The Fall of Innocence

by Jenny Torres Sanchez

  Look at his face, she told herself. Look at his face!

  The man was wearing a black knit hat. And a black coat. His pants were brown and his sneakers were white, but his face was turned away. Yes, she remembered now. She had seen him. What she’d forgotten, repressed, pushed its way through now. It flickered on, like a movie in her mind.

  Show me your face!

  Emilia saw Mia’s eyes were now focused on the sky and she was looking far away. And Emilia remembered. This was when the crows, my beautiful crows, showed up.

  Emilia lifted her head, opened her beak, and cried. Louder and louder.

  Come! she told them. Come now!

  She could see some in the trees high above, but much fewer than Emilia remembered. Why wasn’t the sky darkening with so many crows like she remembered? Why were they just sitting on the branches, watching?

  Panic filled her and Emilia screeched louder.

  Please! she begged. Help me! Someone help me!

  Only then did the crows respond, flying from the branches. She heard their wings fluttering. A few swooped down by the attacker casually.

  And that’s when he let go.

  He saw just those few crows coming toward him. Flapping around him. And he let go.

  Emilia watched him back away now in a frenzy as if they were the most terrible things he’d ever seen, yelling and holding his arms over his face, swatting at the crows, which only then became agitated.

  Let me see your face.

  He swatted at them harder. He was scared. Terrified.

  Emilia saw him fall backward and trip over an exposed tree root. He tried to catch himself as he fell and brought down his arms.

  And she saw him, his face.

  She saw his ordinary face. His terribly ordinary face. Like that of any man she’d ever seen on the street, at the market, in a shopping center. Like that of any ordinary stranger.

  That’s him.

  It rushed back to her now.

  Brown hair around the edges of the knit cap, dark eyes. Thin lips. Sallow skin.

  That was him. That was his face. His terrible face.

  And it was not Jeremy Lance.

  Emilia looked above for all the crows she remembered, for the darkening of the sky as more and more came.

  But she felt dizzy with confusion and betrayal. There had been hundreds of crows that day, hundreds. They came to her rescue, surrounded and comforted her, kept her safe until she was found. But now only the same few remained, no more, no less, perched high in the trees once again.

  Emilia heard the gurgle. She tasted more metal in her mouth and heard Mia’s heavy breathing.

  I’m coming. I’m coming for you. I’ll save you.

  Emilia swooped down.

  Detective Manzetti Promised

  Detective Manzetti promised Nina and Sam he would look for Emilia himself. He promised he would use all his resources to find her. He did not tell them his resources were limited, nor that now that Emilia was sixteen, the department would likely not start looking for her until she’d been missing a full twenty-four hours. He did not tell them the chances of someone taking Emilia were slim. He did not tell them he was worried for their daughter.

  “We’ll find her,” he assured them, looking at Emilia’s family. The same, only older. He looked at her boyfriend, the last person to see her, and asked him again about the conversation he and Emilia had at the train station. Ian told him they’d broken up and Detective Manzetti wished he hadn’t. With her father’s sudden return, the revelation of Carl Smith, and a breakup with her boyfriend, on the surface, Emilia was looking too much like a classic case of a teenage runaway.

  But Detective Manzetti was sure she wasn’t.

  The night felt surreal to him, so similar to the night Emilia went missing eight years ago. He’d had that uneasy feeling then that he would have to tell another mother terrible news. It was like a stone in his stomach. He had the same feeling now.

  When he returned to his car, he remembered the message that came through when they found Emilia. That night he’d been wrong.

  He hoped he was wrong tonight.

  Manzetti put his car in drive and turned on his lights.

  Where are you, Emilia? he thought.

  The night did not respond.

  What Did I Miss?

  “What did I miss?” Nina whispered to Sam. They were sitting at the kitchen table. They’d been instructed by Detective Manzetti to call any friends their daughter had, and Nina sat struck as she realized Emilia had none. “I missed something,” she said.

  “No, you didn’t,” Sam said as he looked at Tomás and Ian sitting near the window in the living room. Tomás sat with his arms crossed, chewing on the inside of his lip as he stared at the wall. They’d walked in just moments before, Sam’s heart swelling with hope and Nina jumping up from the chair when the doorknob jiggled, and how crushing when it wasn’t Emilia.

  For a moment, when he saw Ian, Sam thought maybe they’d overreacted. For a moment, he thought Emilia would come in after them. They’d say they all just went out for pizza together. They’d wonder why their parents looked so worried, why Nina looked deathly pale.

  But no, Tomás explained he had worried about her at work. He’d come home to look for her. He hadn’t heard from her.

  Tomás’s worry compressed Nina’s worry. Sam’s also. Especially when Tomás said, We looked everywhere I could think of, everywhere. But still, no sign of Emilia.

  “I can’t sit here and just wait.” Nina’s voice cracked.

  “Detective Manzetti said it would be best.”

  Nina shook her head, went over to the window, and looked out.

  “I missed her call,” Tomás said suddenly. “The phone was ringing. It was her—I know it was. And I missed it.”

  Nina went to him, pulled Tomás close to her. “It was me. I called. I let it ring and ring and ring. I thought she might be home.”

  Tomás leaned into her, crying harder than Nina could ever remember her son crying. She felt his body go slack, as if relief was flooding through him, weakening his limbs. Nina held him tighter, and he allowed her to, at least for a few moments.

  * * *

  * * *

  Tomás watched the clock tick away as they sat together, waiting for Emilia, waiting for the phone to ring. Waiting for news.

  “I can’t do this,” Ma finally said again. “We have to keep looking for her.”

  His father nodded and quickly rose from his chair like he couldn’t stand the waiting, either. “Let’s go,” he said. “Ian, you stay here in case she comes back.”

  Ian nodded and watched the three of them go.

  They got in the car and his father drove, careful to go down each street slowly, so they wouldn’t miss her, though Tomás really wanted him to speed through the whole town so they could get to Emilia immediately, wherever she was.

  “Where would she go?” Ma said over and over again.

  The library was now closed, the arcade, too. They stopped at fast-food places and went inside. Carro’s. The small fruit market even. They stopped by the diner, where Ma rushed inside to check if Emilia was there. She came out moments later shaking her head. They headed to the park where Emilia used to play and where Tomás would cut through on his way home from work and see Emilia on the swings sometimes.

  Aren’t you getting too old for the playground? he teased her once when he saw her there. It had been just a few months ago. The first cool breeze of fall in the air. He could see her now, jumping off the swing while it was high in the sky, and running over to him to walk home together.

  She had smiled and shrugged, and as they came up to their house, she said, I try to remember how I used to be. When I’m on the swings, I almost can. Almost.

  She’d said it casually, moved on to something else. But there had been a pause in
there, a few seconds of silence Tomás felt now he should have asked her what she’d meant. Emilia never talked about the attack. Any time he’d ever gotten too close to the subject, she’d change topics or say she had something to do.

  Tomás sat in the back seat of his dad’s rental car thinking of those few seconds. And he racked his brain trying to remember anywhere else she might have gone, anywhere she would go to remember how she used to be.

  One of Emilia’s favorite places when they were little was Playland. They’d gone at least once most summers when they were still a family. Emilia loved it. And she’d been happy there.

  Tomás grabbed the headrests of the front seats and pulled himself forward. “Dad, remember how much she loved Playland? The boardwalk, the rides. The food. I think . . . if she took a train . . . maybe she might’ve gone there?”

  His parents looked at each other. His father made a turn and pulled the car over. “Do you really think she’d go there? Why would she—”

  “It’s worth checking,” Ma said. “We have to keep looking, Sam. I can go and you stay here and keep searching. Tomás, you come with me. We’ll cover more ground together.”

  Tomás’s father nodded. “I know, okay . . . ,” he said, unsure at first but then with certainty. “Okay.”

  Tomás took a deep breath. He leaned his head against the window and looked up at the sky.

  Is that where we’ll find you, Mia?

  He watched birds flitter about in a tree, so many of them, outside one of the windows of their old elementary school.

  Your birds, Emilia, he thought. Your birds. Come home, please.

  His father put the car in drive and continued down the street in tense silence.

  Suddenly, Tomás noticed a soft glow in one of the windows of the school.

  “Stop.”

  “What?”

  “Stop the car!”

  His father slowed, but Tomás got out of the car before it even came to a full stop and started running as fast as he could toward the old elementary school.

  When They Saw

  When they saw the glowing lights of the classroom, Ma was confused but relieved.

  She must be here! Oh god, here. By herself. My Emilia.

  They ran to the front of the school, pulling at the doors, pounding uselessly at windows, trying to find a way inside.

  “Get a hammer, something!” Nina yelled at Sam, who ran back to the car and searched as Tomás continued looking for any opening. Emilia was in there, he knew she was; he just had to figure out how she’d gotten inside.

  “Here!” he yelled suddenly as he came across the window that led to the chorus room. “I found a way in!”

  Tomás made his way through the opening, his feet accidentally kicking over a ladder that had been placed there.

  He dropped down into the room, which was darker than the moonlit night outside, darker than sidewalks illuminated by streetlights. He picked up the ladder and helped his mother climb in. They both stood there for a moment, disoriented, trying to adjust to the impossible darkness.

  A moment later, Sam came through the window. Tomás stumbled toward where he remembered the door being when he attended this school.

  “This way,” he told his parents as his mother reached out for his arm.

  He led them through halls and staircases, as they made their way up to the room Tomás had seen from the street.

  At the last stair, they turned the corner and saw the glow of the open classroom up ahead.

  “Emilia!” Ma called as Tomás started running.

  When they reached the doorway, they scanned the room for her, and were immediately struck by both her absence and the magnificence of the room.

  “My god,” Ma said. “Did she do this? All this?” Her mouth opened, as if she was on the verge of saying more, but then she was speechless with each new thing she took in. Never, never in all her life could she have imagined this. The glowing candles, bright and soft and holy. The walls, sparkling? And the room full of crows: shimmering rows of crows hanging from the ceiling, crows in flight painted on the walls, and on the largest wall, a mural of a single large black crow, its wings wide and outstretched.

  But its face was Emilia’s face, an old photograph of herself enlarged and cut out perfectly to fill the bird’s face. Her dark eyes looked as if they were looking right at you.

  And there they were, under one of her wings. Individual pictures of Sam, Ma, and Tomás under one, and under the other, a picture of Emilia when she was about eight years old. Next to her was a picture of Ian, just as young as Emilia. And between their little cut-out bodies, Emilia had drawn their arms reaching out toward each other and their hands clasped together. There was a heart around them.

  Emilia had adorned their heads with little beads so they looked majestic, like they were wearing crowns. She’d put flowers in their hair, too, and around them, her father’s poems written on the wall. Their portraits were connected with sparkling gold thread that reached from one to the other and back again, over and over, entwining all of them together in such a way so that they looked like they could never possibly come apart.

  They looked so beautiful. And this room was beautiful. So many strange little objects assembled here.

  “Emilia?” Ma called out in a shaky voice as she passed the air mattress, made up with a blanket from home. “My god, was she sleeping here? When?” Ma whispered as she brought a hand up to her trembling mouth. She noticed the striped salt and pepper shakers displayed on a stack of books, along with other small decorative trinkets she hadn’t noticed missing from home.

  The school was cold and frigid. It was a calm, windless night. The glittering walls and trinkets and paper crows, all of it was so stunning. That was why none of them immediately noticed.

  It was Tomás who saw it first. The open window. It was he who suddenly felt the world fall away as his head started whirring.

  He slowly walked toward it, telling himself, No, no, while another part urged him forward. He looked down just as his mother called his sister’s name again.

  “Emilia?”

  He yelled without knowing the words were coming from his mouth.

  “Emilia! Emilia! No, no!”

  He looked down at his sister, her broken body illuminated by the light of the moon, as his mother ran into him, her whole weight against him as she screamed. His father grabbed her around her waist, pulled her away from Tomás and from that open window.

  “Shut the window! Shut the window!” his father yelled. But Tomás couldn’t move, and then his mother was running out of the room, and then somehow, Tomás heard her screams coming from down below.

  Those screams, traveling up and into his ears as if she were right next to him still.

  Those screams, shrill and inhuman, but full of his sister’s name, coming from his mother as she held Emilia.

  His father was outside now, too, and he ran to a house close by. Tomás ran down the stairs, pushing against each door he passed on the way, but all were locked and he frantically made his way back to the chorus room and out of the school, the world moving so slow and so fast.

  “Oh god, she’s so cold, she’s so cold!” his mother screamed when Tomás reached them. She had taken off her jacket, wrapped it around Emilia, and was now rocking back and forth with Emilia in her arms.

  Tomás kneeled down next to his mother, crying, and put his arm around her. He felt her shaking with cold and grief and sobs. He looked at his sister, at the blood that came out of her ears and mouth and blue lips.

  Emilia.

  Her shoes had come off.

  One of her feet was twisted at a strange angle.

  She was wearing striped socks.

  Tomás heard his father’s sobbing and then his father was holding him.

  The sound of faraway sirens came closer and mixed with his mother
asking God for help, his father’s crying, Tomás’s heaving breaths.

  Red and Blue Lights

  Red and blue lights flashed on the glossy feathers of the crows in the trees. From there, they watched the people below. Their faces were all drawn to the ground. Only Emilia’s faced upward, at the sky, at them, before a zipper hid it from view and she was enclosed in a black bag.

  They watched as she was rolled into an ambulance.

  They watched as she was taken away.

  They watched.

  And they cried. Caw. Caw.

  More crows arrived, filling the trees and the school roof as the people below them left. The night filled with silence as the world went to sleep. The crows stayed. All night and into dawn.

  Until the sun rose, and the crows took flight.

  * * *

  * * *

  Carl Smith lay in his bed earlier that day as a dozing hospice nurse sat in the corner of his room. He wished she would leave. He didn’t care that she adjusted his pillows and held a straw to his lips so he could drink the water. He was disgusted by her, and if he’d been able to speak, he would have told her so.

  But Carl Smith couldn’t speak. And each breath he took, even with the machine pumping oxygen through his nostrils, was a struggle. He could barely move and only now and then opened his eyes and took in the world around him. His eyes flitted from the woman in the corner of the room to the window. His brother kept the shades open so Carl Smith would have a clear view outside whenever he managed to open his eyes.

  For a brief moment, Carl Smith was able to do just that. And he looked out the dirty, smudged pane and saw his brother below, selling away his items. One by one.

  A deep hatred for his brother stirred in him, not only because he had taken over his house, his life, even his death, but because his brother was good and gentle and kind. All the things Carl never was and never could be. He glared at the man his mother loved more. But the hate made him tired, and just when he was about to close his eyes, he caught a glimpse of a young girl running across the street.