From: [email protected]
I accidently dropped my phone down a well. (Not really. You know what I mean.) Tell me you’re ok NOW!!!!! Luv u 4ever, Snow
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Somebody got my number, my fault, I gave it out, don’t even. Total terror-fest. Plus I think it had GPS. So. Spooked. Might get another for emergencies. Now that I get you have to throw them out all the time or PEOPLE FIND YOU. Do not trust Law & Order reruns for survival tips. ? ? ?
She’s e-mailed Olivia, aka 1SnowWhite5150, twice, and if I don’t get to El Molino, California, fast, she gets her new emergency burner and she’s gone.
I drive there in the dark, guzzling Red Bull.
I’m in an innocuous grayish Prius I bought for cash off a used-car lot just before it closed as soon as I hit California. Don’s car is by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. I hiked back. I’m not sneaking up on this girl in a car you can hear coming a mile away.
It’s seven a.m., still chilly, and the library doesn’t open for hours. I dig a flannel shirt out of the trunk and cruise. There are FOR RENT signs planted in front of half the apartments abandoned by students taking off for summer.
I want a command post with an ergonomic chair and a mattress from this century, not another sleazy motel. I’m not a guy who throws money around, but I throw some rent at a place in a Victorian house I can get week-to-week. The girl who’s handling the rental seems so relieved to get the place off her hands, she doesn’t care if I’m in town to commit acts of terror.
I sit in the ergonomic chair and stare at my screen while more days of my life go down the tubes.
There’s nothing like a good obsession to keep a guy mesmerized. Four days in, I’m still sitting in the desk chair in boxer shorts, waiting for something to happen. I’m beating myself up for not walking El Molino systematically, street by street, looking for her, when my screen offers her up.
She’s e-mailing Olivia from the John Muir branch again. The rush is like a free fall, like bungee jumping where you’re not supposed to be.
I’m there in five, scouting.
I watch her hands hover over the keyboard, her arms emerging from the sleeves of a giant tee, her face bent toward the screen. The hair that was once straight and blond, now brown and curly, falls over the side of her face as she leans forward. She has glasses now. I see the thin blue vein in the corner of her forehead, watch her push her hair behind her ear. The diamond studs from the photos are gone, her earlobes curved and white.
I watch her breathe.
I don’t let myself feel what I’ve felt since I saw pictures of her that first time, more difficult now that she’s more my physical type, curvier and a little older-looking. She’s still small and beautiful and a killer.
When she gets up to leave, I follow her carefully through a leafy neighborhood of big, old wooden houses to a park with a playground. There she sits, reading a book, shading her eyes from the afternoon sun. There I sit on a rock not more than twenty yards behind her, pretending to stare into space.
And it’s not that I’m too self-disciplined to move in precipitously, it’s that I have no idea what I’m going to do next.
26
Cat
An express to El Molino was the first bus out of San Diego. The ticket lady said, “Whole different state up there.”
I nodded like a girl that no one would remember.
But even if she did remember, since LA—with my (sallow) skin, my (stringy) hair, my (unnecessary) glasses, my (penciled-on) eyebrows, my (rapidly increasing) weight, my (lumpy) padding, my (non) style of clothes—nothing about me is the same.
This time, if Piper Carmichael sat down next to me, she wouldn’t even think I looked familiar.
I probably shouldn’t be outside reading anyway. But the point of looking this different is that I’m supposed to be able to walk around in public without being terrified.
I look up to see the little girl fall because she’s screaming.
Not in terror, in joy, as she leaps from the swing and soars over the playground’s sand floor. Until she lands on a bike and a red wagon. The sound of the child hitting the metal, the bicycle crashing against the wagon, isn’t that loud. But it’s deafening.
I’m up before I even think, running toward her.
When I was supposed to be as noticeable as a bush, or a slat in the bench, or one more nanny.
The little girl is silent, not making another sound.
A guy runs past me from out of nowhere, outruns me, crouches over her.
You can hear him swearing.
I yell, “Don’t move her!”
I’ve seen enough cheerleading pyramid falls to know this. But there’s blood. Her pants are torn above the knee. There’s a red stain seeping across the yellow cotton like spilled Hawaiian Punch.
The guy takes off his button-down and uses a sleeve for a tourniquet around her thigh, pressing down on the leg.
In tones of iced rage, he says, “Where’s the mom?”