I am what you dream
I watch your back, always.
I am what guides your hand.
As she entered the square, she caught sight of her reflection in a plate-glass window and was surprised at how short she was. She looked at herself for a long time, remembering the day when she and Mom bought the coat in Nordstrom’s, at the head of Courthouse Square in Portland. Remembered the two of them seeing it for the first time and knowing they were circling it together, that it was really expensive but they both wanted it in their lives. Madison had said nothing, knowing that this was a decision her mother had to come to under her own steam, that an extravagant spur-of-the-moment gift would appeal to her sense of hip motherhood, where acceding to a demand—however muted or subtle—would not: Madison not understanding how she knew this, but knowing it all the same.
They left the store and walked around others, looking but not really looking, and Maddy had known that if she just kept quiet and was sweet, they would find themselves back in Nordstrom.
They had.
And she realized now how she’d known how to get what she wanted that day, and on other days. She realized that something within her had always known how to dominate, how to quietly get people to do what she wanted. Someone had been at her back then, too.
He had always been inside.
It was nice in the square, but it did not feel as it had at night. Though there were more people around, it somehow felt less crowded. Maybe that was because the people here now were not the same. They were not like the homeless men, but rather were tourists, passing through. People who took pictures of things instead of seeing them, who thought they owned a place because they stood in it, instead of understanding it worked the other way around.
One of them was different, though. When she’d been there about half an hour, sipping her way through an Americano from the Starbucks on the corner, Madison saw an SUV pull up on the other side of the street. A man got out. He walked straight through the traffic and into the square. He didn’t seem to be there for any reason, but sat on a bench for a while. He was quite tall and had broad shoulders and for a moment Madison had an urge to run over to him and tell him her name and ask him to help. She could see that he was different from the man whose car she’d slept in, that if this man knew that there was something he should do, then he would not stop until it was done.
But instead she found herself slipping off the bench and walking quickly out of the square—not looking back until she was sure the man wouldn’t be able to see her. Madison might want the man’s assistance, but the man in the cloud did not. She dimly recalled the attempted phone call in the night—largely through the aftereffects on her hands—but not what it might have been about. Instead she realized that she now wanted to make another call, to the man she’d previously been avoiding. She felt stronger now. She could deal with him.
When she located a phone—this time in the lobby of a hotel a few streets away, a fancy one with an awning with red and gold stripes—she got out the notebook and removed from it the white card with the number on the back.
He answered immediately.
“It’s me,” she said. “I need some information.”
“Where are you?”
“Did you hear what I said, Shepherd?”
“Look,” the man said. His voice was patient and annoying. “I want to help. But I need to know where you are. You’re nine years old. You’re…not safe.”
“Are you done talking?”
“No,” he said. “Madison, nothing’s going to happen until you tell me a place to come and meet you. Do that and we’ll talk. I’ll find out whatever it is you need to know. But you’re making it hard for me to do my job.”
“You’ve done your job,” she said. “And have been paid. Despite the fact that you didn’t do as you were told, did you? Which means I have no reason to trust you.”
“What did I do wrong? I came to you—”
“Too early. You were supposed to wait until I was eighteen, like always, but you wanted your fee now and didn’t care that I wasn’t ready. But I am ready, in fact. I’ve always been ready to take control. Though I guess you remember that. You had better anyway.”
“Look,” the man said. “You had an accident, that’s all. You fell over on the beach. You saw me there and thought I meant you harm. You started to run, you banged your head. Your hurt yourself. That’s why you keep blacking out. That’s why you’re having these strange—”
“Oh, do shut up, Shepherd. I’m going to ask you to find out something. Then I’m putting the phone down. I’m going to call again in fifteen minutes from a different location. If you don’t give me the information—and make me believe in it—I’m going to start doing things that really will make your life difficult. Doing things and telling things. Understand?”
“Madison, you’ve got to trust me.”
A wheedling note had entered the man’s voice, but Madison knew that this was fake—him trying to appear weak, caught off guard, in the hope she’d fail to take him as seriously as he deserved. This man didn’t wheedle. “I’ve done everything you want….”
“No,” she said coldly. “You haven’t. But you’re going to. You really are. You and everyone else.”
She told him what she needed and put the phone down without waiting for a reply. Checked the time and headed toward the elevators. This was a pretty big hotel. She could lose herself in the corridors for fifteen minutes without people bugging her, she thought, and it would be a change from pounding the streets.
As she got into the elevator, she passed a slim young woman in a smart suit and blouse, eyes bright and hair sleek. She caught the faint scents of coffee and breath mints and knew that the woman had been sitting alone in her hotel room until moments before, muttering self-confidence mantras, reapplying her corporate mask before some drab meeting, trying to convince herself she was a grown-up now, no longer a little girl.
“Nice tits,” Madison said.
The doors closed on the woman’s astonished face.
As the elevator climbed, a car was rapidly approaching the outskirts of the city. Simon O’Donnell was driving. Alison was in the passenger seat with two maps and her cell phone. She had just gotten off a call which had succeeded in getting her put through to someone in the Missing Persons Bureau of the Seattle Police Department, a man named Blanchard, who had appeared to take her seriously. He said he would meet them, at least.
“This exit?” Simon asked.
“Next one,” she said. “I think. I should remember, but…”
“I know,” he said. “It’s been a while.”
It had been a little over ten years, in fact, a figure that was easy to remember because they’d moved out of the city soon after Alison learned she was pregnant, soon after they had decided to name their baby after the street in the city where they had first met. Simon started to pull through the lanes of traffic, doing so with his usual judicious care. There’d been times when this had irritated Alison. Right now it did not.
They’d spent the last twenty-four hours waiting with a desperation that would prevent the passage of time from ever seeming the same again. The police said there had been a possible sighting of a girl trying to get on a plane in Portland, but that she’d been prevented from doing so, and so they should just stay put and wait. And so they had. But they had also talked. The absence at the center of their life was so vast it seemed pointless not to open all the drawers and pull everything out, to make the void universal. Alison admitted the friendship she’d maintained with a man her husband had never met, swearing—truthfully—that it had never been more than that. As she did this, a bubble burst in her head, revealing that nothing had ever been inside.