and ended up right back where it started, with a big zero. Circles meant nothing; circles were holes to fall into. Dana wanted constellations like the Big Dipper, Orion, and the reliable North Star pointing the way to Bailey.
Dana’s hands began to shake. Beth Gordon strode across the room and took the box from her.
“These are going to be appreciated.”
Dana looked at the empty room and wondered by whom.
How could she not have foreseen what had to happen eventually, that the women and men who had come forth immediately and with such optimism would eventually grow tired of spending their days in a gloomy basement pretending their cause was not a hole in the ground. She did not blame the others for giving up. She herself wanted to give up sometimes.
Even her husband, David, when he talked about Bailey, had begun to get a discouraged sideways look around his eyes. As much as she wanted to talk about this with him, she could not make herself ask the question. Will we ever find her? All their years together they had been each other’s support and encouragement. When David’s professional football career was over, she told him he would ace the California bar and be another kind of star. Her Ph.D. efforts dragged on and on, but he told her she was brilliant anyway. And when doctors said there was something wrong with Bailey’s mind, they had held each other up. It was the way their marriage had worked until Bailey vanished. For comfort and support they were no good to each other now.
For a few weeks she had attended a support group for the families of children who had disappeared. As if agony could be slotted into an appointment book, the group had met every Tuesday night at seven in a church basement virtually indistinguishable from the undercroft. On a table to one side of the circled chairs, coffee and tea and some kind of cake or cookies were set out. Dana remembered the hum of the air conditioner and the almost constant sound of bodies shifting on the uncomfortable metal chairs. Heavy sighs, the rustle of clothing and scuffle of shoes on the linoleum floor. No one was at ease in that room. No one wanted to be there. Mothers and fathers, boyfriends, grandparents, everyone either overweight or way too thin, the jittery eyes Morse coding the need for a smoke: they all had stories. Their children had vanished from highway rest stops, shopping malls, on the way to school. Ordinary children, not one of them spectacular in any way. Little boys in OshKosh B’Gosh overalls with tape on the temples of their small eyeglasses. Girls in school uniforms or cutoffs, their hair in ponytails or curly or cut short and straight with bangs that hung down over their eyebrows. Dana saw there was an epidemic, a virus of vanishment running through the cities and suburbs of America, with hardly a family left uninfected. “Support group” was a misnomer. The sad faces and stories only deepened Dana’s misery and fed the rage she struggled to suppress.
She was not a quitter. Her emotions never got the better of her good sense. She was stubborn and dogged once she set her mind on something. These were traits that had served her well and brought her far from her beginnings. But sometimes she wished she had been made differently.
Beth’s teenage grandson, Jason, came through the door from the parish kitchen. A fidgety, beanpole boy in baggy pants and a baseball cap worn backward, he stopped when he saw Dana. From across the room she could see the color rise in his cheeks.
“Oh. Mrs. Cabot. Hi.”
He saw the croissants.
“Help yourself,” Dana said.
Beth gestured for him to open a folding chair for Dana. Beth was a tall, stately woman somewhere in age between sixty and eighty, with broad, straight shoulders and the posture of a cadet. Before May, Dana had known her only as a familiar face at the eight o’clock Eucharist. Since Bailey’s disappearance she had learned of Beth’s troubled family history. A son gone bad, a grandson named Jason whom she doted on despite his problems with authority. When Bailey was taken, the shyly adoring Jason had been the first to offer Dana his help, and then Beth and the churchwomen had come forth bearing food—the calming, soporific casseroles, the tortilla bakes and shepherd’s pies. While David and Dana were still stuporous with shock, Jason and the women of St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church had organized the Bailey Fund and raised a phone tree with branches all over the vast diocese of San Diego, stretching into Orange County, Los Angeles, and Arizona. They held a banquet and raised thousands of dollars to cover the cost of materials and printing, though, of course, by now expenses had gone far beyond that. Beth told Dana not to worry about money. The ECW was managing the finances. And a good thing, too. Dana had not looked at a bank statement in three months. She and David were deeply in debt, but it did not matter. There was only room for Bailey in her mind.
Bailey: a seven-year-old with her mother’s brown eyes and her daddy’s heart-shaped mouth and dimpled chin. She had not quite mastered skipping and could not tell time. She had been teaching herself to whistle. She was so pretty and her smile so extraordinarily sunny and dimpled, it was not immediately obvious that there was something wrong. At first Dana and David had not wanted to believe it, and after a dozen trips to doctors of all varieties up and down the coast, they knew no more than what they had guessed themselves. There had been a genetic glitch, and nothing could be done about the slow learning, the obsessive behavior and unpredictable moods. Bailey was not autistic or OCD, the experts said. She was mentally slow and easily frustrated. There might be a mood disorder, but they would not know until she was older.
Beth gestured to the empty room. “It’s one of those days when everyone has an appointment they made months ago. They’ll be coming in later. Do you know I have to arrange to see my dermatologist six months in advance, he’s that busy?”
She’s embarrassed. Because no one is here.
Jason said, “Me and my friend, we’re gonna post these here at all the interstate rest stops.” He held up a new flyer printed on bright yellow paper with Bailey’s school photo in the center. Three front teeth out, but she grinned from ear to ear with no idea of how funny she looked. By now that empty space would be filled in.
Stop.
Beth said, “Jason likes road trips. He’s going to drive up I-5 and then down 101.”
“What about your job?” Dana asked the boy.
“The copy shop don’t care.” He scuffed his feet into the worn linoleum and added, looking at the floor, “They done all the printing for half price.”
Beth patted Dana’s arm. “In their way, they’re part of this, too. We all are. This time next week there’ll be new pictures of Bailey from here to the Oregon border.”
Dana imagined a mountain of paper litter, thousands of trees slaughtered in the name of Bailey Cabot. What happened to these flyers when they’d been read—presuming that anyone looked at them anymore, that people were not sick of the subject of missing children. Who could blame them? Why would anyone want to think about lost children unless life forced the subject upon them? She bit into a chocolate croissant that was dust on her tongue and sawdust in her throat. Sugar thickened on her taste buds, and she realized she had not eaten since lunch the day before. She put her hand over her mouth and swallowed hard.
Beth sat beside her. “Tomorrow there’ll be half a dozen people down here typing and making calls and all that good stuff. Don’t you worry.”
“Do I seem ungrateful?” Dana asked. Misery had made her transparent to others, but to herself she was mystery and dark corners. “I am grateful, though. Truly. Without everything you’ve done, Beth . . .”
“If the shoe were on the other foot, wouldn’t you be helping me? Of course you would.”
Dana could not think how to respond. She could not remember the kind of person she had been before May twenty-ninth. Those days were on the other side of time, in a universe where the only problems were money, snagging time for herself, and making sure the details of life ran smoothly.
“What can I do?” she asked the older woman.
Beth stood up and looked around, hands on hips, her broad shoulders straight as a T square. She and the women like her held the church on their shoulders. “If we make pom-pom streamers for car antennas, the churchwomen will distribute