When the Lights Go Out(67)

“I told you,” he said after I’d followed him into the living room—voice remarkably composed because he had likely sat there half the day rehearsing what he was going to say—“that I was through. We’ve been at this for a year,” he said. “Over a year. We’re broke, Eden. Everything we’ve worked for is gone. We have no more money to invest in this,” he said, holding out a bill for me, one that arrived in today’s mail, a credit card statement with a seventeen-thousand-dollar debt. “Look what this has done to us. To our marriage. To you.

“I can’t keep doing this,” he told me.

“I meant it, Eden. I’m through.

“It’s time for you to choose.”

And then he reached for a packed bag that sat on the hallway floor.

The front door opened and then closed again, and I wondered if that was it then.

If that was the last time I’d ever lay eyes on Aaron.





jessie

I sit on the sofa beside Liam, in his apartment. His laptop is on my thighs. I find my way to the website for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, thinking that if Mom stole me, for whatever reason, if I had a family before her, then maybe someone once reported me as missing. Maybe my real family is missing me.

On the website, I discover countless babies stolen from their cribs. Kids who got on the bus, but never made it home from school. Pregnant women last seen on the gritty footage of parking lot surveillance cameras. Infant twins missing after a parent was found dead. Babies lifted from hospital nurseries.

One by one, I become absorbed in the sad stories. The stories of the missing. Thumbnail image by thumbnail image, I open them all. I read about a toddler who was last seen playing on his own front porch in some small town in Georgia, where he lived with his father and stepmother in Jeffersonville, Georgia. He was last seen at approximately ten fifteen on a Tuesday morning, way back in 1995. His hair is sandy and his eyes are green. An age-progressed photo shows what he might look like today, if he’s even still alive. He was taken by his mother in a custody battle. There’s a picture of her too. In it, she looks a little agrarian, a little unsophisticated, a little mean. Her hair is sparse and thin, her skin weathered and blotchy.

I think that it’s possible that, like the little boy from Jeffersonville, Georgia, I am a child stolen from my front porch or from my crib, a child that climbed aboard the school bus one morning and never came home that afternoon.

“What did you find?” Liam asks as I scroll through the website, finding a search form.

“Nothing yet,” I tell him. But I hope I will soon.

I fill in as much as I think I know and leave the rest blank. I am child. I am female. These are things I know. I make up the dates I may or may not have gone missing. I fill them in, this three-year gap that stretches clear from the day Jessica Sloane was born until the day she died. Three years. Three momentary years. Shorter than a presidential term, than the span between Olympic Games, between leap years.

I watch as over one hundred cases load. One hundred little girls missing in a three-plus-year time span. One hundred little girls missing in a three-year time span that now, seventeen years later, still haven’t been found. It makes me sad. I think of their parents, of their real moms and dads.

One by one I click on the images and they tell me everything I need: when and where the child went missing; the color of their eyes, their hair, how old they would be. There are age-progressed photos, though how accurate they are, I don’t know. Ivy Marsh went missing at the age of two. She was last seen in Lawton, Oklahoma, a little girl with blue eyes, blond hair, dimples like me. Kristin Tate went missing on her third birthday, last seen in Wimberly, Texas. She too has dimples.

I scroll down the page and click the arrow, move to the second page, and then the third. The fourth. “What are you looking for?” Liam asks, glancing over my shoulder to see what I see.

“I don’t know,” I say, but then I take it back, telling him that what I’m looking for is me. I take in the age-progressed photos of children who went missing nearly twenty years ago, wondering if any of them might look like me. Though I tell myself that an age-progressed image of an infant wouldn’t have the same accuracy as that of an older kid because of how the face changes over the years. All babies have big, round eyes, chubby cheeks. Enormous foreheads. Toothless grins. There’s nothing distinguishable about them. They all look the same to me. So who’s to say what a baby’s face would look like in twenty years?

And it doesn’t matter anyway because scanning the missing children, not one bears a resemblance to me.

I push the laptop away. I reach into my bag and for the first time show the photograph to Liam. He asks who it is and I say, “Just some guy,” though I feel in my gut that there’s more to it than that. Because of some primal instinct to be close to this man, to know who he is. I tell Liam where I found the photograph, hidden in the cubbyhole behind the closet mirror.

“You think he’s your father?” he asks, both a question and a statement. I shrug. He takes the photograph into his hands, holds it closely to his eyes, examining it before he slips the photograph back into my hands. My hands still shake, the tremor that for all these days won’t go away. The room goes quiet, all except for the steady beat of rain against the window. It’s a drizzle only, not a complete washout, though the day outside is ugly and gray. The morning’s beautiful sunrise has been clouded over now; it’s long gone. The melody of rain on glass is calming. I find myself soothed by it, tuning out everything else but that sound, wanting to sing along with it somehow, like a song’s refrain.