by T. Greenwood
“Not until I find her.”
When your taxi pulls up I watch you from the balcony. I peer down at the street as you pay the driver and gather your small suitcase from the trunk.You look up, as if you sense me watching you, and I wave. But I know that all you see above you is the purple canopy of jacaranda blossoms.
After nearly six weeks, we are like strangers. I have forgotten the details of your face. As we lie in the bed, and you fall asleep, I trace my finger along the scar that runs from your nose to your lip. You have shaved, and the scar is exposed, the raised welt and sleep making you somehow vulnerable.
We sleep through the morning, and wake in the midst of making love, our bodies reaching for each other, clinging to the familiarity of each other’s flesh. Above us, the ceiling fan rocks as it stirs the thick, hot air. I think of other hotels, other countries, other cities. How is it that I love you more when we are away from home? When the world around us is unfamiliar? Something about traveling has always awoken me, made me hungrier for you. I have always felt closer to you the farther away we are from everyone else. But there is something else this time. Something beyond the strange smells and sounds, this thick fragrant air. Something beyond the normal sense of being together, alone, allied, among strangers. There is an urgency to this. Because soon, we will not be alone again. I think I am terrified of what we are about to become.
For six days, we live at this precipice. Waiting.
I am raw, tender, bruised by the time the call comes. My lips are swollen, and it stings when I pee. I order cranberry juice in the cafe, blushing when the waitress gives me a knowing glance. She thinks we are newlyweds, that we are just beginning this life together. And I think that she is both wrong and right.
“You must come right away,” our lawyer says.
We are slick with sweat, my skin tight with dried saliva, my cheeks stinging from the scruff of your unshaven cheeks. The sheets are stiff, filthy. I worry I have forgotten to eat as I stand up and see stars, the world vignetting.
“She says we need to come right away.”
You have not met Esperanza yet. You have not held her in your arms, smelled the tangerine scent of her skin. You do not know the sound of her raspy voice or the way her heartbeat feels under the pads of your fingers. She is still only a dream, a promise, a wish.
“This is real?” you say.
I nod and tears run hot down my cheeks.
On Wednesday morning, I call Ryan’s office three times before I finally get through. I had asked him if I could go with him to talk to Andrews, to show him the plate number, the barrette, but he insisted that the information would be better coming from him.
When he finally answers the phone, he sounds like he’s been running. His voice is muffled.
“I’m sorry. Did I get you at a bad time?” I ask.
“No, no . . . I rode my bike to work. Hold on, I just need to dry off.” I hear rustling sounds. Imagine him wiping sweat off his forehead.
“You can call me back,” I offer. “But call on the landline number I gave you. I’m at the lake.”
“No,” he says. “It’s fine. I was just going to call you.”
I grab a bagel from the cupboard and search the drawer for a serrated knife. There is one bagel left from the ones we brought Zu-Zu, and I forgot to get them pre-sliced.
“So how did it go?” I ask. “With the police?”
“It went okay. I have a buddy at the PD. I asked him to run the plate number. I also asked him to look into this Sharp guy, told him that he appears to be a registered sex offender.”
“He is a registered sex offender,” I say. “Did you give him the barrette?”
I had been reluctant to leave it with him. It seemed like the only true thing I had connecting me to her. Relinquishing it felt dangerous.
“No,” he says. “Not yet.”
“But that proves she was there. It’s hers,” I say.
“I think it would be best if we keep that information to ourselves. For now anyway.”
I can’t find a serrated knife, so I grab a butcher knife and start to cut the bagel. It has gotten stale, hard in the last six days.
“Listen,” he says. His breath is even now. Calm. “We need to let them think they’re the ones building this case. I work with cops a lot. The last thing they want is to feel like some civilian is overriding them, doing their job. . . .”
“Well, if they actually did their job, then maybe I wouldn’t have to,” I say. And then the knife slips, cutting into the thin skin between my thumb and index finger. I wince and grab at a paper towel from the rack. It is soaked with blood within seconds.
“Tess, I know. I’m on your side. But just trust me on this. Let Andrews feel like he’s the one putting these pieces together. Do you want to find her, or do you want to be the hero?”
My throat swells. I can feel my heart beating in the wound in my hand.
“I want to find her. I want them to find her.”
“Then trust me,” he says. “Lay low. Be patient.”
I nod. He believes me.
“You should probably get stitches,” Effie says, cradling my hand in hers. The slice is clean, deep. It won’t stop bleeding.
I shake my head. “I’ll be fine. I’ll just get some of that liquid Band-Aid stuff,” I say.
“Can I see, can I see?” Plum asks. She is the child of the iron stomach, the nerves of steel. I have watched her dissect bugs, pull a splinter out of her own heel. She recently had to have two adult teeth removed to make space, and Effie said she did it with Novocain alone. I am humbled by her fortitude, by her grit.
Plum bends over and examines my hand, assessing the damage.
“I had worse,” she says, finally, with a shrug. “Remember when I rode my bike into that barbed wire fence?” she asks Effie, as if it’s possible to forget something like that.
“Look,” she says, turning her shoulder to me. There is a raised pink welt like a seam in her skin.
“It’s fine,” I say, when Effie shakes her head again. “I’ll just catch a ride with you into town when you go to the library. You can drop me off at the Rite Aid. I’d like to go with you on your route today too, if that’s okay.”
“Yeah?” she says.
“I want to see if that dog is still at Lisa’s house.”
“Actually, Lisa’s not on my Wednesday route. I’m not scheduled to go back there until Friday,” she says. “Besides, what good will that do?”
I shrug. I don’t know how to tell her how restless I am. Now that Ryan has forbidden me from doing any more investigating on my own, now that the information I have managed to gather is out of my hands, I don’t feel relief, but powerlessness. It’s the same feeling I get the moment I buckle myself into a seat on an airplane.
Flying never used to scare me. I never thought much about it at all. I used to travel quite a bit for work, and Jake and I always prided ourselves on being adventurous travelers. In just one year, we went to Cambodia, Greece, and Brazil. But something happened after Guatemala. I could no longer get onto a plane without feeling a flush of terror and regret. Relinquishing control, trusting, had brought me nothing but heartache.
Yesterday, when I handed everything over to Ryan, I had felt the same way. I’d even thought, for a moment, that I would just leave his office and march down the street to the police station myself. But somehow, he’d managed to convince me that there was too much at stake. That if I refused to surrender this, if I refused to trust him, then it would all be for naught. And that it might ruin any remaining chance we had of the search being resumed.
I wander around Rite Aid searching for the first aid aisle. It is too bright in here, too cold. The Muzak on the overhead speakers plays some pop song from when Effie and I were in high school, and I get that sensation again that I am being somehow transported to a place where things are both recognizable but, at the same time, twisted. I could be in the cold, brightly lit bathroom at the high school, the tinny sound of the music
coming from the school dance in the cafeteria. I could be slumped over in the bathroom stall, thinking I might never come out again. The pulsing of my heart in my ears is the same. Or I could be in the small bar where I’d stumbled that afternoon eight years ago, the one with the tiled floor and the barstools painted in candy colors. Music coming from a transistor radio on the countertop. The ceiling fan overhead whirring uselessly, endlessly. All of it dizzying. All of it unbearable.
I need to leave the store, but I have gotten myself turned around in this labyrinth of sundries and don’t remember which way the exit is. I start to feel queasy as I try to retrace my steps. And then when I turn the corner, I see a woman pushing a cart.
She’s an older woman, maybe in her sixties, and she is hunched over the little basket where you keep your purse. I can see that there is a baby in the cart, and she is cooing to it gently. But as I get closer, I can see that it’s not a baby at all. It’s a doll. Just a filthy, rubber baby doll.
“Mama’s just got to pick up a few things, sweetheart,” the woman says. And I feel that swooning feeling again. I dodge her cart and weave down the aisle away from her. I can’t seem to walk straight; I feel almost drunk.
And then I am overwhelmed with a need to sit down. But where? I follow the overhead signs to the pharmacy and see the blood pressure machine. I sit down in its plastic seat, which cradles me in an unyielding embrace.
“Ma’am,” someone, a girl in a blue apron, says. “Are you okay?”
I focus on her voice, which sounds like it is at the end of a tunnel.
I speak, try to pretend that this isn’t happening again. My own voice sounds like it is under water. “I’m looking for liquid Band-Aids?” I say.
“Um, maybe you should go to a doctor?” the girl says.
I don’t understand at first, and then look down at my bandaged hand and see that it is soaked with blood. It is startling. Shocking. No wonder I was feeling faint. But that isn’t the reason, not the real reason. Still, I nod.
Effie drives me to the urgent care clinic, and by the time we get there, the light-headedness has turned to nausea. She has me hold my hand above my heart to keep it from bleeding so badly, but the new bandage we put on in the parking lot of the Rite Aid is already completely soaked.
The nurse practitioner on duty takes one look at my hand and scolds me.
“And why exactly didn’t you come straight to us?” she asks.
Her breath smells of coffee. That and the antiseptic smell of the clinic do not help the feeling that I am on the verge of vomiting. I try not to look at my hand as she sews it up. When she is finished, she gives me a tube of antibiotic cream and tells me how to care for it.
“Now I’m going to need you to come back in to get these removed in about a week. And if you see anything unusual, redness, swelling, discharge, or if you start to run a fever, I need you to call us right away. You think you can do that?”
I nod obediently. Chastised.
Effie and Plum are sitting in the waiting room when I come out, sheepish and embarrassed, a fresh bandage covering my wound.
“Can I see the stitches?” Plum says.
I ride in the bookmobile with Effie as she drives her Wednesday route. This route takes us deeper into the woods this time, beyond the picturesque Lake Gormlaith into the dark forest near the pond whose bottom is made of sawdust. We made the mistake of swimming there once when we were kids. Both of us got ear infections and were sneezing sawdust for weeks.
“Do you still go to the swimming hole?” I ask.
There is a beautiful spot not too far from here where Effie and I used to go to swim. It was so private, so remote, we didn’t even bother with clothes. And best of all, there were long flat slabs of rock that sucked up the warmth of the sun. We’d lie on those rocks for entire days sharing secrets.
The last time we went there together was when I came to visit her when she came home after three years in Seattle. It was the summer after her ex-boyfriend, Max, overdosed. The summer she met Devin.
“God, I haven’t been there in years,” she says.
“We should go,” I say. “When you finish your route.”
“That would be nice.”
“What’s a swimming hole?” Plum asks. She sounds leery.
I smile at her. “Do you believe in fairies?” I ask.
She scrunches up her nose. “Maddy says they’re not real.”
“But what do you think?” I ask.
I think of Star, the fairy who left them gumdrops. How she always seemed to visit when I did. I kept every letter Zu-Zu and Plum ever wrote to Star. Someday I plan to make a little book for them of all those notes.
She shrugs.
“Well, I know for a fact that there are fairy houses at the swimming hole. Your mom and I used to find them all the time.”
Her eyes widen, though I know she’s trying to remain pragmatic about this. This is ten: when there is still the remote possibility of fairies.
“Can we go, Mama?” Plum asks, and Effie turns to her and smiles.
“Sure,” she says. “I’ve got three more stops. We can go after that.”
Traversing a creek is a narrow wooden bridge, which is barely wide enough for a small car, never mind the bookmobile, so we park and go the rest of the way on foot.
It is hot today, and I am grateful for the shade as we duck into the woods. The path here is not as well-worn as when Effie and I used to come here, and I wonder for a minute if we’re in the right place.
Effie leads, Plum trails behind, and I follow.
“Is that it?” Plum asks, pointing down toward the enclosed body of water, circled by a wall of rock. There is a small waterfall that feeds it.
“That’s it,” Effie says.
We all scramble through the thick foliage, enormous ferns tickling our arms and legs.
We get to the water and Plum says sadly, “I don’t have my swimsuit.”
“That’s the best thing about this place,” Effie offers. “You don’t need a suit. It’s private.”
Plum looks skeptical. When she was a baby, she never wore clothes. She was a notorious nudist. It wasn’t until she was about six or seven that she suddenly got modest. I remember Effie saying how sad it made her, how it signaled the end of something for her when Plum felt compelled to cover up.
“You can swim in your panties,” she says. “Here. I’ll do it too.”
Plum looks back in the direction we came from.
“We’re all alone,” I nod, reassuring her that no one has followed us here.
She cautiously peels off her T-shirt and slips out of her shorts. She’s ten, but she still has the wonderful round belly of a little girl, a belly made for making raspberries, ticklish, evoking the best belly laughs in the whole world.
Effie strips down to her bra and panties too and reaches for Plum’s hand. Together they slip into the glistening water.
“Can you come in?” Plum asks.
I hold up my bandaged hand and shake my head. “I’m going to look for fairy houses,” I say. “I’ll holler if I find one.”
I walk around the perimeter of the pool, pretending to search under the brush and leaves. I study the trunks of trees, searching for evidence. And I think of how Effie and I used to do the same, even after we were too old to believe. Here, in this magical place, what we knew to be true didn’t seem to matter. It was what we believed, what we dreamed, what we wanted that counted.
I remember being Plum’s age, and searching just like this. I remember feeling a longing and yearning so deep it seemed like I could drown in it. I remember the urgency, like holding on to my childhood depended on it. That if we couldn’t find some sort of proof fairies still existed, then we would lose something. That everything in the world hinged on this. I remember wishing, and studying the architecture of twigs, the placement of pebbles. Dreaming mossy roofs and knothole windows. And how Effie shared this same need. We weren’t ready to be grown yet. And here was the last place where we
were allowed to believe in magic.
I listen to the musical sound of Plum’s laughter, the sound of her splashing in the water, and that same sense of urgency returns. I need to give her this. I’m not ready for her to stop believing yet. And so while she plays, I gather sticks and stones, soft patches of moss. I quickly assemble a primitive structure. In my pocket, I find a string, out of which I fashion a tiny swing for the fairy’s front yard. I make a walkway of stones and a roof of dried leaves.
I come out of the woods just as Effie and Plum are climbing out of the water. Plum’s arms are crossed and she’s shivering, her teeth chattering.
“Lie down here,” Effie says, motioning to a long flat rock, which is bathed in sunlight. Plum obeys, and Effie lies down next to her.
I watch them lying together, and my heart swells and aches. I watch their fingers intertwine, the woven pattern of Plum’s brown skin and Effie’s paler flesh. Effie turns her head and kisses Plum on the temple. I wait until Plum sits up, too hot now in the sun, her skin already dry.
“I found something!” I say.
“A fairy house?” Plum says, scrambling to her feet.
I wink at Effie.
“Come see,” I say, and Plum scurries over to me.
“Where, where?” she asks, and I lead her by the hand to the place where the fairies live.
She marvels at the tiny swing, the little chairs I made from a couple of toadstools.
“Can we leave them a note?” she asks.
I reach into my pocket. “Shoot,” I say. “I don’t have any paper.”
She frowns. “How will they know we were here?” she asks.
“Oh, wait,” I say, smiling as I discover the two little Reese’s Cups I had intended to give the girls the other night. I pull them out of my pocket and hand them to her.
She gingerly sets them in front of the house.
“Can we come back tomorrow and see if they got them?” she asks.