by Amy Gentry
“We are whole in every aspect of our lives. Do you want a new job? You’re already doing it. A spouse? You’re already married, but neither of you know it yet. Relief from a debt? It has been paid, now and forever. A release from pain? There is no pain except in your mind.”
A second weeper has begun, this one gasping for air in between sobs. Every sob that rings out is immediately encircled and washed away in the mumbling tide, so that the next one feels entirely new, as if it’s from a different planet.
“Rejoice! What was lost has been found. It was never lost. It was you who were lost. The son who was dead is now living again; he who was lost is found. But he was never truly dead; he was never really lost.”
I can’t take much more of this. I snap my eyes open. Nobody notices. Then I spot someone across the circle from me. An elderly woman sitting in a wheelchair, wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt.
I yank my hands away and grab blindly for the door, my sweaty fingers slipping on the handle as I heave it open and run, run, back across the sea-green carpet, where my tracks have already been vacuumed away.
Back in my office, I dial the number and the phone rings and rings, but Alex Mercado isn’t picking up, so I’ll have to find what I’m looking for on my own. I type the damning words into the search engine and wait for the most recent news story to come up: BOMB SHELTER REMAINS BELONG TO 13-YEAR-OLD GIRL, EXPERTS SAY.
The lead photo shows a one-story brick bungalow in River Oaks, an old central neighborhood shaded by massive trees and, these days, condos crowded onto too-small plots. The house in the photo was being leveled to make way for one more condo when bulldozers uncovered extra pipelines going to a bomb shelter buried in ten feet of concrete in the backyard. Another photo shows twisted pipes leading to a broken concrete shell. There are no pictures of what they found inside. I keep digging: The house was seized in 2008 from the owner, nursing-home resident Nadine Reynolds, for delinquent property-tax payments. Sold at auction to an out-of-town investor who rented it for years without crossing the threshold, it changed hands several times before being picked up in 2015 by the most recent developer, who decided it would make more money as condos.
But it’s the photo that’s important, not the house. I wind up on the Texas DPS website, where there’s a statewide database of missing persons, over three hundred listings. So many missing; so many unidentified bodies, each one corresponding to a lost daughter or husband or wife or son, like a massive jigsaw puzzle with pieces scattered all over the globe.
I click through the most recent Harris County listings and see the thumbnails of male faces with eyes closed, oddly dignified and brutally sad. Then a head-shaped outline with a question mark. The death date is indeterminate, 2008 or 2009, the approximate time all of our lives fell apart. I hold my breath and click, and the photo that has been haunting me pops up, the horrifying details cropped in order to focus on a single rotted scrap of faded black cloth shaped like two circles connected by a partially eroded isthmus of faded black.
I can see why I didn’t recognize it at first. After all, it’s been eaten by the air in the bomb shelter for eight years. No one could have recognized it right away, not even someone who’s been carrying around the memory of her daughter’s nightshirt for eight years. A nightshirt now reduced to a pair of Mickey Mouse ears.
I just want the body, I once said in the support group, before I left forever. I just want something to bury. The chorus of police voices and therapist voices and media voices chanting in tandem—The first three hours, the first three days—made it hard to conceive of a world in which my daughter was living. Now I feel a strange numbness settle over me at the thought that she hasn’t been. That she isn’t. I didn’t recognize it right away, because I didn’t want to. I didn’t want Mercado to be right about Julie being dead. I didn’t want him to be right about anything that had to do with my daughter. I wanted to be the one who knew her better than anyone.
My cell phone is ringing; it’s Alex, calling me back. I hit the green icon to pick up, ready to make a full confession. But I never get a chance.
“I have some bad news,” Alex says.
Petes
is what she called them, even the ones who bought the pills and weed she’d stolen from the shopping cart under the bridge without even asking her to suck their dicks or let them shove them inside her. She’d learned to spit in her hand and wrap it around fast, so there was a chance they’d forget about putting it inside her if she moved quick enough. And if they remembered, it’d go a little easier, be over a little faster.
By the time she got to San Francisco, she’d lost track of the men who got her there, but at least she remembered their names. Their names were Pete. Two Petes in the bus station. A Pete in the bathroom of a Diamond Shamrock gas station. One Pete on the bus she’d tried to fight off with the knife, but then she’d let it go and took his wallet instead. He sat next to her the whole way to Sacramento with his dirty fingers interlaced with hers, like they were girlfriend and boyfriend. She turned fourteen between Petes, but she wasn’t sure when exactly the day passed, and anyway, to Petes she was sixteen, to police, eighteen. She had the birth year for eighteen memorized, and when asked to move along—How old are you, young lady, aren’t you supposed to be home at this hour? Oh, really, what’s your birthday?—she gave random dates from that year, once accidentally saying that day’s date without realizing it. That policeman said, “Happy birthday,” and made a face.
The last Pete turned out to be a cop. And when she got into his car and he asked for her date of birth, she’d rattled one off and he just looked at her and shook his head. “You sure you’re eighteen?” he said. “You know you could be charged as an adult.”
He hit something and a siren went on, and she looked and saw that the doors didn’t have locks on the inside, and her door didn’t even have a handle.
“January eleventh, 1989,” she said immediately. It wasn’t the right day or the right year, but it put her two years closer to her real age.
“That’s more like it. We’re going to get you a social worker and get a case opened up on you before you get into a situation you can’t get out of.”
I’ve been in one, she thought. I got out.
“I know you think you’re tough and all,” he said, giving her a quick sidelong glance. “But you were about to get picked up by somebody who would have hurt you pretty bad. Juárez owns this block. That was one of his boys in the beater, just before I pulled up.”
The rust-blotched Honda had slowed and the driver had rolled down its window, but then he rolled it up and sped away before she could step off the curb.
“They took off when they saw me. They know I’m a plainclothes cop,” he said. “It’s a good thing, too, because you were about to get pounded to within an inch of your life. Then you’d get dumped somewhere conveniently near Juárez’s place—that’s not his real name, by the way, he just wants everyone to think he was a big shot in Mexico—and he’d talk you into a kind of a deal, like you’d crash at his place and work for him, and he’d make sure nobody hassled you out on the street, make sure nobody ever came after you again. And a week later you’d see the one who raped and beat you sitting in your living room eating a Pop-Tart on your sofa and you’d figure it out, but it would be too late.”
She sat silently during this lecture. Officer Pete, as she had begun to think of him, had a weariness to his voice and a tic of flicking his nose. He did it regularly, a little more toward the end of the speech, so quickly his other hand didn’t even whiten on the steering wheel.
He cleared his throat. “So, anyway, you’re welcome,” he muttered. “Now we’re going to meet the nice social-worker lady who’s going to open a case file on you and get you in a foster home.”
She started upright. “I don’t need to be in a home. I’m eighteen.”
“So you said the first time. What’s your birthday again?” He laughed. “I bet you can’t remember either one of them.”
“
I don’t need to be in a home.”
“I don’t want you on the streets getting knifed by some pimp. You haven’t been on your own very long, have you?”
She considered the question. Was John David on her own? She didn’t know, but she shook her head anyway.
“I thought so. You’ve been in town for less than a week?”
Two days.
“You don’t love this work you’re doing, do you? It’s not your passion?”
She shook her head again.
“Okay. So you need a place to stay for free. At the very least, you’ll go to a group home for a while.”
A group home. She’d heard of them. If she didn’t know any details, it was only because kids on the street who said “I just ran away from group” weren’t saying it to share their life stories. They were saying it to scare the shit out of you.
He saw the expression on her face. “Relax, I’m not driving you straight there,” he said. “You’ll talk to Wanda, and Wanda will figure out what to do with you. If you’re so scared of group, tell her you want emergency placement and then you want to be adopted by a nice family that doesn’t beat you or whatever yours did.” He flicked his nose again and stole a glance at her that he probably thought was surreptitious. “I’m sorry about whatever it was. I guess it was pretty bad. Still, this is a hell of a dangerous way to survive. You dead set against going home?”
She thought about home for a long moment. It seemed less real than what she had done, not just with the Petes to survive, but the other time. She remembered a wicked little blade and scrambling out of a hole on hands and knees slippery with blood. She thought of who was waiting for her at the hole’s mouth. Whose blood was drying on the bunker floor.
“It wasn’t—” she said, and tried again: “I just needed to get—”
“To San Francisco. I know.” He sighed deeply, and she hated him with every fiber of her being, the stupid Pete. “You didn’t invent it,” he said.
She knew she didn’t. Petes did. Janiece did. John David did.
12
Tom is finishing off some reheated food at the kitchen table when I get home. There’s no sign of Julie.
“Where’s the money,” I say. The words are thick and wavy, as if seen through a streaky window.
He puts his fork down. “Anna,” he says, already desperate enough that I know I’m right.
“Where is the money in the Julie Fund,” I clarify, “and are you fucking Alma?”
“No.”
“Liar.” I can’t believe it even occurs to me to feel anger at this. I have been lying, Julie has been lying. Jane, too, about school if nothing else. Tom, though—I honestly didn’t know there was a part of me left that still needed him to be truthful, to be the good one, but there was. I wanted to have all the bad feelings to myself, cope with Julie’s death—Yes, I tell myself, her death—in the worst, most self-destructive way possible. And he let me think I was doing just that. This is the ultimate betrayal, then. Not that he was the liar, the cheater, this whole time but that he let me think I was.
“Anna, listen,” he says. “You were drinking so much. And you wouldn’t talk to me, you wouldn’t listen. I was so alone. You wouldn’t even come to the support group with me.”
I want to yell that I stopped going to the group because it was killing me. The hope, yes, but also the sight of other people’s pain, the thought of other people’s daughters. Only my pain mattered.
“Do not put this on me,” I start.
“You left, and I needed someone. I didn’t love Julie any less than you did. I didn’t miss her any less than you did.”
“You’re the one who managed the fund,” I say. “You’re the one who kept up the message board, distributed the flyers. You arranged the damn billboards. You talked to the trustees. And you put Alma in charge of the money.”
“Yes,” he says.
“Where’s the money, Tom?”
“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.”
“Like what? You stole Julie’s money and gave it to your whore!”
“Anna!”
“Deny that you gave it to Alma Ruiz,” I say, spitting out the name.
He puts his head in his hands. “I gave it to Alma. Yes. Some lowlifes working for her ex-husband came forward with a ransom request—maybe the ex’s girlfriend ditched him and he figured out raising a kid alone isn’t such a cakewalk, I don’t know. I made her the admin so she could sign off on my emptying the account, and I gave it to her for ransom money, and she got her daughter back.”
“Now deny that you slept with her.”
There is a long pause.
“Deny it. Go ahead. I want to hear you.”
“Once,” he says, miserable. “After that—we went our separate ways.”
“I guess you’d served your purpose.”
He stands up, suddenly angry. “You don’t get to say that.”
“I think I get to say whatever I want right now,” I say, but he’s talking over me.
“You think you’re telling me something I don’t know? Yeah, maybe it was about the money, and maybe I was so damn lonely and messed up—anyway, we had it and she didn’t. I don’t blame her, I would have done the same in a heartbeat to get Julie back. If I thought fifty thousand dollars was all it took, I’d have slept with anyone for it. I’d have killed for it.” He’s trembling. “You would have too.”
I can’t think. I can’t let myself. “What if we had needed it for a ransom for Julie?”
“But we didn’t.” He swallows, looks down, then back up at me. “You want me to admit it? I thought she was dead, Anna. It was easier to believe that than to hope.” This breaks him. He bows his head, starts to shudder, dry-eyed, crying without tears. It is gruesome. “Can you forgive me?”
Right here is where I’m supposed to go to him, put my arms around his neck and let him hug my waist, and start crying as I confess that I, too, believed the worst. And follow that with the horrible truth: that I was right, and therefore he was right too. Right to fuck Alma, right to save Alma’s kid instead of holding out hope for our own. That by the time he was giving the money away, Julie was dead. Dead, dead, dead.
But I can’t even think about doing any of that because I hate him for not believing in Julie’s return. All these years, I doubted it only because I thought he believed. The thought of us side by side, each locked in our private mausoleums, mourning Julie alone, year after year, is depressing and enraging. All these years I’ve been jealous of his faith. If I’d known he was doubting, I could have been the one to hold out hope. It could have been me going to those meetings, me keeping the search alive for as long as the money held out. It could have been me.
“Anna, please,” he says, looking up.
I walk out of the kitchen without saying a word. I’ve got to get to the meeting I set up with Alex after he told me about the Julie Fund, but first I need to find something in my nightstand. The IHOP on I-10 is too close to the house, but I want this over with fast, before I change my mind.
The manila envelope has grown fatter, as if it has been eating steadily since the last time I saw it. It no longer closes but gapes open on the sticky table between us, the contents partially obscured by the dog-eared flap. I wonder what Mercado has collected in that envelope about Tom and me, about Alma Ruiz, about Gretchen Farber. My life, in layer upon layer of sedimentary lies, beneath which, at the very bottom, I can see a glossy corner of the truth: the photograph. I hold the flap to the table with one thumb and pry the picture out.
I hold it in my hands and force myself not to look away. The original is so much bigger than the thumbnail, and so much more horrible. Bones bleached a dirty yellow by the flash, skull slumped to one side, a crescent of reflected light cradled in each blank eye pit. Scraps of black clinging to the rib cage in that shape I now recognize as an awful parody of a child’s cartoon.
I just want the body.
I try to paint my daughter’s face over the skull’s awfu
l blankness. I build up the soft cheeks, fill in the eye pits, give her blue eyes and white-blond hair that spills over the ground. But it is too much, and instead I find myself thinking of Julie, of not-Julie, of the woman living in my house who says she is my daughter—for money, for kicks, for some other reason too awful to imagine. Her face intrudes even on this moment. The photograph goes blurry but I keep staring, the tears rolling down my face.
“I’m so sorry, Anna,” Alex says softly, and he puts his hand on my forearm, where the muscles that keep my fingers pressed around the photo are jumping. He leaves it there for a long moment, then pulls back.
I set her down on the table as gently as I would lay a baby down in a crib.
“You’re sure, now,” says Alex, voice still low but with the piercing, restless quality already coming back. “Why?”
I reach into my purse, pull out the photograph, put it on the table, and turn both photos toward Alex.
He immediately sucks in his breath. “The nightshirt,” he says. “I don’t know why I didn’t—”
“I had to see them together to be sure.” The photo is from Christmas morning nine months before it happened. She’s sitting up on her knees in front of the last Christmas tree we ever had, holding her new diary in one hand and the too-large box we’d purposely wrapped it in to throw her off the trail in the other, smiling with the goofy, groggy happiness of a child still young enough to care about Christmas.
“Why don’t the police have this?” Alex mutters, still staring.
“They asked for recent pictures,” I explain. “I just didn’t think to—I mean, look at her. She’s still a little girl.” But it was only nine months between when the picture was taken and when Julie disappeared. How could she have changed so much in nine months? It’s the smile, of course. This is the last picture of Julie smiling the way kids do, with her mouth all the way open, showing her teeth. Shortly after that, she became a close-lipped teenager. And then she was gone.