Where I Lost Her (7 page)

D
espite the crowd forming by the woods, the formal volunteer search has not begun yet. Devin has suggested all volunteers congregate at Hudson's at noon. There, in the back room, they will be fed donated sandwiches, outfitted with reflective vests, given maps of the area, and a description of the girl.
My
description of the girl.

Effie took Zu-Zu and Plum into town, ostensibly for Zu-Zu's ballet class, but I know she wants to keep them both away from the circus that is growing outside for as long as possible. Plum has already asked if they'll be allowed to search with us, but Effie offered her a playdate with her friend Maddy instead, and that seemed to distract her.

In town, Effie's going to pick up the food for the volunteers; the Shop 'n Save has offered to supply coffee and donuts, sandwiches and sodas. She's also picking up the reflective vests. I imagine they were originally made for hunting: to help differentiate the hunter from the animal. She asked if I needed anything from Quimby, but I couldn't think of what I would need now. What else exactly might be missing.

She also has to run her bookmobile route this afternoon: delivering books to the shut-ins and those who are unable to travel into town to the library. She thought maybe if I came with her, we could use the opportunity to canvas as well. Distribute flyers. Maybe somebody, somewhere, saw something.

Devin is already at Hudson's meeting with Billy Moffett, whose father has owned the store since we were kids. Effie and Billy used to sneak off to the woods together to make out when we were teenagers. Now he has a full beard and six kids. I wonder if she ever told Devin about him. It's incredible to me the things that one cannot know about another person. How easy it is to keep such large parts of one's life a secret. How readily we overlook entire portions of our loved ones' pasts. Dismiss those things that do not fit into our visions of them.

When Jake and I met, he'd just broken up with a long-time girlfriend. They'd dated in college, and started their lives together in New York. But while he'd gotten a job in publishing, she'd pursued a career in journalism and unexpectedly gotten an opportunity to be a foreign correspondent for a major cable news network. I see her on TV sometimes, reporting from Afghanistan, Iraq. She is so different from me physically: pale, diminutive, bird-like. She'd slept next to him for nearly seven years. They'd even been engaged briefly before she broke it off. Yet, we never talked about her. I didn't know her middle name, what she smelled like. What he loved about her. He must have felt deeply for her. But out of sight is out of mind. It is incredible to me how willing we are to forget. It makes me wonder how quickly I too might be forgotten, dismissed.

“So, what are we going to do if they don't find her by Sunday?” His voice startles me.

“What's that?” I say.

The car still smells sour.

“I just mean, we've got to get Zu-Zu down to the dorms on Sunday. She starts the program Monday morning.”

I shake my head. The idea of going back to New York seems strange now, ludicrous.

“I don't know,” I say. “We can't just leave. I mean, if they don't find her.”

“Charlie's book is going to auction on
Monday
.”

I turn to him, look at his face, a face more familiar to me than my own. For three weeks now I have been trying to imagine what she must think, feel, when she looks at him. How he might return her gaze. I have tried to remember what it was like to love him.

“Couldn't you handle it from here?” I ask. “If you needed to?”

He sighs. “Without cell reception?”

“Effie and Devin have a landline,” I say, and know even as I say this how absurd the idea is. I think of the ancient wall-mounted phone, the curling cord. The rotary dial. I try to imagine him conducting a publishing auction in the kitchen nook as the world swirls around him.

“I need to be at the office,” he says.

“Then go,” I say. “Go home.”

“Don't do that,” he says.

“Don't do what?”

“That thing you do,” he says, sighing. “It's passive-aggressive.”

I feel a knot forming under my breastbone.

“How so?” I ask.

“You want me to stay. To say that this is more important than work. But instead of just coming out and saying that, you give me this false permission to leave. It's passive-aggressive.”

“You don't need my
permission
to do anything.” I bristle.

He rolls his eyes then. Just a little. But he's not looking at me. He's looking at the road. And he's not speaking.

“I am not your keeper,” I add. “Clearly.”

W
e pull into the parking lot at Hudson's and leave the windows rolled down. The smell of the wine-soaked carpet is strong even without the floor mat. The wine must have seeped into the carpet beneath. I will need to have the car detailed when we get back to New York.

New York
. It feels so far away now. A place I dreamed of once, instead of the place where I have lived the last fifteen years. Where I made and then abandoned a career. A place where I have friends, a routine, a life. I often feel this way when I come to visit Effie and Devin. The lake has that effect. When I wake to the sounds of the loons on the water, to the light filtered through the soft natural lens of leaves, I become an amnesiac. As if my entire life leading up to the moment has been a sort of waking dream (one of asphalt and hissing buses, of crowds and glass and concrete). There have been a hundred times that I have imagined staying here. Of never returning to Brooklyn. It would be so easy, I think, to buy a little house here, a plot of land. To find a job and start over. How simple it would be to just come
home
. As I told Andrews, I grew up here, though I don't have family here anymore. After my mother passed away, my father retired from the college and moved back to Maine, to the small island where he was raised. Still, I could stay here. I could come home. I could just slip back into this life. I think this happened to Effie too. Except instead of waking up, she just gave in to the pull this place has. Refused to wake up. I envy her this delicious acquiescence.

I am surprised to see that Hudson's parking lot is completely full. Cars also line the edge of the road for a quarter mile in either direction. I see the bookmobile parked around the side of the building. That means Effie is already back from town.

Jake's phone rings. He gets cell reception here.

He grabs the phone and glances down at the screen. “It's the office,” he says. “I've got to get it. I'll meet you in there.”

I wonder if it's her. Would she be that careless? That needy?

I take a deep breath and get out of the car.

A small group of women huddle at the doorway holding steaming cups of coffee and smoking cigarettes.

“What if it's like that Jaycee Dugard girl?” one woman says. “You know that one was livin' in the backyard of that house? With that monster all those years and nobody knew. I read her book.”

“You mean like somebody's been
keeping
her?” another woman says. Her eyebrows are pencil thin and rise up high, making her look surprised.

“It could happen. Way out here in bumfuck nowhere. That man that took that Dugard girl got her pregnant twice. What if it's like that? Like one of them babies escaped. How else do you explain that there ain't nobody called her in missing? Maybe don't nobody know she exists.”

“Or maybe she
don't
exist,” the lady with the eyebrows says.

“Like she's a ghost?”

“Like maybe that lady, the one from New York, didn't really see nothing at all.”

“
Excuse
me,” I say, and, as I push past them, a look of recognition crosses the second woman's face. I can tell she's searching for words, smiling stupidly at me.

“Hey, wait,” she says. “You're the one who found her. I saw you on the news.”

I nod. What else am I supposed to say?

“We're here to help,” she says. Nodding, smiling sadly. As if it's my own child that's lost. “We'll do whatever we can.”

“Thanks,” I say.

They part then and let me pass. I can hear their whispers behind me. I feel my skin grow hot, like I am in middle school again and these are the mean girls.

I enter the store and make my way through the crowd of people to the back room, where Effie and Devin are waiting for me. Effie offers me a sandwich: wheat bread, turkey, bland cheese. I eat it, because I know I should, but it barely registers on my tongue. She hands me a cup of coffee as well, but I refuse it. I am jittery enough already without more caffeine. Devin is distributing vests, flyers, and maps.

“Excuse me,” Devin says loudly, standing up on an overturned milk crate, a makeshift platform. People stop talking, turn to him. It's incredible, despite how soft-spoken he is, how easily he commands attention.

“First, I want to thank Bill Moffett for offering up this space. And to the folks at the Shop 'n Save for generously donating lunch,” he says. “What I need for you all to do now is to sign in. It's very important that everybody sign in so that we know exactly who is out there looking. We don't need to lose anybody while we're searching. When you finish for the day, please come back here and sign out. Effie's got vests and maps. If you are able to distribute flyers, please take some. We'll caravan back to the site in about a half hour. The police are already there. They'll explain to you exactly what you should do. Thank you again.”

Devin returns to his spot behind the folding table where the stack of flyers and the sign-in sheet are.

“Where are the girls?” I ask Effie.

“Zu-Zu has a private lesson after her regular class, and Plum's at Maddy's. We can pick them up after we do my route. You still want to come with me, or do you want to go search with the others?”

“I'll go with you,” I say.

She squeezes my hand. “You okay?”

I nod. But I am not okay. I ate the entire sandwich, but I still feel empty.

I go to the table and wait in line to sign in and grab a flyer. The tall guy in front of me turns around and smiles. His teeth are tobacco-stained, his gums red. His eyes are bulging, prominent, with fleshy pockets beneath them. He stares at me for several seconds too long. In New York I am accustomed to being ignored, to invisibility. His prolonged gaze makes my skin crawl.

“Sure is a shame,” he says, still grinning. And when he speaks, I can smell the nicotine and stink of those rotten teeth in his breath. “Sounds like a sweet little thing.” He grabs a flyer from the pile and hands it to me.

“Thank you,” I say. He keeps grinning.

I walk away from him, clutching the flyer, but I can still feel his gaze on my back.

 

Missing,
it says in a bold font.
Caucasian girl, approximately four years of age with brown curly hair. Last seen wearing a pink tutu and ladybug rain boots. Possibly injured. Seen along Lake Gormlaith Rd. at 11:30
P.M.
on Thursday night. Please call 911 with any information you might have.

 

 

“Her name means
hope
?” Your eyes widen with the implications of this: that the humility and yearning born from our bodies' failures is somehow, suddenly, manifest in a two-year-old child. This filthy, hungry girl. Her head likely infested with lice, one eye rheumy with infection, her limbs emaciated. This is how Hope materializes: as need. As hunger. Esperanza.

I hang the flyer on our refrigerator, next to the collage of photos of Effie's girls. She is the same age as Plum. This is
two,
I think:
wide eyes, small hands
. Mine. Mine.