I moved into a different emotional moment with him. Suddenly I could see only what had driven us to divorce.
I said, “Well. I’ll let you get back to what you were doing.”
I stepped down off his stoop. Headed down the stone walkway to my car.
“Keep me posted, okay? Let me know what happens.”
I waved my answer without turning around.
As I started my car I wondered, perhaps for the first time, what on earth had possessed me to seek out that exchange.
“So, we have it narrowed down,” Grace Beatty said. “Or, at least, we hope we do. Of course, we’re relying on this guy’s memory. But we have patrol cars going up and down the streets in what we think is the most likely radius. And of course they’ll gradually spread out if they don’t find her there.”
I opened my mouth to speak. Then I closed it again.
I was sitting on a hard chair near her desk. It was making my hip bones hurt. I had been sitting there for quite a while. I had my hands in my lap. My skinless lap.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“You looked like you had a question.”
I opened my mouth again. Closed it again.
Then I surprised myself by going for it.
“You think this guy’s enough of a monster that he’d purposely give us bad information about where he left her?”
An image flooded into my brain. Behind my eyes. Looking up at the guy’s face. In hopes of identifying him later. Seeing only a black ski mask. It had made him look like a monster. A faceless monster.
“I don’t,” she said. “No. But not because I have faith in his good character. Because it’s been made painfully clear to him that he’s responsible for what happens to Etta. He’s already looking at reckless endangerment charges. Possibly even depraved indifference. And that’s if he’s lucky. That’s assuming we find her and she’s fine. This guy wants very, very badly for your daughter to be found, and to be okay. But probably only to save his own skin.”
I remember thinking he was lucky. To have skin.
I don’t believe I said so out loud.
After that, and after some time that’s too fuzzy to properly relate, I found myself doing something I now see as ridiculous. Even for that horrible day.
I went out and tried to find her.
It was ridiculous because I knew far less than the police knew regarding where to look. I hadn’t been there when they questioned The Monster. His every word had not been related back to me.
I knew only that he had been heading south toward San Diego. From West LA. On the 405. And that he had been driving for maybe twenty minutes when he got off the freeway and put her out of the car.
Then again, time could be a very fluid thing. I was proving it that day.
Try to understand. I had to do something. If I didn’t, I felt as though I might explode.
I found myself cruising down a crowded boulevard north of the airport. Pulled over toward the curb, going slow. Cars honked at my slowness. Pulled around me. A couple of drivers gave me the finger.
I had my windows down, and I was calling my little girl’s name.
I guess I figured that was one thing I could do better than the police. If she heard my voice, she would come to me. What if she heard a police officer call to her? What would she do? Hide?
I had no idea. It was a theory we’d never had to test.
So I had my voice, and that was good.
But she’d only hear me if she were maybe twenty yards away. And the range of where she could have been abandoned was maybe twenty square miles or more.
That was bad.
It was an overwhelming, sickening thought. But, oddly, that was not ultimately the realization that turned me for home.
This was the realization:
I was driving slowly because, if she were magically near, she might run into the street. Or she might anyway, just out of fear. I was driving as though my daughter were dodging traffic nearby. Because that was a horrible possibility.
And then it hit me.
The other drivers were not being careful. Nobody was looking out for Etta except me. And there were thousands of them. All not driving as though my daughter were dodging traffic nearby.
I pulled over to the curb, where there was no stopping. And I cried. And cried. And cried. And cried. And cried.
When I got home—or maybe I should say “back to my mother’s house” and leave the concept of home out of this—my mother gave me an odd look.
She was sitting at the kitchen table. Drinking something from a mug. Could have been tea. Could have been booze. I had no time to wonder.
“Where have you been?” she asked me. She sounded distinctly irritated.
“At the police station.”
“Well, I called there, and you’d left some time ago.”
I was standing in the kitchen, tapping my keys against my thigh. Wanting just to walk away from her. After all, I was an adult. I didn’t need to answer to my mother.
Only trouble was, I felt like her minor child in that moment.
“I went to see David. And then I drove around.”
“And what if that Officer Beatty had tried to call you?”
“She has my cell number. I told her to call me on my cell.”
I watched her face twist into a mass of negative judgment.
“Your cell phone was stolen.” She plainly thought it was foolish of me to have forgotten.
“I got a new one. And I called and told her that. Why? Did she call here?”
“No.”
“Did somebody else call me here? Anybody? Is that why you’re giving me the third degree?”
“David called here,” she said, her face untwisting. “Because there was something he wished he’d said when you were there.”
I felt a rage boil up in me. Granted, I was angry in general. Skinless. Unable to cope with the slightest irritation. But it was more than that.
