He could be anyone. That was the truth of the streets: If there was danger, anyone could hold it. No one could be trusted, not in the end.
Celia believed this.
The beefy man, his eyes like tiny periscopes on her, could be him. The man prowling the downtown streets, making her friends disappear. Some turned up as corpses, floating in the river. Others just vanished. Not that such things didn’t happen anyhow, but lately—in this heady spring of rain showers and streets that ran blood dark with freshets—it was happening more and more. Like all the time.
She stole another glance at him. His mashed face, pinched through the nose and eyes, was still watching her. Under his damp silvery hair, two funny-shaped ears protruded like little cabbages. His mouth was torn with scars.
Celia was down on skid row as dusk fell, the last of the businesspeople rushing, briefcases against their hips, like horses spurring themselves home. Oil puddles, sheened with water, made rainbows under the streetlights, and the night sky rushed away, reminding her the universe was vast. The gay bars were lighting up, the first of the cross-dressers coming out after dark when the night lights were kinder to their coarse faces, the stubble that the razors never quite got. Some had fake eyelashes so long they poked you when they came in for a hug. Which they liked to do, plenty.
She told herself she had nothing to fear. She had her friends for protection: Stoner and Rich, the two boys she hung around, street kids like her. Numbers in safety, Rich once joked. The boys were on the corner now, panhandling, their cold palms damp and empty. “Spare some cash?” they asked the suits whirling by. “I’m hungry, mister.” Celia watched as the flood of commuters rushed down the street. Soon all that would be left would be the street people because the night was made for them.
She looked back over at the scar-faced man, but he was leaving. She saw his back and wet shoulders as he walked down the street. The brick wall where he had stood was empty. There was a dry shadow where he had been, like the outline of a shape from an atomic war.
Rich waved to her, a bill held triumphantly in his fist. “Some fool gave me a twenty,” he bragged as she came closer. “Let’s get some food.”
Sometimes Celia thought she was a bird, flying over these streets. Sometimes she felt more like a slip of air that could disappear, like the tendrils of mist rising from the gutters. But mostly, in her secret heart, she was a butterfly, with magic wings beating hard for escape.
* * *
That night Celia called her mom.
The other street kids didn’t know she had a mom. None of them talked about that stuff anyways—it was too raw. Some of the kids said they were orphans, but Celia thought probably they were not. Orphans of the heart, maybe.
Celia borrowed a cell phone from another girl and tapped in the newest numbers written on the damp scrap of paper from her jacket pocket, fully expecting this number, too, would be out of service.
But the number was still alive. Maybe, too, the voice on the other end.
“Who is this?” her mom asked softly.
“It’s me. Celia,” she said, turning away from her friends. She remembered the first time she had heard the term opioid addiction and realized they were talking about her mom.
“My baby.” In the background Celia could hear the television blaring. She strained to hear any sound of her sister, Alyssa. Now six, the same age Celia had been when her sister was born. The voice lowered. “I miss you.”
“How is Alyssa?” Celia asked.
She could hear the airy high in her mother’s voice. “She’s fine.”
When Celia talked to her mom her very pores cried with sadness, and in just moments she became heady with despair, dizzy enough she had to reach for something to hold on to, which turned out to be the brick wall where she so often stood.
“You coming home?”
“You know I can’t, Mom.”
There was silence. She could hear her mother’s slow breathing. Celia wished she understood this world, the things it did to you.
The other girl wanted her phone back—she poked Celia in her back with a broken nail. “I got to go, Mom. I was just saying hi.”
Her mother yawned. “Celia. Is that you?”
Celia ended the call. A life can now be extinguished with the swipe of a finger. Then she went and sat on the curb, the car lights scoping the dark. The men in these cars, like her stepdad, were part of her. Her very cells had tasted them. Her blood coursed with them. But this was her life now, and she had to make something out of it.
* * *
Oh, the butterflies. They soften the edges of this hard world. Caught up so high in the sky, they fall to earth like meteorites, their iridescent wings trailing red thunder and liquid gold and the kind of purple only nature can provide.
Celia felt her back scrunch against her denim jacket, then relax. Sometimes she thought she had wings, bare nubs under the skin, and if others said these were her shoulder blades, she would say, Naw, that is where my wings are hiding. She could imagine the other kids along the row having wings, too, folded tight against their backs, wet and pulsating, opening now to feathered wonder. Bright green that flashed, the kind of silver that became light, white that became gold.
There could be legions of us, she thought, flying into the night sky. If all the street kids suddenly took flight, why, the night sky would glow with gold currents. Or maybe, she thought, it would just be her.
With a deep exhale, she flew.
Chapter 4
Naomi understood that in investigations, the ground matters.
She had worked dozens of missing child cases, and each search began on the ground. It might be soft and dappled, with fir needles, as in one case of a Boy Scout who stepped off the trail. Or frosted and covered with snow, as in the case of a child gone missing in the Pacific Northwest woods. Or it might be rutted with concrete, a spill of black asphalt steaming on a city street.
The ground mattered because it led her someplace, always. She would find her sister on this earth because of the steps Naomi took on the ground. The thought filled her with impatience to begin.
Naomi knew to go to the darkest streets first. She went looking for the street people.
The place was called Sisters of Mercy, and it existed on a street known for winos and junkies. As night fell, Naomi passed crowds of street nomads, dusty in black leather, and skid row alcoholics with faces like bruised cherries. She saw a skinny old woman with tufts of hair on her balding dome digging through the loam of a gutter, cackling. There was a troubling number of families—mother, father, one or two kids, all with the tired, tense faces of poverty but not much else to say they were homeless but this: the long line.
It snaked around the corner, with the orderly discipline of the hungry. Having worked many missing cases involving the poor—they were usually the ones who needed her the most—Naomi had found they were the most orderly of all. Desperation was a profound governing force.
Cutting past the line, Naomi walked in the front door with scarcely a murmur behind her. That, too, was being poor. They were afraid of not being served, of going hungry. The empty café was filled with tables and rickety chairs, like any other restaurant. Only this one had a nun behind the counter, and her tired, warm eyes caught Naomi’s.
“It’s not time yet. Back of the line.”