The Disappeared Girl

by Martin J. Smith

  When his daughter finally arrived at the kitchen door, Christensen could see she’d been crying.

  “You’re up?” she said.

  He poured her a cup without asking. “Don’t worry, it’s decaf.”

  She tried to smile and patted her belly. “But were the beans handpicked by virgins?”

  “You’re mocking me, aren’t you?”

  “Only the best for the lima bean.”

  “Absolutely,” he said, and went to the refrigerator. “I have some cream here from a cow raised in a giant plastic bubble and fed nothing but rose petals. Let me get it for you.”

  “Don’t be annoying.”

  Christensen poured the cream, and she stirred it in. She stared hard into her cup as the black coffee became a smooth tan. He poured himself a mug and sweetened it with sugar. Neither spoke. Did she need a father now, or a therapist? He was willing—and qualified—to play either role, but he kept his mouth shut. Melissa would talk when she was ready. He’d just follow her lead.

  “Have you told me everything?” she said at last.

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “About my adoption. Have you told me everything?”

  He sipped the hot coffee. “Pretty much.”

  “That’s definitely a qualified answer.”

  Christensen nodded. He had not told her what he’d learned in the past few days—answers to questions he’d never before asked, answers that raised a lot more questions.

  “What’s going on?” Melissa said.

  Where to start? “I’m pretty sure your water dreams are memories, not dreams.”

  His daughter closed her eyes but said nothing, waiting.

  “There was an airplane crash,” he said. “It ran out of gas and ditched in the river right about the time Uncle Michael brought you into the United States.”

  “The one I saw on the news,” she said, eyes still closed. “The plane they just found.”

  “Yes.”

  “Their finding it—is that why I’m remembering this stuff now? Did that trigger it?”

  “Hard to say. The timing’s right.”

  She opened her eyes. “You’re not just guessing, though, are you?”

  Christensen shook his head and tried not to look at the bandage on her wrist. “After Sunday, I started asking questions. A lot of the pieces fit. Best I can figure, you were on that plane when it went down.”

  “Uncle Michael, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he never told you?”

  Christensen spooned more sugar into his coffee and stirred it in. “Not until this week.”

  “Why not? Did he say?”

  Now they were at the heart of it. “How much do you know about Uncle Michael’s work back then, before he was in radio?”

  Melissa pulled a knee to her chest and rested her chin on it. “Wasn’t he an ambassador or something?”

  “State Department. Career diplomat. He’d been posted all over the world. At the time your mom and I were trying to adopt—late 1970s, early 1980s—he was working in the US embassy in Buenos Aires. He’d been there about four years.”

  “So he had a lot of connections?”

  “Aunt Carole knew how frustrated we were. Domestic adoption—any adoption, really—is a marathon emotionally, financially, on every level. Totally exhausting. Two years into it, we were getting nowhere. So when Carole said Uncle Michael offered to help, we were thrilled.”

  Christensen’s own memories swirled back: the slow realization that something, someone, was missing from their lives; the doctor with the broken eyeglasses who explained to them why Molly likely would never become pregnant; their naive hope as they began the endless process of adoption paperwork; tense interviews with suspicious bureaucrats; their tentative hope when Dorsey described his contacts with Argentinian officials who had the authority to end their increasingly desperate quest for a child.

  “And Uncle Michael came through.”

  Christensen nodded. “It was like a miracle, ’Lis. Within a couple months, we had you.”

  “But you never knew about me being on the plane?”

  “No one did, apparently. When I confronted him about it this week, Uncle Michael said he did everything he could to make sure no one found out you two were on that plane. I don’t know how, or why, but he said his career was at stake.”

  “What about before?” Melissa asked.

  “Before?”

  “Before he brought me here. I was five. What about before the crash?”

  Christensen was embarrassed to say so, but he knew only what he’d been told. “You were abandoned at birth, parents unknown, and raised in a Buenos Aires orphanage.”

  Melissa closed her eyes again. “I see cribs.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Beds. Rows of baby beds, dozens of them.”

  “You dreamed that?”

  She shook her head and opened her eyes. “It feels real. Could I remember something from back that far?”

  Conventional wisdom, backed by recent research, suggested that the memories of most adults dated to age four, particularly if the memory in question was particularly traumatic or particularly happy. Five?

  “Very possible,” he said. “You wouldn’t understand them, but some images might stick.”

  “I’m looking at rows of cribs,” Melissa repeated.

  Christensen neither encouraged nor discouraged her. After years of research into human memory, what he didn’t know still dwarfed what he did. But to him, his daughter’s fleeting memories of what sounded like her life in a Buenos Aires orphanage could be the confabulation of a confused young woman who was urgently trying to fill in the gaps of her life before adoption. He kept the opinion to himself.

  “Interesting,” he said.

  “And the sky!” his daughter said, animated now but with her eyes still closed. “I remember a man—maybe it’s Uncle Michael—walking me outside, and seeing the sky after being inside for so long. I remember being scared, crying—it was so big above me. It’s all coming back now.”

  “Melissa—”

  “Winnie-the-Pooh!” she said. “On my shirt!”

  Christensen reached beneath the kitchen table and found his daughter’s warm hands. She kneaded the skin on his hands with her thumbs as her voice grew more excited. Still, Melissa’s eyes stayed closed, as if she was watching film unspool on the backs of her eyelids.

  “You’re wearing a shirt with Winnie-the-Pooh on it?”

  “I’m on the plane,” she said. “With a man. Uncle Michael. It’s very quiet.”

  Christensen was sure Melissa was stitching together a narrative based on the scant details she now knew or believed. “It’s very quiet,” he said, reflecting her words back to keep his reactions noncommittal.

  “The engines quit!” she said. “It was loud, then it was quiet. Just the sound of the wind. And all of a sudden everybody was talking, yelling.”

  Christensen thought of Trey Brosky’s story about the other passengers he pulled from the river that night. “Everybody?”

  “There was a little window, real tiny, but I could see out. I see the bridge and those shadows, dancing all in a line.”

  The streetlights. He remembered Melissa tracing their ornamental ironwork on his computer screen the day she caught him looking at the Web photo of the Homestead High Level Bridge, remembered the highlighted text in Ray Krug’s transcript from his interview with the witness on the bridge at the time of the crash. Christensen’s telephone reference to the dancing streetlight shadows is what convinced Krug to meet with him.

  “Then everything is upside down. Dark. People are screaming. A baby’s crying. And it’s cold, Dad. The water. We’re in the water and I’m sinking in the cold.”

  He felt her shiver, and she opened her eyes.

  “I remember now,” she said.

  “It’s possible.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “Does that matter?”

  �
�Yes.”

  He believed it was possible. Her descriptions of the plane crash were consistent with everything he now knew. The other stuff—the rows of cribs, the scary open sky, all the rest of it—he couldn’t say. But it didn’t seem nearly as incredible as it did when they’d started the conversation.

  “I believe you,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  It wasn’t over. He could tell from her fidgeting that there was something else. Melissa absently stirred her decaf again and set the spoon back on the table, then reached into the pocket of her robe and carefully unfolded a piece of paper torn from a yellow legal pad and laid it between them. He recognized Brenna’s barely decipherable handwriting as his daughter tapped her finger beside a name.

  “Beatriz Vargas,” he read out loud.

  “I found a file on your desk the other day. It had a bunch of papers in it, adoption papers. Why didn’t you ever tell me I was a Catholic?”

  Christensen was confused. “You are?”

  “I was baptized, in Argentina,” she said. “There’s a certificate in the file, buried in an envelope with a bunch of other stuff.”

  He leaned forward. “I’d forgotten that, I guess. Or never noticed it.”

  Melissa again tapped a finger on the woman’s name. “Her signature is on the certificate, as a witness. It’s dated the day before I left for the US.”

  “So?”

  “She lives in Bethel Park. Brenna helped me find her.”

  Now Christensen was the one who shivered. The late-night phone conversation. That’s who Melissa had called.

  “She knows the story, Dad,” she said. “I just talked to her, and what she said—shit, she didn’t say anything, really. It was more the way she said it.”

  Melissa stood up and tucked a strand of loose hair behind her ear. She leaned forward, standing over him now with both hands flat on the table.

  “She’s the bridge.”

  “The bridge?”

  “Between my life before and my life after. This woman—” Melissa stabbed the name with her index finger. “I think she knows everything.”

  Chapter 31

  The digital clock in the corner of the screen read 1:24 a.m. as Christensen and his daughter began their search. They pulled chairs side by side to his desk, he at the computer’s keyboard, Melissa hunched forward to his left, watching as they entered the hypertangle of the Internet.

  The web had something human memory did not. It offered thousands of search engines—search spiders, web crawlers, data miners, directories of directories—each using a different approach to create order from the chaos. A web browser was the electronic equivalent of dragging a miles-long gill net across the ocean floor. Responding to his instructions, and using algorithms Christensen could not pretend to understand, it would scoop up everything in its path, leaving him to sift the useful from the useless. But it was a place to start.

  In the Google search box, he typed: “Argentina.”

  The first proffered links were to news stories about the ongoing financial turmoil of a once-prosperous South American power and the national team’s World Cup prospects. Those links were followed by a link to the Lonely Planet Guidebook—Destination: Argentina!—and something called “Sitio Oficial de la Presidencia Argentina.”

  “That’s just a government information site,” Melissa said. “Scroll down.”

  She pointed to a link halfway down the page. “Go to the CIA World Factbook. It always has a condensed history section about each country. Let’s see what was happening there in the 1980s.”

  Christensen hesitated, because he remembered what was happening in Argentina during the five years Melissa lived there, though only in the most general terms. He knew Carole used to fret about her husband being posted in a country where whispered stories about official terror were growing into a chorus of protest. He recalled news reports and accusations and foreign funding debates on the floor of Congress. He remembered the term “Dirty War,” but he and Molly were so focused on their careers and the adoption back then that he never took the time to learn what it was all about, even after Melissa came to them from that faraway inferno. He wondered again about the questions he didn’t ask twenty-two years before, when it was so easy to take Michael Dorsey at his word.

  “Things were bad back then, down there,” he said.

  “Bad, like how?”

  Christensen pointed and clicked. The CIA World Factbook page about Argentina loaded onto the screen, and he followed the link labeled “Introduction.” The country’s history had been reduced to three paragraphs. The last one read: “After World War II, a long period of Peronist authoritarian rule and interference in subsequent governments was followed by a military junta that took power in 1976. Democracy returned in 1983, and numerous elections since then have underscored Argentina’s progress in democratic consolidation.”

  “There was a war on,” he said.

  “A war?”

  “Not a shoot-’em-up kind of war. More of a political oppression thing.”

  “Dictators, silly uniforms, stuff like that?”

  Christensen nodded. “Stuff like that.”

  “Go back,” Melissa said. “Let’s see what else.”

  The Google search had turned up thousands of hyperlinks, many of them in Spanish. He scrolled through page after page of links to Argentinian banks, businesses, and professional soccer clubs. One link took him to a catalog of lyrics to well-known pop songs and the phrase “scooter boys and Argentinians.”

  “Indigo Girls,” Melissa said. “Oh, yeah.”

  “That’s the name of the band?”

  She waited for some flicker of recognition. “Jesus, Dad, it’s a classic.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What else is there?”

  They linked on, sampling pages here and there, once detouring for ten minutes to take a virtual tour of Buenos Aires. He scrolled past a link called “History and Aftermath of the Dirty War.”

  “Wait,” Melissa said. “Check that one.”

  Christensen clicked. They were in uncharted territory now, and he suddenly felt a shimmer of fear. Of what? He wasn’t sure. The unknown? It crossed his path like a raptor’s shadow. Why hadn’t he asked more questions?

  The page opened up to a wall of text. It was in English, at least, but dense and full of the kind of language that smelled of academia. A closer reading revealed that it was the preface of a 1991 book published by the University of Texas Press and written by Donald C. Hodges. It was called Argentina’s Dirty War.

  “Print it,” Melissa said.

  He scrolled down, checking its length. “All of it?”

  “All of it.”

  He printed two copies, gave Melissa one, and started reading his copy: “The ‘Dirty War’ of 1975–1978 was of special significance to Argentine national life as it brought to a head social tensions that had been accumulating since the launching of the military era by Argentina’s first successful coup of the century in September 1930.”

  “This may be more than we wanted to know,” he said. “Let’s keep looking.”

  Melissa kept her eyes to the printout, scanning down the pages. “They called it the ‘Military Process,’ but it sounds like a freakin’ witch hunt,” she said. “The government was going after anybody and everybody it thought might be an enemy. Union organizers. Teachers. Lawyers. Psychiatrists. Journalists. Even the family and friends of those people.”

  “So Joe McCarthy moved south,” Christensen said. “No wonder Carole wasn’t too happy when Uncle Michael got that posting.”

  “She must have hated it down there.”

  “Actually, she never went.”

  Melissa looked up. “That’s a juicy bit of family history you’ve never shared with me.”

  “Not a big deal. Things were unstable there. Carole was tired of moving every two years. She just decided to sit that one out.”

  “Is that when she bought the house in Sewickley?”

  Ch
ristensen nodded. “That was a little later, but basically, yes. She wanted to settle. She loved trailing Michael around the world. Really, they lived a grand life. But after a while she really wanted a place, somewhere she could feel rooted after all those foreign postings.”

  “So they were separated for those years?”

  “Not”—he crooked his fingers into quote marks—“‘separated.’ Michael was just working in Argentina for a few years, and Carole decided to stay here. It happens.”

  “No big family scandal?”

  Christensen laughed. “They did fine, obviously.”

  Melissa read more from the printout in her hand. “Can’t say I blame her. Kidnappings, torture—a real vacation spot down there, huh?”

  “It wasn’t so much that. Carole just wanted a home of her own. You know how she is.”

  “Obsessively domestic?”

  “Fair enough.”

  His daughter stood up and stretched, reaching high above her head, exposing again her healing wrist. The gauze bandage was gone, and Christensen felt his stomach clench at the sight of the burgundy train track of stitches on his daughter’s arm. Turning away, he busied himself shutting down the computer, hoping she hadn’t noticed him staring.

  “I’m going to go see her,” Melissa said.

  Christensen swiveled his chair back to his daughter. “Who?”

  “This woman. Beatriz Vargas. I have to. All this—” Melissa pointed to the computer, the printout. She lifted the baptismal certificate from the corner of his desk and waved it like a flag. “It’s all connected. She knows my story.” She patted her belly. “And I need to know what she knows.”

  “What makes you so sure, ’Lis?”

  His daughter waved the certificate again. “Something she said before she hung up. Something like, ‘It’s hard to understand now why people did the things they did back then, in times like that.’ Why else would she say that?”

  Christensen snapped off his desk lamp, and for a moment they sat in the dark without speaking. He didn’t have an answer, only a condition: “I’m going with you.”