Little Girl Gone

by Alexandra Burt

  The kitchen still smells of stale coffee, the living room of extinguished fireplace ashes. I’m bombarded with odors more powerful than words, captivating me, odors I can’t place – new carpet smell maybe, bleach, Pine-Sol – and I feel the urge to leave this place. The tangs and whiffs of unfamiliar odors go topsy-turvy in my mind, and I can’t think of anything but escaping the stench of guilt this house holds.

  I enter the stairwell, barely able to hold on to the railing. As I walk up, I hear a familiar sound; a creak on the third step. I reach for the smooth railing, covered in numerous layers of glossy paint. The creak echoes in my head and my hand tightens even harder around the railing. I watch my knuckles emerge from under my skin like white rocks in a river bed. Suddenly I’m covered in anguish; it soaks through my clothes, opens the pores of my skin, and seeps all the way to my bones.

  This time, I see nothing, not a single image. But I feel everything. I hear a voice from far away but I’ve no idea where the words are coming from until I recognize them as my own. And I return to the day I walked up these same steps.

  ‘She’s gone, she’s gone, she’s gone, gone,’ I hear myself cry. ‘I can’t find her anywhere.’

  And then floodgates open. I’ve returned, been magically transported through time and space, the sound of buses, garbage trucks, and children laughing shooting through me like an arrow. Pigeons cooing and a sharp slapping sound of wings.

  I remember I twisted the door knob and the attic door swung open. There was light shining through a windowed door at the end of the attic leading to the rooftop. A mummified pigeon lay in the corner, its feathers devoid of vanes, merely spiky shafts attached to a skeleton.

  When I felt dizzy, I closed my eyes, and then my knees hit the floor. I felt the impact, accompanied by crowing pigeons, and a feeling wrapped itself around me like a coat, skintight; I was unable to undo its buttons, the fabric had merged with my skin and there was only one way out. Don’t be misled, I wasn’t delusional, I didn’t think I could fly. I wanted to hit the ground but darkness came before I could make good on my plan.

  When I woke up, my knees were throbbing. As I made an attempt to push myself off the ground, I felt something soft beneath me. I scooped it towards my nose and inhaled. The scent had a sparkle, but not the sparkle of glitter or fireworks, not the sparkle of a Christmas day snowfall or a frosty February wind, yet it was more than the freshness of chamomile and lavender and camphor … but at the same time it had warmth, but not the warmth of cinnamon or brown sugar … the scent was a combination, a juxtaposed blend of both, it was delicate and robust all at the same time, like a worn, soft quilt from your childhood … yet daintier than cotton, more refined, but strong at the same time. This scent was pure and grand and it was all around me.

  I opened my eyes. I was holding Mia’s blanket. Silver stars stitched in the corner, next to a moon and sun, the ‘Sun, Moon, and Stars’ collection from Macy’s.

  Mia’s baby blanket was staring at me as if to say you should look harder, you should not give up so quickly. What kind of mother are you?

  I sense movement behind me. Dr Ari, who has followed me without my knowing steps closer, and for the first time since we started our sessions, Dr Ari feels the need to clarify, to put a name to the madness.

  ‘You found Mia’s blanket in the attic. You were not sure about what happened, you even thought that Mia didn’t exist. Your postpartum depression had progressed into psychosis.’

  Where is he going with this? I was a monster. I had stopped loving my baby; I was afraid of what I would do to her. I had failed her.

  ‘You needed help, Estelle. This is nothing mothers can just get over by themselves. You needed antidepressants; you needed therapy, support, and friends. Many mothers imagine hurting their infants, even drowning them, burning them. Understand this, if you don’t understand anything else: when mothers imagine hurting their children, their mind doesn’t signal a wish. It’s the mind’s mechanism visualizing the worst outcome so you can counteract.’

  I consider his explanation, but I’m torn. I try to take it all in. ‘I remember a pair of scissors by her crib when I was still with Jack. I had cut off the clothes tags. Every time I saw the scissors, I imagined myself stabbing her, mutilating her body. I moved the scissors, stuffed them in the very back of the linen closet. I thought I was a monster.’ The last words come out in a wail.

  The more upset I’ve become, the calmer Dr Ari appears. It all makes sense to him, but I wish it made sense to me, too.

  ‘Postpartum psychoses require immediate treatment,’ Dr Ari says, ‘you lost touch with reality and you still don’t know what was real and what you imagined. The statistics are very clear in that most women who experience postpartum psychosis do not harm themselves or anyone else. They don’t want to kill themselves or their children. But their thoughts can become so delusional and irrational that their judgment is impaired. Suicide is rare, infanticide extremely rare. It’s even rarer that they kill and commit suicide.’

  I latch on to the word and. ‘Commit suicide and kill the infant. I didn’t kill myself. But I wanted to. What does that mean?’

  ‘You wanted to kill yourself. Until you found the blanket.’

  ‘I looked for her,’ I say.

  ‘You looked for her?’

  ‘In every closet and under the furniture. I opened every drawer, looked behind every curtain. I went outside and looked in the Dumpster. I walked up and down the street, looked in cars. I just want you to know that I looked for her.’

  ‘I believe you, I know you looked for her. But we’re not done, we have to keep looking.’

  One memory emerged and that one will be linked to the next by triggers, scents, visions, by time. My mind will arrange those puzzle pieces and form a complete picture. For the first time in a long time I have hope.

  We leave the building and sit in the van. Dr Ari pulls a golden watch from the pocket of his pants. It dangles on a gold chain and attaches to the belt loop of his trousers. The sunlight hits it and sends a blinding ray my way.

  ‘One more thing before we continue. What you did in there, allowing the glass to cut open your fingers isn’t acceptable and I don’t want you to repeat this again,’ Dr Ari says.

  I look down at my fingertips speckled with tiny cuts and covered in dry blood. I nod.

  Oliver is standing by a food truck. He holds a wrapper in one hand and a cup with a straw in the other. He puts the cup next to him on the bench and lifts his face upwards. The sun is bearing down on the van and my eyelids are heavy. The past hour is weighing heavy on me. I’m thirsty, famished.

  ‘Estelle,’ Dr Ari’s voice is laden with fatigue, ‘tell me what you know for sure. Tell me what you know to be the truth. Everything we have spoken about, everything you remembered today, tell me what you know with absolute certainty.’

  I sit in silence for a while. The first thought that enters my mind is sadness. It’s located in my stomach and feels like thirst, but no liquid has ever cured it. Even antidepressants have never limited its reach. Sadness had turned into the carnivore of my life, eating up everything in its path. It’s a vortex that pulled everything else in my life downward, towards this moment. I wanted someone to find me, pick me up, hold me up against the light, brush me off with a shirt hem and consider themselves lucky having found me.

  ‘I’ve been sad for a long time.’

  ‘And after you had Mia it got worse, didn’t it?’ he asks.

  ‘I love her more than anything in the world. But it was so hard.’

  ‘Hormonal changes can be so dramatic that they push mothers from a general anxiety to a more severe disorder. Family members don’t pick up on it because mothers appear to be fine for long periods of time.’

  ‘I understand what you’re telling me. But what now? How does that help me now? Or Mia? She’s still gone.’

  Dr Ari takes off his glasses and wipes his face with the palm of his hand. ‘But you are here. And you have to do everything you
possibly can to find out what happened.’

  ‘What if I hurt her? What then?’

  ‘Right now we are looking for her. Let’s not ask questions we don’t have the answers to.’

  ‘I should have tried harder,’ I say and cry again.

  ‘Estelle, you have to be aware of this sadness from here on out. A mild depression in childhood can turn into a full-blown depression after adolescence, and you were certainly predisposed to postpartum depression. Slipping into a psychosis could have been prevented.’ He clears his throat and I’ve a feeling he has something else to say. ‘We’re still in the infancy of brain research, we know there’s a common mechanism, but its nature is still unknown to us.’

  ‘Do we have to come back here again?’ I ask and look over at the front door of 517.

  ‘I doubt it. You made great progress today.’ He looks at me for a long time. ‘You seem to have something on your mind. Can I answer any questions for you?’

  ‘I was just wondering, I don’t understand this whole memory thing. The doctors told me I had memory loss because of my injuries and that it might take a long time for my memories to return. And some memories would never return, but the MRI didn’t show any brain damage. So what is all this … this scent,’ I point at the blanket in his hand, ‘and the moment in there, on the steps, how can it just come back to me? Where were those memories? I don’t understand.’

  ‘I think it’s safe to say that it’s impossible to untangle the entire ball of yarn that caused your amnesia. There was trauma, there was postpartum depression, psychosis, your injuries, and whatever other condition might have played a role. In my opinion you suffer mainly from dissociative amnesia.’

  ‘But you can’t say for sure?’

  ‘I don’t think we need to define it just yet, if at all. Dissociative amnesia is nothing more than a mental interruption or breakdown of your memories. You blocked out information that is too stressful or too dramatic to deal with. That’s the difference between dissociative and regular amnesia; dissociative means that your memories still exist but are deeply buried in your mind. Those memories usually resurface the moment they are triggered by something. Hence the scent trigger.’ He points at the blanket in the Ziploc bag. ‘If your brain was damaged, the memory would have been lost forever.’

  ‘So, in a way I’m lucky.’ I remember the doctor in the hospital indicating the tiny sliver of luck I had to be alive. ‘I’m lucky and this close,’ I say and hold up my fingers, ‘right?’

  ‘That’s the spirit.’

  Dr Ari motions to Oliver. He stands up, stretches and drops the Styrofoam cup in a nearby trashcan. Oliver gets in the van and turns the ignition key. I smell the chemical reaction of his skin’s melanin to the UV rays. My stomach contracts violently.

  ‘I’m going to be sick,’ I say and cover my mouth.

  ‘Here you go,’ Oliver says, suddenly at my side, shoving a paper bag in my hand.

  I take deep breaths with Oliver standing next to me in the open van door.

  I hear the sound of paper tearing and then a citrus scent drifts my way. I watch Oliver hold a wet wipe in front of the AC vent. Then he presses the cold wipe against my forehead.

  The lemon scent seems to drown out everything around me – the waft of onions from the hot dog stand, the exhaust from the van, the musty odor from the van’s AC – turning into the force of hands pressing the wipe to my forehead, allowing me to breathe. There’s another scent mixing with the lemon, earthy and sweet at the same time. It’s almost as sharp as pine, but not quite, more secret and not as obvious, as if the fragrance itself was clandestine, only meant for a chosen few. A scent as if it was cut straight from a hole in the ground, ripped from the earth itself.

  My heart is pounding in my ears, yet suddenly the edge is a safe place to be.

  Chapter 16

  Later, back in the parked van with the brownstone in view, Dr Ari takes a deep breath in, and rests his folded hands in his lap. ‘You found Mia’s blanket in the attic. Tell me what you did next.’

  ‘I don’t know why I’m so … so afraid.’ Afraid is not even the right word. Paralyzed maybe? No, paralyzed means incapable of movement. Transfixed? Yes, transfixed meaning motionless, spellbound in a way. But by what I cannot say.

  Why do I feel this way? As if I’m a wild rabbit, spellbound by the curved talons of an eagle. Something I can’t quite put my finger on, a complicit state of silence, an almost Manchurian conspiracy wall I feel I’m not allowed to climb.

  Like a promise I had made, a promise of silence.

  ‘Fear is an autonomic response, don’t allow it to distract you. You can’t get to the bottom of it unless you let it run its course. Just accept it, but don’t make it more than it is.’

  He pushes Mia’s blanket towards me. My hands move forward and then slightly hesitate, but I know that I have to search for all the jagged pieces of the puzzle. I grab the blanket and close my eyes. I enter the elevator, surprised that, with time, the image has turned into a perception of actually being there.

  I hold the blanket as if it is a relic, a sacred object. It still holds the aroma of Ariel and baby lotion, but more than its scent, energy travels through my fingertips, up my arms, and straight into my brain. Clutching the fabric tight, squeezing it like a wet rag, wringing it in an attempt to extract every single drop of water, and in my mind I reenter the brownstone, back to where I had found the blanket.

  Blanket in hand, I went back downstairs, where I found my door still unlocked and the building silent. There was a ringing in my head and my body started tingling, I broke out in a sweat. Then it all went dark.

  The first thing I became aware of was a melodious tolling of church bells. It surrounded me before I even opened my eyes. I listened for a while and realized it was St. Joseph’s across the street, summoning parishioners for Sunday Mass.

  The second thing I realized was that I was on lying the kitchen floor and I had pulled Mia’s blanket over my shoulders. It barely covered my upper body but the solace it gave me was boundless.

  The tile was cold, yet I remained still, waiting for the buzzing in my head to stop. As I picked off the few random pigeon feathers that stuck to my pants, I watched one rainbow-colored feather drift towards the wall next to the pantry, sticking to a narrow gap between the wall panel and the floor. Its downy barbs quivered in the draft, then it sucked the feather underneath the panel and it disappeared.

  I sat up on the tiled floor, blanket around my shoulders, and noticed the same persistent breeze that had sucked up the feather. The draft was so strong it made me shiver. I managed to get up off the ground, holding on to the countertop, but it took immense effort to stand up on my feet. My skull was buzzing like a beehive.

  The draft became stronger and colder, the closer I moved towards the panel. I had never noticed a draft around my feet before, a draft I should have been aware of by washing bottles in the island sink.

  The apartment’s walls, as in so many older row houses, were covered in wood paneling, partially for decorative purposes, but mostly solely decorative, not covering anything at all. There were alcoves, niches, false walls covering windows, doors leading to brick walls. There was even a door without any hardware covered in paint in the hallway. Neglecting those details probably saved money during the renovation process and I wasn’t sure just how many fake panels there were throughout the apartment.

  Maybe the panel the feather had disappeared underneath was one of those panels, just for show and not insulated properly.

  When I tapped my knuckles against the panel’s four corners, it produced a hollow sound. The skirting boards continued on both sides of the panel but were noticeably missing where the panel met the floor. Like the draft, I hadn’t noticed the missing floorboard before either. No, it wasn’t that I hadn’t noticed before, I was sure the skirting boards had been uniform all around the walls. I bent down and poked my fingers under the crack. The draft became even stronger.

  Moving around pr
oved more difficult than I imagined. My vision grew blurry, my legs were wobbly, and my tongue kept clinging to the roof of my mouth. I managed to get a cup from the cupboard and I downed three cups of tap water. I had to fight to keep it down and decided to wait before attempting to eat anything.

  When the pigeons outside my window started cooing, a recollection of the attic emerged, nebulous at first, then it came into stark focus. The notion of my jumping off the roof now seemed overly dramatic, silly almost, just another moment when illogical actions seemed rational and well thought out. What I knew for sure was I had to find my daughter who had been in the attic at some point and that I wasn’t crazy after all.

  I kept staring at the panel, the mismatched skirting boards. I kneeled down and tugged at the bottom of the panel where the draft was strongest. Nothing. I yanked the knob attached to the panel. It didn’t budge. I kept tugging, gently at first, then I gave it my all, using both my hands. After initial resistance, the panel creaked and screeched and popped out of its rectangular frame. I fell back, and the panel landed flat on the kitchen floor.

  I found myself staring into a compartment the size of a narrow door, its depth that of a pantry or a coat closet. The floorboards were the original hardwood boards, not porcelain tiles like the rest of the kitchen.

  And there it was. The shiny rainbow-like pigeon feather. There were remnants of construction debris, wood, and drywall, countless bugs, some flattened, and sticking to the floor, some on the outer edges still plump and stout, dusty, a battlefield of dead insects.