Where I Lost Her (8 page)

E
ffie's bookmobile route takes us around the entire lake as well as down each of the dirt roads that branch off the main road like spokes on a wheel.

When she first got the job, the bookmobile was simply a modified Ford Econoline van, but when the van finally died, the town raised funds to buy the new state-of-the-art bookmobile, commissioned a famous local artist to paint a mural on the body, and decked out the inside not only with shelves but comfortable seats as well. You could practically, happily, live in it.

Most of the people she delivers to are elderly. Shut-ins. They are the same people who get home deliveries from the Shop 'n Save, from Meals on Wheels, from the mobile clinic. Vermonters are headstrong people; many folks in their eighties and nineties here refuse to leave their homes for assisted living facilities, nursing homes. Effie's grandmother, Gussy, lived in her own home in Quimby until the day she died. She even chopped her own wood until well into her eighties.

There are others she delivers to as well: the families who have unreliable vehicles, those who simply wouldn't go to the library on their own. She visits the small schools that don't have their own libraries. Home day cares. Effie used to deliver books to a younger woman, a midwife, who was agoraphobic. After her little boy was killed in a car accident on the old covered bridge, she never left her property, a little house down by the river. Then Hurricane Irene came. Thankfully, her daughter managed to get her out of the house before the river swept it away.

Today we stop at a dozen houses, dropping off books and flyers, asking if anyone has seen the little girl, pleading with them to keep an eye out, to spread the word.

“
That
place is creepy,” I say, pointing to a house set back from the road, obscured by trees. The house itself is fairly typical, a shoebox of a ranch house. But surrounding it are a half dozen rusted-out trailers, windows blocked with sheets of plywood. Weeds grow up around them, enclosing them, strangling them with their thorny vines. I think about the women back at Hudson's, about that poor kidnapped girl they were talking about, the one who'd been kept in that guy's backyard for eighteen years.

“Who lives there?” I ask.

“I don't really know,” she says, shrugging. “It's not on my route.”

“Should we try to deliver a flyer?” I ask.

She gestures to the
BEWARE OF DOG
signs stapled to the trees. The
NO TRESPASSING
signs duct-taped to the trailers that face the road. She looks at me, grimaces a little. “Do
you
want to go in there?”

She slows the bookmobile, and I peer through the trees, struggle to see if there are any vehicles in the driveway. But the gravel path leading to the garage is empty.

“Doesn't look like anybody's home,” I say, and I can practically hear Effie's relief.

“I've just got one stop left,” she says, pulling off the road and onto a long drive. She parks next to a beat-up black Honda.

As we get out of the car and walk toward the house, my stomach flip-flops.

The yard is littered with toys: ride-on toys, a plastic toddler's playhouse, baby dolls, and toy guns. It looks like there has been an explosion, the way these filthy artifacts of childhood are scattered. You can hear the sound of the children through the closed door as Effie and I walk up the cracked sidewalk, sidestepping plastic bats and mud-splattered bouncy balls. Naked Barbies missing limbs and heads.

Effie knocks on the door, turns to me, and smiles.

“They must be eating lunch. Usually the kids hear me coming.”

A woman answers the door, looking frazzled and confused. There is a baby in a diaper on her hip. The baby leans against her chest, twirling its finger through a blond curl. The woman is probably younger than she seems, but her face is long, drawn. She's wearing a Metallica T-shirt and jeans. She is barefoot.

“Oh, wait, is today Friday?” she asks.

Effie smiles. “It is. Are the kids eating lunch?” she asks, leaning forward and peering into the house.

“Just finishing up,” she says.

“Listen,” Effie says, reaching for a flyer from the stack she's got under her arm. “You probably heard this on the news, but there was a little girl found wandering alone in the road here last night. She ran off into the woods though.”

The woman takes the flyer and nods. “I saw it on the news this morning. I could hear the helicopters last night. Really scary. They said nobody's reported anybody missing though? Seems kinda fishy to me. Like some kinda hoax.”

I bristle.

Effie persists. “Does she sound familiar at all? Do you have any kids who fit this description?”

The woman studies the flyer. “Sounds like half the kids I take care of,” she says. “The girls anyway. Wearing dress up clothes and boots. I got one girl who wears a tiara and pink cowboy boots every day. But no. None of 'em with curly hair.”

I look at the baby in her arms, at its mane of curls.

“Oh,” she says. “ 'Cept for Stevie here.”

“You do drop-ins sometimes, right?” Effie asks.

I have no idea what this means.

“Every now and again.”

“Have you had any new kids come in lately?”

She shakes her head. “No, nobody I don't know anyway.”

“Is that the Book Lady?” a voice trills behind her. And then there is a stampede of little kids, all scrambling to get out of the doorway to the bookmobile, whose back doors are wide open, beckoning. I back up to make way as they push past. I study each one, as though she will be among them. As if she might just emerge as she did last night, in her tattered tutu and rain boots.

“I should go to the van,” Effie says to me. “So they can check books out.”

I nod. “Okay. I can help.”

The woman says, “I got the ones to return in the other room. I'll bring 'em out as soon as I get Stevie down for his nap.”

She slips into the house, but leaves the door to the kitchen open.

Effie follows the group of children to the bookmobile, but I hang back. I peer into the kitchen, see the table littered with breakfast dishes. Bowls filled with colored milk, sippy cups of juice. A cat comes to me and cries, winds itself around my legs.

“Well, hello,” I say. I squat down to pet him. He arches his back, pushes his head hard into my thigh, and then starts back into the house.

And then I see them. Ladybug rain boots on the mat just inside the door. They are in a tangle of tiny sneakers and sandals. I didn't notice them before when I was standing. My heart pounds in my chest as I gesture in disbelief at the tiny boot. I reach into the house and pick it up.

The woman comes back then, without the baby this time. Hands on her hips, she studies me.

“This is her boot,” I say, looking up at her.

“What's that?”

“Her rain boot,” I say. I stand up, still clutching the boot. “The little girl. The flyer. This is what she was wearing last night.”

The woman shakes her head, smiles. And my jaw falls open.

“This is
her boot,
” I say again, feeling my eyes sting with tears now.

“Then she's a four-year-old with the biggest feet I've ever seen,” the woman says, laughing. “Those are my niece's. She's ten.” And then I see the same look pass across her face that passed across the deputy's face last night.

My head pounds and I nod, muttering apologies as I back out the door.

 

We get into the bookmobile after the children have all picked out their books. They stand on the porch of the house, clutching their colorful selections to their chests, waving at Effie, who leans out her open window and blows kisses to them. It makes me think of a video I saw on YouTube not that long ago of a missionary leaving an African village. As his helicopter lifted off, the children shielded their eyes from the sun and peered up at him waving, jumping. It's as if Effie connects them to some distant civilization.

“That was the last stop,” she says. “How many flyers do you think we distributed?”

I look at the stack on the seat.

“A lot,” I say. “Maybe forty or fifty? Should we make some more copies?”

“Sure. I'll make some more. I need to get the bookmobile back to the library and grab the girls from in town. Do you want to come with me, or should I drop you off at Hudson's?” Effie slows the van and looks at me.

I am staring at the flyer, at the words that have distilled the little girl down into parts. Like she's a little puzzle made of interlocking pieces.

“You okay?” she asks.

I look up at her. She's the closest thing I have to a sister. She will know if I am lying.

“What's going on?” Effie asks, reaching for my hand. “I mean, other than this.”

“He's sleeping with a girl at work,” I say. Though this is not what is going on in my mind at all. This is not what is making my skin crawl, making my heart race and my head pound.

Effie takes a deep breath and looks at the road again. Her eyes well up with tears.

It takes me aback. This is not what I expected. I expected her to get angry. To say,
What the fuck? That asshole
.

But instead, there are tears in her eyes.

And something about seeing her crying, about how completely blindsided I am by her response, makes me want to cry too. She scoots across the seat, and puts her arms around me. I feel my body tremble and then the tears come. It feels like a dam has broken. And for some reason I think of that woman Effie told me about. The woman whose house was swept away in the raging river during the hurricane. I worry that if I'm not careful, I might be carried away as well. That I might just get caught up in this awful current. That I could drown.

And so I pull back, wave my hands in front of my face, swatting away the tears.

“It's fine,” I say. As if words are enough to make that true. But it's not fine. None of this is fine.

“What are you going to do?” she asks. “Are you going to leave him?”

It feels like someone has just sat on my chest. All of the air goes out of me.

Jake and I have been together for almost twenty years. I barely remember who I was before I met him. In the last three weeks I have imagined a thousand scenarios about how all of this would play out, but in none of them did I imagine
me
leaving
him
. Where would I go? I'm afraid I don't remember who I am outside of this anymore, outside of
us
.

“God damn it,” she says then, wiping at her own tears with the back of her hand. And then she shakes her head, and gives me exactly what I need. “What the fuck, Tess? What an asshole. How did you find out? Did he tell you?”

And I am so grateful for this, I feel myself starting to cry again.

W
e go together into town. I am not ready to deal with Jake and the police and the media again yet. I just want to see the girls, to go get ice cream with Zu-Zu and Plum. To sit at a picnic table and ask them about their lives. I think about the rain boots, about my mistake. How could I have thought a ten-year-old's boots belonged to a toddler? I want to study Plum, to know what
ten
looks like.

Watching her grow up has been agonizing. Because of the girls, maintaining my friendship with Effie has demanded more from me than I knew I had. We had dreams, she and I. About our children, about watching them grow up together. I came here, not long after we received the referral from the adoption agency, proudly clutching the photo just as Effie had held on to the sonograms of her daughters. How was this different? It's all dreaming then, isn't it? It's all imagining until it's not anymore.

We sat at the kitchen nook, and I unfolded the photo, pressed the worn creases flat with my fingers. We studied her, peered into her face, dreamed what her skin would look like. Zu-Zu was five at the time, but Plum was two. The same age as Esperanza. A living, breathing
two
.

We would have shared everything, we promised. At exactly the same age, they would have been like sisters. They would have learned to ride a bike at the same time, how to tie their shoes, how to read. We would have taken them swimming in the lake with plastic floaties on their arms. They would have learned to climb the ladder to the tree house together, scurrying tentatively behind Zu-Zu, who would have loved Esperanza like a little sister. She might have held her hand. I thought about when they were older, when Plum would come to visit us in New York. How I would buy them matching dresses and take them to the Met to see the ballet. Effie and I joked that they would be Country Mouse and City Mouse. Esperanza would teach Plum how to ride the subway, the trick of the turnstile. She would teach her how to hail a cab and how to sleep in the sticky heat of our house, with the sounds of sirens and honking horns outside the window. She and Plum would grow up together the way Effie and I had.

But then, one day I woke from the dream. And Plum became a ghost to me, the remembrance of what was lost. Of what should have been.

 

We go to pick up Zu-Zu first. She takes ballet lessons at the same place where my mother sent me when I was little: Miss Gracie's Dance Studio. Miss Gracie had little patience for me and my flailing limbs though; I didn't make it through even the first year. This is where Effie's sister, Colette, learned to dance as well. It's a little converted garage off of Gracie's house. Gracie's oldest daughter, Sara, has taken over the studio now. Sara worked as a professional dancer for many years before coming home to help her mother.

We stand at the window and watch as Sara adjusts Zu-Zu's hips, gently turns her heel forward, her knee out. Taps her butt and then her stomach. Holds Zu-Zu's head and tilts it a fraction of an inch. Sara motions for her to go to the center of the floor and searches for the music on her iPad. And then Zu-Zu is dancing the variation she's been working on: the Lilac Fairy from
Sleeping Beauty.

She is thirteen years old, but her entire body seems to have a wisdom that far exceeds those years. Every muscle is informed by the music. I shake my head. She is not only perfect, flawless, and precise, but there is also such tender emotion imbued in every gesture, though it is nuanced. Controlled. If her movements were words, I'd describe them as
articulate,
but the prose of her limbs and spine are also, somehow, luminous.

I turn to Effie and watch her watching her daughter. There is a moment when I realize that Effie doesn't even remember that I'm here; she is so focused on this beauty before her. And it isn't pride exactly that I see, but wonder.

She turns to me, refocusing. As though she's just woken up.

I shake my head. “I had no idea,” I say.

She shakes her head as well in disbelief.

“I
have
to let her go, don't I?” she asks.

I nod. And then I remember why we are here. Jake and I have come to visit and then to bring Zu-Zu with us to New York. To deliver her to the teachers who will take this talent that is somehow both raw and refined and shape it further. We are going back to New York. Back to our house in Prospect Heights. Jake is going to go back to his job. Back to our lives.

It feels far away now. So much has happened since I found the texts, since we loaded up the trunk with our suitcases and the treats for Effie and Devin's girls. Since we drove in silence for three hundred miles. Since we sat outside under the twinkling lights strung in the trees, drinking wine, pretending nothing had changed when, in fact, nothing was the same. Between the time before the girl wandered out of the woods and disappeared back into them.

What do we do now? How do we go on? It seems like my entire life has been a series of these strange moments, which have changed the entire trajectory of my life. A pinball in a machine, trying so hard to simply get from one place to the next, but at the mercy of the flippers and spinners and slingshots.

Zu-Zu finishes the variation and then notices us in the window. She smiles, sweat beading up on her hairline. She motions for us to come in. Sara sees us and smiles as well, turns off the music, and opens the door.

While Effie and Sara chat, Zu-Zu flops down on the floor to remove her pointe shoes. She slips them off and tosses them into her dance bag. She peels off her filthy toe pads, and wiggles her damaged toes at me.

“Aren't my feet pretty?” And she is thirteen again.

I smile. “That is disgusting,” I say.

Her feet in the shoes were beautiful, but now they look disfigured. Damaged. Boney-looking bunions, and pulsing veins. Her toes are callused and blistered. The nails cut short and one toe caked with dried blood.

 

“I'll see you in September,” Sara says, hugging her. “Remember, don't be afraid of the Russian teachers. They just
seem
scary. Text me some pictures. And have fun.”

And then we are in the bookmobile again, all piled into the front seat.

“Did they find her yet?” Zu-Zu asks, leaning her head against my shoulder as we pull out of the small parking lot. I turn and kiss her forehead. Her skin is salty.

“No,” I say.

“She must be really scared,” she says.

She is old enough to understand all of the terrible things that could happen to the girl, and I can only imagine what she is thinking as she gazes out the window as we drive to the library.

We drop off the bookmobile, get Effie's car, and go to pick up Plum at her friend Maddy's. They've been playing in the sprinkler. She is wet and muddy when she throws her whole body around me.

“Can we please get ice cream?”

And I am grateful she isn't thinking about the little girl. That she is so easily distracted.