Read More: A brief Q&A with Susann Cokal
Mukhtar Saeed and I had barely begun when the signs went up around his neighborhood.
Have You Seen Me?
They were the only posters allowed in Osos Valley Estates. Xeroxed on yellow and blue and pink paper, taped to every telephone pole and some mailboxes, in defiance of HOA regulations.
I am LIZZIE BEHREN. Have you seen Me?
The little girl was eight years old, Caucasian, with curly light brown hair and blue eyes, last seen in a pink-and-green Lilly Pulitzer dress with a full skirt. She looked like a doll from the 1950s. Her mother had dressed her up for the last day of school and taken her picture with her five-year-old twin brothers, the whole family standing beside the schoolbus as Lizzie climbed up the steps. She had a normal day in third grade and the bus dropped her off that afternoon, but she never came home.
She was a year younger than Mukhtar’s oldest child.
In college, Mukhtar and I had lived in the same dorm for two years. He did very well, both academically and socially, because he was handsome and good at soccer, and because the white kids liked saying the name Mukhtar, as in My friend Mukhtar and I went out hard last night, or Mukhtar and me are going to the beach, or Mukhtar is awesome at differentials, you should ask him to help you. He got a lot of tail, as the non-Mukhtar guys said enviously. In the dorm, at the mirror in the morning, I would hear, Last night Mukhtar and I literally did it. I was prudish back then, and I wondered how those girls could give themselves away so easily.
Right after graduation, Mukhtar surprised everyone by getting married. I heard that for his vows, he wrote that Regina Kim—also from our dorm—was the only person he could imagine spending his life with. They had three kids right away, and then they struggled to stay in love.
In a way, he’d been too smart for his own happiness. He was the rare person who managed to get a job nearby in his chosen field, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The unspoiled beaches and top-ranked elementary schools were too good to pass up, but opportunities were limited for Regina, who had studied hard to become an engineer. After years as a stay-at-home mom, she ended up in a real-estate office; she was the person who processed paperwork for wealthy retirees and resentfully underpaid college professors. She and Mukhtar finally divorced at thirty-one, and he started sifting through Facebook for people he’d hooked up with once so he could do it again. He found me by searching on the name of our dorm and our graduation year.
I’m not sure he remembered that we’d never been together, only sort of my face and barely my name, Paloma Grove. Anyway, I was online and nearby, having posted a picture of myself pointing to a sea anemone in the tidepools at Spooner’s Cove with an announcement that I was catsitting for a month. He hearted the picture and asked if I wanted to have dinner with him.
We met in the restaurant at Port San Luis, where sea lions lounge between the legs of the pier, barking for fish guts. It was Friday night and Lizzie had been missing for just over three hours, but I didn’t know it yet. The place was noisy, which was good. Sometimes having trouble hearing the other person makes the social overtures easier. Everybody just smiles and nods and is pleasant.
So Mukhtar and I started the long process of catching up, complicated by the fact that we weren’t really catching up to anything.
“What was your major?” he asked, as if we were still in school.
I babbled a bit about the history program, sharing barely remembered facts. Too late, I realized I should have asked Mukhtar what he had studied; I should have pretended I hadn’t been keeping track of what he and a few other golden children had been doing this whole time.
“What is machine learning?” I asked him. He gave a brief answer about training computers to learn from their mistakes, so that eventually there will be no need for humans to program them anymore; they will take care of themselves and grow smarter than we’ve ever been.
My dismay must have shown on my face, because he immediately switched the subject.
“So,” he said, “do you have a family? Kids?” Which showed he hadn’t looked at my profile all that carefully.
I didn’t have either of those things. I didn’t even have a job; I’d been laid off when the small press for which I’d been an editor, copyeditor, and receptionist closed its doors. My sole responsibility now was to give an ancient calico cat two pills and an eyedropper full of medicine twice a day in exchange for a place to stay.
“Oh,” I said, “you know.”
That seemed to be enough information to go on with.
I followed him home to the heart of Osos Valley, where we coupled in a McMansion echoing with the special acoustics of Sheetrock and particleboard and very little between the walls. Basic furniture. No art. Drapes tacked over the windows without rods. It looked temporary, like the set for a porno.
On my way to the bathroom in the small hours, I was surprised to look through one door and see pink plastic toys on the floor. I was surprised that there were children after all. I would have expected three kids to leave more of a mess all over, even when they were spending the week at their mother’s. I thought Mukhtar might have been lying about them.
The next morning, the signs were all over Osos Valley.
Have you seen me? Call this number now.
I am Lizzie Behren.
MISSING.
MISSING.
MISSING.
The Estates had grown up around what used to be a road to a cowboy bar, which itself had taken over an old dairy barn. Those things were gone now. The development was all big white stucco houses on small lots, crowded behind tiny green lawns. Each one had a single sapling three feet from the sidewalk, a bed of petunias or impatiens by the door, and a few leaves peeking over a still-raw, tall wooden fence to the backyard. Every garage door was closed; every street felt like a cul-de-sac. They folded in on themselves, all with similar names such as Plover Drive and Plover Road and Plover Lane. It was easy to panic in a place like this, all twists and turns and sameness. Just me and hundreds of identical houses, thousands of pictures of Lizzie Behren.
Every radio station was reading a description of the girl and trying to pinpoint the moment she’d disappeared. Where on the five-minute walk from bus stop to front door had her white-sneakered feet gone astray? I switched the sound off to concentrate on driving.
I passed Mukhtar’s house again. It was the one landmark property, because its yard was a desert. The sapling had withered, the lawn had browned out, and no one had bothered to plant any flowers. I must have driven past it a half-dozen times before I found my way out of the Plovers, first to a cluster of streets called Tern, then to some Egrets, then to the main road.
In Morro Bay, the little working-class house that I’d so enjoyed seemed cramped and grubby after Mukhtar’s place. It had been built for workers in a defunct abalone canning plant, so there was a fishy odor mixed with the smell of the sea, as opposed to joint compound and paint. The owner was “artsy,” which meant her house was stuffed with sea glass and vintage furniture that smelled of an incense called Ghost Musk. It was familiar from places I’d lived all my life.
After tending the cat, who had yeast infections in both ears and an ongoing kidney problem, I spent the day on the beach. My muscles and joints were sore from sex, my skin ultra-sensitive. I felt smug. I was having a fantastic vacation; I needed this break; everything was going to work itself out. I would soon forget the stresses of unemployment, a crowded city, a limited skillset. The word skillset. I had already rediscovered how much I loved to read when it wasn’t part of my job. Who cared if I saw Mukhtar again? There were sea lions and otters all over the sandspit. Tomorrow would be good for whale watching.
The smug feeling faded as the day went on. Three separate people thrust flyers for Lizzie Behren under my nose. I used one as a bookmark and gave two away. All the pressures of my own life closed in again when I thought about Lizzie.
When I got back to the little house, I found the mailbox and screen door stuffed with more flyers, some of which now included details about Lizzie’s grade in school, her parents’ names (Tyler and Hannah), and and and … I tried not to read on, but I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t avoid the local tragedy forever. Impending, possible tragedy—there was still a chance that Lizzie would be found. She might just be lost; she might not have been taken. This wasn’t a ransom situation; OVE residents were well-to-do but not rich. The schools were safe. Her parents had had no work done on the house recently, no strangers over to visit.
Lizzie had gone off to play on the last day of school and was lost, that was all. So we had to hope she was splashing in a tidepool somewhere, swinging in a forgotten playground, holed up in a tumbledown farmhouse the developers hadn’t started on yet.
Yes, I told myself stubbornly, Lizzie was going to be all right. Children simply weren’t abducted from Osos Valley.
I already thought I knew the place.
That day, Tyler and Hannah Behren took to television, Twitter, and internet news feeds. They were tear-stained but well dressed, saying things like, “Stay strong, sweetheart, Mommy and Daddy are going to find you!” And to the adults, “If you have any information at all, call the hotline we’ve set up. Or go to our website and send an email.” And, “We know in our bones that our daughter will be found.”
The police were interviewing the bus driver and the children from the neighborhood. Delicately, so as not to traumatize more kids than they needed to.
I felt panic closing in on me, as if this were my loss, as if I could do something about it. I tried to pretend otherwise; I tried to stay on vacation. I petted the cat and read Agatha Christie, one of the ones in which everyone had a motive and the plot worked out neatly, then Hercule Poirot gave the murderer a chance to kill himself before going to jail.
I wasn’t quite at the neat part when, at eight-thirty, I got a text: I miss you. Come over now?
It was a relief, feeling smug again.
In the morning, while Mukhtar showered, I found a letter from the Osos Valley Estates Home Owners Association lying on his dresser.
Dear Mukhtar,
We are writing to remind you of the standards to which you agreed when you purchased your home on Plover Way.
If you review your closing documents, you’ll see that all OVE residents must maintain a lawn and a tree in front of the house, plus at least one plot of seasonal flowers near the front door (impatiens and petunias recommended, all colors welcome). Additional flowerbeds and planters are encouraged, though not strictly required.
We have noted that these landscaping elements have either died off or never were in place at your residence.
The neighbors to the sides and back of your property have also reported that your backyard is still undeveloped. Although every homeowner has the right to self-expression in private space, we remind you that some combination of attractive plantings and furniture is expected. Neighbors should not have to look out of their bedrooms at bare dirt.
Mukhtar, our records indicate that you moved into your new home over Christmas, which dates your residency here to six months. The Home Owners Association feels that this is ample time to get settled, and so we request that you swiftly comply with the terms of agreement you signed. We enclose a list of landscapers.
We look forward to seeing your property in compliance by the first of next month.
We all benefit from green spaces.
Sincerely,
XXXXX
Mukhtar found me reading the letter, whisked it out of my hands, and threw it away. “It’s the fucking vigil,” he said, and handed me my clothes. He was already in jeans and a T-shirt, his hair dripping over his handsome face.
“Excuse me?” I was confused.
“All those people carrying candles Friday night, walking the streets. They never would have noticed my place if …” He stopped himself.
… if Lizzie Behren had not disappeared.
I was glad he did not say it. “There was a vigil that night?” I hadn’t seen anything of it as I drove after him through the maze of streets, hunting for my booty call.
“It’s bullshit anyway,” he said, “that letter.”
“Lawns are very bad for the environment,” I said, shrugging into T-shirt and shorts and skipping the bra. I didn’t want him to have a chance to do that man thing, hold the breasts and pretend his hands were the bra. “They’re an ecological wasteland. A desert, really.” I had read about that in a book we’d published on microclimate management, the kind of thing people write and read when they’re trying to convince themselves that the planet isn’t entirely doomed.
“Then I’m glad I don’t have one,” he said.
He gave me a perfunctory kiss. It was time for me to go. His ex was dropping the kids off before she and her Realtor team ran a Sunday open house.
I was too late. The front door rattled and then in they trooped, Jessie, Marla, and Jamal: gazelles with fine features, button noses, and thick, curly dark hair. They lined up and stared solemnly at me, their eyes round with questions.
“Paloma is our new landscaper,” Mukhtar said to them. “She’s going to fix our yard.”
He hugged them, one by one, and I remembered a time in college when he’d tried to grow a mustache. It had been downy and thin and had lasted a week, but during that week the dorm had talked of little else.
“Are you ready to have fun?” he asked his kids.
He shook my hand and I left, bra shoved deep into my pocket.
Sunday was the Behrens’ prayer day. They now believed that a kidnaper had Lizzie, and they spoke directly to that person. “Please,” they said, “if you know where our daughter is, if you have her, help us bring her home safely. God is good, God forgives. We forgive you. Please just bring Lizzie back!”
I didn’t think that speech would work. A child molester does not want to think about God, but if he’s promised forgiveness, he’ll keep doing exactly what he’s been doing. The police must have thought so too, because they doubled their own efforts, with more press conferences, posters, and threats delivered at all strata of the news. The task force fielded over a hundred calls an hour from people who had seen a little girl playing alone on the beach, or a man carrying what could have been a sleeping child, or a drugged one, or a woman and a little girl with veils covering everything but their eyes. Psychics posted on Facebook and Twitter to hint about their premonitions and invite the family to contact them.
Unconsciously, I kept an eye out for Lizzie. I searched for a tiny face at the window of every house and car I passed, a pink mouth rounded to an O. A silent shriek of fear—or delight, having fooled all the grown-ups. Or a scrap of pink-and-green dress caught on a fence that protected a breeding ground for birds, a starfish hand poking out of the sand.
I left the beach early and took a nap with the sick cat on my belly, then microwaved a cheese enchilada for dinner. I watched the white box revolving on the oven’s glass wheel and I thought, Machine learning.
That night, Mukhtar texted that he was going to leave his front door unlocked. He would be taking a nap in the TV room while the kids slept upstairs. I should come in at midnight and wake him up by making love to him.
Is that really a good idea? I asked.
It’s the best idea, he replied.
I felt adult, sneaking around to have sex. Though the children were rooms away from us, there was the urgency of knowing they could walk in any moment—sure, we’d pushed the doorknob into locked position, but every kid knows how to defeat it.
That night, Mukhtar said words I’d never imagined listening to voluntarily. He talked about cock and pussy in a steady, quiet monotone. I came so hard that I had to clap a hand over my own mouth, stifling my noises. We fell asleep on the scratchy TV sofa, our bodies slick with sweat, salt on our breath, and didn’t wake up till the kids clattered down the stairs.
Mukhtar made them instant oatmeal and they ate it at the counter, scraping their spoons and watching the two of us go over the HOA agreement before the carpool picked them up for summer STEM camp. I felt like an actress with a tiny, judgmental audience. They knew I was just handsome Daddy’s latest fuck.
After the carpool picked the kids up, Mukhtar gave me keys to his van and a credit card. “Get the stuff on the list,” he said. “With some big-ass flowers, I mean really huge ones. We’ll make a statement. Screw the HOA.”
I looked at him, weighing the keys in my hand. It seemed he actually wanted me to landscape the yard. He expected it. I was both insulted and oddly pleased, made speechless by both emotions. My chance to be with Mukhtar’s house. Inside Mukhtar’s life.
“There’s a new Home Depot on the edge of San Luis,” he said, and as he escorted me through the kitchen and into the attached garage, he gave me directions.
The van was a navy blue breadbox with a large, uncarpeted, windowless area behind the backseat, more like a delivery van than a family house-on-wheels. Nonetheless, the rear bumper was fish-scaled with stickers from national parks and campgrounds, plus slogans such as Precious Car, Go! and Soccer: a Kick in the Grass. It took some getting used to. During one careening right turn, a black-and-white ball unwedged itself from somewhere and bounced back and forth for a while.
The parking lot at Home Depot was already packed. People were lining up at a folding table by the main entrance, bending down to sign their names to one of the clipboards heaped beneath a giant banner.
MISSING. Have you seen me?
Oh. Of course.
“Heartbreaking,” said a woman who had just parked next to me. She was plump, in her fifties, wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants—not the Osos Valley Estates type. “Are you here for the search?”
“I’m here to shop,” I said apologetically. “I didn’t know the little girl.”
“Neither do I,” the woman said. She made a beeline for the table.
I did my shopping. I had to make two trips out to the van, packing the plants into the backseat and laying a maple sapling down sideways in its pot. Three associates loaded in the rolls of sod: “Are you sure you don’t want this delivered, ma’am?” … “No, I’ll just take it.” I worried that Mukhtar would object to the expense—over twelve hundred dollars—but really, I reasoned, he could afford it if anyone could. I signed his name on the card screen and nobody questioned it.
Leaving, I had to idle in the van a good long while. The volunteer searchers were milling around, waiting to be sent out. They eyed me, I felt, balefully because I wasn’t joining them. And because of the van, which sagged and scraped bottom on the speed bumps. I felt guilty every time I heard the grind of metal. It was a relief to drive away and down an empty road with farmland to each side, not to have to think about Lizzie Behren for a few minutes, before reentering the Estates. I tuned to the college radio station and remembered how exciting it used to be to listen to a stranger’s playlists, as opposed to loops of songs I liked playing over and over.
This time, I had no trouble finding the house. Muscle memory took me there.
In the next hours, I was a homeowner. I wrestled the maple sapling into the ground, then dug up the flowerbed and crammed in some spiky birds of paradise that would probably die in the shade cast by the big house. They didn’t look great, but I had followed the letter of the agreement. I set plastic pots with elephant ears and mini palm trees in the middle of the backyard. After I stuck them in the ground, all that would remain was the bare dirt out front, waiting for a lawn. I’d need someone to help unload the sod to cover it.
I was exhausted and thirsty, and I needed to pee—indoors; I couldn’t do it in the yard, with so many neighborly windows looking down on me. Mukhtar hadn’t thought to give me a key to the house, but the van had a remote for the garage, and from there I could jimmy the door into the kitchen.
I am alone in Mukhtar’s house, I told myself as I stepped over the threshold. This is the house of Mukhtar Saeed. I had delayed this pleasure till I was done with the work. I kicked off my muddy shoes and tiptoed like a cat burglar.
The temptation to look around and dig through drawers was strong. I wanted to see photographs, souvenirs, tokens left from the last twelve years of his very successful life. But those things simply did not exist. The only picture I saw anywhere was a lone eight-by-ten on the (gas only) mantelpiece, a mall-studio portrait of Mukhtar with the three kids grinning ear to ear. They looked gorgeous. If I hadn’t already met the children myself, I would have suspected this was a stock photo used for selling frames.
As I was inspecting it—up close, the kids showed some strain as the photographer urged them to smile—the doorbell rang. I set the photograph down guiltily, though I had not in fact pried into anything. I went to the door.
There stood Regina Kim-Saeed, Mukhtar’s ex-wife. She was wearing a sleekly tailored red dress, with sunglasses pushed up like a headband holding back beautiful, lush hair. I watched her recognize me, blink, stand up taller.
“I had no idea he’d kept in touch with you,” she said by way of greeting. Then to soften the blunt statement, she moved in for a hug.
I needed to pee more than ever. I noted that her dress felt synthetic, and she seemed to have on some kind of shapewear that made her flesh feel unnaturally firm.
Regina introduced me to two middle-aged women and a man, all sexless and white and indistinguishable from each other. “This is Paloma Grove,” she told them. In her mouth, my name sounded like another housing development. “Unless you’ve changed your name? No? Paloma, these people represent the HOA.”
She told me their names, but I was too flustered to take any of them in.
“We noticed that somebody was finally working on the yard,” said one.
“Are you bonded?” asked another.
“They called me,” Regina explained. “Mukhtar didn’t file any plans.”
I made myself casually dignified, leaning into the doorjamb and blocking their way as if I had all the time in the world to chat. “He doesn’t have to file plans,” I said. “He doesn’t have to use a bonded landscaper either. Those items are not in the contract.”
We gazed at each other at an impasse. In some ways I must have been reassuring to the HOA, a woman home in the middle of the day, gardening. Then again, I was a stranger, at a time when Osos Valley did not want to see anyone new. And I was uppity.
Someone said, “We don’t allow street parking.”
I promised to move my Honda.
“Or parking in driveways for more than three days in a row.”
I must have looked amused, because Regina said quickly, “Especially that van, am I right? I used to beg him to get rid of it.”
An HOA member said to me, “Please remind Mukhtar to put the van in his garage.”
I promised that too, while Regina’s lips flattened into a line.
“And for God’s sake, be careful about opening the door,” she added. “My kids live here part-time.” She opened her handbag and took out a business card. “Here’s my cell number, in case you need anything. You probably know I live just a few blocks that way”—she motioned toward the southeast—“in the Egrets.”
I hadn’t known she was so close; Mukhtar didn’t mention it. I supposed it was convenient for the children, going from one house to the other.
She kept her hand out, palm up.
“I don’t have a card,” I said, which was about the same as admitting I didn’t have a job, other than what I was doing here. Regina probably thought Mukhtar was paying me.
Maybe he should, I thought as I closed the door on the four of them. I hadn’t planned on any of this when I arranged to catsit. A house in a development. Gardening. Three kids.
I watched the flyers blowing on the light poles along the street.
Have you seen Me?
I wondered how much Mukhtar’s children knew about Lizzie. When he brought them home that afternoon, they appeared to be happy, normal, as if they’d never heard a bit of bad news in their lives. They spent their evening with outrageous piles of homework—for summer camp—then watched cartoons and played video games for an hour after dinner. They were well-adjusted modern kids. Slightly boring.
“Why do they have all that homework?” I asked Mukhtar as we gathered up the napkins and pizza boxes. “I never brought books home when I was a kid.”
“They say it takes a village,” he drawled, then folded the boxes together and crushed them under his sneaker heel. “Or that’s what they used to say. Now it’s ‘Teachers are overwhelmed with big classes, so parents have to help out at night.’ Some people hire tutors, of course. They even have professional coaches to train the kids for show-and-tell now. Speaking of which …”
It was a cue. Jessie, the nine-year-old, approached me, all doe eyes and sweet smile. “Daddy said you were a writer. Can you help me write a report?”
“I’m an editor,” I clarified. And by the time I had explained what an editor is, I’d talked my way into the job.
“What’s the assignment?” I asked as we settled in at the lightly crumbed dining table. Jessie had her own laptop; it was one of the requirements for STEM camp. She opened it up and logged in, then turned the screen to me. There was a special set of instructions for parents, with graphics of a panda bear, an elephant, and a panther hugging each other.
The project was about animals around the world; it was intended to help children start coming to grips with the effects of climate change. “This assignment is not intended to trigger panic,” the document assured its adult readers. “Rather, it will lead children gently toward an appreciation of the natural world and our need to preserve it.” I supposed that ecological disaster would be covered in the normal school year.
“Which animals have you chosen?” I asked Jessie.
“I’m doing marsupials in Australia.” She typed Marsoupiels into a new document, ignoring the squiggly red line that appeared underneath.
“Why did you choose them?”
“They’re cute,” Jessie said. “And they live in their mom’s pouch a really long time.” She leaned confidingly toward me, as if she were about to say a dirty word. “There’s a nipple down at the bottom.”
The next day, I joined a volunteer crew.
“Okay,” Mukhtar said as I groped through the bedsheets for my underwear. “You have officially drunk the Kool-Aid.”
“Just trying to be a good citizen,” I said. I couldn’t explain about Jessie; she was his daughter. “The little girl is lost.”
“The little girl is dead,” he said. “I’m sorry, but after this long, it’s bound to be. Or else something so bad has happened that …” He stopped there, scratching his lower lip, but I knew what he would have said: … it would have been better for her to die.
I hopped out of bed. My jeans lay on the floor with the panties still inside, and I put them on in one swoop. My tank top was in a ball by the window.
“She could be anywhere by now,” Mukhtar went on thoughtfully. “The hills, a canyon, a warehouse … out at sea … Search parties don’t work. They just make people feel better.”
I wanted him to stop talking. I said, “Maybe she did wander off to play. Her parents say she loves Montaña de Oro.”
“A little girl that age would never get there on her own. She’d have had to get a ride from somebody. And if he took her that far, he’d just keep on driving until—”
“You’re freaking me out,” I interrupted, and then I felt selfish. I owed it to Lizzie to listen, to face what might have happened. To feel terrified and still have hope.
“Of course, it could be someone in her family,” Mukhtar said heedlessly. “Or a neighbor. Even her parents.”
“Shut up,” I said.
“Somebody who—”
“Just shut up.”
Then he shut up. But I couldn’t. I said the obvious: “What if it were Jessie or Marla? Or Jamal? Wouldn’t you keep looking till you found something?”
It was unthinkable to me that Mukhtar, who in college was so popular and successful, so good at being around people and making them like him—was completely disinterested in little Lizzie’s disappearance.
“Would you rather know your kids were dead,” I asked, relentless in my turn, “or keep hoping that they were still alive, even if they were … maybe … in terrible circumstances?”
Mukhtar got out of bed. “I got an email from the HOA last night,” he said, dressing with his back to me. His T-shirt went on inside-out. “They want to know when the grass is going down.”
I was relieved to talk about something so insignificant. “I can’t do that by myself.”
“We can do it together,” he said. “On the weekend. The kids will be with their mom then anyway.” He never said Regina’s name, just the kids’ mom. “So you can stay here the whole time.” He turned, fully dressed, and held out his arms.
I was glad he wasn’t mad at me. But I was a little angry with him. Or put out, maybe, I thought as I got into my car. By now he should be ready to talk about his children with me.
As I drove off, I remembered that I was supposed to tell him to move the van.
I went to the little house in Morro Bay to give the cat her pills and drops. As I showered, I talked myself into believing that Mukhtar was more deeply affected than he let on. He just couldn’t bear to acknowledge how bad the situation was, much as I felt when Lizzie’s disappearance first encroached on my vacation.
Back in Osos Valley, I found out what had happened to the old milk barn turned cowboy bar: It had become the community center where Plovers, Terns, and Egrets came together. The white building now housed locker rooms for the pool, plus a conference room for HOA meetings. A bronze historic marker explained the structure’s history and the efforts to preserve it while adapting it for “the way we live now.”
Nobody was going inside. The lifeguards watched over an empty pool.
Each person who signed in received a flimsy yellow T-shirt with Lizzie’s name and picture, plus a stick-on nametag. I pulled the T-shirt on over my tank top and let myself be herded into the group headed for the eucalyptus woods. The groves were known to get wild some nights, when college kids used them for partying. Or so I’d heard; that hadn’t been my crowd.
While I was attaching my name tag, a gangly man with a shock of red hair approached. “What a pretty name … Paloma,” he said, reaching for my hand. His was soft and a little sticky. He seemed genuinely glad to meet me—genuinely glad, period. His name was Dave; he would tell me later that he’d taken a personal day off from the community college’s IT department and bought a new pair of hiking boots to come here. “Are you new?” he asked.
“I live in the Plovers.” I enjoyed telling Dave a little lie. I didn’t like to admit that this was really part of my vacation, touring through someone else’s tragedy. Though I sincerely did care about the little girl.
Dave’s smile broadened. “I’m on Plover Drive myself.”
“Neighbors,” I said, though I wasn’t sure how far the Drive was from the Way.
“Where do your kids go to school?”
I should have been expecting the question. Well, now I had to tell a truth; I didn’t know the names of any schools. “I don’t have kids.”
“That’s okay,” he said, which irritated me—I didn’t need his approval. “Neither do I.”
I didn’t like Dave. But we were being encouraged to carpool, since parking by the woods was limited, so I gave him a ride. He chatted too eagerly as we joined the line pulling through the labyrinth of streets that would lead out of the Estates and into the park.
“Do you know where her house is? No? We can drive by on the way back. We can even stop.” He looked at me. “You know, put a face to a name? A house to a name, anyway?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, gripping the wheel. My Honda was the smallest vehicle in the convoy, except for a few Fiats in pastel colors like Jordan almonds.
“Oh well.” Dave shrugged. “Thought you might want to see.”
I felt disgust wash over me—though wasn’t that level of interest what I’d wanted from Mukhtar?
And of course I wondered about the Behrens and their house. I wanted to know everything about how such a thing could happen. But I did not want to be a person who would snoop through the leavings of a tragedy.
For five hours, fifty or so of us marched through the woods, as steadily as you can go when the ground is hilly and the leaves, twigs, and bark are sometimes ankle deep. The crackle underfoot drowned even the sound of the waves crashing on the sandbar behind; the only cries we heard were the distant sea lions’. Each one stopped my heart before my mind caught up and told me what it was.
We’d been instructed not to pick anything up, to leave the site as intact as possible for now. So we passed by beer cans and chip wrappers, discarded condoms, animal scat. Aside from those reminders of modern life, the woods were otherworldly. Under the drought, the trees’ long leaves had gone from silvery green to brown, and the orange bark was peeling away, revealing gray skin underneath.
I was none too pleased to find Dave beside me, matching me step for step.
“You know,” he said once, when we paused to remove debris from our shoes, “they say that the person who kidnaps a child often turns up to search for them. They find it exciting or something.”
“That’s sick,” I said.
I looked around. A middle-aged woman was drinking water nearby. She might have been one of the committee from the HOA, but I couldn’t be certain; the ugly yellow shirts did a remarkable job of making everyone look the same. I tried to catch her eye, draw her toward me. She refused to look.
“The whole thing is sick,” Dave agreed. The new boots had blistered his feet; his white socks were splotchy with blood. But he got up and kept going.
At four o’clock, a whistle blew three times, and the team leaders tied orange plastic ribbons around a few tree trunks to mark our progress. We all turned around to tramp back. Much faster, much less organized.
Nothing had been found.
“It’s a good sign, in a way,” I heard a woman remark with false cheer, but the general mood was depressed.
We all wanted there to have been something—a scrap of a silly pink-and-green print, a hair ribbon. Some proof that Lizzie Behren really was out there to be found. A sign that our own effort had meant something.
Dave and I were the last ones in. He was having trouble with the last mile, and much as I longed to, I couldn’t leave him behind. I even took him by the elbow and led him down the final hill. My fingers left white marks on his sunburn; he hadn’t thought to put on any block.
At the end of the trail, there was Regina, in the parking area, handing out refreshments rather late in the event. For each of us, she had a dry oatmeal cookie and a cup of brackish lemonade made from powder.
“Thanks for all your hard work today,” she said. She did not say our names. But I knew what she thought as Dave and I limped toward my car. She couldn’t wait to tell Mukhtar that she had seen me with a man.
At the community center, the tables had been moved and the big photos of Lizzie were now mounted on the walls. The swimming pool was in business again, full of splashing kids, lined with watchful parents.
I left the engine running, but Dave took his time. He had unlaced his boots and now tied them again.
“I understand you, Paloma,” he said, face between his knees. “I see who you are. I just want you to know that.”
I chose not to answer.
“You don’t really live in Osos Valley, do you?” he asked.
I pressed the button that unlocked his door again, so he could hear the noise. “Good-bye, Dave.”
“I give great back rubs—”
“Dave,” I said, “get out of my fucking car right now.” […]
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Susann Cokal’s novels are Mirabilis, Breath and Bones, Mermaid Moon, and The Kingdom of Little Wounds, which won a few national awards and also a spot on the American Library Association’s list of books most often banned and challenged during the past decade. Her shorter work has appeared in publications such as Cincinnati Review, Electric Lit, The Journal, Prairie Schooner, Gargoyle, Writers on the Job, and The New York TImes Book Review. She lives in a crumbling farmhouse in Richmond, Virginia, and on the web at susanncokal.net.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Susann Cokal