My mother and I simply had gone along for the ride.
I wonder about it again, as I traverse yet another crowded subway train, filled with potential danger, and yet emerge safely at my destination. As I climb up the stairs into the rapidly darkening night. As I make a left and head once more to my tiny North End apartment.
My footsteps are brisk and sure, my chin up, my shoulders square. But I'm not simply telegraphing my capabilities to potential muggers. I'm honestly happy to be going home. I'm looking forward to seeing my dog, Bella, and I know that after spending all day cooped up alone, she is looking forward to seeing me.
We will probably go for a jog along the waterfront, even though it's after dark and in a crime-infested city. We'll run very fast. I'll bring a Taser. But we'll go, because Bella and I both like to run, and what else can you do?
I am alive. And I am young, and I am helpless not to look ahead. I want to expand my business someday, maybe have two or three assistants and rent a real office space. More than sewing, I have a flair for color and space. I've been thinking about taking classes in interior design, of building my own little Martha Stewart empire.
Sometimes I think of meeting someone special. I attend the small community church just around the corner. I have made some passing acquaintances. Every now and then, I try to date. Maybe I will fall in love, get married. Maybe, someday, I'll have a baby. We will move to the suburbs. I will plant dozens of roses and paint murals in every room. I will never allow my husband to buy luggage; he will think it's a charming eccentricity
I will have a daughter; in my dreams it's always a daughter, never a son. I will name her Leslie Ann and I will buy her dozens of personalized ceramic mugs.
I think of these things as I reach my apartment building, as I look left, then right, note no strangers lurking in the shadows, then slip the outer-door key from between my clenched fingers and unlock the old, solid wood door. Bright lights fire up the little antechamber, left-hand side covered with a row of slender brass mailboxes. I close the exterior door, making sure it latches behind me.
I get my mail: some bills, some junk mail—good news, a client's check. Then I peer through the glass window of the inner door to make certain the lobby is clear. No one is about.
I enter the lobby, I start climbing up five flights of narrow, creaky stairs. I can already hear Bella above, having caught a whiff of my approach, whining excitedly at the door.
There is only one problem with my fantasies, I think now. In my dreams, no one is ever calling me Tanya. In my dreams, the man I love calls me Annabelle.
Chapter 8
IT PLAYED OUT like this: The police weren't going to help me. Paranoid or not, my father had been right: Law enforcement is a system. It exists to aid victims, to catch perpetrators, and to advance key officers' careers. Witnesses, sources—we were fodder along the way, disposable objects inevitably ground up by the huge, bureaucratic machine. I could sit by my phone all day, waiting for a call that would never come. Or I could find Dori Petracelli myself.
My desk was covered in a jumbled pile of fabric scraps, window-treatment sketchings, and client proposals, not an unusual state of affairs for an apartment that offered more ambience than square footage. I gathered the whole mess into my arms and shifted it to the alarmingly large pile tilting dangerously on the coffee table. Now I could see my target: my laptop computer. I booted it up and got to work.
First stop, the website for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. I was greeted with photos of three small children who had been declared missing in the past week. One boy, two girls. One was from Seattle, one from Chicago, the other from St. Louis. All cities where I used to live.
I wonder sometimes if this is what got my mother in the end. That no matter how much we ran, we still ended up running again. If you want to get technical about things, there's no safe place to raise a child. Crime is universal, registered sex offenders live everywhere. I know; I check the databases.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children hosts its own search engine. I entered female, Massachusetts, and missing within 25 years. I clicked on the arrows to launch the search, then sat back and chewed on my thumbnail.
Bella came out from the tiny kitchenette, having just scarfed down her dinner. Now she regarded me reproachfully Run, her gaze said. Outside. Get a leash. Fun.
Bella was a seven-year-old purebred Australian shepherd, her leggy, athletic body a mottled mix of white splashed with patches of brown and blue. Like a lot of Australian shepherds, she had one blue eye, one brown. It gave her a perpetually quizzical look she liked to use to her advantage.