I feel as if some invisible line demarcates the space in my mind, creating an unbridgeable division in time: before Emma disappeared, and after. In one portion of my brain there exists an entire lifetime of memories, a complex network of emotional and intellectual information—sensory impressions and remembered voices and mini-movies of important and mundane events—all the stuff of which my personal history is made. Emma is there, and Jake, and Ramon, Annabel, my mother, my childhood. All I must do to relive a happy moment with someone I love is to conjure one among billions of memories embedded there. And yet, I cannot help but wonder why my memory performed so poorly on the day Emma disappeared. What synaptic impulse chose the details to be saved and the ones to be thrown away?
25
JAKE AND I drive out to the Sutro Baths on a cold morning at the end of August. There are only a few tourists milling about. The place smells faintly of fish, and of the cypress trees lining the adjacent cliffs. Neither of us has mentioned what brought us here. Neither of us dares give voice to our fears as we peer over the edge of the parking lot into the gray ruins, shrouded in mist.
A search team covered this entire area within forty-eight hours of Emma’s disappearance and found nothing. I’ve already been out here a couple of times myself. We keep retracing our steps, searching the same places again and again.
The old Sutro Baths sit near the end of the peninsula. The baths, which opened in 1896, were destroyed by fire seventy years later. A green-tinted building with a two-acre glass roof once housed 517 private dressing rooms, six tanks containing almost two million gallons of salt water, and an amphitheater and promenade that could seat more than seven thousand. Now, only the cement footings remain. There’s an end-of-the-world feel to the place, as if the apocalypse descended on this small portion of cliff and beach, leaving the rest of the city untouched.
When the tide comes in, the current pulls everything past the baths and into the bay. Things get stuck in the ruins and stay for days before being dragged back out to sea. Looking down into the catacombs, watching the ocean tumble over the shattered seawall, one has the feeling of having stepped into another, darker century. The large circular structure, which once served as a holding tank for seawater being pumped into the baths, is now filled with stagnant rainwater and a thin green layer of slime.
“My dad used to swim here when he was a kid,” Jake says. “I have a photograph of him standing on a diving board in one of those rented, black wool bathing suits that visitors were required to wear.”
I peer through the binoculars into the cold Pacific. A barge moves through the choppy waves toward the bay. Freight boxes stacked three deep bear giant Chinese characters. I move the binoculars by a fraction and am staring suddenly not into the vastness of the ocean, but into a single catacomb. Things are floating there: a Coca-Cola can, its label faded to pink; some tattered item of clothing; a paperback book, waterlogged. One by one I search the compartments, terrified by what I might see. Those who commit the most horrific acts must find somewhere to conceal the evidence; every few weeks there’s another report of a body found in a ravine, a Dumpster, an abandoned building. I do not want to think about the myriad places where a child’s body might be hidden, but it’s impossible not to think of it, impossible not to envision the most terrible possibilities.
Jake’s back is turned to me. Though he doesn’t say it, I know he is praying. Since that day when I went to mass with him, he hasn’t pressured me to go again, but I know he’s been attending every week, occasionally meeting with a priest. It angers me that he’ll pour his grief out to a stranger when he confides so little in me, when he considers the support group to be a waste of time. I was surprised this morning when he called and asked if I would go with him to the Sutro Baths. I was grateful to him for reaching out to me, for trying, in his way, to reconnect.
I scan the ruins one last time. “Nothing,” I say, relief welling up in my chest.
Jake’s whole body relaxes, like a kite string going slack.
We walk the steep path down past the baths. At the end is a dark tunnel cut into the rock. Inside, the temperature drops sharply. There is an echo, a constant drip-drip of water falling from the cave walls and splashing into the shallow pools beneath. A cone of light shines through from the other side. Jake does something he has not done in weeks: he takes my hand. We emerge at the other end of the tunnel. The rocks beneath our feet are slick, and water swirls among them. In the distance, the Marin Headlands roll out toward the sea, their sharp edges softened by fog.
“Do you remember when we brought Emma there?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“She was in heaven when we explored the old fort,” he says, jingling his keys in his pocket. “Remember how she insisted on going back to the car and getting all her dolls so you could take a picture of them sitting on top of the cannon?”
His voice catches and he puts his arms around my shoulders, holding on. Maybe, if Emma had died, if we had seen it happen and attended the funeral, we could bear to relive the memories. Maybe we could repeat little things she said, recount our outings together in great detail. Maybe, if she were dead, we would discover some language with which to talk about her. But not knowing where she is, not knowing if she is suffering, if she is alone, if she is terrified, makes it impossible. With each pleasant memory that our words conjure, there are other, darker images lurking in the background.
The wind whips Jake’s hair around his face, drops of seawater cling to his wool sweater, and we stand silently for a while, shivering, staring out at the freezing water.
From here we can see the antlike figures of surfers bobbing on the waves, waiting. I remember reading somewhere that a swell can travel for thousands of miles across the ocean before it reaches shore. Surfers look so relaxed astride their boards, but the truth is their bodies must be intimately attuned not only to the surface of the water, but also to what’s going on underneath. By some magical trick or instinct or vision, they must be alert at the exact instant when the well-traveled swell drags the ocean bottom in a certain way and forms a wave. It seems like some divine accident, that the wave and the surfer should meet at all.
26
THE HOLGA was invented in Hong Kong in 1982. Its name comes from the term ho gwong, which means “very bright.” The camera is made almost entirely of plastic, and its parts do not fit together perfectly. The result is that light leaks through the seams, causing streaks and flashes of overexposure on the images. Viewing a Holga image is always somewhat disorienting, like stepping into someone else’s dream.
The fourth photo on the reel is a double exposure, consisting of two disparate images, layered one on top of the other: Emma walking away from me, and the dead seal, shot from a distance of several yards. The effect is that Emma seems to be floating inches above the seal. Between her small feet and the seal, there is a strip of bright light.
I think about how this image might appear to someone who came across it years later, unlabeled. Unaware of the double exposure, the viewer might accept as fact that these two figures—the child and the seal—existed in that position, in that moment, simultaneously. Perhaps they would imagine that she was leaping over the seal, which would explain the narrow space between her feet and the seal’s curved body. They would not suspect that at this moment the child is seconds away from meeting her abductor.
When we view a snapshot—out of context, out of time—we automatically create a story to go with it, a way to make sense of the subject. We are voyeurs, entering into a one-sided relationship with the person in the photo. We see; they are seen. Viewers, as a rule, have the upper hand.
27
SEPTEMBER 22. Two months to the day since Emma disappeared.
Thanks to an old acquaintance from college who works at NBC, Jake has landed a spot on the Today show with Katie Couric. He took the red-eye to New York last night. On TV, he looks slightly different, although I’m not sure why. As he tells Katie the details of Emma’s disappearance a
nd describes identifying characteristics—the small scar on her left forearm, the mole just to the right of her nose—I realize he’s wearing makeup. A little foundation, a little concealer beneath the eyes. Yet another transformation, as he becomes, by degrees, less and less recognizable.
NBC runs a home video in which Emma skates down the sidewalk on Rollerblades, waving as she nears the camera. After the clip, Katie Couric’s eyes water and she goes to commercial.
“We’re looking for Emma’s mother,” Jake says at one point. He looks directly into the camera. “Lisbeth, if you’re watching this, I need to talk to you.” There’s a strange intimacy in the way he speaks, despite the fact that his plea is being broadcast to an audience of millions. I’m thinking, as he says it, that he’s the one grasping at straws. If Lisbeth wanted to be found, surely she would have stepped forward by now. A photograph flashes on the screen. It’s a close-up of her face, the same photo Jake gave to Sherburne at the beginning of the investigation. “One of only a few I kept,” he told me. “I would have gotten rid of all of them, but I figured one day Emma might want to know what her mother looked like.”
In the picture, Lisbeth has long dark hair, and her face is thin. She’s smiling, but it isn’t a very convincing smile. The photo has been cropped for television. I remember the original and am aware of what has been left out of the frame—Emma as an infant, lying in a stroller beside her mother. When I first saw the picture, I was struck by the fact that Lisbeth was not looking at Emma or touching her. The picture had been taken outside on a foggy day, and a slim line of white light separated mother from daughter.
I never told Jake that I sympathized with the woman in the photograph. She has dark bags under her eyes, milk stains where her full breasts press against her T-shirt. It’s clear from her eyes and her stance that she’s still suffering from the twenty-three-hour labor and the emergency C-section, a kind of physical pain I can’t begin to imagine.
At noon, Jake calls me from LaGuardia to tell me he’s catching the next flight out. “Maybe this is the break we needed,” he says, his tone guardedly optimistic.
Over the course of the day, leads come in by the hundreds, and hits soar on www.findemma.com. The following day, over pizza at the Sausage Factory, next door to the command post, Jake talks about all the things we’re going to do together when Emma comes home: we’ll visit Disneyland, we’ll take a cruise to Alaska. I don’t remind him that, just days ago, he was convinced that Emma had drowned. He used to be the most even-tempered person I knew, never given to mood swings or drastic shifts in opinion. Now, his perspective changes from one day to the next, and I never know in what state I’m going to find him.
He drops his fork on the floor twice during the meal. Normally a fastidious eater, he keeps getting crumbs all over his shirt. “You okay?” I ask.
“I haven’t slept. In a while. A week, maybe. Last weekend I cleaned out the garage. Can you believe it? The garage, as if it matters! But I’d let everything go for so long, and I’ve searched every nook and cranny of the city so many times, talked to everyone I can find to talk to. I couldn’t sleep, and I found myself walking toward Emma’s room, but I just couldn’t go in there again. I had to find something to occupy all those hours in the middle of the night. So I cleaned out the garage.”
I know what he means about filling the hours. David from Parents of Missing Children has persuaded me to start working again. “You don’t have to go full throttle,” he said. “Just a gig here and there, to get your feet wet until you’re ready to wade back in.” He says it’s the first stage to putting my life back together.
“How can I reconstruct my life when a vital piece is missing?” I asked.
“If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for Jake,” he said. “Work will make you calmer. Believe me, after Jonathan was gone, work was the only thing that saved me.”
It occurred to me that maybe he was right. And even if he wasn’t, I’d already accepted too much money from Annabel. So last week I reluctantly returned a phone call from a potential client. I decided to start with something easy, safe—not a wedding or a child’s birthday party, just a restaurant opening.
After lunch, I visit my favorite photo store, Adolph Gasser. The store looks exactly the same—a jumble of lighting gear in the back, expensive equipment locked away in glass cabinets, some books and digital printing stations in the middle of the store. The only difference is a picture of Emma in the window. The flyer is still taped to telephone poles and shopwindows all over the city, and I imagine that people walking by no longer see it; to them, it is simply a picture of that girl who went missing a couple of months ago—a sad story, but in no way a part of their lives.
Marly is at the high wooden counter, just as she was the day before Emma disappeared. She’s twenty-nine, gigantic, heavily tattooed, a grad student at California College of the Arts. In the six years I’ve been coming here, a seemingly endless succession of photographers-in-training have worked behind the counter.
I find film, batteries, and photo paper, take them to the counter, and hand Marly my Visa card.
“We’ve missed you around here,” she says, busying herself with the card. “I’m so sorry about Emma.”
“Thank you.”
She drops my purchases into a paper bag. The bag feels foreign in my hands, like a prop from a play that has finished its run.
On my way back to Muni, I pass a row of televisions in the window of an electronics store, all tuned to the same channel. Emma’s face flashes across the screens. Emma’s black hair, Emma’s dimpled smile, Emma’s crooked bangs, in multiple. A sheriff appears, standing at a lectern before a big microphone, a crowd of press and onlookers gathered around him. My throat tightens. Worst-case scenarios flash through my mind: they’ve found Emma, and she’s dead.
A bus screeches to a halt on the street behind me. The crowd surges past. Someone’s arm brushes against my back. A girl and her mother stop at the window. The girl is about fourteen, wearing tight jeans and a midriff-baring shirt. “Any news on the missing girl?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
“A shame,” the mother says. “Hundreds of kids dying in the Middle East every day, but they focus on this one kid. Because she’s white, cute, and American.” She shakes her head and takes her daughter by the arm. They saunter off, shopping bags swinging from their hands.
I go into the store and turn up the sound on one of the televisions. The sheriff is in Morro Bay, about four hours south of here. Behind him stands a row of men in suits and police uniforms, each one straining to stay within the frame of the camera. A red-faced man with a few strands of hair brushed over his bald head steps forward, ostensibly to adjust the microphone, but it’s clear he just wants to get closer to the camera.
“We have new information in the Emma Balfour case,” the sheriff announces. My first response is shock, followed by that old familiar panic—heart racing, a kind of tingling heaviness in my skull—then a cautious sense of hope, all of this in the span of a second, while I wait to hear what the sheriff has to say. “At noon today, a woman came into the station claiming to be Lisbeth Balfour, the mother of the missing girl. We have confirmation that she is indeed who she says she is. She’s going to talk to you for a few minutes, following which I’ll answer any further questions.”
It takes a few seconds for the information to register. I experience a brief moment of elation, quickly followed by doubt. Why now? I wonder. Why, after all this time, has Lisbeth chosen this moment to present herself?
The sheriff clears his throat again and retreats. The men in suits step aside to allow a woman through. She’s not what I imagined. She looks very little like the photograph that was taken almost seven years ago. Judging from Jake’s descriptions of her, I expected the sunken eyes of a heroin addict, slurred speech, ratty hair, bruises left by her latest poor choice in boyfriends. But she is nothing of the sort. She’s medium height, slightly chubby. Her dark hair is tastefully styled, and sh
e’s wearing a subtle navy dress.
“My name is Lisbeth Dalton,” the woman says slowly. “That’s L-I-SB-E-T-H.”
She pauses, smiles. She’s wearing red lipstick, pearl drop earrings, a strand of beads that matches neither the dress nor the earrings. She’s attractive in a suburban housewife sort of way, with a small, straight nose—Emma’s nose—and a tan. I try to picture Jake with her, but it’s impossible. What did he see in her? What could they possibly have had in common?
“I’m Emma’s mother,” she says. “I just found out about this terrible tragedy yesterday when I heard about my husband—pardon me, my ex-husband—being on the Today show.”
I know she’s lying. There’s no way she could have been living in Morro Bay all this time and not heard about Emma. It was all over the news.
Lisbeth reaches up and touches one earring. I suddenly realize that I have an identical pair—Jake gave them to me on the six-month anniversary of our first date. It was a sweet gesture, but I rarely wear them; it’s the kind of jewelry my mother used to wear, an emblem of feminine respectability. It occurs to me that Lisbeth’s earrings were probably a gift from Jake, too, and I find myself feeling foolish, wondering what other gifts he may have duplicated.
Lisbeth smiles, activating her dimples; the resemblance between her and Emma is unmistakable. “I just wanted to stand up here today and say to the kidnapper, whoever you are, please give her back. And, Emma, if you can hear me, I love you, sweetie. I’m praying for you. We all want you to come home.”
The Year of Fog Page 11