Her route for all her eighteen years in Sycamore had been a combined walking and driving one, in the older Riverbend subdivision behind the high school. She had enough seniority to switch to one of the few all-curbline routes, like those in her own neighborhood in Roadrunner Heights or over at Juniper Meadows near the highway to Sedona. Luz, in fact, had jumped at the driving route in Roadrunner Heights, but Maud liked to walk, even in the heat, even with torrential bursts of monsoon rains, even with a forty-pound satchel hanging off her shoulder—even now, at fifty-seven, when she had to wear a brace on her creaky left knee, when her shoulders and hips ached and she knocked back ibuprofen with her morning coffee and again in the evening before bed. She pictured her father’s stooped shoulders, his swollen knees. He hadn’t loved it like she did. He had taken early retirement and spent his afternoons puttering around with house repairs (and driving her mother up the wall) until he got a part-time job at the neighborhood hardware store. She remembered her father saying he knew his mail route better than his own neighborhood, and this was true for her, too. No matter what else happened in her life, each day she could at least walk her streets.
Each day advanced the same: starting in the truck over at Overton Orchards. That morning, Iris was out on the tractor and Paul, home for a visit, was carrying a ladder across the field. Maud stopped and watched him a moment, noting the pronounced hunch of his shoulders, the shine of his now-bald head. She whistled, sharp and quick, and Iris turned with a wave. Then Maud drove the truck over to Riverbend and parked. Her satchel grew lighter at the end of each relay, the steps counter at her waist clicking from the hundreds to the thousands, and she marked her progress by yard features: the oak stump with kids’ carved initials on the corner of Dry Run; the tilting streetlamp on Bottlebrush; the hairpin cul-de-sac on Alameda. She knew the dogs, the pitch and lengths of their barks and growls. She knew which box hinges squeaked, which swayed on loose posts, which were dented and scratched and rusted. She knew what it was to pull down the little metal door, anticipating what lay inside, so she took care stuffing the boxes. Some part of her felt as if she were watching over it all, keeping everyone safe. And in some ways, she was: she had called ambulances, police, and family members. They watched out for her, too, old women and men waiting at the door with smiles, with envelopes of cash and boxes of fudge at Christmas. The path of her day was clear-cut, waiting for her every morning like a faithful pet, and she did not veer. Some would find this mind-numbingly monotonous, but not Maud. She needed the sureness of pavement, of brick steps, of concrete driveways under her rubber-soled shoes. She needed to feel the strike of her feet on surfaces that would not disappear beneath her.
After the mornings when she found letters, Maud tended to be distracted and jittery all day, walking at a faster pace, her satchel thumping her hip. Long-ago images and sounds snuck in when she was like this, tunneling under the wall of her defenses. All the tricks she’d learned in counseling with those other families of the missing, learning how to take care of herself, to stop the spiral of obsession—pushing air into her belly, a countdown from ten to one in an elevator that opened onto her safe place, tying the thought to a balloon and watching it disappear into the sky—none of it worked. There was Jess’s voice, or what had become an approximation of it, like words and phrases from her notebooks, or the outgoing message on their old answering machine. The words buzzed like swarms of cicadas at dusk. Maud pressed her finger to her good ear, closing it off, as if she could block the sound of memory.
In the early years, Maud heard and saw Jess everywhere. In her dreams at first: Jess turned up without explanation, the same age, suspended in time, waiting on the doorstep or inside the house. Oh, Mom, I know you love to worry. I’m right here. So Maud took a lot of sleep aids to stay in that world as long as she could. When she wasn’t at work, she was in bed, trying to get closer to the dreams. But then Maud began to see Jess in broad daylight. She’d see Dani Newell, or Angie Juarez, or other kids around town, all those young smooth faces, and behind them she’d see Jess ducking around pillars and street corners, ghost girl, her voice and long curls trailing.
And then there were the imaginings, the speculation about what had happened: body snatched, body bloated, body burned, body naked, body floating, body bleeding, body buried alive. Maud’s counselor taught her how to replace her terrible images with a more positive one: Mexico, their family vacation spot before the divorce, the last place they’d traveled together the summer before Jess disappeared. The last place Maud remembered Jess being happy. Maud had trained herself to see one image: Jess standing at the blue-gray Sea of Cortez at sunset. The water lapped over Jess’s ankles, and she smiled, bathed in the final light of day.
As she walked her route, Maud tried to get to that image. She managed to get in her mental elevator and count down; the door dinged and opened to her safe beach: Mexico. But there was young Jess on the beach in a stretched-out tee and floppy hat, drinking a bottle of 7UP, chewing Chiclets, saying, “Mama, mama, watch!” as she hurled herself at the spawning grunions at sunset. “Mama, look!” There was Jess riding on her father’s broad back, the three of them standing together in the low surf at sunset. There was Jess and Dani Newell, her first best friend, sipping their sodas, toes in the sand. There was Jess, infant—body tiny, body spongy, body rocked and nursed, squalling and red-faced and perfect—and teenage, rolling her eyes at Maud from the passenger seat. Jess, staring down the Thanksgiving table at Adam Newell. Jess, huddled on her bed, crying as if her heart had turned inside out. There was Maud’s counselor, a kind woman, asking, “What is it you see for yourself, Maud?” which Maud never could answer. Lately, when she had tried to think about this question, she had been conjuring the fireflies on her grandparents’ farm in Tennessee, the summer when she’d lost the hearing in her left ear and most of it in her right. When the counselor gently pushed, asking, “But what else? What about the future?” Maud couldn’t say. She could see backward but never forward. Only the endless now.
The days moved faster, too, when Maud found a letter. Before she knew it, it was lunchtime. She took her half hour in the shady parking lot of Juarez Autos. She waved to Angie Juarez working in the bays with Luz’s brother Beto, at Rose Prentiss and her daughter Hazel in the front office, but stayed in her truck to eat her PB&J, even though sweat soaked her shirt and shorts. She watched all of them—grown, healthy, their bodies heavier but still taut with youth. She tried to place Jess among them, to re-see her, transform her into an adult. But she couldn’t get the image to crystallize: Would her hair be prematurely white now, like Angie’s? Cut short into a bob like Dani Newell’s?
“I like your hair like that,” Maud had said to Dani last week, when she’d gone to have blood drawn for her annual checkup. Dani had worked at the medical center for a couple years now, though she’d been in town since she’d failed out of Stanford so quickly. For years, Maud would see her at whatever job she happened to have—the deli counter at Bashas’, stock clerk at the HealthCo—or she’d spot her out shopping or walking or driving. Dani kept her head down, eyes averted, even when Maud waved hello. Maud knew Dani was renting Esther’s guest house now. Everyone in town knew Dani’s story, too.
“Thanks,” Dani had said, not looking up from her hands as she tied the rubber tube around Maud’s upper arm. She flicked for a vein at Maud’s inner elbow, scrubbing at her skin with an alcohol swab. They sat so close, Maud could see a brown mark on the sleeve of Dani’s scrubs, a mottled red flush on her cheek, a vein thrusting at her throat. Her hands, though, remained steady.