The sergeant clicked the pen again and set it on the desk, then put the form back on top with the others. “Not long enough,” he said. “Has to be gone forty-eight hours. Till then she’s missing, but she’s not a missing person.”
“She only a baby.”
“How old?”
“Fifteen,” Woodrow said.
“She’s just a runaway,” the sergeant said.
“She never run away before,” Woodrow said. “This ain’t like her, sergeant.” Woodrow felt that like all white men, the man enjoyed having attention paid to his rank.
“Don’t matter. She’s probably waiting for you at home right now, wondering where you two buggied off to. Go home. If she isn’t home, then come back when she’s a missing person.”
Woodrow took Rita’s arm as they went back, because he sensed that she was near collapsing. “What happened?” she asked as they turned the corner of U and 10th streets. “Did you say somethin bad to her?”
He told her everything that he could remember, even what Elaine was wearing when he last saw her. Answering was not difficult because no blame had yet been assigned. Despite the time nearing midnight, they became confident with each step that Elaine was just at a friend’s they did not know about, that the friend’s mother, like any good mother, would soon send their daughter home. Rita, in the last blocks before their apartment, leaned into her husband and his warmth helped to put her at ease.
They waited up until about four in the morning, and then they undressed without words in the dark. Rita began to cry the moment her head hit the pillow, for she was afraid to see the sun come up and find that a new day had arrived without Elaine being home. She asked him again what happened, and he told her again, even things that he had forgotten — the logo of the football team on the light-skinned boy’s jacket, the fact that the other boy was bald except for a half-dollar-sized spot of hair carved on the back of his head. He was still talking when she dozed off with him holding her.
Before they had coffee later that morning, about seven thirty, they called their jobs to say they would not be in. Work had always occupied a place at the center of their lives, and there was initially something eerie about being home when it was not a holiday or the weekend. They spent the rest of the morning searching the streets together, and in the afternoon, they separated to cover more ground. They did the same thing after dinner, each spreading out farther and farther from their apartment on R Street. That evening, they called neighbors and friends, church and lodge members, to tell them that their child was missing and that they needed their help and their prayers. Their friends and neighbors began searching that evening, and a few went with Woodrow and Rita the next day to the police station to file a missing person’s report. A different sergeant was at the desk, and though he was a white man, Woodrow felt that he understood their trouble.
For nearly three months, Woodrow and Rita searched after they came from work, and each evening after they and their friends had been out, the pastor of Rising Star spoke to a small group that gathered in the Cunninghams’ living room. “The world is cold and not hospitable,” he would conclude, holding his hat in both hands, “but we know our God to be a kind God and that he has provided our little sister with a place of comfort and warmth until she returns to her parents and to all of us who love and treasure her.”
In the kitchen beside the refrigerator, Rita tacked up a giant map of Washington, on which she noted where she and others had searched. “I didn’t know the city was this big,” she said the day she put it up, her fingertips touching the neighborhoods that she had never heard of or had heard of only in passing — foreign lands she thought she would never set eyes on. Petworth. Anacostia. Lincoln Park. And in the beginning, the very size of the city lifted her spirits, for in a place so big, there was certainly a spot that held something as small as her child, and if they just kept looking long enough, they would come upon that place.
“What happened?” Rita would ask as they prepared for bed. What he told her and her listening replaced everything they had ever done in that bed — discussing what future they wanted for Elaine, lovemaking, sharing what the world had done to them that workday. “What happened?” It was just about the only thing she ever asked Woodrow as the months grew colder. “What happened? Whatcha say to her?” By late February, when fewer and fewer people were going out to search, he had told the whole story, but then he began to tell her things that had not happened. There were three boys, he said at one point, for example. Or, he could see a gun sticking out of the jacket pocket of the light-skinned one, and he could see the outline of a knife in the back pants pocket of the third. Or he would say that the record player was playing so loudly he could hear it from the street. They were small embellishments at first, and if his wife noticed that the story of what happened was changing, she said nothing. In time, with winter disappearing, he was adding more and more so that it was no longer a falseness here and there that was embedded in the whole of the truth, but the truth itself, an ever-diminishing kernel, that was contained in the whole of falseness. And, like some kind of bedtime story, she listened and drifted with his words into a sleep where the things he was telling her were sometimes happening.
By March, Woodrow had written countless letters to his father telling the old man it was not necessary to come to Washington to help look for the girl. “I got a sign from God,” the old man kept writing, “that I could help find her.” Then, with spring, he began writing that he had received signs that he was not long for the world, that finding the girl was the last thing God wanted him to do. In the longest letters the old man had ever written to the one child of his who responded, he would go on and on about the signs he saw signaling his own death: The mongrel would no longer take food from his hand; the dead visited him at night, sitting down on the side of his bed and telling him things about himself; the rising sun now touched his house last in the morning, though there were houses to the left and right of his.
“You keep telling me that I’ll be hurt or lost,” the old man wrote Woodrow. “But I know the way that Washington, D.C. is set up. I came there once maybe twice. How could I get lost. Take a chance on me, and we’ll have that child home before you can blink one eye. I can bring Sparky he got some bloodhound in him.”
In late April, Rita took down the map in the kitchen. The tacks fell to the floor and she left them there. She put the map in the bottom drawer of her daughter’s dresser, among the blouses and blue jeans and a diary she would not find the strength to read for another three months. Her days of searching during the week dwindled down to two, then to one. She returned the car a church member had lent her to drive around the city in. Each evening when she got home, Woodrow would be out and she left his dinner in the oven to stay warm. Every now and again, when the hour was late, she went out to look for him, often for no other reason than that there was nothing worth watching on the television. As she put on more and more weight, it became difficult for her to stand and dish out food to the students at lunchtime. Her supervisor and fellow workers sympathized, and, after a week of perfunctory training, she was allowed to sit and work at the cash register.
As he continued going about the city, sometimes on foot, Woodrow told himself and everyone else that he was hunting for his daughter, but this was only a piece of the truth. “I’m lookin for my daughter, who’s run away,” he said to those opening the doors where he knocked. “She’s been gone a long time, and her mama and me are about to lose our minds.” He sometimes presented a picture of his daughter, smiling radiantly, that was taken only months before she disappeared. But just as often, he would pull out a photograph of the girl when she was five, standing one Easter between her parents in front of Rising Star. All who looked at the photograph, even the drunks half-blind with alcohol, were touched by the picture of the little girl in her Easter dress who had now gone away from her parents, parents who were now worried sick. Many people invited Woodrow into their homes.