Imagine, in that amnesiac state, trying to do something as simple as preparing a meal. Because your short-term memory is intact up to a few minutes, you’re able to put a pot of water on the stove, wash the tomatoes, dice a clove of garlic, set the table. But by the time the water begins to boil you won’t remember what you had planned to make, or who you were making it for. Only by the details—the untouched dishes, the empty feeling in your stomach—will you know that you haven’t already eaten. Only when the doorbell rings and you open it to find your sister standing before you will you know that she is your dinner guest. You are like a computer with a full hard drive; anything typed onto the screen will be lost the moment the file is closed, because there is no way to store the file, no way to save it for future reference. Fundamentally, you are a person with a past but no present. You will never form another emotional attachment, because you cannot remember what you like about any new person you meet. A few minutes after the best orgasm of your life, you won’t even know you had one.
You exist, each moment, as if waking from a dream, with no awareness of where you are or how you got there, no knowledge of what, or who, might be waiting for you in the next room. Each thing you perceive has no more significance than a random snapshot in a stranger’s photo album. A life without memory is a life without meaning.
32
DAVID FROM Parents of Missing Children has been calling me. Once a day, twice, sometimes more. His phone calls are life preservers, holding my head above water. He doesn’t offer me God or praise the healing powers of meditation. He understands that getting up and showering, pouring cereal for breakfast—the most mundane things—cease to be routine, the smallest tasks require impossible concentration. One’s clothes must be washed, one’s hair must be brushed, one’s dishes must be done. The tank must be filled with gas, the bills paid, the trash taken out, the mail brought in.
Some days, even dressing is an effort: the buttons, the zippers, the shoelaces. To force the round disk through the hole, to fit the tiny metal stay into the zipper pull, to form the loop and fasten it tightly. It’s impossible to do these mindless things; some mornings I end up sitting on the edge of the bed, staring down at my open blouse, unable to navigate the row of glaring buttons.
When I feel I can’t make it through the day, it’s not Jake I call, but David.
“What’s wrong?” he says.
“I don’t know what to do, where to start.”
“Go in the kitchen,” he instructs. “Run water into the coffeepot. Take the coffee out of the fridge. Measure three scoops into the filter.”
While the coffee is brewing, he tells me to get a pencil and a notepad, make a list. He begins with the simple things—pay the gas bill, take out the recycling—then moves on to more difficult items, such as calling Detective Sherburne, making my daily trek to the beach, stuffing envelopes, visiting the command post, raising money to add to the growing reward—$300,000 and counting. Task by task, he revives me, until I’m ready to hang up the phone and get on with my day alone.
“But the uselessness,” I say one night. “How do you handle that?”
It’s past midnight, day eighty-four. Down on the street a police cruiser’s lights are flashing. Someone’s car alarm is going off. I never sleep at Jake’s house these days. Our bodies no longer seem to fit together.
“Think back,” he says. “Before this happened, what did you do when you felt things falling apart? How did you wind down?”
“I’d go into the darkroom and work.”
“Do that.”
“How can I waste time in the darkroom when Emma’s still out there?”
“Force yourself. You’re going to have to do it at some point.”
The darkroom. That small space where I once spent hours every day, losing myself the way some people lose themselves in books or movies. That room where I could be alone, nothing but me and the red glow of the light, the slick feel of the paper when it comes out of the fluid. The solid mass of the enlarger, the heft of the arm as it locks into place. The methodical precision of fastening the negative to the tray. I’ve barely entered the darkroom since that one time in July, the second night after she disappeared, when I developed the roll of film from the Holga. The clients for the shoot at the restaurant wanted only color photos, so I took the film to a processor rather than doing it myself.
“Now?” I say.
“Yes, now.”
I hang up the phone, climb the stairs to the darkroom, and shut the door. I take the apron off its hook, slip it over my head, and tie the strings around my waist. For several minutes I just stand, not knowing what to do. Finally, the old familiar rhythms take over. First I prepare the chemicals, the basin of cool water. Then I take down some negatives that I left drying a few days before she disappeared, cut the negatives into strips, place them on the light board, and make my selections. One by one, I expose the negatives to the light, then guide the photo paper through the chemicals. At the end of an hour, the water bath is full of prints, floating one on top of the other.
The photos are from a wedding I shot months ago. These are the prints I didn’t make for the happy couple’s memory album, the ones the clients wouldn’t want to see. Over the years I’ve been collecting these candid wedding shots, hoping to bring them together one day in some sort of meaningful sequence. I imagine a solo show that tells the grim truth about weddings, the kind of show that would make the viewers laugh uncomfortably.
This roll is from late in the evening, when everyone was already two sheets to the wind. The bride’s dress is askew, the groom’s paper party hat wilting. Around ten o’clock, the mother of the bride told me to go home. “I’d rather not have this part of the night captured for posterity,” she said, fingering the pearls around her neck.
“Nonsense,” the drunken bride said to me. “You’re staying.”
So I did. There’s the bride with her mouth open wide, her carefully constructed hairdo toppled, making a toast to her husband. And there’s the maid of honor, a teenager in a miniskirt, dancing inappropriately with the father of the groom. Somebody’s great-aunt with a martini in hand, demonstrating saucy maneuvers for the honeymoon.
The photos have a grainy, documentary quality. It’s my thing, it’s what people hire me for. Couples come to me when they want the candid shots, not the carefully posed groupings of the wedding party on the lawn and the polite still life of the wedding cake.
I suspect these people don’t know just what they’re getting into, and for this reason I rarely show my clients all the contact sheets. Would the groom, for example, want to see his father’s meaty hand groping the maid of honor while they danced? Wouldn’t the bride prefer to forget shouting at the florist? Weddings bring out the worst in people. Perhaps the air of new and hopeful love inspires cynicism and drives law-abiding citizens to debauchery. Maybe drunkenness and general bad behavior are everyone’s way of thumbing their nose at the idea of a perfect future, their way of saying “till death do us part” is really just so much fluff.
You’d think attending so many weddings as the impartial observer would have turned me off to having my own. The fact is, it only made me want it more. A wedding is still, despite its flaws, a demonstration of optimism, one couple’s brazen pronouncement that they’re going to make it. Underlying every wedding is the bold assumption that the divorce statistics don’t count, that this couple will beat the odds.
The date for our wedding came and went. It was to have happened last Saturday, at a small chapel in Yosemite. The reception was to be held at the Wawona, a rustic hotel on the edge of the park. When Jake and I saw each other at the command post that day, neither one of us brought it up. The wedding now seems like a moot point, a frivolity that doesn’t make sense in the context of our radically changed lives.
The last shot on this roll is of the bride and groom standing on the street, waiting for the valet to bring their car around. His tie hangs loosely around his neck, and she’s holding her shoes in on
e hand. She’s standing in front of him, and he’s got both arms around her waist. Her mascara is smeared, her lipstick gone, and the padding of her bra peeks up from the low neckline of her dress. His head is bent and he’s whispering something in her ear. The expression on her face is impossible to read.
One by one, I hang the prints up to dry. It feels good to be back in this room beneath the red glow of the lamp. The chemical smell returns me to the deep dark of that tiny darkroom in Alabama, returns me, unexpectedly, to Ramon. The bulb cast a strange red glow over his hands as he shepherded the photographs through the bins. In one hand he held the tongs, swishing the glossy paper back and forth in the developing fluid. The other hand was cupped between my legs, and he was telling me to come.
Come where? I thought. He said it again, more urgently. I wasn’t sure what he meant; I had some idea, but come seemed like such a strange word, so out of touch with what we were doing. I wanted him to define it for me, but it seemed like a bad time to ask, and I didn’t want him to know how inexperienced I was.
I was sixteen years old. He was twenty-seven. I dug my fingernails into the soft leather of his belt. On the photo paper, shapes began to emerge: the silhouette of my sleeping face, the curve of my naked calf, the bell-shaped slope of a lampshade. He pushed his finger inside me, whispering into my ear, and I thought of the secluded beach near the Fairhope pier where he took me for the very first time. Took. At sixteen, I knew what that word meant. I knew Ramon had no business dating a girl my age.
The fluid sloshed over the paper and the image became clearer—the striped print of the man’s shirt that just reached the tops of my thighs, the small star dangling from my charm bracelet, a big hand intersecting the frame of the photo and resting on my ankle.
He lifted the photo from the developing fluid and slid it into the stop solution. Then he went down on his knees in front of me, held my denim skirt around my waist, and slid his tongue inside. I did not think that I loved him, or even that I would know him for very long. I considered him an instructor of sorts—more interesting and adept than boys my own age, who lacked skill and grace. Despite my youth and inexperience, I could still discern from some inflection in his voice when he said my name, and the way his body shifted and his stance softened when I walked into a room, that for him things were not so simple or so temporary.
We met in February of my eleventh-grade year. Eighteen months later I left Mobile for college in Knoxville, Tennessee. I refused to let him follow me. He called me every night for three weeks, begging me to reconsider. In mid-September, I got a phone call from Annabel. When I picked up the phone, she wasn’t her usual nonchalant self. The sarcasm was gone from her voice, and I knew something was wrong. “It’s Ramon,” she said.
“What?”
“There was an accident.”
I was standing in the kitchen of my apartment in Sunsphere Suites. I leaned against the counter. I had just made a fresh pot of coffee, and the smell was suddenly too strong.
“And?”
“On his motorcycle. He didn’t—”
She couldn’t say it, but I knew what she meant. What she meant was he didn’t make it. What she meant was, he was gone. It turned out he had been drinking. He had called me early that morning, and I had let the machine pick up. “I know you’re there,” his message said. “You’ve got to talk to me.”
Maybe it was partly in homage to Ramon that I became a photographer. I had planned to be a journalist, write for newspapers, take pictures only as a hobby. But a couple of semesters later, I declared my major as photography.
Later, I was saddened to realize that I didn’t have a single photograph of Ramon. He was always behind the camera, a perpetual watcher—always seeing, never seen. I tried to imagine that he maintained his vision after death, that he would always be an astute eye, hovering, taking things in. But even with my Southern Baptist background, I could not bring myself to believe that any part of him survived after his body’s physical death. I knew, deep down, that he was simply gone.
33
AT FOUR-THIRTY in the afternoon on the twenty-eighth of October, Detective Sherburne pays a house call. When I open the door, he thrusts a white cake box into my hand. He must notice the alarm on my face, because he says quickly, “Nothing’s happened. I was just in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d drop by and see how you are.”
“I’m good,” I lie.
“It’s chocolate,” he says, pointing to the box. “Arizmendi Bakery, my favorite. I went in to buy some cookies and I saw the cake. It seemed to be calling your name.”
“Thank you. I never say no to chocolate.” The words sound blank, ridiculous. Everything sounds ridiculous. Every ordinary thing has ceased to make sense. It has been three months and six days. Three months and six days without a sign of her.
“I just made coffee,” I say. “Cream and sugar?”
“Please.”
“Have a seat.”
He looks out of place here, in his dark suit and bright tie, his perfectly combed hair, his air of reliability. “Nice place,” he says, sitting on the edge of the sofa, elbows on his knees.
“I used to keep it cleaner. Before—”
I bring him a cup of coffee and sit across from him in the small leather chair that Emma used to love. She would curl up here with a cup of hot chocolate, a blanket over her lap, and watch Disney movies. There’s a mark on the left arm where she cut into the leather with a pair of scissors several months ago. She’d asked to watch some PG-13 cheerleading movie, and I had refused. When I came out of the kitchen a few minutes later, I saw an inch-long line where the stuffing showed through. I confronted her and she denied having done it, despite the fact that the scissors were on the table in front of her. Because I didn’t know what else to do, I pretended to believe her. I remember thinking at that moment that I wasn’t cut out for discipline.
“I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am,” Sherburne says, staring into his coffee. “I keep thinking there might have been something we could have done differently, I don’t know what.”
“You’ve done everything you can.”
He leans back and looks me in the eyes. “I don’t know how to say this, Abby.”
“Go ahead.”
“Three months. You need to prepare yourself. You need to think about the fact that she might not be coming back. It’s a terrible thing to have to say, but when this much time passes—”
He nervously sips his coffee, and I think of his children at home, doing the things children do—watching cartoons, doing homework, sneaking sweets from the kitchen before dinner.
“She’s not dead, I know it. How can we find her if you don’t believe there’s a reason to look for her?”
“That’s not what I said. I just want you to be prepared.”
I lean forward in my chair. “If it was one of yours, would you be prepared?”
He shifts his leg, looks away.
“Would you?”
“I don’t want to fight with you.”
“This isn’t a fight. I just want you to know that nothing you say will convince me to stop looking.”
Sherburne stands up. “I understand, I do.” I wonder how many times he has done this, how many times he has shown up at someone’s door to deliver the news that they have to give up hope. Where is he going now? I imagine him stopping at some other house, delivering a somber speech to the family of some other victim.
I follow him to the door. “I don’t want you to think I’m not grateful. You’ve been wonderful to us through all of this. But you can’t give up on Emma yet. You just can’t.”
He puts his hands in his pockets and looks at the ground. “I’ve talked to Jake. I know that you’re not sleeping. I can look at you and tell you’re not eating. Life goes on, it has to. You can’t keep searching at this frantic pace forever. At some point you have to get back to the routines of your life. If you don’t, then you’ll be lost, too.”
He pats me on the shoulder and closes
the door behind him. I can hear the echo of his shoes on the stairs. And I’m thinking that he’s wrong. Despite all his experience, he’s simply incorrect. Life does not go on. Everything stops, and there’s no way to make it start again.
34
THE NEXT morning, I drive to Stonestown Mall. This isn’t the first time I’ve searched Stonestown, and it may not be the last. I can’t bring myself to do nothing, can’t bring myself to believe, as Sherburne does, that it’s time to give up.
In the food court, among the tables, I search for a child of Emma’s approximate height and weight; she could be blonde, I remind myself, she could be wearing boys’ clothing, she could be barely recognizable. I search every shop, checking behind racks, in dressing rooms.
In the restrooms, I go from stall to stall, opening doors. Then I stand by the sink and wait for the occupied stalls to empty. There is the odor of diapers and Lysol. Pearly pink soap drips from dispensers lined up like IV bags along the wall. Muzak emanates from invisible speakers. Behind each closed door, hope. So my search for Emma has been reduced to a bathroom version of Let’s Make a Deal: choose door A and you get the girl, choose door B and you go home empty-handed. With each flush of the toilet, each rattling of a lock, I hold my breath and wait for the door to swing open, for Emma to emerge. She will walk out into the bright light of the restroom, approach the sink to wash her hands; then, looking up, she will see me. For a moment, confusion, and then my presence will register. She will run into my arms. I will whisk her out of the bathroom and into the bright chaos of the mall. Hand in hand, we will make our escape. I will kidnap her from the kidnapper.
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