He smiled inexpertly. “You need an accompanying adult to get you to departure,” he said. “It’s the law.”
“Really?” she said. “Are you sure?”
“Uh-huh. ‘Unaccompanied minors must be brought to the gate by a parent or responsible adult,’” he added, quoting, “‘who must remain at the airport until the child boards and the airplane departs the gate.’ You need all this arranged and booked ahead of time, too. You can’t just turn up at the gate and fly, kid.”
“But…I’m going to visit my aunt,” the girl said, sounding slightly panicky. “She’s waiting for me. She’s going to be worried.”
“Well, maybe your momma should have made sure you—”
“Please? I do have someone with me. They…had to go outside to smoke. They’ll be here in a minute, really.”
Jim shook his head. “Even if I let you through here, which I ain’t gonna, they’ll check again at the gate. You’re not getting near that plane without an adult.”
The girl’s smile slowly faded.
“Sorry, kid,” Jim said, making what was for him quite an effort to hide the fact that he was not.
She looked up at him for a moment. “Watch your back,” she said softly. Then she ducked under the rope and walked away across the concourse, where she was quickly lost among the other evening travelers.
Openmouthed, Jim watched her go. When it came to kids, he was phoning it in from the land of Who Gives a Shit, from a really bad connection. But…shouldn’t he maybe go after her? Check that she really was here with someone?
On the other hand, the line was getting long, and some of the people in it looked bad-tempered, and, if the truth be told, Jim just didn’t really care. All he wanted was to close out his shift, get home, and drink a series of beers while watching the tube, then get on the Net and find some porn. There was that, plus…
Of course it was absurd, just a little a girl using a phrase picked up from a movie. But there’d been something in her tone that made him think if she’d been a couple feet taller, he would have taken the threat seriously. Even from a woman. He didn’t want to have to explain this to anyone. So he went to the next person in line, who turned out to be French, so, while he had identification, it wasn’t American identification, which mandated Jim to stare even longer and harder than usual at his documents and to look up at the guy’s face in a suspicious and “Don’t think we’ve forgotten about you punking out over Iraq” kind of way. By the end of this, he was King of the Line again.
He didn’t think about the little girl until the detectives turned up the next day, and it wasn’t until he realized he’d missed the opportunity to prevent a nine-year-old girl from vanishing into thin air that he understood there were smaller holes than he’d ever realized, and he was about to spend a while being pulled back and forth through one of them.
Meanwhile Madison had made her way back outside the airport building and was standing forlornly on the sidewalk.
Now what?
Frowning, trying to remember why she’d been so convinced she had to fly when getting a cab to the house and her father would make the most sense, Madison noticed a guy standing ten feet away having a cigarette. He was looking at her as if he were wondering what she was doing here by herself. He seemed like a nice man and the kind who might ask her if she was okay, and Madison wasn’t sure what the answer to that was. She wasn’t sure she trusted herself to speak either; she’d been almost rude to the man in the airport, which was not like her at all. Maddy was very polite, always, especially to grown-ups.
She crossed the street quickly and went into the multistory parking lot, as if that’s where she’d been going all along. Seeing the smoking man stirred a memory from the blank period earlier in the day. Another man had looked at her, she thought, after she had…of course.
That’s how she’d gotten to the city.
By bus, duh. She’d arrived at the Greyhound station on NW Sixth Avenue. Then she’d walked for a long time, she remembered, looking for an address. It was in a place she knew, but somehow she didn’t know where that place actually was. The area wasn’t very nice. A lot of the store-fronts were boarded over and had letters above them that didn’t make words in English. There were cardboard boxes all over and the smell of rotting fruit in gutters. The parked cars looked old. It had been different also from the parts of Portland that Madison knew in that it seemed to be a place where only men lived. Men, standing in dirty grocery stores. Men leaning in doorways, by themselves or with someone just like them, not talking to each other but watching everyone who went past. Men, on street corners, shivering. There were white men and black men and Asian men, but they all looked more or less the same and like they all knew about the same things. Maybe this was what her mom meant when she said the color of someone’s skin made no difference. At some point there’d been a man in particular, two men, in fact. They had a dog on a chain. They’d come toward her purposefully, looking all around as they got closer, but then their dog suddenly started going nuts and they crossed the street instead.
Did she find the place she was looking for? She still couldn’t remember that part. But she knew she didn’t have the small notebook when she left the house that morning. So maybe that’s where it had come from. Good. Call that squared away. She got to Portland by bus.
Once she’d filled in every one of these little gaps, everything would be back to normal.
Inside the parking lot, it was dark and cool. People walked back and forth with suitcases that made clackety sounds. Cars pulled out of spaces and went swishing out onto the road. Big white and yellow and red buses with sliding doors and hotel names on them let people off or picked them up. It was a place full of people who didn’t know each other. That was good. Madison decided she would find somewhere she could sit and think in quiet. She walked down the center of one of the aisles. Everyone was talking or laughing or paying cabdrivers or keeping track of their own children. It was like they couldn’t see her at all. This reminded her of something, though she couldn’t remember what.
She was approaching a car that was parked halfway along the aisle, when she found herself slowing down. The car was yellow, and the driver’s side door was open. She diverted her course to the other side of the aisle.
As she passed the car, she glanced across. A man was sitting inside. He was pretty old and had gray hair. His hands were on the steering wheel, though the engine was not running. He was staring through the windshield and looked like he’d been there a while. Madison was wondering what the man was looking at, when he seemed to wake up. He turned his head and saw her. She had time to notice that there was something weird about his face, and then he backed out of the space like he was in a car chase. He went screeching out of the lot before she really had time to absorb what was happening.
But now the last gap was filling, like water running back up through the drain into a bathtub. Something about when she was walking through town…a Chinese woman. Yes. She had given Madison the notebook. After she left the woman’s house and was walking again, a man had pulled over to the curb, offered her a lift in his car. Maddy had lived all her life with very clear instructions about not getting into the cars of strangers, and yet that’s what she’d done. The man had been very nice to her at first; he just happened to be heading to the airport, and he’d be happy to help out. Then he became nervous and like a little boy and kept laughing even though neither of them had said anything funny. He said stuff about how pretty she looked, which she liked when Dad said it but not when this man did.