I'll Be You(49)

I walked stiffly along the front path, past a decorative cactus garden, and toward the front door. There was no portico for shade, just a severe slab of concrete jutting out from the wall. I rang the doorbell and then stood there blinking in the sun.

Nothing. I counted to twenty, then rang it again, this time pressing my ear to the door to listen for movement inside. I couldn’t hear a sound except the faint metallic chime of the doorbell echoing off a tile floor.

The house was empty. The owners were at work, or on vacation. Maybe this was even their second home.

I looked up and down the street. The homes in this neighborhood were far apart, discreetly positioned for privacy, and showed no signs of life. There wasn’t even a gardener in sight.

I stood there wilting, lost. What to do now? Drive all the way back home empty-handed? What a ridiculous waste of time this had been. There wasn’t even a mailbox from which I could glean the name of whoever lived here.

My mother had been right all along: My sleuthing was of no use whatsoever. I could have been taking Charlotte to the park today, eating ice cream with her on the pier. Getting to know my niece. That would have been more helpful than this, another day of half-assedly pursuing clues that might never have been clues in the first place. A list that meant no more than the scrap of paper it was written on.

And yet. I kept thinking of that bizarre phone call with Michaela Blackwell yesterday afternoon. She’s not Elli. It had to mean something. It had to have some connection to GenFem and my sister’s current situation, didn’t it? The first name on this list had not only known who Elli was, she’d known that she wasn’t herself anymore.

I checked the time—it was only noon. My only shot at salvaging this trip was to wait until the end of the day and come back to see if the owners returned to the house after work. It would mean spending the night in Scottsdale, but perhaps that was better than driving home in this condition anyway. I could feel the previous twenty-four hours starting to weigh me down, a yoke of exhaustion.

I’d noticed a café on my way through town and I headed back in that direction now, driving until I found myself in a small shopping district. The café was wedged between a gallery displaying oil paintings of stoic Native Americans and a boutique selling alligator cowboy boots, as if standing an awkward sentry between the two conflicting narratives. It was a neighborhood place, the sort of café that compensated for its mediocre coffee with live jazz trios on Fridays and community bulletin boards where you might find yourself a local teenage babysitter.

Inside, the air was so cold that it made my teeth hurt. The café was empty except for a pair of bored-looking teenagers ignoring each other as they tapped on their phones. The barista was wearing a sweater. How strange, to live in a climate of such extremes; how hard it must be to find equilibrium.

I ordered a black coffee and took it to a table in the corner. I sat there, nursing the coffee as it revived me, wishing I’d brought a book. How was I going to kill the next six hours?

I pulled out my phone and texted my sister. For God’s sake just let me know you’re not being held hostage. I’m worried. It joined the rest of the texts and photos I’d sent her over the last few days. WTF is going on? And Is today the day you’re going to stop giving us the silent treatment? And You need to stop this. And Please come home. And Do it for Charlotte not for me. All of them had been marked read. None of them had been answered.

I hit Send and then sat there, sipping my coffee, waiting to see if Elli would respond. A few minutes after I sent it, three dots appeared below my message. She was typing. I sat upright, jerked alert. But the dots hung there, and hung, and after a maddeningly long time they finally just disappeared altogether. Maybe she’d changed her mind about responding, or maybe she wasn’t OK and she didn’t want to lie. I was too tired to speculate anymore.

I ferried my coffee cup back to the barista, a paper-clip-thin twentysomething with rhinestones glued along her lash line. “Refill?”

Her pour was haphazard; half the coffee ended up in my saucer. “Sorry,” she said. “Napkins are over there.” She pointed me toward the coffee station.

It was underneath the community bulletin board. As I sopped up the excess coffee, I skimmed the flyers that had been pinned there, wondering if I might find an ad for a GenFem learning center. Punk band needs drummer. And Thai massage $50. And Painting lessons by a proffessional Artist. And that’s when I saw it, on a flyer that was barely visible underneath a postcard for a local real estate agent.

It was Charlotte’s face.

I yanked the real estate agent’s postcard down so I could see it better, to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. But I wasn’t. It was her. Younger—still a baby, really—her hair shorter; but the furrow in her forehead, the unsettling sense that she was watching you and thinking something surprisingly adult—that was unmistakably Charlotte.

MISSING, the flyer read. EMMA GONZALEZ.

I dropped my coffee cup, barely even noticing as the scalding coffee burned the skin of my calf.



* * *



—

The barista was by my side in seconds, wiping off my legs with a damp tea towel. “Fuck,” she said. “Was the coffee too hot? Please don’t sue the café. I’ll get fired.”

I ignored her, preoccupied with the flyer that I’d torn off the bulletin board and was now reading.