We Run the Tides(20)
The detectives seem happy with my response.
“Well, we have a lead,” Tight Pants says. Detective Anderson slides me her business card. “Call me if anything else occurs to you.” I take the card and don’t know what to do with it. I don’t think I’ve ever held a business card before. I lift up my skirt and the male detectives look away. They don’t know we wear gym shorts under our uniforms. I place the card in a pocket of my shorts.
I enter science midway through class. There’s a drawing of a penis being projected onto the screen, its parts labeled.
At recess, rumors swirl. We see the vans of news stations surrounding our campus. We’re ushered back inside the classrooms, which makes us more stir-crazy. When the air-raid siren goes off at noon we all scream. It’s hard to distinguish between the siren and our screams, but we keep going even after the siren has ceased. We know it’s a practice drill but things are tense. Even the teachers seem at a loss about what do without Maria Fabiola at school. The desks she normally occupies in each classroom seem extraordinarily shiny.
By the time school lets out, all the students are acting frenzied. The news trucks are still surrounding our school. There are more of them now. NBC. ABC. KPIX. Well-coiffed anchorwomen in suits and pearls stand beyond the school gates, their backs to us, commenting. I’m sure they’re using the words “private,” “elite,” “wealthy” as often as they can. Every parent has been called and asked to pick up their daughter after school. None of the mothers work except for my mom, so I call her at the hospital. I know her work phone number by heart because it’s the punch line of a story. My mother entertained our guests at a dinner party one night by telling them about the looks she gets when she’s at work and leaves a message on a fellow Swede’s answering machine. She’ll ask them to call her back and then give them the phone number—666–7777—which in Swedish sounds like Sex! Sex! Sex! Who? Who? Who? Who?
I dial the number now.
“She’s in the OR,” Mrs. Markson says. Mrs. Markson is my mother’s supervisor and Petra’s mom. She asks if she can take a message. “No,” I tell her. She congratulates me on winning third place in the hospital contest for kids. I designed a new nurses’ locker room. Svea won the contest and received $400. I got a subscription to a teen magazine I don’t read.
After school, the parents line up in the horseshoe-shaped driveway by the field. The pick-up process is slow and made slower by the fact that every mother gets out of the car to talk to other mothers about Maria Fabiola’s disappearance. The caravan looks like an ad for Volvo. I see the dour friend’s mom picking up her daughter and my sister. The mom now waves as though she’s just returned from a cruise. Hello! I missed you! I have presents!
I sneak out the back gate while the parents line up at the front one. I start walking. I don’t go into my house, but instead grab my bike from the garage and pedal quickly to where I suspect Maria Fabiola is hiding.
13
I stop my bike across the street from the Olenska School of Ballet, in front of the comic-book store. The studio’s floor-to-ceiling curtains are closed. I move my gaze up to the apartment above the studio, where Madame Sonya lives. She often complains of hot flashes that didn’t cease even after she completed menopause, so she likes to keep the windows cracked. But now the windows are shut—a good indicator she isn’t home.
I lock my bike and cross the street and pass into the narrow outdoor passageway that leads to Madame Sonya’s backyard. I’ve never been to the backyard before, but one day after class Madame Sonya took me and Maria Fabiola to her parlor, as she called it. She had seen something in us, she said, something that reminded her of herself. She wanted us to know that if we were ever in trouble (“I won’t ask what kind of trouble, I will never ask”) we were welcome to come stay in the shed in her backyard. “It’s a safe haven,” she said, pointing out the window. “A safe haven?” Maria Fabiola asked. Madame Sonya explained what that meant and told us the combination to the lock that would grant us entry. There wasn’t much drama in our lives, and I tried to imagine a time when we might need such a place. Maria Fabiola was probably thinking the same thing. We both smiled gratefully.
The corridor leading to the backyard has cracked cement, a hose spiraled like a forgotten lasso, and a wooden door with a lock. Madame Sonya told us the code to the door’s padlock is the year of her greatest fame: 1938. She blames the start of World War II for the premature derailment of her career.
The backyard isn’t much of a garden. The large shed takes up most of the small plot of land, and, around it, weeds have grown tall, and in patches, prickly. I step up to the front of the shed. It has a proper door, like to a house. I turn the knob suddenly and push the door open. I want to catch Maria Fabiola by surprise.
She’s not here.
The light is on. As I glance around, I think the room looks very familiar. But where would I have seen it before? And then I remember: on the walls of the ballet studio hang photos of Madame Sonya’s dressing room in Paris. The interior of this shed is a replica. I know the year this unofficial shrine is commemorating—1938.
On every table of the room stand vases of bouquets of dried roses, fraying ivory-colored ribbons still tied around their stems. Pointe shoes hang from hooks in a row, like Christmas stockings. In the center of the room is a plush pink divan draped with a white fur blanket. I run my fingers over it. The tips of the fur are pointed and hard, as though a substance was spilled on it decades before.