And yes, the butterflies. They cascaded around her now, tickled her tired feet, lifted her shoes all the way back to the bus stop. They rode next to her through the bus window. As she got off downtown, one grabbed hold of a strand of her hair. Celia laughed. She could remember being a little girl in a sun-splashed meadow with her mother. She could feel her wings open.
What are you doing, Celia?
Flying, she told the imaginary person in her mind.
Arms out now, running through the downtown streets, seeing the shocked faces of the day people as she passed. Celia the butterfly, brilliant green, blue, red like a star. Celia the truth.
Rich looked up to see his friend running down the middle of skid row, her arms stretched out, a glorious look on her face. It was funny—he could almost see the shine of her wings. People stood back, watching her fly.
Celia. Just Celia.
Chapter 14
The city morgue had, at one time, been set near a community center, and across from a bookstore selling used library books. Naomi had visited the facility on other missing child cases that brought her to the city. She had found it a friendly place, with attendants bustling in their greasy plastic aprons, a pot of coffee stewed to sharp bitterness on the counter, and a plate of cookies no one wanted to eat. The old place had been associated with all sorts of scandals, including an attendant caught taking dried blood home to fertilize his roses.
The new building had been built out in the suburbs, possibly to clean that stain. It sprawled, all pale stone, and yet the refrigerator chill was more obvious. There were no more strange cookies in the waiting area. There was only a fan circulating the muddy air.
The medical examiner was a quiet man named Mike Morton whose hobby was making model airplanes. One for every case that haunted him, he had once told Naomi—now he sat behind a desk so crowded with flying machines it might take off with him. Maybe that’s what he wanted, Naomi thought.
“Child finder,” Mike said, rising quickly to shake a hand.
Naomi smiled at her nickname and sat down. Mike Morton was a small man, made smaller by his work. His skin was the same gray color of the bodies he worked on.
“I’m looking for my sister,” Naomi said, and explained.
“If you’ve entered your DNA into the system, I don’t have anything new for you,” Mike said. Naomi felt some relief, but not much. In her heart she was convinced her sister was alive.
“I had assumed you were here about the murdered street girls,” Mike said.
Naomi hesitated. No one had hired her officially on the case, but no one was stopping her either. Now that she had met some of the street kids—Celia especially—she felt responsible. She told herself it wasn’t hurting to work that case while searching for her sister.
“I thought you might have some ideas how to identify them,” Mike said.
Naomi remembered her foster mother, Mrs. Cottle, and how hard she had fought to get Naomi a legal identity. Like so many children who ended up in foster care, Naomi didn’t have a birth certificate. If she had run away or been kidnapped before Mrs. Cottle managed to get her a social security number, there would have been no way of tracking her, just like there was no way of tracking her sister.
“I’d check with child welfare,” she told him. “Maybe those girls were in foster care before they became homeless. That could be why you’re coming up empty.”
His eyes widened. “What a good idea. Thank you. Would you be willing to look at them, tell me what you think?”
Naomi hated looking at corpses. They left a lingering shadow on her, a mark. And now she couldn’t go back to Jerome and decompress. But she knew it would be impossible for her to say no, not if it helped a child find her way home, dead or alive. She followed Mike back into the chilly morgue. Soon he was pulling open body drawers, citing the Tanner stages—the ages of sexual development—of the girls as he went. Most were Tanner stage four: about thirteen or fourteen. One was barely pubescent. Her narrow, undeveloped body reminded Naomi of the street girl she had confronted outside the library. Celia, she remembered.
Part of her licensing as an investigator was in examining remains, but Naomi’s greatest knowledge came from her past. She put the last foot back down on the table. For a long moment she stood motionless. She was remembering how after running in escape, her feet had hurt for weeks. The ground had been too tender to touch, so Naomi had wrapped her feet in Mrs. Cottle’s flowered dishcloths and hobbled around until her soles toughened.
Once free, Naomi couldn’t stop moving. Mrs. Cottle had understood. It was a puzzle because Naomi had never asked Mrs. Cottle how she knew, and now it was too late. Naomi had run away, as usual. She had an excuse—she was working a missing child case at the time—but she had missed saying good-bye to the only mother she had ever known.
“They weren’t in the river very long, but I bet you knew that. A day or two at most,” Naomi said. “What needs to be investigated is what happened before the murders.”
Mike stepped closer. “What do you mean, what happened before?”
Naomi lifted the white foot. “Look at these feet. No calluses. None of them have any signs of wear or activity on their feet. It’s one of the first signs you see in cases of captivity.”
“Jerome?”
He was sitting in Diane’s living room, ensconced in her velvet sofa. The room had the scent of incense and the leftover pizza he had heated for lunch.
He looked up, his face cautious.
“I’m sorry.” She went to him, sat down, held on. She felt his hair against her cheek. She had always loved his hair. Naomi knew that might not be the right way to see it—Jerome was Kalapuya, an Oregon native—but those childhood memories, of magic, held on. For her, at least.
“I’m tired of moving, Naomi.” She saw his firm mouth, the tender chin. “I’m tired of being second best.”
“You’re not—”
“Yes, I am. Either we make this a partnership or it doesn’t work.”
Naomi felt fear. It was a fear as vast as an empty tomorrow. “What does that mean?” she asked.
“We need to put down roots. Make a home, someplace. It doesn’t have to be forever, but it needs to be now.”
“I need to find my sister.”
“I know.” His voice was gentle.
That broke her. She wept against him, just as she had cried against Diane, and he put his arm around her. It wasn’t just fear of not finding her sister, Naomi realized. It was fear she would not be strong enough to stay once she did.
* * *
When Jerome was little, a woman came for him. She came picking her way over a yard littered with dog turds, swollen black garbage bags, a knocked-over hibachi with a vacant grill. The woman had the look of a farmhouse wife, the kind of grandma you see in books. She wore a checkered or flowered dress—now he wasn’t sure—stout shoes, the kind of thick pantyhose you wear for varicose veins. Her hair was silver and piled on her head, and her eyes were a kind, bright, merry blue that said Christmas and cookies rolled into one.
Angrily, his last foster family shoved his belongings—another black garbage bag, this one full of torn shirts and a broken frame photo of his mom, who had died when he was an infant—out the door. Later, back on the farmhouse porch, Mrs. Cottle carefully took everything out and even folded the garbage bag into a tiny square. “When you have lost everything, everything matters,” she had said, in her gentle voice. “I will keep this for you.”