“Everyone was her friend.” Maizie rolled up the sleeves of her sweater, gazing at the turkey. I noticed she wore makeup and that her chin-length hair had been blown dry. All dressed up for Saturday night but unable to stop cooking. “Monday I took Emma to her music class and half the moms and nannies asked about Annika. God. Not even a week ago. When I still thought she was coming back…”
“Maybe I could talk to some of them.”
Maizie went to the sink and washed her hands. “The music moms? I have to confess, I don’t know anyone’s last names. There’s Rachel, Brandon’s mom, and Georgine, Hallie’s mom, and I’m Maizie, Emma’s mom… I’ll try to find a class roster.” She dried her hands. “Wollie, mind if I work while we talk? I’m so behind, with Thanksgiving coming up, and Grammy Quinn’s invited half of Palm Springs for dinner…” She took a small knife and made a slit between the turkey’s legs, a deft movement, drawing the knife neatly up to its abdomen.
“Is this what you do professionally?” I asked. “Annika said you had a business.”
She laughed. “Cooking? No, cooking’s my passion. My business is aromatherapy.” She nodded to the shelves across the room, filled with the Art Deco glass bottles. “Bath, body, and hair products. No preservatives or carriers, just pure ingredients, beautiful packaging, and beautiful markup. I keep it small, high-end boutiques and some mail order, so I can work from home. I’m not very ambitious. I like my freedom, my hobbies. My family. I like cooking.” She made another incision in the turkey, this one horizontal. I was fascinated. No one in my house had cooked much. I should start watching cooking shows. Maizie looked up. “Can I ask-don’t misunderstand, I think it’s wonderful of you to take this on-but it’s a lot of trouble, isn’t it?”
“Have you ever not taken the time to listen when someone needed you to?”
Maizie’s eyes grew soft. “Every single day. I’m a mother. There’s never enough time. Maybe when you’re a grandmother…” She took a breath and went back to work.
“That’s the reason I came here, that first day,” I said. “Guilt. And her mother had called, and I felt sorry for her because I’ve been in that position.” I gazed at the turkey. I’d never seen one still wearing feathers, tiny ones all over its body. I said, “I have a brother who’s had some problems, he used to wander off, and trying to find him-you’re dependent on people’s goodwill, asking favors of total strangers. It can be awful. And people have been kind to me, too many times to count, and to him… So it started like an errand, the sort of thing anyone would do, except that I’m not anyone, I’m her friend, and even though in the back of my mind I thought I’d hand it off to someone, someone would say, ‘Okay, we’ll take it from here,’ that never happened. And now I can’t hand it off, it’s a mission. I have to see it through.”
“The curse of the volunteer.” The cat came through the open door, the fat yellow guy I’d seen the first day. Maizie looked up. “You sign on for table decorations and end up doing puff pastry for two hundred. Because you’re the only one who can do it right.”
I sneezed. “Believe me, anyone could do this better than I can.”
Maizie moved to the sink and washed her hands again. “You know what I think about? How young Annika is, for all her independence. Smart, but not sophisticated. I should’ve been a better mom to her.” Maizie grabbed the fat yellow cat and deposited him on a chair, away from the bird. He immediately jumped down. “And how will you know when it’s long enough, when you’ve done enough? That’s what Gene keeps asking, how long we have to wait before we close the book on this.”
I shrugged. “I just keep doing the next thing that occurs to me. Until there’s nothing left to do.”
Maizie picked up the cat again and went outside. I followed.
“There’s always something left to do,” she said, and pointed to the house. “See the lights?” The wraparound porch was trimmed in tiny icicle lights, hundreds of them, giving the house a welcoming look. “I put them up that day you came for the photo. My husband thinks I’m crazy, but I can’t turn them off, night or day. It’s just a little thing, but it’s what I do. Gene says I’m leaving the porch lights on for Amelia Earhart.”
17 January. Dear Emma, Thanks for the present and the super photo. I am so surprise that you remember my birthday! And Mr. Snuggles must wear a birthday hat. I have only 1 week with you, but you are my family. Good night and sleep tight.
Annika
There were other letters like this, plus cards for holidays, the English improving as the year went on.
I’d parked just south of Ventura Boulevard, back near the newsstand, unable to wait until I got home. The au pair application was exhaustive, eighteen pages long. There were photos, a medical history, letters of recommendation in German and English. Annika had two hundred hours of child-care experience, worked in a kindergarten, and had studied French and Latin as well as English. She had no siblings. She did not attend church or temple. She’d had chicken pox as a child. Her blood pressure was 120/80. Her grades fluctuated-she was great at Mathematik and Biologie, okay at Englisch and Musik, not great at Geschichte and Sozialwissenschaften, whatever those were.
The photo collage didn’t display much artistic talent. The captions were sloppy, but the energy and joie de vivre were unmistakeable. There was Annika with friends, cat, dog, horse, goats, and dozens of children, all of them smiling. There she was with her mother-“Mutti”-an older, rounder version of Annika, same brown hair, same apple cheeks, same incandescent smile. Glasses. There was no mention of a father.
There was an essay, eager, sincere. “I wish to be a gift in the life of children.”
One thing caught my attention. Although the application was in black and white, a page near the end had a date circled in red, and a question mark next to the circle. The page was in German, official and terse: Name, address, birth date, and place of birth translated easily enough, but not the word in the middle of the page: Führungszeugnis.
The date circled was February, two years earlier. I checked the date on the first page. Last October. I counted it out on my fingers. Twenty months between the time of the Führungszeugnis and the day Annika applied to be an au pair. Was that significant? It seemed that someone thought so.
My gazed drifted. What Maizie had said about Amelia Earhart rang a bell. Why?
A man stood at the newsstand, holding a newspaper but looking my way.
I remembered. Annika had talked about a scientist who, using fuel levels and wind velocity, had determined where Amelia Earhart’s plane had gone down. “Physics,” Annika had said. “People think, ‘This is a mystery’ or ‘That cannot be known’ but if we have facts, we can make an equation. With equations, we understand the world. I may not be smart enough to make equations, but someone is. Is this not reassuring?”
It hadn’t reassured me then, but it reassured me now. Wherever she was, whatever trouble she was in, Annika wouldn’t panic. She’d do the math. I stared at Ventura Boulevard, as though I might see her walking, pocket calculator in hand.
The discrepancy between the dates on the Führungszeugnis and the application-was there an equation to be made there?
The man at the newsstand was still looking, pointing me out to another man.
Except they weren’t pointing at me, but at something behind me. I turned and saw a sports car. Parked. Occupied.