The Lost Girls

by Jessica Chiarella

  Andrea folds her hands on the table in front of her. Even Olive pays attention, seeing the seriousness of her posture.

  “I’m saying, maybe it’s time to shift your focus onto something that won’t take such a personal toll.”

  “I’m fine,” I reply, though my voice is threaded with a raspy note. “Don’t I look fine?”

  I address my question to Olive, who gives me a smile and claps her chubby hands in affirmation. She’s the only one who thinks so. I’m pretty sure I don’t look fine, still recovering from the open bar and wearing yesterday’s eye makeup. Wolfing tofu wings like a sleepwalker who has just awakened, ravenous.

  “I’m just saying,” I continue, “the Jane Doe fell in our lap. We weren’t even looking for Maggie. Think of what we might find if we actually looked.”

  “Fine,” Andrea says, though I can tell she’s just placating me. I know that this will not be the last time we discuss shifting our focus onto a different case. But I’ll take whatever little victory I can get, for now. “Then we need to find one lead. The most credible one, and start there. Do some research, pitch it to Lane.”

  “Good. Now, did I mention I didn’t get much sleep last night?” I ask, because my head is still throbbing a bit, despite the influx of food.

  Andrea ignores me.

  “If we start trying to tackle all of them at once, it’s going to look like we’re letting the mob direct the course of the show. We have to be deliberate about where we take this next, or the audience is going to drop.”

  “No sleep, actually. I got no sleep last night.”

  Andrea sets down her knife and fork, wiping her mouth on her napkin, and then leans forward, to the point where her overalls are dangerously close to brushing her eggs.

  “Marti,” she says, her voice so low it’s like she’s doing an Elizabeth Holmes impression. “I have an eight-month-old child who doesn’t sleep through the night and depends on constant sustenance from my tits. I’m not allowed to have coffee. And I’m not allowed to drink. So I’m going to need you to suck it up right now with your hangover and your one sleepless night, okay?”

  “Right, sure,” I reply, giving her a halfhearted thumbs-up. “So what theory are we thinking? Mafia lady?”

  I give Andrea a teasing grin, testing the waters. The Mafia theory is my personal favorite, from a woman who called four times, saying she was once married to a member of the Carlotti crime family. Saying Maggie looked just like the girl who was dating the youngest son of Vito Carlotti—il capo di tutti capi himself—back in 1998. Ignoring the fact that Maggie was definitely not commuting between Chicago and New York before she disappeared, the theory has a panache I like.

  “I’m being serious,” Andrea replies, unsmiling.

  “Yeah, well, serious is the guy who thinks my sister starred in a Ukrainian porn video he helped film back in 2005,” I reply. Because that’s the nightmare scenario right there, the one that drove my father into an early grave. Maggie getting into that car and being taken to a rest stop on I-94, forced into someone’s trunk or the bed of a truck. Then into a shipping container. Into a pipeline of girls just like her, facilitated by the burgeoning mainstream use of the internet, chattel to be rented out to vicious, voracious men.

  The sex trafficking theory is one that’s been cropping up more and more since the podcast went viral. It’s the most likely scenario, for a girl of her age, from her background, disappearing without a trace. That was the theory that pushed me from wine with dinner to vodka whenever I needed it. To stop my brain from moving. To keep me from imagining it.

  “And let me tell you,” I add, “after four days of looking through that shit? It’s no wonder Eric and I stopped having sex.”

  “Come on, you guys stopped having sex long before that,” Andrea replies. “But I get your point.”

  Olive starts to squawk from her high chair.

  “Is she hungry?” I ask.

  Andrea shakes her head. “Just fussy.”

  “Give her here,” I say, and Andrea lifts the little grump, handing her across the table to me. I sit her in my lap, kissing the downy hair at the crown of her head. Breathing deep, letting her presence chase all the darkness out of me.

  “So, fine. We need something more serious than Mafia lady,” Andrea says as I bounce Olive on my knee. “But maybe avoid anything that has us looking for a needle in . . . you know.”

  “In the dark web,” I say.

  “Right,” she replies, and I can hear the relief in her voice. Because I know that if there’s anything worse than imagining Maggie’s disappearing into a shipping container, it’s being the mother of a daughter, raising her with the knowledge that one day she will escape your grasp and the world will have her. And there will be nothing to do but hope she doesn’t get lost.

  “What about the runaway theory?” Andrea asks as Olive grips my hoodie’s drawstring and begins to gum the knot in its end. It’s the most popular theory behind sex trafficking, that Maggie ran from the cloistered, repressive wealth of her upbringing and disappeared into a world that would more readily accept her for who she was. The theory was bolstered by a report from a classmate named Lauren Price that she and Maggie had, on numerous occasions, had sex in the basement of Lauren’s house. They had even discussed running away together, she said, though neither of those claims had ever been substantiated. She did report that they’d broken up a year before Maggie’s disappearance, however, and had fallen out of touch, so the girl couldn’t provide any additional practical information about Maggie’s potential whereabouts.

  But the runaway theory is a compelling one, especially considering all the terrible alternative possibilities. And it’s made even more compelling by the fact that, in the weeks leading up to her disappearance, Maggie took large amounts of cash out of the checking account my parents had set up for her, totaling over six hundred dollars. No one knows what she did with the money, only that it wasn’t left among the rest of her things in her bedroom at our house.

  “Who’s the man in the car, then?” I ask. Because the runaway theory depends heavily on my getting that part of the story wrong. That there wasn’t a man driving that car. That Maggie was not afraid. That she did not tell me to run. And I, unfortunately, am not wrong about any of it.

  “Okay, so what if she was pregnant?”

  A riff on the runaway theory, and just as obvious in its naming. The argument that Maggie, despite being involved in a treacly high school–sweetheart relationship with a boy named Spencer Talbot at the time of her disappearance, had gotten pregnant by an older man. The man in the car.

  The theory sort of ends there, though. Because regardless of the likelihood that a teenager could get pregnant in the sex-ed desert of the nineties, it doesn’t explain why she dropped off the face of the earth after that. Which means that the pregnancy theory becomes the matricide theory, which leaves Maggie as dead as most of the others do.

  “It’s just basically ‘the man in the car killed her,’ ” I reply. “There’s no way she was afraid enough of disappointing our parents to run off to have a baby and then stay underground for all this time. Like, my mom’s scary, but she’s not that scary.” I think of the last conversation I had with my mother, the two of us shouting at each other over the phone. About my divorce. About my airing of our family secrets in public. I’ve taken the brunt of my mother’s anger and her grief, over the years. And if I—the accidental, late-in-life baby—am still standing, then Maggie, the golden child my mother planned her life around, would have been too.

  “It always comes back to the man in the car,” Andrea says, running her fingertips through her hair until they meet at the bun at the crown of her head. Andrea always plays with her hair when she’s feeling stymied. The problem here is that, well, I’m the problem. Me and my inability to remember anything specific about the man, or about the car. Other than the fact that I hadn’t eve
r seen either before.

  “So we look into anyone who has called or written us with a theory on who the man is?” Andrea asks.

  “I guess it’s a place to start.”

  Olive, who has no doubt realized she won’t be getting any food from the pull on my hoodie, starts to whimper on my lap. Within a moment, it’s a full-on wail. “Oh god,” I say, lifting the little girl and handing her across the table to Andrea. “DEFCON One.”

  “Yeah, she’s all cute and cuddly until she’s screaming in your face,” Andrea says, rolling her eyes. I can’t tell if it’s at Olive or at me.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  I intend to sleep the rest of the afternoon, even though I’ve promised Andrea that I’ll look through “the cranks,” as we’re calling them—the calls and emails from podcast listeners—before the production meeting next week. I’m working tonight though, and the last thing I can handle is tending bar on the little sleep I got on the flight home. The cranks will have to wait.

  Except, the dreams have begun again.

  She stands before me, as she was at sixteen. At my feet, something heavy or sharp. Just beyond us, in the darkness, a man. A man I do not recognize, whose face seems to shift the more I try to see it. He says nothing. He doesn’t have to say a word; I know what I am to do.

  I pick up the object at my feet. A piece of glass. A knife. A length of metal pipe. I put it to work. Cut her throat. Cave in her skull, soft as clay beneath the heavy crush of a brick. Tell her I have to. Tell her I have no choice. I have to save myself.

  I never wake from them suddenly. The dream is so thick around me, it takes a long moment for me to pull myself back to the surface. My hair wet, my bed too. My body going haywire, reacting to the dream like it’s an infection. Trying to burn it out.

  I’m groggy and disoriented, like I’m not where I’m supposed to be, even though I’m in my own apartment. Sometimes I get this feeling like I’m always facing the wrong direction, as if the life I should be living is oriented a different way from the life I’m living now. Never more than when I wake in this little apartment, my semiconscious mind instead expecting the condo I shared with Eric or—worse—the house I grew up in. As if my mind is trapped somewhere back in a younger version of myself, unable to comprehend the path my life has actually taken.

  I can’t sleep anymore. Not after one of the dreams. So I pull on a ratty old T-shirt and shorts, grab my bike from my entryway, and carry it down the stairs. I head south on Broadway, the Saturday-evening traffic light, the air almost cool, the sky tinted orange with sunset. Skirting lingering cars, waiting to pick up the afternoon bar hoppers and the early dinner crowd. I pray for a breeze off the lake, something to lift the sweat from my skin as I ride, but there’s nothing but stale, briny air around me. That’s the thing about Chicago—fall air is like taking in a mouthful of cold sky, and in winter, in certain parts of the Loop, the air is redolent of chocolate from a nearby candy company. But in the summer, the whole city reeks of exhaust and asphalt and sewer gas. It’s almost enough to make you wish for a chill.

  There’s always an evening cohort at my gym, even on weekends. Shift workers, mostly. Blowing off steam, like me, before going in. Or decompressing after a Saturday spent on the clock, watching other people enjoy themselves. It’s a boxing gym, very old-school, mostly men, not really what I’m used to. Still, it’s better than nothing. I lock my bike out front and duck inside, where it’s humid with sweat and the blare of hip-hop gives every movement a rhythm. I wave to Randy at the front desk and go to the mats to warm up. Just a few jumping jacks, some push-ups, mostly upper-body stuff, since I biked here. Then I wrap both hands and take my place at the heavy bag.

  My fingers ring out in tingling pain with the first connections of my fists with the tight-stretched canvas. Then my arms, waking up, adding their protests bit by bit, as I get into a rhythm. Fast. I have to be fast, because I’ll never be strong enough.

  That’s a lesson you learn quickly, as a girl. It’s why I only box to keep fit, and to keep my edge against an opponent. Boxing isn’t much use to me otherwise—mostly because it’s a sport designed for men. Its rules even the playing field, advantage those with more weight and upper-body strength. It rewards the people with the most reach, the most power, when standing two feet from their opponent and trading punches. I only started coming here because it’s close to my place in Uptown and because I can’t afford my old gym anymore.

  When I was with Eric, I used to go to Bucktown Jiu-Jitsu for training. The serious kind. To practice joint locks and chokeholds, to grapple on the mat, where the referee of a boxing match would never allow the fight to go. In a boxing ring, I don’t have a prayer against any of the guys working out around me. That’s why the sport has weight classes—put a heavyweight into the ring with someone my size, and you’re not going to get much of a fight.

  But take the rules away, take the fight to the mat and let me use speed and leverage and technique, and I could have them tapping out no matter their size if I’m fast enough. If I’ve practiced enough. Out in the world, being able to punch someone twice my size does me no good. There is no referee to determine if the fight is fair. Out in the real world, I have little hope of being able to do actual damage to a man who seriously outweighs me, no matter what the movies say. But can I take him by surprise, buy myself a few moments to run? That, I know how to do. Still, I think as I punch the heavy bag, it does feel good to just fucking hit something, sometimes.

  * * *

  * * *

  I SPAR A little with one of the smaller guys in the gym and then grow tired—as I always do—of not being able to get close and sweep his legs out from under him. There is no moment of triumph for me in this. Even landing a punch is unsatisfactory. I want him helpless, not mildly bruised. I want to imagine that I could escape him, if I had to. If it came to that.

  When I’m sufficiently wrung out, I turn to find a familiar man watching me from the side of the room. Coleman. I figured it was only a matter of time before I ran into someone from my old life, but still, seeing him out of context brings with it a rush of disorientation. The last time I saw Coleman, I had sex in the upstairs bathroom of his town house with a member of his dinner party’s catering staff. I hope beyond hope he doesn’t know about it.

  He tips an imaginary hat in my direction when I catch him staring and approaches as I step out of the ring.

  “I didn’t recognize you at first,” he says, motioning to my short hair. “It’s been a minute.”

  “Yeah,” I reply. Coleman, on the other hand, looks exactly the same. Broad and short, like most of the guys at this place. He is a guy who loves MMA and his job in finance equally, because he’s the sort who always needs to feel like he’s going into battle with someone, even when he’s wearing a suit. I wonder how much Eric told Coleman about our separation. The two of them never struck me as particularly close—no more than casual work buddies. But still, perhaps Eric might have confided something, even in passing. I wonder how Coleman must see me now.

  “How’s work?” I ask.

  “Good. We’ve been killing it this quarter,” he says, as if he’s relaying important information. “And Cindy’s pregnant. Due in October.”

  “Congratulations,” I reply. “You must be so excited.”

  “Yeah.” He nods. “I asked Eric to be the godfather. I thought, you know, it might be good for him.”

  “That’s really nice of you,” I reply. I guess Eric and Coleman are closer than I thought.

  Or perhaps Coleman overheard the little tiff Eric and I got into at that party last year, over whether I should have ordered a gin and tonic at the bar. Eric, being Patron Saint of Perpetual Responsibility, felt the need to quietly remind me of the statistics regarding fertility and alcohol consumption. At any other point in our marriage I might have rolled my eyes and acquiesced, if only to keep the peace around Eric’s work bud
dies. Or looked him right in the eyes as I sipped my gin, daring him to get angry with me.

  But this wasn’t any other point in our marriage. This was two weeks after the Jane Doe showed up in the morgue. After I’d given the police my DNA, and then gone out for a run late that night and fucked our favorite bartender in the storeroom of our favorite bar. After I’d spent days lulling myself to sleep at night thinking of Detective Olsen and the clutch of attraction I’d felt when I met him at the police station. The man whose job it was to care about what happened to my sister. Whose job it was to try to find her.

  In the days since Olsen had called to tell me that my DNA was not a match for the Jane Doe, I’d begun to realize that, no matter what I tried, I couldn’t go back to the way I’d been before. By the night of Coleman’s party, everything I’d been keeping at bay to appear normal—to act like the good wife, the patient daughter, the devoted, resilient sister—was slipping out through seams I’d once stitched so tightly. And Eric hadn’t noticed yet. He didn’t realize that I had spent the past two weeks wild and invincible with grief. Eight years old again, but no longer allowed to scream at the top of my lungs, to kick, to drop to the floor. If he’d known, he never would have insisted on going to the party that night. If I’d told him what had happened, he would certainly have watched me more closely.

  But I hadn’t told him. And he didn’t notice. So instead, I handed him my gin and tonic and went out to the back patio to bum a cigarette from the group of waiters taking a smoke break.

  I remember letting my posture slacken as I joined them, abandoning the air of age and respectability that came with putting on an expensive floral dress and attending a catered cocktail party with my husband. Trying to let them know that I was really one of them, underneath it all. After all, I’d bartended for three years in college to pay for jiu-jitsu, because my mother wouldn’t have dreamed of financing something as unbecoming as martial arts training.