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Published in 2009 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing A Random House Group Company First Published in USA in 2007 by Delacorte Press, a division of Random House, Inc.

Copyright © 2007 by Michelle Richmond

Michelle Richmond has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

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For Bonnie and John

“Viewfinder cameras have a simple plastic or glass viewer and no adjustable focusing system. The viewer is located just above or to the side of the lens, and indicates approximately what the final photograph will look like (though some parallax problems—the difference between what the eye sees through the viewer and what is actually recorded through the lens— are apparent in the processed negative or print).”

—Henry Horenstein, Black and White Photography: A Basic Manual

“The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. . . .”

—Eugene Ionesco, Present Past, Past Present

Michelle Richmond is the New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Fog and No-One You Know. Her award-winning stories and essays have appeared in Glimmer Train, Playboy, The Oxford American, and elsewhere. She has been a James Michener Fellow, and her fiction has received the Associated Writing Programs Award and the Mississippi Review Prize. A native of Mobile, Alabama, Michelle lives with her husband and son in San Francisco, where she is at work on her next novel.

Praise for Michelle Richmond and The Year of Fog:

‘Smart and adept’

New York Times

‘Thoroughly riveting … thoughtfully explores family dynamics, the ripple effects of tragedy, and the importance of the stories we tell.’

Booklist

‘Richmond never strikes a false note in No One You Know … an intelligent, emotionally convincing tale about a family tragedy and the process of storytelling.’

Boston Globe

‘A mesmerising novel of loss and grief, hope and redemption, and the endurance of love.’

Library Journal, starred review

‘Grade A. Gripping … Richmond makes the reader feel the gamut of emotions, from the initial disbelief and blind hope to the nagging guilt and gnawing despair.’

Washington Post

1

HERE IS the truth, this is what I know: we were walking on Ocean Beach, hand in hand. It was a summer morning, cold, July in San Francisco. The fog lay white and dense over the sand and ocean—an enveloping mist so thick I could see only a few feet in front of me.

Emma was searching for sand dollars. Sometimes they wash up by the dozens, whole and dazzling white, but that day the beach was littered with broken halves and quarters. Emma was disappointed. She is a child who prefers things in a state of perfection: sand dollars must be complete, schoolbooks must be pristine, her father’s hair must be neatly trimmed, falling just above his collar.

I was thinking of her father’s hair, the soft dark fringe where it touches his neck, when Emma tugged at my hand. “Hurry,” she said.

“What’s the rush?”

“The waves might wash them away.”

Despite our bad luck so far, Emma believed that on the beach ahead lay a treasure of perfect sand dollars.

“Want to go to Louis’s Diner instead?” I said. “I’m hungry.”

“I’m not.”

She tried to extract her fingers and pull away. I often thought, though I never said it, that her father spoiled her. I understood why: she was a child without a mother, and he was trying to compensate.

“Let me go,” she said, twisting her hand in my own, surprisingly strong.

I leaned down and looked into her face. Her green eyes stared back at me, resolute. I knew I was the adult. I was bigger, stronger, more clever. But I also knew that in a test of will, Emma would outlast me every time. “Will you stay close by?”

“Yes.” She smiled, knowing she had won.

“Find me a pretty sand dollar.”

“I’ll find you the biggest,” she said, stretching her arms wide.

She skipped ahead, that small, six-year-old mystery, that brilliant feminine replica of her father. She was humming some song that had been on the radio minutes earlier. Watching her, I felt a surge of joy and fear. In three months, I would marry her father. We hadn’t yet explained to her that I would be moving in permanently. That I would make her breakfast, take her to school, and attend her ballet recitals, the way her mother used to do. No, the way her mother should have done.

“You’re good for Emma,” Jake liked to say. “You’ll be a much better mother than my ex-wife ever was.”

And I thought, every time, how do you know? What makes you so sure? I watched Emma with her yellow bucket, her blue cloth shoes, her black ponytail whipping in the wind as she raced away from me, and wondered, how can I do it? How can I become a mother to this girl?

I lifted the Holga to my eye, aware as the shutter clicked— once, softly, like a toy—that Emma would be reduced to a blurry 6×6 in black and white. She was moving too fast, the light was insufficient. I turned the winding knob, clicked, advanced again. By the time I pressed the shutter release a final time, she was nearly gone.

2

HERE THEN is the error, my moment of greatest failure. If everyone has a decision she would give anything to retract, this is mine: a shape in the sand caught my eye. At first it looked like something discarded—a child’s shirt, perhaps, or a tiny blanket. By instinct I brought the camera to my eye, because this is what I do—I take pictures for a living, I record the things I see. As I moved closer, the furry head came into focus, the arched back, black spots on white fur. The small form was dusted with sand, its head pointing in my direction, its flippers resting delicately at its sides.

I knelt beside the seal pup, reaching out to touch it, but something stopped me. The wet black eyes, open and staring, did not blink. Spiky whiskers fanned out from the face, and three long lashes above each eye moved with the breeze. Then I saw the gash along its belly, mostly hidden by sand, and felt some maternal urge bumping around inside me. How long did I spend with the seal pup—thirty seconds? A minute? More?

A tiny sand crab scuttled over the sand by my toe. The sight of it reminded me of those miniature creatures that littered the beach at Gulf Shores when I was a child. My sister Annabel would capture them in mason jars and marvel at their pink underbellies as they tried to climb out, legs ticking against the glass. This crab kicked up a pocket of sand, then disappeared; at most, another ten seconds passed.

I glanced eastward toward the park, where the fog abruptly ended, butting up against startling blue. As a transplant to this city from the bright and sultry South, I had come to love the fog, its dramatic presence, the way it deadens sound. The way it simply stops, rather than fading, opaque whiteness suddenly giving way to clarity. Crossing from fog into sunlight, one has the feeling of having emerged. Traveling in the other direction is like sinking into a mysterious, fairy-tale abyss.

Just beyond the beach, along the Great Highway, a hearse led a line of cars south toward Pacifica. I remembered the last funeral I attended, a healthy guy in his late twenties who broke his neck in a rock-climbing accident; he was a friend of a friend, not someone I knew well, but because I’d talked with him at a dinner party two weeks before the accident, it seemed appropriate to go to the funeral. This recollection took another five seconds.

I looked ahead, where Emma should be, but did not see her. I began walking. Everything was saturated a cool white, and distance was impossible to measure. I clutched the plastic Holga, imagining the great images I’d get, the deep black of Emma’s hair against the cold white beach.

I couldn’t help thinking of the dead seal pup, how I would explain it to Emma. I believed this was something mothers instinctively knew how to do. This would be a test, the first of many; at that moment I was not thinking entirely of Emma. I walked faster, anxious to know if she had seen the seal; it was a good thing for her to see that day, alone on the beach with me. I wanted her to be frightened by the dead seal pup so I could step delicately into the role of stepmother.

I don’t know exactly when I realized something was wrong. I kept walking and did not see her. I pushed my hands in front of me, aware even as I did so of the absurdity of the gesture, as if a pair of hands could part the fog.

“Emma!” I called.

The panic did not strike immediately. No, that would take several seconds, a full minute almost. At first it was only a gradual slipping, a sense of vertigo, like the feeling I used to get as a child when I would stand knee-deep in the warm water of the Gulf of Mexico, close my eyes against the white-hot Alabama sun, and let the waves erode the platform under my feet. First the sand beneath the arches would go, then the toes, and finally I would lose my balance and tumble forward into the surf, mouth filling with seawater, eyes snapping open to meet the bright spinning world.

“Emma!”

I yelled louder, feeling the shifting, unreliable sand beneath my feet. I ran forward, then back, retracing my steps. She’s hiding, I thought. She must be hiding. A few yards from the dead seal pup stood a concrete drainage wall covered with graffiti. I ran toward the wall. In my mind I pictured her crouched there, giggling, the pail propped on her knees. This vision was so clear, had such the ring of truth, I almost believed I had seen it. But when I reached the wall, she wasn’t there. I leaned against it, felt my insides convulse, and vomited into the sand.

From where I stood, I could make out the shape of the public restrooms down the beach. Racing toward them, I felt a sense of dread. I knew, already, that the search had somehow shifted. I crossed the highway and checked the women’s room, which was dark and empty. Then I circled around to the men’s side. The windows were made of frosted glass, dim light spilling onto the tile floor. I plunged my hand into the trash bin, looking for her clothes, her shoes. I got down on hands and knees and looked behind the urinals, holding my breath against the stench. Nothing.

As I crossed back to the beach, I was shaking. My fingers felt numb, my throat dry. I climbed to the top of a sand dune and turned in circles, seeing nothing but the impenetrable white fog, hearing nothing but the soft hum of cars along the Great Highway. For a moment I stood still. “Think,” I said out loud. “Don’t panic.”

Up ahead, more fog, a half mile or so of beach, then the hill leading to the Cliff House, the Camera Obscura, the ruins of the Sutro Baths, Louis’s Diner. To the right, there was the long sidewalk, the highway, and beyond it, Golden Gate Park. Behind me, miles of beach. To my left, the Pacific Ocean, gray and frothing. I stood at the center of a fog-bound maze with invisible walls and infinite possibilities. I thought: a child disappears on a beach. Where does that child go?

3

I WILL RETURN again and again to that moment. I will keep a notebook in which I record the details. There will be poorly done sketches, graphs of time and motion, page after page on which I attempt to recover the past. I will pretend that memory is reliable, that it does not erode as quickly and completely as the brittle lines of an Etch-a-Sketch. I will tell myself that, buried somewhere in the intricate maze of my mind, there is a detail, a clue, some tiny lost thing that will lead me to Emma.

Later, they will want to know the exact moment I noticed she was missing. They will want to know whether I saw anyone unusual on the beach, whether I heard anything in the moments before or after she disappeared. They—the police, the reporters, her father—will ask the same questions again and again, staring into my eyes with desperation, as if by repetition they might make me remember, as if by force of will they can conjure clues where there are none.

This is what I tell them, this is what I know: I was walking on the beach with Emma. It was cold and very foggy. She let go of my hand. I stopped to photograph a seal pup, then glanced up toward the Great Highway. When I looked back, she was gone.

The only person to whom I will tell the entire story is my sister, Annabel. Only my sister will know I wasted ten seconds on a sand crab, five on a funeral procession. Only my sister will know I wanted Emma to see the dead seal, that in the moment before she disappeared, I was scheming to make her love me. For others, I will choose my words carefully, separating the important details from misleading trivialities. For them, I will present this version of the truth: there is a girl, her name is Emma, she is walking on the beach. I look away, seconds pass. When I look back she is gone.

This single moment unfolds like a flower in a series of time-lapse photographs, like an intricate maze. I stand at the labyrinth’s center, unable to see which paths lead to dead ends, which one to the missing child. I know I must trust memory to lead me. I know I have one chance to get it right.

The first story I tell, the first clue I reveal, will determine the direction of the search. The wrong detail, the wrong clue, will inevitably lead to confusion, while the right clue leads to a beautiful child. Should I tell the police about the postman in the parking lot, the motorcycle, the man in the orange Chevelle, the yellow van? Or is it the seal that matters, the hearse, the retaining wall, the wave? How does one distinguish between the relevant and the extraneous? One slip in the narrative, one mistake in the selection of details, and everything disintegrates.

4

PI TIMES radius squared equals the area of a circle. Time is a continuum, stretching forward and back infinitely. I learned these things in school.

In a ninth-grade classroom at Murphy High School, Dr. Thomas Swayze, an exhilarating and shady character who was rumored to have received his doctorate through the mail, drew a giant circle on the chalkboard. On the outer rim of the circle and on a straight line drawn from the midpoint to the circle’s edge, he scribbled numbers and formulas. His biceps flexed, straining the white sleeve of his T-shirt. “Radius, diameter, circumference,” he said, his FM radio voice inciting in me sweaty adolescent desires. He turned to face the classroom and rolled the gleaming white cone of chalk from palm to palm, looking straight at me.

The sun glared through a long row of windows, turning the copper hair of the girl in front of me to flame; she smelled like Juicy Fruit gum. My hand lay on the desktop in a pool of burning light; all around my thumbnail were flecks of blood where I had chewed the skin to shreds. In my head, a steady, maddening hum. Dr. Swayze turned toward the blackboard. Some hidden object formed a faded and perfect circle on the back pocket of his blue jeans.

“And the greatest of these is area,” he said. My knees slid apart, and I could feel little pools of sweat gathering on the plastic seat beneath my thighs.

Years before, Mrs. Monk, my third-grade teacher, had moved the hands on a giant cardboard clock and extolled the virtues of time. Seconds were grains of sand, she said. Minutes were pebbles. Hours were the bricks of which past, present, and future are made. She talked of days and years, decades, centuries. She talked of the millennium, when we would all be grown. She opened her big arms wide and whispered the word eon. In our portable classroom, the air conditioner sputtering mildly against Mobile’s April heat, Mrs. Monk, teacher of the year for 1977, preached and glowed and sweated.

I sat at my wooden desk, looking up at that huge circle with its eternally trapped hands, and cried. She came over to me and laid warm, damp fingers on my neck. “Abby, what’s wrong?” she asked. I leaned into her ample, motherly waist, buried my face in deep folds of polyester, and confessed, “I don’t understand time.” It wasn’t the clock itself that confounded me, the half-past and quarter-till, the five-of and ten-after, but rather the essential nature of time. I did not have the words to explain this to Mrs. Monk.

What disturbed me most were the lost stretches between bedtime and waking, those dark hours when my mind went on fantastic and terrible journeys. I knew time was a place where one could be lost, a place where bliss or horror might go on and on, though when I woke, my mother would look the same, my sister Annabel would not have aged, and my father would get up and put on his suit and go to work as if nothing had changed. I believed I lived in a different world than they, that my family slept while I traveled. I felt invested with responsibility, as if I had been chosen to shoulder a burden for my entire family.

Mrs. Monk’s voice stayed with me, and long after I had learned to tell time I was still disturbed by the clock’s steady, unstoppable rhythm. Sitting in Dr. Swayze’s class, looking at the dull chrome clock on the wall above the blackboard, I wished there were some way to make it stop, to make the days last longer.

“How do we measure the area of a circle?” Dr. Swayze asked.

I imagine that the circle begins as a cosmic pinpoint, small as the body of a child. The child is stooped on the beach, reaching for a sand dollar. A tall figure appears in the fog. A hand clamps over the child’s mouth, a strong arm lifts her up. With each step the stranger takes, the circle widens. With each second, the area of possibility grows.

Where is the child? The answer lies within a maddening equation: pi times radius squared.

5

THE ROOM is small, with hard plastic chairs and a concrete floor. In the corner there’s an odd touch, placed here perhaps by a secretary or thoughtful wife—a mosaic end table and pretty lamp. The bulb clicks and hums as a moth flutters beneath the shade. A large metal clock ticks off the seconds. Jake is in another room, behind a closed door, strapped to some contraption. The polygrapher is asking him questions, monitoring his heart rate, watching for signs of a hidden motive, a carefully concealed lie.

“We must first eliminate the family,” Detective Sherburne said last night. “Nine times out of ten, it’s the mother, or father, or both.” He watched my eyes when he said this, waiting for me to flinch; I didn’t.

“I’m not the mother,” I said. “Not even the stepmother. Not yet. The mother picked up and left three years ago. Are you looking for her?”

“We’re considering all possibilities.”

The clock is ticking, the circle is widening, and I am waiting my turn.

Cops stand around the station, singly or in pairs. They sip coffee from Styrofoam cups, shift from one foot to the other, talk quietly, making private jokes. One stands with a hand on his gun, the palm closed gently over the metal, as if the gun itself is an extension of his own body. Yesterday, Jake raced home from Eureka, where he was visiting a friend for the weekend. We spent the night in the station filling out forms, answering questions, going over every detail. Now it’s eight a.m. Twenty-two hours have passed. While I sit here, waiting, who is searching?

It’s no secret that the longer a child is missing, the more difficult it is to find her. Danger grows by the second. Time is the kidnapper’s greatest friend, the family’s most formidable enemy. With each passing minute, the kidnapper moves farther away in some indiscernible direction, and the area that must be searched, the diameter of possibility, grows.

Yesterday, Sherburne arrived at the Beach Chalet within ten minutes of the first squad car and immediately took charge. Now, he works at his desk, clad in a pale blue shirt and odd, iridescent tie, surely a gift that he feels obliged to wear. I imagine him at home, getting ready for work amid the domestic chaos. I imagine a happy wife, a couple of very clean children. There’s something comforting about his presence. He reminds me of Frank Sinatra, with his broad forehead and immaculate haircut, his sloping blue eyes. He moves with a kind of old-fashioned grace.

I catch his eye. He holds up a hand with fingers spread and mouths the words “Five minutes.” He reaches for his coffee, lifts it to his mouth, sips, and sets it down again. Six more seconds have passed. Say Emma is in a car, going 60 miles per hour. In 6 seconds a car moving at 60 miles per hour can travel 170-something yards. Square that and multiply it by pi. In the time it took him to take that sip of coffee, the search area broadened by more than 870,000 square feet. If each sip is another 870,000 square feet and if there are 100 sips in a cup, I wonder how large the circle will be when he is finished, and how many cups he would have to drink to expand this circle around the globe.

I consider all the possibilities of human bodies in motion. Did the kidnapper take Emma by the hand? Did he pick her up? If the latter, then what is the length of his stride? How many feet can he cover in a minute? And how far did he go on foot? How many yards was it to his vehicle? Did she struggle, and, if so, would this have slowed him down? Does he try to appease her when she’s hungry?

I imagine a van stopped at a diner on some dusty highway. Inside the diner sit a shadowy figure and a girl. They are eating breakfast. Perhaps he wants to make her trust him, so the girl is having chocolate chip pancakes with an unhealthy dose of syrup, maybe even chocolate milk. Would Emma know to eat slowly in order to stall their departure? Take your time, I think, willing the message telepathically through the void. Chew each bite carefully. A song comes to me from summer camp in the Carolinas when I was an unhappy member of Girls in Action: “Give each bite fifty chews and follow with a sip of juice … ” During those minutes in the diner, they are not moving in any direction; the clock is still, the circle remains static.

This is not the only possibility. The police are already leaning toward a theory of drowning.

Yesterday, not long after the police arrived, the Coast Guard boat appeared. I stood on the beach answering questions, watching the boat plow through the freezing water. Overhead, an orange chopper came swooping in from the north. Its nose tipped toward the ocean, and the loud thwack-thwack of the blades reminded me of movies about Vietnam. Hours later, as evening pressed in, the Coast Guard boat disappeared. The ocean was blue-black beneath a darker sky, and the wind had picked up, pushing the fog eastward. As the sand cut into my face and neck, I worried about Emma in her sweatshirt, not warm enough for this kind of wind. I hoped she had worn socks, but I couldn’t remember.

At some point Jake arrived. I don’t remember how it happened—only that for the longest time he wasn’t there, and then, suddenly, he was. Cruiser lights flashed red and blue over the dark beach. There was the strong creosote smell of a bonfire downwind. A few surfers were coming in, their bodies slick and seal-like in black wet suits. The police questioned them one by one.

Eventually, someone from the Coast Guard approached us. His uniform looked neatly pressed despite the fact he’d been working all day. “There’s not much we can do in the dark,” he said. “We’ll start again early in the morning.”

“If she’s out there,” Jake asked, “what are your chances of finding her?”

The Coast Guard man looked down, dug the toe of his shoe into the sand. “Hard to tell, depends on the tides. Sometimes, after a drowning, the body will wash up on shore, sometimes not.”

“Emma’s terrified of water,” I said, looking to Jake for confirmation. “She wouldn’t have gone near it.”

Sherburne turned to me. The pages of his yellow legal pad flapped in the wind.

I explained how I’d recently taken Emma to the birthday party of a bossy girl named Melissa. Screaming children played Marco Polo in a yellow-tiled pool in Millbrae, while Emma sat cross-legged on a lounge chair, terrorizing a ladybug that had fallen into her root beer float. “She refused to go in the pool,” I said. I could see Emma in her blue bathing suit, sitting there, clear as a snapshot. Every now and then she’d squint, glance up at the glittering pool, and move her foot by a fraction, as if she might get up her nerve and go in, but she never did. In the car on the way home, when I asked if she’d had fun, she propped her skinny feet on the dashboard and said, “I don’t care for that Melissa.”

Sherburne looked at me in a pitying way, as if to say this was no kind of proof. But from the way he lowered his head and put a hand on Jake’s shoulder, I could tell he wanted to believe me.

“She’s a really smart kid,” I said, desperate to make him understand. “If I thought for a second she’d get anywhere near the water, I wouldn’t have let go of her hand.”

Jake turned away from me then, toward the ocean, and I realized that some tiny part of him was actually considering it, that somewhere in his deeply rational mind this idea was taking hold as a minute but distinct possibility: Emma might have drowned.

“I’ve got two kids,” Sherburne said. “I’m going to do everything I can.”

Now, Jake emerges through a door, head bowed. I touch his shoulder as we cross paths. He jerks as if he has been stung, then looks at me, his eyes red and swollen. With obvious effort he moves his hand in my direction, clasps my fingers, and lets go.

“How could you?” he said, moments after hearing the news. “God, Abby, how could you?” It was on the phone, long-distance to Eureka; his voice was shaky, he was crying. Now, I can see in his face that it’s an effort for him not to say it again—to repeat it over and over, an angry refrain. And I’m thinking, How could I? The guilt is a physical sensation, a constant, sickening pain.

The polygrapher stands in the doorway, hands on his hips, smiling as casually as a friendly neighborhood salesman. “Norm Dubus,” he says, shaking my hand. “Ready?”

The room is blank and white and very warm. A space heater beneath the window buzzes, its coils glowing red. A smell of sweat and burned coffee. Norm shuts the door behind us and motions for me to sit down. He loops cords around my chest, tells me to sit up straight, and adjusts the height of the chair so my feet are flat on the floor.

“Relax. I’m going to ask you a few questions.”

On the table in front of him is a legal pad, and beside it a gold machine with a needle. He flips a switch and the machine begins to hum. The needle starts moving, scratching four flat blue lines across the paper. The questions, at first, are mundane:

Is your name Abigail Mason?

Were you born in Alabama?

Did you attend the University of Tennessee?

Is your current place of residence 420 Arkansas, Unit 3, San Francisco, California?

He records answers on his pad, checks the needle mark, makes notations. After a while, the tone of the questions changes.

Have you and Jake been arguing lately?

Do you have children?

Do you want children?

Did you ever fight with Emma?

Norm’s hair is glossy black, except for a couple of gray strands above the ears. He has purplish spots around his hairline, and he smells like green apples. He must have just dyed his hair in the last day or two, possibly even that morning.

Half an hour has passed since the polygraph began.

Have you ever punished Emma?

Do you know where Emma is?

Did you have anything to do with her disappearance?

Did you lose your temper?

Did you drown her?

Did you kill Emma?

As the session comes to a close, I fall apart. Norm offers me a tissue and leans over to detach the monitors from my pulse points. The sweet apple scent of his shampoo grows stronger. “Emma loves applesauce,” I find myself saying. He lifts an eyebrow, smiles in a distracted way, and an absurd jingle rolls through my head, the sort of phonic litany one memorizes in kindergarten. A is for apple, A is for Adam, A is for Abraham.

“We’re done here,” Norm says. “You may go.” Then, more gently, “It’s routine. Just something we have to do.”

“I know,” I say.

A is for Anywhere.

Outside the police station, a reporter for Channel 7 is waiting with her cameraman. Jake looks directly into the camera and speaks into the woman’s outstretched microphone. “If you have Emma, please let her go. Just leave her in a public place. Walk away. No one has to know who you are.”

The reporter waves the microphone in my face. Her makeup has a shiny plastic look, and her lip liner extends slightly beyond the natural edges of her lips. “What is your relationship to the child?”

“I’m her father’s fiancée.”

The woman presses herself between me and Jake. “Is the wedding still on?”

“I just want to find my daughter,” he says.

She barrages Jake with more questions, never pausing long enough to get a complete answer. “How do you feel? Where is Emma’s mother? Do you know who might have done this?” I know she’s looking for the perfect sound bite—an outpouring of grief, a statement implicating the mother, the mention of a creepy neighbor or crazy uncle—anything to make her story more interesting.

Jake fields her questions calmly, professionally. Not once does he show impatience or break down into tears. He’s made for such moments of crisis, this sturdy Californian who is always in command. His great-great-great-grandfather was a 49er of the gold-panning kind; his father was a 49er as well, a football hero whose name still gets mentioned in the sports page, a bigger-than-life talent who died in his early forties, wasted by alcohol. Jake played football in high school and was pretty good, but he happily gave up the sport when his father died. Still, there is something of the football player’s swagger in him, a good-natured confidence that never fails to win people over.

Watching him, I know that he will play well on TV. The public will admire his air of gentle sobriety, his thick, wavy hair that is always slightly out of control, the full lower lip he bites when contemplating a question, the subtle glasses that make him look like a quiet intellectual. They will like the dimpled boyishness of his smile, the way he glances down at his feet when anyone pays him a compliment. I think of the television audience, watching us and judging, the way I have done in better times.

We drive to Jake’s house at Thirtieth and Lawton. There, another reporter is waiting. Jake pauses to make a statement pleading for Emma’s safe return. Once inside, we close the curtains and stand in the dark living room, not speaking and not touching, just standing, arms at our sides, face to face. Emma’s things are scattered around the room: on the coffee table, a magic wand fashioned from tinfoil; in a basket by the stairs, a pot holder she was making for her teacher; beneath the couch, the red ballet slippers she liked to wear around the house.

I lean into his chest and put my arms around him. We’ve always fit best this way, standing up, my head reaching just to his sternum, his arms wrapped around me in a way that makes me feel protected. But he doesn’t embrace me this time. Instead, he pats me on the shoulder—once, twice, three times—like an acquaintance at a funeral.

“I’m so sorry,” I say.

He lets his hand drop to his side. “I know, it’s not your—”

But he can’t say it’s not my fault, can’t say he doesn’t blame me, because it is, and he does.

He reaches behind his back to unclasp my hands, then goes upstairs, into Emma’s bedroom, and shuts the door behind him. Bedsprings creak, and his sobs carry down through the floorboards. I think of Emma’s bed, the yellow comforter with white flowers, the small pillows she likes to hide things under: crayons, doll clothes, crisp dollar bills. Minutes pass before I hear movement upstairs, a door opening, heavy feet shuffling across the floor, another door closing, then the swish of water into the bathroom sink.

Leslie Gray on Channel 7 reports the story in this way: “A six-year-old San Francisco girl, the granddaughter of legendary 49er Jim Balfour, disappeared yesterday at Ocean Beach. Although the girl’s father and his fiancée have not been ruled out as suspects, sources say they both took a polygraph and passed. Authorities are attempting to locate the girl’s estranged mother. Police fear the girl may have drowned.”

A photograph of Emma appears on screen, last year’s school portrait. Her bangs are cut unevenly, and she’s wearing a blue barrette. She’s missing a tooth, front and center. I remember the day this photograph was taken. I helped her pick out the barrette, and she persuaded me to style her bangs with a curling iron. I placed my hand between the curling iron and her forehead to keep from burning her, the way my mother used to do, and as she chattered on about a boy named Sam who’d poisoned the class canary, I realized she was beginning to like me.

Leslie Gray frowns in a practiced way, forming a series of creases in her peach-colored makeup. “Anyone who may have seen the girl should call this hotline.” A number flashes on screen. I pick up the phone and dial. The girl who answers is probably no more than seventeen.

“Missing children hotline,” she says cheerfully. “How may I assist you?”

I want to tell her to please find Emma. I want to tell her that Emma loves potato chips with salt and vinegar, that she’s been taking cello lessons. I want to tell her that Emma made a perfect score on her last spelling test, and that I’ve been teaching her how to use a camera. Instead, my throat freezes and I say nothing.

“Hello?” she says. “Hello?” Her voice changes from perky to annoyed. “Hello,” and the line goes dead.

6

FOR WORK, I have always used my Leica R8. It’s easy to manipulate, allowing maximum control over my images. But in the past few months, I began feeling that my photographs lacked something—some quality of depth I couldn’t quite define. I wanted to try a camera without gadgets, without special lenses and precision focus, which is why I chose the Holga for that day at Ocean Beach. With no focusing mechanism and only two f-stops, the Holga is the simplest kind of viewfinder camera.

It is the day after Emma’s disappearance, the middle of the night. Jake is out searching. Today, a few dozen volunteers fanned out across Golden Gate Park, with the intent of covering all 1,017 acres—the dense woods and enormous soccer fields, botanical gardens, lakes and playgrounds and equestrian rings. A woman named Bud with the Park Police led the search on horseback. I recognized her from a tour Emma and Jake and I took of the Presidio stables in the spring. On that day, which seems like a lifetime ago, Officer Bud showed Emma how to feed the horses carrots from the palm of her hand. There were several other children on the tour, and I was embarrassed when Emma, overcome with excitement, stealthily skipped to the front of the line. I didn’t remember ever having been that bold as a child, and I wondered, with a mix of amusement and unease, what forms Emma’s precociousness would take as she grew older.

For me, tonight, the search leads back to my apartment, to the darkroom with its chilled air and chemical smell. I take yesterday’s film out of the Holga, remove the film from the cassette, and wind it carefully around the reel. It’s something I’ve done thousands of times, yet my fingers shake. I drop the reel into the processing canister, put the cap on, and turn on the overhead light. I check the temperature of the developing fluid, pour the chemicals in, and gently rock the canister back and forth. Then I do the same with the stop fluid and the fixer, timing each action precisely, aware that I’m holding the most important film I have ever shot. Finally, I take the top off of the canister, run water over the reel, unroll the film, and hang the strips to dry.

It’s three in the morning when I cut the negatives into strips of three, slide them one by one into the enlarger, move the arm until the image is in focus, then lay the photo paper on the counter and expose the film, four seconds per print. Then the basins: developer, stopper, fix. Finally, the water bath.

Each photo captures the moment with some degree of accuracy, and yet I am struck by the inadequacies, the story the pictures fail to tell. One is a close-up, her face just inches from the camera, a big grin, a spot of flour on her face from our pancake-making adventure earlier that morning. In the second, she is a few feet away, bending to examine a sand dollar, caught in profile, her hair hanging down and concealing her face. The third is shot from behind. The photo shows a small, blurred figure in the left-hand side of the frame. If you were to come upon this photo in a gallery, or on someone’s living room wall, you might find it mysterious, pleasing: a child’s black hair, white fog, a vast expanse of beach.

Yet something essential is missing from the photos. What is missing is the truth, what is missing is the answer. Again and again, I scan them with a magnifying glass, looking for a dark figure lurking in the shadows. Within the grain, I search for some kind of clue, some hidden meaning or simple, obvious thing that has slipped my mind. I search until my vision goes blurry, unwilling to believe that there is simply nothing there. It’s seven a.m. when I leave the darkroom, sick with disappointment.

To any problem there is a solution: it’s something my mother told me as a child, and I’ve lived my life believing it. But now that old aphorism falls flat—just an optimistic deception with no practical application. The one thing I know is this: there is a girl, her name is Emma, we were walking on the beach. She was there, and then she wasn’t. There is no way to retrieve that moment, no way to rewrite the script; I looked away. It cannot be undone.

7

THE PHONE rings and rings. I see myself as if from a distance: the receiver clutched in my fingers, the emerald engagement ring on the hand that holds it. Everything feels impossible, like some terrible scene from someone else’s life.

Finally, a man with a high, strained voice comes on the other end. “Nine-one-one,” he says. “Do you have an emergency?”

“I lost a little girl,” I say, my voice trembling.

“When did you realize she was missing?”

“Thirty-five minutes ago.” I’m staring at my watch, unbelieving. Thirty-five minutes. What can happen to a child in thirty-five minutes?

“Where did you last see her?” the man asks.

“Ocean Beach. I went back to the parking lot to look for her, but she wasn’t there.”

“The important thing is to remain calm,” he says.

But I know he is wrong; to be calm implies some sort of rest, sitting back and waiting.

“Where are you now?”

“The Beach Chalet.”

“Speak up,” he says. “I can barely hear you.”

“The Beach Chalet.” The volume of my voice startles me. People in the restaurant turn and stare: a man in an apron rolling silverware into napkins, a heavily tattooed couple sharing an omelet by the window, a group of German students contemplating the menu. The restaurant’s hostess, a prematurely maternal woman with a thick Russian accent, stands in front of me, wringing her hands.

“Is the little girl your daughter?” the voice asks.

“No, my fiancé’s daughter.”

“How old is she?”

“Six and a half.” The volume of my voice rises again. “Please send someone. When are you going to send someone?”

“You need to stay calm, ma’am. I’m dispatching a patrol car.”

“How long will it take?”

“Five minutes. Stay right where you are. The officer will meet you there.”

He sounds so sure of himself, not the least bit nervous. I feel vaguely comforted by the tidiness of protocol, imagining the dispatch going out over the airwaves to be picked up by a coterie of well-trained officers. Within seconds they’ll be racing toward Ocean Beach, sirens wailing, and within minutes, surely, Emma will be found.

“I get you some coffee,” the Russian woman says. She disappears into the kitchen.

The silverware man comes over and puts a hand on my shoulder. “What’s her name?”

“Emma. Emma Balfour.”

He unties his apron and tosses it on the counter. “I’ll check the park.”

I fight off a mental image of Emma with some stranger behind the trees on a rocky path. I check my watch. Thirty-nine minutes. She could be anywhere by now.

The tattooed couple wolfs down the last bites of their omelet. “What can we do?” the girl asks, pulling on her jacket.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I can’t think.”

“We could go back to the parking lot,” the boyfriend says. “We could take down license plates.” He seems eager, almost excited, as if he’s caught up in some movie, the role of his life.

“Here, take this.” I hand him my Holga. “There are only five shots left.”

“We’ll bring it back when we’re done,” the girl says. She slaps a twenty on the counter, and they head out the door. The German teenagers keep glancing up from their menus and whispering, as if this is somehow part of the entertainment, a play staged just for them.

The Russian woman returns with a thick mug of coffee, a little pitcher of cream, two sugar packets, and a spoon. “Your daughter,” she says, “we will find her.”

I pick up the phone again and dial Jake’s cell, almost hoping that he won’t answer. I imagine calling him a little while later, after I’ve found her. Part of me thinks that, in a few minutes, all of this will be over, and life will return to normal. Emma is simply playing hide-and-seek, or she ran off to find a bathroom, or she got lost in the fog and it took a while for her to get back to the parking lot. She’s probably standing by the car right now; she must be. I should have stayed there and waited for her.

Jake’s phone rings twice, three times. I know that in the moment I tell him, the nightmare will become real. On the fifth ring, he picks up.

“Abby?”

I hear voices in the background, sports announcers, the ambient noise of a crowd. I don’t know how to begin.

“You there?” he says.

“I have to tell you something.”

A wild cheer goes up from the crowd, and Jake lets out a whoop. “Delgado just hit a home run!”

“Jake, you have to come home,” I say. Even as I say it, I’m calculating the time it will take him to drive the 270 miles if he leaves right now, if he goes over the speed limit and doesn’t have to stop for gas, if there isn’t much traffic.

“What?”

“You have to come home. It’s Emma.”

“I can hardly hear you.”

“Emma,” I say.

The tone of his voice changes. “Is something wrong?”

“She’s gone,” I say.

“What?”

“Emma. She’s gone.”

His voice strikes a high, unfamiliar note. “What do you mean?”

“We were on the beach. We were walking.”

How to finish the conversation? Nothing about the moment seems real. I know there must be some appropriate words to utter, but I have no idea what they might be. This is a glitch in time, a mistake, a joke. At any moment Emma will walk through the door.

“What do you mean?” he says again.

“There was this dead seal, a pup. I looked away for a few seconds, I swear it was only a few seconds. Then I looked up and she wasn’t there.”

“But … where is she now?”

Where is she? A valid question. The obvious question. How to answer?

“Lost,” I say. As if she simply strayed, the way children do. As if she is standing patiently at some fixed point, waiting for me. “The police are on their way.”

On the other end, several seconds of silence. A stranger’s voice says, “Hey, man, you okay?” I will later learn that this is the voice of the hot dog vendor. Jake’s legs have given out. One moment he’s standing, mind on the game, holding up two fingers to indicate that he wants two hot dogs. Then he’s sitting on the ground—no, not sitting but kneeling, knees to the cement.

“This isn’t possible,” Jake says. “Abby, how could you?”

In the background there is the smack of a baseball bat, the roar of the crowd.

I met Jake a year ago at the high school where he teaches. I was doing a slide presentation on the landscape photography of the Southwest for a group of juniors and seniors. Before I cut the lights, I saw a man sitting alone in the back row, looking a bit out of place. He had wavy black hair, glasses with thin silver frames, and he wore a blue button-down. When the lights came back on, he gave me a thumbs-up.

I opened the floor for comments. There were none. The art history teacher, an anorexic brunette with very short bangs, asked a couple of predictable questions to make up for her students’ lack of interest. When the bell rang, the students rushed the aisles, jostling each other and shouting. The sudden activity stirred up unpleasant odors of adolescence—cheap perfume, hair spray, sweat, and pent-up lust. When the din cleared, the guy from the back row was standing in front of the platform.

“You were pretty good up there,” he said.

“You’re just being nice.”

“Really, they’re a tough crowd. You held your own.” He reached out to shake my hand. “Name’s Jake.”

“Should you be wandering around without a hall pass?”

“Last period was my lunch break, and this is my prep time. I couldn’t bear the thought of sitting in the teachers’ lounge.”

Just then the lights went off, plunging us into darkness. “Budget cuts,” Jake explained. “All the lights are on automatic timers.” The auditorium was empty save for the two of us. We both reached for the shut-off switch to the slide projector at the same time, and when our hands touched, there was a quick fuzz of static electricity.

“Sparks,” he said.

I smiled.

We pushed through the crowded hallway, a chaos of backpacks and cell phones and iPods, a hothouse of colliding pheromones. The place felt unpredictable, unsafe, as if at any moment a gun might be drawn or a knife fight might break out. A skinny kid in a sagging sweater gave Jake a high five, and a girl in a vinyl miniskirt blew him a kiss. Several students shouted his name. I wondered how he’d managed to earn their trust. I’d never liked teenagers, even when I was one myself. I assumed the feeling was mutual; surely they could see right through me, could sense my dislike and smell my fear.

“What subject do you teach?” I asked, swiveling to avoid a television being wheeled through the hallway by an obese, balding boy.

“Philosophy.”

“Do you like it?”

“To be honest, I only get one section of philosophy per year. The rest is soccer and American History.”

“A Renaissance man.”

“More like a hired gun,” he said. “Who roped you into this?”