Hope was all but dead at the house on Maple Street, where Jake and Laurie remained. They’d refused to abandon the scene of the crime, because it was, after all, the scene of everything else involving Jennifer—her first birthdays, her first words, her first steps. And also because it happens to be what the parents of missing children do—stay put, because how else will their child ever find their way home?
By 2012, only half the poster remained, buried beneath ones for Mitt Romney and Chuck Schumer. Only the upper half, so you could still make out Jennifer Kristal’s eyes, which, like the Mona Lisa’s, seemed to be staring at you no matter which side of the street you were coming from. There were people who passed by and didn’t know whom the poster was for—people newly arrived in the neighborhood, and even some of the older residents, who’d simply forgotten that there’d ever been a missing child.
Her parents didn’t have that luxury. Five years from the date of Jenny’s disappearance, Jake made a new plea on a local Long Island TV station—like the messages NASA places on interstellar satellites rocketed into the void, doubtful anyone will read them, but willing to give it a shot: “Jenny, if you’re out there, I want you to know we will never stop looking for you. And if her kidnapper sees this, I want them to know that we just want her back. Please. That’s all we want. We won’t go to the police. We just want our daughter back.”
The local reporter followed with some depressing stats concerning the odds of Jennifer—or any missing child—still being alive after all that time. About on par with winning the New York Lottery (1 in 3,838,380, according to the New York State Bureau of Statistics). Yet, in an effort to provide some small sliver of hope, a few cases were cited—Elizabeth Smart, the girl found in Utah, for example, and a few other cases where a missing child was miraculously tracked down or simply walked into a police station one day and announced their identity. The same picture that had been nail-gunned to the telephone pole was prominently displayed on-screen, next to a police artist’s rendering of what Jennifer might look like now. A teenager who didn’t look very much like Jenny anymore, devoid of her neon smile and laughing eyes, as if the artist had tried to imbue it with whatever myriad horrors might have been perpetrated on her during all that time.
* * *
—
It was seven years later, when the original poster was only marginally visible, faded to almost complete white—the barest ghost image lurking there—when rain and snow and mud and time had mostly obliterated me, that I finally came home.
ONE
Forest Avenue, the neighborhood hub, three lanes on each side, with the Forest Avenue Diner—early-bird specials starting at five P.M., dessert and coffee included—standing watch on the northwest corner, or was it the northeast corner? Note to self: Check which way’s which. No matter, I remembered it.
I’d eaten in that diner, a Sunday tradition for the Kristal family, starting when I was small enough to fit into one of those red plastic baby chairs.
I wondered if they ate there now—Mom and Dad and Ben—maintaining the tradition against all odds, or if they’d long ago given it up, picked some other diner to eat their Sunday breakfasts in, or just stopped going out at all.
Just as I passed it, the door flew open. I could smell a mixture of pancakes, syrup, and fried eggs wafting through the door. Okay, I was hungry. But then I was always hungry—had been hungry as long as I could remember.
I had what felt like two dollars scrunched in my jeans pocket. Not enough for a muffin or even one egg. Coffee maybe . . . but what good would that do?
I floated on—floating is what it felt like, as if I were hovering over this little neighborhood, like you do in a dream, when you’re both in it and above it, everything half-remembered and half-not, things looking just the same and startlingly different. Just like me.
It was late fall, warm enough to think about ditching my zippered jacket. The brown leaves littering the sidewalk were so brittle they crunched into dust when I stepped on them.
I was making a game of it, in fact, not so much walking down the block as announcing my presence with each leaf-obliterating step. Hello, I’m back. Advancing in a kind of zigzag pattern—some of the shopkeepers had swept the leaves into piles, forcing me to lunge here and there to keep it going, wondering if I looked high on something, like someone staggering home after an all-nighter.
That’s when I saw it—when I locked eyes with my former six-year-old self. Such barely there eyes—you really had to squint into the white void to see them. It was on a telephone pole outside a pizzeria. A dog was checking out the base of the pole, deciding whether or not it was going to grace it with its piss, the owner—a middle-aged woman—languidly scrolling through her phone and pretty much acting as if she wasn’t holding a leash with a dog attached to it.
I wanted to walk up to that pole and take a good look, but dogs scared me. So I waited until the lady finally stopped staring at her cell and moved on, yanking the dog away in mid-pee.
It was kind of like looking in a mirror, I thought, when I stepped up to the poster, except it was more like a magic mirror where you can look back in time—this parallel crazy world lurking just on the other side of it. I was coming back from that crazy world. And I was going to step back into my six-year-old room where all my toys were lined up just as I’d left them. Remember: The Bratz. Elmo. The two Barbies. A herd of plastic horses—one of them a Palomino I’d named Goldy.
Remember . . .
“Yoh.”
It took a second nasal yoh to understand that someone was actually speaking to me.
A guy. Nothing new about that. Put me on a sidewalk somewhere and odds are some dude will come chat me up. He might’ve been older than me but was somehow dressed younger, a red bandanna poking out of the back pocket of his low-slung jeans—which were precariously balanced on his hipbones and showing an inch or more of ugly brown boxers.
“You got a smoke?” he asked.
“No.”
He still hung around; maybe he was showing off for his friends, since there seemed to be an audience of boys—they looked like boys, too, younger than him—lurking by the pizzeria entrance.
“You’re not from around here,” he said, half as a question.
“Who said?”
“Never seen you, thas all . . .” He was trying to grow in a goatee—emphasis on trying, because it looked like the scraggly tufts you see on cancer patients.
“Okay, you got me,” I said.
“So you’re not . . . ?”
“Not what?”
“From around here.”
“Sure I am. Just not lately.”
“Oh . . .” He looked confused by that. Stared at the pole for a second, where I saw his eyes connect with mine. My old eyes. Before they saw a bunch of things they shouldn’t have.