The Year of Fog (8 page)

17

N
EAR THE
end of my first semester at the University of Tennessee, my mother told me a story. We were in the Chevy Impala, pulling a U-Haul packed with books, clothes, everything I had so hopefully carried with me into my new life at the university. My mother had arrived at my apartment the day before and announced she was taking me out of school until the following fall. There was a huge blowup, I refused to go, but she reminded me that I had no money and no job, no way to pay the rent.

What happened was this: she had come across a stash of photographs my boyfriend Ramon had taken of me the previous year. When the photographs were taken, I was sixteen, Ramon was twenty-seven, and the photos were a bold testament to the things we did together. After a long talk with the youth minister at their church, my parents concluded that I suffered from an abnormal sex drive. “We’ve enrolled you in a group,” she said that day when she showed up at my apartment.

“What kind of group?”

“A therapy group for sex addicts.”

“Sex addicts?” I asked, incredulous.

“Your father and I saw the photos, Abby. Those things just aren’t normal.”

“How could you look at those? They were private.”

I was furious. I didn’t want any part of the life she was taking me back to. By that time, Ramon was already gone—killed in a motorcycle accident just a few months before. I could not stand the thought of my parents picking through the remnants of our life together, examining them like some kind of sordid evidence.

We were on the road by noon the next day. We drove in and out of a storm for several hours, one of those erratic thunderstorms so common in the Deep South. One minute we’d be slogging through a downpour, the windshield wipers on full blast, the road in front of us blurred and dangerous, and the next minute we would emerge into sunlight, onto dry road surrounded by endless miles of green. She kept talking, while I stared out at the vast emptiness rolling by and pretended not to hear.

Near Linden, Alabama, the rain came down so hard our windshield wipers were useless, so my mother inched off the highway and pulled into the parking lot of Stuckey’s. Inside, we bought two coffees and my mother’s all-time favorite snack, the Stuckey’s pecan log. There was no one else in the place except the woman behind the counter and a rough-looking truck driver with three gold crosses in each ear. My mother took the side of the booth facing the trucker, so he couldn’t get a look at me.

The coffee was burnt and there was no cream, just little packets of nondairy creamer so old it had solidified. As we sat there, damp and exhausted, waiting for the storm to clear, I tried to plan a route of escape. When I left for school in August, I had felt that good things were finally happening. Then, when Ramon died in September, it seemed as though every link to my previous life, with the exception of Annabel, had been severed. Sitting in Stuckey’s with my mother, I had the despairing sense of traveling backward in time.

“Do you remember when we went to Gatlinburg?” my mother said, peeling the wrapper off her pecan log.

“No, when was that?”

“You were ten.”

I had been to Gatlinburg once with Girls in Action, but I didn’t remember going with the family. My mother was smiling, though, and the memory seemed to soften her, so I didn’t admit that I had no recollection.

“We had the best time,” she said. “We drove through the night, with you girls sleeping in the back seat, and we got to Gatlinburg early in the morning, remember? Our hotel was beside the Little Pigeon River. We took a chairlift to the top of the mountain and had our photo taken at one of those old-fashioned portrait studios. Then we skied down and had hot chocolate in an old caboose that had been converted into a restaurant. The waiter gave you and Annabel free slices of apple cake.”

It sounded so sweet and homey. Gradually, the memory returned to me. As the rain beat down outside and the trucker hummed softly to himself, I traded reminiscences with my mother. It was the first civil conversation we’d had in months. “The water was freezing,” I said, remembering how I had waded in the Little Pigeon River, where the broad stones were topped with snow.

“Remember taking the luge ride with your father?” she asked.

Of course. I sat in the front of the sled with his arms wrapped around me, and we sped down the mountain, wind rushing past. “And I got an Indian girl doll at a souvenir shop,” I said, remembering stiff braids, a tiny beaded headdress, eyes that blinked, and the smell of plastic.

The rain stopped. My mom popped the last bit of pecan log into her mouth, and we went out to the car. “I’ll drive,” I said. To my shock she let me, and I thought things might be different between us now. I thought that, a day or two after we got home, I could convince her to forget the nonsense about the sex addiction classes and let me go back to school. But as we pulled onto the freeway, she clutched the dashboard and sucked her breath through her teeth and said, “Watch where you’re going.” The spell was broken.

We didn’t speak for the rest of the ride, and she didn’t forget her reasons for bringing me home. As it turned out, I would spend the next several months sitting in a cramped room with a creepy Christian counselor named Sam Bungo and a dozen sex addicts. In my mother’s defense, she could not have foreseen that my sexual education would begin in earnest in Sam Bungo’s class, that the students would get together on weekends in parked cars and dingy motel rooms. In truth, my sex drive up to that point had been average, nothing special. Then, suddenly, I was spending time with these people who had sex on the brain round the clock. I was like a weekend poker player forced to hang out at a high-stakes table in Vegas.

A few years after that conversation at Stuckey’s, Annabel used her spring break vacation to visit me in San Francisco. One afternoon, I mentioned the trip to Gatlinburg.

“Where was I?” Annabel asked.

“What do you mean? You were there.”

“I’ve never been to Gatlinburg.”

“That’s impossible. We wouldn’t have taken a family vacation without you.”

“I’m calling Mom,” she said. “I swear you’re making this up.”

She dialed Mom’s number and put her on speakerphone. Annabel didn’t let on to the fact that she was with me.

“Where was I when you took the trip to Gatlinburg?” Annabel asked.

“What trip?”

“Abby says that when she was ten, we all went on vacation. But I’m sure I’ve never been there.”

There was a long pause. Then my mother said, “Oh, that. She brought that up? Listen, honey, how’s school?”

“School’s fine. You’re changing the subject.”

“That was years ago. I don’t remember.”

“Mom. Why didn’t I go?”

I could hear my mother eating on the other end of the line. It sounded like popcorn. She had always been bone thin, but every time I talked to her on the phone, she was eating. We didn’t know then that the cancer had already taken root, a little cluster of angry cells multiplying beneath the skin.

Mom took a drink of something and chewed on the ice. “Can you keep a secret?”

Annabel looked at me and grinned. I turned up the volume on the speakerphone. “Sure.”

“We never went to Gatlinburg.”

“But Abby said—”

“I know. Swear you won’t tell her, but I made it up.”

“Why the hell would you do that?” Annabel asked.

“You may not remember this, but your sister was a very difficult teenager. She thought I was Mommie Dearest or something. I wanted her to have at least one good memory of childhood.”

“So you lied?”

“You make it sound so sinister. I just wanted her to have something happy to look back on, especially after the mess with that child molester, Raul.”

That’s when I chimed in. “It’s Ramon, and he wasn’t a child molester. He was my boyfriend.”

“What are you doing there?” Mom said. “You tricked me.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I argued. “I remember the caboose restaurant and the Little Pigeon River and the chairlift.”

“You must be thinking of your Girls in Action trip.” It was just like her to be so nonchalant after getting caught red-handed in a lie.

“That’s impossible. I couldn’t have remembered everything wrong.”

“Well, we never went, and that’s the truth. But you have to admit it was a good story.”

Later, I took Annabel for drinks at Sadie’s. She was perfectly at ease, ordering a vodka martini with a twist like a seasoned barfly and making eyes with some guy in leather pants. “It’s pretty funny when you think about it,” she said. “I wonder what else she told us that wasn’t true.”

That night, I couldn’t sleep. Annabel had gone to a party with the guy in leather pants, and I was alone in my studio in the Mission, the noise of motorcycles and rap music throbbing beneath my window. I lay awake staring at the ceiling for a long time, recalling other moments that were part of my version of my life, things I remembered with great clarity: riding a green bicycle through a new subdivision where all the homes were unoccupied, picking pecans with Annabel on our grandparents’ land in rural Alabama, steering the boat while my father coached me on a family outing to Petit Bois Island. I wondered how much of it was true. I knew I should take my mother’s deception in stride, should just let it be a funny story I’d tell to prove how off-kilter my family was, but instead, I felt tricked. I couldn’t trust my mother; worse, I couldn’t trust my own memory.

Maybe that’s one reason I’m drawn to the medium of photography. Unless a photo has been doctored, if something appears in a photo, it was really there. It’s a version of history you can trust, even if it’s just history as seen through one person’s eyes. Despite the inevitable element of distortion, despite the difference between what the eye sees and what the camera records, a photograph is still evidence, a historical record, a frozen moment whose physical veracity is more accurate than memory.

Even photographs, however, are prone to human error. Again and again, I look at the photographs from that day on Ocean Beach. The last few frames, taken by the young couple in the parking lot about forty-five minutes after Emma disappeared, reveal nothing. When I handed them the camera, I failed to tell them about one of the Holga’s quirky features. Whereas most cameras are designed to prevent multiple exposures, the Holga allows you to click the shutter release button as many times as you want without advancing the film. The van does not appear in the photographs, nor does the orange Chevelle, the postal truck, the motorcycle. Instead there are the foggy outlines of cars and blurred faces of strangers, layered one atop the other. In every picture, there is also a finger in the frame, a strand of someone’s hair.

18

H
ERE IS
one piece of the truth, one thing I know: there was a yellow Volkswagen van, gone to rust in places. In the windows hung gauzy blue curtains, pulled to one side. A woman was looking through the window, her face deeply tanned, her blonde hair cut short. She waved at Emma. Emma waved back. Something in the woman’s gesture—a tilt of her head, the lifting of her chin as she smiled—struck me as familiar. I felt I had seen her somewhere before.

We were in the parking lot above the beach. It was cold. Waves thundered onto shore. The beach was nearly empty—just a few joggers, people with dogs, the resident homeless, and a couple of tourists in bright orange sweatshirts boasting
I Survived Alcatraz
. Emma was holding my hand and I was feeling extraordinarily well, as if life had, at the age of thirty-two, finally begun. I loved this cold, this salty smell, the foggy gray of a summer morning. I loved this child.

The driver’s side door of the van was open. A man was standing there, wearing a navy blue wet suit peeled down to the waist. On his hairless chest was a tattoo of a breaking wave; the wave curled over his right nipple. He was waxing a longboard, which was propped against the van beside him. The board was a faded shade of red with some sort of symbol at the center. The surfer’s biceps flexed as he moved the wax in slow circles over the board. He was maddeningly good-looking, even though he clearly could use a bath. His tan was deep and golden, his blond hair badly in need of combing.

“Hello, ladies,” he said. When he smiled, three dimples showed—one on each cheek, one below his left eye.

“Hi,” I said.

He winked at Emma, and she looked to me for direction; she knew, after all, not to be friendly with strange men. I squeezed her hand.

“Hey,” she said to him, flashing that Emma smile, the right side of her mouth raised slightly higher than the left. And then we were out of the parking lot and on the beach. This entire exchange took twenty seconds at the most.

I told these things to Detective Sherburne at the police station the night of Emma’s disappearance. I left out the fact that, as Emma and I were walking down the steps to the beach, I imagined how the surfer’s hair would smell up close, like salt and sun.

Sherburne nodded, arms folded across his narrow chest. Occasionally he unfolded his arms and scratched something on a yellow pad.

“Difficult to find a vehicle with no license plate,” he said.

“It was yellow. Rusty. Blue curtains in the windows. There was something odd about this couple, I can’t put my finger on it. And when I got back to the parking lot after Emma went missing, the van was gone.”

“The Chevelle?”

“Gone. And the postal worker who’d been sitting there, he was gone, too. So was the motorcycle.”

Repeating it for the umpteenth time, I began to question my own narrative—the sequence of events, the minute details. What if, through repetition, my story had been slightly altered, the order changing, one detail replaced by another? Would this be reason enough for the police to discount it entirely? I’d seen this happen before. The parents say one thing one day, something slightly different another, and suddenly the investigation grinds to a halt. All energy is focused on the family, while other leads go untended. I knew the search for Emma would depend on memory, an imprecise art. Her life depended on my getting every detail right, every time.

Sherburne nodded to a photo of Emma that was tacked to a bulletin board. “Listen, she’s a cute kid. People are friendly to cute kids. That doesn’t mean they’re kidnappers.”

The board covered half of one wall and featured hundreds of faces of children captured in some casual moment—school photos, picnics, playgrounds. The far right side of the board was reserved for the newer cases, those children who had disappeared within the last six months. Each photo had a date scrawled beneath it in thick black ink. Emma’s picture was at the top of this section. I was startled to realize that in this sea of faces, hers did not stand out; on the board she looked like just another victim, another missing child.

The far left was reserved for successes—each picture had the word
FOUND
stamped across it in red block letters. There were also thankful notes from parents, newspaper clippings with headlines like
San Rafael Girl Found
. But most of the faces took up the big middle space—all of the children who had disappeared in California in the last five years whose cases had not been solved. Some of the photos were accompanied by age progression sketches—the hair slightly longer or shorter, the temples broader, the lips thinner. In these sketches, the eyes all had a haunted, waiting look. I wondered where the pictures went after five years had passed. I imagined a huge filing cabinet in some basement room, thousands of photos fading in manila folders, never to be viewed again.