I wanted badly to see James and Jackson, but they were spending the weekend with Julia’s mother in a dry, flat town four hours south. I was hungry. Though I was a reasonably autonomous girl and could easily have fixed myself something to eat, I did not. I reread part of a book about a brother and sister who run away to live in a museum and fell asleep with the light and all my clothes on, missing my mother fiercely.
I woke to the smells of breakfast and wandered into the kitchen, where my father gently asked that I sit. He put before me a heaping plate — a silent apology or an assimilation of one for not seeing to my dinner the night before — of two raspberry pancakes, two strips of bacon, and an egg-in-a-basket, the yellow-white a wondrously perfect circle against the even brown of the bread. He did not speak, did not look at me, and got up twice to refill his coffee. He did laugh lightly, perhaps sadly, certainly thinking of my mother, when a strand of my hair got into the syrup without my noticing.
I devoured every last bit. I was hungry from crying, from telling a useless lie, from what the missing girl had taken with her when she left, from the realization that had grown hard and final in my sleep: that she, and it, were not coming back. When he was sure I was done, he addressed me. We were to go to that poor man’s house and I was, in no uncertain terms, to apologize. Furthermore, I was to have no more ideas about solving the mystery of Anna Martin. There were plenty of adults doing the best they could. I was to keep doing well on my tests, to ride my bike, to feel the independence and responsibility a library card afforded, to make thoughtful decisions based on my growing set of rights and wrongs, to do all the things Anna could not.
As we approached the man’s little house and crossed the yard, which was thick with unraked leaves, I wished with all my concentration that he would not be home. As if he knew this, my father informed me that he had called Mr. Mortensen ahead of time and he was expecting us.
He opened the door in a pink pullover sweatshirt that was pilled and ill fitting and scared me, somehow. Though the cats had all been taken two days before, the smell was overwhelming. One sharp glance from my father let me know I was not to let the slightest acknowledgment of this so much as breeze across my face.
He looked at me, but not my father, with his down-turned and watery eyes.
“Come in … please,” he said, with a slowness and thickness that sounded more like a muted foghorn than words. He shuffled in, gestured to a futon with sun-faded cushions so thoroughly defaced with cat scratches that the foam showed through more often than not, and sat himself in an orange plastic chair that was very clearly once the property of a junior high school classroom. The only other objects in the living room were a television, on top of it a bunch of little white flowers in a novelty plastic cup bearing a faded endorsement for a children’s movie, and another school chair, but this one of dark blue. Tacked on the wall was a very old wedding photograph. The two people in the picture — presumably his parents — had their eyes slightly off center, and I tried to fixate on anything but that, the thought of him being a child once too much to bear.
“Ida?” My father asked. “Do you have something to say to Mr. Mortensen?”
The same hot tears began to stroll down my face. Tasting the warm salt in my mouth, I pushed my tongue against the roof of my mouth, willing the sibilant word I was here in this awful-smelling, sad excuse for a room to say.
“I’m suh, suh, sorry,” I sobbed. “I wanted … I just wanted … her to be back.”
The man gave me the look he probably received all day long, the look that says: I pity you, but not quite enough to take the time to understand you. He raised one hand, palm upward, and let it drop. He closed his eyes as if to make the vision of the lanky, crying girl go away. It was more than likely he wanted to share four walls with me as little as I wanted to share them with him. Neither the man nor I had the words for that moment, but my father did.
“Mr. Mortensen, I’ve explained the very serious consequences of her actions to my daughter, and she is, as you can see, extremely remorseful. I can’t imagine what you must have gone through, and can only apologize again for the nightmare that was brought into your home.”
The man, again, flipped his hand up in a gesture that could imply both receiving and offering. He nodded weakly, brought a remote from his pocket, and turned on the television. It was a signal as good as any, and we left.
Two weeks later, the case was solved — though “solved” seems the wrong word for it. (Were it solved, the girl would have been back in the neighborhood, all the photographs and votive candles would be taken off her porch, and our parents would not think twice if we were not home exactly within the ten minutes it took to return from school.) Though what all the parents wanted was for a broad-shouldered, fiercely virtuous detective type to come across a hidden clue that snapped all pieces together and led to the kidnapper, that was not what happened. There was no hero. Instead, a man with a criminal record that spanned years simply came forward and confessed. He had strangled Anna with a piece of yellow cloth, he said, and would lead them to her grave. The body had decayed for two months, but the blue-and-white-striped flannel pajamas Anna had been wearing served as instant identification. In the photograph that graced the front pages of all the newspapers, taken in the courtroom after the man was sentenced to death, he is smiling.
~ ~ ~
Though on paper I had only given local animal rights activists a cause to unite around briefly and community members an unpleasant aftertaste to gossip about, it seemed to Jackson that I had at least done something about the missing girl, and I think this is how he avoided the issue of my using what he may or may not have said in his sleep as a reason to go ruining the life of some poor disabled guy with a repulsive amount of cats — although years later, it showed up in his memory as an event altogether wrong, something he felt embarrassed to be even slightly connected to. What it did was make him think about consciousness in a way that children are hardly prompted to do. He’d pick things up just for the sake of dropping them; read aloud the backs of packages of macaroni and chicken pot pie his mother kept in the freezer, sounding out consonants; turn on the faucet to slight, medium, strong and feel the various pressures on different parts of his hand. All of these acts sacred, private, even beloved. He grew obsessed with navigation, pored over maps, saved up his allowance for a compass. It became very nearly a tic, the way he would take out the prized metal object and announce: north. northeast. southw-southeast! He urged us to try new routes to school, elaborate zigzags and “shortcuts”—just a left, a right, and a sharp right. More: he memorized the bones in his body in order to understand and own how they carried him. What felt like moments before, we’d felt a dumb pride in sticking needles into the thickness of our summer calluses, but now Jackson spoke in metatarsals and phalanges.
Burdened by a capacity he never asked for, Jackson began to process his ability to shift the world around him in his sleep without his specific desire and designed a reaction: he set about wanting small things and making them happen. Even if it meant pressing the doorbell and procuring the expected sound, the fact that he had made it happen, during the daylight, in his favorite thin red cotton shirt, felt important. When his mother regaled houseguests with stories of his sleepwalking and the adults cackled over the absurdity of, for instance, The Family Heirloom Jackson Put in the Fish Tank or The Time Jackson Tried to Put on a T-shirt as Pants, he felt so embarrassed that he had to leave the room. Oh, honey, his mother would say as he left, but she would continue to laugh and then offer her friends the even further hilarious anecdote of the time she found him allegedly using a roll of toilet paper as a telephone and asking more and more insistently to be connected to someone named Rick. Often the laughter at the Rick story carried enough that back in his room, he would stick his fingers in his ears and hum obsessively, or, if he let me, I’d lead us in song at increasing volumes, keeping in mind what my father told me: it’s hard to know all the words, so the ones you do know, you’ve got to sing really loud.