“DON’T YOU FEEL LIKE WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING?” I say to Judah a few days later. “Like really just jump up and do something.” He is sprinkling green leaves onto a sheet of thin, white paper. I watch, transfixed, at the nimbleness of his fingers as he licks, then rolls.
“Like what?” he asks. “Start our own investigation?”
“Maybe,” I snap. He finishes one joint and sets about rolling another.
“Let me try,” I say, pushing his hands aside. He leans away from the table, an amused expression on his face. My knees press against the wheels of his chair. My fat, bulging knees. I hope he doesn’t look down and notice. The wind picks up, and I can smell the tang of his skin—sweat and cologne.
“It’s not as easy as it looks,” I say. I don’t like the way Judah’s smell makes my body react.
“No, it isn’t.”
He’s watching me closely. It makes me self-conscious. My hair is shaggy, and my skin is stained red from the sun exposure. My fingers fumble, and I spill flecks of green across the table.
“Easy there, Slim.” Judah picks up a few pieces and drops them back onto the paper. I glance at him briefly to see if he’s angry, but he’s not even looking at me anymore. He’s watching the trees across the street.
This morning, I got up early and met with one of the search groups scouring the woods on the east side of the Boubaton River. They gave us doughnuts and coffee and neon yellow vests to wear over our clothes as a safety precaution. Some of the police officers brought their dogs—great big German Shepherds wearing vests that said POLICE in bright yellow lettering down the side. We walked a straight line through the woods, looking for anything that might be out of place—a piece of ripped clothing, blood, hair. I grew more breathless with each step I took. Wondering if I would be the one to find Nevaeh.
Children went missing every day, with one percent of those cases making it into national news. People hurting kids. When it’s a kid you know, one who rides the bus with you, and walks down the same shitty streets you’ve been walking down your whole life, it feels black. Evil was allowed to pick us off one by one, starting with the weakest.
“My joint sucks,” I say, holding the fail between my fingertips. It’s baggy. Some of the grass falls out one end and blows off the table when the breeze kicks up. He plucks it from my fingers and begins again.
“You are helping,” he says. “You’re searching the goddamn woods. What more could you do right now?”
“Find her,” I say. “She’s somewhere, right?”
It’s the look on his face that sets me off. He tries to cover it with what I want to see: hope or something equally as pathetic. That’s what I am, I guess—a pathetically hopeful human who wants to believe that a little girl is still alive. And even if she were, what condition would she be in after all this time? I shake my head, and my voice quivers a little when I say, “You don’t have to look at me like that. Like I’m stupid or something.”
“That’s the last thing I think you are, Margo. The last. She’s been missing for two months…” Has it really been two months? I think back to the last time I saw her. It was June; the sun had started to consistently shine. School had just let out, and all the children in the Bone had a wild excitement on their faces. Nevaeh had told me that her granny had given her two dollars for every ‘A’ she’d earned on her report card.
Ten dollars! She’d boasted proudly. I’m going to save it and buy something really good.
She never got to spend her money, I’m fairly certain of that. It was probably still in that little Hello Kitty wallet in her book bag, stuffed behind packets of Gushers and the purple teddy bear she kept hidden at the bottom. She’d called it Bambi.
I can’t just leave her at home, she’d said, her little voice ringing sweet and vulnerable. She goes where I go.
I walk off, suddenly sore with grief, and leave Judah to smoke his blunt. Let him use his grass to curve the sharp edges. I would rather take them—feel the pain—because that was more real. What a hypocrite I am; I spend my whole life reading books that allude to happiness, when I refuse to experience it.
Sadness is an emotion you can trust. It is stronger than all of the other emotions. It makes happiness look fickle and untrustworthy. It pervades, lasts longer, and replaces the good feelings with such an eloquent ease you don’t even feel the shift until you are suddenly wrapped in its chains. How hard we strive for happiness, and once we finally have the elusive feeling in our grasp, we hold it briefly, like water as it trickles through our fingers. I don’t want to hold water. I want to hold something heavy and solid. Something I can understand. I understand sadness, and so I trust it. We are meant to feel sadness, if only to protect us from the brief spiels of happiness. Darkness is all I’ll ever know; maybe the key is to make poetry out of it.
I find myself in the woods, touching the knotty bark of the trees and rubbing a leaf between my fingers. I think about Lyndee Anthony, Nevaeh’s mother. I’ve seen her a few times standing on her porch, looking out at the street, her eyes darting to and fro, mimicking the movement of her brain. She is a thin woman, her dark hair cropped close to her scalp. She’d look almost childlike, except her features are sensual and full. Sometimes, when I used to see them together in town, I’d think that Nevaeh looked more like the adult than her mother. Nevaeh, with her all-seeing, soulful eyes. The steady movements of her body. Lyndee’s eyes were hollow and bored. They reminded me of puppy eyes.
Ever since Nevaeh went missing, Lyndee’s face has been on the front page of the Harbor Bone, drawn and sad. I started collecting the articles, the varying shades of Lyndee’s sadness spread out on the covers with headlines such as: ‘Mother pleads for information about her missing daughter;’ ‘Mother gives police new leads about missing girl.’ Nevaeh’s father never showed during the first weeks of the search. It was rumored that when Lyndee called to tell him what had happened to their daughter, he asked for a paternity test. When the local news stations picked up the story, he changed his tune and began doing a series of teary-eyed interviews, claiming that Lyndee never let him see his daughter, and that would change as soon as they found her. I never for a second bought into his damp-eyed pandering for attention. And when the case died down a few months later, so did his act.
I walk out of the woods and approach the eating house from behind. The weeds tickle my calves as I trudge through the overgrowth of the yard. The line my mother once hung our wet clothes on has snapped free of its pole. I pick up the loose end and examine it. I look up to see my mother’s drapes parted, her face staring down at me. We catch eyes for a moment before I look away first. When I look down at my hand I realize I’ve rubbed a hole in my leaf.