There was nothing.
Pao yanked on a piece of river grass in frustration, wincing when its razor-sharp edge sliced her hand. It stung, and suddenly Pao wanted to lie down on the sandy bank and cry herself to sleep like a child.
Blood trickled out of the cut, dotting her palm like a string of beads. Her bright red blood and dark brown skin blurred together as her eyes filled with tears. But when she blinked and refocused, she spotted something red by her feet, too.
Pao felt her heart kick into high gear.
It isn’t blood, she thought, almost deliriously. Any drops would have soaked right into the ground. Pao bent down to investigate, and it was like the dream’s current had caught her again….
Because there, in the sand, lay Emma’s ruby ring.
The police got very tight-lipped after Pao turned over the ring. She tried her million-questions routine, but it was clear she and Dante had reached the limit of their usefulness as far as the grown-ups were concerned. They didn’t tell her a thing.
What does this mean? she asked herself. Had there been something to her dream after all? Pao’s subconscious making a connection she couldn’t prove with facts?
It happens, she told herself. It’s neuroscience, not magic.
But dream science was still frustratingly nebulous, as Pao had learned in her years of reading about nightmares. There was nothing she could say about her dream that wouldn’t make her sound totally batty.
So she didn’t mention it to anyone. Even though it continued to nag at her.
The police left to go back to the station, where they said they would get their resources together to begin an organized search. They told her reassuring things they couldn’t back up. Pao knew the truth: The police didn’t know any more than she did.
Pao’s mom was due at the bar by noon, to work a double shift. “Would you rather I stay home today?” she asked Pao. “I could call in sick.” But Pao saw the lines around her mother’s eyes grow more pronounced as she offered—probably at the thought of losing out on tips.
“I’ll be fine, Mom.”
“Pao can hang with me and my abuela until you’re back,” Dante chimed in as the polite tiptoeing between mother and daughter threatened to become awkward.
“Aren’t you supposed to play soccer at the park?” Pao asked him, trying to keep the bitterness out of her tone.
Dante gave her a look that said Don’t be ridiculous, and even in the midst of the world’s worst circumstances, Pao felt a tiny ray of light break through the clouds.
“Oh, thank you,” Pao’s mom said, also reading Dante’s expression. She hugged him impulsively. “And thank your grandma for me, too.”
As glad as Pao was not to be alone, once they were back in Dante’s room, she could barely breathe. The PlayStation stayed off, and the ceiling fan uselessly stirred the sultry afternoon air. The last thing Pao wanted to do was sit there doing nothing.
Ignoring the pile of as-yet-to-be-folded laundry on the floor and the milk crates of comics stacked everywhere, she paced the room as Dante threw a mini basketball against the wall again and again. The pounding was driving her crazy, but she didn’t have the heart to tell him to stop—not after he’d given up his soccer game to stay with her.
Everything changed when I found the ring, she thought. Pao’s discovery of hard evidence that Emma had been at the riverbank—a precious belonging she never would have left behind voluntarily—made her friend’s disappearance real.
And serious. Pao was well acquainted with the looks adults gave kids when they didn’t think they could handle something, and today, after the ring, she’d seen it on three faces at once.
“I had a dream,” Pao finally blurted out. Dante stopped throwing the ball and looked at her. She’d never told him about her nightmares before. But this felt too important to keep to herself, and who could she trust besides Dante?
“Okayyy…”
“Before Emma disappeared, I dreamed about a hand coming out of the river, and it had her ring on it,” Pao said, the words bumping into one another as she spat them out too fast. “And then, last night, I dreamed that the guy we saw by the river was the same one from the news. You know…the Mesa kidnapper.”
Dante’s eyes were wide by the time she finished. He didn’t say anything at first.
“It’s probably a coincidence, right?” Pao asked. “I mean, dreams are just electrical impulses that take things from our memories. It’s nonsense. I shouldn’t have—”
“You gotta admit it’s kind of weird, though,” Dante cut in, looking even more worried now.
“Yeah,” said Pao, biting her fingernails. “I guess.”
Silence fell between them. Pao so intensely regretted bringing up her dreams, it was like a physical sensation. She might as well have quoted her mom: Dreams are visions that have a purpose in our greater journey. It was so unscientific. Dante probably thought she was an idiot.
When he mentioned lunch, Pao wasn’t hungry at all, but she dragged her feet across the root-beer-brown carpet anyway just for something to do, dreading the pitying looks of another grown-up who wouldn’t tell them anything important. Not to mention having to sit across from Dante while he regretted skipping soccer with his cool friends to hang out with the town weirdo.
But Dante’s abuela wasn’t in the kitchen. True to form, Señora Mata had left the TV blaring and food out on the “dining room” table. But when Dante called, “Abuela?” there was no answer from her bedroom.
He shrugged, but Pao could tell he was nervous. Everything felt off today. His abuela rarely left the apartment—only to go shopping at the grocery down the block and to play ¡Bingo en español! every Saturday at the community center.
They were picking at their reheated chicken enchiladas, when the local news jingle played from the television. Pao’s heart raced. Would they report on Emma’s disappearance? Pao snapped to attention, appreciating Dante’s silence as the anchor began to speak.
“Silver Springs is reeling today over the disappearance of a twelve-year-old girl,” came the first sentence, and the blood pounding in Pao’s ears made the voice sound far away. Pao felt rather than saw Dante move his chair next to hers. His presence was comforting, despite her embarrassment over confessing her dreams.
“Emma Lockwood was last seen by her parents, Connor and Karen Lockwood, yesterday evening, when she left home to meet two school friends near the notoriously dangerous Gila River, the site of a drowning just last year.”
The scene cut to a shot of the Gila, which looked more ominous than ever, dark and agitated in the late-afternoon light, while the anchor told of the many drownings that had taken place in town since its founding a hundred years ago.
Pao took another bite of her enchilada, but it felt like she was chewing cardboard.
“Police spent the morning investigating the possible site of Ms. Lockwood’s disappearance, and a personal item of jewelry was discovered there….”
“Yeah! By me!” Pao yelled at the TV, standing up too quickly, her knee colliding with the table. Dante grabbed her hand to pull her back down, and when she sat, he kept holding it. If her heart had been racing before, it now felt like it was trying to escape her rib cage.