Little Girl Gone

by Alexandra Burt

  Two months later I was in my car on the way to North Dandry while Jack was at the airport waiting for his flight to Chicago.

  ‘I can’t say I like it but I don’t see any other way right now,’ he said when I called him from the car on my way to the brownstone. ‘The project manager is living in the upper apartment while he’s supervising the construction on the other two units. His name is Lieberman. If you need anything and I’m not available, call him. You won’t have to lift a finger. The movers will unload and unpack. It’ll be the easiest move you’ve ever made.’

  ‘I don’t need anyone to check up on me, Jack.’

  ‘I’m just saying if you need anything, call him. I’ll be gone for three weeks, four tops, after that I’ll come home for a weekend. I told you that last week, remember?’

  Was he trying to tell me that I was senile?

  ‘I’ll fly home as often as possible, I promise, depending on the workload.’

  I heard muffled voices and the sound of him switching his cell from one ear to the other, then a metal detector alerting and a voice telling someone to step aside. I imagined Jack, his arms raised, the handheld metal detector following the contours of his body.

  ‘I’m at the gate. Take your meds, okay?’

  ‘Sure.’ I knew Jack had been counting the pills and only stopped after I had phoned in the refills. The truth was I could no longer remember how it felt to be normal and I wanted to believe that I would get better, eventually. It could take weeks or months, the doctor had told me, and I didn’t see any alternative. And so I appeased everybody and told myself any day now it would all be better.

  I swerved to the right and hit the curb. It took me only a few seconds and the car was back under control.

  ‘Bye, I’ll call you, okay?’

  I didn’t answer, hung up the phone and threw it on the passenger seat. I had always been a careful and defensive driver, I didn’t even recognize myself anymore. I was acting like a lunatic. If I looked in the rearview mirror and saw a foil beanie on my head, I wouldn’t be surprised.

  I spotted the North Dandry sign and pulled up to the curb. I killed the engine and looked at the brownstone. In the back Mia’s contorted body was hanging over the side of the seat, her head turned at an odd angle. She had fallen asleep. And I had failed to buckle her seatbelt.

  Chapter 9

  ‘Detectives,’ Dr Baker nods at them on his way out. ‘Thirty minutes tops. If her vitals make somersaults I’ll put my foot down.’

  The detectives wait until Dr Baker has left the room.

  I recognize one of the detectives but not the other. Just yesterday they had questioned me and it seems like they should be spending their time looking for Mia. I have nothing more to add but the detectives regard me like an insect under a microscope. I can’t read their faces, they are all but blank.

  ‘My name is Detective Wilczek. I’m with the Special Victims Unit and I’ll be heading the investigation. You remember Detective Daniel?’ Wilczek is in his forties, buzz cut, thin and wiry. His nails are bitten to the quick. He points at the middle-aged rotund man. ‘We appreciate you talking to us, Mrs Paradise,’ he says and pulls out a notebook.

  Dr Baker has removed the morphine pump and I try to ignore the pain behind my left eye.

  ‘I’d like to go over everything again, if you don’t mind. I understand you must be getting tired of repeating the same thing over and over but I prefer to hear it from you.’

  Traces of morphine linger in my system and I long for the warmth that went through my entire body at the push of a button, making me feel weightless. Everything was surreal then but now my body is heavy. My heart sinks. They would lead with the fact that she’s safe if they had found her and so I resist the urge to ask them.

  I walk them through it, my routine during that first month since I had moved into the brownstone, Jack’s job in Chicago, the days leading up to her disappearance, the morning I found her crib empty. While Wilczek takes notes, he never interrupts me. When he doesn’t take notes he twists the narrow wedding band on his right hand with his thumb.

  ‘Tell me about the locks. Why did you have those locks installed?’

  ‘Just to be safe.’

  ‘Did you feel threatened in any way? Did anyone make a threat towards you?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. I was basically living there by myself most of the time, it was just a precaution.’

  ‘Nothing odd happened in the days before your daughter disappeared?’

  ‘Not that I can think of.’ I want to tell them that I have already answered all these questions but given the fact that one of them is from another department, I decide to go along with the questioning.

  ‘Who had access to the apartment?’

  I think about it for a while. ‘Jack. The movers. The man who installed the locks.’ Suddenly my pulse quickens. ‘The guy who installed the locks … he was odd, he looked at me the entire time.’ I’m grasping at straws but for all it’s worth, they haven’t asked me about him yet.

  ‘We dusted the entire apartment for prints. The ones on the door are from the gentleman who installed the locks. We checked out his alibi and he’s been eliminated. He takes care of his elderly parents. There are a few from your husband, mainly on the furniture. Some other prints on the furniture checked out as prints from the movers.’ Wilczek’s voice turns composed, almost kind. ‘Were there any strange phone calls? Anyone watching you? Anything out of the ordinary? Even something insignificant to you might be a very important fact.’

  Once, there was an imprint in my bed, the sheets crumpled, as if a supernatural visitor had taken the liberty of living here in my absence. Then one day I came home and the mirror appeared crooked. Was I imagining it, is my view of the world skewed somehow? My first thought was; there’s someone here. But the house was empty. So I dismissed it. The next time it was the coffee table, haphazardly pushed aside. There were visible dents in the rug, as if my mother’s ghost, annoyed by my lack of furniture placement, had come to rearrange my table properly. Remembering the crooked mirror, I dismissed it, as if I was accepting my warped and disturbed home, completely letting go of all logic.

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary,’ I say.

  And then: ‘Tell me again why you didn’t call 9-1-1?’

  ‘I had the phone in my hand, dialing the number, and then I saw that her bottles were gone. Her clothes, everything. I didn’t understand what had happened.’

  ‘So you did what?’

  ‘I looked for her, everywhere. In my car. In alleys, around the neighborhood, everywhere. I asked a homeless woman on the corner if she’d seen anything. I even looked in Dumpsters.’ I catch myself but it’s too late. The word Dumpster echoes in my mind. It just didn’t sound right. I looked for my daughter in Dumpsters. Why did I even say that?

  ‘You went up and down the street you say; did you ask for help?’ Wilczek’s voice remains calm.

  I shake my head.

  ‘How about the people working construction in the house?’

  ‘It was a Sunday, everybody was gone.’

  ‘How about your neighbor? There was one other person living in the building, right? Did you ask him for help?’

  ‘He visits his sister on the weekends. He leaves on Friday afternoons. I called him a few times but I couldn’t even leave a message.’

  ‘What did you think happened to your daughter?’

  Focus on his question. ‘I didn’t have any idea.’

  ‘Did you call your husband?’

  ‘No.’ I lower my head and wonder where I’d be right now if I had called Jack right away. Jack would have called the police, he would have rushed home, and he would have known what to do, because Jack always knows what to do. Not calling him was just another one of my blunders. ‘He had just left and started his new job. He was under a lot of pressure. I knew it would be hard for him to call every day and he was due to come home in a week or two for a few days.’

  Wilczek leans forward, adj
usting his tie. ‘Why didn’t you ask him for help? He’s a lawyer, he’s got resources and connections other parents of abducted children only dream of.’

  ‘I … no … I was confused. I thought many things.’

  ‘Did he call you at all since he’d left New York?’

  ‘Yes, we talked. Not at length, no, just how are you, how’s the baby, everything okay, how’s the house coming along, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Tell us why you bleached your entire house.’

  I bleached my house? Oh, yeah, that. I remember the bleach. The acid burning in my nose and eyes, struggling to breathe as if someone had his hands around my lungs, squeezing them, my wheezing and coughing. When I returned to North Dandry, after I left the precinct, a stench hit me, a fusion of coffee grounds and dead air behind windows that had gone unopened for days, maybe even weeks. And then I saw the filth; the grimy drain and the moldy ring around the faucet. I went to work among buckets, rags and steel wool, when one toothbrush wore down, I got another from the bathroom drawer. I dipped the bristles in bleach and scoured the grout between the floor tiles, ran ice cubes through the disposal. I moved from room to room, removing objects from shelves, mopping, wiping, scouring. As my hands started to burn and my cuticles all but dissolved, I realized that this sense of mission was designed to make something right, something that I wasn’t sure I had wronged to begin with.

  I cleaned with bleach, yes I did. Detective Wilczek wants to know why, and who could blame him, I know what he is insinuating. All I remember is that I didn’t want to leave a mess behind, but I don’t know why. And I recall that by the time I was done, the sun had gone down twice and come up once.

  I look out the window as if to find the answer in the distance. The detective waits for me to answer but I have no logical explanation for him and so I remain quiet. He seems oddly content with my silence and just moves on as if he didn’t expect a coherent answer to begin with.

  ‘I need you to explain why you left the precinct without reporting the disappearance. Picking up the phone and then not reporting her missing after you realize her things have disappeared is one thing. But then you decide you need to talk to the police after all. You walk to the station but you don’t ask for help. You must understand that this doesn’t make sense. There’s no intruder, no break-in. Just a missing baby and a mother who can’t remember anything.’

  ‘Dr Baker told you I have amnesia, right?’

  ‘We are aware,’ Wilczek scoots his chair closer, his eyes appear soft. ‘But children don’t just disappear out of locked apartments. They don’t disappear without a trace. Are you telling me that someone walked through walls and made away with a closet full of clothes and a dozen baby bottles? Boxes of diapers? And all that while you were sleeping?’

  I have to agree with him. It sounds like a melodramatic soap opera.

  ‘You missed Mia’s doctor’s appointment,’ Wilczek continues. ‘Some sort of scheduled vaccination. You’ve been to all previous appointments, but not that one. Why didn’t you go?’

  ‘I forgot.’ I didn’t go to her scheduled vaccination appointment? I would never just miss a vaccination, there must have been a reason. Something irks me but I can’t put my finger on it.

  ‘The daycare said you never returned with her shot records.’

  ‘The daycare needed the complete shot records to enroll her and since I missed the vaccination appointment, there was no reason to go back. And it wasn’t childcare, really, just a couple of hours here and there.’

  ‘Did you reschedule the appointment?’

  ‘I was going to but then she …’ I pinch my lips shut. I need to be alone, I need to think this through, everything’s unclear, too vague to put in words.

  ‘She what?’

  ‘She disappeared.’

  Wilczek lowers his head and studies his notebook.

  ‘Tell me about the homeless woman.’

  ‘There was a homeless woman on the corner, I’d seen her before, and I thought if she’d been there all night, she might have …’ It dawns on me that if he knows about her, he’s undoubtedly spoken to her. ‘You talked to her? What did she tell you?’

  I watch his eyes fly over the notes in his little book. ‘I don’t want to go by what other people tell me when I can hear it from you.’

  ‘She was confused. She had a dog with her. That’s all I remember.’

  ‘Tell me about the car seat,’ Wilczek says.

  I hear a peeping sound behind me, speeding up. Then it hits me: I left a car seat on the curb and I gave the homeless woman my suitcase. I shake my head in disbelief. My heart is beating in my throat. How stupid and how random. Why did I do that?

  ‘I don’t know what to tell you.’ I try to sound calm but I can feel the tears gathering behind my eyes. My heart is beating fast and my head is shaking from side to side. Anxiety tremors, according to Dr Baker. ‘The accident caused me to forget what happened the days before. My memory only goes so far.’

  ‘So there’s something you’re not telling me?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to explain to you. I don’t know what I’m not telling you. I can’t possibly know what I don’t know.’ I want to be cooperative, want to help, and so I curl my lips into something like a supportive smile and even though I catch myself, it’s too late. He must have seen me smile because he pinches his lips shut.

  ‘Time’s up.’ Dr Baker pokes his head in the room and shuts down the interview. When the door closes behind him, Wilczek gets up to leave.

  ‘Did you find any blood?’ The words escape before I can rein them back in. Careful. Be more careful.

  ‘Blood? What kind of blood?’ Det. Wilczek’s facial expression is blank.

  Are there different kinds of blood? Blood is blood. Don’t say that.

  ‘I’m just wondering if there was any blood.’

  ‘We’re waiting on forensics,’ he says, ‘but like I said, all that bleach … Call me if you can think of anything else. We’ll talk again soon.’

  I nod and close my eyes.

  Minutes later, I stand up, unsteady at first, then I get the hang of it. I slide my feet more than lift them off the ground which makes walking easier. I reach for the doorknob. I can’t resist the urge and peek out the door down the hallway and wonder what would happen if I just started walking. My guard leans forward ever so slightly when he detects movement.

  A baby’s wail travels down the hallway, straight through the open door, aiming directly into my auditory cortex, hitting it like an arrow piercing a bull’s eye.

  I slam the door shut. I lean against it as if I’m attempting to keep the acoustic waves at bay. I run my fingers through my hair, upwards, and hold my head, gently at first, then I pull my hair as hard as I can. My scalp starts to pulsate but the pain drowns out the baby’s wails. If I could cut off my other ear to deafen the wails, I would.

  Mia is gone and I’m the suspect.

  And as I sit on the floor in my hospital room, a uniformed leg ever present by my door, and I pull my hair to dull the baby’s cries from down the hall, I see myself not so much for what I am, but for what I’m not.

  There’s a word for my behavior; ‘blunted affect,’ a lack of emotional reactivity, a sign of trauma, brain injury. I’m not a tearful mother whose eyes are red and swollen, begging the kidnapper to return her child. I wish Dr Baker was here right now to see what this crying baby is doing to me. I’m not a pleading mother. Instead I say things that I find suspicious myself, I smile when I have no reason for happiness. I ask questions when clearly I don’t remember. I can only imagine what the detectives are thinking right about now.

  I’ve seen distraught mothers on TV, mothers who clutch their kid’s beloved stuffed animal, mothers who promise they’ll never stop looking. The fathers behind them, arms wrapped around them, families in support of them, wiping tears, trying to hold in their emotions. I’ve seen mothers on front pages, eyes glazed over, the Valium doing its job of delaying the pain for at least
a few hours. The agony in the parents’ eyes is painful for the onlookers, even translates through television sets – it is unrestrained, unedited, and raw.

  And then there are the monsters. Monsters lying about the disappearance of their children, tearful pleas to phantom carjackers, Munchausen Syndrome lunatics running into emergency rooms, cradling dead or near-dead babies. Newborns stuffed in trash receptacles after being born in Walmart bathrooms. With their umbilical cords still attached. Not mere tragedies like forgetting a baby in the car, but intentional, deliberated, maybe even premeditated harm done to a helpless child. In which category do I fit?

  Jack’s words ‘we can still fix this’ echo in my mind. Did I do something that needs fixing? I remember how I nervously carried her in my arms walking down steep stairwells, the pull of scissors and sharp objects, the way they seemed to beckon me, and how the cord of the lamp by her crib made me nervous. Sharp edges and blunt corners, heights atop stairs seemed tempting.

  I have a suspicion. I won’t tell anyone, but I whisper it to myself.

  Chapter 10

  The day Jack left for Chicago I met the property manager in front of the brownstone on North Dandry. Jack had hired Yolanda Drake to oversee the renovations of the brownstone. She started talking the moment I got out of the car.

  ‘Sometimes properties are …’ Yolanda paused and searched her mind for the right word, ‘cursed,’ she finally said and lifted her index finger.