Anna was four years older and had just begun junior high. Though she was too old to join in on our games, she would sometimes smile encouragingly when she walked or rode past. She was thin and lanky like I was, with unruly brown hair she always wore in unkempt waves and wide red lips that curved over the gap in her slight front teeth. She wore baseball shirts with three-quarter length sleeves; on the few times I was close enough, she smelled to me like soaked-in chlorine and the thick, unpasteurized apple juice my father bought in the spring. I had spoken to her only a handful of times, which I replayed in my head obsessively. On the Fourth of July two months before, I had shared a whole ten minutes near her: she had taken the empty canvas camping chair next to me, placing a soda can in its mesh cup holder and adjusting her fascinating preteen body with little sighs. Eager to impress her, I had mentioned how one time Jackson and I had got our hands on some illegal fireworks from Chinatown in San Francisco, leaving out the fact that Julia had confiscated them almost immediately. Anna had beamed briefly, politely, and emptied her soda can, the last of the cola tinkling as it escaped into her lips. In the middle of the street, my father lit a foot-tall brick and held his beer bottle up triumphantly as it rained its bits of slow, mournful yellow lights twelve feet above.
“As much as I like the fireworks,” Anna said then, “I like the smell afterward,” and sniffed as if to demonstrate. I couldn’t think of any response, and soon after she got up, leaving the aluminum can and a wake of her scent.
It wasn’t just Anna that had been stolen. The drugstores raised their Halloween aisles from wherever they’d been hiding for a year, and our street bore less and less resemblance to the kingdom we’d galloped through laughing and planning wildly. Autumn was decidedly adult: the nuanced colors — muddled oranges and browns, the uncertain gray of the clouds — were much harder to love, to understand, than the sticky pinks of popsicles, the confident thick greens of happy grass and plants, the haughty blue of the sky above it all. I halfheartedly indulged my father’s conversations regarding my costume that year, and on the night when the boys and their mother came over to carve pumpkins on our porch, I was distracted and without my usual grandiose jack-o’-plans. I took pleasure, instead, in making deep, sharp stabs, cutting only sharp lines and extracting simple shapes from the flesh of the pumpkin, and removing its guts in fistfuls.
The man who’d taken Anna had waved a knife at her friends: I wondered if somewhere he was making similar incisions, stealing her flesh in isosceles triangles and parallelograms. In my imagination this was not painful for Anna, only confusing; she would look at her body and watch the light coming through, then behind her at strange shadows she cast. As a child who’d lost her mother, I had developed a morbid and skilled imagination regarding death and human pain that I felt somehow entitled to use.
The candle went on burning in the window of the Martins’ house, and on the night of Halloween her parents sat on the porch with candies of every variety: nougat and fruit-flavored hard candies, peanut butter cups in milk and dark chocolate, lollipops with blue gum inside them. Instead of cauldrons of dry ice, ghoulish motion detectors that cackled on a trick-or-treater’s approach, or an excess of gauze spiderwebs, their stoop was a tribute to the possibility of actual death. The flowers had not stopped coming and the bouquets bled into each other among store-bought sympathy cards and ones made of construction paper in seventh-grade homerooms: WE MISS YOU ANNA. Photographs cataloging twelve years of life were papered to the windows, the same smile replicated in different poses and ages.
Parents had to drag their children up the stairs; some of the littler ones cried. It was strange that her parents had done this; it was courageous or it was insane. Anna’s mother wore a sedated smile, clutching the hands of parents and hungrily eyeing the cowboys and grim reapers; her father distributed candy in businesslike gestures, nodding and drinking out of a red plastic cup. When we approached, my father offered his hand but I shook it off. I maintained eye contact with the mother of the stolen girl until she broke it; I felt Jackson staring from beside me and cast him a look of reprehension.
As per routine, I spent Halloween night in the boys’ bedroom, where we traded caramel apple pops for watermelon Jolly Ranchers. James, with his unusual taste for the unpopular black licorice, gathered a wealth of them in his corner. His plastic pirate sword lay forgotten as he counted and recounted, until finally Julia came in and gave us ten minutes to change and brush our teeth and turn off the lights. From outside came the whoops of teenagers, the sudden acceleration of cars driven by those with new licenses, the wee-woos of a mechanical ghost slowly losing batteries.
The sources of light in their bedroom after dark were of a different frequency: the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling, the luminous crack from beneath the door that changed in color while Julia watched television, the modest glow of the fish tank, the red of the numbers from the astronaut clock — they were known by few and as such I cherished them as secrets, like the little sighs that issued from James like exclamations as he drifted off: mm, mmph, Mmph!
I couldn’t sleep and whispered to Jackson to see if he was awake. I twisted my body toward him, I dared myself to ask the question that hung over the flowers and cards on the porch of the woman with the lost daughter:
“Where do you think she is?”
“I …” Jackson stuttered with the thought of I, with the thought of an authoritative statement; as children we were rarely asked questions of this gravity.
“I don’t know. Maybe he let her go somewhere. Or maybe he wanted someone to come with him somewhere, and they’re almost there, and then he’ll let her go.”
“Like where?” I tried to imagine Anna and a faceless man in a car, listening to the radio loud and stopping at gas stations so she could get whatever snacks she wanted, but I couldn’t shake my vision of Anna with all the pieces missing, like what is left after the cookies have been cut out of the dough.
“Mexico?” I suggested. I had always liked the sound of Spanish being spoken by the Mexicans who waited around at gas stations for work: it seemed happy, the way it moved like mountains, rolling. There was a postcard from Puerto Vallarta on our fridge that I had memorized, and I imagined Anna in one of the beach lounge chairs, smiling that smile, sending little squirts of lemonade through the gap in her teeth or drawing a picture of the ocean: the reporters sometimes mentioned on television that art and music had been her favorite classes.
“Mexico. Yeah. Like maybe he was gonna go with his friend? But his friend couldn’t? So he took Anna, only it’s long-distance and she doesn’t have the money to call.”
Jackson rolled over and I looked, again, at the neon stars we had stuck to his ceiling, considering Mexico. I liked the idea that she was just on vacation, but why her? It had to be someone who knew her, who admired, like I did, the way her skin stayed brown and friendly all year, the way she tilted her head when she listened. Who maybe had seen her play piano at the band recital, like I had, and watched the way she bent her head way low and sideways, her curls falling even longer while her fingers leaped.
It wasn’t long before James started murmuring, and as always, I was reassured by the sounds. They meant that people were still people when they slept, that these hours void of conscious words and sunlight were still part of the story, if perhaps in parentheses. And what fit between parentheses, I learned later, were often the parts that provided fuller meaning, that sought to include what was overlooked.