By the time I get home, it’s well after five. The autumn days seem shorter here in Concordia than they ever were back home. In the distance, the sun has dipped behind the chocolate mountains leaving a line in remembrance of its fame. In L.A., we watched as the sun was swallowed down by the sea in a blaze of tangerine glory, but here that purple outline over the mountains assures us it’s over before it ever began. I feel for people who haven’t witnessed a resplendent ocean-drenched sunset. People visit California for the beaches and the amusement parks, but it’s the sun that’s the real showstopper, the real star of the entire smog-riddled state.
I pull into the driveway, charged to find the house lit up like a jack-o-lantern, and I head inside, only to have the thick scent of roasted chicken light up my senses. James is a Johnny-one-note in the kitchen, but he can play the hell out of that one note.
“Smells scrumptious!” I wrap my arms around him spontaneously for the first time in months. His hair is neatly slicked back, his face clean-shaven, naked, and suddenly it feels as if we’re on a date somewhere altogether foreign to us.
He pulls back with heavy lids, a smile on his face that lies somewhere between one too many glasses of wine and lust as if to ask the question.
This is the longest dry spell we’ve ever cast on our marriage—the Hailey Oden sponsored coital cessation. Of course, the resistance has come solely from me.
I give a little nod as if to say yes to the unspoken fornicating question swirling between us. Tonight will be the night we come together again as husband and wife. It’s the first day I can remember that doesn’t feel like Hailey is hovering between us like a sexed-up ghost. In truth, she ruined our bond long before that day Faulk showed up on my doorstep in the shape of a human puddle. She was the other woman long before she made the title official. I suppose it works that way more often than not.
“Reagan?” I shout over his shoulder with a laugh caught in my throat. This joy and that which is to come—namely me—is what has me so giddy. “It’s time for dinner!” I give a sly wink to my husband. Tonight, long before we start in on that intimate dance, I plan on flirting shamelessly, making him want it, making him want me.
“She’s not here.” His head cocks to the side, vacuuming my gaze into his as he drips a line down my cheek with his finger.
“Then where is she?” A hint of panic flickers through my belly as my mind spins through a rolodex of possibilities. I shake my head as if coming to. That rolodex is useless in Concordia. There’s only one option. “Is she still at school?” I suck in a quick breath. “My God, did you forget to pick her up?”
“No.” He blinks back with a laugh. “She’s at Ota’s house. I said I’d pick her up as soon as you got home.”
“Ota’s house?” My brows rise with amusement, and then just as quickly fright. “Did you meet her mother?”
James locks his curious eyes over mine, and a moment of palpable silence bounces between us. “No, Ota asked if they could go over. I said yes.”
“Just like that?” I stagger to the door and let myself out into the icy air, already thick with dew.
“Hey, where are you off to? Relax.” James catches up to me while poking his arms through his jacket. “Reagan is fine. I promise.”
“How do you know she’s fine? She’s being rude, is what she’s being. We haven’t even met the child’s mother.” My heart ratchets into my throat as I quicken my pace. “Which house is it?” I look to each lit up home like a suspect in some sinister crime. “You’ve never been as careful with Reagan as I have. You’re too blasé, too caught up in that utopian society in your mind you think we all live in.” As quick as my mind reels, my mouth unleashes with chaos.
“Allison, would you stop?” He spins me into him as his eyes pierce through mine. “Look, you’re working yourself up over nothing.” He grips my shoulders and rubs my arms until they’re warm. “This is Concordia.” His voice softens as if begging me to do the same. “Idaho. She’s just at a friend’s house.”
“You’re right.” I blink back to life, startled by my own urgency to panic. “Sorry about that.” My lips pull down on their own, and I fight it. Of course, James knows what a shit world we live in. Three of his siblings died before he was twenty. All different causes and through nobody’s fault, with the exception of his older brother Aston, whom James blew a hole through while they cleaned their rifles. It was ruled an accidental discharge. It could happen to anybody, and often did. James always makes a point to show me similar reports in the news as if to say there goes another one. But I could tell he held onto that grief, onto the guilt, and wasn’t planning on ever letting it go.
“Which house do you think it is?” My breath pulls in a plume of fog as I size up the options. “I’ve seen Ota walk toward the woods.” I glance to the forest that lines the empty lot at the end of the street, odd and out of place like a toothless smile. My stomach sinks at the sight.
James squeezes my hand as if girding himself. “She said it was the house at the end of the street.” His voice comes out in a papery fog as he stares at the vacant forest where a house should seemingly sit. “Let’s try them all.”
James and I head door to door, starting with our neighbor to the right, an elderly gentleman and his wife. They laugh at the idea of having a little girl running around underfoot and suggest we try the house on the corner. Molly has at least a dozen grandchildren now, and Ota is most likely one of them.
“It could be,” I pant as James and I head over. “She never said more than a word about her family. She’s been standoffish since the beginning.”
“Ota’s a good kid.” He gives my hand another squeeze as we leave no stone unturned, heading house to house until we hit Molly’s oversized boxy home, a cookie-cutter replica of our own.
An elderly woman with a warm smile and short blonde hair answers the door wiping her hands on her apron. The scent of something sweet comes from the oven, and suddenly all of the worry melts right off me. Living in Los Angeles has been nothing more than a toxin, and now that I’ve let my paranoia get the best of me, I can clearly see that.
“We’re here for Reagan,” I say breathless, struggling with a smile. “I’m Allison, and this my husband, James. You must be Ota’s grandmother.”
The older blonde tilts her head, wrinkles her forehead into a series of lines, and that ball of acid explodes deep into the pit of my stomach once again.
After a lengthy ten-minute exposé on who we are, who we’re looking for, Molly steps out onto the porch. “You might try the Sanders across the street. They had a whole mob of little shits running around—but that was years ago”—she shakes her head at the darkness across the way—“most of them are off at college now.”
“Lovely,” I mutter as a steady rise of panic floods me. “Reagan?” I shout as I cross the street, but James has me beat. We hit the Sanders’ home, the Stuarts’, the Malkovichs’, and an older Chinese resident who simply goes by Yolo. “Shit.” I stagger toward the street. “Nobody has seen them.”
“Where did she say she lived?”
“Down the street!” I roar through tears. “She pointed to the woods.” We look to the end of the quiet road, to the dark twisted limbs of the pines that sway in the wind as if mocking us.
“Maybe she meant down another street.” James jumps back as if assessing the neighborhood. James and I get into the car and drive a two-block radius, painfully drudging door to door like beggars. Then a six-block radius, then ten, before we speed like hell back to our own backyard, screaming Reagan’s name at the top of our lungs, our voices threadbare, our sanity spent.
I turn to James, the heat of all of my hatred pinned on him at the moment. “Where is our child!”
His features pull down, the look of defeat written across his face. “I don’t know.”
My mind can’t stop racing. I can’t catch a single errant thought.
“God, she’s in the woods,” I say bolting past him into the expansive night, down into the
icy street with its veil of fog and darkness.
“Ally!” James cries after me, but before long we’re jogging side by side screaming our lungs off, feeling the razor-sharp burn as we shout for Reagan, time and time again.
Neighbors evict themselves from their homes, stopping cold on their porches, observing as we run around like loons, our panic like a torch lighting up the night.
We hit the woods at the edge of the street and my body flares with chills. I give one last primal shout into the nothingness that has swallowed my daughter whole. “Reagan!”
But she’s not there.
She’s gone.
James
Concordia has always been more of a mythological place I escaped from than some small rural town tucked in the back of an Idaho hillside. Death seemed to be liquid here, constantly in motion, the inertia of which you could never escape. It held the stench of death, of dying, of far worse things than death could ever bring—those were the things I told Allison just once in the beginning of our relationship like some deep, dark confession. There are some things that shouldn’t be repeated or even said to begin with.
My gut wrenches tight as the urge to howl at the sky takes over. Reagan is out there somewhere, like a grain of sand I unwittingly tossed out over the horizon, so easy to lose, impossible to find.
I pace the creaky floors, cursing under my breath at what a fucking idiot I’ve proven myself to be.
My father shows up before the cops ever get here.
“Where’s Allison?” He storms in to find her tucked in a ball on the sofa, weeping into her hands, and recoils at the sight. My father and I share the same height, same straight nose and cheekbones that my mother said drove the women to the brink of insanity, but that’s where the similarities end. His thick hair is gray, his face weathered with time, eyes watery and red as a stoplight. He wears fatigue like a mask these days. My father is a ballbuster, a super-achiever who suffered more loss than anyone should ever have to face, and yet here I am with a fresh loss of my own. But Reagan is coming back to me. I can feel it.
In truth, this all feels like a waking nightmare, like I’m walking numbly under water and any moment I’ll be startled awake by the shrill of the alarm. If I could guess, I would say the nightmare began the day the Odens moved in next door all those months ago.
“Look, she’s pretty upset.” My voice is tight. It’s been hours since I’ve last seen my child in the flesh and it’s all I can do to keep from dropping to my knees and wailing. “I wouldn’t say anything that might set her off.” I glare at the old man a moment. Allison may not realize it, but it was my father who planted the idea in my head that we should move back to Concordia. He promised a peaceful life, a quiet existence like something out of a storybook, and I bought the Cinderella story—hook, line, and shattered glass slipper. But at the end of the day, it was simply my company he was craving. He suggested a change of lifestyle as if that was the panacea that could easily save my marriage, and that was exactly what I was hoping to do. I never told him directly about Hailey, about what really happened between the two of us, the dark turn it quickly took. But he guessed there was someone else right out the gate, and I suppose that’s all he needed to know. He shed his favorite phrase like oil, the wages of sin is death, and God knows I came close to killing my marriage. His son was a cheating fool who had lost his marriage just moments before he quite literally lost his child. But I feel like far more than a fool. I’m an asshole who should never be near Reagan again for the sake of her safety.
The whoop of a police siren fills the night air as a flashing red light strobes through the darkness. “That would be Richard.” He nods past me as I make my way outside. Richard Olsen, my first cousin on my mother’s side, is a bona fide police officer, and right about now, I’m damn glad he is.
“James.” He jogs around his patrol vehicle and offers me a hearty embrace. Something about the sight of that heavy, weighty black and white parked in my driveway makes all of this real and sends a whole new shrill of fear bumping up my spine.
Richard looks the same since the last time we met—dark crimson hair, same pale freckled face as my mother. Tears come to my eyes, and I give a hard blink trying to stave them off. The Olsens all carry on the Irish traditions as far as those rosy features go, that hair of fire as my mother called it. She once called me her little dark knight who rushed into her life to save the day. How I wish I could have saved the day when we lost Wilson and Rachel—Aston, too, but that was my boneheaded move and one I will never forgive myself for. My mother, however, forgave me right off the bat, stoic and stiff as if she had no say in the matter. Live twice as hard for the both of you, she charged me with. As an unemployed civil engineer with a wandering eye and a badly misplaced daughter, I’d say I was fucking up for the both of us instead. And I’m sure as hell no hero—least of all to my own daughter.
We head inside and Allison and I give him a detailed description of both Reagan and Ota. Alarmingly, Richard asks more questions about Ota than he does Reagan.
“We don’t think she has anything to do with this,” Allison mumbles through the tissue wadded up over her mouth. “She’s a little kid for God’s sake.” Her eyes bulge crimson and swollen as if I took a baseball bat to her, and I cringe because that’s what this surreal pain amounts to in the end.
Before Rich has the chance to offer any comfort, my father escorts a petite woman with a mop of dark hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a heavy frown this way.
Rich stands to greet her. “James, Allison, this is detective McCafferty who will be assisting us this evening.”
“Detective?” Allison squawks. “We don’t need to open up an investigation. What we need is to send an officer knocking on every damn door in this town!”
I wrap my arm around my trembling wife as I pull her in. “I agree. Let’s get people combing the area. Have Ota’s parents called in yet?”
“No.” Detective McCafferty kneels next to Allison, studying her face as if examining a corpse. Allison is a beautiful, strong woman, and something about the way this chick in her gray zoot suit is sizing her up makes me feel like I want to punch a hole through every wall in this house. “I’ll call the schools and see if there’s a student who goes by that name. It might have been a misunderstanding. We should work well together as long as there are no secrets between us. Every little detail could help bring home your daughter.”
“I agree.” Ally nods. “The girl’s name—it isn’t Ota,” she says it slow like the vital information it’s panning out to be, and that knot in the pit of my stomach gets a little tighter. “It was Otatay or something like that. I remember thinking it sounded like pig Latin. But she mentioned everyone called her Ota.”
Allison and I give them a detailed description of the girl, along with the odd detail of what Allison calls her affinity for Easter dresses.
I strip a few frames of Reagan’s pictures and give one each to Rich and Detective McCafferty. “She’s a sweet kid.” My voice breaks as I swallow down the painful knife in my throat. “So now what do we do?”
Rich looks over his shoulder at a couple of patrol cars that have pulled up to the front of the house. “I’ll have my guys comb the woods. McCafferty will call the schools like she said, and I’ll run a scan on that name. It’s unique, so if she’s ever been in a talent show, science fair, Girl Scout troop—we’ll know about it soon.”
McCafferty steps in, only a little more than half his height as she sheds a crimson-lipped smile. Her skin is pale, pulled back too tight, and there’s something corpse-like about her in general. “Why don’t you comfort your wife? I should have information to you in about an hour or so.” She scowls over at Allison as if she didn’t harbor one good thought about my wife. “Maybe get her a glass of water. She looks like she needs it.”
She fucking needs vodka, but I don’t say a word. Instead, I do as I’m told and Allison nearly knocks the glass out of my hand.
“Are you kidding? Our daughter is out th
ere somewhere. She could be wandering the hills freezing, hungry, and afraid.” Her voice hikes to terrible heights on its way to the stratosphere. “We can’t just sit around all night and hope for the best. Nobody is going to look for her the way we will.”
She snaps the keys off the table before pulling the heavy flashlight from the hall closet. “Are you coming with me or what?”
Both Rich and McCafferty give a subtle shake of the head as if advising against it.
“I’m coming with you.”
Reagan is out there.
I’ll be damned if I’m not looking for her.
* * *
All night and well into the morning, Allison and I scour the back hills beyond our property, scaring off coyotes and raccoons alike, looking into the startled eyes of a small mountain lion, but there’s not a single sign of human life.
At about five thirty, while the sun is busy flirting with the horizon, I drive us home and Allison does a thorough room search in the event Reagan has decided to turn this into a game.
“That little demon she’s with probably talked her into playing some twisted version of hide-and-seek.” She drops her head into her hands and sobs convulsively.
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