Where I Lost Her Read online

  Then, as I start to pull away, I realize I need to be able to find this spot again. There is nothing but my own memory of this road to rely on. I need to be able to recall where I am, where I found her, where I lost her.

  I search the car frantically for something, anything, I can leave behind. Something more substantial than the scraps of paper in my purse. Something that won’t just blow away. But there is nothing but the broken bottle of wine. Jake and Devin unloaded everything we had out of the car after we arrived.

  This time I am able to find the button to pop the trunk without setting off any alarms, and I get out of the car and open the trunk. I find the sweater I’d wanted to give her. I pull it out and set it at the edge of the road. A marker. An offering.

  And then I get in the car again, turn the key, and drive.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Jake says, meeting me in the back doorway. His eyes are wide. He grabs me by the elbow, too hard. “I was just about to go after you.”

  Before we go into the warm, bright kitchen, he leans close to me, still clutching my elbow.

  “Did you get pulled over?” he hisses quietly. This is the way we speak to each other lately. In hushed whispers we don’t want anyone else to hear. His tone is almost always accusatory, as though I am the one at fault. If it weren’t so sad, it would be laughable.

  “No,” I say. I shake my elbow loose from his grip and go into the house.

  Effie and Devin are in the kitchen. There is a teakettle on the stove, flames beneath it. Devin is washing our dinner dishes at the sink. Effie smiles when I come in, but her smile disappears when she realizes I’m frantic.

  “We need to call the police. There’s a girl,” I start. “In the road. I found a little girl.”

  A collective look of horror passes across their faces.

  “Oh no,” Effie starts, her hand fluttering around near her throat. “Were you in an . . . accident?”

  I shake my head. “No, no, she was just standing there.”

  “What do you mean?” Devin asks.

  “I looked down for one second, and when I looked up again, she was in the middle of the road. Like a deer or something.”

  “Where is she now?”

  I shake my head.

  “You left her there?” Jake says.

  I shake my head again, feel tears filling my eyes at the realization of what has just happened. What I saw. “She ran into the woods, and I followed her. But it’s so dark out.” The last three words are just a hush: “I lost her.”

  “How old do you think she was?” Devin asks, drying his hands on a dishtowel, and reaching for the telephone on the wall.

  “I don’t know, maybe three? Four?”

  “Jesus,” Effie gasps.

  “She didn’t have a shirt on. She was just wearing a tutu, like for dress-up. And ladybug rain boots. But she’s hurt. A cut on her hand, I think. There was a lot of blood.” I can barely catch my breath. “Oh my God.”

  Effie motions for me to sit down on the bench in the kitchen nook. I put my elbows on the cold Formica, rest my head in my hands.

  “Do you want me to call?” Devin asks, motioning to the phone.

  “No, no.” I shake my head, looking up at him. “It’s okay.”

  Devin hands me the phone, and I dial 911.

  “911. What is your emergency?”

  The teakettle on the stove starts to rattle, steam, scream. Effie hurries up out of the nook and pulls it from the flame. Sorry, she mouths.

  “There’s a girl in the woods between Gormlaith and Hudson’s. She’s hurt.” But all of the carefully rehearsed details have slipped away now. Words once again fail. “I just saw her . . . but she ran away.”

  “Ma’am, you’re going to need to slow down,” the operator says.

  As I try to explain what happened, to make sense of it to the dispatcher (to myself), Effie makes coffee with a French press. I study her as she pours the boiling water into the glass cylinder, as she presses the plunger and the water muddies and swirls. The intricacy, the complexity of this task seems somehow ludicrous now. Frivolous.

  “Ma’am, where are you right now?” The dispatcher sounds irritated.

  “At the lake,” I say. “Gormlaith. At my friends’ camp. I couldn’t get a signal on my phone.” I give her Effie and Devin’s address. There is no address for that dark bend in the road, the place where she disappeared.

  “Okay, ma’am, I’m sending a deputy right out. Stay where you are, please.”

  Devin brings a blanket and puts it over my shoulders. Effie pours us all cups of coffee, begins the process with the teakettle and French press again. And after all that effort, the coffee is bitter. Gritty with loose grounds and too strong. Still, I take a long swallow, feel as it burns my throat. Clears my head.

  Jake has pulled on a long-sleeve shirt and put on pants. His cheeks are flushed with wine and sun. He looks boyish. Handsome.

  “Should we drive down there?” he says to Devin.

  Devin shakes his head. “Nobody should be driving anywhere.”

  The coffee burns in my chest.

  “Do you remember exactly where you saw her?” Devin asks me gently, putting his large hand on my shoulder. It makes me feel safe. Small.

  “About halfway between here and Hudson’s,” I say. “Maybe two, two and a half miles away? You know where the road splits and then starts to curve away from the lake?”

  “That’s not too far,” Devin says to Jake, grabbing a flannel shirt from the back of a chair by the stove. “We’ll walk. You guys stay here and wait for the cops.”

  Effie nods and finally grabs a cup of coffee for herself.

  “You need a jacket?” Devin asks Jake, and suddenly, I remember the sweater.

  “Wait. I left a sweater on the side of the road,” I say. “To mark the spot.”

  “Oh, good,” Devin says, smiling. “That was smart.”

  “Do you have a flashlight?” Jake asks Effie.

  Effie pulls open a drawer and grabs a flashlight, tries it. The beam seems weak. She shakes it, tries the switch again, and the light surges, blinds me. “Oh, sorry,” she says, and clicks it off.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Devin says, squeezing my shoulder. “We’ll find her.”

  Jake leads the way out the door without speaking to me. The screen door slams shut behind them, but I can hear the sound of their footsteps as they walk quickly down the road.

  Plum and Zu-Zu come down the stairs then. I’d almost forgotten about them. They stand in the kitchen doorway, both of them rubbing sleep from their eyes. Zu-Zu yawns. She clutches the tattered seal under her arm, and she could be three again instead of thirteen.

  “What happened?” asks Plum.

  The officer takes nearly a half hour to arrive. When he pulls into the gravel driveway, Effie ushers the girls back upstairs to bed, and I go outside to greet him. Devin and Jake are still gone.

  The night is dark. No flashing blue and red lights. No sirens.

  He gets out of the car and slams his door shut, adjusting his holster on his hip as he walks toward me. He’s a beefy guy, short but thick with red, shiny cheeks and a blond, stubbly buzz cut. He’s young, maybe mid-twenties, but he moves slowly, like an arthritic old man. Like he’s got all the time in the world.

  “You the one called in about a girl?” he asks.

  I nod, standing in the doorway, shivering.

  “I’m Sergeant Strickland,” he says. “Can we go inside?”

  “Oh,” I say. “Of course. I’m sorry.”

  Inside the bright warm kitchen, I motion for him to sit down, but he shakes his head and pulls a pad out of his back pocket.

  I grab my coffee, which is cold now, and sit back down in the kitchen nook.

  “At approximately what time did you spot her?” he says.

  I try to recall the clock on the dash, but I can’t remember. “Maybe eleven forty-five, midnight?”

  He glances down at his watch. “And it’s one A.M.
now.”

  “Yes. I called 911 as soon as I got here. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Where were you going?” he asks. “When you saw her?”

  “What?” I say, confused.

  He is leaning against the counter. I watch a carpenter ant, fat and sluggish, crawl across the Formica. “Awfully late on a Thursday night for you to be out driving around. Where exactly were you going?”

  “Oh,” I say. “I was at Hudson’s. Buying wine.” My throat thickens. Why did I tell him that?

  “At midnight?” he says, one bushy eyebrow rising.

  I shake my head. “We ran out,” I say.

  “So you were drinking?”

  “No,” I say, eyes burning. “I mean, yes, we had a glass of wine with dinner.”

  “Awfully late to be eating supper,” he says.

  I should have known to say supper. Dinner makes me sound like I’m not from around here.

  “We were catching up. We’re visiting, my husband and I. From New York.”

  I see something pass across his face, disgust, I think. He thinks I’m a summer person. A flatlander.

  “I grew up here,” I say as if I have to defend my native status. As though this has anything to do with a half-naked child in the middle of the road in the middle of the night.

  “So you were having supper, drinking wine, catching up,” he says, sneering, “and then you decided to get in your car and get more alcohol.”

  I shake my head. But yes, what he’s said is exactly what happened.

  “Can I tell you about the girl, please?” I say.

  “I’m just trying to establish the events leading up to the sighting, ma’am,” he says, scratching his pen against his notepad. “Shit,” he mutters. “Out of ink. Would you happen to have a pen?”

  I stand up and go to the bookcase where Effie keeps a coffee mug full of pens. I grab one and hand it to him.

  I sit back down. The bench is cold and hard. I stare into the coffee mug.

  “Okay, so you left Hudson’s and were on your way back here. What happened next?”

  “I hit a pothole, or something, and . . .” I start to tell him about the wine bottle falling on the floor and then stop myself. “. . . I was distracted. When I looked up again, she was standing in the middle of the road.”

  “Lots of deer up here,” he says. “Wild animals. Just last week, got a call in about a rabid raccoon.”

  I shake my head. “It wasn’t a raccoon,” I say. “It was a girl.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do I know what?”

  “That it wasn’t an animal? No streetlights on the road there. Could have been your eyes playing a trick on you. How much exactly would you say you’d been drinking?”

  I can’t believe where this is going. I want a different officer. I want to start over. My whole body feels flushed, feverish. I rub my shoulder, which is fiery now with the sunburn. I feel bruised.

  “I know the difference between a girl and an animal,” I say, baffled. And I wish that Jake and Devin were still here. That Effie would come down from upstairs. “I stopped the car and got out. I talked to her.”

  He scratches, scratches. Shakes the pen. “This one’s out too.”

  I take a deep breath, get up, and grab another pen and hand it to him.

  “Did you ask her what she was doing outside in the middle of the night? Did you ask her where her parents were, if they knew where she was? Probably just snuck out of the house to meet a boy.”

  I feel like someone punched me in the throat. “What are you talking about?” I say. “She was a baby.”

  “Wait,” he says. His smirk disappears. “How old was she exactly?”

  “I told the 911 operator. She was maybe only three or four years old. She was wearing a pink tutu and rain boots. She had blood on her hands and her legs. She wasn’t wearing a shirt.”

  He stands up straight, moves away from the counter. He has stopped scratching on the pad. He’s listening now.

  “Before I could do anything, she ran away. She got scared,” I say. “Oh, wait, the alarm, I forgot. I accidentally hit the panic button, and it set off the car alarm. I think that’s why she ran.”

  He looks at me and his face is serious now, angry even. “So she took off into the woods, a half-naked little girl who’s bleeding, and you decide the best thing to do is to leave the scene, after you’d been drinking, and drive home?”

  “Yes,” I say, exasperated now. “I mean, no. I followed her. Into the woods. But it was so dark, I lost her.” Something catches in my chest. Fabric snagging on a barbed wire fence. I remember the twig poking me in the rib, consider lifting my shirt, looking for proof. Instead, my finger taps at the spot, feels the tender place.

  He scratches his head, looks mystified. By my story. By me.

  “Did you consider calling 911?”

  I feel like screaming.

  “I couldn’t get a signal on my phone,” I say, taking a deep breath. “I came back here to call for help.”

  I am trying to stay calm, to be rational. Reasonable.

  “Please,” I say. My ribs ache. “Can you please just send someone out there to look for her? She’s little and scared and hurt.”

  Something softens in him. For just a moment. Maybe he has a little girl at home.

  “Can you give me an idea of where exactly you think you saw her?”

  “My husband and our friend went back, they’re there now.”

  “They been drinking too?”

  “They walked,” I say. Jesus Christ.

  He goes outside, the screen door slamming behind him. I can hear him on his radio, initiating a search of the area. Dispatching a team. And despite how rattled I am, I feel grateful he’s finally doing something.

  Effie comes downstairs without the girls.

  “You okay?” she asks.

  I shake my head. I feel like a child, like I’ve been scolded.

  The door opens again, and he peeks his head into the kitchen. “Ma’am, I’m going to need you to come with me.”

  Effie and I go outside. The air is so cold now; it’s dropped at least ten degrees. I think about the little girl out there by herself, and my chest aches.

  The officer gets into the driver’s side of the cruiser, slams his door shut, and turns his lights on. They paint the dark night red and blue.

  Effie hugs me. I start to open the passenger door, and the officer rolls down the window. “In the back. Pretend it’s one of your New York taxi cabs.”

  I obey, but I can’t get myself buckled in with the elaborate seat belts, and so he has to come around and latch me in. The seats are hard, plastic. As he leans over me and locks the belt into place I feel like a child. “You don’t have any weapons on you, ma’am?” he asks then, and I feel like a criminal.

  “It’ll be okay,” Effie says, but her voice is unconvincing. “They’ll find her.”

  I nod and nod, trying to convince myself, and her both.

  Effie reaches through the window and squeezes my hand, but he rolls up the window and she has to pull her hand away. I turn to look at him but see only the pixelated blur created by the wire mesh between us.

  By the time we get back to the spot in the road, that dark bend where the trees swoon, making a cavern of leaves, the other officers have started to arrive. I can’t help but wonder why it took Sergeant Strickland so long to get to Effie’s, when these guys seemed to materialize out of thin air.

  I see Jake speaking to one of them at the edge of the road. Devin is talking to another. Within only minutes, there are police dogs straining at their leashes and the crush of boots on damp leaves. The darkness is filled with red and blue lights, the bright beams of flashlights cutting through the darkness. And then a helicopter buzzes overhead. As I get out of the cruiser, I feel like I’ve stepped onto the set of a movie.

  It is only June and so cold; I tremble thinking of her out there by herself.

  The dogs bark, and their voices echo.
When Effie and I were kids, we loved to holler our names out toward the water, listen as they bounced back to us. A magical call and response. I have watched Plum and Zu-Zu do the same.

  Strickland goes over to another officer, who is standing outside his cruiser. The other cop towers over him. He could be a former Marine; he has that ex-military air about him. Strickland looks back at me and motions for me to come over.

  “Ms. Waters, this is Lieutenant Andrews. He’s the officer who’ll be in command of the search.”

  “This the RP?” the lieutenant asks Strickland.

  “RP?” I say.

  “Reporting party,” he says. “You the one who called it in?”

  “Yes.” I nod. Finally, someone in charge around here. Someone taking this seriously.

  “Problem is, ma’am,” he says, and clucks his tongue, “we haven’t gotten any calls in about a little girl.”

  I shake my head. I don’t understand. I called in about a little girl. I called. “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “You say you saw a girl out here, but nobody’s called in to report a missing kid.”

  “Maybe they don’t know,” I say. “Her parents. Maybe they don’t realize yet.”

  I think about all those stories of girls who go missing from their beds, stolen away in the middle of the night while their parents are sleeping. Oblivious until morning when they go to their child’s empty room.

  I am shaking now from the cold. My whole body is trembling, my teeth are chattering. Bone hitting bone.

  “Can’t you put out some sort of Amber Alert or something?” I say.

  “Not without a missing persons report,” the lieutenant says.

  I am so confused.

  “Wait. So I found a girl. But she’s not lost, because no one has called in to say they lost her?” I look at him in disbelief. “She’s four years old. She’s bleeding. Somebody has to find her.” I spin on my heel to look for someone, anyone to back me up here. I feel crazy.