The Year of Fog

by Michelle Richmond

  Jake keeps pacing the room, and he has begun to sweat. “It’s boiling,” he says, “are you hot?” Without waiting for an answer, he goes over to the window and opens it. He leans out and breathes the night air. A faint scent of ocean drifts in, mixed with diesel fuel. A car passes slowly on the street and Jake is briefly illuminated, his body casting shadows over the sofa, wall, and rug.

  He looks at me. “How do you think they’d act at a coroner’s office?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’d think they’d be sympathetic, right? You’d think they’d understand the delicacy of the situation.” He laughs—a weird, unsettling laugh. “But it’s not like that at all. They’re just doing their job. They might as well be working at the mall. It’s like they’re completely immune to the whole thing.”

  He comes over and sits down again. “So I went up to the desk and I gave the girl my name. She said, ‘You here to identify a body?’ Just like that. She leaned into a little microphone and called for Mr. Brewer. A few seconds later a big white door opened and a man came through. He was in his fifties, wearing a white lab coat, and he smiled and shook my hand. Roger, he said his name was, then he motioned for me to follow him.

  “We walked through an endless maze of hallways, and he told me it was his first week on the job. Then he started talking about that show The Love Squad, about how the night before this beautiful young woman from Manhattan had been paired up with a nightclub owner from Miami. Roger asked me if I’d seen it, and before I could answer he started apologizing profusely. Said he talks when he’s nervous.

  “To be honest, I was grateful for the chatter,” Jake continues. “I don’t think I could have taken silence. He didn’t give one of those speeches the way they do in movies. He didn’t tell me to brace myself. He just walked, and talked, and at the end of one of the hallways he opened a door, and then we were in a small, bright room with three metal tables lined up in the middle. The tables were scratched and shiny; they reminded me of the cafeteria at school. But they were bare, no one on them, just tables. I was so relieved. I thought maybe the whole thing had been a mistake, maybe someone else had already come and identified the body, some other father had made the awful pilgrimage and had found his daughter there, the body had already been removed, the table washed, and now that father was driving home. I felt sorry for the guy, but I was glad it wasn’t me. I was turning to walk out the door when Roger said, ‘In here.’

  “That’s when he opened the refrigerator. That’s what it was, an enormous steel refrigerator fitted with drawers. He pulled out one of the drawers, and I didn’t have time to think about it, didn’t have time to cover my eyes or ask questions or give myself a pep talk. He just slid it out and there was this body, this mutilated young girl. No sheet, no clothes, just the body, cold white skin and her little hands and these small, bluish feet.”

  Jake is sobbing. He’s not the crying type, he’s only done it a couple of times since Emma disappeared, and the fact that he’s crying now terrifies me.

  “I looked at her hair,” he says. “That’s the first thing I saw, the hair. She was blonde, this poor little girl was blonde.”

  My heart settles back into place. Time resumes its natural movement, and he puts his arms around me and holds on so tight it feels as if my ribs might break. I find myself crying, too, with the relief of it, and also the guilt, knowing what Jake has had to go through because of me, knowing all the pain I’ve brought down on him, all the grief and horror I’ve dumped on his previously happy life.

  After a couple of minutes he lets go. He sits up straight, wipes his eyes, and puts his hands on his knees. “After that I was able to look at her face. Her eyes were closed. She had the tiniest ears, and little pinpricks where her earrings had been. She must have been about Emma’s age. There were bruises around her neck, like she’d been strangled, and scratches all over her body. Roger must have thought I’d made a positive identification, because he put his hand on my back and stared down at the floor, and I could tell he was trying to think of something to say. When I told him it wasn’t her, he seemed very relieved.”

  Jake reaches over, puts his hand on the back of my neck, pulls me toward him, and kisses me. It’s an aggressive, hungry kiss. There is nothing apologetic in this kiss, nothing reserved; he kisses me as though he must have me, as though letting go of me at this moment is not an option. And something in me stirs, too, a desire I haven’t felt in months, haven’t wanted to feel because it didn’t seem fair to Emma. He slides his hand up my shirt, and minutes later we’re in the bedroom, unclothed and desperate, awkward as high school kids. “Wait,” I say, rolling off him.

  “What?”

  “Let’s go slowly.”

  We lie there for some time, just touching, talking quietly. I run my fingers over his body, feeling the tiny hard knob lodged beneath the skin at the top of his right thigh—that small anomaly I’ve come to love. He touches the wide scar below my belly button, a remnant from a skating accident when I was ten. In this way we reacquaint ourselves. And as he moves into me, I am reminded of our first time, at a bed-and-breakfast in Bodega Bay, while the ocean roared just outside our window and a group of teenagers played a loud game of hacky sack. Afterward, we sat on the balcony in complimentary bathrobes, drinking fizzy water, making plans. Watching the teenagers, I had a pleasant sensation of the future, when we would bring Emma to places like this and she would meet kids her age, and we would watch her closely, but not too closely. I vowed that she would have a happy childhood, an even happier adolescence. I thought of my parents’ miscalculations in child rearing and swore not to make them myself. A beanbag sailed over the balcony rail. One of the hacky sack players waved up to us, a bright-eyed girl in a green bathing suit. “Good throw!” she said, after Jake tossed the beanbag into her waiting hands.

  Around two in the morning we disentangle, each of us retreating, as we have always done, to our separate sides of the bed. Jake snores softly, and I lie awake thinking of the blonde girl, the steel refrigerator in which she lies, waiting to be identified. I think of her tiny ears, the bruises around her neck. She is embedded in my brain, an image I can’t shake, a horror that won’t let me sleep. At three a.m. I get out of bed and walk across the hall to Emma’s bedroom. The door is shut. I turn the knob. The floor is uneven, the room at a slight tilt after seventy years of frequent tremors. I’ve felt them many times, the house rattling and jerking slightly, but always standing, always remaining intact. When the latch is loosened, the door slowly swings open. I sit on Emma’s bed. In this room there is a still faint smell of her, that sweetish, muddy odor that she always carried with her into the house after she spent the afternoon playing outside, mingled with the milk-salty smell of Elmer’s glue and the musty scent of construction paper.

  Time passes. I look up to see Jake standing in the doorway, hands at his sides, tears in his eyes, watching me.

  39

  I WAKE AT five in the morning, make coffee, sit in the kitchen, and try to read yesterday’s paper. The small words blur. The headlines run together, forming nonsensical sentences. The phone is on the table, inches from my hand. I consider calling Jake. In the distance, a fire truck’s sirens wail.

  It is the seventeenth of November. Day 118.

  Today, Emma turns seven.

  Around noon, I call Jake. His machine picks up, the same outgoing message that was there before Emma disappeared. An hour later, I call again. No answer. Driving up Eighteenth Street through Eureka Valley, I try to plan our conversation, try to think of all the things that should be said.

  His car is in the driveway. Next to it, Lisbeth’s Cabriolet.

  I park across the street and sit for several minutes, willing him to see me, willing him to come to the door and invite me inside. A very long half hour passes before the door opens and Lisbeth walks out, gets in her car, drives away. As soon as she’s gone, I go to the door and stand there for a couple of minutes, trying to work up the nerve to knock. Down th
e street, a motorcycle guns its engine. A man and two children pass on the sidewalk. The man is carrying a shopping bag, the children hold ice cream cones, and they chatter loudly about a pet rabbit they have at school.

  I ring the doorbell and nothing happens. I ring it again, wait for a couple of minutes, then slide my key into the lock. Inside, the curtains are drawn and no lights are on. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Jake is sitting on the sofa in the living room, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. The floor around him is crowded with gifts wrapped in bright paper with elaborate bows. Tape and scissors rest on the mantel.

  “Jake?”

  He doesn’t look up.

  “I saw Lisbeth leaving,” I say.

  Still no response. I can’t help wondering why she came, what she wants from him. I can’t bring myself to trust her, can’t bring myself to believe that she has Emma’s best interests in mind.

  I thread my way through the presents and sit on the sofa beside him. I want to touch him but don’t know how. I just sit and wait for him to talk to me, trying not to look at the vast array of packages. Sometime later I hear steps outside, a tapping sound, the hushed scrape of paper against metal, a soft thud as the mail hits the floor. Inside, everything is still. We sit this way for a very long time. At some point I sense a leaving of light, the cool approach of night.

  Driving home, the red of the traffic lights appears lurid, the noise of car radios strikes me as somehow obscene. As always, I drive slowly, keep the windows down, scanning the streets. With each intersection, each doorway, each glittering shopwindow, I am struck anew by the fact of her absence, that permanent, insurmountable thing. I find myself winding through the Mission, then doubling back on Guerrero. Then I’m in Dolores Park, walking. There are two kinds of people who hang out in Dolores Park this late—those selling drugs and those buying them. As I walk through the park, voices softly call out the evening’s wares—weed, coke, meth. I shake my head, thrust flyers into strangers’ hands.

  “What the fuck is this?” someone says, grabbing my arm when I hand him the flyer. He’s wearing a pink wool cap, and the cap strikes me as oddly childlike. Then I realize he is a child, sinewy and pale, no more than fifteen.

  I breathe deeply, try not to show my fear, and repeat my mantra, the phrase that has become as second nature to me as breathing: “I lost my little girl.”

  “You’re in the wrong place,” the kid says, giving my arm a painful squeeze before letting go. Minutes later I’m in my car, hands shaking on the wheel. Jake doesn’t know that I do this. He doesn’t know about my trips to Ocean Beach and Golden Gate Park and the Tenderloin at night, doesn’t know about all the ill-advised places I go at ill-advised times. He has his own way of searching—the command post, the radio, the organized lists and charts—and I have mine.

  Back home, I call Annabel. “She turns seven today,” I say.

  “I know. I called several times. Alex wanted to send her a present. I don’t think he really understands.”

  Annabel is eating something. She’s like our mother that way—an enormous appetite and a blessed metabolism.

  “Did I ever tell you that Mrs. Callahan sent me a card when I graduated from college?” she says after a little while. “It was weird, just this ordinary graduation card, and a gift certificate to the Gap. But there was a letter stuffed in the envelope, written on notebook paper. It was all wrinkled, like it had been wadded up and then straightened out again. It was this long, rambling letter about how she and Mr. Callahan had split up a few years before, and he was living in Dallas, and she was the director of a children’s choir at some church in Satsuma, Alabama.”

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said, how the guy kept Sarah alive for seven weeks. Where did he keep her?”

  “In his house, just a couple of miles from where her parents lived. He even took her to the mall three weeks into the kidnapping to buy a new dress. He had her wear a wig and lots of makeup so no one would recognize her.”

  I think of Sarah standing in the mall, the kidnapper’s big hand crushing her fingers. “Why didn’t she run?”

  “He had her convinced that if she tried to escape, he’d kill her parents.”

  “I realized a few days ago that, whoever did this, I want them to die. A long, slow death.”

  “Abby, that doesn’t sound like you. I can’t believe I’m hearing this from the woman who staged the huge death penalty protest in college.”

  “I don’t feel like me. I don’t think I’ll ever feel like me again.” I pause. “I’ve been making lists.”

  “What kind of lists?” Annabel asks.

  “Of kids who’ve disappeared. There are thousands, stretching back decades.”

  “Why are you doing this to yourself, Abby?”

  “It’s as if they all just vanished into the fog.”

  I think of a family trip we made to San Francisco when we were teenagers. It was July, and like so many tourists do, we had packed for summer in California. In shorts and light sweaters, Annabel and I set out to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. Within seconds we were shivering. The bridge that day was shrouded in fog so dense we didn’t even see the famous orange towers. The great white mass moved over the bay, obscuring the city skyline. Annabel and I posed for pictures. Many years later, when we went home to divide our mother’s things, we found a shoe box marked “San Francisco scrapbook.” Our mother never got around to making the scrapbook, but she had kept ferry ticket stubs, a key chain for Alcatraz, and the photographs. In the pictures, it is impossible to tell where we are, or even who we are. All that is visible are our ghostlike silhouettes, floating in a bright white haze.

  40

  DAY 138. Three a.m., insomnia, a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue at my elbow—a gift last year from a grateful client. Outside, a storm, wind rattling the windowpanes. Inside, the computer screen glows a milky white. For hours I’ve been scouring chat rooms, telling Emma’s story, leaving the web address like a calling card: www.findemma.com. Hits soar on Emma’s site, the electronic guest book bulges with messages, sympathy abounds, but no one has a clue. There is perhaps no greater proof of the despairing loneliness of the world than a late-night romp through cyberspace.

  Sasha67 writes, She looks just like my niece who died of leukemia six years ago.

  Snowboard4ever says, It’s 4:00 a.m. in Missoula. Call me. He leaves his phone number and, inexplicably, his date of birth; he’s young, probably a college student.

  Bored2tears says it’s snowing in Vancouver, then posts a list of all the girls who’ve left him over the past fifteen years, along with a detailed account of their reasons.

  It is a wonder that the vast circuitry of the Internet remains intact minute by minute, hour by hour, as the sins and the sadness of millions of Web surfers crash down upon it like some monstrous wave. There is something comforting in the fact that the technology of the Web is immune to human grief, that the wires and chips process all these desperate confessions like so many numbers. Death and destruction, broken hearts and angry threats, missing girls and panicked mothers—it all amounts to just so much data that can be sent and stored and forgotten.

  An instant message to my private e-mail address—the one I also use for work—pops up on screen. Howdy. Just got back from Finland. When can I come get the pictures?—Nick Eliot.

  I had completely forgotten him, Nick Eliot with his spiky hair and impressive family history of longevity, Nick Eliot whose great-grandmother Eliza recently turned ninety-nine. He grew up in Oxford, England, but had been living in the Bay Area for several years. The week before Emma’s disappearance, he came to my place with a small stack of photos that he wanted to have restored. “I found you through your website,” he said, placing the envelope carefully in my hand. “I liked your picture. You have a trustworthy face.” He allowed his fingers to linger a second or two more than necessary.

  I’ll admit I felt something, some quick electricity that traveled from his fingers thro
ugh the envelope to my palm. He had a familiar smell, like pound cake. He was wearing a dark blue suit with a French blue shirt underneath. I thought of Jake and pulled my hand away.

  “Let’s see what we have here,” I said, opening the envelope.

  There was Eliza at seventeen in a broad-rimmed hat and puffy sleeves, waving from the window of a train. And Eliza with squinting eyes and buckled shoes, sitting on the steps of a courthouse with her new husband. Eliza a few years later, one hand resting on top of a small child’s head, the other on her bulging stomach. In each photo, Nick’s great-grandmother was faded, her skin ghostly pale, as if she’d been too long in the dark.

  “Think you can fix them?” he asked.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  He handed me his business card; the vague job title Consultant was printed in tiny, neat letters beneath his name. As he was leaving, he turned around, scratched his head, grinned in a slightly embarrassed way, and said, “I don’t usually do this, but when I come back to get the pictures, could I take you out to dinner?”

  I held up my left hand and twiddled my engagement ring. Even as I did it, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to sit across a table from Nick, discussing travel and books, learning about his tastes, his family history. It was the first time since meeting Jake that I’d been confronted with someone who made me consider what I was giving up—the heady thrill of experiencing a first kiss with someone new, the kinetic moment of connection, the freedom to act upon this connection, to follow it through to some possibly surprising end. I loved Jake, I loved Emma, I was so happy to be on the cusp of this new life with them; yet I could not help but think about everything I’d be trading in the moment I walked down the aisle.