The Disappeared Girl

by Martin J. Smith

  Christensen couldn’t help but wonder if any of the mothers were looking for a daughter named Julia Limon. He kept the thought to himself.

  “What’s that?”

  Maybe it was the late hour, or maybe it was the accumulated tension of the day, but Melissa’s question made him jump. Christensen waited for his heart to stop thumping before answering.

  “It’s about this group,” he said, “the mothers of people who disappeared. They hold a protest every week in Buenos Aires and—”

  “Madres de Plaza de Mayo.” Melissa waved the stack of pages she’d been reading. “They’re pretty well known. There are references to them in a lot of this stuff.”

  “They probably have records, lists of names,” he said. “We could contact them and see.”

  Melissa reached for the printout in his hands and scanned the introduction. As she read, he turned to his computer again and closed his Web browser. He was about to shut it down when his daughter said, “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “Here.” She handed the introduction’s final page back to him and pointed to a line of faint type at the bottom. “Did you see this link?”

  He read aloud in white man’s Spanish: “Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo?”

  “Abuelas,” she repeated. “Grandmothers. Let’s check it out.”

  Christensen wasn’t sure why, but he suddenly felt like they’d stumbled onto something significant. He opened the web browser again and retraced his steps. He searched by the same terms, and linked to the doctoral thesis again. At the bottom of the introductory page was the bright blue link that he’d overlooked: “Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo.” He pointed and clicked and felt, suddenly, like he was touching destiny.

  Chapter 41

  He had sat with her more than an hour, long enough that she required a second syringe. Each time she had agreed to cooperate if he removed the gag ball and tape, nodding her head like a child when he asked, but each time she had tried to scream as soon as she was able. The second injection had put her to sleep, but now her eyes were open again. He gently tugged the tape from her mouth, relieved when she remained silent.

  “Can you hear me, Beatriz?” he said in Spanish.

  Her eyes saw nothing as they scanned the dark room, but she could hear him speaking to her from the edge of her bed. She offered a weak and bleary nod.

  “You have no screams left then?”

  From her throat came a horrible sound, as if she were trying to swallow gravel. She shook her head.

  “Then perhaps we can talk now? I would like that very much, after all these years.”

  Her lips formed a word. “Please—”

  She coughed and closed her eyes again. The effort to speak seemed to drain her.

  “Beatriz?”

  She opened her eyes, straining at the effort.

  “Tell me what you told the man and his daughter. Take your time, but tell me everything.”

  The bedroom was dark, but still light enough that he could see the lines of her body beneath the thin cotton gown now damp with her sweat.

  “Beautiful Beatriz,” he said. “How fondly I remember.” She had turned her head away, so he reached for her chin and turned it back. “The man and his daughter,” he said. “What did you tell them?”

  Beatriz swallowed another mouthful of gravel. “Mo-ther,” she said, a strangled rasp. “She wants—”

  He waited, but soon grew impatient. “She wanted to know about her mother?”

  A nod.

  The thought troubled him. Christensen and the girl were no longer asking just about the plane crash but about the circumstances of the girl’s birth. They were getting closer.

  “And what did you tell them, Beatriz?”

  “Noth—”

  “Nothing at all? But they were here for several hours. Surely you told them something.”

  “Please—”

  “What did you tell them, Beatriz? Did you tell them about your work with the mothers who were detained?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell them that I worked there, too, at the hospital militar?”

  “No.”

  “Those women should have been in prison, you know. But the pregnant ones—it would have been wrong. Cruel. So the government kept them where it was clean and safe. Did you tell them that, Beatriz? About the humanity of that?”

  She shook her head. “I was … just … a nurse. I did not know.”

  Probably true, he thought. She tended the mothers until their babies were born, but likely knew little of the wider operation. He found a glass on her nightstand, raised her head, and tilted it to her parched lips. She sipped and tried to swallow, but instead gagged and showered him with tepid water.

  “What did you know, Beatriz? You had so many in your care back then. You must have wondered who they were, or why they were there.” He paused. “Or where they went.”

  She nodded. “I wondered, yes. But … do not know.”

  “Did you not talk to the women?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “They must have told you things,” he said. “The mothers were frightened. Alone. Many of them were quite young. They needed someone to talk to, and you were so tender and caring. I watched you during my time there. They talked to you.”

  A hesitant nod. “Names,” she said. “They told me … their names.”

  He responded with an intense, chastening silence. “That was not allowed, Beatriz. Surely you knew that.”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you keep a record of these names?”

  A long moment passed before she nodded.

  “A written record?”

  Another nod.

  “So where might I find this list?”

  She described a journal with a rough brown cover. “Other room,” she said.

  In the dark living room, he let his flashlight dance across the rows of books on her small but tidy shelf. She read the classics. He walked his gloved fingers over the titles, but nothing looked like the brown-covered journal she had described. Then he saw it, in plain sight, on her living room coffee table. Back at her side, he fanned the pages beneath his light.

  “Beatriz?”

  “Yes?”

  “The list, it is somewhere in your journal?”

  She nodded. “End.”

  He turned the book over in his hand and opened the back cover. There, on the final pages, were columns and columns of hand-lettered information. Dates. Birth weights. Names.

  “Oh, Beatriz. This was definitely not allowed.”

  “I know.”

  “I am so glad you told me. To whom have you shown your list, Beatriz?”

  “No one.”

  “No one?” He bent lower and spoke directly into her ear. “The man and his daughter, Beatriz. Did you tell them about your list?”

  “I—”

  “You showed them your journal, did you not, Beatriz? It was out and on the table where you talked. They were here a long time, and you told them about your list of names.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Did you give it to them, this list?”

  “No.”

  “Or allow them to copy it?”

  “No.”

  “But you showed them the names?”

  “Yes.”

  “So now they know the name of the girl’s mother?”

  “Yes.”

  Her breathing had quickened again. He stood up and surveyed the room from his place at the edge of her bed. “Sit tight,” he said.

  The apartment was small. He followed his flashlight’s beam through the apartment’s tight cluster of rooms, working out a plan. A sliding glass door in the living room led to a small balcony filled with potted plants and bags of soil. He opened the door and stepped into the humidity of a predawn summer morning. A waist-high railing bordered the small deck, with nothing beyond it but nine stories of air and space. Could he lift her? Perhaps, but he would need at least two Advil afterward. He checked his wristwatch. Tw
o hours until sunrise.

  He did not bother to close the door as he stepped back inside.

  Back at the edge of her bed, he sighed. “I am so sorry you told them, Beatriz, the man and his daughter. Things might be different had you not done so.”

  He turned off his flashlight and placed it back in the bag along with the journal and two spent syringes. Quickly, before she could protest, he popped the ball back in her mouth and covered it with tape. He would need only a few more minutes of her silence. Then he injected her in the hip with the remaining syringe, a small dose, just enough to make her sleep. When he was done and she had drifted away, he removed the tape and gag ball, placed them into the medical bag, and carried it into the living room. He set it beside her front door. Back in her bedroom, he rolled the stiffness from his shoulders and cracked his knuckles once.

  “OK then, Beatriz,” he said at last, and slid his arms beneath her neck and knees. She was still limp, dead weight, but remarkably light as he carried her through the dark living room, through the open slider door, and out into the warm, moist summer air.

  Chapter 42

  Suddenly, Dorsey was awake, his dream exploding in the dim silence of their bedroom like the thudding impact at the end of a long fall. His body convulsed once, and he grabbed his pillow, shaking the bed frame, waking Carole.

  “Michael?”

  Cold. The covers were tangled at his knees, and cool air stroked his skin. He could hear the house’s massive air conditioner humming outside in the bushes just beneath the bedroom window. Still, the sheets were damp with his sweat. The digital face of the clock radio glowed amber just two feet from his face. It was 4:17 a.m.

  “Sorry.”

  “You OK?”

  Dorsey eased one leg off the mattress and found the thick wool of the Persian rug. He pushed himself off the bed and stood, tugging his T-shirt away from his sticky skin. “I’m fine.”

  Carole rolled back into a cocoon of bedclothes. By the time he’d pulled on his light summer robe and guided his feet into his slippers, she was snoring again. At times like this he wished he’d told her everything years ago; she was a good woman and deserved to know. He was sure, too, that he’d have slept more soundly over the years knowing he’d been honest with her. As it was, for more than two decades now, she had accepted his fever dreams and bouts of late-night anxiety as nothing more than the restlessness of a driven man.

  Downstairs, he tugged open the Sub-Zero door and squinted into brightly lit shelves that could have been from a refrigerator ad—everything in its place, uncrowded and neatly displayed, labels facing out. His wife was obsessive about such things, a personality trait he’d long ago accepted. After he poured himself a glass of milk, he knew to put the ceramic pitcher back in the same spot on the same shelf, handle facing out. She’d mention it at breakfast if he didn’t, and might ask why he was up again. The fewer questions, the better.

  He fished two Oreos from the ceramic pink-pig cookie jar on the counter and opened one of the French doors that led onto their flagstone patio. The night air was warm and moist, smelling of cut grass and rich soil, and the yard was alive with tiny yellow-green pinpricks of the lightning bugs. He watched them move across the lawn and Carole’s gardens, bright against the dark backdrop of tall pines at the far edge of the property. The air conditioner kicked off, and the only sound that was left was the low drone of the cicadas hidden in the distant trees.

  Dorsey walked to the edge of the patio, down the three wide stairs, and onto the stepping-stones that snaked across the lawn. He followed them for a while, then stepped off into the dewy grass. He walked until his slippers were soaked through. He was aware of the dampness and a vague sense of discomfort, but focused instead on a more troubling sensation.

  He felt at times like a man standing between trains that were moving toward one another on the same track. His past was catching up. His future was rushing at him. His only choice was whether to stay put or to step off the track and watch the disaster.

  Which would be worse?

  He bit one of the cookies in half and chewed slowly, hearing the crunch but tasting nothing. When that one was finished, he ate the other and drank the milk and stood for a long time with his empty glass, just listening to the sounds of the night. Dorsey tried to remember his dream, but all that came back was the bitter aftertaste of fear and the heart-stopping moment that had startled him awake.

  KDKA-TV was reporting a small hole in the skull that divers had found in the sunken plane.

  Something changed then, an almost imperceptible shift of light. He turned toward the house and saw their bedroom windows lit by the pale glow of his wife’s bedside lamp. Carole was silhouetted in one of the window frames, standing perfectly still and staring out into the night. To her, he was just a restless man standing alone in the dark in the middle of a sprawling green carpet of yard. But she couldn’t hear the low drone of those approaching trains, or imagine the impact when they finally collided.

  Chapter 43

  They read together without talking, huddled at the computer screen like cave dwellers at a fire. It offered no warmth. In fact, what they read was chilling.

  “Scroll to the next page,” Melissa said.

  Christensen hit the Page Down button and read more of what they’d found on the website of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, the Grandmothers of May Square:

  “A unique subset of the desparecidos are the approximately five hundred children who were kidnapped along with their parents or who were born in the clandestine detention centers where their pregnant mothers had been taken. Many of the children were given as gifts to infertile couples in the regime and registered as their adopted children; others were abandoned, and still others were left in institutions as children whose identity was unknown. In this way, many children disappeared and their identities were destroyed. They were deprived of their rights, freedom, and natural families.”

  Melissa’s hand went straight to her belly, a reaction to something unexpected inside.

  “You OK, ’Lis?”

  His daughter nodded, but left her hand where it was. “So it’s—Jesus, what she said is all true.”

  Christensen was several paragraphs ahead of his daughter:

  “In order to locate the disappeared children, the Grandmothers of May Square continue to denounce this atrocity before national and foreign governments, seek judicial redress, keep alive the memory of the lost children in the press, and conduct personal investigations to locate those who were taken.”

  “They’ve found fifty-eight of them,” Christensen said, pointing to the number on the screen.

  “Fifty-eight? Out of five hundred?” Melissa said.

  They read on. The group relied on a technical team of eighteen professionals—lawyers, doctors, psychologists, genetic specialists—to identify the missing children and reconcile them with the families they never knew they had, or at least to restore to them their true identities, their roots, and their history. “Identity is the fundamental basis of human dignity, so we search even though our success often means disrupting the lives of the children we find and identify. But they have a right to know who they are.”

  “Think they’re looking for me?” Melissa asked.

  “If what Beatriz Vargas says is true, if she really did attend your brother’s birth at this mechanical school and help smuggle you both out of Argentina, they could be.”

  Christensen scrolled to the next page. They both leaned forward to read: “Each one of the disappeared children has a case pending before the Argentine judiciary, and when new information is received it is added their files so that, as time passes, the judiciary will be able to determine the real identity of all the children and of those responsible for their kidnapping or illegal adoption. A Bank of Genetic Data has been created by National Law No. 23.511, where the genetic histories of all the families whose children have been abducted will be stored.”

  Christensen understood the implications, even though Melissa r
ead with a deepening look of bewilderment.

  “They’ve set up a system, using DNA matching, to identify the missing children.” He pointed to a particularly dense paragraph on the screen. “It explains all that here.”

  “As a result of help from the Blood Center in New York and the Association for the Advancement of Science (United States) it is now possible for us to prove that a child comes from a particular family with a certainty of up to 99.5 percent (index of grand paternity) based on very specialized blood tests of the grandparents. If one of them has died, we rely on blood tests of the aunts and uncles of the child as well. These tests are now done at the Durand Hospital in Buenos Aires, a dependency of the Municipality of Buenos Aires.”

  “So even if the parents are dead, they can use those tests to figure out what family you came from?” she asked.

  “Apparently so.”

  The Abuelas home page ended with a call to action, all caps: “ANYONE WITH DOUBTS ABOUT THEIR IDENTITY, COME TO US. WE WILL BE WAITING FOR YOU WITH LOVE IN ORDER TO HELP YOU. WE CONTINUE IN THE SEARCH FOR OUR GRANDCHILDREN. IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION ABOUT WHERE WE CAN FIND THEM, WE WILL BE HERE WAITING FOR YOUR CONTRIBUTION. PLEASE HELP US FIND THEM.”

  “What time is it there?” Melissa asked.

  “Where?”

  “Buenos Aires. There’s a phone number,”

  “An hour later than us,” he said, checking his computer’s clock. “So—whoa—5:17 in the morning. I can’t imagine there’s anyone there right now. We should try to get some sleep and go back at it—”

  “E-mail them then,” Melissa said. “Tell them what we know. Ask them about Julia Limon.”

  It seemed almost too easy. The Internet had forever changed standard notions of time and space. From his home in Western Pennsylvania he could, with a few keystrokes, initiate a conversation with someone half a world away. The conversation might unfold in minutes, hours, or days, depending on how quickly his correspondent replied, but the possibility of making those connections still amazed him.