This from the woman who took a monthlong vacation to Cancun, alone, five months after Emma was born. The woman who walked out on Jake and Emma three years ago and has rarely bothered to phone.
“Were you in contact with your daughter?” a reporter asks.
“Yes,” she lies.
“If you could talk to Jake’s fiancée, Abigail Mason, what would you say?”
She touches her earring again, looks straight into the camera. “It breaks my heart what happened. It tears me apart. But I want that woman to know I forgive her.”
“Given the circumstances, do you wish Emma had been in your custody?” another reporter asks.
“Of course, but you can’t second-guess. What’s happened has happened. Now we just have to take it from here. We just have to find my baby.”
What comes across as Lisbeth speaks into the microphone is not despair or desperation. Every word, every gesture, seems premeditated.
“If she is found,” another reporter says, “will you seek custody?”
“That’s a strong possibility. I am her mother, after all. Her father and I had our differences in the past, but it’s time to put all of that aside and find our little girl.”
Our little girl? I feel a rush of anger, fueled by a possessive streak I didn’t know I had.
I call Jake on my cell phone, but he doesn’t answer. I push through the crowd in Union Square, so angry I have trouble focusing on the mundane business of getting home.
I try again to reach Jake at the command post. It’s Brian who answers. In the background, the television is going and phones are ringing, and there are voices and more voices colliding against each other.
“Did you see the press conference?” I ask when Jake comes on the phone.
“Yes. I’m stunned.”
“What do you think she’s after?”
“Hard to tell. Sherburne’s bringing her in for questioning this afternoon. She already agreed to a polygraph.” His voice is hoarse, weary. “I just kept hoping—”
“I know.”
All this time, Jake has been holding on to some vague hope that Emma might be with her mother, and I allowed myself to entertain this notion as well. At least that would mean she’s relatively safe. At least it would mean she’s alive. But if Lisbeth were involved, surely she wouldn’t be holding a press conference.
This new development feels like a major defeat. Another dead end. Another false hope. The search area widens once again.
“I’m going to come right over,” I say.
“I’m heading over to KQED right now to do a follow-up to the Couric interview. Meet me at my place afterward.”
The line goes dead. Most of our conversations these days go something like this. We never say enough to each other.
I arrive at Jake’s place at seven o’clock. I wasn’t counting on the car parked in his driveway, a red Cabriolet. I try the front door but it’s locked, and, somehow, I don’t feel that I should use my key. So I knock. No answer. I ring the doorbell. Jake opens the door, and I know something’s off when he doesn’t go in for the customary peck on the lips. Despite everything else, this has remained a habit, one thing I can count on: that he will always greet me with a light kiss.
“You’ve got company?”
He nods and steps aside to let me in. “Lisbeth’s here.”
I don’t have time to prepare myself, time to hide my shock. She’s sitting on the sofa in the living room, a cup of coffee balanced on her knee. “Hi,” she says, smiling.
“Abby,” I say.
“Oh.” Lisbeth looks me up and down. “The fiancée.”
I want to ask her how she could have the nerve to come here and sit on Jake’s couch as if she belongs, as if the past three years never happened. Instead, I blurt, “I saw you on TV.”
“Did you? I was so nervous. I’m no good in front of cameras.”
Jake motions to the armchair by the window. “Have a seat.” Cordial, as if I’m just some neighbor dropping by. “Coffee?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll make a fresh pot.” He disappears into the kitchen.
Lisbeth is wearing the same navy blue dress she wore at the press conference, but she has undone the top two buttons.
“What are you doing here?” I ask. It seems, at the moment, like the only logical thing to say to this woman who has simply appeared from out of the blue.
She sips her coffee. “Pardon?”
“What do you want from him?”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
“You walked out on him. Worse, you walked out on Emma. Hardly a word from you since you cleared out. Then you cozy up to the cameras like the heartbroken mother.”
She sets her mug on the end table and crosses her legs. Her dress slides up her calf, revealing a large oval birthmark just below her knee. “You think I have no feelings? You think I don’t love that little girl?”
Her eyes are deep green, pretty—Emma’s eyes. She leans forward, rolls up her sleeves and stretches out her arms, palms up. Her skin is wrecked, a road map of needle marks and wasted veins. Instinctively I look away.
“No mother who gave a damn would stick around in that condition,” she says, rolling her sleeves down. “If you’d ever been addicted, you’d know. You can’t raise a kid like that.”
Part of me wants to believe her, but this impulse only lasts a moment. Why can’t I feel the same sympathy for her that I feel every time I see a junkie panhandling in the Tenderloin? Why do I feel this hardness, this anger, when I look at her? I struggle to keep my voice calm. “You never even called to see how she was. Not so much as a birthday card.”
“My life was shit,” she says. “I had to get my act together first.”
“But you had to have known she was missing. How could you not have known?”
“I don’t watch TV,” she says. “I don’t keep up with the news. A friend told me about the Today show bit.”
“Right.”
Jake returns from the kitchen and hands me a cup of coffee. In the old days, when we played off each other like a couple in a comedy routine, I would have made some crack about what a rotten host he was, leaving the two of us alone to fight it out. But there’s nothing funny here, no way to save the party.
“Jake was just telling me where the investigation stands,” Lisbeth says coolly, as if our whole ugly exchange never happened.
He sits down on the sofa beside her. They look like a couple, sitting there, and a history unfolds before me, a family portrait I’ve never had to confront before. There are no pictures of Lisbeth in the house, no snapshots of Jake, Lisbeth, and Emma together. Jake rarely speaks of her. As long as I’ve known him, it has been just Jake and Emma, happy together, but not entirely whole. I always had the sense that something was missing from that small family, but it never struck me as a thing that had been there before. Instead, there was a space open and waiting, and I was the right one to fill it. I had relished the idea of entering their family, completing the picture. Now, observing Jake and Lisbeth together, I recognize something natural in the pairing, something that makes sense. Even though they haven’t seen each other in years, there’s an ease between them—in the way he leans back into the sofa beside her, the way she reaches over to extract a bit of dress caught beneath his leg.
He closes his eyes. He looks so tired, sapped of strength. I want to go over there and hold him, put his head in my lap and stroke his hair, the way I used to do after he’d had a bad day at work. I want to reclaim that good thing we used to share. But Lisbeth reaches over and squeezes his hand. And I’m not imagining this: Jake squeezes back.
Later, after she’s gone, I can’t help asking what seems to me the most obvious question. “So Lisbeth suddenly cares about Emma?”
I feel it again, that possessive streak running through me. I know Emma isn’t my daughter, but the love I feel for her isn’t small and tidy, it doesn’t take into account the proper semantics of our relationship. Ther
e is nothing of stepmother or stepdaughter in this love, nothing so manageable that I can simply stash it away when her biological mother walks into the picture. When Jake and I decided to get married, he broached the subject of adoption. “Not right away,” he said. “It’s just something we might want to think about in the future.” I was startled but then elated by the possibility, and I stood there in stunned silence, trying to burn the moment into my memory. Now, I don’t know how to process this new information, the fact of Lisbeth’s presence.
“She really is concerned,” Jake says. “It’s not an act.”
“Come on, Jake. Think about it. She had to have known about Emma from the beginning if she’s been living in Morro Bay. So why did she wait until two months after the fact to make her appearance? It’s obvious, isn’t it? She showed up now because she didn’t have a choice. Her picture was on national TV. She knew someone would recognize her. This sudden appearance isn’t about Emma—it’s about her, Lisbeth. You’re the one who told me she never thinks about anyone other than herself.”
“I’m not condoning her actions, Abby. I’ve never pretended to understand why Lisbeth does the things she does. To be honest, I think she’s on another planet. She—” He doesn’t finish his sentence, looks away.
“She what?”
“She actually had the audacity to ask if we had a chance.”
“What chance? What do you mean?”
“Me and her, if—when—Emma comes back. She wanted to know if we could give it another go, try to make a family.”
I’m trying not to succumb to this feeling of the ground sliding beneath my feet. It’s a physical sensation, like the tremors after an earthquake, that sense of unsteadiness, that feeling of being entirely at the mercy of forces beyond my control. “That’s insane,” I say.
He bites his lower lip, a gesture that takes me back to the first moment I met him, in the auditorium of his high school. “It is.”
But I can tell there’s a part of him, just the tiniest part, that doesn’t think it’s such a crazy idea. That’s Jake’s albatross: he’s forgiving to a fault. He has even tried, I know he has tried, to forgive me.
28
THE NEXT day, on the way to the restaurant shoot, I’m worried I won’t be able to pull it off. Especially now, with the image of Lisbeth fixed in my brain, her words running through my head on continuous loop—“I am her mother, after all.”
When I arrive at the restaurant, it’s already packed. I’m often astonished, on a job, how much of San Francisco seems to be made up of the young and beautiful, the rich and carefree, the perfectly coiffed and tastefully clad. When I moved here in the early nineties, the city was still a little dirty, a little ragged around the edges. It still had, in some ways, the feel of a Western outpost, where artists and writers rented shabby apartments, two to a bedroom, and got their social fix at dive bars in the Mission and the Lower Haight. To be honest, I liked it better the old way, before every bar had a wine list and every twenty-something had stock options.
As I work the crowd, I remember the grand ideas I started with. I planned to take raw, honest photos of illegal immigrants and the urban poor, aging sex workers, single mothers scraping by on minimum wage. After finishing my degree in documentary photography at the University of Tennessee, I moved to San Francisco and rented a studio apartment with bad plumbing and peeling paint in the heart of the Mission. I turned my bathroom into a darkroom, took a job waiting tables at a tapas bar, and spent my free time wandering the streets with my camera. I thought my photos would make a difference, would help people to see one another. Back then, if someone had told me I would end up photographing posh restaurants and corporate Christmas parties, I would have laughed. But it didn’t take me long to realize that the kind of pictures I wanted to take didn’t pay the bills.
The first few shots are almost impossible, but eventually, I get into a rhythm. I’m little more than a machine, identifying the appropriate scenes, framing the shots, checking the light, focusing, pressing the shutter release. Afterward, driving home through patches of fast-moving fog, I wonder if Emma could forgive me for this: for doing something as mundane as working, taking pictures at a party, when she’s still out there, waiting.
29
DAY SEVENTY. Bright sun and wild, crashing waves. The highway has been closed for erosion control. Sand is spread across its four lanes, and the traffic lights are blinking red. Jake once told me that, when he was a kid, the Great Highway was a long stretch of smooth ocean road where teenagers would drag race. Now, with the sand moving in thin sheets across the pocked surface, it looks abandoned. A major American city on a Friday afternoon, and on its western edge lies this deserted road, this no-man’s-land.
I pull up beside Sutro Heights Park and climb to the top of the parapet, which is all that remains of the grand old Sutro House. From here I have a perfect view of Ocean Beach. It’s nothing like the day Emma disappeared. Then, the fog was white and clean-looking, so dense it was impossible to see. Today, I can see down the length of the beach, which stretches three miles south to Daly City. While most of the country is preparing for fall, San Francisco is heating up. This is our true summer, September to October. Telltale black spots bob up and down in the surf along the coastline—wet suits. When I first moved to San Francisco, I met a man who surfed. Sometimes I’d tag along with him for the drive to Pacifica or Bolinas, where the waves are calmer and a beginner can try his luck; or we’d pick up sandwiches at Joe’s Deli and take them down to Ocean Beach, where we’d sit on a blanket and watch more-intrepid surfers battling the wild breaks at Kelly’s Cove. My friend could not conceal his awe.
“Unbelievable,” he’d say, watching some veteran gracefully catch an overhead wave. “I’d give anything to be able to do that.” Anytime a surf flick was playing at the Red Vic, he’d make a point to get tickets to the first showing, and he had copies of September Sessions and Step into Liquid that had gone blurry and dim from being played so many times. About a year after I met him, he moved back to the East Coast, but not before his admiration for the surfing life rubbed off on me. I never got up the nerve to try the sport myself—something about the speed, and the sharks, and the freezing Pacific. I’d always thought the ocean in this part of the country seemed beautiful but terrifying.
On foot, I head down toward Louis’s Diner and the Cliff House, and stand for a minute in front of the empty storefront where the Musée Mécanique used to be. The arcade housed elaborate coin-operated mechanical games dating back to the 1880s. I brought Emma here a few times. She loved the miniature carnival, with its rides that lit up and started moving when you dropped the nickels in. And the Mighty Wurlitzer, with its player piano and mandolin rail, bass drum, and flute pipes. But her favorite was Laughing Sal, a life-size redheaded woman ensconced in glass. Emma would put her quarters in the slot and watch openmouthed as Sal rolled her eyes and nodded her head, passing her fingers over an array of colorful cards, before a printed fortune was dispensed through a little slot. Emma kept the fortune cards on a bulletin board in her room. They’re still there: You will travel to far-off lands. A handsome stranger will bring surprising news.
The smell of burgers wafts downhill from Louis’s, and I realize I haven’t eaten since yesterday. I walk the steep hill down to Kelly’s Cove and head south, surprised once again by the day-to-day flux of this stretch of sand I’ve walked hundreds of times since Emma’s disappearance. The beach today is littered with dead fish, a man’s drenched sock, an empty toothpaste tube, clumps of seaweed, a broken tennis racket, and rotting driftwood. Every few hundred feet there’s another abandoned fire pit, some of the embers still smoking. They’re a nightly ritual here, the bonfires around which teenagers drink beer and surfer girls dance and homeless people heat their tins of food. While the Richmond district caters to Russians, the Mission to Mexicans, Pacific Heights to the obscenely wealthy, and Bernal Heights to the granola set, Ocean Beach defies the boundaries of San Francisco’s neighborhoods. Eve
ryone comes here, rubbing elbows in the wind and fog.
Today, there isn’t a sand dollar to be found amid the natural and man-made detritus. Sticky black patches dot the sand, and the air smells of tar.
About half a mile down the beach I come upon two girls, sisters, about ten and eleven years old, gathering shells by the water’s edge. They’re barefoot, laughing, jeans rolled above their ankles.
“Where are your parents?” I ask. “You’re not here alone, are you?”
The taller girl grabs her sister’s hand. They stop laughing and walk away, eyeing me with mistrust. I look around but see no adults. Who would allow them to be out here alone?
At the intersection of Judah and the Great Highway, I cross the two-lane highway and go into the public restroom, the same restroom I searched that day in the frantic moments after I noticed Emma missing. A homeless woman is washing up at the sink. Spread on the floor beside her is a makeshift toilette—plastic comb, sliver of soap, new lipstick tube, and a small plastic container of blush. By force of habit, I pull a flyer out of my pocket.
“I’m looking for a little girl,” I say.
She takes a quick glance and hands the flyer back to me. “No offense,” she says, “but who isn’t?”
I cross La Playa, navigate the circular bit of road where the electric buses of the N-Judah line curl together like a gigantic centipede, turning around for their return trips inland. The wind blowing off the ocean drives sand into the bare skin of my neck. I can hear the roar of the waves, smell the sweet saltiness of the ocean before a rain. Boxy houses in ruined pastels present their haggard faces to the wind. The outdoor tables at Java Beach are empty except for an elderly man with a thick gray beard reading a battered paperback copy of The Charm School. The right side of his face is marred by a dark growth the circumference of a silver dollar. Inside, I order an Americano from a towering guy named Darwin with a bald head and a yellow piece of yarn tied around his wrist. “For my brother in Iraq,” he explained to me once. Darwin has taken my order so many times I suspect he lives at Java Beach.
The Year of Fog Page 12