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I feel myself being pulled, lifted by cold hands I can’t see. I scream in pain, but the sound is swallowed instantly, or maybe it’s only in my head.
Where am I?
I hit something hard and cry out.
ITSOKAY.
I am dying.
It comes to me suddenly, grabs the breath from my lungs.
I am dying.
September 3, 2010
4:39 A. M.
Johnny Ryan woke, thinking, Something’s wrong. He sat upright and looked around.
There was nothing to see, nothing out of place.
He was in his home office, on Bainbridge Island. Once again, he’d fallen asleep working. The curse of the working-from-home single parent. There weren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done, so he stole hours from the night.
He rubbed his tired eyes. Beside him, a computer monitor revealed a frozen image, pixilated, of a ratty-looking street kid sitting beneath a crackling, on-and-off neon sign, smoking a cigarette down to the filter. Johnny hit the play key.
On-screen, Kevin—street name Frizz—started talking about his parents.
They don’t care, the kid said with a shrug.
What makes you so sure? Johnny asked in the voice-over.
The camera caught Frizz’s gaze—the raw pain and angry defiance in his eyes as he looked up. I’m here, aren’t I?
Johnny had watched this footage at least one hundred times. He’d talked to Frizz on several occasions and still didn’t know where the kid had grown up, where he belonged, or who was waiting up at night for him, peering into the darkness, worrying.
Johnny knew about a parent’s worry, about how a child could slip into the shadows and disappear. It was why he was here, working day and night on a documentary about street kids. Maybe if he looked hard enough, asked enough questions, he’d find her.
He stared at the image on-screen. Because of the rain, there hadn’t been many kids out on the street on the night he’d shot this footage. Still, whenever he saw a shape in the background, a silhouette that could be a young woman, he squinted and put on his glasses, peering harder at the picture, thinking: Marah?
But none of the girls he’d seen while making this documentary was his daughter. Marah had run away from home and disappeared. He didn’t even know if she was still in Seattle.
He turned off the lights in his upstairs office and walked down the dark, quiet hallway. To his left, dozens of family photographs, framed in black and matted in white, hung along the wall. Sometimes he stopped and followed the trail of these pictures—his family—and let them pull him back to a happier time. Sometimes he let himself stand in front of his wife’s picture and lose himself in the smile that had once illuminated his world.
Tonight, he kept moving.
He paused at his sons’ room and eased the door open. It was something he did now: check obsessively on his eleven-year-old twins. Once you’d learned how bad life could go, and how quickly, you tried to protect those who remained. They were there, asleep.
He released a breath, unaware that he’d drawn it in, and moved on to Marah’s closed door. There, he didn’t slow down. It hurt too much to look in her room, to see the place frozen in time—a little girl’s room—uninhabited, everything just as she’d left it.
He went into his own room and closed the door behind him. It was cluttered with clothes and papers and whatever books he’d started and stopped reading and intended to pick up again, when life slowed down.
Heading into the bathroom, he stripped off his shirt and tossed it into the hamper. In the bathroom mirror, he caught sight of himself. Some days when he saw himself, he thought, Not bad for fifty-five, and sometimes—like now—he thought, Really?
He looked … sad. It was in the eyes, mostly. His hair was longer than it should be, with fine strands of gray weaving through the black. He always forgot to get it cut. With a sigh, he turned on the shower and stepped in, letting the scalding-hot water pour over him, wash his thoughts away. When he got out, he felt better again, ready to take on the day. There was no point in trying to sleep. Not now. He towel-dried his hair and dressed in an old Nirvana T-shirt that he found on the floor of his closet and a pair of worn jeans. As he headed back into the hallway, the phone rang.
It was the landline.
He frowned. It was 2010. In this new age, only the rarest of calls came in on the old number.
