Little Girl Gone

by Alexandra Burt

  I used to sing to Mia. I would clear my throat and she would focus on my eyes, and then smile. The first note always made her cock her head.

  Sleep baby sleep.

  She’d babble along as if attempting to sing with me.

  Your father tends the sheep.

  There was a frown, a wrinkled forehead.

  Your mother shakes the dreamland tree.

  Her eyes never left my face, her eyes blinked, ever so fleeting.

  And from it fall sweet dreams for thee.

  The sing-song tone and exaggerated pitch prompted her to screech.

  Sleep, baby, sleep. Sleep, baby, sleep.

  Remembering those fleeting moments leaves me with a heavy feeling. Unlike a cut or a bruise it’s invisible to outsiders and the fact that I caused the pain myself brings even more agony. With every ounce of my being I wish I had the courage to fling myself off a building or walk into the depths of an ocean, to take a gun and place the cool metal against my temple, pulling the trigger, shooting away what I feel. I realize that this pain will never cease. Like a shore pounded by waves, the force is perpetual and our cord will never be severed. North Dandry is the scariest place I can imagine but there’s no alternative. And so I resign myself.

  ‘Tomorrow you’ll tell me about your family.’

  Chapter 13

  Someone had shoved a lump of clay into my hand. Even now, so many years later, as I sit in Dr Ari’s office, I fight the urge to look down at my hand. I don’t think I ever threw that lump away. I have forgotten about it at times, but been reminded frequently, like a pebble in a shoe, its presence rendering me unable to move. I’m struck by the intensity of my feelings, even after all these years.

  Tell me about your family. Such a simple request, yet such a complicated web. The weight of my family’s history is not a matter of heaviness; it is almost weightless, like a ghost.

  My mother had delivered a healthy baby girl: Marcia Paradise. I was eleven; my brother Anthony almost eighteen. It was a weekday, and we had stayed home from school. Mom and Dad finally called and said they were on their way home. The previous night I had gone through my bookshelf and closet and selected toys and books for my new sister.

  The doorbell rang, but instead of my parents, two police officers and a lady in a beige coat stood on our front stoop. They were matter-of-fact: my parents had been in an accident on their way home from the hospital – pile-up he said and I didn’t know what that meant but didn’t ask – and did Anthony want to call anybody?

  Within hours Aunt Nell, our only relative and Mom’s sister, arrived from New Jersey. She made the living room couch her home, her crimson-rimmed eyes were puffy and she had a habit of shredding Kleenexes. She was taller and heavier than Mom, but they had the same chestnut hair, and nearly identical profiles. Nell’s hair was shorter and she seemed like a less refined and polished version of Mom.

  The next morning I opened the newspaper and stared at the picture of the accident. There was an aerial photo taken by a news helicopter, cars piled up like an accordion − hood-bumper-hood-bumper − like endless road kill on a gray strip artificially painted onto an otherwise green landscape. The roads seemed like a concrete maze of asphalt and steel bridges, some looping above, some ducking under. It was hard to believe that somewhere in there were my parents and my baby sister.

  I went into my father’s study and retrieved the round magnifying glass he used when studying his antique map collection. My hand shook as it hovered over the newspaper. The harder I tried to make out our white Suburban, the more the pixels began to dance in front of my eyes. It was impossible to see what was left of my family and I wondered if anyone took a photograph of the baby before she died.

  ‘We have to talk about what we’re going to do,’ Aunt Nell said the day before the funeral. She sipped her coffee, frowned, and added two more cubes of sugar. ‘A lot of things are going to change but I want you to know that …’ she cleared her throat and eyed the coffee in her cup, ‘the sooner we make those hard decisions, the better.’

  I stared at the rings the cup had made on the poplar table, hoping they’d come out with the Old English oil Mom kept under the sink.

  ‘Anthony and I talked earlier and we thought it’d be best if you come to Jersey with me, Stella.’

  ‘To live?’ I asked.

  ‘Right,’ said Aunt Nell.

  ‘For how long?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s the thing,’ Aunt Nell said. ‘After we go to Jersey, you won’t be coming back.’

  I looked around. ‘What about the house? All our stuff?’

  ‘Selling the house seems like the best thing to do.’ Aunt Nell pushed her cup towards the middle of the table, making the rings worse. ‘We’ll sell the house with everything in it.’

  Jersey. I thought of the friends I didn’t have there and the park that was too far to walk to by myself. I suddenly felt a panic I couldn’t describe. I looked over at Anthony who had lowered his head.

  Aunt Nell emitted a constant odor of stale smoke and always carried a pack of Virginia slims in her hand. At that moment I imagined her falling asleep with a slim white cigarette in the living room, burning down the entire house.

  ‘Waisenkind,’ I said and traced the coffee rings on the table with my eyes.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Waisenkind. It’s a German word, it means orphan. We read about it in school. Children packed their suitcases the night before they were shipped off to the concentration camps. That’s what they wrote on the suitcases. With chalk. Waisenkind. An orphaned child. I want to pack my own orphan suitcase.’

  ‘I know this is very difficult for you and your brother, for all of us, but we shouldn’t be so dramatic about everything. An orphan suitcase? That’s just macabre.’ Nell shook her head in disgust.

  ‘What can I keep? What about my books and my furniture?’

  ‘My place is small. Just the essentials. A small bag. We’ll manage.’ Aunt Nell smiled and nodded the way grown-ups do when they don’t mean what they say.

  ‘What about Mom’s cameras? And Dad’s stuff?’ The darkroom was filled with photographs and equipment, my father’s study lined with books and trunks full of maps.

  ‘It will be donated,’ Aunt Nell said and fidgeted with her hands.

  I imagined strangers going through my mother’s photographs and my father’s maps being sold at some antique sale. I looked around the house. The surfaces were dusty as if the cold ashes from the fireplace had draped the house in a layer of soot. I wanted to take the layer and wrap it around me, the first layer to hide my sadness, the subsequent layers to form a coat that would protect me, so no one could touch me on the inside. Just pretend, I said to myself, pretend you’re okay.

  Aunt Nell got up and put the cup in the sink. The rings on the table had widened and had soaked into the wood. I doubted they would ever come out.

  That night I climbed into the attic and pulled the smallest suitcase I could find from a shelf of dusty boxes. I packed my father’s maps, my mother’s photographs, a white baby outfit and a pair of baby shoes, the newspaper with the article of the car pile-up, and Anthony’s science fair award.

  Days later, when I opened the suitcase in New Jersey, it was full of clothes. When I asked Nell what she had done with the items I put in it, she just shook her head.

  ‘Hanging on to the past is just not very helpful in this situation.’

  When I started crying she said, ‘This is as hard on me as it is on you. Please don’t make a scene.’

  ‘Every morning I would wake up wondering if it was all a dream. It wasn’t like I tried to convince myself they were alive, but I had to get used to them being gone, over and over again, and every morning, during the first few seconds after I opened my eyes, it felt as if they were still alive.’ Every morning they died all over again, every morning I started out with hope and within seconds, hope died.

  I pause and look around Dr Ari’s office, a large rectangular space. A door behind his
desk leads to what I assume is his private bathroom. I am aware that I picked the beginning of the story, but why the clay in my hand and the funeral? I hadn’t thought of my parents in years, the last time probably in high school, when I stopped searching for my mother’s face in a crowd, when my heart no longer skipped a beat when I saw a white Suburban.

  ‘Dr Ari, why am I talking about this? There’re no family secrets hidden away in the attic, no bodies buried in the backyard. Why are people always mesmerized with their childhoods?’ I keep pulling on my shirt sleeves, they almost reach my fingertips. ‘I don’t have a single recollection of my childhood before the age of ten. Am I supposed to remember anything that far back? It seems like there is this point, there’s nothing before and everything after. I’m not sure I’m making sense, I guess what I’m trying to understand is if there’s a reason why I don’t remember my early childhood.’

  ‘Not remembering doesn’t mean your childhood was bad but not having bad memories doesn’t mean that it was good, either.’ He seems proud of the comment but confusion must be written all over my face. He crosses his legs and shifts in his chair as if to get comfortable, ready for an extended monologue. ‘The first years are all about attachment. The kind of adult you are is the most reliable indicator of a positive or negative childhood, more reliable than any memory or the lack thereof.’ Dr Ari looks at me as if this is supposed to explain something.

  I am perplexed. ‘Given why I’m here, that means what?’

  ‘Thinking about your mother, what is the most—’

  ‘Let’s get real, let’s just call it what it is. I’m here trying to remember if I had anything to do with the disappearance of my daughter. And I’m being kind, I could ask the real question, the one everybody’s wanting an answer to.’ I can feel myself getting upset, my heart is beating hard against my chest and I feel the urge to get up and move around.

  ‘So you don’t want to talk about your mother?’

  ‘No, no, you’re getting it all wrong. It’s not that I don’t want to talk about her. My senses don’t remember her, not her scent, the touch of her hand, her presence, how it felt being around her. Just facts is what I recall. She was always busy, slightly distant maybe, but what does that mean? What’s the conclusion I should draw from that? What does that say about me?’

  ‘Like I said, it means nothing at this point,’ he says.

  ‘What if I …’ I stop, I don’t know where to go from here.

  ‘Being distant is not hereditary, it’s not a genetic mutation, if that’s what you’re wondering,’ Dr Ari says.

  ‘Maybe not in a hereditary way but how about a pattern? Is that possible?’

  ‘We can’t draw any conclusions from that. Let me give you an example: The child of a drug addict will deal with the addiction – one way of coping would be to keep the drugs a secret. Which leads to keeping more secrets. Think of the behavior of children more like an attempt to cope with their parents’ shortcomings.’

  ‘What a shame my mother is not around to answer any questions.’ I try not to sound sarcastic but I can’t help it.

  ‘In my line of work we usually don’t confront parents until it is too late. Makes for a one-sided conversation, doesn’t it?’

  ‘That’s why so many people see shrinks.’

  Dr Ari squeezes his lips shut until they disappear and his mouth looks like a slash made by a knife. He begins to tap his leg, then scoots to the front of his chair and leans forward.

  ‘Don’t think of me as a shrink. Think of me as, as …’ he is scanning his mind for the right word, and then his face lights up, ‘your midwife, in a way. Think of me as your midwife. I’m here to assist you to birth the past. Neither compassion nor friendship will help you complete the process. You’ll ignore me, beg me to make it stop, most certainly you will hate me at some point. Eventually, when you cradle the truth in your arms, you’ll realize that I was on your side all along.’

  You’re on my side then, I want to ask him, but I don’t. As I think about his words, I realize that the only thing I can ask for is someone to be on my side. That very moment, I decide to trust him and that I will allow him to take me places I would rather not go if I want to find my daughter. Or find out what happened to her. Or find out what I have done to her.

  ‘You seem tense,’ Dr Ari says, looking at my hands.

  I’m a miner, I descend deeper into the mineshaft and all I have to do is bring gemstones up into the light. If memories are gems, I will continue on, leaving it to Dr Ari to separate fools’ gold from whatever is precious.

  At my parents’ funeral someone had shoved a lump of clay into my hand. I stood beside a dark hole in the ground. The church service, the mourners, the prayers – they had nothing to do with my family. The undertakers had propped up three coffins – a small one in between two larger ones. The priest was young and his attempt at growing a moustache had resulted in nothing but a few sorry whiskers. His skin was poreless as if he had been dipped in wax.

  Suddenly I remembered Joan Hardaway, a girl who lived on our street and went to school with me. We all knew she was a cutter, but we couldn’t grasp what that really meant. All we knew was that she liked to hurt herself. Joan Hardaway was a doughy girl with a flaky scalp and yellow teeth. I saw her legs once, after PE when we changed clothes. Her thighs were covered in red spider webs. They seemed deliberate, like images drawn in the sand, illegible, but spelling out some sort of pain. I remember thinking how odd it was to create more pain in order to forget pain. It seemed illogical then.

  Aware of Dr Ari’s questioning eyes I realize that I haven’t spoken in a while. The memory of the funeral evokes nausea, just as strongly today as it did fifteen years ago. I must stay focused; I must speak slowly and deliberately, must tell him what happened, that I threw the lump of clay and how it thumped off my sister’s coffin and rolled into a flower arrangement.

  I tell Dr Ari how I turned into a bystander because being in the picture seemed too painful, as if observing myself reduced the pain somehow, and vividly, I see Anthony and me, standing there, holding hands.

  When they lowered the coffins into the ground, one by one, pulling away the ropes with an indifferent flick of their wrists, I started crying. I tried to pull away from him but he held on to me, squeezed my hand so hard it hurt.

  ‘No. NO. Wait.’ I screamed, followed by a universal gasp. Women started sobbing in the cluster of mourners, handkerchiefs pressed against their mouths, their eyes wide, embarrassment in their muffled voices.

  ‘Stella, please, don’t.’ Anthony’s voice was pleading. ‘Stop pulling so hard. Stop pulling my—’

  My sobs became louder, the tears made it impossible to see anything, but I knew everybody was looking at me, staring at the little girl who was losing it. I managed to pull my hand out of Anthony’s grip and stepped forward.

  I had no plans to jump in, I didn’t prepare for a leap. I lost my footing when the ground caved in right at the edge, by the mat of artificial grass. I fell and landed, like a shovelful of newly dug earth, on one of the larger coffins. The scent of gardenias was overwhelming, the wreaths were sharp, making my skin itch. I rolled over, my shoulder throbbing, and looked up. Dozens of eyes stared down at me, towering, countless hands extending, waiting for my hand to reach out and grasp theirs. I sat on top of the coffin, not sure if it was my mom’s or dad’s, faces staring down at me. I looked past them, up into the sky. Anthony lowered himself into the hole and held me up for hands to pull me out.

  Hours later everybody had gathered at our home, a house with a cold and ashy fireplace that felt unsympathetic. I sat in an armchair turned to face the front door and the first thing anyone saw when they walked in was a girl with a sullen face and a full plate in her lap. I had filled it with meatballs, potato salad, finger sandwiches, and stuffed mushrooms. Aunt Nell gave me a look, and I stacked some more sandwiches on top. I sat, plate on my lap, not bothering with a fork or napkin, and eyed the people spilling through the door. My silen
t guarding of the door didn’t go over well; adults didn’t know whether to stroke my hair or hand me a fork. No one greeted me as they entered the house but one middle-aged lady with noticeable upper lip hair, who I had never met before, kept eyeing me.

  ‘Hello, Sally,’ she said, and offered her hand. How I wished to be a Sally somewhere, I thought, but didn’t correct her, nor did I shake her hand. Her dark reddish roots made it seem as if she was bleeding from her parted hair.

  ‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ she added.

  ‘Thank you, Shirley,’ I said. ‘Thank you so much.’

  She looked at me puzzled and walked off to talk to Aunt Nell.

  The entire time I sat by the door, ‘Shirley’ kept eyeing me suspiciously. I sat for a long time and watched the stream of mourners reverse itself until finally the house was empty.

  I grabbed Anthony’s hand and pulled him into my dad’s study. The walls were covered in black-and-white photographs of buildings, the majority of them industrial. The first one, right by the door, was the Lipstick Building, at 53rd and Third, shaped as if oval hatboxes had been stacked on top of each other. There were photographs of churches, I recognized the Riverside Church, the Bryant Park Hotel, and Grand Central Terminal, my favorite. Photographs of buildings lined the walls like family pictures, taken by my father the architect, who dealt with the aesthetics and value of buildings and lived in a world made of stone and steel, slabs and cement.

  The shades had been pulled and the big cedar chest in the corner released a spicy odor, strong and fragrant. Dad kept his historical map collection in that chest. Over the years the maps’ wet-rag-in-the-kitchen-sink aroma had changed to the same aromatic odor of the chest. There was also a hint of smoke in the air. I had seen Aunt Nell smoke on the front stoop and in the backyard but maybe she had started plopping herself down in my father’s chair, propping up her feet, having a cigarette. I had a vision of her, wearing my mother’s dress, walking through the house, smoking, and making endless plans we knew nothing about.