Free The Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond

plans, for just one more second with Emma. I am startled to realize that I would do the same.

13
    A N ORANGE Chevelle. New paint, old tires. Windows halfway down. The Virgin Mary dangling from the rearview mirror. In the driver’s seat, a man. Gray hair. Blue shirt, five o’clock shadow, reading the paper. I saw the headline as we passed:
Relations with China Strained
.
    “Look,” Emma said. She pointed to an army of ants carting a tiny, dead sand crab across the pavement. She crouched over the procession, mesmerized. “Where are they taking him?”
    “Home.”
    “Oh,” she said. “They’re going to look after him.”
    “That’s right,” I said. I was marveling at her endearing innocence when she did something unexpected: she took her red plastic shovel and brought it down hard against the crab, crushing the shell. The ants stopped moving.
    She looked up at me, gleeful. “I killed them!”
    “You did.”
    But then the shell began moving again. This time, she lifted her foot and stomped both crab and ants to oblivion. “There,” she said, swinging her yellow bucket. We continued across the parking lot toward the beach. I glanced over at the man in the orange Chevelle. He was still reading his paper, drinking his coffee. There was a hula girl ornament on the dashboard, which he kept tipping back and forth with his finger as he read.
    Each day, I seem to remember a bit more of the man’s face, another small detail about his car: a scratch on the hood, a yellow stripe down the side. But the clearer the details become, the more I doubt my own memory. Memory, it seems, should become more impressionistic as time passes, the lines going soft, the colors muted, one shape blending into another. Instead, what begins as impressionism moves steadily toward close-up photography, until one is left, ultimately, with alarming specificity. How many of these specifics are true, and what have I simply conjured?
    During my freshman year at the University of Tennessee, I took a required course in collegiate study methods. The first half of the class was devoted to memory. I have forgotten most of it, but one thing that sticks with me is the relationship between physical space and memory. A student who sits in the same desk every day will retain information better than a student who moves around. If one is at a loss as to the specific order of some event, it generally helps to return to the place where the event occurred. By viewing the layout of the place and the various details of setting, one’s temporal memory may be jogged. And if you lose something, you should retrace your steps, back to the last place you remember having possession of the lost object.
    It is with these things in mind that I make a daily pilgrimage to Ocean Beach. Emma went missing at 10:37. I return each day from 10:00 to 11:10, to allow for about a half-hour window in each direction. It’s not only my own memory I hope to recover as I retrace our steps, day after day. I’m looking for the orange Chevelle, the yellow van, the motorcycle, the postal truck, anyone who might have seen Emma on that day. I’m looking for clues.
    I find a lot of things along the cold gray stretch of sand, but never what I’m really looking for. At the intersection of Sloat Boulevard and the Great Highway, among the bits of concrete and stone that make up the jumbled seawall, I come across an uneven slab of stone bearing a faded inscription. I can just make out the words
in memory
and
died 187
…the last number has been rubbed away.
    I’m reminded of a bit of history Jake shared with me early in our courtship. In the 1800s, Ocean Beach was the outer edge of a vast sweep of sand dunes stretching several miles inland. The area, known as the Outside Lands, belonged to Mexico. It wasn’t until 1848 that the U.S. government annexed the Outside Lands; almost twenty more years passed before it was made part of the city. Still, to San Franciscans, the remote beach, with its dense