by Paula McLain
“What?”
“Your happiest place?”
I had no idea where she was going with these questions, but Mendocino was the only possible answer. “My memories aren’t all good,” I clarified, “but it’s home.”
“Okay.” Squeezing the frames of her glasses in her hands, she looked out at the city’s grid, the sky. Then she closed her eyes. “Every day, I want you to picture Mendocino, to go there in your mind. Visualize it until it’s complete, the whole place, just as you remember it. Then, when you have it all clearly, just as you want it, I want you to start building a house very slowly, board by board. A house big enough for everyone you’ve lost, everyone you haven’t been able to save.”
A chill sped through me. I stared at her. What kind of person talked like this? What kind of life had Corolla lived that let her sit in a room with a stranger and feel safe enough to close her eyes?
“How will this exercise help?”
“It’s a way of integrating what’s happened to you. A healing story.”
Healing story? Had she read that in some therapist’s manual? “There isn’t a house big enough,” I finally said.
“It’s your house, your mind.” The muscles in her face had softened. “It can be as big as it needs to be. Paint the rooms with bright colors. Let the light in. And when you have everything just right, picture them coming in together, Anna, together and happy and whole. All those children, the ones who deserved better.”
Inside my chest, I felt something shudder and drop. If she would only stop talking, I could reset. But she wouldn’t.
“It’s not what you carry, but how you can learn to carry it. You need to heal yourself. Your child self too, Anna. Make room for her. Find a way to let her in.”
(twelve)
Back at the cabin after leaving Caleb, I heat up a can of stew and eat it over the sink, then pour two fingers of Maker’s Mark into a glass, catching a glimpse of myself in the window glass. Haphazard ponytail and rumpled thermal undershirt, the jeans I haven’t washed in weeks. Caleb was polite enough not to remark on it when we were together earlier, but clearly I’m having a Call of the Wild moment.
I stay up long past midnight, drinking and staring into the fire until I collapse at one point onto the scratchy plaid couch in the living room. Dreams come that I don’t want. Haven’t asked for. Are they even dreams?
I’m in the forest on a narrow trail with Eden. She walks ahead in one of Hap’s heavy work jackets, her shoulders straight and solid. Not sick, then. Not sick yet.
“Look here, Anna. A medicine woman showed me this once.” She points to a tree that’s bent sharply sideways, as if it has a waist and is peering down at the thick, damp humus around it.
Wait. “You know a medicine woman?”
“It’s a marker tree.” Has she heard my question? “An arrow. The Pomo sometimes did this to signal one another hundreds of years ago. And see, we’re just getting the message now.”
“What message?”
Then Eden is gone, and Hap is with me instead, older than I ever knew him in life. Bent like the tree, nearly in half. Stooped on the trail.
“Just the old hip, screaming,” he says aloud, as if he can hear my thoughts and knows I’m worried about him. “Come on. We can do it together. We’re almost there.”
Where? I try to step closer but am stuck somehow, glued in place. I miss you, I try to say. I can’t do this alone.
“Almost there,” he says again. But he hasn’t moved.
Around us the fog is so complete that the trees drip with it. I see a banana slug on the path near my wet boot tip, fat and yellow-green, slick with dew.
“Everything’s getting a drink today.” He’s listening to my thoughts again and laughs a little. “Here, now. Look.”
It’s the same marker tree, but the branches point down at a wounded doe. The creature’s buff hide has been ripped open by something terrible, its abdomen chewed through so that I can see how its heart trembles, fist sized, black with blood. From its throat comes a noise not human or animal but both at once—a steady, deep sound of hurting.
Oh, Hap. Do something.
“I can’t, but you can. She’s just like you, honey. That’s how you’ll find her.”
Then the deer is gone. The forest floor is cinnamon colored with redwood needles, cool and whole and still. Hap is nowhere in sight, but I can hear him, his words moving through me like original sound, the sea in a cupped shell, the whole forest in the branch of one tree.
“Don’t be afraid. You’ll know what to do. Just follow the signs.”
What? No. Come back!
“Anna, honey. This is why you’re here. Open your eyes.”
* * *
—
I wake to a pounding headache, my tongue coated and thick. I’ve long been a vivid dreamer. All cops are, or eventually become that way. But this dream has left a hangover that has little or nothing to do with the Maker’s Mark.
Starting the shower, I stand under the streaming water for a long time, waiting for the thudding in my head to subside, but it doesn’t. A wave of nausea hits me and I drop to the floor, hugging my knees together while water rushes over me like a curtain of hot rain. I feel a strange dull ache in my lower back and belly, a sensation that confuses me until I smell a faint hint of iron. Notice the blood trickling from between my legs and down the drain, pale pink and diluted. My cycle is back.
As my mastitis has slowly healed and my breasts have begun to return to normal, I’ve tried to forget about my body, but clearly it remembers everything. How I screamed that day, sounding like a stranger. How Brendan kept telling me the ambulance was on its way, as if that made any difference. My neighbor Joan wouldn’t leave my side. Her face was white and bloodless. I’m so sorry, she kept saying. But I couldn’t answer her. Later the paramedics stood over me, my jeans clinging to my legs, wet and cold. I felt dead inside them. It was time for me to let go of the body, but I couldn’t make my arms open. From far away, I heard a baby crying. One of the paramedics kept repeating my name, which sounded absurd suddenly.
Drenched and shaking in the shower, I feel it all with shocking immediacy, the weight of my guilt, the pain I’ve caused Brendan, Frank’s doubt in me, the wreckage of my life in the distance, like a city on fire. I hoped Mendocino could help me heal and forget. Instead it’s full of ghosts and clues, messages that have been waiting impatiently for me. Hap in my dream of the wounded doe. She’s just like you, honey. That’s how you’ll find her. Cameron’s haunted eyes in her missing poster. Her call for help, which I haven’t stopped hearing for a moment, no matter how much I’ve tried.
I stand up, my knees knocking together so hard it feels dangerous to be in my body. I just got here. I’m not near ready for any of this, but it doesn’t matter. In the fog on the bathroom mirror, a small circle has cleared, and my own face is centered inside of it. Every sign is the same sign. I’m supposed to find Cameron Curtis.
(thirteen)
On the Fourth of July 1970, all the cruisers from our sheriff’s department lined up on Main Street for a parade out to the bluff for fireworks. I was twelve that year, waiting for my share of the sparklers Ellis Flood was handing out to all the kids. He had a whole stash in his office, including smoke bombs and fountains and Red Rockets that said DO NOT HOLD IN HAND AFTER LIGHTING on the side of the orange-and-blue box—as if we needed to be told. But maybe we did.
I’d never been very comfortable with holidays. Celebrating typically meant chaos to me, the grown-ups in charge even more distracted and erratic than usual, giving themselves permission to cut loose even more than they did every day.
On Christmas morning when I was eight, I woke up early in our apartment in Redding to find my mother wasn’t in her bed in her room, wasn’t home at all. In the living room, the plastic tree that we’d put up the week before had only a wadde
d-up bedsheet beneath it where the presents were supposed to be. The tree lights had been left on overnight and threw blinking rainbow-colored eggs across the wall and the carpet. On the coffee table, next to an overflowing ashtray, three red-and-white felt stockings that still had the price tags on them were half hanging out of a Longs Drugs plastic bag.
I was just starting to put all the pieces together when the kids came out of their room and I had to think fast.
“Did Santa come?” Jason asked. He was wearing his Captain Kangaroo T-shirt and no pants, his stuffed cheetah, Freddy, by his side.
“He must be busy this year,” I covered quickly. “He’ll probably come tonight instead.”
“Where’s Robin?” Amy pulled her thumb out of her mouth to ask the question, and then quickly plugged herself back in, looking all around the room as I pushed her gently from behind.
“Helping Santa. Come on, let’s eat.”
Jason and Amy were my half brother and sister, four and five that year. Irish twins, my mother always called them, though I had no idea what she meant. Their own mom, Trish, had always been a bit of a mess and hadn’t come around for visitation in a long time. Our dad, Red, was doing time in county for armed robbery of a liquor store. He’d worn a ski mask, but had taken it off as soon as he was outside, and there were witnesses.
“What an idiot,” my mother had said more than once after his sentencing. “He couldn’t find his ass with both hands.”
I’d learned to agree with her a long time before, and not to make anything harder. Thankfully she liked the kids even though they weren’t really hers and she had never cared for Trish. I did most of the work anyway. We’d been on our own for months now, the four of us, and it was going okay. I had been allowed to cook from the time I was five or six and never had an accident or even burned a finger.
“You’re a good helper,” my mom said every once in a while, and when she did, it felt like the sun coming out from behind a large dark cloud.
* * *
—
That morning, I dragged a chair over to the stove to scramble eggs, pushing them back and forth in the pan with the wooden spoon until they cooked all the way through. Amy wouldn’t eat them otherwise.
Amy had white-blond hair. When she was worried, she pulled the tips into her mouth and sucked on them at the same time as her thumb. She did it now. “Where’s Robin?” she asked again.
“I already told you, she’s helping Santa. Now drink your milk.”
“I’m still hungry,” Jason said. “Can I have a Pop-Tart?”
“You’re fine.” I had already looked at the food we had. Once, before the kids had started living with us, my mom had gone to the store for cigarettes and not come back for two days. I’d eaten cereal until I ran out of milk. For the kids, I would have to be more resourceful. “Here,” I said, giving Jason the rest of my eggs. “We’re going to get dressed and play a game outside.”
“Aren’t you going to school?” Amy asked.
“No, it’s a holiday, honey. Now stop asking questions.”
All that day we played in the courtyard of our apartment building, in the laundry room, which was perfect for hide-and-seek, and in the swimming pool, which had been drained at the end of the summer and wouldn’t be filled again for months. We ate cheese sandwiches under a camellia bush and then built a fairy garden with rocks and clothespins and anything else we could find. That was good because it took a long time. Whenever one of the kids would ask when we were going back inside, I would tell them to be patient. That Christmas was late this year because of an ice storm at the North Pole and that was why Robin had to help.
Everything was moving along smoothly as a dream until one of our neighbors, Phyllis, walked by with her Chihuahua, Bernard, and stopped, eyeing us as if we were doing something wrong just by breathing. “Where’s your mother?”
“Sleeping,” I said, shooting a look at the kids that meant they shouldn’t contradict me.
Jason nodded and then reached for Bernard, who skittered sideways, trembling.
That dog didn’t like people, and especially not kids, but Jason couldn’t help himself.
Phyllis scooped up Bernard’s wriggling body with a disgusted look on her face and kept staring down at us. “On Christmas?”
Amy hadn’t moved, but now she piped up. “What’s wrong with that? She’s tired.”
Phyllis eventually went back into her apartment, but kept looking out through the slit between her drapes. Meanwhile I told the kids how good they were and that I was proud of them. And I was. Whatever worry I felt about my mother was balanced out by the lightness of the day, how easy things felt, except for the exchange with Phyllis, how free. Mom had “a lot on her plate,” as she often put it. Even with food stamps, feeding three kids was no picnic. As erratic and moody as Red could be, he always had a way of making her laugh. Now that he hadn’t been in the picture for a while, nothing stopped her from dropping down a deep well of a mood. She was lonely and tired, and life was passing her by.
Once, I found Amy in the hallway listening to Mom cry in her room through the door. She’d been in there all day.
“What is Robin so worried about?” Amy asked when I gave her a handful of animal crackers to distract her.
“A lot of things. You wouldn’t understand.”
(fourteen)
Will’s office is the same one his father had, I find. He looks up from his desk as I knock, surrounded by paperwork in a pool of fluorescent light, red-blond stubble flaring along his cheeks and upper lip, his eyes tired but expectant as soon as he sees me, and clearly surprised.
“Anna. Hey. What’s going on?”
“Do you have time to talk?”
“Things are pretty intense right now. Can I call you later today?”
“Actually I’m hoping you’ll let me help you with the case.”
“What?” He blinks rapidly. “Are you serious?”
“Very.”
He pours us coffee in stained ceramic mugs and tips in powdered creamer, the smell sweet and chemical, familiar. Everything is, the gray-beige industrial-wasteland cinder-block walls; the creased manila file folders spilling scraps and forms; the curled Post-it notes and half-used three-by-five notebooks; the scattered blue Bic pens with the caps bent and chewed. Behind Will’s desk a sheet of butcher paper hangs with scribbled lists of names, dates, and times for Cameron’s case. Just beside it is another missing poster, pinned at eye level.
KIDNAPPED
At Knife Point
Polly Hannah Klaas
D.O.B. 1/3/81
Brown hair—Brown eyes
4'10"—80 lbs
Last seen October 1, 1993, in Petaluma, Calif.
My eyes catch—snag—as everything speeds up. October 1 was yesterday. “Wait. What’s this?”
He shakes his head as if he wishes he could erase the facts. “I know it’s a lot to process. I’ve been on the phone since dawn. The suspect’s still at-large.” He hands over a composite sketch of a heavyset middle-aged man.
SUSPECT
White Male Adult 30–40 yrs.
Approx. 6'3" Dark/Dark Gray Hair
Full Beard, Wearing Dark Clothing
With Yellow Bandana Around Head
If you have any information on this man
CALL THE PETALUMA POLICE:
707-778-4481
A lot to process? I came here ready to do whatever I can to find one girl, and here is another. As if there’s some kind of sick revolving door just out of sight. “How is this related to our case? Could this be the same guy who has Cameron?”
“I kind of hope so,” Will breathes. “There are witnesses this time. There’s a crime scene. Polly’s two best friends were with her when he entered her room. They heard his voice. They saw his face.”
; As I let the details sink in, I feel more and more as if I’m treading thick dark water. We’re in the deep end now. These were three twelve-year-old girls in the middle of a slumber party. Their Friday-night sleepover torn like a pink paper heart. Polly’s kidnapper had blackened the bedroom door, threatening to slit their throats if they screamed. He’d put pillowcases over the girls’ heads and had them count to a thousand. What had a thousand felt like? Nothing short of forever.
“There weren’t any prints on the back door,” Will is saying. “That’s how he got in. The CSI team did find a print in Polly’s room, but it’s too smeared to run through the system. Apparently he came in with precut ligature and a hood he’d made, some sort of silky material, like a slip.”
I reach for the sides of the bucket chair, smooth and solid. “One hood?”
“Right. The girls said he seemed disoriented to find three of them there. He asked which one of them lived in the house.”
“Maybe he saw Polly somewhere else and zeroed in on her, not thinking or caring about who else might be there when he made his move. A house full of girls isn’t exactly quiet. Where were the parents?”
“Mom was asleep and Dad was at his own residence. They’re divorced.”
“They might not have been able to protect her, even if they were both there and awake. Some predators stop at nothing once they’re set in motion.”
Will’s eyes have gone slightly glassy, and I know why. For the last ten days, since Cameron’s family reported her missing, he’s been in a minefield, but now it’s twice the size, with double the risk. “If this is the same guy who took Cameron,” he says finally, “I mean, if he’s actively on the hunt, there’s no chance we’re going to find her alive, is there? You can tell me.”