When the Stars Go Dark: A Novel

by Paula McLain

  “She fits here,” Emily said defensively. “She belongs with us.”

  “Of course. All I mean is that when hard things happen for kids, they often think they did something to cause it. That it’s their fault.”

  Emily is wearing an oatmeal-colored cashmere sweater and soft suede loafers, her tawny hair held back in a tortoiseshell clasp. Everything about her is neutral and refined, smoothed to perfection. But her eyes have grown clouded. “We tried to show her every day how much we loved her.”

  “I believe you. But someone gave her away, Emily. It’s hard to get over that, even into adulthood.”

  “Maybe,” she says. “But I had two parents who stayed married and I can tell you that was no walk in the park, either. And Troy’s parents weren’t much better. He’s from West Virginia. He likes to say he was raised by wolves, but I’d trade places with him in a second. His parents were simple people. They didn’t have much, but there’s no shame in that.”

  The word hangs there for a moment. “What is there shame in, Emily?”

  “What?”

  “What would you have changed about your own family?”

  I watch her shoulder muscles clench and then settle. Some great weight either landing there or letting her go. “Everything.”

  It isn’t hard to follow the shadows in her gaze back to Ohio, to long muffling winters and short, hot summers, taffeta formals at the country club. But of course I’m guessing. Emily is the only one who really knows how big everything is, what it contains, where it still clings.

  “One thing.”

  “The politeness, I guess. The civility. Ironed linen napkins at every meal. My father had this phrase, ‘Mail your envelope,’ meaning your napkin should be in your lap. ‘Mail your envelope, Emily.’ ” Her voice vibrates with held emotion as she imitates him. Rage, probably, and much more.

  It’s a big jump, where my mind goes next, and yet I have to ask. “Did he ever beat you?”

  “No.” She doesn’t seem surprised that I’ve opened this door. She might even be relieved. At a certain point, once they get tired enough of holding it, most people want to put down their stories. “Not that.”

  “Tell me a little about your father.”

  “There’s not much to tell. He worked all the time and lived at the club on the weekends. When he drank too much he’d call me over to the bar and show me off to his cronies. Not the best time.”

  “Did you ever ask him to stop?”

  Her chin bobs with a kind of fierceness. “I wasn’t raised to acknowledge my own feelings, let alone stick up for myself like that. That’s movie dialogue, not real life.”

  “Maybe it’s why you got into acting. So there’d be room to actually say things.”

  She shakes her head. Her eyes blaze up. “Do all detectives sound like psychologists?”

  She has me there. “A lot of them, yeah. People are interesting.”

  “Why are we talking about me instead of Cameron?”

  It’s the right question. But the answer is so complicated that it takes me a moment to weigh how much to tell her. “Family systems are revealing. That’s something I’ve learned from this line of work. The more you talk to people, the more you see how generations repeat patterns. Everything fits together, even when it seems not to.”

  “And the adoption? How does that work with this theory about families?”

  “I see it this way. Your biological parents give you their genes, the map of your physical self. But whoever raises you makes you who you are, for better or for worse. Family dynamics are acted out, not built in, though someday scientists might prove otherwise.”

  “The tension with Troy,” Emily says. “I wish I had been able to keep that from her.”

  “Maybe that would have helped. Or maybe Cameron needed the opposite…more talking through things, not less. Who knows, really? When she comes home, you can ask her.”

  Emily’s face contorts, her eyes shining. “If I can just have one more day with her—” She can’t finish the sentence.

  Emily and I are different women with entirely different stories—but I need to see the thread between us. How we’ve been to the same war.

  I’ve spent time faulting her for not keeping Cameron safe enough, not protecting her when she couldn’t protect herself. But what does it all add up to? What is all the suffering for if not so we can see how alike we are, and not alone? Where will the mercy come from, if not from us?

  (forty)

  Will makes good on his promise and soon we have a warrant to open Cameron’s adoption file. He offers to send Leon Jentz to Catholic Family Charities in Sacramento, but I can’t let anyone else go. I don’t want to see a fax or copy. Whatever I might find, this is personal—and I’m okay with that. Maybe too involved is exactly the way to find Cameron. Maybe the moment I decided to come back to Mendocino, this was always going to happen. All of this, just the way it’s unfolding.

  The drive to Sacramento takes four hours, long enough to feel grateful that Cricket is a model traveler. I stop near Clearlake to give her a bathroom break, and then we set off again on Interstate 5, past a checkerboard of parched-looking farms and fields, the median thick with white oleander. Once we reach the patched asphalt parking lot, I don’t feel great about leaving her in the car, but she’s not an official service dog—not yet. So I park in the shade and crack the window to give her plenty of fresh air.

  “I’ll be back in half an hour,” I tell her while her ears tip forward, listening. And then I hear myself and have to smile in disbelief. In forty-eight hours I’ve become someone who thinks dogs can tell time?

  Inside, Catholic Family Charities has the feel of a government building and houses fewer nuns than I expected. Mostly I pass drably dressed clerks in polyester skirt sets and flat shoes, and lots and lots of filing cabinets. Once I find my way upstairs, I talk to a secretary who pushes me through to another, and finally to the cramped office of the on-staff attorney, a pantsuited woman with a helmet of inky-black hair who asks only a few questions before handing over a copy of the file and asking for my signature. The flat look on her face tells me she’s overworked and underpaid. Cameron means nothing to her, and how could she? The metal cabinets behind her are full of cases, each file a complex story, a life. I thank her and head back to the bank of tired elevators in the hall. And then it hits me that I now have Cameron’s documents all to myself. It’s as if I’ve robbed a bank.

  I push the button for the first floor and step inside alone, almost dizzy with the instant privacy, the anticipation. As soon as the door closes, sealing me off from everything else, I open the file and notice Cameron’s childhood address. Ukiah. Emily and Troy were living in Malibu when they adopted Cameron. In 1989, four years ago, when their daughter was eleven, they moved to Mendocino, to the glass house on the bluff. And if you drew a line from that bluff almost straight east over the coastal range, Ukiah was just thirty miles away. With a closed adoption, neither family would have had any idea. But some force had pulled them close anyway. Thirty miles between Cameron’s before and after lives? It was crazy. It was fate, Eden might have said.

  Stepping out into the main lobby, I spot a pay phone and pause in front of it, digging for quarters to call Will. But then I stop. I have the names and address of Cameron’s birth parents right here in my hands. I’m close—so close—to learning more about her early life. Maybe a key piece to the puzzle of her disappearance is nearby, too, with her first family.

  For a long moment, I feel myself teetering on the brink of something, pulled in two directions. Will would want to be involved in the interview, but part of me doesn’t want him there. Doesn’t want to share, or wait for him to join me, or to have to jump through hoops of any kind. I don’t even want to ask for his permission. Going alone is a maverick, shortsighted move. What if I miss something? What if I screw it all up?

 
I pocket the quarters and open the file again. Clipped just inside is a photo of two children in dress clothes against a swirling blue background, the kind you’d get done in a Sears Portrait Studio in a shopping mall. The boy must be Cameron’s brother, about ten in the picture, with a starched white collar, jet-black hair, and slightly crooked front teeth. But it’s three-year-old Cameron I can’t look away from. Brown eyes like saucers under dark, feathery brows. Her face round and brave, and so precious it’s hard for me to breathe right, looking at her. The fierce set of her chin, as if she’s challenging not just whoever stands behind the camera but the whole day and everyone who’s part of it. Her hair in a fountain held off her face with a white plastic butterfly clip. Her dress made of white lace and cotton, and her smile wide open. Her light right there, pure and bright as the fucking sun. No victim sign. No bat signal. Just a little girl, Lisa Marie Gilbert, born March 20, 1978, the first day of spring.

  (forty-one)

  Driving fast in a straight shot up Highway 101, Cricket and I hit Ukiah just after four with all the windows down. Hap had always called Ukiah a cow town, too small for culture and too big to have any kind of charm or quaintness. I never corrected him, nor did I tell him what I remembered from living here myself, twice, in two short placements, each less than a year. My memory of that time was frayed, even then. Just small shreds of images, a first-grade teacher who wore dark flesh-colored nylons and drank Tab at her desk, a mother in a filmy yellow nightgown, on the couch drinking peach schnapps from a coffee cup all day long, a February afternoon when some kids on the bus jeered and told me my brother smelled like pee. He wasn’t really my brother, and I was the one who smelled, actually, but I’d only slid down in the seat with my book and disappeared.

  * * *

  —

  I come off the freeway to a string of fast-food restaurants next to check-cashing places, a Walmart Supercenter, and the Bartlett pear factory, recognizing nothing, thankfully. The section of town beyond Ford Road where Cameron spent her early years stands between the freeway and the fairgrounds. I pass Vinewood Park, a chunk of dry grass ringed by low-slung ranch houses, most of which have seen better days. The park looks thirsty and dejected, the squared-off playground studded with one of those climbing gyms made from recycled tires, and a badly oxidized swing set.

  Cameron would have played here, though, as Lisa, the same way we played in a drained swimming pool and thought it was wonderful. She wouldn’t have seen any of the dinginess, because no one ever does until they’re on the outside of a place, looking in.

  * * *

  —

  Even with the address in my hand, I have no way of knowing if any members of the Gilbert family still live here, at 3581 Willow. The surrounding streets are named similarly—Mimosa, Acacia, Fig—pastoral words that clash with the blistered, derelict lawn furniture strewn over the yards and stoops, the sagging clotheslines strung up between carports. I park in a dusty pullout as a shorn-headed boy in a Hulk T-shirt roars a three-wheeler around in a wide circle a few hundred yards away. He’s staring at me as if I must be lost. Possibly I am.

  Climbing out of my Bronco, I pocket my keys and approach the long, slim ranch house with Cricket at my heel. It’s done in rust-colored siding with silvery aluminum trim that throws off spears of light. A lopsided TV antenna dangles from the roof. Before I even reach the three plywood steps, the front door rocks open and a short, thick-shouldered man stops me like a bulwark. I feel Cricket’s energy change instantly, and put a hand on her collar.

  “Help you?” he asks, but really he means Go away. His right eye is lower than the left and red rimmed, giving him a mournful look. The rest of him is all sledgehammer, thick biceps, unshaven double chin, wide jaw clenching as he sizes me up.

  “I’m looking for Ruben or Jackie Gilbert. They’re not in trouble or anything. I just need some information.”

  “They don’t live here no more.” Obviously he’s spotted me as a professional, badge or no. He coughs, waiting for me to back away.

  “Are you a relative?”

  “That family moved on. I don’t know where.”

  “I’m working on a missing persons case in Mendocino, a fifteen-year-old girl named Cameron Curtis.”

  “Never heard of her.”

  “She’s in real trouble, Mr. Gilbert.” The name tips out and I let it fall, fishing.

  His big body heaves as he takes in a deep breath. Then he says, “Get the fuck out of here. I don’t know anything about no missing girl.”

  I flinch back before I can stop myself. He’s a big guy and could mess me up pretty bad if he had a mind to. Maybe coming alone has been a terrible idea. “Listen, I don’t want to hassle you, I just need to fill in some missing blanks.”

  “I don’t talk to cops.”

  “I’m not a cop, I’m a detective, and anyway, you’re not in trouble. This is about Cameron. You haven’t seen the news?”

  He coughs roughly, throws back his shoulders. “No.”

  “She may have had a connection to this place, a long time ago.”

  No response.

  “There are several girls missing in the area, actually, but I’m just here about Cameron. Can’t we go inside and talk a little, please?”

  His chin dips, his good eye seeming to bulge. “I told you. I don’t know shit about no missing girl. Now get the hell out of my way. I gotta work.” Then he stares me down, posturing, until I have no choice but to step aside.

  I stand in the yard and watch him climb into a maroon Ford Taurus, feeling almost nauseated because I’ve blown it. Cameron lived here. Somewhere nearby are missing pieces, maybe, ones that might show the whole of her. And what now? I can try to canvass the neighborhood and pray someone is here who either still remembers her or has anything to tell me about the Gilberts that will help in some way. But I’m not feeling overly optimistic.

  The Taurus accelerates through the turn from Willow onto Fig, nosing dangerously close to a stand of mailboxes, and then the kid on the Big Wheel is back, coming around for another lap on his circuit, his gaze on Cricket. Kids always seem to zero in on dogs.

  I give him a small wave, but his eyes are stony. They graze right over me, and then he brightens. Behind me, the door has opened silently.

  “Hey Kyle,” a voice says.

  “Hey Hector,” the kid says. “Can I come in for a while? My mom’s not home.”

  I look back and forth between the two, too surprised to say a word.

  “In a minute, okay? I gotta talk to this lady.”

  (forty-two)

  Familiar shag carpeting stretches through the living room and into the tiny kitchen, threadbare and pea green. A table and chairs and a tired-looking sofa with a dark stain across the back are the only furniture. Cricket parks herself at my side while Hector stands with his hands on his hips, studying me studying him. I’m guessing he’s twenty-one or -two, with muscled, tattooed forearms under his faded blue work shirt. His neck is inked, too, a band of interlocking shaded bubbles, like python skin. Dark, cuffed jeans hang from his waist over black steel-toed, ass-kicking boots.

  He’s a rough-looking character, and yet I don’t feel threatened. Instinctively I believe he’ll at least listen to my questions. His age and coloring make him a good bet for the boy in the photo or another sibling of Cameron’s. Plus he opened the door.

  “Hector, my name is Anna Hart. I’m trying to find a missing girl from Mendocino.”

  A shadow passes through his dark eyes. “What happened to her?”

  “We don’t know for sure. She vanished from her home on the night of September twenty-first, and no one’s heard from her since. I’m worried that someone might have taken her.”

  “I heard about that other girl in Petaluma. She’s not mixed up in something like that, is she?”

  “I don’t know. I wish I did.”

 
“I heard you say she was fifteen, huh? I have a sister who would be that age.”

  I don’t even breathe, hoping he’ll go on. And he does.

  “I was eleven when they split us up.”

  “The girl I’m looking for was adopted in 1982. What was your sister’s name, Hector?”

  “Lisa.”

  Something twists hard in my throat, then relief rushes in. Hope. “Can you tell me about it?”

  He sits down heavily on the couch and reaches for a pack of Camels on the floor next to a blue glass ashtray, lighting up. “My folks probably knew social services was coming to take us, but they didn’t say a word. Isn’t that the most fucked-up thing you’ve ever heard?”

  I take the chair across from him, and Cricket follows my cue, lying down while I register the tension in Hector’s face and hands. “What happened then?”

  “I don’t know everything. My dad was mixed up in a lot of shit, I think. Drug stuff. The cops came a few times, and then one of the neighbors made an anonymous call about negligence.” He nearly spits the last part.

  “Was that your father I talked to?”

  “That piece of shit? That’s my uncle Carl. My dad went to San Quentin a long time ago. Still there, for all I know.”

  “Why wouldn’t Carl talk to me?”

  Air comes in a puff from Hector’s nose. What I’ve asked is ridiculous.

  “But you’re talking to me,” I say.

  “I got nothing to hide. Plus I just got a feeling that you were here for something important. You ever get those feelings?”

  Yes, I want to say. Like right now, all of this. “Your mother, where is she?”

  He shrugs, his forehead bunching. “She skipped town a while back with some other loser. I’d be surprised if she was still alive. She was working pretty hard to kill herself even then.”