Featured Work

MRS. JOCELYN’S SON Hammond had been doing spectacularly in pre-algebra and it was a delight to tell her so. I waxed on about Hammond’s innate quantitative ability, his friendly and helpful manner in class, his creative problem-solving skills. I segued to a gentle suggestion that there might be occasional interpersonal difficulties, but nothing to worry about. These I knew were primarily due to Hammond’s poor hygiene—his nickname among his peers was “Grease”—but I had no intention of mentioning that in a parent-teacher conference. The kid caused me no problems and was a whiz at the math.

Mrs. Jocelyn beamed brighter as I brought the conference to a close with the classic pleasure-to-teach. Not that I’m insincere when I use it, but you develop a certain shorthand for these things, and sometimes it’s surprising how completely parents fall for it. Mrs. Jocelyn’s pride in her son shone through an otherwise haggard demeanor—Hammond was the third of her kids I had taught in as many years, and God only knew how many more were in line, wearing the poor woman out with their hygiene issues and their need to be fed and their unsettling intellectual gifts Hammond and his siblings all attended Sheffield Academy on academic scholarship. Mrs. Jocelyn was proud of her brood, and genuinely grateful for the opportunities Sheffield afforded them. She touched a hand to the ruffled neckline of a pale green, faded-looking dress when she thanked me.

The conferences were drawing to a close. Most of the parents had been sane and polite and unassuming. Others lived up to the cliché of private school parents, furrowing their brows and jabbering on about college prospects, with the occasional hint of threat underneath the concerned veneer, as though five years from now I’d better watch my back if their kid ended up at the ag tech. A good portion, maybe a third of the total, had no clue about their twelve-year-olds, academically or otherwise. That proportion would increase sharply over the next few years, reaching something close to a hundred percent parental cluelessness by the time the kids hit tenth grade. I was starting my third year of teaching and felt pretty confident with he ropes. It’s amazing how fast you learn to read the parents, how few surprises there ever are. Early in the evening, Emily Warrenton’s mother had cried a little, but that was nothing I hadn’t seen before.

It was exactly ten after nine when I ushered Mrs. Jocelyn out the door. I said goodbye with the freshest smile I could muster at that late hour, and reminded myself that I was almost done—only Timmy Dolan and Rachel Allimont left to go. I worried that I might not be up to the task of filling the Dolans in on the subtleties of what I perceived to be Timmy’s rather deep-rooted problems, partly because I was getting fuzzy with fatigue. I’d caught myself at one point telling Mrs. Jocelyn that Hammond had gotten a whiz on the last test, but I was pretty sure she hadn’t noticed.

Rachel’s parent were waiting in the hall, sitting awkwardly in the student desk-chair combinations that had been lined up out there, an indignity all the parents had to suffer. They were scheduled for after Timmy’s parents but had arrived early. Rachel’s mother, a petite woman in jeans and a jean jacket with a notebook open in front of her, said hello to Mrs. Jocelyn and then apologetically to me, “Don’t mind us, Mr. Wesley. They told us how you like to stick to your schedule.” She mimed zipping her lip and waved me back into the classroom with complicated self-effacing semaphore: we’ll wait our turn, we’re humble people—an offering of patience tot he teacher conference gods, that her mute deference might earn her daughter a glowing report. Her husband sat next to her smiling dully, a big genial man crammed into his desk, obliviously used to this kind of nonsense from the little lady. I was sure it all said something about why Rachel was so clearly headed toward eating disorders, but I was too tired to piece it together. I considered telling them to come in and get it over with since there were no Dolans in sight, but instead I waved my thanks and ducked back into the room for a breather.

I went back to my desk and turned to my notes on Timmy Dolan, wondering which “they” had made me out to Rachel’s parents to be a persnickety schedule Nazi. Probably Mary Ann in the front office, who had always had some kind of problem with me. I glanced out the window at the leafy autumn parking lot, where several figures milled about among the cars in the eerie glow of metal halide lighting. I was about among the cars in the eerie glow of metal halide lighting. I was about to let the Allimonts in when there was a knock on the door. I put on a charming attitude and rose to greet the Dolans.

The wife opened the door and smiled at me apologetically, mock-devastated. She was white, which I had heard, and tall. She moved confidently into the room, revealing a startlingly handsome black man with a squarish face that I recognized immediately. Gray at the temples, tall like his wife, wide shoulders, tweed jacket. He looked at me and paused in the doorway as if considering a retreat, then stepped in and closed the door behind him in a kind of dazed slow motion. I’d had sex with him in Yellow Notch Park. Twice.

Mrs. Dolan said, “I’m so, so sorry. Are those poor people in the hall waiting because of us?”

I half nodded, half shook my head, keeping my eyes on hers.

“It’s inexcusable, I know,” she continued. “I’m Loretta Dolan and this is my husband John.”

I extended my hand and she took it in both hers and squeezed a further apology. When she released it, I extended it toward her husband, with a dizzying awareness of having done so in the past. He took it and we shook hands perfunctorily, but with a moment of direct eye contact. In one glance we both saw that the other knew, and that we were on our own.

I remembered those eyes: beautiful and deeply brown. They had once looked at me with raw appraisal and veiled interest, and then, when we ran into each other the second time, with recognition and playfulness and desire. And he had noticed mine, too. Those are some beautiful green eyes now, aren’t they?

“Nice to meet you both,” I said, motioning them to take the chairs that faced my desk. THey were adult-sized folding chairs, not demeaning student desklets, but as I took my own more comfortable seat behind the bulwark of my desk, I wondered if the arrangement might make some parents feel an unwelcome power dynamic. It occurred to me that in this ase I should feel grateful for any advantage, but I’d had no such intention when I first chose the setup two years ago. The prospect of unconscious unacknowledged intentions of all sorts suddenly filled my brain, vaguely and alarmingly.

And yet my exterior seemed to show no alarm, no distress, any. more than Mr. Dolan’s did. He sat next to his wife and took her hand in his. He wore a thick gold wedding band, which had not been there in the park. From all indications—the small, finely calibrated smile on his face, the precise relaxation of his body, neither too rigid nor too loose—the initial panic I was sure I had witnessed just seconds earlier had completely vanished, or perhaps had never been there at all. He sat with his wife and waited for me to begin. The beautiful eyes showed friendliness and attentiveness in perfect proportion for the parent-teacher conference scenario. I smiled at Mr. and Mrs. Dolan exactly as I expected to be smiling at Mr. and Mrs. Allimont in ten minutes’ time. It was astonishing how accomplished Mr. Dolan and I both were at this, whatever it was we were doing.

“Okay,” Mrs. Dolan said with a comically exaggerated sigh, “let’s hear the bad news.” She glanced at her husband with a little laugh, then back at me.

“Oh, no. No bad news,” I said. “Not really.” I pushed around some papers on my desk, looking for my notes on Timmy, and remembered that they were on top of the pile.

“Timmy’s a great kid,” I said, habit coming to my rescue. It generally seemed best to start with something noncommittally positive like great-kid. It was never really a lie. A kid could be great in any number of ways—most kids were, if you looked hard enough for the evidence—and still be abominable in plenty of others.

“Oh, good,” said Mrs. Dolan. “It’s so nice to hear at least something positive, even if you don’t really mean it. The reason we were late was Ms. Davis had so many bad things to say about Timmy that she kept us there for twenty minutes, didn’t she, honey?” Nadine Davis taught earth science. She and I had often commiserated about Timmy over coffee.

“She was unkind,” said Mr. Dolan. The voice was deep and masculine, self-confident, not quite how I remembered it. I had known him to use it only sparingly—some beautiful green eyes now. I wasn’t sure I had used my own at all in my encounters with him. His was all direct efficiency now, but its availability for sensual nuance was there in the undertones. The smile appeared to be fading.

“No, not unkind,” said Mrs. Dolan, removing her hand from his. She looked at me to check my reaction, which I hoped was neutral. “She was just very clear about certain things.”

I found myself searching for a phrase that wouldn’t come to me, something descriptive of this encounter or some aspect of it. There was a perfect word for it, but I couldn’t think what it was.

“I call it unkind when someone calls my son maladjusted,” he said.

Mrs. Dolan rolled her eyes in my direction as if to ask my indulgence, then turned to her husband and said, “She didn’t say that . And do you mean unkind to him or to you?”

Down low was the phrase. He was having sex with other men in secret. He was on the down low.

“To him,” he said evenly. He shifted his focus to me. The smile fell away. I imagined I saw him decide, in his annoyance with his wife and Nadine, that if behaving normally was going to be his goal, he might as well drop the politeness act. “But why don’t we hear what Mr. Wesley thinks.”

“Oh,” I said, “I’m sure Ms. Davis doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” The disorientation that sets in after three hours of conferences is a kind of drunkenness. I felt unfit for the concentration this was going to require.

Mrs. Dolan laughed, as if I’d made an intentional joke. Mr. Dolan was unmoved. He said, “How is Timmy doing?” He stared at me, impatiently I though, but as though it had nothing to do with me, as though impatience were a habitual state with him. He was bouncing a knee. It looked as though it could bounce forever. The eyes were steady, comfortable in impatience.

“As you probably know,” I began, “he hasn’t been doing all that well on quizzes and test so far this year.”

“No, we didn’t know,” Mr. Dolan said, with no hesitation and no request for corroboration from his wife. “Ms. Davis said the same thing and it was news to us. How badly is he doing?”

“We didn’t actually think there had been enough time for tests yet,” Mrs. Dolan said, defending herself in advance against charges of not keeping close enough tabs on her son and his quizzes and his college prospects and his at-risk behaviors. We were six weeks into the year and I’d given three quizzes and three test.

“The transition to middle school can be rough for some kids, and there can be some transitioning for parents as well. Sheffield is very big on quizzes and test, even though we’re not supposed to admit that.”

The bid for conspiratorial camaraderie had no discernible effect on either of them.

“So how badly is he doing?” Mr. Dolan asked again.

“Well.” I knew the answer, but took some time to look at my notes anyway. “His average is a 63.”

“So he’s flunking.”

“He’s not off to a good start, no.”

Except for the discomposure of his first few seconds in the room, we still had not shared the slightest acknowledge of our situation—no subtle warning in an inflection of voice, not even a conspicuous avoidance of eye contact from either of us. I was sure that any observer—Mrs. Dolan, for example—would be incapable of detecting anything out of the ordinary, other than the typical tensions of a conference with a teacher who’s failing your child. But that absence, that refusal, was itself a bond. Mr. Dolan and I shared an impregnable hiding place, some pitch-black cave where we couldn’t be seen, even by each other, hunched in our separate corner—but we were both there.

“There’s still plenty of time to get him on track,” I said. “And I was wondering how you thought we might be able to work together to make that happen.” This was standard issue, Education 101. When a child has emotional and developmental problems, you’re not going to get anywhere without full collaboration with the family. But as soon as it was out of my mouth, I realized what bullshit it was, because I saw what bullshit Mr. Dolan considered it to be.

He lowered his eyebrows a tad. “So you need help from us on this,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “it’s Timmy who needs all our help.”

“Because his problems are so sever?”

“He didn’t say that,” said his wife, her pitch rising with her annoyance. ” I think my husband is just concerned, Mr. Wesley. We’re both more concerned that we expected to be this evening. We think Timmy is a good boy.”

“Oh, he is!” I said. My need to please had taken over, the need to keep the meeting safe, and I heard the insincerity and weakness in my voice.

“If things are so bad, why is everybody just mentioning it to us now” asked Mr. Dolan. His frown deepend, demanding something coherent from me, something they could use.

It was a nastiness. That was the word Nadine and I had settled on. Never a punch, never a swear word, never any detentionable offense. Nothing that could be said, nothing to point that would begin to cover it. Just constant, low-level meanness, self-satisfied underachievement, unpleasantness, unworthiness. He sneered at people. He sneered at his classwork and homework. Most of the other children hated him and avoided him. The friends he did have were always just back from a suspension or on their way out again. We didn’t like him, but we were worried about him, or at least we thought we should be.

Mr. Dolan was looking into my eyes in a new way, as if he’d heard my thoughts. The look was ironic and predatory at the same time, aware of both the game and the stakes, like the first look he ever gave me. He was bringing it into the open, warning me to remember myself on my knees before him under the pine trees before I dared to say another word about his son.

And then the pine trees of Yellow Notch Park, surrounded us there in the classroom, where I never allowed them. Their Christmas smell, the cool damp of their shade. I’d been living in Burlington a week or two when I discovered them, out for an innocent drive in the Vermont countryside the summer before I started at Sheffield. The parking area showed all the signs—secluded, silent, a few empty cars, a few with single men behind the wheel who watched you as you drove by and then as you parked and wandered into the woods to see what might be there to sees. Something to do if you’re new in town, or lonely and lazy, or daring, or shy, or too redneck for the bars, or married. I called myself curious. I’d been curious since puberty.

A path led down along the creek that dried up to nothing in the summer. Mr. Dolan and I circled each other at a distance the first time, slow, spiraling in, cautious, probably not cautious enough. The second time was months later, last April, and there was no circling, no hesitation then. Beautiful green eyes now, aren’t they?

I turned to his wife. She looked at me as if waiting for me to say something. I imagined her guessing the truth from my eyes and racing home in tears, piling Timmy and some clothes in a car and getting as far from her husband and me as she could. Or—did she already know? Maybe she’d been putting up with it for years. Or maybe she liked it, liked to watch. Or had secret lives of her own. Maybe she was an old hand at sitting politely, pretending everything was in her control, waiting in secret for the components of her life to fly apart. Why shouldn’t she be as good at the game as her husband and I were?

She waited for another moment, and then said, “What exactly are we talking about Mr. Wesley? How do you think we can help?” She was holding her husband’s hand again. Whether for comfort or to restrain him, I couldn’t tell.

“No,” I said, “It’s not. . .”

Mr Dolan leaned forward in his seat.

“I’m only here as hi math teacher,” I said. “Maybe if you could help with him homework from time to time—”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Dolan, seizing on this as a solution to whatever the problem was. “We should do that. We can do that?”

She looked to her husband and I remembered his hands on me, under my shirt.

“The problem is fractions,” I said.

Mr. Dolan looked as if I’d spoken Latin. “Fractions?” he said. “What does that mean?”

“He doesn’t have them under control.”

“He doesn’t have fractions under control?”

“What is so hard to understand about that?” his wife asked him, clearly furious with him now and trying not to show it, but still holding the hand with the wedding ring, holding to the idea of the unified front. “Mr. Wesley is the math teacher and he’s telling us that Timmy is having trouble with fractions.”

“What’s hard to understand about fractions?” Mr. Dolan asked me.

“Well, you know. How to add them. Finding the lowest common denominator. For Timmy, even what they mean, really.”

“What they mean?”

“Yes.”

“What do they mean?”

“Well, you know, in the sense of what the numerator and the denominator represent.”

“What do the numerator and the denominator represent?”

“John!” said Mrs. Dolan. “What is your problem tonight?”

“Apparently it’s some kind of a math problem, Loretta.”

“I apologize,” Mrs. Dolan said. “He knows perfectly well what the numerator and denominator represent.”

“Do you?” He asked her.

“Yes! Piece of Pie!”

“Sometimes,” I interrupted, falling back again on the tried-and-true, falling back, falling back, “I try to use real-world examples to make it easier and more fun, especially since some kids, like Timmy, aren’t able to think . . . abstractly yet at this age. But Timmy doesn’t really respond to that the way some other concrete-thinking children do.”

“Okay,” Mr. Dolan said. He help up his hands in a sarcastic surrender. “Think of me as a concrete child. Give me a real-world example. Make this easier and more fun.”

He leaned back in his seat as though getting comfortable for a long explanation, but Mrs. Dolan pulled her hand sharply out of his, as though he had squeezed it painfully. She immediately recovered and folded her hands on the conference orientation sheet she had on her lap. Or maybe he hadn’t squeezed too hard at all and I was merely extrapolating from the bruises he had left me with, a little discomfort and discoloration to remember him by the next day. Not the first time, but the second, when his hands held my ribs and pushed me against a tree and he kissed me until I stopped struggling against it.

Mrs. Dolan sat up very straight, hands folded in front of her, still doing her best to give nothing away. And what was she struggling against? A wretched sex life at the very least. Emotional neglect. Was he in the habit of bruising her? Or Timmy? I suddenly felt that I was the one in the room with the least to lose. I wanted him to remember that I hadn’t been the only one on my knees.

“Okay,” I said. “Say one-third of the kids in the room have brown eyes and one-half have blue eyes—what fraction have eyes that are neither brown nor blue? That kind of thing.”

He looked away and stared at the wall, at my poster of pi to ten thousand decimal places. Then he looked at his wife, shaking his head in a parody of disbelief, then back to me. “That’s a real-world example?”

“A simple one.”

“You have a lot of classrooms where half the eyes are blue?”

It was the resonate voice again. The deeper, woodsy tone. Challenging me, shifting the parameters, seducing me back to his home turf.

“It’s only hypothetical,” I said.

“Why not look at the actual eyes of the actual kids in the class and use the real numbers? Everybody might learn a thing or two.”

He was doing a great impression of refusing to see the point, a tactic his son was a master of. I had allowed Timmy to decide the terms of too many arguments to allow it again here.

“Because then everything would become a simple matter of counting, Mr. Dolan.”

“Well if it’s a simple matter of counting, then it’s a simple matter of counting. Why complicate it for the poor kids?”

“It’s not a matter of . . .”

“How is it different from saying some of the kids are black and some are white and some are left over, so how many must be both?”

“John, please don’t be ridiculous,” Mrs. Dolan said quietly, looking at the floor.

“Or there’s three little nelly boys in a class of fifteen, what fraction of the boys are queer? Is that what you get into with these kids, Mr. Wesley?”

Mrs. Dolan stood up. Her eyes were closed. She looked not merely mortified but genuinely shocked by her husband’s behavior, and I realized she had no idea. No idea who she lived with, no idea who was teaching her kid. She only knew her husband was insulting me, and that something was more wrong that she had suspected. She put a hand on her husband’s shoulder and appeared to squeeze it hard. Again it wasn’t clear whether it was him or herself that she was trying most to control. “Mr. Wesley, I’m terribly sorry about all this.”

Mr. Dolan shrugged her hand off and stood next to her and said, “I asked y ou a question. Are those the kind of things you’re teaching my boy, Mr. Wesley?”

Mrs. Dolan spoke loudly and with finality, an unmistakable warning to her husband not to interrupt again. “Mr. Wesley, my husband is an engineer. I’m sure he knows all there is to know about fractions, including why it’s important for Timmy to learn how to handle them. I’m not sure why he’s putting either of us through all this. We should go.” She picked her purse up off the floor and headed for the door.

Her husband remained where he was. HE stood looking down at me, back-lit by fluorescents that I could now hear humming. In the stillness of the eyes I thought I could see that he felt he’d won, but then I decided the subtlety of the approach, the first touch, the strength of his arms, the rush of fear I felt in myself and in him. The kinds of power we held over each other then and still held. And I thought again of his wife leaving him, shattered, even less able to handle Timmy on her own. Then I thought of the Allimonts out in the hall, waiting to hear what I would have to say about their daughter, expecting to believe me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not sure which part of me was speaking, or to whom.

He looked for a moment as though he might reply, but instead looked away, and I caught a glipse of Timmy in his profile, the same curve of forehead, the same resignation and retreat. The shame that he could not allow himself. I watched him follow his wife out of the room and I thought then, and almost believed, that I would not be going back to that park.

---

THEY LOOK LIKE THEY’RE IN ON IT. That’s how kidnapped girls strike me on the flyers circulated after their abductions. The pictures are usually school photos, which don’t start off as anything special—just an image of a child told to sit in front of a gray paper screen and smile. But when that picture gets taped to a shop window, scanned onto the back of a milk carton, and stamped with the word “Missing!” the kidnapped girl becomes a star, someone we desperately need to see. It’s as if posing for a picture makes her complicit in her own disappearance; if she’d just stayed out of sight, after all, she wouldn’t be missing girl’s final moments, and makes me wonder why she didn’t hide, why she was foolish enough to smile, even though one day soon, as she skipped to school, a man would drive by pointing and say, “That one. The cute one. She’s the one I want.”

That’s what happened to Jaycee Lee Dugard, one of the vanished stars. On June 10, 1991, a man and woman drove up to her while she was waiting at her school bus stop, pulled her into their. car, and sped away. According to the photos on the Missing flyers that soon appeared, Jaycee didn’t see it coming and smile all the way through it. She would stay missing for eighteen years, until she was finally found in 2009.

The story of Jaycee’s kidnapping sounds a lot like another story I heard as a little girl, the story of being seen doing something you do every day, and then being discovered and made a star. Nadia Comaneci was spotted doing cartwheels in her schoolyard and became the first Olympic 10. Cindy Crawford was spotted in a cornfield in Illinois and became a supermodel. Every day as I went to school, went to dance class or went to the grocery store with my mother, I thought about these stories and staged my discovery in my mind, wondering who would see me and when. I didn’t want to be lost exactly, but I wanted desperately to be found.

Michaela Garecht, Amber Swartz-Garcia, and Jaycee were all stars of my youth—girls who were kidnapped in Northern California, where I grew up, when they were more or less my age. They were my best friends the way Jason Priestley was my boyfriend: I stared at their pictures, memorized every detail of their lives, and looked for them everywhere I went. Jaycee’s story struck closest to home. When she was eleven and I was thirteen, she was taken from the same neighborhood in South Lake Tahoe where my grandparents had a vacation home, a neighborhood where A-frame houses in cul-de-sacs are tucked into groves of Jeffrey Pines. My memories of Tahoe are summer memories—visits to the lake during the day to sit on warm sand, read Sweet Valley High books, and float on air mattresses, one hand dangling into the water. The summer after she went missing, Jaycee kept me company all day long.

In the morning, I saw her picture on the front window of the market where my grandfather and I walked to pick up the paper. Along the way, I would count the fire hydrants at the edge of the road. Each fire hydrant was topped with a small flag, so it could be located under the snow. After Jaycee was kidnapped, I imagined her counting the hydrants as she was driven away, a trial of breadcrumbs that would be buried when the seasons changed.

“I heard she doesn’t even look like that anymore,” said a man in the market one day. “I heard that whoever grabbed her cut her hair as soon as she got in the car.”

Every afternoon my family went shopping at Raley’s. where I saw those flyers taped at the entrance. I made sure to have as much fun as I could picking out the special foot I ate only on vacation—jellybeans and Fruit Roll-Ups and Skippy peanut butter—because I felt Jaycee watching me do what she no longer could. Jaycee’s flyers spun around on the casinos’ revolving doors, and on the evenings when my grandparents took us to Harrah’s buffet for dinner. I would turn to get a look at her description—four feet seven inches, eighty pounds, blond hair and blue eyes—as my grandmother hurried my sister and me past the slot machines.

Most of the flyers featured on of two photos. The school photo showed Jaycee with her hair in what I used to call a some-hair-up-some-hair-down ponytail. Her bangs are brushed to either side of her forehead, a bit out of place, as if she’s been running or jumping rope. She’s looking straight at the camera, smiling with her mouth a little open, perhaps laughing at something the photographer said. Our school photographer told us to say, “boys have stinky feet,” and I always started laughing before I could get the words out. The other photo on the flyers looked like a snapshot, more close-up than the school photo, as if there were originally other people in the picture who had been cropped. Jaycee looks mischievous, like she could barely stand still long enough for that picture to be taken. Her smile faces the camera, but her eyes wander off in the direction of her ponytail. These photos didn’t stay where they were supposed to, in the plastic sleeve of her stepfather’s wallet, or taped to a magnet and stuck on her aunt’s fridge. Only people who loved her were supposed to see them.

In my first school photo, I look like I already know what a frightening thing it is to be seen. I wear a denim jumper, a red gingham blouse, and red barrettes, and I’m frowning. My mother tells me this is because I used to misunderstand what it meant to smile. In candid pictures, taken when I was twirling on a tire swing or running through the sprinklers, I grinned like any kid. But when I was made to smile for the camera, I furrowed my brown, stuck out my lower lip, and turned down the corners of my mouth. As I grew older, though, I figured out what to do, and even enjoyed posing. I began to understand what it took to become a star. After Charles and Diana got married, my parents bought a coffee table book of royal wedding photos. I’d flip through the pages, focusing on the pictures taken of Diana when she was still a schoolteacher, when the world was just beginning to see her. One photo caught her standing in the schoolyard, balancing a child on her hip. She wore a long white skirt, and the sun shone behind her, exposing her legs to view. Maybe because she was aware of this, or maybe because she wasn’t, she lowered her chin and gazed at the camera through her eyelashes. She looks reluctant to be seen, but like she still wants to know who’s watching. She looks like a star.

When I was eleven or twelve, my friends and I took pictures of ourselves pretending to be someone else. We used hot rollers and crimpers and my mother’s free Clinique make-up samples, and we made ourselves up like celebrities. My prettiest friend had long brown hair and large brown eyes, so we would an eye pencil to color in a dark mole on her upper lip and she would pose like Cindy Crawford. One day we went to Glamour Shots, where cranky college-aged girls did our hair and make-up and then took our photos. They teased and curled my hair until it surrounded my head like a halo. They brushed orange eye shadow up to my brows, taped on false eyelashes, and coated my lips in sticky pink gloss. They gave me a red scarf to wear, and draped it over my shoulders so it looked like I wasn’t wearing anything else. I felt gorgeous and mysterious while the camera was clicking, cut when I saw the photos, all those layers of paint and fabric looked like a crow of people piled on top of me, hiding me from view.

When my friend’s mother picked us up from the shop, she bought a few photos of her daughter and the flipped through mine.

“Melissa, don’t you want to buy anything?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“But I think your parent would love these!”

“I don’t think they would,” I said.

That night, my father drove to the mall and bought all the photos. I told him I didn’t think I looked that good in them, and that I didn’t want any. He said that he only got them because he didn’t want anyone else to see me like that. I didn’t look like anyone he recognized.

As time went on and Jaycee stayed missing, photographs of her gave way to fantasies. She was eleven when she was kidnapped, and eleven-year-old girls change quickly. Those Missing flyers were probably outdated before they even went up, if she had her ponytail cut off in those first few minutes. A few summers after she was abducted, I began seeing flyers with images of an older Jaycee, uses age-advancement technology to represent what she might look like now, if she were still alive and attractive and in the habit of sitting for photos. In one, she looks about sixteen, like a high school athlete who’s popular but doesn’t make a big deal out of it. She looks strong and confident, but her smile’s not quite as wide as when she was younger. The other picture looks like it could have been taken when she was younger. The other picture looks like it could have been taken at her first job out of college, maybe working as an office manager or an elementary school teacher. She wears hoop earrings and a denim jacket, and this time her smile is bright, showing off dimples on her cheeks.

Those age-advancement images must be so hard on the parents. After they see that picture, something between a portrait and a police sketch, they have to accept that their daughter is now someone else’s creation. But parents take so many pictures of their children in disguise. I have a picture of myself as a princess, trick-or-treat in a silver gown; I have a picture of myself as a purple crayon, cartwheeling in a matching leotard and triangular felt cap; I have a picture of myself draped in pink pearls, playing dress-up with my great-aunt’s costume jewelry. Jaycee’s age-advancement images don’t seem so different from my snapshots. They made her look like she was happy and safe, enjoying an afternoon of make-believe. I wonder if that’s the reason those images didn’t bring her back home. Apparently, Jaycee was spotted a number of times while she was missing—by a neighborhood boy, by a man at a gas station—but nobody recognized her as a little girl in danger.

She was finally found in August 2009, shortly after Phillip Garrido went to the police station on the UC Berkeley campus, hoping to get permission to hold an event for a Christian program he had started called “God’s Desire.” He seemed a little odd, so the officer he spoke with asked him to come again the next day. In the meantime, she did a background check, and realized Garrido was a registered sex offender, currently on parole. When he returned to the campus station, he brought along two girls, aged eleven and fourteen, whom he introduced as his daughters. After they left, the police officer called Garrido’s parole officer, who said that Garrido didn’t have any daughters. The parole officer asked Garrido to come in for a meeting. Once again, he obliged, bringing along the two girls, his wife Nancy, and a young woman named Alissa. When police spoke with Alissa separately, they discovered that she was actually Jaycee, and those two little girls were her daughters with Garrido. He was charged with abduction and rape, and Jaycee was reunited with her mother. In June 2011, Garrido was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. His wife, Nancy was also found guilty, and sentenced to thirty-six years to life. Appearing on the cover of People magazine in October 2009, Jaycee looked completely different from what everyone imagined. She was taller, her hair was curly, she was brunette—but there was something else, too. She was a real girl once again.

Just as with pictures of any star, photographs and age-advancement images do not simply represent with girl; they are all we have left of the girl, and perhaps all that they want. After they go missing, kidnapped girls are at our disposal. We see their pictures and make up stories about where they are and who they might become, filling in a few details and making up the rest. In reality, of course, every picture takes us a bit further from the truth. The girl who goes missing loses more of herself every time she is seen, even by those just trying to protect her, trying to imagine her back in the place she should be. I always felt like those pictures made the missing girl look just like me; imagining myself in her pace, her terror became my own.

I grew up surrounded by an elaborate system of safety precautions that should have made me feel protected. The knowledge that someone was always watching out for me, no matter where I was, should have comforted me. But safety drills and neighborhood safe zones only increased my sense of danger, making me feel like every menace was close at hand. Everyone began to look like a threat.

When children in my neighborhood sensed danger—say, if a strange car started following us down the street—we were supposed to knock on the door of the closest Block Parent, identified by a yellow sign in their front window. The presence of Block Parents implied that one or two people in your neighborhood are guaranteed not to hurt you. As for the rest—who knew? Looking at the houses next to the Block Parent homes, I wondered what they were hiding. They weren’t saying they would keep safe. So what were they saying? But then I would look back to the Block Parent sign and wonder if that home hid the real strangers I should fear. Perhaps I shouldn’t trust what I saw. What if Block Parents were actually kidnappers hoping to lure children into their homes, and those yellow signs were like the gumdrops and peppermints that tricked Hansel and Gretel? I knew I wasn’t supposed to enter the home of a stranger. But was it okay if I was only trying to hide from someone worse?

My elementary school frequently held “stranger danger” drills. First, we heard a high, piercing beep, and then we learned what was wrong. Our principal, Sister Elaine, would get on the school loudspeaker and say something like, “There is an unidentified woman by the drinking fountain. All children must stay in the classroom.” That beep always indicated the start of an announcement, and at 8:10 every morning, it was as reassuring as homemade pancakes, signaling a daily ritual of prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. But at any other time of day, it meant something bad had happened, something out of the ordinary. When the Challenger space shuttle broke into two streams of smoke, we heard that beep, followed by Sister’s broken voice leading us in a decade of the rosary.

I was always a little excited to hear that unexpected beep. You knew it couldn’t mean something terrible happened to you personally—student messengers arrived at the classroom door with a note from the secretary when there was a family emergency. And no actual disaster would ever be signaled by a beep. We heard that beep for our fire and earthquake drills, when it was obvious that we weren’t actually having a fire or an earthquake. With those drills, there was nothing to fear.

But stranger drills were different. We had to stay inside, sit where we always sat, and keep doing the work we always did—so we could never really tell whether the threat was real. We couldn’t rely on our senses to help assess the situation. If there were a fire we have smelled it, if there were an earthquake, we would have felt it—in that kind of disaster, your body can help you save yourself. But during a stranger drill, all we could do was stay inside, feel uneasy, and wonder if we were being watched.

After a half hour or so, the principal would come on the loudspeaker to give us the all clear, and tell us it had only been pretend. Someone always had to run to the bathroom then, having barely held it throughout the drill. But the rest of us just went back to doing what we were doing during the drill, which made it seem like we were always surrounded by strangers and could never know when we were safe. If you don’t burn, you’ve avoided a fire; if you regain your balance, you’ve survived an earthquake; but if you stick to your same routine—leaving your house at the same time every morning, walking to the same corner where the carpool mom picks you up, drinking from the same drinking fountain at recess—you can’t be reassured because everything’s back to normal. It’s the predictability of these routines that puts us in danger, that makes us able to be spotted, and maybe stolen.

One day when I was in third grade, two child safety experts visited our classroom, teaching us what to do if anyone tried to steal us. The women put each child through a simulated abduction attempt. They started by describing a few scenarios in which we could be kidnapped. Let’s say you live close to school, and it’s a Saturday, and you want to play on the monkey bars without all those bigger kids around stealing your turn. You go to school by yourself, where you’re used to feeling safe, and a strange man grabs you from behind while you’re hanging off the bars, drags you to the parking lot, stuffs you in a waiting car, and you’re off. Or, let’s say your tap dancing class is over, and you’re waiting outside for your mother to pick you up. It’s November, just starting to get cold, and you have a sweatshirt, but even though you zip it up, it only goes down to your waist, and your tights aren’t really keeping you warm. Pretty soon a woman about your mother’s age pulls up next to you and says she’s there to take you home, says she’s your new neighbor, doing a favor for your mother. You’ve never seen her before, but maybe you have; a lot of the neighborhood ladies look alike. She seems nice, she drives a station wagon, so you get in and you’re off.

“You have to remember all of the weapons you carry around with you every day,” one of the women said. She scanned the room as she spoke, bobbing her head in line with each row of desks. “Like your fingers! Like your fingernails!” She raised her arms about her head and clamped her hands open and shut like a cartoon lobster. “Don’t forget your pinchers!”

The pinching technique fit in with the being-grabbed-from-behind scenario. You were supposed to pinch your abductor’s arms and hands to make them release you. When it was my turn to demonstrate the technique, I looked at my feet, clenching my stomach muscles the way I would when my sister tickled me. When the woman grabbed me from behind, I started to giggle.

The other child safety expert, standing at the back of the room, shouted, “Go, go! Come on! Time’s running out!”

I tried to pinch, but my fingernails were ragged, chewed to my skin, and I couldn’t get a good grip.

“I’m dragging you to my car,” the woman said. “We’re about to drive away.”

My classmates started to laugh.

“I can’t do it, I can’t,” I said, blushing and out of breath. After a minute or so, my teacher told me I could head back to my seat.

“All right, everybody,” the safety expert said. “Something just happened that you have to make never happens in a real situation. Melissa didn’t pinch me because she didn’t want to be mean. She knows she’s not supposed to to mean to grown-ups, so she didn’t want to hurt me. But that won’t help you in a real situation.”

She was wrong. I didn’t pinch because I was afraid to drawn any more attention to myself. I felt so exposed already. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t forget what it felt like to be grabbed from behind, to pinch the person grabbing you and know you couldn’t pinch hard enough to save yourself. Trying to practice my pinching, I dug the nail of each index finger into the tops of my thumbs. But I had a habit of scratching my thumbs when I felt anxious, so pinching myself only added to my anxiety, as if the repeated act of keeping myself safe was an expression of fear, and nothing more. Any precaution I might take, anything I might do to protect myself, seemed beside the point. Practicing what I was supposed to do in a “real situation” made me feel like I was rehearsing my part as the kidnapped child in every abduction story I’d ever heard. I pulled the covers up to my chin and looked at the crack of light under my bedroom door, watching for the shadows of a stranger’s feet. Recalling those two strangers in my classroom, grabbing and shouting at me, I could see how my abduction story would end.

I always thought it would happen to me. I grew up blue-eyed and blond, just like Amber and Michaela and Jaycee. “They’re killing Kennedys,” Jackie supposedly said after Bobby was assassinated. “They’re killing blonds,” I though to myself, every time I felt in danger. I know it’s absurd to think of hair color as an affliction. I know how ridiculous it sounds, how sorely y fear lacked perspective. It isn’t just blond girls who are kidnapped; boys go missing too, and so often we focus on the abductions of white children while ignoring the children of color who disappear from their homes and fade from public memory all too quickly. But I’m not the only one worried about blonds. In September 2009, amidst the flurry of interest in Jaycee’s reappearance, the New York Times ran a story questioning whether parents should allow their children to walk to school by themselves. The author of the article, Jan Hoffman, wrote that her friends warned her not to let her daughter walk alone, saying things like, “‘She’s just so pretty. She’s just so . . . blond.'”

On morning when I was thirteen, my mother turned on the news as my sister and I got ready for school. The night before, a thirty-one-year-old man carrying three guns had walked into a bar in Berkeley and taken everyone hostage, killing a UC Berkeley student and wounding several other people. Mehrdad Dashti shot out the lights in the room. Then he made the blond women strip from the waist down, and had the men violate them with carrots. I remember seeing the news reports that morning live from the scene, eating my Cheerios and watching half-naked blonds run out of the bar. They didn’t scream or cry; they just stared straight ahead, avoiding the cameras and each other, and ran like hell. I wondered if, by watching these women, I was violating them myself—violating them in the same way that all those Missing flyers violate kidnapped girls. The missing disappear because they’ve been exposed, but they can only be discovered when they are exposed again. This is the dilemma of visibility. This is what it means to be lost, and then found.

I’ve got my own story of being lost and found. I always think of it as the day I was almost kidnapped on my way home from kindergarten. My mother waited at the bus stop for me one afternoon, and kept waiting as the other children filed out. When the driver pulled away, and I still hadn’t appeared, she got in her station wagon and drove to my school. I imagine her rushing into the classroom, where my teacher was putting away tubs of paste left over from that day’s art project. He told my mother that he definitely saw me get on the bus. What must have happened, he said, was that he somehow walked me to the wrong bus, and that I was probably still on the wrong bus. He gave her maps of the routes that the other buses took, and my mother got back in the car to drive around town.

Three kindergarten buses lined up at the school curb every afternoon. I always took the third in line, the one marked “C.” But on that day, the buses were out of order, and the one marked “C” was second in line. I didn’t know what to do, so I got on the third bus, which that day was marked “B.” When the bus turned left at the corner instead of right, I realized my mistake and panicked. I started crying, and at the first stop I rushed up to tell the driver that I was on the wrong bus. She said I would have to stay on the bus until she finished her route and then she would bring me back to school. Despite what she said, I though I would have to stay on the bus until someone discovered me, cold and hungry and stinking like vinyl from sleeping on the seats all night.

I ran back to the last seat and cried, until I heard a car honking behind us. My mother told me later that when I turned around, she saw the tiniest face crying, the tiniest hand waving back at her. I remember that moment of turning and waving as if seeing myself through my mother’s eyes. I knelt on the backseat and propped my chin on the bottom ledge of the rear window. My bangs dropped almost into my eyes and my face took up so little space. I felt small and lost and scared, and even though I could see my mother, I worried I could so easily be missed, so easily miss my chance to be found. The time Melissa got on the wrong bus, as the story is known in my family, wasn’t really a close call. I thought I was going to live at the bus depot, and the thought made me cry, but I knew I wasn’t being kidnapped. Yet I remember it as my almost-abduction because it was the only time I ever experienced the thrill of being discovered. And so it is the only story I can offer to claim my place among the stars of my youth, those girls who were lost and those girls who were found.

So many of their stories start to sound the same after a while, stories of a certain girl who was spotted by a certain person, singled out, and made a star. And once you realized that, there’s nothing those kidnapped girls can teach you. There’s no lesson to be learned from any of their stories—no place to be avoided, no person to be ignored, no special attention to be plaid. If anything, it’s the happy stories, the ones about being in the right place at the right time, that are the real cautionary tales. They warn you that to have a chance at becoming a star, you can’t very well stay hidden. To be visible—to make oneself vulnerable to discovery—is to be in a constant state of peril. But to be invisible, you may as well be dead.

WE SEE THE SKY getting dark and Chris goes out to cover the lettuce. He wants the vegetables safe and unbruised, has tarps and buckets collected in the outbuilding for must such an occasion. I’ve learned not to ask if he wants help. When I used to offer, he thought it was because I figured he couldn’t do it himself. But it wasn’t that. Or maybe it was. It doesn’t matter anymore.

The clouds roll in and I watch him cover his lettuce fro the kitchen window, remembering the time I was ten and visiting my aunt in Illinois. We had a storm, what the news people said was a derecho, like a wall of hell. A horizontal tornado, some said, but it rolled more like a hurricane. It lasted a long time and I was crying before it was over. When we looked at the sky, the layers of dark heavy clouds, I was sure it was the end of the world. But it finally cleared, and people picked up, cleaned up, moved on.

The rain starts falling fast and hard. I see Chris stoop, but he doesn’t wasn’t to sacrifice the tender lettuce. He puts the tarp over some, weights it down with big rocks. He places buckets over the tomato and pepper plants.

Then the hail comes, pellets hitting the roof of the porch, tinny and loud. Chris tried to cover himself by holding his non-arm over his head, but he doesn’t quit, because now his work is even more important. Some wives would run out, grab an umbrella or a pot or something that would happen in a movie. I stand and watch, wondering how long it will take him to give in.

Before the storm came, I’d been grating carrots for a salad. Chris is vegetarian now. This has irritated me from the beginning, not because I care about the food, but because it seems so predictable, like something that would happen in a movie. That’s what this all feels like sometimes—not our real life, but some melodramatic, made-for-TV movie. Boy goes off to war, sees unspeakable, loses left arm in an IED explosion, can’t stomach the blood and flesh of meat anymore. I can’t name any movie where this happens, but I’m sure it has. It’s not that I don’t have any compassion, until I couldn’t be anymore.

When I was grating carrots, I heard a car coming up the drive. Really, it wasn’t in our drive, just going slow up the bumpy dirt road, but as I jumped to look, I slipped. The carrot nub flipped out of my hand, and my knuckles went down hard and fast across those sharp teeth. It took a minute to sink in, the way it does when you hurt yourself in some stupid way and can’t look down for fear of what you’ll see. Pictures flashed in my head of shredded skin, white knuckle bone shining through blood and gore. I grabbed a dishtowel and pressed it to my knuckles, but when I looked down I saw that a few tiny drops of blood had dripped into the salad bowl. The red was bold and hot against the orange of the carrots, and I knew that I should throw it all out. But the big wooden bowl was full of tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, and peppers. Throwing it out would be wasteful, and there wasn’t time to run to town for more vegetables.

This is how I told it to myself. And when I came back downstairs after washing my hand and bandaging my knuckles, I mixed the the carrot shreds up good so the bloody spot were gone. That’s what I did and I’m not sorry.

“Son of a bitch came on fast,” Chris says when he bangs in, soaking wet and dripping all over the kitchen floor. “I think I got it in time. Hope I did.”

“I’m sure you did,” I say, but I don’t have much in my voice to convince him. He doesn’t notice, so I don’t try too hard.

“I don’t remember the weatherman saying it was going to rain today, do you? Is it still hailing? You know what they say about hail.” Chris looks out the window, though we can hear the ice bouncing off the porch roof. They say hail is sometimes a sign a tornado is coming, but I don’t know what Chris means anymore. He could mean anything.

“You’re dripping,” I say. “You shouldn’t track that mud upstairs. Just strip your clothes here, then go put on something dry.” His face goes a little funny because he doesn’t like the idea. “Come on, Chris. It’s a mess.”

“Fine,” he says. I cross my arms and watch as he pushes off his boots, then, one-handed, undoes his buckle, button, and zipper; he sloughs his wet jeans off like a snake losing his skin. His boxers are wet through, but I decide not to push it. I wonder if he’ll leave the non-arm on as he tries to get his wet T-shirt off, or if he’ll release this contraption I hate. I see he’s also wondering which would be best.

He doesn’t like for anyone to see his scars, not even me, and it’s not because of vanity. Chris is a good-looking man, always has bee, but doesn’t try too hard. No hair gel or fancy clothes. He still wears the same brand of drug store cologne his mother bought him when he started shaving, even through the army, even still. I think he’s afraid the scars and stump and machine-like parts of the non-arm make him look weaker. He already feels weak, even after all the months in physical therapy, even though his good arm is stronger than most two put together. Some men get to hid their damage, but Chris has to wear his—artificial flesh-toned and creepy veiny—every day.

It took a while, but now he can dress and undress himself, take care of his bathroom things. He can do garden work and some of the farm work for his daddy, like drive the tractor. “Use the arm,” the therapists told him. “It’s not like the old prosthetics. These new pieces are incredibly.”

At first, they wanted to give him a hi-tech, robot-like one that could grasp cups. It was an experimental model and they tried to tell me how it works—something about nerves being re-routed, muscles in the chest learning to twitch in a way that would make the fingers move. I didn’t understand. When they showed me, I couldn’t stop staring at the icy silver of it.

“Chris would be able to hold your hand,” one therapist said. She was a young girl with the bright eyes, a long curled ponytail, intricately applied makeup. She wasn’t much younger than us, but she seemed like a kid. To her, the idea of Chris being able to hold my hand again probably sounded sweet, romantic.

I touched the robot hand and tried to imagine the cool fingers beginning to tighten. I thought I felt a twitch and jerked away.

“What good is this doing?” Chris asked the girl. “I’ll never be able to feel her hand. Why would I ever do this in real life?”

My cheeks went red then, imagining real life and what he might do with his bionic arm. Images flashed in my head of our bedroom, Chris saying, “Look how my chest muscles make my fingers close. Look how I can move them on you.” I felt a sick quake in my stomach and had to get up. I was outside the door quick, and slid down the wall.

The pretty girl couldn’t understand. She met men like Chris and wives like me every day, but then she went home to her boyfriend who still has everything he’s supposed to have. Some farm boy who still has his twinkle, who hold her and undresses her and touches her with two warm hands.

“That’s the last time she’s in here,” I heard Chris say to the girl.

CHRIS HAS A DIFFERENT sort of arm now. This one fastens around his body with thick straps and is still incredible, but now quite as incredible as the robotic one. He thought that one scared me, and that I was embarrassed. He told the therapist it just didn’t feel right, that maybe he wasn’t strong enough yet. So instead he has one that looks more like “the real thing” from the elbow down. The hand is always slightly bent, ready for gripping. The doctors say that the technology is improving all the time, especially now with such demand. Chris tells me he’s on a list to get a better arm permanently. I read about it on the internet—the “Luke” they call it, after Luke Skywalker’s bionic arm in the Star Wars movies.

I WATCH CHRIS STRUGGLE, trying to get the wet T-shirt up and over his non-arm. Normally he could do it, but the shirt is wet and stuck to his skin. “Okay, Jenny,” he says finally. “Help me.”

I peel gently from the bottom, first over his good arm so he can help, then over the non-arm, then over his head. I’m close enough that I can see the little welts on his shoulders and forehead where the hail hit him. That’s when I remember to listen, and hear that it’s stopped.

“Just rain now,” I say, and realize I”m still holding the shirt above his head and that our chests are touching. On my tiptoes I just can reach his lips because he is tall and I am not. I’m surprised that I kiss him because I didn’t think I would. My hand is in his hair, long now, grown out, so that I can grab it, wrap my hand up in it like he used to in mine.

“Jen,” he says around my lips, but I keep my hand in his hair, and kiss him so hard that I taste blood in my mouth, his or mine I don’t know.

If he would take off the arm, I would lick his scars. When he’s awake, he won’t let me touch them, doesn’t want me to look, but sometimes when he’s asleep, I kneel on the floor beside the bed and run my finger around each purple crevice, each indentation. I cup the missing piece. The pills make him sleep deep and I’m glad, because if he woke to find me there, he would howl. He’d push me and my kisses away like he does every time.

I pull his hair, force his head back and kiss his throat.

“What’s gotten in to you?” he says. He’s trying to move away, trying to laugh me off, but I don’t want to let him go.

How would the movie go? If we were living out this drama on the screen, would he push me away now, again, or would this be the climax where Chris finally lets me unstrap his non-arm and lies down on the cold kitchen tiles? Would he cry? Would the hail start again, or the lightning and thunder, rolling over us?

I USED TO LOVE those nights when the air got thick with electricity. The thunder rolled around the house in waves, the lightning showing Chris to me in flashes as it lit up the bedroom. When it was over, there was just the slow, soft rain. We’d lie close together. I knew everything then.

WITH HIS GOOD HAND, Chris pats my shoulder. “Isn’t it about time for dinner?” he asks. “I’ll go get some dry clothes on. Okay?” He’s using his hand to disentangle mine from his hair. He doesn’t want to hurt me. He just wants to go.

I watch him gather his wet clothes from the floor. I think I should go get the mop and take care of the puddles, but I don’t. Instead, I get the vegetarian lasagna from the oven. I get the salad from the refrigerator.

The storm has somehow circled us and, when we sit to eat, the rain is loud again. When the thunder comes, I can feel it in my whole body as the house shudders.

“Here it comes again,” Chris says. He’s wearing a blue T-shirt from high school, with the school mascot—a wildcat—on the front. His hair is in his eyes. He looks so young, so much younger than I feel. How unfair that he can look like that and I have to feel like this. His non-arm is resting on the table. He’s waiting for me to serve him.

“This looks good,” he says as I cut the lasagna and scoop it onto his plate. I’m not a good cook, especially when it comes to dishes where delicate vegetables are expected to pull together and make something hearty.

“Have some salad.” I use the plastic tongs to fill our bowls to the top.

I spear some with my fork, but don’t put it to my mouth until I’ve watched Chris take a mouthful, mostly lettuce, streaked with shreds of orange. He chews and when he sees me watching, he smiles.

“At least I can make salad,” I say. I take my bite, already knowing that after he goes to sleep tonight, I’ll sneak out and drive the forty-five minutes to Morgantown to get a greasy fast food cheeseburger. Maybe two.