The Disappearance
J. F. Freedman
For Al Silverman
T
HE WEATHER HAD BEEN
raw and miserable virtually every day for two months; this was the worst winter in a couple of decades, way worse than those of ’95 or ’82, a continuous, relentless, El Niño-driven hard-falling rain from right after Christmas all through January and February, torrential sheets of cold piercing needles crashing down days at a time without cessation, soaking the ground past saturation, waterlogging everyone and everything. Wet-dog smell stunk up houses, cats sprayed and crapped behind couches because they wouldn’t go outside, everywhere indoors reeked of mildew, a decaying-newspaper rot. There was widespread flooding of basements and low-lying dwellings—people in those houses and apartments who hadn’t sandbagged properly, mostly lower-incomers who could least afford any loss, saw some of their most precious possessions—family photographs and records and heirlooms—ruined by mud and water, or washed right out of their dwellings. Turbid runoff flowed through the creeks and streams, joining contaminated effluent from broken sewage lines and cracked septic tanks, the force of the water a full-on raging swollen urban river, cascading down the streets and roads, at times climbing to a level of four or five feet in the streets that didn’t have good gutters and storm drains. Those foolhardy enough to be driving down these overwhelmed streets in the middle of one of the heavy downpours would see the water rushing past their car windows. Several cars were floated clear off the road, crashing into parked cars or washing up on the sidewalk, where they had to be abandoned.
Uprooted oaks and eucalyptus, big ones, old ones, their root systems rotted out, fell in the middle of main thoroughfares. Massive palm fronds littered the streets, literally closing off some roads. Power outages were common—a wide swath of the busiest commercial area downtown lost power at 9:30 on New Year’s Eve. Most of the restaurants had to close down early; people fought their way home and watched the mess (those who hadn’t lost power themselves) on the local television news.
There were fewer drunken accidents. That was one of the only consolations.
Finally, the rains stopped. Everyone immediately began spending as much time outside as possible.
The ground was still soaked. It would take another month to dry out, but the worst was over.
DAY ONE
T
HE MOON, TWO DAYS
past full, hangs low and forbiddingly cold, diamond hard in the late winter dead-of-night sky. A thirty-knot wind swooping out of the northeast earlier in the evening, blowing as hard as the summer Santa Anas, has brought the temperature down almost to freezing, which rarely happens this late, mid-March, people aren’t prepared for it, even though they should be, given the terrible winter this new year has brought forth.
It’s late now, well past midnight. Nothing is moving on the streets. All the lights are out in all the houses.
The girl sleeping on the futon hears a noise, a dull thump, like a body bumping into something. The sound is just loud enough to bring her to the edge of consciousness, somnolently turning her head to look up from where it’s buried in a pillow.
There are three fourteen-year-old girls sleeping in the bedroom, eighth-graders having their little slumber party. They have been together most of the day, from mid-afternoon. Emma’s mom dropped them off downtown a couple hours before dark.
They cruised the Paseo Nuevo mall, bought some tops and shorts at Nordstrom and The Gap, followed that with dinner at California Pizza Kitchen, and finished off downtown by going to a movie at the Metro 4 down the street (an R-rated movie with Johnny Depp, they brazened their way in with attitude, the movie people let the ID deal slide as long as you don’t look like a sixth-grader). Emma bought the tickets. She’s fourteen, going on twenty in her head, mature-looking for her age, with an innocent sensuality that oozes from her.
Their parents have just started letting them out at night on their own, as long as they’re in by a reasonable hour. They are growing up fast.
Between the time they had dinner and the time they went to the movie they flirted with some older boys who were at their school before moving on to high school—Bolt or Thatcher or the public high school—but then they danced away, giggling and whispering. They liked the attention, but they aren’t dating yet. Except for Emma, and her dates are secrets only her very closest friends share.
Their parents have given them plenty of money on top of their allowances (these mothers and fathers who comprise various combinations of married, separated, and divorced adults have their own weekend agendas which don’t include their children, they are all, in their own self-wrapped-up ways, happy the girls can take care of themselves for an entire evening), so they cabbed home and watched
Mad TV
followed by
Night Stand
, a stupid-humor takeoff on a talk show. The guy who hosts the show lives in Montecito, the same as them. The girls have seen him in Starbucks, hunched over the
News-Press
, nursing a latte. Probably checking out his reviews. He’s a minor celebrity, nobody to get excited about, not when there are real celebrities all over the place, John Cleese walking on the beach, Michael Douglas having lunch at Pane e Vino, Jodie Foster buying wine and brie at Von’s.
They’ve stayed up way late, past midnight. After they were done watching TV, they went outside and smoked. Emma’s house has a huge yard, more than two acres of manicured lawn and beautifully trimmed trees and voluptuous flowerbeds you can get lost in it easy, especially at night. Smoking is new to them—they know kids who have been doing it from when they were ten or eleven or even younger, but these are mostly Chicano public-school kids. At fourteen, though, eighth or ninth grade, lots of kids smoke, it isn’t that big a deal.
Big deal or not, they don’t want their parents to find out. They don’t want the hassle of dealing with their parents about shit like that.
Glenna, Emma’s mom, knows that Emma smokes. She hasn’t actually caught her daughter with the burning evidence in her mouth, but she sees the signs. She doesn’t like it, but she doesn’t hassle Emma too much about it, like other mothers would, so most of the time the girls hang out at Emma’s house. Glenna looks the other way about lots of things regular mothers wouldn’t—having boys in the house when there aren’t any adults around, watching any videos or TV shows they want no matter how R-rated-raunchy they are. Glenna is a woman of the ’90s, she wants her daughter to be one, too. So she cuts Emma a lot of slack.
The house—it could truly be called a mansion, Montecito is full of houses like this—is one-story, the bedrooms located in two separate wings from the rest of the house. Emma’s bedroom has French doors that open onto a flagstone patio, from which a path leads down the full acre of rolling lawn to the swimming pool and bathhouse. When the girls came back to Emma’s room they took off their shoes and left them outside.
One of the French doors is open. The moon, just past full, bathes the doorway and part of the bedroom in pale yellow shadowy light.
Is something moving in the room? A person?
Whatever it is, it is out the door, pulling the door closed behind it, crossing the patio.
The girl feels she must be dreaming, a dream within a dream, the kind of dream that feels incredibly real, the kind of dream that if retained at all is always a nightmare in the remembering.
She isn’t used to smoking and staying up so late, the way Emma and Hillary, the third girl in the slumber party, are. They’re faster than her
—
she was tremendously flattered and surprised when Emma inexplicably decided, at the beginning of the school year, to admit her into her circle of friends.
Still, she’s the third of the threesome. Which is why she is sleeping on the futon on the floor while the other two are in the twin beds. Not that she cares. Being in this company is enough, it doesn’t matter where you sleep. Futons are fun, like camping out.
In her dream the French doors are now closed, the room is tranquil, empty. The moon shines on the carpet, a small shimmering pool. The figure is gone.
Then nothingness. The girl rolls over in her sleep and her unconscious mind goes blank.
Hillary and Lisa don’t wake up until after ten—normal teenage weekend behavior. Emma isn’t there; her unmade bed is rumpled. They figure she’s gotten up earlier and gone out.
They lounge around in the room for a while, not sure what to do—go out into the house and look for Emma, or wait for her to come back. They watch some television, get dressed, wait.
Finally, hungry and bored, they wander through the house to the kitchen. Glenna—Mrs. Lancaster to the girls—is sitting on a stool at the island, drinking black coffee and reading the
New York Sunday Times
magazine. Her angular, striking face is devoid of makeup, and her straight black hair is pulled back in a ponytail; her long, slender feet are bare. A tall, athletic woman, she was awake early and played tennis for two hours on her private court with her coach and a friend.
“Emma still sleeping?” she asks casually, her eyes going back to her article. “How late were you guys up, anyway?”
The girls look at each other. “She’s already got up, Mrs. Lancaster,” Hillary says. “We thought she was in here.”
Glenna shakes her head. “I haven’t seen her all morning.” She glances at the clock on the wall. It’s almost 10:30. “She must be in the shower.” She turns a page. There’s some great clothing coming out this spring. She needs a trip to New York in the near future.
“We used her bathroom, Mrs. Lancaster,” Lisa pipes up. “She wasn’t in it.”
Glenna cocks her head for a moment, thinking. “Well, she’s around somewhere.” She lays her magazine aside and favors them with a smile. “She isn’t much of a hostess, leaving the two of you to fend for yourselves. Do you want any breakfast?” She gets up from her perch, crosses to the refrigerator. “There’s fresh orange juice, bagels, croissants. Do your parents let you drink coffee?” Without waiting for a reply she pours two small glasses of juice. “There’s cereal, if you want it. In that cupboard,” she points across the room.
Lisa hesitates before she speaks. “I had this really weird dream last night. More like a nightmare.”
Glenna smiles. “That’s what happens when you stay up too late. You’re disturbing your biorhythms.”
Lisa nods, uncertain. “It was like I woke up in Emma’s bedroom, just the way it was when we went to sleep? And the door to the outside was open, and somebody was in there?”
Glenna looks at her more seriously. “Are you sure this was a dream?”
“I thought it was.”
“Tell me what you thought you dreamed. Or saw,” she says, becoming agitated. “What time did you think this was? In your dream.”
“I don’t know. It was really late. Like maybe morning, almost.”
Glenna crosses to her. “Did you see something, Lisa?” Her eyes locked onto the girl’s. “Look at me, Lisa. What did you see?”
It’s early in the afternoon. Glenna and the girls had combed the property looking for Emma. When they didn’t find her, Glenna called the police who referred her call to the county sheriff’s department. She’d been reluctant to do so, but nothing felt right, and she figured it was better to err on the side of caution.
“What exactly did you see, Lisa?”
They are in the study of Emma’s parents’ house: Lisa, Hillary, Emma’s mother, and the police detective. The detective from the sheriff’s department, a big man with a hairbrush mustache, has asked the question. He’s asking all the questions. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the missing kid blithely breezes in and wonders what all the commotion’s about, but you still have to go through the drill.