Rich touched her arm. Celia opened her eyes. He smiled at her, eagerly. She closed her eyes, ignoring him. She wasn’t ready to be friends again yet.
Finally it was their turn. Given a plate each, heaped with the beans and cornbread and rice. They took the last table and sat with something like relief. Within moments the food was gone, and Celia stared at her empty plate.
“Are we gonna stay and help clean up?” Stoner asked. His voice sounded tired, like he was talking from the bottom of a deep well.
“Count me out,” Celia said, scraping her plate to see if a stray bean might materialize.
“We said we would,” Rich said. But when the boys got up, they found there was a ready line of dishwashers working off their meal.
“Come back tonight, to help with dinner,” the nun said to the boys.
Celia wandered back into the annex. Her eyes were drawn to the message board and the posters for the missing and murdered girls, some of whom she had known. There in the middle, surrounded by yellow marker, was a brand-new flyer. She stepped closer, lured to it. Another missing girl, this time years ago. Celia shuddered when she read they had been held in captivity. I am looking for my sister. Tell her I am sorry and I miss her.
At the bottom was a name and number. Naomi, investigator.
“‘Tell her I am sorry and I miss her.’” Celia tried the words out, saying them out loud.
They sounded funny—not ha-ha funny, but sad funny, like that was the last thing she expected anyone ever to admit in public.
* * *
In Celia’s own memory she was six and her mother was pregnant. A girl, her mother announced, after a rare visit to the county health office. Celia was old enough to remember a time when her mother was a different person, the kind who went to doctors and even took Celia to the dentist, though they couldn’t afford it. Somewhere, in her misty recall, was the feeling of her mom reading to her, the warm softness of her arm.
But then came Teddy. One of Celia’s earliest memories was getting up late at night to pee and finding her mother on the couch with her white arm extended. Teddy, crouched as if he were proposing marriage, was sticking a needle in her mother’s arm. Her mother had looked up, her eyes thick with sleepiness and guilt. She had been too high to even really notice her daughter.
But Teddy did, later.
He became the proud owner of a swollen drum of a belly he patted, lasciviously. And then it seemed like the day turned over and her baby sister was born. The infant lay in the hospital, wrapped in blankets. She had a dimple between her legs just like Celia, a confusing place of lies and secrets. From next to the hospital bed her stepdad had watched her, a warning on his mouth.
But Celia didn’t want to tell, not then. What she wanted was to hold her baby sister, love her, protect her as she had not been protected. She had looked into her sister’s sleeping face and promised, in her heart, that she would be her mother.
On the day they left the hospital, no one looked twice at the deflated mother, her eyes closed, sweat of withdrawals on her brow, the tall, lanky man next to her, his face grizzled with a red beard, or the little girl walking alongside, holding no one’s hands but her own. Celia often walked that way, hands entwined in front of her like a monk on a stroll, and adults commented, chuckling, how it made her seem old and wise. They didn’t know Celia clenched her hands like that to keep her limbs from flying off in fear.
Walking next to her mother and baby sister, Celia felt then, as she often did later, that she moved in and out of buildings and schools, waiting rooms and stores, and no one ever saw her. She was invisible, someone to be erased.
But her sister would be seen. Her sister, she promised herself, would be loved.
That night, on the row, Celia turned a trick. It was just her mouth, she told herself. You can always spit it out.
Her friends watched her climb back out of the car. The look in Rich’s eyes was something like sadness. Celia strode up to him, holding out the money. “What I owe you,” she said, voice hoarse.
“You can keep it,” he said, face turning scarlet in the night. Behind them, loud in the dark, they heard sirens. Sirens all night, sometimes, until it seemed the streets turned into a puddle of flashing lights, spilled blood and mercy.
Some nights seemed made for magic, and this was one. It caught Celia unaware, like the hard breeze off the river, like the clouds rushing overhead. One moment she was standing on the sidewalk, rocking in her thin shoes, eyes half closed to the world, and the next a warm feeling swept through her body until her eyes blazed open.
Like she wasn’t really a twelve-year-old street kid, ears closed against the crack of thunder. Like her mouth wasn’t open to the pure cleansing rain.
The next morning, crossing the bridge, they watched the men on the patrol boat pull a body out of the river. It was a naked girl, as pale as a fish. The street kids stood at the railing and watched. A group of day people gathered on the esplanade nearby, and they, too, watched as if death were interesting to them, and not a little bit scary. One of them was the woman with the glossy hair. She had her arms folded as if she was enraged.
As the men on the boat hooked the body, Rich asked, “Do we know her?”
Stoner shrugged. “I think she was called Destiny.”
The officers were touching the girl’s body with more tenderness than she probably ever had felt.
Stoner was watching Celia with his sleepy eyes.
“We’ll keep you safe, Celia,” Rich promised, but Celia didn’t say anything because she didn’t think that was possible. It was one of those nice thoughts that had no power. The three of them walked slowly with their heads down away from the river as the boat churned water.
Chapter 8
The FBI satellite offices downtown looked designed by someone with a degree in ’70s kitsch: glossy mirrors, silver everywhere, burnt orange rugs. The modern desks and the high-tech computers reeked of money, and the receptionist looked like she was trying to fit in. Her silver eyes matched her hair.
“I’m here for Special Agent Richardson,” Naomi said, sliding her license across the desk.
“Winfield said you would come,” the agent said moments later, coming out into the waiting room, where Naomi was contemplating a recipe for stewed chicken in a cooking magazine. She wondered if there would ever be a day when she owned a kitchen and Jerome would come home to find she had stewed a chicken. Something made her doubt this.
Sean Richardson had glossy black hair that went with his title. He wore the classic Fed suit: pinstripe, with a neat little tie that suggested he was one tight asshole. Naomi disliked him instantly but had expected that: she and the Feds never got along. Unlike detectives like Winfield, they resented her for cracking cases they had spent years on.
He signaled at the chair. Naomi stayed standing. She looked out his window, at the river. “You were the one that solved the Nick Floyd case,” Richardson said. He was annoyed at also having to stand, since he didn’t want to sit if she wasn’t about to.
Naomi glanced over. “I was glad to help,” she said, gently.
“I read what you said about our office.”
Naomi smiled, to herself. She didn’t feel bad. Men like this were nothing. All she trusted in life was love, and none of it was here.