After I snap a few more pictures and write down the remaining details—Renee’s purse is still here, overturned with a broken cell phone on the floor next to what looks like a drop of blood on the concrete—I turn and look at Cee. “I didn’t know her,” she says.
“There are a lot of people here.” We both realize it’s unrealistic to expect her to know everyone. Even someone with the social-butterfly gene like Cee can’t possibly get acquainted with everyone in a stadium full of displaced people.
“But I don’t know anything about her. Not really,” she says, folding her arms across her chest. “Just her name and what people have said about her.”
I want to say something comforting—that’s what Cecily needs from me right now—but everything I think of sounds too cold. Reducing a person to a paragraph of hearsay is depressing no matter what words you use.
“Oh!” Cecily sits up straighter. “I forgot. Someone told me they thought Renee did something with computers. You know, like, for work. They weren’t sure what, but something pretty badass. She’d said something about it one night, about missing her job, and how without computers she was practically obsolete.”
“I’ll put it in the file,” I say.
Cecily laughs. The bitterness doesn’t sound right coming from her. “She thought she was obsolete then. I wonder what she’s thinking now.”
Even though I know it won’t help, I say it anyway. “This isn’t your fault.”
“How could she have disappeared like that?” she asks, picking at her fingernails. “How could any of them? Jennifer Joyce or Clinton Nelson or David Bonnell or—”
I interrupt her before she names all of them. The truth is that she’s right. We shouldn’t be losing more people now. But I don’t say that. Instead I say, “I don’t know, but these are teenagers and grown adults. You can’t be responsible for them.”
She looks up at me, and our eyes meet for the first time tonight.
Her blue eyes are glassy, and I want her to feel better, so I reach for something—anything—that might do it.
“Who knows, maybe they’re not even missing,” I say. “Maybe Renee Adams walked off.” The words stick in my throat. The lie is awkward and forced on my tongue. Someone who loses half a fingernail doesn’t walk off without the last few belongings to her name.
Cecily just shakes her head and looks away.
She knows what I do: that most of the people who are here have nowhere else to go.
“We haven’t found any of them,” she says, her voice hitching near the end of the sentence.
I press my lips and try to think of something useful to say, something to make her feel better. But she’s always been far better at that than I have.
“Where are they all going?” she asks.
I don’t answer, because for the life of me, I don’t know.
“Don’t worry, it’ll get better,” I lie as I hug her.
Then Deirdre and I are in the car and driving through the maze that is the parking lot. We suffer in silence for a few minutes, Deirdre with her lips pressed together, her frown lines etching themselves more permanently into her face. I briefly wonder if she’ll ever laugh or smile like she used to, and then she says what I’ve been thinking this whole time. “Another one.”
I don’t answer, because I don’t have to.
My dad worked in Missing Persons—it was his first job as an analyst with the Bureau—back in the nineties. His first year, there were 67,806 active missing-person cases in the US. I remember thinking then how unfathomably huge that number seemed.
But that was when he was alive.
It doesn’t seem huge anymore.
Because as of this morning, there are 113,801 missing persons—the ones not presumed dead. And that’s just in San Diego County.
Renee Adams is number 113,802.
We pass through the first military checkpoint at Aero Drive and then the one at Balboa Avenue without incident.
Each time, Deirdre stops the car and it’s the same routine. A Marine with a machine gun strapped over his shoulder shines a flashlight into the car. Deirdre holds up both our IDs, and when we’re recognized, the Marine nods and waves us through.
While we drive, I avoid looking out the window. It’s dark, so it’s not like I could really see anything. But I know what’s there. I know the Walmart on Aero Drive survived the quakes with minimal damage, only to be destroyed by the looting. It’s too easy to remember the last time I was there. The crunch of broken glass under my feet, the thick smoke, the smell of fire and burning plastic, and the body of the dead pregnant woman, killed by blunt-force trauma to the back of the head.
It’s much too easy to remember. Every time I close my eyes, I wish I could forget.
Around Balboa, there are some houses still standing and some that are at least inhabitable—but for the most part, everything is different. It doesn’t hurt any less to drive by neighborhoods that are flattened, to see debris where there used to be structures.
It hurts to think that I can hardly remember what it looked like before.
I keep my eyes closed and try to think about nothing—absolutely nothing. I will my mind to keep itself blank. But it’s black, like a black hole, like a portal, and suddenly I can see Ben, his dark eyes and his soft brown hair. I can see the look on his face when he said, “I’ll come back for you.” When he took one more step back and promised. When he stopped, said my name, told me he loved me, and then the portal swallowed him into the blackness.
Aching and a little breathless, I press the heels of my hands into my eyes hard, as if that will somehow get rid of the memory.
But instead of waving us through, he holds on to them, examining their every corner with the flashlight.
My first reaction is to be annoyed. I’m so exhausted my whole body aches with a heaviness that makes me feel sluggish and irritable. We’re supposed to be on the same team—the good guys—and here we are being