Where I Lost Her (18 page)

A
fter dinner, Effie and Plum lie together on the daybed on the front porch, reading. I sit in a rocking chair and linger, avoiding the inevitable, enjoying the sound of Effie's voice as she reads to Plum, who is curled up next to her, her head in her lap. Effie told me that Zu-Zu stopped wanting to be read to when she was six, that she preferred to read to herself. But she suspects she'll be reading to Plum even through high school. Effie's voice is soothing, hypnotic even, and I find myself feeling drowsy. But I can't fall asleep. I need to call Jake again. I've avoided it long enough.

“I'm calling Jake,” I whisper.

Effie nods.

Plum's eyes look heavy. She is fighting sleep.

I slip outside with the cordless phone Effie keeps upstairs and sit down at the picnic table, where I am still able to get a connection, before dialing Jake's cell number.

The phone rings once.

“Hey,” he says, breathless. “Did you get my text? Why didn't you call this afternoon? I was worried about you.”

I wince. I don't want him worrying about me. I don't want him feeling compassion or concern or tenderness toward me. It makes it too hard. It confuses me.

“How did the auction go?” I ask.

He pauses. “It was wild. We got offers from FSG, Knopf, Simon and Schuster, and Harper Collins.”

“How much?” I ask. Because this is, ultimately, what matters. We can pretend otherwise, but the bottom line is always the bottom line in publishing, as it is in any other industry.

“All but one are offering six figures,” he says.

“That's great,” I say, trying to muster enthusiasm for Jake despite my feelings about Charlie. That smug asshole. “Who are you going to go with?”

“Wait.
Three
of them are offering six figures, but Judy at Knopf is offering one-point-five,” he says. He is giddy, like a child. “
Million
.”

“Holy shit,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “I
know
.”

This is Jake's first seven-figure deal. It could be a real game changer for the agency. These days a seven-figure advance is practically unheard of.

“How is Charlie handling it?”

“Well, he's Charlie,” he says.

“What does that mean?”

“It means he doesn't want to give up world rights.”

I picture him, the petulant little shit. The newest fist-pounding, feet-stomping Veruca Salt of the publishing world.

“How long do you have?”

“Until Friday,” he says. “I'm trying to keep them from figuring out that he's putting up a fuss. But I feel like I'm dealing with a child.”

I could have told him this would happen six months ago. Meanwhile, most of Jake's other clients are pulling in twenty-thousand-dollar advances, keeping their day jobs, and hoping for their big break. I have a half dozen writer friends who write brilliantly, beautifully, who have no retirement savings, no way to pay for their kids to go to college. This is a cruel, cruel industry. The spoils seem always to go to the spoiled.

“I'm sure he'll come around,” I say, though I have no idea if this is true. And, though I should, I really don't care.

“How are things there?” he asks.

So much has happened in the two days since he left, I'm not even sure where to begin. Once, a long time ago, I would have gone into excruciating detail about the conversation, the accusations Andrews made. I would have told him about my midnight trek onto Sharp's property. I would have confided in him how scared I am. For the little girl. For myself. And he would have helped me work through it all. He would have helped me come up with a concrete plan, a step-by-step solution that would get me from point A to point B. Once, he wouldn't have even left me here to deal with this shit on my own in the first place.

But nothing is the same anymore. I am Alice on the other side of the looking glass, where things are both the same and completely different than they should be. Where the words are jumbled, and I can barely remember the way things are supposed to be anymore.

“Okay,” I say. “The police called off the search. But people are still looking. Really holding out hope.”

Hope
. The word stings us both. I can feel his chest heave on the other end of the line. It's a sword, that word. A dagger.

Silence. And then finally, “Anything new at all? Has anyone else come forward? That guy with the truck?”

“Not yet,” I say. “But there are a couple of leads.”

“Like what?” he asks, and now it just feels like he's challenging me. Questioning me.

“Well, I found out some stuff about one of the neighbors. He's a registered sex offender.” I figure this is the most compelling and concrete and convincing thing I've got.

He pauses.

“Tess, I read online that the police are calling it a hoax.”

I feel my whole body grow hot, my nerve endings raw. I look toward the porch, where I can see Plum and Effie curled up together still, the orange glow of the light turning them into shadows.

“Do you think about her?” I ask.

On the lake, a loon calls out to another in that familiar mournful keen. But its cry goes unanswered.

Jake is quiet.

Once, he would have known right away what I was talking about. But now, I suspect his mind goes first to the woman he's sleeping with. To
Jess
. That Esperanza, like the little girl, has disappeared into the dark woods of his imagination.

“No,” he says, a deep sigh that sounds both exasperated and exhausted. “Not anymore.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, feel tears. When I open them, the lake and trees blur together in front of me.

“She would be ten,” I say. “Like Plum.”

The solitary loon cries again. Unanswered.

“She
is
ten,” he says. “She's not dead.”

I shake my head. It is impossible for me to imagine her still alive. Still on this earth. The day that we flew away from Guatemala, I had to pretend that she was dead, or I would never have been able to leave.

“I feel like you will never let this go,” he says. “Never let her go. And I am so tired of competing with a ghost. I can't win.”

I hold the phone away from my ear because his words hurt.

I want to tell him that
I
am tired of competing with all the others. With his clients. With his colleagues. With Jess and all the possible others. I am tired of competing with his papers and his laptop and his cell phone. Because that is a competition I can never, ever win.

“When are you going to come back?” he says. “So we can deal with this? Figure this out?”

I study my hands in the dark. The long fingers. The nails bitten to the quick. I feel strangely unattached from myself. Both inhabiting my body and outside of it.

I turn to the window and watch as Effie leans over Plum, tucking her into the daybed, where she has fallen asleep. The simple gesture, the way she leans over and kisses her, is almost unbearable.

“Not until I find her.”

O
n Wednesday morning, I call Ryan's office three times before I finally get through. I had asked him if I could go with him to talk to Andrews, to show him the plate number, the barrette, but he insisted that the information would be better coming from him.

When he finally answers the phone, he sounds like he's been running. His voice is muffled.

“I'm sorry. Did I get you at a bad time?” I ask.

“No, no . . . I rode my bike to work. Hold on, I just need to dry off.” I hear rustling sounds. Imagine him wiping sweat off his forehead.

“You can call me back,” I offer. “But call on the landline number I gave you. I'm at the lake.”

“No,” he says. “It's fine. I was just going to call you.”

I grab a bagel from the cupboard and search the drawer for a serrated knife. There is one bagel left from the ones we brought Zu-Zu, and I forgot to get them pre-sliced.

“So how did it go?” I ask. “With the police?”

“It went okay. I have a buddy at the PD. I asked him to run the plate number. I also asked him to look into this Sharp guy, told him that he appears to be a registered sex offender.”

“He
is
a registered sex offender,” I say. “Did you give him the barrette?”

I had been reluctant to leave it with him. It seemed like the only true thing I had connecting me to her. Relinquishing it felt dangerous.

“No,” he says. “Not yet.”

“But that proves she was there. It's
hers,
” I say.

“I think it would be best if we keep that information to ourselves. For now anyway.”

I can't find a serrated knife, so I grab a butcher knife and start to cut the bagel. It has gotten stale, hard in the last six days.

“Listen,” he says. His breath is even now. Calm. “We need to let them think they're the ones building this case. I work with cops a lot. The last thing they want is to feel like some civilian is overriding them, doing their job. . . .”

“Well, if they actually
did
their job, then maybe I wouldn't have to,” I say. And then the knife slips, cutting into the thin skin between my thumb and index finger. I wince and grab at a paper towel from the rack. It is soaked with blood within seconds.

“Tess, I know. I'm on your side. But just trust me on this. Let Andrews feel like he's the one putting these pieces together. Do you want to find her, or do you want to be the hero?”

My throat swells. I can feel my heart beating in the wound in my hand.

“I want to find her. I want
them
to find her.”

“Then trust me,” he says. “Lay low. Be patient.”

I nod. He believes me.

 

“You should probably get stitches,” Effie says, cradling my hand in hers. The slice is clean, deep. It won't stop bleeding.

I shake my head. “I'll be fine. I'll just get some of that liquid Band-Aid stuff,” I say.

“Can I see, can I see?” Plum asks. She is the child of the iron stomach, the nerves of steel. I have watched her dissect bugs, pull a splinter out of her own heel. She recently had to have two adult teeth removed to make space, and Effie said she did it with Novocain alone. I am humbled by her fortitude, by her grit.

Plum bends over and examines my hand, assessing the damage.

“I had worse,” she says, finally, with a shrug. “Remember when I rode my bike into that barbed wire fence?” she asks Effie, as if it's possible to forget something like that.

“Look,” she says, turning her shoulder to me. There is a raised pink welt like a seam in her skin.

“It's fine,” I say, when Effie shakes her head again. “I'll just catch a ride with you into town when you go to the library. You can drop me off at the Rite Aid. I'd like to go with you on your route today too, if that's okay.”

“Yeah?” she says.

“I want to see if that dog is still at Lisa's house.”

“Actually, Lisa's not on my Wednesday route. I'm not scheduled to go back there until Friday,” she says. “Besides, what good will that do?”

I shrug. I don't know how to tell her how restless I am. Now that Ryan has forbidden me from doing any more investigating on my own, now that the information I
have
managed to gather is out of my hands, I don't feel relief, but powerlessness. It's the same feeling I get the moment I buckle myself into a seat on an airplane.

Flying never used to scare me. I never thought much about it at all. I used to travel quite a bit for work, and Jake and I always prided ourselves on being adventurous travelers. In just one year, we went to Cambodia, Greece, and Brazil. But something happened after Guatemala. I could no longer get onto a plane without feeling a flush of terror and regret. Relinquishing control, trusting, had brought me nothing but heartache.

Yesterday, when I handed everything over to Ryan, I had felt the same way. I'd even thought, for a moment, that I would just leave his office and march down the street to the police station myself. But somehow, he'd managed to convince me that there was too much at stake. That if I refused to surrender this, if I refused to trust him, then it would all be for naught. And that it might ruin any remaining chance we had of the search being resumed.

I wander around Rite Aid searching for the first aid aisle. It is too bright in here, too cold. The Muzak on the overhead speakers plays some pop song from when Effie and I were in high school, and I get that sensation again that I am being somehow transported to a place where things are both recognizable but, at the same time, twisted. I could be in the cold, brightly lit bathroom at the high school, the tinny sound of the music coming from the school dance in the cafeteria. I could be slumped over in the bathroom stall, thinking I might never come out again. The pulsing of my heart in my ears is the same. Or I could be in the small bar where I'd stumbled that afternoon eight years ago, the one with the tiled floor and the barstools painted in candy colors. Music coming from a transistor radio on the countertop. The ceiling fan overhead whirring uselessly, endlessly. All of it dizzying. All of it unbearable.

I need to leave the store, but I have gotten myself turned around in this labyrinth of sundries and don't remember which way the exit is. I start to feel queasy as I try to retrace my steps. And then when I turn the corner, I see a woman pushing a cart.

She's an older woman, maybe in her sixties, and she is hunched over the little basket where you keep your purse. I can see that there is a baby in the cart, and she is cooing to it gently. But as I get closer, I can see that it's not a baby at all. It's a
doll
. Just a filthy, rubber baby doll.

“Mama's just got to pick up a few things, sweetheart,” the woman says. And I feel that swooning feeling again. I dodge her cart and weave down the aisle away from her. I can't seem to walk straight; I feel almost drunk.

And then I am overwhelmed with a need to sit down. But where? I follow the overhead signs to the pharmacy and see the blood pressure machine. I sit down in its plastic seat, which cradles me in an unyielding embrace.

“Ma'am,” someone, a girl in a blue apron, says. “Are you okay?”

I focus on her voice, which sounds like it is at the end of a tunnel.

I speak, try to pretend that this isn't happening again. My own voice sounds like it is under water. “I'm looking for liquid Band-Aids?” I say.

“Um, maybe you should go to a doctor?” the girl says.

I don't understand at first, and then look down at my bandaged hand and see that it is soaked with blood. It is startling. Shocking. No wonder I was feeling faint. But that isn't the reason, not the real reason. Still, I nod.

 

Effie drives me to the urgent care clinic, and by the time we get there, the light-headedness has turned to nausea. She has me hold my hand above my heart to keep it from bleeding so badly, but the new bandage we put on in the parking lot of the Rite Aid is already completely soaked.

The nurse practitioner on duty takes one look at my hand and scolds me.

“And why exactly didn't you come straight to us?” she asks.

Her breath smells of coffee. That and the antiseptic smell of the clinic do not help the feeling that I am on the verge of vomiting. I try not to look at my hand as she sews it up. When she is finished, she gives me a tube of antibiotic cream and tells me how to care for it.

“Now I'm going to need you to come back in to get these removed in about a week. And if you see anything unusual, redness, swelling, discharge, or if you start to run a fever, I need you to call us right away. You think you can do that?”

I nod obediently. Chastised.

Effie and Plum are sitting in the waiting room when I come out, sheepish and embarrassed, a fresh bandage covering my wound.

“Can I see the stitches?” Plum says.

 

I ride in the bookmobile with Effie as she drives her Wednesday route. This route takes us deeper into the woods this time, beyond the picturesque Lake Gormlaith into the dark forest near the pond whose bottom is made of sawdust. We made the mistake of swimming there once when we were kids. Both of us got ear infections and were sneezing sawdust for weeks.

“Do you still go to the swimming hole?” I ask.

There is a beautiful spot not too far from here where Effie and I used to go to swim. It was so private, so remote, we didn't even bother with clothes. And best of all, there were long flat slabs of rock that sucked up the warmth of the sun. We'd lie on those rocks for entire days sharing secrets.

The last time we went there together was when I came to visit her when she came home after three years in Seattle. It was the summer after her ex-boyfriend, Max, overdosed. The summer she met Devin.

“God, I haven't been there in years,” she says.

“We should go,” I say. “When you finish your route.”

“That would be nice.”

“What's a swimming hole?” Plum asks. She sounds leery.

I smile at her. “Do you believe in fairies?” I ask.

She scrunches up her nose. “Maddy says they're not real.”

“But what do
you
think?” I ask.

I think of Star, the fairy who left them gumdrops. How she always seemed to visit when I did. I kept every letter Zu-Zu and Plum ever wrote to Star. Someday I plan to make a little book for them of all those notes.

She shrugs.

“Well, I know for a fact that there are fairy houses at the swimming hole. Your mom and I used to find them all the time.”

Her eyes widen, though I know she's trying to remain pragmatic about this. This is
ten
: when there is still the remote possibility of fairies.

“Can we go, Mama?” Plum asks, and Effie turns to her and smiles.

“Sure,” she says. “I've got three more stops. We can go after that.”

Traversing a creek is a narrow wooden bridge, which is barely wide enough for a small car, never mind the bookmobile, so we park and go the rest of the way on foot.

It is hot today, and I am grateful for the shade as we duck into the woods. The path here is not as well-worn as when Effie and I used to come here, and I wonder for a minute if we're in the right place.

Effie leads, Plum trails behind, and I follow.

“Is that it?” Plum asks, pointing down toward the enclosed body of water, circled by a wall of rock. There is a small waterfall that feeds it.

“That's it,” Effie says.

We all scramble through the thick foliage, enormous ferns tickling our arms and legs.

We get to the water and Plum says sadly, “I don't have my swimsuit.”