Little Girl Lost Read online

  “How about letting your mom know where you’ll be, and come right back? I’m sure someone is going to worry an awful lot about you.” I couldn’t help it. You can take the girl out of the city but you can’t take the city out of the girl. They’d have missing posters up in an hour back home.

  Her little lips pull into a line as her gaze narrows in on me, twin pools of ebony, and I hold my breath until I spot the whites of her eyes just beyond that. For a second there, I thought she wasn’t human. Driving thirteen hours straight and living off gas station carbohydrates will do that to a person, make them loopy and turn everyone into a cheap B-movie alien.

  “She knows exactly where I’m at.” Her lips twitch like maybe she doesn’t. “She’s the one who sent me to say hello. We live just down the street.”

  “That’s fantastic. My name is Allison. What’s your name?”

  Her lips cinch as if considering this. “My name is Otaktay, but everyone calls me Ota. Nice to meet you.” She bubbles with laughter as she skips over to the side yard and disappears.

  “Cute,” I say as James comes out choking a bottle of beer in his hand.

  “Who was that?”

  “Neighbor girl. It looks like Reagan has a brand-new friend.” I steal the cold drink from him and take a quick swig. “Strange name, though. Almost sounded like—pig Latin.”

  James gives my ribs a quick pinch. “If this were L.A., it would’ve been.”

  We share a laugh, and the sun breaks free from the clouds a moment before veiling itself in the murky thicket once again.

  If it were L.A., a lot of things would be different.

  My gaze snags to the grass in front of me, its whiskers dehydrated in the shape of two Mary Jane slippers, and a shiver runs through me at the sight.

  I’m betting a pot sat there too long with the previous owner, but something about the sight unnerves me.

  * * *

  Ota comes by almost every day after school, so after two weeks of being helplessly rude to her mother, I bake a batch of cookies in hopes to walk down and have a proper introduction.

  No sooner do I pull them out of the oven than a brisk knock erupts at the door.

  “It’s for me!” Reagan sings, her dark ponytail whipping behind her like a leash. Back home there were penciled in play dates, overscheduled activities—sports all year round. But here in Concordia, life unspools at a much slower pace. James and I haven’t even looked into extracurricular activities yet. I told James that Reagan is the new kid, and I want to make that transition as easy as possible, to which he replied everyone in first grade is the new kid. Point taken, not to mention the fact there’s not a six-year-old on the planet who needs a scheduling calendar to keep track of their social events. They need a breather, and perhaps a nice friend like Ota.

  “Well, hello, young lady.” I open the door to the bushy-haired delight. She’s donned her bright yellow sundress for the occasion. Each day it’s a game between Reagan and me to see what color dress Ota will show up in. Apparently, her mother doesn’t believe in jeans, but that’s part of the charm of Concordia in general. In L.A., if you had ovaries, you lived in black yoga pants right down to the six-year-olds, but here, Ota wears a dress every livelong day.

  “Yellow!” Reagan does a little bunny hop because she guessed right. “You look pretty in yellow. Come on. Let’s go. I’ll race you to the swings!”

  James insisted we uproot Reagan’s swing set and drag it across several state lines with us. At first I thought it was silly. Eventually, we could have bought her a new one, but James didn’t listen to me, and for once I’m glad about it.

  “Actually”—I step between them before they take off—“I baked some cookies for your family. I’d love to go over and give them to your mom.” I thump my finger over the top of Ota’s little nose, and a tingle travels up my arm with a static current. “Ouch.” I’m quick to laugh it off. “How about we take a walk down the street? I’m dying to meet her.”

  Ota’s lips pull into a flat line. Her jaw redefines itself as if what I’ve suggested angered her on a cellular level.

  A breath hitches in my throat. I don’t think I’ve technically ever pissed a child off. “Is everything okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Her voice erupts an octave too deep, and the hair on the back of my neck prickles. She clears her throat. “My mother can’t have company right now. She has a cold, but I’ll gladly take the cookies.” Her eyes plead with me to understand as she bats those heavy lashes my way. Ota holds a strange beauty, dark and mysterious with the eyes of a very old soul.

  “That’s fine.” My own lids flutter because I had told myself I wouldn’t take no for an answer. “You’re more than welcome to take them.”

  Reagan picks up her hand and I listen as the girls squeal their way through the house and into the park-like yard.

  Why do I get the feeling there’s something she doesn’t want us to know about her mother? If this were L.A., it would have been an easy leap to surmise that she was a user, in rehab maybe, or an absentee, but Ota is impeccably clean, those pinafores—a fifties throwback if ever there was one, are always pressed to perfection. Somebody cares deeply about this child, so I let it go. But there’s a nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach that says I shouldn’t.

  * * *

  On a dreary Monday, I’m off running errands. James offered to pick Reagan up and start dinner. I was going to put off my rag-tag list of nonsensical things to do, but James suggested I take some me time—that I work so hard as a mother and wife. So I stole a few hours and took myself to lunch then coffee. It felt indulgent and unnecessary in this time of financial restraint.

  James has had three job interviews, and as luck would have it, there’s not a county in the area who happens to be in the market for a civil engineer. Charles says he has a lock on a job in the development department down at the city, but when James went to check on it, nobody knew anything about it. Apparently, Concordia hasn’t had a civil engineer for the better part of a decade. Before James’ mother died a tragic death, she was starting to show signs of dementia, and now I’m fearing for poor Charles. Loretta Price, my former mother-in-law, was a saint, and it crushes my soul to think of the torment she must have gone through on that fateful afternoon. Charles was the lone witness. I could imagine it though and I have over and over, replaying it like a haunting chorus. When it initially happened, I tried desperately to get through my day as if that horror wasn’t intimately attached to us. But I saw it as if I was there, felt it as if I took the impact—her eyes widening as the train raced toward the car, then the powerful blow, the smashing of glass and steel crushing her ribcage all at once. Horrific. Hellish.

  By the time I get home, it’s well after five. The autumn days seem shorter here in Concordia than they ever were back home. In the distance, the sun has dipped behind the chocolate mountains leaving a line in remembrance of its fame. In L.A., we watched as the sun was swallowed down by the sea in a blaze of tangerine glory, but here that purple outline over the mountains assures us it’s over before it ever began. I feel for people who haven’t witnessed a resplendent ocean-drenched sunset. People visit California for the beaches and the amusement parks, but it’s the sun that’s the real showstopper, the real star of the entire smog-riddled state.

  I pull into the driveway, charged to find the house lit up like a jack-o-lantern, and I head inside, only to have the thick scent of roasted chicken light up my senses. James is a Johnny-one-note in the kitchen, but he can play the hell out of that one note.

  “Smells scrumptious!” I wrap my arms around him spontaneously for the first time in months. His hair is neatly slicked back, his face clean-shaven, naked, and suddenly it feels as if we’re on a date somewhere altogether foreign to us.

  He pulls back with heavy lids, a smile on his face that lies somewhere between one too many glasses of wine and lust as if to ask the question.

  This is the longest dry spell we’ve ever cast on our marriage—the Haile
y Oden sponsored coital cessation. Of course, the resistance has come solely from me.

  I give a little nod as if to say yes to the unspoken fornicating question swirling between us. Tonight will be the night we come together again as husband and wife. It’s the first day I can remember that doesn’t feel like Hailey is hovering between us like a sexed-up ghost. In truth, she ruined our bond long before that day Faulk showed up on my doorstep in the shape of a human puddle. She was the other woman long before she made the title official. I suppose it works that way more often than not.

  “Reagan?” I shout over his shoulder with a laugh caught in my throat. This joy and that which is to come—namely me—is what has me so giddy. “It’s time for dinner!” I give a sly wink to my husband. Tonight, long before we start in on that intimate dance, I plan on flirting shamelessly, making him want it, making him want me.

  “She’s not here.” His head cocks to the side, vacuuming my gaze into his as he drips a line down my cheek with his finger.

  “Then where is she?” A hint of panic flickers through my belly as my mind spins through a rolodex of possibilities. I shake my head as if coming to. That rolodex is useless in Concordia. There’s only one option. “Is she still at school?” I suck in a quick breath. “My God, did you forget to pick her up?”

  “No.” He blinks back with a laugh. “She’s at Ota’s house. I said I’d pick her up as soon as you got home.”

  “Ota’s house?” My brows rise with amusement, and then just as quickly fright. “Did you meet her mother?”

  James locks his curious eyes over mine, and a moment of palpable silence bounces between us. “No, Ota asked if they could go over. I said yes.”

  “Just like that?” I stagger to the door and let myself out into the icy air, already thick with dew.

  “Hey, where are you off to? Relax.” James catches up to me while poking his arms through his jacket. “Reagan is fine. I promise.”

  “How do you know she’s fine? She’s being rude, is what she’s being. We haven’t even met the child’s mother.” My heart ratchets into my throat as I quicken my pace. “Which house is it?” I look to each lit up home like a suspect in some sinister crime. “You’ve never been as careful with Reagan as I have. You’re too blasé, too caught up in that utopian society in your mind you think we all live in.” As quick as my mind reels, my mouth unleashes with chaos.

  “Allison, would you stop?” He spins me into him as his eyes pierce through mine. “Look, you’re working yourself up over nothing.” He grips my shoulders and rubs my arms until they’re warm. “This is Concordia.” His voice softens as if begging me to do the same. “Idaho. She’s just at a friend’s house.”

  “You’re right.” I blink back to life, startled by my own urgency to panic. “Sorry about that.” My lips pull down on their own, and I fight it. Of course, James knows what a shit world we live in. Three of his siblings died before he was twenty. All different causes and through nobody’s fault, with the exception of his older brother Aston, whom James blew a hole through while they cleaned their rifles. It was ruled an accidental discharge. It could happen to anybody, and often did. James always makes a point to show me similar reports in the news as if to say there goes another one. But I could tell he held onto that grief, onto the guilt, and wasn’t planning on ever letting it go.

  “Which house do you think it is?” My breath pulls in a plume of fog as I size up the options. “I’ve seen Ota walk toward the woods.” I glance to the forest that lines the empty lot at the end of the street, odd and out of place like a toothless smile. My stomach sinks at the sight.

  James squeezes my hand as if girding himself. “She said it was the house at the end of the street.” His voice comes out in a papery fog as he stares at the vacant forest where a house should seemingly sit. “Let’s try them all.”

  James and I head door to door, starting with our neighbor to the right, an elderly gentleman and his wife. They laugh at the idea of having a little girl running around underfoot and suggest we try the house on the corner. Molly has at least a dozen grandchildren now, and Ota is most likely one of them.

  “It could be,” I pant as James and I head over. “She never said more than a word about her family. She’s been standoffish since the beginning.”

  “Ota’s a good kid.” He gives my hand another squeeze as we leave no stone unturned, heading house to house until we hit Molly’s oversized boxy home, a cookie-cutter replica of our own.

  An elderly woman with a warm smile and short blonde hair answers the door wiping her hands on her apron. The scent of something sweet comes from the oven, and suddenly all of the worry melts right off me. Living in Los Angeles has been nothing more than a toxin, and now that I’ve let my paranoia get the best of me, I can clearly see that.

  “We’re here for Reagan,” I say breathless, struggling with a smile. “I’m Allison, and this my husband, James. You must be Ota’s grandmother.”

  The older blonde tilts her head, wrinkles her forehead into a series of lines, and that ball of acid explodes deep into the pit of my stomach once again.

  After a lengthy ten-minute exposé on who we are, who we’re looking for, Molly steps out onto the porch. “You might try the Sanders across the street. They had a whole mob of little shits running around—but that was years ago”—she shakes her head at the darkness across the way—“most of them are off at college now.”

  “Lovely,” I mutter as a steady rise of panic floods me. “Reagan?” I shout as I cross the street, but James has me beat. We hit the Sanders’ home, the Stuarts’, the Malkovichs’, and an older Chinese resident who simply goes by Yolo. “Shit.” I stagger toward the street. “Nobody has seen them.”

  “Where did she say she lived?”

  “Down the street!” I roar through tears. “She pointed to the woods.” We look to the end of the quiet road, to the dark twisted limbs of the pines that sway in the wind as if mocking us.

  “Maybe she meant down another street.” James jumps back as if assessing the neighborhood. James and I get into the car and drive a two-block radius, painfully drudging door to door like beggars. Then a six-block radius, then ten, before we speed like hell back to our own backyard, screaming Reagan’s name at the top of our lungs, our voices threadbare, our sanity spent.

  I turn to James, the heat of all of my hatred pinned on him at the moment. “Where is our child!”

  His features pull down, the look of defeat written across his face. “I don’t know.”

  My mind can’t stop racing. I can’t catch a single errant thought.

  “God, she’s in the woods,” I say bolting past him into the expansive night, down into the icy street with its veil of fog and darkness.

  “Ally!” James cries after me, but before long we’re jogging side by side screaming our lungs off, feeling the razor-sharp burn as we shout for Reagan, time and time again.

  Neighbors evict themselves from their homes, stopping cold on their porches, observing as we run around like loons, our panic like a torch lighting up the night.

  We hit the woods at the edge of the street and my body flares with chills. I give one last primal shout into the nothingness that has swallowed my daughter whole. “Reagan!”

  But she’s not there.

  She’s gone.

  2

  James

  Concordia has always been more of a mythological place I escaped from than some small rural town tucked in the back of an Idaho hillside. Death seemed to be liquid here, constantly in motion, the inertia of which you could never escape. It held the stench of death, of dying, of far worse things than death could ever bring—those were the things I told Allison just once in the beginning of our relationship like some deep, dark confession. There are some things that shouldn’t be repeated or even said to begin with.

  My gut wrenches tight as the urge to howl at the sky takes over. Reagan is out there somewhere, like a grain of sand I unwittingly tossed out over the horizon, so easy to lose,
impossible to find.

  I pace the creaky floors, cursing under my breath at what a fucking idiot I’ve proven myself to be.

  My father shows up before the cops ever get here.

  “Where’s Allison?” He storms in to find her tucked in a ball on the sofa, weeping into her hands, and recoils at the sight. My father and I share the same height, same straight nose and cheekbones that my mother said drove the women to the brink of insanity, but that’s where the similarities end. His thick hair is gray, his face weathered with time, eyes watery and red as a stoplight. He wears fatigue like a mask these days. My father is a ballbuster, a super-achiever who suffered more loss than anyone should ever have to face, and yet here I am with a fresh loss of my own. But Reagan is coming back to me. I can feel it.

  In truth, this all feels like a waking nightmare, like I’m walking numbly under water and any moment I’ll be startled awake by the shrill of the alarm. If I could guess, I would say the nightmare began the day the Odens moved in next door all those months ago.

  “Look, she’s pretty upset.” My voice is tight. It’s been hours since I’ve last seen my child in the flesh and it’s all I can do to keep from dropping to my knees and wailing. “I wouldn’t say anything that might set her off.” I glare at the old man a moment. Allison may not realize it, but it was my father who planted the idea in my head that we should move back to Concordia. He promised a peaceful life, a quiet existence like something out of a storybook, and I bought the Cinderella story—hook, line, and shattered glass slipper. But at the end of the day, it was simply my company he was craving. He suggested a change of lifestyle as if that was the panacea that could easily save my marriage, and that was exactly what I was hoping to do. I never told him directly about Hailey, about what really happened between the two of us, the dark turn it quickly took. But he guessed there was someone else right out the gate, and I suppose that’s all he needed to know. He shed his favorite phrase like oil, the wages of sin is death, and God knows I came close to killing my marriage. His son was a cheating fool who had lost his marriage just moments before he quite literally lost his child. But I feel like far more than a fool. I’m an asshole who should never be near Reagan again for the sake of her safety.