The Lost Girl

Jessie’s mom drove her home from her abortion.

Back in the car, it was quiet. The low rattle of radio commercials, the volume turned down too low to make out what they said. Jessie picked up the travel mug of coffee Mom had poured herself before they left the house. It was still full, lukewarm now and too sweet for Jessie’s tastes, but she drank it anyway.

“You OK?” Mom looked straight ahead. The wipers groaned against the windshield. It was sprinkling sparse, cold rain from the gray sky—Shermantown, New York weather, precisely how Jessie had remembered it.

“I’m OK,” Jessie said. She had new texts from Simon, asking where she was. He’d cycled from curious to scared to angry and back again. She took the slower trickle of texts to mean he’d grown resigned, now, messaging her as a formality, no longer expecting a response. She hadn’t told him anything about going home.

Back at home, she retreated to her room and closed the door like she would when she was a teenager. A magazine pullout poster of Jon Bon Jovi still hung on the wall from when she had a crush on him (still with a ballpoint mustache her brother had drawn). Her boom box still sat on the dresser, a mess of cracked CD cases around it.

She still had her journals.

Jessie used to chronicle her life in mismatched notebooks of different sizes, some lined some not, some spiral bound some thermal. Sometimes she drew, but mostly she recorded the events of the day and her thoughts with an angst that alternately amused or mortified her when she entertained the all-too-real possibility her parents had read them at some point. She’d left the journals unattended when she went off to go to college, to do Peace Corps in Guyana, to take a job at a non-profit in San Diego, another in North Dakota, finally back in a little college town in Western New York, close enough she could drive home when she felt the walls closing in.

She pulled one of the journals, a little Moleskine, and turned to the first page.

*

Before Sara Dogwood became known throughout Shermantown as the lost girl, Jessie knew her as the only other girl from Chess Club.

I don’t even like chess, Jessie wrote in one journal entry. Nonetheless, she’d joined the club because her mother nagged that she needed to have some activity on her transcript if she wasn’t going to play basketball anymore. Chess Club showed up first on the alphabetical list of non-sports extracurriculars from the flyer Mom had picked up from the guidance counselor.

Meeting Sara was a pleasant side effect of joining Chess Club. One afternoon, they skipped Chess Club altogether and huddled at the foot of a quiet school stairwell, close enough so they could both hear the music through the headphones to Sara’s Discman and listen to the new Ben Folds album, Whatever and Ever Amen.

Jessie had only heard one Ben Folds song before. The one on the radio. “Brick,” where Folds sang nasally about how she’s feeling more alone than she ever has before.

“You know what that song’s about, right?” Sara asked.

She didn’t have a chance to finish the thought. A janitor opened the door and seemed genuinely confused rather than accusatory when he asked, “Are you supposed to be here?” They giggled as they grabbed their book bags and scurried up the stairs away from him before he could get a better look at them.

Sara let Jessie borrow the CD, but she never had the chance to give the CD back. Sara Dogwood went missing on her bike ride home from school.

*

Jessie was just wrapping her head around an indefinite stint back home in Shermantown, back under her parent’s roof, sitting down for a plate of Mom’s lasagna and a glass of Merlot when Dad said, “It’s time to address the elephant in the room.”

Dad hadn’t bothered to turn off his phone, silently streaming a basketball game. He’d been sports-obsessed as long as she could remember, and Mom made it sound like he had been betting a lot. He still wore his yellow button-up from work, undone over a plain white t-shirt.

“You’re in your thirties now, Jess,” he said. “That’s a little old to be rolling up to the house, assuming you have a place to stay.”

“Jack,” Mom said. “We don’t have to do this now.”

“Relax.” Dad put a hand over hers. Growing up with her brother Ben, there were always two leaves in the kitchen table to extend it—sometimes a third when they had guests. They’d taken out the leaves after Jessie went to college and left them out, leaving the table smaller, the kitchen around it unfamiliar for how vast the empty spaces around that table appeared. “I’m not pushing you out on the streets, Jessica, I’m just saying it’s time you have a plan.”

They had versions of this conversation each time Jessie landed back home, and a handful of times over phone calls—easier because Jessie could invent an excuse to get off the line.

“You don’t have a boyfriend, right?” Dad asked.

Jessie made eye contact with her mother for a half-second before she got up for a glass of water.

“There’s this young guy at my office, Stu, and I think you might like him.”

With a conscious effort, Jessie stopped herself from rolling her eyes, but her face must have betrayed her.

“I know, I know, you don’t like getting fixed up. But Stu’s a good kid—a good man. Close to your age.” Dad paused to watch his phone. Someone must have scored. The game must have been close for Dad to stop mid-thought and pump his fist from the elbow in subdued celebration. “Look, it’s not an arranged marriage. I’m just asking you to go on a date.”

*

Jessie rarely thought back to Sara Dogwood, just as she rarely thought to call home to Mom or Dad when she was away. That’s how life was. The most important thing happened—milestones, losses, big choices—and then it was on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, never time to reflect on what anything meant.

Jessie looked at the Notes app on her phone, her closest approximation to a journal in recent years. Rarely complete sentences, more stray thoughts. She deleted the ones she didn’t have enough context to place.

She’d written in complete sentences about Simon, though, tracing their history one Sunday afternoon. They’d been friends when she poured lattes and he pored over thick, old books from the campus library at a bohemian coffee shop called Grinders off campus. He was a PhD student in American history, researching The Reconstruction, and when she was down on her luck after she got fired for her third missed shift without a good excuse, he let her move into his one bedroom with him. She knew he had a crush on her then, and was taking advantage, she supposed. But then, one night she made the both of them spaghetti for dinner and he took a wolfish bite from a meatball that sprayed marinara on his glasses and as she helped him wipe the lenses clean, she realized she liked him too. Another night, not long after, he said everyone from his program assumed she was his live-in girlfriend, and then she started calling him her boyfriend, and then she moved off the couch, into his bed.

But there she was that Sunday. Simon sat at the kitchen table, annotating the yellow pages of another book, eating sunflower seeds. He ate sunflower seeds compulsively, spitting the shells into an empty coffee mug. And Jessie curled in a corner on the couch, typing in her phone—volume all the way down, ringer off, making every effort to stay invisible and silent, and she wondered when she’d become such a nuisance, her every breath a distraction from his work.

Another note, Jessie recounted walking the family planning aisle of a CVS. She had the sensation someone was watching her. She was always running into people from Simon’s cohort who recognized her before she recognized them, or people she used to serve at Grinders.

She grabbed the first pregnancy test she could find—periwinkle with the white outline of a heart in the corner, the size of the pencil case she had in middle school—and made a beeline for the checkout line.

*

I might have been the lost girl, Jessie wrote in one journal entry. She imagined whoever took Sara watching the both of them leave the school, strap on their helmets, climb on their bikes. This person—it had to be a man, didn’t it?—had his choice.

Sara didn’t have many friends. Her family had only moved to town a few months before she went missing. The upshot was no one called Jessie on it when she started calling Sara her best friend—something that slipped out to her parents and that she tried out at school.

Jessie liked the attention until she didn’t.

Until her big brother’s friend, Jim, showed up at her bedroom door. He knocked carefully, his face already hovering in the open space where the door was cracked. “Hey,” he said. “I wanted to see if you’re OK.”

It didn’t occur to Jessie until later, when she journaled about it, that her brother and her parents hadn’t checked on her like that. She’d always had a little bit of a crush on Jim, and she knew he liked her, too, but there was Ben in between them, besides which, their timing never seemed to work out. Still, she imagined someday she might find him outside her bedroom.

But this was all wrong: the way he looked at her with pity; the way, after she didn’t say anything, he stayed in the doorway and tripped over words he’d clearly rehearsed about how hard it must be to lose a close friend.

“I’m OK,” Jessie said. “Thanks.”

Ben called him away to play Street Fighter II in his room next door. From there, all Jessie heard for an hour was the tinny music from the Super Nintendo, the grunts and punches of sixteen-bit combat.

*

Jessie didn’t go on a date with Stu. She met up with Jim instead.

Arriving early to Unlucky Ned’s felt like another homecoming. She’d snuck in with a fake ID before she started college and had a couple stints tending bar there when she was back home after. She thought she might ask about picking up shifts for the next week or two, but couldn’t spot anyone working whom she knew.

So, Jessie ordered her whiskey sour. Though the bar wasn’t busy on a Wednesday night, she took it to a table out of the way from the dancefloor and the pool tables. Old school arcade games had been installed since the last time she’d come around—Pac-Man, Space Invaders. Artifacts the bar might have bought off one of the pizza places that went out of business, or else ordered special because retro games were hip and Unlucky Ned’s altogether felt like it was trying to be hipper, the rustic old barn feel she remembered all diminished by degrees.

Jim had dark rings under his eyes, stubble on his chin. He wore a wrinkled black-and-blue checkered flannel and a pair of jeans. Jessie got up from her chair and waved, big and wide, and he smiled easily when he saw her. They hugged each other tight.

He ordered a Corona at the bar and as they sat down at her table, Jessie asked, “This isn’t weird right?”

“What would be weird?”

“Just the two of us, out at a bar.”

Jim tipped back his bottle, a wedge of lime butting down against the neck. “We’re two old friends having a drink. Why would that be weird?”

“Did you tell Alice you were coming out to meet me?”

Jim’s wedding band knocked against the bottle as he set it down on the table. He gave Jessie a guilty, boyish grin. “So, you’re back in town? For—?”

“For now,” she finished his sentence. “Resetting for a minute before I make my next move.”

An elderly couple took the dance floor. There was no live band that night, just the radio, playing “Smooth” by Rob Thomas and Carlo Santana, just as it might have when Jessie and Jim were still high school kids.

“We should have you over to the house for dinner,” Jim said.

“Where Alice lives?”

“She’ll be fine.”

The old couple seemed to know what they were doing, their bodies slow and frail, but moving in rhythm, cheek-to-cheek. Another old couple applauded them from the sidelines.

“Actually, Alice is kind of weird about having people over lately,” Jim said. “Which is fair, because the house is a disaster. Who would have thought having a second kid would be twice as hard as having one?”

Jessie laughed with him. She’d seen social media pictures of the boy, Robbie—three, maybe four years old? Cecelia had only been the born that past summer.

“And you left Alice to take care of both your children alone?”

Jim blushed a little. “And here I was, thinking I was being the good guy taking time out of my crazy life to entertain an old friend.”

The old man on the dancefloor set the old woman to a slow spin. The old man from the table raised his glass to them.

“I appreciate it.” Jessie raised her glass, too. “Here’s to old friends.”

They clinked, drank, and wound up talking about Ben, whom neither of them heard from much anymore, each comparing notes from what they’d gathered over Facebook (and a Twitter account Jim cited, that Jessie hadn’t known existed, where he mostly posted pretentious quotes from Virginia Woolf or Marcel Proust). Jessie recycled stories she wasn’t sure if she’d told him before from years back in Guyana. Jim talked about being a father. They took a break when he got them each another drink at the bar, and when he got back, Jessie asked to see pictures of the kids.

“I want the deep cuts,” she said. “The kind that never made it to Facebook.”

Jim had hundreds. Robbie especially, eating spaghetti with his bare hands, splashing at the shoreline of a beach, drawing amorphous blue crayon blobs on a sheet of yellow construction paper. The pictures of Cecelia were less diversified. She wasn’t very mobile yet, Jim explained.

One shot really got Jessie. Jim with his shirt off, knelt beside a bathtub, Robbie in the water to one side of him, Cecelia in an inflatable duck tub within the larger tub—a safety measure Jessie assumed. Jim looked so happy, an open-mouthed smile, playing the fool for their amusement. Simultaneously silly and more grown up than she’d ever seen him before.

“You really love them,” Jessie said.

“They’re my whole world right now.” Jim took a long sip. “So what’s your story? You seeing anyone?”

“No,” Jessie said automatically. She took a deep breath. “Not really, anyway. I’m sort of coming out of something.”

“And that’s what brings you back home.”

Jessie took a sip from her drink. It wasn’t a whiskey sour, but a Jack and Coke, three maraschino cherries floating in it. Her old drink, because she’d preferred whiskey since she started drinking, and before that, she’d been a Cherry Coke fiend. Jim knew the whole history.

As if on cue, Jessie’s phone vibrated against the table, and the screen lit up with a text from Simon: Can we talk?

She put the phone in her purse.

They chatted a while longer, but Jim kept yawning and before he’d feel obligated to buy a third drink, Jessie told him she was tired. They hugged again, longer, before he went to the door and Jessie went to the bathroom, where she took out her phone. On a high from seeing Jim, light-headed from the whiskey, feeling the kick of the Coca-Cola when she never drank soda anymore, she replied to Simon’s texts for the first time since she’d gotten home: I’m on a date.

Her pulse pounded while she peed, second-guessing the text. The phone vibrated while she washed her hands, then her face, focusing under her eyes. The cold water from the tap and the dread of what Simon might say sobered her.

The text read: Slut.

*

Jessie had a picture in her phone’s camera roll she’d taken when she first moved into Simon’s apartment, sight unseen. The photo showed the king-sized bed that ate up the entirety of Simon’s little bedroom. He informed her the previous tenants left it behind when they couldn’t figure out how to remove it, which was fine by him because he didn’t own a bed. It became one of her favorite features of the apartment. Crawling directly into bed marked a threshold between the outside world and a place of rest. There wasn’t room to bring much in—anything more than her phone, a glass of water—only what she could balance on the headboard.

Jessie had written about the day she told Simon about ruin value. She’d learned the term from Dan, a boy she dated when she was in college. An architecture major, he was fascinated with the concept buildings should be designed so, as they deteriorated, their remains would become more beautiful.

She thought maybe that was the premise of her relationship with Dan. They took so many pictures together, back before the days when everybody had a good camera on their phone. He’d get the photos developed at a drug store, always in doubles so she could have one. They dated nearly their entire junior year, the length of their relationship fully documented.

Jessie should’ve known Simon wouldn’t be interested in the symbolism. Early on in their relationship, when he learned she’d studied literature, he balked at how English majors wanted to make everything a metaphor. Simon cared about facts and dates, about lines of causality. He said there was enough real meaning in the world to keep somebody occupied for a lifetime without dithering in make-believe about what something might represent.

Simon reduced her musings about ruin value to this: “You know I don’t like it when you talk about old boyfriends.”

*

A few weeks after Sara Dogwood went missing, there was a candlelight vigil down at the riverfront. It was early November, not technically winter, but cold enough to see your breath.

Jessie recalled in her journal that Ben stayed home. He claimed he had too much reading for AP US History—an argument their parents probably wouldn’t have bothered with were it not for the subtext they didn’t like leaving him home alone when a child had gone missing. He was less subtle in telling them, I’m not a child.

The candles were small and stabbed through the surface of paper plates to collect wax as they melted. People milled around the riverfront, talking politely. Jessie stayed in place. Grownups populated the vigil, and the kids looked younger than Jessie, and stayed close to their parents’ sides. She watched a little girl in a thick periwinkle coat, the thumb of one of her wool mittens hooked into her mother’s palm.

Jessie thought about saying they should go, because a bunch of people chitchatting with candles felt awkward and pointless. Besides, she hadn’t started her math homework yet. But an old pastor took center stage, standing up on the stone ledge around some shrubbery.

“On behalf of the Dogwood family, thank you all for being here,” he said. “These are trying times for not only them, but our entire community. But as we know, it’s in these trials that our faith is tested. For the sake of the lost girl, and for the sake of us all, we mustn’t lose hope. Let us pray.”

He led the crowd, a few mumbles joining in him in the words. Jessie wondered if Sara or her family were religious. Maybe they’d asked for this. Or maybe the pastor took this role on himself at the vigil, unable to imagine anyone might dissent. When he was done, he asked if anyone else would like to speak. Mom pressed her palm to Jessie’s back.

Jessie had tried her hand at Speech and Debate Club before basketball. She didn’t like it much either. It wasn’t so much the public speaking itself that bothered her as the constant critique about not using filler words like like or umm, or all the rules about time parameters and having to rehearse the same words to get them right before competition.

But once she’d taken a step up toward the ledge, all eyes were on her and there was no stepping back.

“Sara was my best friend,” Jessie said. Someone hollered for her to speak up, so she said it again. Then on with the platitudes. “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. That’s in a song right?” Some of the older folks chuckled or nodded along as Jessie remembered Joni Mitchell’s name a beat too late to be relevant. Hardly anyone listened to a speech for long—that had been her biggest takeaway from Speech and Debate, in conflict with what the club advisor, Mrs. Bentley told them all. If no one was making a point of judging, then delivery mattered a lot more than the words themselves. She exhaled, letting her breath falter. “This is hard,” she said. “I feel a little lost now. But if we all believe in each other, I’m sure we’ll get through this.”

She stepped down from the ledge and there was a rumble of approval and awkward slapping of hands against thighs, because everyone was holding a candle in their other hand so they couldn’t clap properly.

*

Jessie had written in her journal how over-protective her parents acted the months right after Sara went missing. Mom picked up Jessie from school, and her and Dad both asked where she was going and when she’d be back every time she went to the door. They called friends’ houses to see if she’d made it OK. They debated the pros and cons of getting her a cell phone right in front of her, before compromising: she’d carry a roll of quarters so she’d always have money for a payphone. Ben snickered and said if somebody tried to nab her, she could coil a fist around the roll of quarters, too, and knock him out. Dad told him it wasn’t funny.

By senior year of high school, things mellowed. Jessie had her own car—an Oldsmobile hand-me-down, an early graduation present from her brother when he could afford a better junker.

No power windows. No power locks. The lock on the rear passenger side door didn’t work at all and she had to slam the trunk precisely so it would stay shut while she was driving. The car had a real metal exterior, though, that made Jessie feel as if she were driving a tank, indestructible, like no one could get at her.

She drove all over Shermantown, and out of town, on largely deserted country roads she knew would lead somewhere if she only kept going. She’d keep going someday, she promised herself. A week past Halloween, in the bleak period of the first snow flurries, Jessie drove down a bumpy road. It felt like the pavement had been stripped for repaving, and she wondered if she’d missed signs that she wasn’t supposed to drive on it, and was thinking of turning back when the bright orange tire pressure light illuminated the dash. Seconds later, she could feel the car was out of alignment, hear the sound of the flat rumbling from the front passenger side. She pulled to the side of the road, muttering shit shit shit to herself, and tried to remember the last time she’d seen another car.

By the time Jessie’d loosened two of the lug nuts, she had to take a break, her fingers blackened from road dirt, red and numb from the cold. She thought to get back in the car to warm up, and went as far as opening the front driver’s side door to climb in before she realized she probably shouldn’t with the car up on the jack. So she unzipped her coat and tucked her hands inside, under armpits to get feeling back in them, and wished she’d worn a hat because her ears burned cold. She sucked back snot and waited.

Jessie waited until it occurred to her all of this might be a plan. She hadn’t seen anything on the road that would have given her a flat tire, but maybe someone had planted something there, in the middle of nowhere and waited for someone to pull over. Someone who was alone. Ideally a girl who wouldn’t know how to defend herself, who’d be distracted enough with the flat not to even notice him approaching.

A man named John Little had been convicted for the abduction and murder of Sara Dogwood, after he was arrested for trying to take another kid in Floboro, an hour away. He confessed to taking Sara and leaving her body in a river between the two towns. The body had never been found. Later, Little recanted the confession, and said he’d been confused. He said he was losing his mind.

Jessie wrangled the keys as best she could in her hands to unlock the front passenger side door. She fetched the roll of quarters from the glove compartment and wrapped a fist around it the best she could.

She picked up the tire iron from the road and forced it beneath her coat, too, ripping the inner fabric in the process. She didn’t find much comfort in having a weapon in each hand, but couldn’t fathom letting go of either at that point either.

Jessie didn’t know if it were better to think Little, in prison, were responsible for Sara going missing, or if it were better to think he really was mistaken altogether, on the prayer Sara might still be alive somewhere, two years later.

If Little hadn’t taken her, though, it had to have been someone else.

As daylight faded, she saw the headlights.

Jessie thought to hide, but as the car drew closer, she recognized it as a police cruiser. The way the headlights shone over the metallic surface of the Oldsmobile, broken down at the side of the road, it looked beautiful for a second. The officer got out and Jessie was surprised she was a woman, shorter than Jessie, but broad-shouldered. The way she stood made her look sure of herself. “Do you need a hand?” she asked.

*

Two in the morning, a full day removed from her night out with Jim, Jessie texted Simon: I’m sorry I left without saying anything.

Then, You didn’t deserve that.

It took a few minutes—a few false starts of ellipses, signaling he was typing back appearing, then going away. You can come get the rest of your stuff whenever you want.

Then, If you’re still in town.

Then, Thanks for saying you’re sorry and I shouldn’t have called you a slut.

Jessie looked at her phone a long time, curled at the end of the couch in her parents’ living room. The house was still, silent. It was two in the morning and she wondered if she’d woken Simon. She never knew him to keep a sleep schedule, always drinking coffee all day long.

She texted, If we’d had a daughter, I would have named her Sara.

Simon didn’t respond.

*

Mom dragged Jessie along for Christmas shopping the week after Thanksgiving. For Mom, shopping was a part of the holiday experience, a joy in itself to wander between riverfront stores as “(There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays” played over speakers outside. The most serious debate she was prepared to engage in was about whether she should buy the regular hot cocoa or the extra dark variety for Jessie’s cousin Mike.

There was some comfort in not having to talk about anything hard.

Jessie and her mother passed the spot where the candlelight vigil for the lost girl had happened a lifetime back.

Sara Dogwood’s family hadn’t hung around Shermantown. How could they when the defining story to inform the place was all about loss? They weren’t around long enough for it to become home.

Jessie interrupted something her mother was saying about buying new garland to ask if she remembered the vigil for the lost girl, because it had happened right there where they stood.

“I remember.” Mom nodded. “It was awful. And I remember most of all your father and I were so worried about you.” She went on to correct Jessie, though, because this wasn’t the spot of the vigil. That spot was a block down, and she could prove it, too, because didn’t Jessie remember the ledge where she’d stood up to give her speech? “We were so proud of you for speaking.”

Mom shifted shopping bags in her hands. They looked heavy for her, and Jessie knew she should offer to carry the weight. But she started walking again instead, toward a storefront she didn’t recognize. Wasn’t that the strangest thing about coming home? One minute, you think you know your way.