Free Where I Lost Her by T. Greenwood Page B

suggested all volunteers congregate at Hudson’s at noon. There, in the back room, they will be fed donated sandwiches, outfitted with reflective vests, given maps of the area, and a description of the girl. My description of the girl.
    Effie took Zu-Zu and Plum into town, ostensibly for Zu-Zu’s ballet class, but I know she wants to keep them both away from the circus that is growing outside for as long as possible. Plum has already asked if they’ll be allowed to search with us, but Effie offered her a playdate with her friend Maddy instead, and that seemed to distract her.
    In town, Effie’s going to pick up the food for the volunteers; the Shop ’n Save has offered to supply coffee and donuts, sandwiches and sodas. She’s also picking up the reflective vests. I imagine they were originally made for hunting: to help differentiate the hunter from the animal. She asked if I needed anything from Quimby, but I couldn’t think of what I would need now. What else exactly might be missing.
    She also has to run her bookmobile route this afternoon: delivering books to the shut-ins and those who are unable to travel into town to the library. She thought maybe if I came with her, we could use the opportunity to canvas as well. Distribute flyers. Maybe somebody, somewhere, saw something.
    Devin is already at Hudson’s meeting with Billy Moffett, whose father has owned the store since we were kids. Effie and Billy used to sneak off to the woods together to make out when we were teenagers. Now he has a full beard and six kids. I wonder if she ever told Devin about him. It’s incredible to me the things that one cannot know about another person. How easy it is to keep such large parts of one’s life a secret. How readily we overlook entire portions of our loved ones’ pasts. Dismiss those things that do not fit into our visions of them.
    When Jake and I met, he’d just broken up with a long-time girlfriend. They’d dated in college, and started their lives together in New York. But while he’d gotten a job in publishing, she’d pursued a career in journalism and unexpectedly gotten an opportunity to be a foreign correspondent for a major cable news network. I see her on TV sometimes, reporting from Afghanistan, Iraq. She is so different from me physically: pale, diminutive, bird-like. She’d slept next to him for nearly seven years. They’d even been engaged briefly before she broke it off. Yet, we never talked about her. I didn’t know her middle name, what she smelled like. What he loved about her. He must have felt deeply for her. But out of sight is out of mind. It is incredible to me how willing we are to forget. It makes me wonder how quickly I too might be forgotten, dismissed.
    â€œSo, what are we going to do if they don’t find her by Sunday?” His voice startles me.
    â€œWhat’s that?” I say.
    The car still smells sour.
    â€œI just mean, we’ve got to get Zu-Zu down to the dorms on Sunday. She starts the program Monday morning.”
    I shake my head. The idea of going back to New York seems strange now, ludicrous.
    â€œI don’t know,” I say. “We can’t just leave. I mean, if they don’t find her.”
    â€œCharlie’s book is going to auction on Monday .”
    I turn to him, look at his face, a face more familiar to me than my own. For three weeks now I have been trying to imagine what she must think, feel, when she looks at him. How he might return her gaze. I have tried to remember what it was like to love him.
    â€œCouldn’t you handle it from here?” I ask. “If you needed to?”
    He sighs. “Without cell reception?”
    â€œEffie and Devin have a landline,” I say, and know even as I say this how absurd the idea is. I think of the ancient wall-mounted phone, the curling cord. The rotary dial. I try to imagine him conducting a publishing auction in the kitchen nook as