~ 1 ~
I am with the girl in the room. She has not said anything since they brought her in.
“You’ve been away a long time,” I say.
“Yes,” she says, and it startles me. She had not replied to anything I’ve said before and I’d expected it to elicit the same silence.
“Many years,” she says.
At first, I think she says, “Men are ears.” It takes me a second to mentally shift it to something more context-appropriate.
She has in fact been missing for nearly three weeks, but I do not want to correct her and risk her going quiet again.
“Many difficult years,” she says more clearly this time, “though I made such good friends from them too.”
Then she looks up at me and smiles as if I were one of those friends.
~ 2 ~
I will not tell you very much about myself. I don’t want whoever you imagine me to be to cloud your judgment. I want to present to you what I know, or at least what I am able to share at this time.
I want you to decide what happens to her, Margerie Sloan, age 13, who walks into the woods asking, “Are you laughing about me?” and is not seen again for 20 days.
I want you to know how cold it is in the room with her just then, as if she’s brought the air she’s slept in back from wherever she’s been.
Brought it back to our world.
~ 3 ~
I look over at my partner sleeping next to me. Romantic partner. I’m keeping it vague on purpose, because I don’t want you to think you know anything because of who I say I am. I just wanted to distinguish them from my work partner. They wouldn’t be sleeping next to me. I guess they could have at one point but they never did.
I think about who we let into our beds. You spend so many nights alone, and then you allow someone in, and then you allow them to stay there. People do it all the time. Every night, there’s someone next to them, suddenly.
We let them sleep next to us. We trust them. We trust that they’re made of the same stuff we are. But how do we know?
I press my fingers into my partner’s back, then thigh. Deep sleeper. They shift slightly.
How do I know there isn’t sand in there? No, not sand. I’m thinking of squand. A moldable, neon-colored sand-like material that was marketed as a toy in the ‘90s.
How do I know my partner is not made of squand? Should I cut them open and make sure, if I’m going to allow them to sleep in my bed, where and when I’m at my most vulnerable?
I am thinking of how people disappear. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don’t. Where do they all go? Is it the same place the girl went?
I’ll never know. Not unless I make myself disappear. But even then, I’d have to see every missing person there ever was to know it was just one big place they all go to. I doubt it, I think to myself, still staring at my partner. Their leg. Thinking I could bend it any way I wanted to, and it would only make a soft foam crunch.
~ 4 ~
The next morning, my partner says, “You didn’t sleep.”
“No,” I say.
They make coffee and set it on the table, then leave the room. They make very good coffee, in my opinion. It’s as good as the nice cafe by us. Better, even. It’s nice that they always make it for me, even when I don’t drink it half the time.
They close and lock the door. They work from home. Their work is talking as well, but the people they talk to are often in a better mood than the ones I talk to. I overhear them talking about trips sometimes, vacations we’ll never take. One has her own helicopter. I think she’s CEO.
I rode in a helicopter once. We were looking for a man who fed some people to his huge dogs. We called him Baskerville and Cujo and other names like that. Sandlot, once. Anything with a big dog in it, even though he wasn’t a big dog but just owned a bunch of them. Beethoven was another.
We used the helicopter to spotlight him as he ran across a field. He had a second house set deep in the woods. Had we made it there without us following him, he might’ve been able to hide out for a long time.
He stopped running when the spotlight was on him for a while. He said later he didn’t like the idea of being watched while he ran. He said he always thought he ran in a funny way. He said he imagined us laughing at him for running all weird.
I told him I didn’t think he ran weird at all. I don’t know why I even bothered to say it, but it just came out reflexively.
He started crying and said, “Thank you, thank you,” as they cuffed him and took him away.
He was executed three years later. I can’t say what happened to the dogs, but whatever happened, it probably didn’t take three years to get it done.
~ 5 ~
I’m walking home from the station. It’s close enough to walk, though it’s a long walk. I don’t feel unsafe, even though I know the dangers too well, where they hide and where they tend to come out.
I pass by an empty lot between some buildings that are mixed residential and commercial. Deli on the bottom of one, sushi on another. I pass by this lot all the time and it is a deep one. At night, it is almost completely dark toward the back fence in it.
I see two little dots of light. Eyes. They’re about my height. A raccoon, I think, climbing the fence back there.
Then it steps forward. No, it must be a man. A man with glasses. And I feel myself tense, and instinctively I reach toward my weapon.
Then the lights drop to the ground. Raccoon after all, maybe?
It begins to advance toward me. I see it can’t be a raccoon, because it’s too big. It sort of looks like a man, but the eyes are too far from the rest of the body.
A long neck. Longer than it should be.
I don’t like it, because I don’t understand what it is. I walk quickly away. No one else is around, because of the late hour. No one else sees it.
When I get a good distance from the front fence of the lot, I see the two lights, the eyes, staring at me.
I stare back. I feel in that moment that it’s important to let it know I’m not so afraid of it that I will just keep running away. If it comes down to it, I will fight to protect myself. Whatever it is. Whatever it wants from me.
It turns and crawls back into the deeper part of the lot. I turn and continue home.
I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It has nothing to do with the case. But maybe not nothing.
Maybe I’m telling you this because it illustrates what was going on at that time. How the world was. The types of things that were happening to everyone on a daily basis. Things which you couldn’t sort out, but which demanded all of your attention.
And what can you do about things like that?
Do you think I should’ve run back to the lot and discharged my weapon at the thing? Just because it stared at me in a way I found threatening? Because I felt afraid with its eyes on me?
You can’t pluck out all the eyes in the world just because you don’t like the way you feel when they’re on you.
I’ve thought about doing it plenty of times, but I’ve decided that no, you can’t do that. Not really.
It would take too long.
~ 6 ~
You’d like me to say I formed a bond with the girl, but I didn’t. She barely said anything to anyone after she returned. Not to us, not to her parents or teachers or friends. She was very shy and quiet after that, which is common for children who have been through something awful.
No one bothered her about it, besides the press, but that was only for a while. People running their own websites bothered her the worst, but we did our best to keep them away, and eventually they moved on to other stories.
Sometimes I’d walk by the school and look at her in the yard during recess or gym or whatever it was. I could tell her mind was wandering. I could tell she was thinking, “How can I pretend to enjoy this after where I’ve been?”
Not because it was so awful and had created a wound too deep to allow for joy to reenter her life, but because she actually preferred where she’d been.
This is how it appeared in my mind when I saw her. I can’t say why I think that, because the thought is just there. I saw her face and then I think that.
Isn’t that how most important thoughts work?
~ 7 ~
When she disappears again, there isn’t the panic that you’d think there’d be, and the media does not return to cover it for a days. Maybe they felt they got everything they could from her, and us, and our town the first time.
I am put on the case, even though I was not on the first until the very end of it. The person who was on it the first time doesn’t want a second shot either. They’ve also moved on to other things.
I enjoy tracing her movements. When I walk where I knew she’d walked, I feel young again myself. In fact, I feel like I’m reliving my own memories, from childhood I guess.
I even start to dress how I did when I was younger too. Just a little bit, not enough for my partners, either of them, to think something is going on.
I grew up in a town nearby. Some of the places are places I’d been before, I’m pretty sure.
It can be difficult to tell what’s a memory and what just feels like one. And things can feel like ones for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they are a memory of a dream of a real memory. Something is there, with glasses and a long neck, for example. But maybe it is a man with glasses. A man with a long neck, crawling at you from out of the dark. Or maybe it is just the dark with nothing in it but itself.
~ 8 ~
She is last seen where she was last seen the first time. The town was supposed to have put up a fence around that path that cut wide through two small patches of wood. The school she goes to, a private one, is so far on the edge of town that there is enough space for trees, even a field, though the field is on campus property while the woods are public.
The girls she is last seen with are different this time. Some of the girls she’d spoken to the first time have since disappeared too, but only because their families have left town. These girls say the same things the other ones did. They were talking about the school day, of this and that, then they walked in opposite directions, despite living in the same neighborhood, generally speaking.
She liked to walk in different directions home than the others, even before she went missing the first time. I did too when I was that age, I’m pretty sure. Had I gone to that school, I would’ve loved that path between the copses.
I like that word “copse” and it just appeared in my head, just now, even though I’ve never said it before. I wonder why I like it. Copse. Maybe because I’m a “cop,” or maybe because it’s almost the word “corpse,” which is a word I’ve used many times.
They were supposed to have put up a fence before then but never did. I’m not sure why. Maybe because the project was meant to pacify the press, just something to feed them to make the mayor look good through the whole thing. Had it gone on longer, the search I mean, it might’ve had to go up if the press kept asking about it. But they mostly wanted to know about her parents, and teachers, and who might’ve taken her.
It’s funny to me that they assumed immediately that she’d been taken, as if a little girl’s never had the idea to leave a place on her own. At that age especially. 13. I sometimes forget she is 13. When I’m tracing her steps, I think of her as much younger than that, for some reason. But 13 is a normal age for kids to try to run off.
The point being that it never crossed their mind that she might’ve gone away on her own. Even to say she “ran off” puts too much urgency on it. She might’ve walked off. She might’ve known where she was going the whole time.
~ 9 ~
Then one night, I’m taking a walk because I can’t sleep, and while insomnia is a usual thing for me, I don’t always feel like watching TV or sitting around during those long quiet hours. I prefer to walk, in fact, unless the weather’s really unforgiving.
But the weather is inviting that night. Not just the weather, but the night itself seems to call to me to walk in it.
And that’s when I see her, standing at the edge of town, below a streetlight. She has the same far away look in her eyes that she often has. She had it prior to disappearing too, but especially did after.
I start to walk toward her, not wanting to frighten her away by running or looking worried.
I wave as I approach. I am pretty far from her when I wave, but not so far that she can’t see who I am. I hope that my familiar face will calm her. And she does recognize me, I can tell right away that she does.
Then I’m not sure what happens. I am suddenly in a different part of town, much further out than I’d been just a second before.
Not sleeping can do that to you. You can lose moments like that if it’s been a few days. Normally, I went a few days and then crash hard and catch up. But at that time, I haven’t crashed and have been up for nearly a week straight.
So I think, it’s ok, your mind just fell asleep for a while. It needed to sleep and you weren’t helping, so it did what it needed to do. You’re ok, everything’s ok.
I figure out where I am and start to walk in what I believe to be the direction of my home. But after a while. I can tell I have not actually moved that way. And I think, am I asleep still, or am I just too tired to know how to walk the right way?
I don’t have my phone on me. I must have dropped it in the time I’d lost, I think. I decide to find it the next morning and keep trying to walk home.
I keep seeing things that are indicators I am not going the right way, even though I’m sure I set out in the right direction. I know that town so well. I’ve travelled every inch of it in the dark. There’s no way I was placing my foot on the wrong path on purpose, I think. Something else is going on.
I hear noises coming from the trees. Is this a copse, I wonder. It’s not the one by the school, it’s a different copse. Is it a copse or a corpse or cops? No, that’s me, I’m one of those. Or all of those, eventually, I think. It doesn’t matter what I am, it matters where I am. Where is this copse?
It’s behind the empty lot, I think. But that can’t be right, because I’m not around any buildings, and there are no trees behind the lot I told you about earlier. But that’s what I think in that moment. It’s the copse behind the lot where that crawling thing lives. The long necked thing with glasses too far from its body.
And then I see those two lights in front of me, set deep in the copse. They begin to move toward me, and I can hear many rapid footsteps as they approach.
I reach for my weapon. Yes, I still have that at least. I ready it. The thing keeps coming at me and just then I wonder if it’s really what I think it is. Does the girl have glasses? Could this be the girl? No, it can’t be. She doesn’t have glasses, I don’t think. Not at all or just not most of the time? I can’t remember.
I get my weapon up and ready. I aim it at the advancing lights, which are now much closer to the ground. I should say something but I don’t. I don’t think I have time to say anything, even though I could call out something like, “Stop!” but I just aim at the two little lights instead.
The lights are closer now and I can make out something, some shape, some awful body, some thing that shouldn’t be there.
My finger wants me to let its weight drop against the trigger. I let it. And it feels good to give in. It feels so good to let go.
~ 10 ~
Now she is there in front of me. We are nearly at the woods. Good, I think, she is up and walking. It wasn’t her back there.
Back where? I wasn’t sure. More time lost. But you don’t lose what’s most important, I think. It just appears when you need it. Or it just appears when it wants to. But it’s never all the way gone. It all comes back, eventually.
“Wait,” I shout, but I am quiet, or she keeps walking too quickly to hear me, but I am too quiet either way.
I try to run to catch up to her, but my legs will only walk at the pace I am already going.
I get to the clearing which where the woods begin and everything else stops.
She is no longer walking. Beyond her, I see many faces, some small, some large, some too large.
She turns to me, very slowly, smiling as she did the day I met her, or think I met her.
“Our friends,” she says and gestures at the others.
“Old friends,” I say.