Blood Orange (2 page)

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS LITTLE GIRL?

Seven-year-old Bailey Cabot was abducted from her home
on May 29, 2004. At the time she wore a pink and lime green
dotted Swiss dress. Bailey’s hair is light brown, her eyes are
brown, and she’s four feet, one inch tall.

Red and green sticky circles dotted the maps of southern
California and western Arizona that were stuck to the walls with strips of masking tape. Green meant the county had been leafleted;
red indicated a Bailey task force had been started in one or more
church congregations. Lutherans and Presbyterians, Methodists and
Unitarians had all become involved. Yellow circles showed that thousands of ID photos of Bailey had been distributed all over California,
Arizona, and Nevada. On a map of the United States blue circles indicated an e-mail campaign underway from San Diego to Vermont.

A three-page article had appeared in People magazine: “HAVE
YOU SEEN BAILEY CABOT?”

There could be no one left in the United States who had not
heard that Bailey Cabot had been stolen from behind her own front
door. If it were propaganda, Dana thought, we’d have won the war
by now.

Instead of circles on the maps, Dana wished the committee had
used stars like those Bailey showed off on the work she brought
home from Phillips Academy. The stars were a code that had been
explained to the parents in a special letter mailed from the principal’s office: a single star meant good effort, and all the children got
that, no matter what; two meant progress; three were cause for a
celebration. No one celebrated circles; circles went nowhere, and
only emphasized the futility and frustration of the search for Bailey
that had started in one place, gone all around the world, 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 eventu ally, 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 1-5 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 them along with
photos.” Walking across the room to a cupboard, she dragged out a
box full of rolls of three-quarter-inch satin ribbon in lime and pink.
“These came in as a donation day before yesterday. Lime and pink
were her favorite colors, right? You told me that?”

Dana nodded. She blinked, and her eyelids ached.

“By next Sunday afternoon there’ll be thousands of these on car
antennas from here to L.A. If I have to tie this ribbon around their
throats, no one’s going to forget Bailey. I promise you that.” Beth
seemed to read Dana’s mind. “I know they look trivial, kind of silly
in a way, but they’re not. Our biggest challenge is to keep the public
thinking about Bailey, watching for her.”

The first few weeks Dana had not been able to sleep but refused
the sleeping pills the doctor prescribed, fearing that if she started
taking them she would sink into oblivion. One night she dreamed of
Bailey at the glass, Bailey knocking at the window crying “Mommy”
and Dana too deeply asleep to notice. When Dana was five and her
mother left her with her grandmother, she had for weeks slept sitting up and wearing shoes, terrified she might not hear the lugging idle of her mother’s old Chrysler New Yorker if it pulled up to the
curb.

Beth was saying, “The worst thing that can happen, is if we let
people forget-“

“Forget?”

“I don’t mean that you’d forget, Dana. Not you, not anyone who
ever knew …” Beth stopped, looking stranded.

These days no one talked to Dana as if she were a normal person.
They treated her like fragile goods, broken by a breath. And she had
lost the gift of conversation. She imagined hostility and irritation all
around her; her feelings were easily hurt, and she took offense even
when she knew none was intended.

The door to the hall opened, and Lexy Neuhaus, the priest at St.
Tom’s and Dana’s best friend, stepped into the room.

“Dana, I thought I’d find you here. I saw your car parked under
the telephone line getting pooped on big time.”

Dana lifted her shoulders and let them drop. She hadn’t washed
her car in three months.

“Can I steal her for a little while, Beth?”

“Go right ahead. I’m fine here. Jason and I have plenty to do.”

Lexy looked at the blue box from Bella Luna. “Do I see chocolate croissants?” She turned her head away, moaning. “Sometimes I
think the whole course of history might have changed if Satan had
offered Jesus a chocolate croissant.”

exy held the door open, and Dana passed through, ahead of the
(priest but aware of the businesslike click of her high heels on
the cement stairs as they both stepped into the bright September
heat. Without speaking they walked across the tree-shaded parking
lot separating the church from the remodeled single-story house of
no distinction that held the church offices. Their feet crunched on
the litter of curled oak leaves. Though the September days were still
hot in San Diego, the nighttime temperatures had begun to drop
into the sixties; and in front of the office the leaves on a pair of large
liquidambar trees were changing from bright green to orange and
glossy red. The shrubs and flowers had spent too many long, warm
days madly manufacturing chlorophyll. In the planters lining the
path the marigolds, zinnias, and pink cosmos nodded on their leggy
stems and looked fevered, on the verge of breakdown, as exhausted
as Dana.