Day 49, p.1
Day 49, page 1
Day 49
The Missing Final Chapter
of
The Year of Fog
Michelle Richmond
Smashwords edition
Copyright 2010
Michelle Richmond
Smashwords edition, license notes:
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.
This ebook may not be resold or given away to others.
Day 49. Five weeks into my new life. It’s how I count off the squares on the calendar now—the number of days that have passed since I found Emma.
Over time, Emma has told her story—to Jake, to Sherburne, to the psychologist she’s seeing twice a week, a kind woman with a comfortable office downtown, complete with coloring books and child-sized sofas. For Emma, it hasn’t been easy. She is beginning to believe that her father did not give her up, as Teddy and Jane had told her. But she is still confused, distraught, vacillating between tears and anger. “When will Mommy get out of prison?” she asks Jake again and again. “I thought we would all be together.”
It was Jane who approached Emma with five perfect white sand dollars that day at Ocean Beach. Jane who said, “I know where we can find some more. Dozens. Maybe hundreds.”
“Where?” Emma asked.
“Come on,” Jane said. “I’ll race you.”
It was the perfect ploy, the perfect way to entice a child who never said no to a challenge. Teddy and Jane had been watching, waiting, for weeks. “Be patient,” Lizbeth had warned them. “Don’t blow it. Wait until the window of opportunity opens.”
I imagine Emma taking a deep breath and setting off, her feet flying over the sand, the red bucket rattling in her hand.
“I didn’t know where I was going,” Emma told Jake after she came home. “I just kept running. Jane said the sand dollars were straight ahead and I’d see them when I got there.”
She ran and ran. I imagine her hair fanning out behind her. I imagine her laughing, out of breath, thinking about nothing but winning the race and finding all those beautiful sand dollars. When she was too tired to go any farther, she stood there, panting, wondering where I was. Jane was right beside her.
“It was so foggy, and I’d run so far,” Emma told Jake. “I couldn’t see Abby anywhere. I was scared. Jane told me not to worry. She said she she’d help me find Abby, if I’d get in the van with her.”
There were a million ways their plan could have gone wrong. If it had been a little less foggy, if Emma had been less interested in the sand dollars, if she had been too tired to race. If there had been no seal pup. If I hadn’t been so concerned about getting the perfect shot. If it had been Jake on the beach with Emma that day, instead of me.
A million ways it could have gone wrong, but it didn’t. And I played right into their scheme, letting Emma wave at the woman when we passed the van in the parking lot. I even said hello to Teddy. And what of those moments on the beach that I gave over to my own daydreaming, those moments when I turned from her, seeking out the perfect photograph? “It was only seconds,” I’ve said a thousand times. But I cannot help but wonder whether my timeline was faulty from the beginning, whether I spent minutes, rather than seconds, with the seal pup. Looking back, I can’t help but think that I practically delivered her into their hands.
“Lizbeth was determined to grab her,” Sherburne has said, in an attempt to comfort me. “There had been other failed attempts. Even if it hadn’t worked out that day, eventually, it would have. Eventually, they would have gotten here. There was nothing you could do.”
Day 49, I remind myself. Emma is home, and it’s day 49 of my new life.
It’s one of those rare, sunny days when the air is still. There are two types of weather in San Francisco—foggy and still, or sunny and windy. The foggy days are generally better, because in order for the sun to shine the wind has to be strong enough to blow the fog away. A sunny day in San Francisco is usually so windy you can’t bear to be outside. It’s part of the character of the city, part of what makes it an interesting place: you can wish for sun, but you have to expect the wind to come with it. Or you can wish for a calm, peaceful day, but you have to accept the fog. Which is why today is so unusual—just a bright, warm sun, and a faint, pleasant breeze.
I’m out in the Avenues, walking. I’ve been coming here a lot since I came returned from Costa Rica. Part of it is that I’ve developed a fondness for the Bashful Bull Too. More significantly, I’ve realized that the deserted, windswept avenues of the Outer Richmond district suit me better than the noisy streets of Potrero Hill. Out in the avenues, there are no stylish boutiques or upscale salons, no four-star restaurants or shiny martini bars. Instead there are odd stores catering to very particular tastes: Gus’s Bait & Tackle, which also sells a bizarre assortment of toys; the Scissor Man, who sharpens shears but doesn’t sell them; the Archery store; a shop that repairs vacuum cleaners and typewriters; a Chinese-owned deli specializing in Italian and Vietnamese food; Sugarbowl Bakery, famous not for its pastries but for the tiny television over the counter that’s tuned to Keno 24 hours a day.
I wander up Balboa, past a thrift store stocked with Chinese-English dictionaries and old 45s in original wrappers, past a package store with a sign that says, simply, Drink Liquor, past the spacious Zephyr café, with its odd mix of handwritten signs declaring “you must spend at least five dollars to use this outlet” and “you must be two paying customers to sit on this couch.”
I cross the street and find myself at the Balboa Theater, where a line has begun to form outside. It’s the neighborhood’s most popular venue by far, the only establishment, aside from Shanghai Dumpling King, that inspires folks to make the trek from other parts of the city. It’s a tiny, two-screen art house where you can still see a movie for about seven bucks, and where every showing is a double feature. Today’s pairing is the two-part, six-hour Italian epic Best of Youth. I check my watch; I could squeeze in Part One if I race home as soon as the credits start to roll.
I’m digging through my purse for cash when something catches me off guard, a sensory impression, a whiff of something delicious that I can’t quite place. Pound cake, I think. Someone’s making pound cake. Then there’s the voice behind me—“Abby?”
I turn. It’s Nick. He’s standing just inches away, clad in jeans, stylishly scuffed brown boots, and an orange T-shirt with some odd insignia on the front. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him in anything other than a suit.
“Hey, you’re not out globetrotting?” I say.
“I’ve been home for a couple of months,” he says.
The line inches forward. A few more people have lined up behind Nick. The sun is shining in my eyes, and I’m squinting up at him, wondering how to proceed.
My mother’s voice bounces around in my head. “Everyone has a finite number of perfect opportunities in her life,” she told me once. “No more than you can count on one hand. Usually a lot less than that, just one, or maybe two.” She was dying when she said this; we both knew she only had a few days left, but neither one of us acknowledged the fact. She was concentrating, as if she was trying to figure something out.
“What is it?” I asked her.
“The thing is, I can’t remember my perfect opportunity. I must not have been paying attention.”
Just then my mother was hit by a wave of pain, and I pressed the call button so the nurse could bring more morphine. Later, I would feel guilty about the fact that my mother’s pain at that moment had actually come as some relief to me, because it meant we didn’t have to finish the conversation. We didn’t have to try to retrace the trajectory of her life back to that elusive moment when she’d been looking the wrong way, thinking about the wrong thing, and her one true, life-altering chance had passed by unnoticed.
The line keeps moving forward, and I’m stepping sideways toward the door, trying not to let Nick out of my sight. I’m thinking about that day at Manuel Antonio beach, how my one perfect chance was sitting on a green towel in the sand, looking up at me.
It occurs to me that maybe I’m one of the lucky few who get two perfect opportunities. And maybe, unlike my mother, I’m actually looking in the right direction when it happens—not just once, but twice.
“I heard it’s a pretty great movie,” I say.
Nick crosses his arms over his chest, looking down at me in that confident way of his. “Yeah?”
“Maybe we could see it together.”
“Maybe,” he says, but he’s not exactly smiling, and I can’t get a handle on his tone of voice.
The line moves again. The woman in front of me steps through the door into the theater. Just as it’s closing behind her, Nick reaches forward and catches it. I step forward, into the cool, salt-smelling dark.
“That book you gave me,” I say. “I read it all the way through. Three times.”
As if reading a book makes up for all the calls I didn’t return.
Nick is still outside, his foot perched on the threshold. For a second he looks away, down the avenues toward the beach, and I can’t judge his intentions. I’m thinking maybe he’s going to let go of the door and walk away.
Instead, he takes a step in my direction, rests his hand on my shoulder, and says, “I’ve been looking for you."
Girl on the Beach:
How a Chance Encounter Inspired The Year of Fog
Emma Balfour walked into my life in the summer of 2003. Our paths collided on Ocean Beach, the 3-mile stretch of gray sand and graffiti-spattered seawall marking the western edge of the city.
She bent down, picked something out of the sand and laid it gently in the bucket.
"Hi," I said.
"Hi." Her voice was sweet and raspy, completely unguarded.
"What are you collecting?"
"Sand dollars," she said seriously, holding out the bucket for me to examine. At the bottom lay a single, perfect sand dollar.
I reached down and touched it admiringly. "Lovely."
"I know!" she said, returning to her search.
I continued walking slowly, turning around every few steps to glance at her. I kept waiting for an adult to appear. None did.
Then something caught my eye -- a shape in the sand, a dark crescent several feet away. I went to examine it. It was a dead seal pup, partially covered by sand.
A minute or two later, I turned back toward where the girl had been, but she wasn't there. She had disappeared into the fog. If I had not talked with her and heard her raspy voice, if I had not felt the rough sand dollar with my own fingers, I might have believed I had dreamt her up.
I never saw her again. But something had happened; this stranger had walked into my imagination, and she would not go away. For the next few weeks, I thought of her several times a day. Finally, having nowhere else to go, she stepped into a novel. I had not planned to write this novel. In fact, having recently completed my first, I was rather determined not to write another one. But there she was, the mysterious girl on the beach, demanding my attention.
Three years and almost 400 pages later, I had figured her out. I knew what she was doing at Ocean Beach, why she vanished and what happened to her afterward. I had given her a name, Emma Balfour, and I had uncovered her secret history. In the process, I had uncovered secrets about San Francisco as well -- the mass grave beneath the swank Lincoln Park Golf Course, for example, and the broken tombstones that make up parts of the gutter at Buena Vista Park. I had come to understand my neighborhood, the Outer Richmond, and its previous life as the Outside Lands, once home to sand dunes and bordellos. I discovered that the windmill at the northwestern edge of Golden Gate Park, where I often take my toddler son to play, once pumped the water that turned the desolate sand dunes into lush greenery.
By the end of my fictional journey, I had also learned a thing or two about myself, for the places we love are a key to our own inner workings. My husband grew up in the Bay Area, left for seven years and returned. I am one of the many who grew up somewhere else, arrived and immediately recognized San Francisco as home. But I never really knew my adopted city until I began seeing it through the eyes of my characters. Its hills and hideaways, its woods and water, lend to it a magic and mystery that is missing from the flat Gulf Coast landscape of my childhood. And while the balmy waters and gentle waves of the Gulf of Mexico beckon swimmers, the wild Pacific in these northwesterly climes does just the opposite. It is a place for rugged surfers armed with wetsuits and surfboards, not swimsuit-clad children with floatees. The beach itself is strewn with glass and garbage and the ashes of illegal bonfires. Not long ago, a homeless man was found dead on Ocean Beach, suffocated by the shifting sand. When I take my son there to play, I always have an eye out for potential dangers.
Which is perhaps why the girl stayed with me: She was a version of myself from nearly three decades before, but in a drastically altered context. On one hand, I felt a bit jealous. How different my life would have been had my parents chosen to stay in the Bay Area, where my father's naval ship was stationed during Vietnam, instead of returning home to Alabama. On the other hand, she called to mind buried fears about raising a child in the city.
It is possible that Emma -- not the actual girl on the beach but the one she became, in my novel and in my imagination -- was a product of my own deepest fears, as so many of our stories are. A child vanishes into the fog -- truly, a parent's worst nightmare. Like a Wes Craven flick or an amusement park house of horrors, the stories we read, and the stories we tell, serve as a repository for the unthinkable. By way of story, we relegate the terrible to the realm of the imagination. And then we rely on the flimsiest things -- vigilance and good luck -- to keep it there.
Follow Michelle Richmond on Twitter or visit her Facebook author page. Or check out her follow-up to The Year of Fog, No One You Know, "a thoroughly riveting literary thriller" (Booklist, starred review) about two sisters, an unsolved murder, an ancient mathematical puzzle, and the power of stories to shape our lives.
Michelle Richmond, Day 49
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