is that I did everything wrong.

“What were you thinking?” Jake says late on the third night, lying in bed, unable to sleep, no parts of our bodies touching. “It’s Ocean Beach, it’s a monster.”

“It was just a few seconds,” I say.

“But Ocean Beach isn’t like the beaches where you grew up. You have to respect it. Haven’t you felt the riptide? Haven’t you seen the signs?”

Of course I have. Wooden signs posted every mile or so, with dramatic warnings.
Intermittent Waves of Unusual Size and Force. People swimming and wading here have been swept to their deaths.

“I know she’s still alive,” I say. “I know she didn’t drown.”

He turns away. “We don’t know anything.”

A
t four in the morning, I wake to find the bed beside me empty, the downstairs lights ablaze. Jake is in the kitchen, standing at the counter, staring at a pot of coffee. It occurs to me that nights will always be the most difficult. We can fill our days with activity, with searching and phone calls and the organization of volunteers, but at some point we have to go home. Every night until Emma returns will find us like this, trapped and helpless, waiting for morning to come.

“How early is too early to start calling people?” he asks.

It is raining. Down the street, a traffic light flashes red. Each flash lingers for a second on the wet asphalt, making the world seem sad, restless, insomniac. A large man in a black T-shirt and jeans stands in front of the Laundromat across the street, alone.

“Mary!” the man shouts. His head is tilted down slightly, as if this woman to whom he is speaking is standing by his side.

From the kitchen comes a sliding sound, a soft thud, and I turn to see Jake sitting on the floor, hugging his knees, shoulders shaking. He lets out a long moan, a helpless sound dragged up from the gut. I go into the kitchen, kneel on the floor, and put my arms around him. I ache to give him something, but I can’t fathom anything that would make up for the horror I’ve caused.

“Where could she be?” he says.

Where? The sheer number of possibilities hits me with a paralytic weight. It’s impossible to know where to begin. I see, as if through the lens of a movie camera, a circle on the beach. A woman stoops to have a conversation with a child. They part and the lens pulls away, taking in a spot of something white and dead on the beach. The clock ticks. As the lens rises higher and higher, the circle expands to include the entirety of the beach, the ruins of the Sutro Baths, the Great Highway, the broken windmills, the furry bison grazing in the park, the Golden Gate Bridge, sailboats strewn like white buttons across the blue fabric of the bay, rows of brittle houses dotting the hills of Daly City, the vast graveyards of Colma, the long bleakness of Pacifica. The lens continues to rise, the search area grows with frightening speed.

“Her friend Sven was having a birthday party tonight,” Jake says. “They were supposed to go to Sea Bowl.”

“We’ll take her when she comes home,” I say.

“The odds—” Jake begins, but is unable to finish his sentence. He’s referring, I know, to the statistics Sherburne gave us yesterday: 60,000 non-family child abductions occur each year. 115 of these are long-term kidnappings by strangers, the kind that make the news. Of the 115 victims, half are sexually assaulted, forty percent are murdered, and four percent are never found. But fifty-six percent—64 children—
are
found. In my mind there is no question: Emma is one of the 64. She simply has to be.

9

A
FTER SUNDOWN
on the fourth day, I park my car at Fort Point at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, about five miles north of where Emma disappeared. I walk along the waterfront, looking for clues on the narrow, rocky beach. I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking for—an article of her clothing, her yellow barrette, some unlikely message scratched in her childish hand?

The last time I was here was with Emma and Jake, about three months ago. I have a picture of her standing at the foot of the bridge, gazing up at the enormous arcade that was rushed to completion on the eve of the Civil War. At six years old, Emma was already shaping up to be a student of history, full of questions about the soldiers who once occupied the brick fort—where they slept and what they ate and whether or not their parents got to come live in the fort with them.

I stop at the Warming Hut to give flyers to the clerk. A little farther on, I walk out onto a floating pier. A man stands at the edge, perfectly still, fishing line slack in the water. Beside him is a cooler, empty except for a single fish lying in a bed of ice. The fish lifts and lowers its head, and a shudder wracks its silvery body. “This is my little girl,” I say, holding the flyer up. “She’s missing.” The man is watching my lips, not my eyes, and I realize that he’s deaf. He shakes his head and turns back toward the water. In a moment of disconnect, a second outside of time, I wish Emma was here with me, because she’s been learning sign language in school. As quickly as the thought comes to me, I’m aware of its absurdity. In the weeks following my mother’s death, I found myself reaching for the phone to call her before remembering that she was gone. It’s like this with Emma—each time I turn around, I expect to see her there.

Around midnight I end up at the Palace of Fine Arts. The ducks in the pond are silent. Wind blows through the columns, bitterly cold. In the moonlight, the carvings of weeping women atop the columns seem lifelike, as if their tears are made of something more than stone. Tucked away among the urns and statues are homeless people in tattered sleeping bags. I approach them one by one, handing out dollar bills with the flyers, hopeful that one of them might know something.

A few hours later I walk into my apartment in Potrero Hill without turning on the lights, feel my way up the stairs, kick off my shoes, and stumble into bed. It seems I’ve just closed my eyes when the phone rings. It’s my sister Annabel, long-distance from Wilmington, North Carolina.

“What time is it?” I ask, reaching for my glasses.

“Seven a.m. in your part of the world. How are you holding up?”

“Not so well.”

“I wish I could come to San Francisco,” she says, and I know she means it. She would give anything to be here, helping with the search. Once an avid traveler, she hasn’t left Wilmington since her youngest child, Ruby, was diagnosed with a severe form of autism last year. Ruby is five years old, a sweet but distant child who communicates with an elaborate system of hand signals. Ruby can hardly stand to be touched, and her sensitivity to sound is so exaggerated that the phones and doorbells in Annabel’s home don’t ring, they blink.

“What can I do?” Annabel says. “Do you need money?”

“I have a little in the bank.”

“How much is a little?”

“Not much. I’ve canceled all my jobs for the next month.”

“What’s your rent?”

“Holding steady at twelve hundred, thanks to rent control.”

“Look,” she says, “I’m going to transfer twelve hundred into your checking account on the first of every month until this whole thing is over with.”

“Every month?” I ask, my heart sinking. “It’s terrible enough to imagine another week without knowing where Emma is. I can’t even fathom the idea of this stretching on for months.”

“I hope you find her tomorrow, but this gives you one less thing to worry about.”

“I can’t take your money, Annabel.”

“No argument. Rick just made partner. Case closed.”

“Thank you. I’ll pay you back.”

“Abby,” she says, “are you okay?”

“Everything was coming together,” I say. “Everything seemed so perfect.”

I tell Annabel how I went over to Jake’s early Friday to help Emma see him off. He was spending the weekend in Eureka with Sean Doherty, a roommate from college who had recently divorced. Sean was in the throes of depression, and Jake went to his rescue, leaving Emma in my care. This would be our first weekend alone together, a kind of test. When Jake returned, he would tell Emma about our plan to marry.

That morning, Emma and I had French toast and hot chocolate at Tennessee Grill. After breakfast we made a rag doll from a kit, with patchwork knees and blue buttons for eyes, thick black yarn for hair. In the afternoon, we saw an animated movie about a sickly girl of indiscriminate nationality who befriends a horse and saves her village from destruction. Emma had too many Swedish Fish, and on the way home from the theater she got a stomachache and began to cry. Learn to say no, I thought, as I reached over and rubbed her back.

At my place, I gave her a glass of water, and she curled up next to me on the sofa while I read to her from
Old Hasdrubal and the Pirates
. She fell asleep with her head on my shoulder. I sat for some time reading silently, lost in the comfort of my favorite book from childhood, loving the weight of Emma’s head against my shoulder. When I picked her up and carried her upstairs to bed, she opened her eyes drowsily, just long enough to say good night.

I changed into my pajamas and crawled in bed beside her. Watching her sleep, I felt content. Perhaps motherhood was something I could do—or if not motherhood, then this other thing, stepmother, this role that was somewhere between motherhood and friendship. Emma was a willful, sometimes wild child, just as I had been, but in sleep she was deceptively calm. I thought of my own mother, who had me at the age of twenty-two, and I pictured her standing in the doorway of my bedroom in her short cotton bathrobe, her red hair pulled back in a ponytail, as I’d seen her do every night of my childhood. I wondered if she too had felt, as I did now, suddenly mature, suddenly at home in the world, possessed of great responsibility.

“It was the first time in so many years I felt a connection with Mom,” I tell Annabel. “I felt like I was finally beginning to understand her. I wished she was alive so I could share it with her.”

No matter what successes I met in my career, what interesting turns my life took, I knew my mother had always considered me ill-accomplished, not quite grown. Without a husband and a child, to her I was simply a girl adrift.

“Did I ever tell you what she said to me toward the end?” I ask Annabel. “When I was back home taking care of her, she made me promise to find a good man, somebody who wanted children. And I did the dumbest thing. I made the promise, but I kept my fingers crossed behind my back, because, back then, I didn’t really see children in my future. Not that I was opposed to having them; it just wasn’t a priority. What kind of person lies to her mother on her deathbed?”

“I’m sure you’re not the first,” Annabel says. “Anyway, she probably knew you were faking it.”

“But the weird thing was, I actually lived up to the promise. I found Jake, fell in love with him, fell in love with Emma. Sometimes I get this uncanny feeling that Mom was orchestrating the whole thing from outer space, like some big cosmic joke.”

“I wouldn’t put it past her.”

I tell Annabel about how Emma and I got up early on Saturday to make pancakes. “I earned points for letting her crack the eggs and stir the batter. I actually thought of it that way, you know? I felt like, with Emma, I’d started with all these marks against me: I wasn’t her mother. Jake was spending time with me, when she was used to having him all to herself. I didn’t have the faintest clue how to make a little kid happy. And each thing I did correctly was a point in the positive column. I figured the more points I got, the more she’d like me.”

“She does like you, Abby.”

“No, that’s not even it. I wanted to make her love me. I felt like every minute we spent together was some kind of test.”

Finally, for the first time, I tell Annabel the whole story, not leaving a single thing out: how I felt a slight tinge of happiness when I saw the dead seal pup. What a great picture it would be. What a fine opportunity to comfort Emma and teach her some sort of important lesson about the transience of life. I even tell her how I smiled at one of the guys in the parking lot—a surfer, waxing his board beside a yellow van. How my smile was maybe a tad too friendly, how I wondered, just for a second, what it would be like to kiss him.

“It’s not a crime to think about kissing someone,” Annabel says.

“I know. My point is, maybe I wasn’t all there. I should have been concentrating on Emma. Maybe if I’d been more focused, this never would have happened.”

“You can’t put yourself through this,” Annabel says.

I think of the sympathetic young policeman who tried to console me that first night at the station. “It could happen to anyone,” he said. This, I know, isn’t true. It couldn’t have happened to Annabel. It couldn’t have happened to Jake. It would not have happened to either one of them, because they would not have looked away.