The Year of Fog (21 page)

47

T
HAT DAY
on Ocean Beach, Emma wore blue canvas shoes, size three, with a smiling monkey face decorating the sides, her name stitched across the tongue in red.

On Saturday, the third of January, Sherburne calls to tell us that a single shoe has been discovered by a tourist. It was wedged into a pile of rocks on Baker Beach in the Presidio, about three miles north of Ocean Beach.

“I was clothed, of course,” the man who found it told the police. “Didn’t even know it was a nude beach until I got there, and I figured, what the hell, may as well take a walk, you only live once.”

It’s a short beach. There’s not much walking to do there. You can take pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge, read a book, watch the nude men sunbathing in the cold. Thus starved for activity, one might take in every detail, such as a shoe wedged into a pile of rocks. I imagine the man bending down, tugging the shoe free just to give himself something to do, so as not to give the impression that he is looking at the nude men. He’s about to raise his arm and sail the shoe out into the ocean when he notices the partially embroidered name.

He told the police that he had seen Jake on the
Today
show, had heard Jake’s description of Emma’s shoes, her clothes. He said he probably would never have remembered were it not for the fact that his granddaughter had a very similar pair of shoes.

What does he feel then? Pity for the father, that distraught and pleading man with the tousled hair and glasses? Or perhaps he experiences a quick lifting of spirit, an excitement at having been the one to find the shoe. All those police, all those volunteers, all that time spent searching, and it is he, a computer salesman from Dallas, who comes up with the clue. Perhaps he even envisions the television interview during which he describes the discovery, his own fifteen minutes of fame.

How easy it would have been for him to look in another direction, to rest his gaze on some distant surfer or seashell or sunbather, rather than on the pile of rocks. I will it to have been so, engaged always in this mental effort to turn back the clock, to rearrange the events of the past.

But the shoe has been found. The police now have a piece of evidence, however circumstantial, to back up their theory that Emma drowned. Worse, Jake has something to believe in, some small proof that it is true.

His first reaction, upon hearing the news from Sherburne, is fearful astonishment. “Are you sure it’s hers?”

I’m standing in the kitchen, stirring a big pot of soup on the stove, privy only to Jake’s half of the conversation.

“What’s hers?” I ask.

Jake covers the mouthpiece, turns to me. “They found a shoe.” He punches the speaker button on the phone, and Sherburne’s voice fills the kitchen.

“We’re pretty certain,” he says. “Of course, you should see it to make sure. I’ll bring it by this afternoon so you can have a look.”

“We’ll come to you,” Jake says.

“It’s all right, I’m in my car just across the park. I’ll be there in ten.”

“Thank you,” Jake says. And then, oddly, “Have you eaten? Abby’s making potato and leek soup for lunch. You should join us.”

I find myself thinking how strange it is that one’s manners remain intact even in the worst circumstances, that during this whole ordeal, as Jake’s world has fallen apart, he has conducted himself with the utmost restraint and comportment. I’ve yet to see him lose his temper or his calm in public. Only in our most private moments has the depth of his fear shown through.

“Thank you,” Sherburne says.

Jake hangs up the phone, goes to the china cabinet, and takes out three of his best bowls. It’s an endearing habit of his—he always uses the fine china for company, no matter how casual or spontaneous the occasion. One of the bowls crashes to the floor. He curses, drops to his knees, and begins picking up the broken pieces with his bare hands.

“You’re bleeding,” I say, bending down to help.

He keeps picking up the shards, oblivious to the blood. “It can’t be hers, can it?”

“We’ll see. Go rinse your hands. I’ll clean this up.”

He makes no move to get up. He kneels there, his hands cupped around the bits of glass, looking at me incredulously. “If it is her shoe,” he says, “what does that mean?”

“It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.” I’m trying to be calm, trying not to let him see my fear. Trying to be the levelheaded one in this moment, even though I feel panic rising in my gut.

I’ve just finished vacuuming up the last of the glass when the doorbell rings. “I’ll get that,” Jake says. His voice sounds off, the whole moment feels off. I think about Sherburne on the other side of the door, holding in his hands the first actual piece of evidence to surface since this whole nightmare began.

From the kitchen I can hear Jake opening the front door. “Come in,” he says.

And Sherburne, playing the polite guest. “Smells delicious.”

I go into the living room, peck Sherburne on the cheek, hear myself chiming in, taking part in the strange game of avoidance. “It’s nothing fancy, just soup. The only thing I know how to make, save for biscuits and gravy.”

The top button on Sherburne’s white oxford shirt is undone, and his tie is slightly askew. I recognize the tie—the same one he was wearing that night when he brought us into the station. He notices me looking at it. “A gift,” he says, lifting the end and holding it up. “From my daughter. She asked me to wear it this morning and I couldn’t say no. She’s got me wrapped around her finger, that one—you know how little girls are.”

This last sentence hangs in the air, and we’re all looking at each other awkwardly, unsure how to proceed.

“I’m sorry,” Sherburne says, blushing. He clears his throat. “We should sit down, I suppose.”

“Of course,” Jake says. Jake and I sit on the sofa, and Sherburne settles in the chair across from us. Jake reaches for my hand, holds it tightly.

Sherburne pulls a plastic bag out of his pocket. The bag is labeled with a white sticker bearing a series of numbers and letters and the word
Balfour
, handwritten in black ink. He opens the bag, pulls out a little shoe, and lays it on the coffee table in front of us.

The shoe is ragged and smells briny, ripe, like the angel wings Emma used to dig up at Ocean Beach. I came across a jar of them once, unwashed, stashed in a basket beneath her bed. The creatures had died inside their shells, and when I opened the jar her room was invaded by the dank, fishy smell.

I notice the toe of the shoe first, where Emma’s name had been. The stitching is mostly gone, but bits of the
E
, one
m
, and the
a
remain. The red has faded to pink. On the side, there’s a hole where the monkey’s nose should be.

Jake stares at the shoe for several seconds, unmoving. Then he reaches out to touch it, run his fingers over the wrecked fabric. His fingers tremble. He begins, very quietly, to cry. He picks up the shoe and cradles it in both hands.

Sherburne sits silently. I find myself staring at the tie just to keep from looking at Emma’s shoe, Jake’s face.

I have a memory of childhood, a Sunday afternoon in Alabama. I remember the shoes I was wearing—a pair of white sandals with a tiny heel, the first heels I’d ever owned. I must have been about eleven years old. We had just finished lunch, and I was helping my mother with the dishes. I couldn’t stop thinking about something the preacher had said that morning in church. He’d said that everyone has to make choices, and the choices we make determine whether we go to heaven or to hell when we die. My mother was handing me pieces of silverware, one by one. “Wouldn’t it be better not to be born?” I asked.

My mother stopped what she was doing and looked down at me. “What?”

“If you’re born, you might go to hell. Hell is the most terrible thing that could happen to anyone.”

“But you might go to heaven,” my mother said. “And that’s the most wonderful thing that could happen.”

“But if you were never born,” I reasoned, “it wouldn’t matter that you didn’t go to heaven, because you wouldn’t even know about it. I wish I’d never been born.”

Over time, I stopped worrying about hell. Now, for the first time in my adult life, the very basic question of existence presents itself again to me, and I find myself imagining with envy an alternate scenario, one in which I never took my place in the world.

W
e’re on the sofa, and Jake is lying with his head in my lap. The lights in the living room are off, music softly playing on the stereo. The smell of the uneaten soup permeates the house. In the hours since Sherburne left, we’ve exhausted ourselves with crying and talking, analyzing the possibilities. Our conversation has gone round and round in endless circles. Hours ago, the light faded. Through the front windows we watched the fog rolling up the avenues. At one point, Jake suggested that maybe it was time to close the command post.

“At least now we know she’s not suffering,” he says finally. It has taken him hours to come to this conclusion, to convince himself of its truth. Now that he’s decided upon this version of the story, it is as if he’d been presented with incontrovertible evidence. “At least she’s not scared or in pain.”

In the months since Emma disappeared, there has been such gravity in Jake’s expression, such tension, that he looked less and less like the man I once planned to marry. Today, as the hours wore on, something of his old expression began to emerge—a relaxing of the jaw, a smoothness of the brow. Now, the look in his eyes borders on peaceful.

I don’t share his strange relief. I feel sick. I know that, for the sake of his own sanity, he has to believe she’s dead; it’s easier than accepting the possibility that she’s alive, suffering unspeakable things.

Around ten p.m. he gets up, goes into the kitchen, and puts the soup in the fridge. He goes upstairs and takes a shower, then comes back down in his bathrobe. He stands at the base of the stairs, looking at me. “Spend the night,” he says.

It’s the first time since his visit to the mortuary that he’s issued such an invitation. We don’t make love. We hardly even talk. But it’s good to lie together in bed, our ankles touching. It’s even good, after all this time, to hear him snoring.

I lie awake thinking of the shoe, unable to believe it is conclusive, unable to accept that it means anything at all. Surely any number of explanations could account for its presence on Baker Beach. Emma, for example, wanted to take off her shoes, but I would not allow it, as Ocean Beach is littered with broken glass. Maybe, after walking ahead of me, she simply disobeyed. Or maybe the kidnapper gained her trust by encouraging her to do so, after I had forbidden it. Perhaps the kidnapping was planned in detail and the perpetrator had a change of clothing so that Emma would not be spotted, in which case he would have disposed of the clothes she was wearing.

Why only one shoe, instead of two? And what of a body? Unless we see a body, we can never know for certain. Add to that the sightings—thousands of calls to the command post, hundreds of messages posted to the website. Just two days ago, a San Francisco woman vacationing in Florida called to say she’d seen a girl who fit Emma’s description in Fort Walton Beach. The lead went nowhere, but the fact is there are still leads. If even one is correct, then Emma might still be alive.

Sherburne has argued many times that Emma may have accidentally strayed too close to the water, but he says this because he doesn’t know her. In my mind, I’ve gone over the possibilities countless times—could she have miscalculated the distance of the water because of the fog? Could she have seen one of those perfect sand dollars and, for a moment, forgotten her fear? I keep coming back to the same answer, which has more to do with conviction than with scientific probability: she could not have drowned, because that would mean she is dead. It would mean there’s no reason to keep looking.

I once read an article about a wild elephant whose cub was stillborn. A photographer looked on in horror while the mother kicked the lifeless body, over and over, for three hours. Then something happened: the baby stirred. His mother had literally kicked him to life by stimulating his heart. Only instinct could drive her to do this.

While memory is the flimsy stuff of image, easily influenced by external suggestions, instinct is utterly internal. Memory may impose incorrect clues into my waking dream of that day at the beach with Emma, false images, dead ends. I’m willing to accept that memory fails me. But instinct—that firmer, truer thing—tells me she is alive. Not possibly alive. Not hopefully alive. There are times when instinct speaks only in terms of absolutes. Emma is alive, and she is waiting for me.

48

T
HE NEXT
morning I drive out to Baker Beach. The twin arches of the Golden Gate Bridge peek above the fog. There are no sunbathers out today—too cold—just a teenage couple eating bagels and sipping coffee on a picnic bench. He’s facing the table and she’s facing him, legs wrapped around his waist. Seeing them together like that, so blissfully oblivious to the world, reminds me of those early days with Ramon, how I’d suffer through class waiting. When the lunch bell rang, I’d sling my backpack over my shoulder and run out to the curb, where he’d be waiting for me in his beat-up Jeep Wrangler. Sometimes we’d drive to the Dew Drop Inn for catfish fillets and shakes; more often we’d just go to his place. Then there would be the rush to get out of our clothes and into bed, knowing I had to be back to school in time for Mrs. Truly’s French class. The sex was so good I remember it still, but sometimes I wonder if nostalgia paints those days a different, better color. Maybe the reason he seemed like such a phenomenal lover was simply that I had no basis for comparison.

I wander north along the beach and pick my way among the rocks, searching for something the tourist might have missed, but find only the usual trash—empty beer cans, a baseball cap, a worn silver guilder that seems out of place and out of time, like loot from some sunken ship. I imagine Emma here, shoved up against these rocks, a stranger’s hands on her. I can’t shake the image. Maybe Jake’s way is better, after all.

On the way home I stop by his house, but he’s not there. The phone at the command post rings twelve times; not even an answering machine picks up. At my loft, I spend a couple of hours answering e-mail from findemma.com and making the usual phone calls. I have a list of every hospital in the country. Over the last few months I’ve called every facility at least once, and now I’m making my way through a second round of calls. It’s always the same story—a bored switchboard operator who connects me to admissions, a series of hurried administrative personnel, my description of Emma, finally an impatiently uttered “There’s no one here by that name or description.”

It’s almost noon when I leave my place on foot. It’s sunny here, the main benefit of living in noisy Potrero Hill. When Jake and I first decided to get married, we briefly considered selling his two-bedroom house in the foggy Sunset and buying one out here, but by then the dot-com boom had already driven the prices prohibitively high. Before everything happened with Emma, I’d been thinking how much I was going to miss this neighborhood, its slightly dirty industrial charm, the crumbling Victorians with their tidy flower boxes and optimistic gardens, the ever-present hum of freeway traffic. I used to love walking in my neighborhood, could kill whole weekends drinking coffee at Farley’s or browsing the shelves at Christopher’s Books, eating barbecue at Bottom of the Hill. Now, all my old haunts have a picture of Emma in the window, and I can hardly remember a time before she was gone, before this horrific unknowing gnawed at my edges every minute of every day.

By the time I get to the Castro, my T-shirt and jeans are damp with sweat. I push through the omnipresent crowd, make my way to the command post. Looking through the window, I find myself face-to-face with Brian, who is peeling tape off the glass. The pictures of Emma are gone. The telephones, tables, chairs, and radio have disappeared. Inside, where a few days ago there were half a dozen volunteers, there is only Brian.

“What’s this?” I say. “Where is everyone?”

Brian steps down from his stool. “Don’t you know?”

“Know what?”

“Mr. Balfour called this morning and told me to close up shop.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The cops are officially closing the investigation.”

“That’s not possible. Jake would have told me.”

Brian shrugs. “I’m as shocked as you are.”

“They can’t do this.” I grab one of the flyers he’s just taken down and tape it to the window.

“Abby,” he says gently, “they’ll just get taken down again.”

One of Sam Bungo’s slogans rattles through my mind. “Every night, every day, strive to keep up your PMA!” PMA stood for positive mental attitude. Sam believed that with a PMA, anything was possible.

“We could be
this
close,” I say. “We could be hours away from finding her.”

“I know,” he says. “I didn’t think it would end this way. I met her once, you know. Mr. Balfour brought her by the school one Saturday. I was painting posters for our food drive, and I asked Emma if she wanted to help. Somehow she got her feet into the paint. She left little red footprints all down the hallway.” He wads up a ball of tape and tosses it into the trash can. “It’s crazy, that a sweet kid like that can go missing. Makes you think the world is just completely fucked up.”

A paralyzing despair sets in. How is it possible that I’m the only one who holds out any hope for her?

I step outside onto the crowded street. It’s Sunday, and the Castro is teeming with tourists and teenagers, young men who’ve made the pilgrimage from the East Bay and Marin and Antioch to the lively gay mecca beneath the giant rainbow flag. A line of eager young guys has formed on Eighteenth Street, at the door to The Badlands. Outside Daddy’s, graying men in black leather congregate. Each bar has its theme, its regular clientele. The mingled scent of smoke and something else—a cloyingly sweet, sexual smell—saturates the air. A crowd gathers outside the Castro Theatre. Today’s film: a revival of
Barbarella,
and a Jane Fonda look-alike contest.

A hand brushes my leg, and I look down to see a homeless teenager sitting on the sidewalk, gazing up through bloodshot eyes. He has a ring on every finger. “Hey,” he says, “I’ll read you a poem for a quarter.”

I drop some change into his cup, push through the crowds, descend beneath Market Street, and step onto the outbound Muni platform just as the doors close on the K-Ingleside. In the second car there is a girl, nose pressed to the window, black hair spilling over her shoulders. As the train begins moving I rush forward and bang my fists on the glass. The girl jumps back, terrified. In a twitch of her face, a movement of her hand as she reaches for the woman beside her, I realize I don’t know her. Something at the center of me deflates.

“You okay?” a man asks. On the crowded platform, everyone is staring. “No,” I say. “I’m sorry. I thought it was someone I knew.”

On the street again, in the too-brilliant sunlight, I begin walking. I don’t know where I’m going. I walk through the afternoon and into evening—down Market Street, onto Montgomery, up Columbus, down Broadway. As the sun sets I find myself over in South Beach, standing beneath the Bay Bridge, looking up at the steel arcs. Cars rumble across. The cold gray waters of the bay lap against the edge of the city. The fog is rolling in, softening the angles of the buildings. The headlights of oncoming cars hover yellowish in the mist. The sheer number of cars is overwhelming. All those vehicles, by the millions, in which a kidnapper might make his escape. All those trunks in which a child might be hidden. All the bridges a car might cross en route to somewhere else. There is a girl. Her name is Emma. She is walking on a beach. There is a girl. There is a girl. I feel the brittle threads of my sanity unraveling. The bay waters seem to be darkening, coming closer. It would be so easy to fall forward, so easy to simply forget. Up ahead, the stadium lights of PacBell Park glow bluish in the fog; a moment later I hear the roar of the crowd.