“Yes?” she says. “How can I help you?”
“Your son goes to school with my boyfriend’s stepdaughter,” I say, realizing too late how convoluted all the labels are. I don’t care. “Sadie. I was wondering if she’s here.”
My heart is beating fast, suddenly. Over the woman’s shoulder, I can see the light from the dining room and hear the clatter of silverware. It’s dinnertime. The entire family is here, and they’ve been settled in for a while.
“Chris,” the woman calls, still maintaining her calm. Why shouldn’t she? It isn’t her daughter who’s disappeared.
The boy from Sadie’s summer school appears in the doorway to the dining room. Two younger boys with his same curly hair and slender physique peer out curiously behind him.
“Have you seen your friend Sadie?” the woman asks him.
His expression goes from blank to startled. “Sadie’s missing?” His voice is surprisingly deep for his age, but he says the words quietly.
I watch him closely. I look for any sign that he’s hiding something. But all I see is the same sudden helplessness I saw on Edison when I left him.
All the Byrnes can do is take Edison’s number and promise to call if they see her. Chris is still standing at the threshold when I leave, and the angst on his face kicks up a level of fear that surprises me. He is already thinking the worst.
I thought he had her. She called him and said she was locked out of Edison’s house and she didn’t want to go home. He rode by on his bike and found her trying to scale the fence and teased her for not being able to make it over. She lost her shoe and he told her to just leave it; he wasn’t going to wait all day. She went with him because her young and foolish heart was willing to forgive him. She sat up on the handlebars and together they pedaled off into the sunset just as the first rain clouds started to form.
I realize that this had been my hope. This was it, and I don’t know where else she could be.
Or I don’t want to believe it. Not yet.
I can’t go back to Edison’s house. There will be police everywhere. They’ll want to ask me questions. They’ll also want to know my name. They might run my fake ID.
“Fuck,” I whisper. “Fuck.”
By now, Sadie could be anywhere. In the trunk of a car speeding toward Utah. Handcuffed to the radiator of a basement thirty miles away. Buried in a mountainside or laughing in a friend’s bedroom as they both eat ice cream out of the carton.
I think about how small she is. Ninety pounds at most soaking wet. Sadie wouldn’t look at herself in the mirror and see what a predator does. Her emotions are larger than life, her joy and sadness big enough to fill all the empty desert space. But she can’t possibly knowwhat lurks out there in broad daylight. The types of people who look for someone exactly like her.
She is to someone what Edison is to me.
It isn’t just for Edison that I want to find her, I realize. It isn’t just that I want to rescue her and bring her home like an offering at the altar of our love. But it should stop at that. Everything I do in this place should be for him, to deepen our love and to sweeten our final moment. Sadie was only ever supposed to be a tool to utilize, and I shouldn’t worry for her. I shouldn’t have this desperate, sick feeling about what must be happening to her, how scared she must be, how she’s hoping that someone will come for her.
If she’s still alive, Sadie has learned something that even I didn’t know when I was her age. It isn’t just the ones who walk down alleyways at night. It can be the woman pushing a baby stroller in the grocery store, or the man in the three-piece suit waiting for the crosswalk signal to turn. All it takes is someone with an insatiable need, and by the time such a person has chosen you, it’s alreadyover.
27
The morning news shows Sadie’s Facebook profile photo. She’s wearing a ten-gallon hat, laughing maniacally as someone snaps the photo in the dressing room of the school theater. They show this one even though, from an identification standpoint, it isn’t the clearest picture. The dim lighting adds a false strawberry sheen to her yellow hair, and you can see that her eyes are light, but not necessarily blue.
They show it because it captures Sadie for what she represents: a carefree young girl with her life laid out before her. Someone’s daughter—maybe even yours.
The church community is more practical. They’ve taken Sadie’s junior high photo—bright lighting, her heart-shaped face in full focus, her gold star-stud earrings visible—and printed three hundred laminated copies. Volunteers are stapling them to telephone poles and every trash can in the parks. This is their contribution to Edison,although it’s been six months since he’s brought Sadie along to Sunday services, because her father is not exactly president of Jesus’s fan club.
Edison hasn’t slept. I returned to him last night after a solid six hours of searching. I don’t tell him that I tore open the bags of every dumpster downtown. As the rain let up, I pulled over at every ditch, parted a path through every dense bit of shrubbery I could find. Not a single blond hair to be found.
If Sadie is dead, whoever had her was either very smart about hiding her, or very lucky.
Edison has taken a more hopeful approach, calling her friends. Next he called the hospitals and the walk-in clinics just in case an unidentified patient came in after being hit by a car.
Now he sits on the couch beside me as the laughing photo of Sadie is shown for the third time. He knows that if she was safe, she would have turned up by now, and his mind is opening to the uglier possibilities. I can see the change reach his face. He’s too pale. His eyes are glossed over. First Sheila, and now Sheila’s only child. An entire legacy slipped through his fingers in a year’s time.
Sadie’s loss should be a gift to me. Edison is malleable, desperate, and I’m all that he has. This couldn’t have worked out better for my plan. I should be soothing his pain with my touch, distracting him with sex, telling him that I’m here, that he still has me. If I do this, slowly, his grief will fracture its bones and take a new shape. He’ll need me more than ever. I’ll be his only light. His oxygen, his purpose.
But when I look at him, it’s as though his pain is mine. I can’t breathe, the sadness is so crushing.
“Edison, love,” I say against his ear. “You should sleep.”
