The Year of Fog (10 page)

21

D
AY THIRTY-THREE
. Her name is Amanda Darnell, and she tells me to relax. She offers me coffee and doughnuts. The doughnuts are still warm, and the sweet smell that fills the room reminds me of Saturday mornings in Alabama when I was a kid, when my mother would take me and Annabel to the Krispy Kreme on Government Boulevard to watch rows of doughnuts, dripping glaze, glide over the big silver rollers.

“They just opened a Krispy Kreme near my house in Daly City,” Amanda says. “I’ve gained five pounds in two months. Now they’re putting in an In-N-Out Burger, Lord help me.” She’s dressed in jeans and a red turtleneck, with feather earrings dangling to her shoulders. She begins by asking me what I do, where I grew up, whether or not I like to cook.

“I’m nothing special in the kitchen,” I confess, “but I do make these drop biscuits with gravy that would drive you out of your mind. The trick is the crumbled bacon. You mix the bacon right in with the dough.”

“I could go for that right now.”

We’re sitting side by side in comfortable chairs, and her sketchbook is on the table in front of her, opened to a clean white page. She has a plastic case full of chalk, pencils, and erasers. This room in the police station is a warm green color, filled with leafy plants in ceramic pots, but no pictures on the walls.

“Do you cook?” I ask.

“I make a decent chicken pot pie.”

It feels good to be talking about something as mundane as cooking, good to be treated like a regular person, not a victim or a criminal. Still, there’s no denying what I’m here for. I find myself looking at her hands, the long pink nails and turquoise rings.

“So,” I say, trying to sound casual, “how does this work?”

“We’re going to play Mr. Potato Head.” She lays a slim book on the table between us. “The FBI Facial Identification Catalog,” she explains. The book contains hundreds of photos of chins and cheekbones and eyes, noses and ears and heads. “We’ll do the woman first, then we’ll move on to the guy. Let’s start with the head shape. If anything looks similar, point it out.”

I flip through a few pages, past square jaws and short foreheads, egg shapes and circles and ovals.

“There,” I say, pointing to a woman with a narrow face and high forehead.

Amanda starts to draw. “Talk to me. You’re the boss here. Tell me when something looks off.” We move from the head shape to the eyes, deep-set with slightly down-turned corners. “Like this?” she says.

“That’s the right shape, but they were farther apart.”

From there we go to the cheekbones, not prominent, and the nose—narrow, with a slightly rounded tip. She draws quickly, glancing up every few seconds to see my reaction. She draws and erases, softens lines by smudging them with her thumb, leans forward to blow eraser bits from the page. A face begins to emerge, recognizable, and my memory becomes clearer as Amanda draws. Little things that have nothing to do with the woman’s face return to me: an empty red stroller parked beside the information booth at the Beach Chalet, a take-out box sitting on the information desk, an overturned tree in the scale model of Golden Gate Park.

When we come to the ears, though, I’m at a loss. I can’t remember if they were small or big, protruding or flat, and whether or not she was wearing earrings.

“That’s normal,” Amanda says. “Most people have trouble with the ears.”

The hair is easy: blonde, straight, coarse. Amanda adds shading to the face, then says, “Show me anything that doesn’t look right. Take your time.”

Two hours into the process, we have a completed sketch. “That’s her,” I say, stunned by the accuracy of the picture. “You’re really good. Did you study art in college?”

“I took some drawing classes in school, but my major was psychology. It’s not about art so much as it is about listening, asking the right questions. You’re not working with your imagination, you’re working with someone else’s memory.”

She takes a different book out of her bag and lays it on the table—the same type of catalog, but this one is filled with men’s faces. An hour and a half later, we have a second sketch. That day at the beach, the man in the yellow van looked so normal, indistinct from dozens of other surfers. Is it the effect of the sketch or is it these long weeks of angry, fearful waiting that make the same face seem less friendly, somehow untrustworthy? The features that appealed to me—his lazy eye and windblown hair, his high cheekbones and full mouth—now seem somehow suspect. Looking at his face, the day comes rushing back: the cold sand, the white fog, the hope I felt walking hand in hand with Emma. And then the panic, the sense of the world turning inside out.

“What happens now?” I ask.

“I’ll give these to Detective Sherburne, and he’ll make copies for his FBI liaison, who will distribute them to FBI offices all over the country. You’ll get copies, too, of course.”

That night at my place, unable to sleep, I take a snapshot of Emma from the photo album, sit down on the sofa, and attempt to draw her. I start with the shape of the face—wide and rounded—then move on to the big eyes with their long dark lashes, the upturned nose, the small mouth. I’m working on one of her errant eyebrows when I stop cold, unable to complete another stroke. At two a.m. I take four sleeping pills. When I wake the next morning on the sofa, my legs are cramped, and my head feels swollen and heavy. The sketch lies in my lap, the poorly drawn features so blurred it’s impossible to tell whether the sketch is of a boy or of a girl. It looks nothing at all like Emma. I wonder how long it would take for my memory of her face to fade, how long before I could look at a badly done sketch and not see the inaccuracies.

22

T
ELL ME
something I don’t know,” I once said to Jake. We had been dating for three months. I was in love, but hadn’t yet told him. We were having dinner at Foreign Cinema, sitting outside under the big white canopy, a heat lamp humming over our table. We had started the evening with oysters on the half shell, and were well into a bottle of chardonnay.
Last Tango in Paris
was playing on the rear wall of the restaurant, a young, confident Marlon Brando dancing in a crowded bar. Emma was at home with the babysitter.

“Long before the Giants, there were the San Francisco Seals,” Jake said. “For a single season in 1914, they played at Ewing Field, west of Masonic. The place was so foggy that, during one game, a mascot had to be sent to the outfield to tell Elmer Zachar, a player for the Oakland Commuters, that the inning was over.”

“Interesting,” I said. “But I meant something about yourself.”

“That’s more difficult.”

“Think.”

“Okay, I was the runner-up in the National Rubik’s Cube Championship, 1984.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

“Why haven’t you mentioned this before?”

“What did you expect? Hi, my name is Jake, and twenty years ago I was good with a Rubik’s Cube?”

“If I were you, I’d slip it into conversation every time I got the chance.”

“The cube just requires patience, and a system. Do you know how many possible combinations it has?” Jake wrote a number on his napkin: 43,252,003,274,489,856,000. The digits got smaller at the edge of the napkin where he was running out of space.

“How do you even say that number?”

“Beats me.”

“Then how do you remember it?”

“I don’t remember it as a whole. I remember it by numerical units, each of which has some meaningful association. For example, 43 is the age my father was when he died, 252 is the number of career home runs for Bobby Murcer, and so on.”

“I’ve never solved a Rubik’s Cube. Ever.”

“If I locked you in a room with just a Rubik’s Cube and food and water, you couldn’t help but solve it eventually. It’s simply a matter of mathematic probabilities.”

“The year you were runner-up, how long did it take you?”

“Twenty-six point nine seconds. The world record now is 13.22 seconds. Finnish kid named Anssi Vanhala.” He speared a piece of squid and offered it across the table.

“If you’re so good with math, figure this one out. How many minutes do you think it will take for us to pay the bill and get back to your place?”

“This is only a rough estimate, but I’d say about thirty-four. Plus five to pay the babysitter and get her out the door.” He raised his hand to signal the waiter.

The more I got to know Jake, the more sense it made that he’d been so good at the Rubik’s Cube. He approaches everything in his life as a task that will ultimately be completed, as long as he follows through. Everything is methodical and driven by logic. Maybe his belief that the right amount of persistence and planning will allow him to solve any problem accounts for his confidence. This time, though, his plan is falling apart. Five weeks, twenty thousand flyers, a couple dozen radio interviews, 247 volunteers, two “person of interest” sketches—and still, we are no closer to Emma. Lisbeth has yet to be found, and Jake has all but lost hope that Emma might be with her.

Last night, I went to Jake’s house with my bag packed to stay over. I had just been to Channel 4 with the sketches of the couple from the van, but the producer for the six o’clock news said the program was full. It was my third attempt to get them to run the sketches, to no avail. Though she didn’t say it, I think the producer believes that Emma is old news.

“What’s that?” Jake said, eyeing the bag.

“I haven’t spent the night in a while. I thought—”

“Tonight’s not a good time.”

“There’s not going to be a good time.” I took off my coat and laid it across a chair. “I don’t want to lose you, too,” I said. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew they were the wrong words. I suddenly felt ashamed of the bag, ashamed I’d thought that I could make him forget, for a few minutes at least, how I’d wrecked his life.

“I’m going out,” he said.

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come over to my place later?”

He didn’t say anything, just pulled on a jacket and opened the door.

“Talk to me. I need to know what you’re feeling.”

He was standing in the open door, one foot inside the house, one foot on the porch. “I’m feeling like my life is over,” he said, his back to me. “I’m feeling like I’ve done everything I know to do, and none of it has worked. I’m feeling like, whatever my baby is going through—if she’s even still alive—I can’t do a goddamn thing to help her.”

He turned to face me. “When all of this first started, I couldn’t get one thought out of my head—the thought that when I found who did this, I was going to kill him. I vowed to make him pay. The rage helped keep me going. But now it’s been more than a month, and I don’t have any energy left for rage. I never should have left that weekend, and I never should have given you permission to take her to Ocean Beach. It was a goddamn stupid thing to do, for what? So I could go let some old buddy who’d gotten a divorce cry on my shoulder? And I keep making these crazy speculations, going back further and further in time, thinking of ways it could have been avoided. There was a moment when I even blamed the whole thing on Sean, because he cheated on his wife, which led to her leaving him, which led to my being gone that day. But I’m the one who introduced them in the first place, twenty years ago. It’s this endless cycle of thinking what I could have done differently, and it all comes down to one thing: I should never have left town.”

“You couldn’t have known. No one could anticipate something like this.”

He moved so that his face was in the lamplight, and I realized he had a tan. A very dark tan, the kind construction workers get. I could see the line at the neck of his shirt where the tan ended, giving way to his natural skin color, which was pallid in comparison. There was a split second of disconnect when I couldn’t figure it out, this healthy brown tan that somehow made him look younger, despite the strain and lack of sleep. Then I realized it was because he’d been spending so much time outside, wandering up and down the streets for hours at a shot, searching.

“No,” he said, “but I should have been there. So tell me what I’m supposed to do. Do I kill myself? Or do I keep living like this for the next fifty years, hating myself, envying every parent I see on the street with their kids? Do you know what goes through my mind when I see girls Emma’s age? I think,
I wish it had been her instead of Emma
. I hate myself so much for thinking it, it makes me physically ill, but I can’t help it. I wish it was any other kid.”

I flinched as his voice rose, felt something deep in my gut tightening. The Jake I used to know would have never talked this way. But the Jake I used to know was gone, and this terrible transformation was my fault.

“You look horrified,” he said, “and you should. The kids at school, friends’ kids whom I’ve watched grow up. I go to church and pray, and even while I’m praying my mind is engaged in these calculations, wishing it was any other kid, any ten or twenty kids, instead of Emma. What kind of person does that make me?”

He looked at me for a few seconds, then turned and left, slamming the door behind him. The house was quiet and cold; a faint odor of garbage emanated from the kitchen. I pulled the curtain aside and watched him drive away. I waited until his car had rounded the corner, then went up to Emma’s room. She and I used to play this game where we’d sit in her walk-in closet and pretend it was a spaceship. Together, we came up with an elaborate set of rules for the ship: as soon as we closed the door behind us, time came to a standstill; we ceased to age, and we no longer needed food, water, or air. By closing our eyes, we were able to see into the future. In this way we solved mysteries and grew famous throughout the world. I went into the closet, shut the door, and tried our old trick. I closed my eyes and concentrated, imagining myself into a future when Emma would sit there with me. In this future she is the same age as she was on the day she disappeared. In this future she has not changed, nor has Jake. In this future things are just fine, and we are a normal family, leading ordinary lives.