by T. Greenwood
“I’ve been a cop for a long time,” he says. “I’ve seen just about everything there is to see.”
I have to resist rolling my eyes. This is Vermont. He’s acting like he’s some jaded cop from Detroit, Chicago. I have watched the nightly news here. Read the papers. Just last night the headline was TRACTOR TRAILER STRIKES DEER ON I-89.
He continues. “And believe it or not, this isn’t the first time I’ve been sent on a wild goose chase.”
I am using every bit of self-control I have not to tear my hair out. Or his.
“Most of the time, it’s because something’s going on at home. It’s a cry for help. I had a woman who faked her own kidnapping. Turns out her husband was about to leave her, and she figured her getting kidnapped might make him stick around.”
“Did he?” I seethe.
“Long enough to help get her admitted to Waterbury,” he says. The state mental institution.
Something about this feels like a threat.
“This has nothing to do with me,” I say.
Again, that patronizing smile. “Ms. Waters, please consider what we have. No kid reported missing. No evidence found at the site. No witnesses.” He ticks each item off with his thick fingers and then curls those fingers into a zero. “We’ve got nothing.”
“Wait,” I say, feeling my heart throbbing in my temples. “There might be another witness. There was a truck, a white pickup truck with Massachusetts plates that passed me right after I saw her.”
“And you’re just now remembering this?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “I came to tell you earlier but you were on your radio.”
He sighs, rubs his face with his hands. I can see the shadow of a beard. He probably wants nothing more than to go home and shower and shave.
“I remember, because I thought it was strange that a car with out-of-state tags would have landscaping equipment in the back. I saw the guy at Hudson’s earlier when I stopped. He had overalls on and long hair. My friend, Devin, the one who lives here, said maybe it’s somebody with a camp at the lake. Maybe he was getting it ready for the summer.”
“So he was inside the store?”
“Yes,” I insist. “You can ask the kid who was working last night. I think it’s Billy Moffett’s son. Check the register tape. He bought forty dollars’ worth of gas and a twelve-pack of Bud longnecks. And when he drove past me, he was headed toward the lake, not away from it. So he wasn’t headed out of town.”
He sighs again. It’s as if he’s been waiting for my permission for him to call off the search. My confession that I made it all up. But like a child caught up in a lie, I keep insisting that it’s the truth.
“Please,” I say. “I’m not doing this for attention. I’m not insane.” The word makes me stiffen, and I hope he can’t see the way my entire body reacts to it.
That night, Jake goes to the cabin not long after dinner, says he needs to prep for the auction, though I know he’s been over all of the editors’ most recent acquisitions. He’s ready, but I don’t argue. Instead I stay with Effie and the girls in the camp. Devin disappears upstairs to read, leaving us alone.
We play a game of Clue, but Zu-Zu and Plum are bickering. Plum doesn’t get the deductive reasoning aspect of the game, and Zu-Zu’s patience is thin.
“I want to make an accusation!” Plum says gleefully, clapping her hands together. “Miss Scarlet, in the library, with the revolver.”
“You already know it didn’t happen in the library,” Zu-Zu says, exasperated. “Remember? I showed you the library card the last time.”
“You don’t know everything, you know,” Plum says, pure sass.
“I know it didn’t happen in the library.”
“Stop,” Effie says, rubbing her temples. “One day without fighting. That’s all I ask.”
“Well, I’ll be gone soon, and then there will be nobody for her to fight with,” Zu-Zu says dramatically, crossing her arms.
“Good,” Plum says. “Because you’re mean.”
“Whatever, Plum.”
“Seriously, stop,” Effie says. “We’ve got company.”
“I’m not playing anymore,” Plum says then, and slips under the table. I can feel her at my feet. I reach under the table, fingers poised to tickle.
“Get out from under the table, Plum,” Zu-Zu says, the little mama. “Don’t be such a baby.”
“I’m not a baby,” Plum starts, and then there is a hard knock under the table, a brief moment of silence, and then wailing.
Effie sighs heavily and then ducks under the table. Plum crawls out, crying and clutching the top of her head. Plum crawls up into Effie’s lap and Effie studies the spot on her head. Kisses it.
“I need to pack,” Zu-Zu says, rolling her eyes. “Are we still leaving on Sunday? I mean, now that all this stuff is happening?”
She’s asking me, but I look to Effie for help.
“We’ll make sure you get to New York on time,” Effie says.
“But what about that little girl?” Plum asks. Her eyes are red, her cheeks streaked with tears.
“People are looking for her. She’s probably just found a safe warm place to hide,” I offer.
“Who does she belong to anyway?” Plum asks.
“We don’t know yet, punkin’,” Effie says, and buries her face in Plum’s hair. Something about this makes my chest hurt. “She’s probably just lost.”
“Well, if I was ever lost in the woods, I’d stay in the same place. That way you could find me. Or I’d use my echo.”
“You don’t use an echo,” Zu-Zu corrects. “Your voice makes an echo.”
“Mom, she’s doing it again.”
“Stop correcting,” Effie says.
“Where are the tights you ordered?” Zu-Zu asks.
“Upstairs, with the pointe shoes and slippers.”
Zu-Zu stands up and starts to head upstairs but then stops, goes to the freezer, and pulls out a bag of frozen raspberries. She brings them over to Plum and gently rests them on her head before skipping into the living room and then up the stairs.
After the girls have gone to bed, Effie and I sit outside in two Adirondack chairs facing the lake. My feet are bare and the grass is cold, but I don’t want to hunt for my shoes.
“You have good girls,” I say.
Effie nods. “Thank you. I need to be reminded of that every now and again.”
“Sometimes, I wonder how things would be different . . .” I say. I don’t even need to finish my sentence, because she knows exactly what I am thinking about. This is the same conversation we’ve been having for eight years. “Maybe if we had a child, if we were a real family, then Jake wouldn’t have done this.” This is what I have to think, because the alternative is even worse. What if we had a child and he did this anyway? What if his selfishness, his lack of regard, extends beyond me? What if he is capable of hurting everyone?
“How did you find out?” Effie asks quietly, pulling the comb that holds her hair up and letting it tumble down.
I take a sip of beer from the bottles she brought out for us. It’s bitter, but the only thing that seems to be taking the edge off. The sharp edge that seems to border everything now.
“Texts,” I say. “A whole string of them. He didn’t even bother to delete them.” But this is not how I know. I think now that I knew long before the note. I sensed it, the way you can smell rain before it comes. I felt it in my skin, smelled it in the charged air between us.
“Who is she?” she asks. “Anyone you know?”
I shake my head, and wonder if I have met her. I’m sure I have, though all of the assistants blur together. They all have the same hungry eyes, the same eager smiles. They share the collective longing, the marvelous ache of ambition and youth.
“I’m going to stay here,” I say.
She turns to me, her eyes widening. She thinks I mean forever. “Of course you’ll stay here. Stay as long as you like. We’ll figure out what to do.”
�
��No,” I say, smiling. “I mean, yes. But I just mean until they find the girl. I know Jake is going to say he has to go back to New York. But I can’t go. Not until they find her.”
Effie reaches out for my hand, and I let her take it.
The sky is filled with stars. I look up, feel dizzy. Disoriented.
“I still dream about her,” I say. “The same dream. I must have had it a thousand times.”
And Effie knows exactly what I mean now too. I don’t have to explain. This is friendship, I think. This is sisterhood.
The first part is real.
I am alone in Guatemala City, staying in that roach-infested hotel: the one with the elevator that terrifies me, with its ancient accordion gate and sticky floors that smell of piss. I have been here for almost a month already. You will come later, though as the days go by, I begin to wonder if this is true. There is always something keeping you. And you are beginning to feel so very far away.
Each morning I sit on the small balcony, which looks out over a terracotta colored courtyard, eating plantains and black beans, fresh cheese and eggs. Drinking the strong Guatemalan coffee. I have acclimated. To this food. To this climate. To this world that does not belong to me.
Please come, I say at night into the phone that tenuously connects me to you. But there is always a new client, a new contract, another conference. Work, work, work.
From my hotel room, I speak with the Guatemalan attorney nearly every day, with the agency, though neither one has anything new to offer me. We have done everything we can do on our end: the home studies, the interviews. We have paid the dossier fees, been fingerprinted, had everything, our entire lives it seems, notarized. There is nothing left to do, they say, except to wait.
“When can I see her?” I ask them. I was told that up to six weeks prior to the finalization, I would be able to visit her in the orphanage. That if we “establish rapport” she can come home with us on a 1-9 visa. I am waiting for the call that tells me it is time.
After breakfast, I wander the streets of Zona 10, careful to stay within the safety of this neighborhood. I carry the photos that we have received once a month for the last five months. I study them, looking for clues. Already, she is changing. Growing. I worry that the clothes I have brought her (those tiny dresses and leggings I worried over in store after store) will be too small. In the marketplace, I buy more clothes, starched white cotton dresses with colorful, embroidered flowers.
My hotel is ten blocks away from the orphanage, but I take a different route. The one time I walked by, I heard the infants crying and I fell instantly ill. I had to slip into a little café. “Baño?” I pleaded, and a group of old men at the bar snickered as I rushed past them to the filthy bathroom where my bowels emptied in a watery rush. I couldn’t get out of bed for three days, and my fevered dreams were all accompanied by the soundtrack of wailing babies.
And then the call comes.
“Ms. Waters?”
“Sí?”
“You come visit Esperanza today. Ten o’clock.”
I search through the pile of trinkets I have bought as I wandered the streets. The colorful tiny bracelets, the little dolls and tiny shoes. I search frantically through the bags in the closet. Finally, I find the toy dog, the impossibly soft and tiny animal I bought after three hours at FAO Schwarz one blustery afternoon last winter.
I study the most recent photo. Will I know her?
At 9:59, I push the buzzer as the church bell across the street rings out the hour.
A tiny woman opens the door and ushers me in.
I follow her soundlessly through the dark corridors. It is remarkably quiet here, and I wonder if I only imagined the keening.
We come to a door that opens to a small, enclosed courtyard, and I see her.
She is sitting on the ground, legs splayed out in front of her. She is playing with one of those plastic cones with the stackable color rings. I had one as a child. Such a strangely American thing. The yellow one encircles her small wrist, and she is chewing on the red one. I clutch the stuffed dog tightly.
I look to the woman to confirm that this is her, though it is only a formality. It is her. This is Esperanza.
When she sees me, I feel my entire body hollow out as though making room for her. And when she holds her arms out to me, waiting for me to lift her up, I feel like I might faint.
Her legs wrap tightly around my waist, and I bury my nose in her thick, dark hair. The tears falling from my eyes make her hair wet. She buries her face in my chest, and I can feel her heart beating through her delicate rib cage. Esperanza. My daughter.
But this is where the dream defies the truth. Denies the truth.
In the dream, I walk with her, back through that dark corridor, her body clinging to mine. I give her the tiny stuffed dog and she clutches it. In the dream I sing the lullaby I have memorized: “A la roro niño, a lo roro ya, duérmete mi niño, duérmete mi amor.” Lullaby baby, lullaby now, sleep my baby, sleep my love. And I walk with her out that heavy door into the blinding sunlight of the afternoon. And together we stare up into the canopy made by the jacarandas, into a purple sky.
Mama, she whispers in the dream. Bella mama.
On Saturday morning, I wake long before Jake does, which is rare. He is usually the first to rise; his alarm goes off at least an hour before I finally pull myself out of bed. But here, in these woods, I wake with the dawn that spills softly through the pale curtains. I feel energized. Purposeful.
I climb out of bed quietly, careful not to wake him. If he does wake up, he feigns sleep, and I am grateful not to have to make conversation. I pull on a sweater and slip on my sneakers and make my way up the pathway to the camp, the wet grass tickling my ankles. The birdsong is cacophonous, louder than the morning sounds of the city even. There’s an odd peace in New York on a Saturday morning. A hush and lull that has always seemed suspect to me. Like the whole city is keeping a secret.
Instead of going to the camp, I make my way quietly across the long expanse of green lawn toward the lake. The sun has yet to burn through the hazy mist, and it encloses me as I make my way down the dock that wasn’t here when Effie and I were kids. I walk all the way out to the edge, and it could be the edge of the universe.
But still, through the haze and fog, I hear voices, a humming motor. And as the fog slips and shifts across the water, I can see the boat. It says STATE POLICE on the side, and there are two men in vests on the boat. Swimming next to them are three divers, their backs laden with oxygen tanks. They bob in the water like bath toys.
Please don’t find anything, I say. I pray.
I feel the dock shifting underneath me, and turn around as I hear heavy footsteps. It’s Devin, holding two steaming mugs of coffee.
“Hey,” I say, smiling and accepting the mug he holds out to me.
“Want some company?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say, and scoot over to make room for him next to me.
He lowers himself down and peers out at the boat, at the divers. His sister drowned in this lake twenty years ago. She’d come here for the summer as part of the Fresh Air program. This must be excruciating for him to watch.
“How old was she?” I ask. “Keisha?”
“Eleven,” he says, smiling sadly. “Just a little older than Plum is now.”
Silently we watch together as the boat moves slowly across the water. Listen to the muted sounds of the radios. An egret perches on a rock at the shore, observing.
“Effie says you want to stay here,” he says. “If they don’t find her by tomorrow.”
I nod.
“I’d be happy to drive Zu-Zu down with Jake,” he says. “That way you can still have your car here. He won’t need it in the city, right?”
I turn to him, my eyes filling with tears. I don’t know what Effie has told him.
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“Absolutely. It’s a good opportunity to do some face time with the folks at Gagosian anyway. See my family too.
It’s been a while since I’ve been in the city. And as much as Zu-Zu insists otherwise, I have a feeling she’ll be happy to have me there.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“Of course.”
We sit together until the coffee is gone, and the boat continues its slow trawl, its agonizing, though thankfully futile, crawl.
“I’m heading down to Hudson’s in about an hour. Do you want to come with me? I think we’re going to get a lot more people searching now that the weekend’s here,” Devin says, standing up. The entire dock rocks with his movement.
“Yes,” I say. “I want to come today too.”
At Hudson’s Devin organizes the crowd of volunteers into groups of five, distributes vests, and repeats the instructions. I am grouped with two men and two women. One of the women looks really familiar to me, but I can’t place my finger on why. I rack my brain trying to think where I’ve seen her before. The Miss Quimby Diner? The bank in town?
“Tess?” she says softly. “Tess Mahoney?”
My maiden name.
I study her face again. So strangely familiar.
“It’s Rose,” she says. “Rose Lund. Mrs. Lund?”
Oh my God. She’s my sixth-grade English teacher. Mrs. Lund. I adored her. She used to give me books, picking out ones she thought I would like.
“Oh my God,” I say. “Wow.” I embrace her, transformed into an eleven-year-old girl again. I used to stay in from recess, and we’d talk about books together. When I was eleven I loved her more than almost anyone else. And now, hugging her, I am transported. I am a child again.
“I heard on the news that you were the one who found her,” she says. “You here visiting Effie?”
I nod. Effie and I had been in the same class together.
“I can’t tell you how happy it makes me what each of you girls have done. Effie and all the good work she does at the library. And you, you fancy editor in New York.”