The Year of Fog (20 page)

45

T
HE WEEK
before Christmas, Annabel calls to tell me there’s someone she wants me to meet. “Her name is Dr. Shannon. She’s a therapist.”

The lights on my Christmas tree are blinking. On the floor is a set of ornaments I bought from Emma during her school fund-raiser last year: a wooden reindeer with twigs for antlers, a tiny metal caboose painted blue, an angel with glittering gold wings. I had this vision of how Christmas would be—me and Jake and Emma decorating the tree together, with Booker T playing in the background and orange peels simmering on the stove. Jake in a Santa suit on Christmas Eve, making lots of noise as he puts the gifts under the tree.

“Are you listening?” Annabel says.

“I just don’t think therapy is going to help.”

“Dr. Shannon isn’t a psychiatrist. She specializes in hypnosis.”

The miniature angel has golden hair and a porcelain face with tiny features painted on. Bright red lips, a dot of a nose. She’s missing one eye.

“I already tried that, remember?”

“I know,” Annabel says, “but this one comes highly recommended. She has a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Stanford and has published important research on hypnosis. Her practice is in Palo Alto, and she’s done work for the CEOs of several Fortune 500 companies, not to mention that senator in Delaware whose intern was murdered a couple of years ago.”

“What makes you think she’d be willing to meet with me?”

“Rick just did a good turn in court for one of her biggest clients. She owes him a favor. She’s agreed to one meeting, but she can’t see you until the end of January. She’s expecting a call from you.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Annabel says. “Think of it as a Christmas present.” She clears her throat, pauses. “That’s not the only reason I called. I don’t know how to say this.” Another pause, longer than the first.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. It’s just—”

“Just what?”

“There’s a letter,” she says, using our father’s phrase. “You know, in the mailbox.”

I swallow hard, trying to think of the right words. “That’s wonderful. How long have you known?”

“I’m almost eight weeks along.”

“When are you due?”

“July 17.”

“Why didn’t you tell me as soon as you knew?”

“Rick and I agreed to wait a couple of months before we let the cat out of the bag.”

“Congratulations. It’s terrific news.”

Mentally, I’m doing the math. She must have conceived about three months after Emma disappeared. Is it possible that she and Rick decided to have another child in part
because
of what happened to Emma? I remember a conversation we had when she was pregnant with Ruby, her second. “I can’t imagine having just one,” she had said. I was sitting in a hard chair in a doctor’s office, and she was lying on the table. On the screen, a tiny white thing pulsed in its dark, mysterious sack. I stared at the large head, the small curled body, that living thing growing within my sister’s womb, and wondered if I would ever have the courage to bring a baby into the world. “What if something happened to your child?” she had said. “How could you go on if you didn’t have another one to take care of?”

“Did you plan it?” I ask now.

“Hardly.”

“How does Rick feel about it?”

“A little nervous, but happy.”

I try to think of the appropriate questions, all the normal responses. I should ask if they’re going to find out the sex of the child, if they’ll add another bedroom to their house. I should ask if Rick plans to take paternity leave, and how Annabel will handle Ruby once the baby is born. Instead, I’m sobbing into my coffee.

“Abby? You okay?”

“Sorry, it’s just—”

“Listen,” she says. “I went online. In 1999, a little boy was snatched from a park in Nashville. He was discovered six months later in an apartment just two blocks from his home. In 2001, a fifteen-year-old girl was kidnapped in Houston and taken across the border to Mexico. They just found her last year. She’d been living with her kidnapper in Tijuana. Detroit, 2003. A nine-year-old girl opened the door of a car going fifty miles per hour and jumped out. She landed in a grassy ditch and was rescued by a jogger. The kidnapper was arrested an hour later, and the girl was given the key to the city.”

“What are you saying?”

“That there’s still hope. Miracles happen. They’re rare, but they do happen.”

I insert Emma’s face into each of these scenarios: Emma jumping out of a speeding car; Emma walking across the border; Emma stepping out the front door of some house, unharmed.

“Give her my love,” a voice in the background says. It’s Rick. I imagine Annabel sitting on the bed, legs stretched out, a pillow behind her back, and Rick there beside her, his hand on her belly.

“Right back at him,” I say.

She makes a kissing sound into the phone. “I gotta go. The bathroom calls.”

“Annabel?”

“Hmmm?”

“I’m really happy for you.”

“I know.”

After we hang up, I drink a bit of Scotch, trying to work up the nerve to call Jake. When I finally get him on the line, he sounds sleepy, or maybe just depressed. “Hey,” I say. “I’m having trouble with this tree. It’s lonely work. Want to come over?”

“I don’t think I’m up for it tonight.”

“I’ll make eggnog.”

“Rain check?”

A woman’s voice in the background says, “I’ll let myself out.”

“Lisbeth is here,” Jake says, before I can even ask.

“What?”

On his end, a door closes. I imagine him walking over to the window and peering out, making sure she gets in her car safely, the way he used to do with me.

“She stopped by,” he says. “It’s not like I called and invited her over.”

“This reappearing act doesn’t bother you?”

“Of course it does.”

“You don’t act like it.”

“That’s not fair,” he says.

“How can you let her back into your life while you push me away?” I hate the desperation that creeps into my voice, but I can’t stop it. Losing Emma was the most devastating blow. To lose Jake too is a possibility I can’t fathom.

“I’m just trying to get through this,” Jake says. “I don’t know how to explain it, but with Lisbeth, I’m able to remember things.”

“What things?”

“Little things that wouldn’t matter to anyone else,” he says. “Like when Emma was born, the woman we shared the hospital room with watched
The Price Is Right
all night long, turned up really high, and she kept arguing with the nurses because they wanted her to breast-feed her newborn, but the woman wanted to use a bottle. And I just remember sitting there staring at Emma, this tiny little baby with a full head of dark hair, amazed that she could sleep through the commotion. I remember being totally astonished by this calm, beautiful baby—I just couldn’t believe she was mine.”

What can I say to that? No matter how much I love Emma, there are some things I simply wasn’t there for, some things Lisbeth and Jake will always share.

“You remember her performance on
Bay Area Morning
,” I say quietly.

“Yes.”

“She actually said she
missed
Emma. After everything she’s done.”

“I think she may have meant it. I’m not forgiving her. I’m just saying it’s complicated.” He sighs, the kind of sigh that means we’ve been over this before, let it rest. The thing is, we haven’t been over this, not really.

“She’s Emma’s mother,” he says finally. “There’s no getting around that.”

The word
mother
falls like a dead weight on my ears. He’s right, of course. I remember my own parents, how they suffered through twenty-five years of a rotten marriage for one simple reason: they had two children.

I can hear my mother’s voice, nearly five years ago now, a few weeks before she died. “The best thing I did with my life was having children,” she said. And I remember thinking I didn’t want to say that on my deathbed. I didn’t want motherhood to be the thing that defined me, that made my life worthwhile. I needed something else, too: I wanted my
work
to make a difference. I had tried to express this to my mother in the past, and she had always looked at me with pity, as if I was sadly misguided, as if I was missing some crucial moral center.

When I was ten and Annabel was eight, my mother bought us a book about reproduction. She sat us down on the couch one Sunday after church and proceeded to explain what happens when two people who are joined in holy matrimony pray to God and ask him for a baby. She recited some very vague information involving a bedroom and God’s divine will, then opened the book and showed us the pictures. There was a line drawing of a pregnant woman in profile: long hair, slender legs, upright breasts, a slightly curved belly. Low inside the belly, a sack, and within the sack a little curlicue of a thing, so small that when my mother pointed to the picture, the curlicue was entirely hidden by her fingernail.

“That’s the baby?” Annabel said, moving my mother’s hand away.

“Yes.”

“It looks like a sea horse,” I said. I was already feeling disappointed about this whole baby thing. I remembered the mail-order sea horses from Everlasting Toys, how they’d turned out to be nothing special.

“That’s just the very beginning,” my mother said, flipping the page. The next picture showed a slightly bigger belly, and this time, inside the sack, there was a little alien-looking thing with a big head and fishlike limbs. The final drawing was of a swaddled newborn. She closed the book and patted our heads. “One day you’ll both have babies of your own.”

“I want to have seven,” Annabel said.

“How many do you want?” my mother asked, tilting my chin up and smiling down at me. I remember feeling privileged, because she wasn’t often affectionate like this. But I also felt sad, as though she and Annabel shared something I didn’t. Babies were sweet and soft, I liked them, but I couldn’t imagine having some strange thing growing inside me, just like I couldn’t imagine doing what apparently came first—the vague, disturbing act she referred to as holy matrimony. I tried to think of the correct answer to her question, something that wouldn’t disappoint her.

“Maybe three?” I said, looking up into her soft eyes. She was wearing tiny gold earrings, and her breath smelled too strongly of coffee. I wondered if she could tell I was lying.

46

T
RUCE,” JAKE
says. It’s Christmas Eve, and he has shown up at my door bearing tickets to the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus performance at the Castro Theatre. “Will you be my date?”

“Of course,” I say. “Just give me a few minutes to get dressed.”

It’s what we did last year, what Jake has done every year for the last decade. I know he’s trying hard to act normal, trying to act like there is cause for celebration, like Christmas means something to him still. But we’re not good at pretending, and we leave during the intermission. Last year before the show, we took Emma to Cable Car Joe’s for her favorite meal: a hamburger, onion rings, and a milk shake. We ate there so often that Joe knew Emma by name, and before we left he gave her a gift—a five-inch-tall teddy bear wearing a T-shirt with the Cable Car logo.

This year, we just order a couple of sandwiches at A.G. Ferrari across the street from the Castro and take them back to Jake’s place. We eat in the living room, staring at the tree, which has lights but no ornaments.

“My heart just wasn’t in it,” Jake says.

The only reason he even has a tree is that a couple of teachers at his school brought it over one evening and insisted that he accept it. They put the tree in the stand, set it up by the window, found the boxes of Christmas stuff in the garage, and helped him string the lights.

The floor beneath the tree is bare. “We should at least put a couple of gifts under there,” I say.

“I learned my lesson on her birthday. It tears me apart to look at presents she’s never going to open.”

I don’t tell him about my own shopping spree, the dozens of presents wrapped and stuffed into my hall closet, each chosen just for her: a pair of ice skates, because I promised to take her to the outdoor rink at the Embarcadero this year; the pink knit scarf and matching hat; the porcelain doll with a little suitcase and parasol. Things purchased on credit, things I can’t afford. I bought them all in a single day, rushing from one store to the next, grabbing anything I thought she would like. While I was shopping for her, I felt happy, maybe because the physical act of picking things up and carrying them to the checkout allowed me to harbor a ridiculous hope that Emma would be opening the packages on Christmas Day. When I got the presents home and saw them laid out on the floor, the happiness dissipated. I put everything in the closet, vowing to take it all back the next day. That was two weeks ago, and I haven’t been able to force myself to open the closet since.

“Is it all right if I spend the night?” I ask.

“Sure,” Jake says, but he doesn’t move toward me when he says it, and I can tell he’d rather be alone.

“Maybe tomorrow night,” I say. And then, unable to stop myself, I ask about Lisbeth. “She’s not—”

“No,” Jake says, “she’s not in town. She’s spending Christmas on the East Coast with friends.”

“Oh,” I say, feeling stupid and relieved.

Jake takes my hand. “You’ve got nothing to worry about on that front, okay?”

“Okay.” It’s such a relief to hear him say it, to see in his eyes that he means it.

I call him late Christmas morning, but he’s still in bed. “I’d rather just be alone today,” he says. “I’ve got some work to do.”

“But it’s Christmas.”

“It’s easier if I pretend it isn’t.”

David from Parents of Missing Children invited me over to his house for a party, but I made up an excuse not to go. Most of the guests will be from the support group, and I can’t bear the multiplied grief, the inevitable tears, the stories of holidays past. Instead, I spend the day with Nell. All day long, friends of her dead son Stephen stop by to say hello. She gives them eggnog and sugar cookies, and they bring her small gifts perfectly wrapped in expensive paper. By ten p.m., the last visitor has left. “I can’t go home,” I say. “I don’t think I can be alone tonight.”

“Of course not,” Nell says. “Stay here. You wouldn’t believe how comfortable this couch is.”

She fetches blankets and a pillow, and we stay up late into the night, playing gin rummy. I keep score on a legal pad, trying without success to concentrate on the game. At one point, my pen runs out of ink and Nell retrieves a pencil from a mason jar on her kitchen counter. The pencil is wide and flat, and I’m nibbling on the yellow flesh when a memory from childhood comes to me.

“Where’d you get this?” I ask.

“I think I nabbed it from Home Depot.”

“Funny, the smell and taste totally take me back. When I was a kid, my dad was a building contractor, and sometimes I’d visit job sites with him. He had these big, flat pencils, just like this one, that he’d use to make markings on the lumber, and he’d let me entertain myself by drawing on plywood scraps.”

“There’s a name for that, you know,” Nell says. “It’s a Proustian memory, so called because of the madeleine and lime-blossom tea in
Swann’s Way
. Scientists think olfactory memories are some of our most emotionally powerful ones because smell is the only sense that’s very closely associated with the limbic system, which is the part of the brain responsible for emotion. After Stephen died, I started taking my clothes to his dry cleaner and even having my blouses starched, which I’ve never done in my life, just because the starch they use reminds me of him. If I close my eyes when I’m wearing one of those blouses, I can almost pretend he’s in the same room.” She smiles and plucks a card from the deck. “Pretty nutty, huh?”

“Not really,” I say. “I went shopping for Emma last week. I bought her this Tinkerbell nail polish that she used to wear all the time. When I got home, I put the stuff on. This really awful shade of pink. I put on two coats and drank three glasses of wine and then just let myself drift off, thinking about her, and you know what was really nice? I dreamt about her. I’ve dreamt of her dozens of times since she disappeared, but it’s always a nightmare, where I’m looking for her and can’t find her, or I’m trying to save her from something terrible. This dream was different. We were at the aquarium, the old one in the park before it closed down, and we were looking at the starfish, and we were both happy. It was the best dream, it was like she was right there with me. But then I woke up.”

“That’s the unfortunate thing about dreams,” Nell says. “There’s always the part where you wake up.”