The Year of Fog (2 page)

3

I
WILL RETURN
again and again to that moment. I will keep a notebook in which I record the details. There will be poorly done sketches, graphs of time and motion, page after page on which I attempt to recover the past. I will pretend that memory is reliable, that it does not erode as quickly and completely as the brittle lines of an Etch-a-Sketch. I will tell myself that, buried somewhere in the intricate maze of my mind, there is a detail, a clue, some tiny lost thing that will lead me to Emma.

Later, they will want to know the exact moment I noticed she was missing. They will want to know whether I saw anyone unusual on the beach, whether I heard anything in the moments before or after she disappeared. They—the police, the reporters, her father—will ask the same questions again and again, staring into my eyes with desperation, as if by repetition they might make me remember, as if by force of will they can conjure clues where there are none.

This is what I tell them, this is what I know: I was walking on the beach with Emma. It was cold and very foggy. She let go of my hand. I stopped to photograph a seal pup, then glanced up toward the Great Highway. When I looked back, she was gone.

The only person to whom I will tell the entire story is my sister, Annabel. Only my sister will know I wasted ten seconds on a sand crab, five on a funeral procession. Only my sister will know I wanted Emma to see the dead seal, that in the moment before she disappeared, I was scheming to make her love me. For others, I will choose my words carefully, separating the important details from misleading trivialities. For them, I will present this version of the truth: there is a girl, her name is Emma, she is walking on the beach. I look away, seconds pass. When I look back she is gone.

This single moment unfolds like a flower in a series of time-lapse photographs, like an intricate maze. I stand at the labyrinth’s center, unable to see which paths lead to dead ends, which one to the missing child. I know I must trust memory to lead me. I know I have one chance to get it right.

The first story I tell, the first clue I reveal, will determine the direction of the search. The wrong detail, the wrong clue, will inevitably lead to confusion, while the right clue leads to a beautiful child. Should I tell the police about the postman in the parking lot, the motorcycle, the man in the orange Chevelle, the yellow van? Or is it the seal that matters, the hearse, the retaining wall, the wave? How does one distinguish between the relevant and the extraneous? One slip in the narrative, one mistake in the selection of details, and everything disintegrates.

4

P
I TIMES
radius squared equals the area of a circle. Time is a continuum, stretching forward and back infinitely. I learned these things in school.

In a ninth-grade classroom at Murphy High School, Dr. Thomas Swayze, an exhilarating and shady character who was rumored to have received his doctorate through the mail, drew a giant circle on the chalkboard. On the outer rim of the circle and on a straight line drawn from the midpoint to the circle’s edge, he scribbled numbers and formulas. His biceps flexed, straining the white sleeve of his T-shirt. “Radius, diameter, circumference,” he said, his FM radio voice inciting in me sweaty adolescent desires. He turned to face the classroom and rolled the gleaming white cone of chalk from palm to palm, looking straight at me.

The sun glared through a long row of windows, turning the copper hair of the girl in front of me to flame; she smelled like Juicy Fruit gum. My hand lay on the desktop in a pool of burning light; all around my thumbnail were flecks of blood where I had chewed the skin to shreds. In my head, a steady, maddening hum. Dr. Swayze turned toward the blackboard. Some hidden object formed a faded and perfect circle on the back pocket of his blue jeans.

“And the greatest of these is area,” he said. My knees slid apart, and I could feel little pools of sweat gathering on the plastic seat beneath my thighs.

Years before, Mrs. Monk, my third-grade teacher, had moved the hands on a giant cardboard clock and extolled the virtues of time. Seconds were grains of sand, she said. Minutes were pebbles. Hours were the bricks of which past, present, and future are made. She talked of days and years, decades, centuries. She talked of the millennium, when we would all be grown. She opened her big arms wide and whispered the word
eon
. In our portable classroom, the air conditioner sputtering mildly against Mobile’s April heat, Mrs. Monk, teacher of the year for 1977, preached and glowed and sweated.

I sat at my wooden desk, looking up at that huge circle with its eternally trapped hands, and cried. She came over to me and laid warm, damp fingers on my neck. “Abby, what’s wrong?” she asked. I leaned into her ample, motherly waist, buried my face in deep folds of polyester, and confessed, “I don’t understand time.” It wasn’t the clock itself that confounded me, the half-past and quarter-till, the five-of and ten-after, but rather the essential nature of time. I did not have the words to explain this to Mrs. Monk.

What disturbed me most were the lost stretches between bedtime and waking, those dark hours when my mind went on fantastic and terrible journeys. I knew time was a place where one could be lost, a place where bliss or horror might go on and on, though when I woke, my mother would look the same, my sister Annabel would not have aged, and my father would get up and put on his suit and go to work as if nothing had changed. I believed I lived in a different world than they, that my family slept while I traveled. I felt invested with responsibility, as if I had been chosen to shoulder a burden for my entire family.

Mrs. Monk’s voice stayed with me, and long after I had learned to tell time I was still disturbed by the clock’s steady, unstoppable rhythm. Sitting in Dr. Swayze’s class, looking at the dull chrome clock on the wall above the blackboard, I wished there were some way to make it stop, to make the days last longer.

“How do we measure the area of a circle?” Dr. Swayze asked.

I imagine that the circle begins as a cosmic pinpoint, small as the body of a child. The child is stooped on the beach, reaching for a sand dollar. A tall figure appears in the fog. A hand clamps over the child’s mouth, a strong arm lifts her up. With each step the stranger takes, the circle widens. With each second, the area of possibility grows.

Where is the child? The answer lies within a maddening equation: pi times radius squared.

5

T
HE ROOM
is small, with hard plastic chairs and a concrete floor. In the corner there’s an odd touch, placed here perhaps by a secretary or thoughtful wife—a mosaic end table and pretty lamp. The bulb clicks and hums as a moth flutters beneath the shade. A large metal clock ticks off the seconds. Jake is in another room, behind a closed door, strapped to some contraption. The polygrapher is asking him questions, monitoring his heart rate, watching for signs of a hidden motive, a carefully concealed lie.

“We must first eliminate the family,” Detective Sherburne said last night. “Nine times out of ten, it’s the mother, or father, or both.” He watched my eyes when he said this, waiting for me to flinch; I didn’t.

“I’m not the mother,” I said. “Not even the stepmother. Not yet. The mother picked up and left three years ago. Are you looking for her?”

“We’re considering all possibilities.”

The clock is ticking, the circle is widening, and I am waiting my turn.

Cops stand around the station, singly or in pairs. They sip coffee from Styrofoam cups, shift from one foot to the other, talk quietly, making private jokes. One stands with a hand on his gun, the palm closed gently over the metal, as if the gun itself is an extension of his own body. Yesterday, Jake raced home from Eureka, where he was visiting a friend for the weekend. We spent the night in the station filling out forms, answering questions, going over every detail. Now it’s eight a.m. Twenty-two hours have passed. While I sit here, waiting, who is searching?

It’s no secret that the longer a child is missing, the more difficult it is to find her. Danger grows by the second. Time is the kidnapper’s greatest friend, the family’s most formidable enemy. With each passing minute, the kidnapper moves farther away in some indiscernible direction, and the area that must be searched, the diameter of possibility, grows.

Yesterday afternoon, Sherburne arrived at the Beach Chalet within ten minutes of the first squad car and immediately took charge. Now, he works at his desk, clad in a pale blue shirt and odd, iridescent tie, surely a gift that he feels obliged to wear. I imagine him at home, getting ready for work amid the domestic chaos. I imagine a happy wife, a couple of very clean children. There’s something comforting about his presence. He reminds me of Frank Sinatra, with his broad forehead and immaculate haircut, his sloping blue eyes. He moves with a kind of old-fashioned grace.

I catch his eye. He holds up a hand with fingers spread and mouths the words “Five minutes.” He reaches for his coffee, lifts it to his mouth, sips, and sets it down again. Six more seconds have passed. Say Emma is in a car, going 60 miles per hour. In 6 seconds a car moving at 60 miles per hour can travel 170-something yards. Square that and multiply it by pi. In the time it took him to take that sip of coffee, the search area broadened by more than 870,000 square feet. If each sip is another 870,000 square feet and if there are 100 sips in a cup, I wonder how large the circle will be when he is finished, and how many cups he would have to drink to expand this circle around the globe.

I consider all the possibilities of human bodies in motion. Did the kidnapper take Emma by the hand? Did he pick her up? If the latter, then what is the length of his stride? How many feet can he cover in a minute? And how far did he go on foot? How many yards was it to his vehicle? Did she struggle, and, if so, would this have slowed him down? Does he try to appease her when she’s hungry?

I imagine a van stopped at a diner on some dusty highway. Inside the diner sit a shadowy figure and a girl. They are eating breakfast. Perhaps he wants to make her trust him, so the girl is having chocolate chip pancakes with an unhealthy dose of syrup, maybe even chocolate milk. Would Emma know to eat slowly in order to stall their departure? Take your time, I think, willing the message telepathically through the void. Chew each bite carefully. A song comes to me from summer camp in the Carolinas when I was an unhappy member of Girls in Action: “Give each bite fifty chews and follow with a sip of juice….” During those minutes in the diner, they are not moving in any direction; the clock is still, the circle remains static.

This is not the only possibility. The police are already leaning toward a theory of drowning.

Yesterday, not long after the police arrived, the Coast Guard boat appeared. I stood on the beach answering questions, watching the boat plow through the freezing water. Overhead, an orange chopper came swooping in from the north. Its nose tipped toward the ocean, and the loud thwack-thwack of the blades reminded me of movies about Vietnam. Hours later, as evening pressed in, the Coast Guard boat disappeared. The ocean was blue-black beneath a darker sky, and the wind had picked up, pushing the fog eastward. As the sand cut into my face and neck, I worried about Emma in her sweatshirt, not warm enough for this kind of wind. I hoped she had worn socks, but I couldn’t remember.

At some point Jake arrived. I don’t remember how it happened—only that for the longest time he wasn’t there, and then, suddenly, he was. Cruiser lights flashed red and blue over the dark beach. There was the strong creosote smell of a bonfire downwind. A few surfers were coming in, their bodies slick and seal-like in black wet suits. The police questioned them one by one.

Eventually, someone from the Coast Guard approached us. His uniform looked neatly pressed despite the fact he’d been working all day. “There’s not much we can do in the dark,” he said. “We’ll start again early in the morning.”

“If she’s out there,” Jake asked, “what are your chances of finding her?”

The Coast Guard man looked down, dug the toe of his shoe into the sand. “Hard to tell, depends on the tides. Sometimes, after a drowning, the body will wash up on shore, sometimes not.”

“Emma’s terrified of water,” I said, looking to Jake for confirmation. “She wouldn’t have gone near it.”

Sherburne turned to me. The pages of his yellow legal pad flapped in the wind.

I explained how I’d recently taken Emma to the birthday party of a bossy girl named Melissa. Screaming children played Marco Polo in a yellow-tiled pool in Millbrae, while Emma sat cross-legged on a lounge chair, terrorizing a ladybug that had fallen into her root beer float. “She refused to go in the pool,” I said. I could see Emma in her blue bathing suit, sitting there, clear as a snapshot. Every now and then she’d squint, glance up at the glittering pool, and move her foot by a fraction, as if she might get up her nerve and go in, but she never did. In the car on the way home, when I asked if she’d had fun, she propped her skinny feet on the dashboard and said, “I don’t care for that Melissa.”

Sherburne looked at me in a pitying way, as if to say this was no kind of proof. But from the way he lowered his head and put a hand on Jake’s shoulder, I could tell he wanted to believe me.

“She’s a really smart kid,” I said, desperate to make him understand. “If I thought for a second she’d get anywhere near the water, I wouldn’t have let go of her hand.”

Jake turned away from me then, toward the ocean, and I realized that some tiny part of him was actually considering it, that somewhere in his deeply rational mind this idea was taking hold as a minute but distinct possibility: Emma might have drowned.

“I’ve got two kids,” Sherburne said. “I’m going to do everything I can.”

Now, Jake emerges through a door, head bowed. I touch his shoulder as we cross paths. He jerks as if he has been stung, then looks at me, his eyes red and swollen. With obvious effort he moves his hand in my direction, clasps my fingers, and lets go.

“How could you?” he said, moments after hearing the news. “God, Abby, how could you?” It was on the phone, long-distance to Eureka; his voice was shaky, he was crying. Now, I can see in his face that it’s an effort for him not to say it again—to repeat it over and over, an angry refrain. And I’m thinking,
How could I?
The guilt is a physical sensation, a constant, sickening pain.

The polygrapher stands in the doorway, hands on his hips, smiling as casually as a friendly neighborhood salesman. “Norm Dubus,” he says, shaking my hand. “Ready?”

The room is blank and white and very warm. A space heater beneath the window buzzes, its coils glowing red. A smell of sweat and burned coffee. Norm shuts the door behind us and motions for me to sit down. He loops cords around my chest, tells me to sit up straight, and adjusts the height of the chair so my feet are flat on the floor.

“Relax. I’m going to ask you a few questions.”

On the table in front of him is a legal pad, and beside it a gold machine with a needle. He flips a switch and the machine begins to hum. The needle starts moving, scratching four flat blue lines across the paper. The questions, at first, are mundane:

Is your name Abigail Mason?

Were you born in Alabama?

Did you attend the University of Tennessee?

Is your current place of residence 420 Arkansas, Unit 3, San Francisco, California?

He records answers on his pad, checks the needle mark, makes notations. After a while, the tone of the questions changes.

Have you and Jake been arguing lately?

Do you have children?

Do you want children?

Did you ever fight with Emma?

Norm’s hair is glossy black, except for a couple of gray strands above the ears. He has purplish spots around his hairline, and he smells like green apples. He must have just dyed his hair in the last day or two, possibly even that morning.

Half an hour has passed since the polygraph began.

Have you ever punished Emma?

Do you know where Emma is?

Did you have anything to do with her disappearance?

Did you lose your temper?

Did you drown her?

Did you kill Emma?

As the session comes to a close, I fall apart. Norm offers me a tissue and leans over to detach the monitors from my pulse points. The sweet apple scent of his shampoo grows stronger. “Emma loves applesauce,” I find myself saying. He lifts an eyebrow, smiles in a distracted way, and an absurd jingle rolls through my head, the sort of phonic litany one memorizes in kindergarten.
A is for apple, A is for Adam, A is for Abraham.

“We’re done here,” Norm says. “You may go.” Then, more gently, “It’s routine. Just something we have to do.”

“I know,” I say.

A is for Anywhere.

Outside the police station, a reporter for Channel 7 is waiting with her cameraman. Jake looks directly into the camera and speaks into the woman’s outstretched microphone. “If you have Emma, please let her go. Just leave her in a public place. Walk away. No one has to know who you are.”

The reporter waves the microphone in my face. Her makeup has a shiny plastic look, and her lip liner extends slightly beyond the natural edges of her lips. “What is your relationship to the child?”

“I’m her father’s fiancée.”

The woman presses herself between me and Jake. “Is the wedding still on?”

“I just want to find my daughter,” he says.

She barrages Jake with more questions, never pausing long enough to get a complete answer. “How do you feel? Where is Emma’s mother? Do you know who might have done this?” I know she’s looking for the perfect sound bite—an outpouring of grief, a statement implicating the mother, the mention of a creepy neighbor or crazy uncle—anything to make her story more interesting.

Jake fields her questions calmly, professionally. Not once does he show impatience or break down into tears. He’s made for such moments of crisis, this sturdy Californian who is always in command. His great-great-great-grandfather was a 49er of the gold-panning kind; his father was a 49er as well, a football hero whose name still gets mentioned in the sports page, a bigger-than-life talent who died in his early forties, wasted by alcohol. Jake played football in high school and was pretty good, but he happily gave up the sport when his father died. Still, there is something of the football player’s swagger in him, a good-natured confidence that never fails to win people over.

Watching him, I know that he will play well on TV. The public will admire his air of gentle sobriety, his thick, wavy hair that is always slightly out of control, the full lower lip he bites when contemplating a question, the subtle glasses that make him look like a quiet intellectual. They will like the dimpled boyishness of his smile, the way he glances down at his feet when anyone pays him a compliment. I think of the television audience, watching us and judging, the way I have done in better times.

We drive to Jake’s house at Thirtieth and Lawton. There, another reporter is waiting. Jake pauses to make a statement pleading for Emma’s safe return. Once inside, we close the curtains and stand in the dark living room, not speaking and not touching, just standing, arms at our sides, face to face. Emma’s things are scattered around the room: on the coffee table, a magic wand fashioned from tinfoil; in a basket by the stairs, a pot holder she was making for her teacher; beneath the couch, the red ballet slippers she liked to wear around the house.

I lean into his chest and put my arms around him. We’ve always fit best this way, standing up, my head reaching just to his sternum, his arms wrapped around me in a way that makes me feel protected. But he doesn’t embrace me this time. Instead, he pats me on the shoulder—once, twice, three times—like an acquaintance at a funeral.

“I’m so sorry,” I say.

He lets his hand drop to his side. “I know, it’s not your—”

But he can’t say it’s not my fault, can’t say he doesn’t blame me, because it is, and he does.

He reaches behind his back to unclasp my hands, then goes upstairs, into Emma’s bedroom, and shuts the door behind him. Bedsprings creak, and his sobs carry down through the floorboards. I think of Emma’s bed, the yellow comforter with white flowers, the small pillows she likes to hide things under: crayons, doll clothes, crisp dollar bills. Minutes pass before I hear movement upstairs, a door opening, heavy feet shuffling across the floor, another door closing, then the swish of water into the bathroom sink.

Leslie Gray on Channel 7 reports the story in this way: “A six-year-old San Francisco girl, the granddaughter of legendary 49er Jim Balfour, disappeared yesterday at Ocean Beach. Although the girl’s father and his fiancée have not been ruled out as suspects, sources say they both took a polygraph and passed. Authorities are attempting to locate the girl’s estranged mother. Police fear the girl may have drowned.”