December 23, 2005
This is how it feels when you realize your child is missing:
The pit of your stomach freezes fast, while your legs go to jelly.
There’s one single, blue-bass thud of your heart. The shape of her name, sharp as metal filings, gets caught between your teeth even as you try to force it out in a shout. Fear breathes like a monster into your ear: Where did I see her last? Would she have wandered away? Who could have taken her? And then, finally, your throat seals shut, as you swallow the fact that you’ve made a mistake you will never be able to fix.
The first time it happened to Daniel Stone, a decade ago, he had been visiting Boston. His wife was at a colloquium1 at Harvard; that was a good enough reason to take a family vacation. While Laura sat on her panel, Daniel pushed Trixie’s stroller the cobbled length of the Freedom Trail. They fed the ducks in the Public Garden; they watched the sloe-eyed sea turtles doing water ballet at the aquarium2. After that, when Trixie announced that she was hungry, Daniel headed toward Faneuil Hall and its endless food court.
That particular April day was the first one warm enough for New Englanders to unzip their jackets, to remember that there was any season other than winter. In addition to the centipedes of school groups and the shutter-happy tourists, it seemed that the whole of the financial district had bled out, men Daniel’s age in suits and ties, who smelled of aftershave and envy. They sat with their gyros and chowder and corned beef on rye on the benches near the statue of Red Auerbach. They sneaked4 sideways glances at Daniel.
He was used to this - it was unusual for a father to be the primary caretaker of his four-year-old daughter. Women who saw him with Trixie assumed that his wife had died, or that he was newly divorced. Men who saw him quickly looked the other way, embarrassed on his behalf. And yet Daniel would not have traded his setup for the world. He enjoyed molding his job around Trixie’s schedule. He liked her questions: Did dogs know they were naked? Is adult supervision5 a power grown-ups use to fight bad guys? He loved the fact that when Trixie was spacing out in her car seat and wanted attention, she always started with “Dad . . .?” even if Laura happened to be driving the car.
“What do you want for lunch?” Daniel asked Trixie that day in Boston. “Pizza? Soup? A burger?”
She stared up at him from her stroller, a miniature of her mother with the same blue eyes and strawberry hair, and nodded yes to all three. Daniel had hefted the stroller up the steps to the central food court, the scent6 of the salted ocean air giving way to grease and onions and stir-fry. He would get Trixie a burger and fries, he decided7, and for himself, he’d buy a fisherman’s platter at another kiosk. He stood in line at the grill8, the stroller jutting9 out like a stone that altered the flow of human traffic. “A cheeseburger,” Daniel yelled out to a cook he hoped was listening. When he was handed the paper plate he juggled10 his wallet free so that he could pay and then decided that it wasn’t worth a second tour of duty just to get himself lunch, too. He and Trixie could share.
Daniel maneuvered11 the stroller into the stream of people again, waiting to be spit out into the cupola. After a few minutes, an elderly man sitting at a long table shuffled12 his trash together and left. Daniel set down the burger and turned the stroller so that he could feed Trixie . . . but the child inside was a dark-haired, dark-skinned infant who burst into tears when he saw the stranger in front of him.
Daniel’s first thought: Why was this baby in Trixie’s stroller?
His second: Was this Trixie’s stroller? Yes, it was yellow and blue with a tiny repeating bear print. Yes, there was a carrying basket underneath13. But Graco must have sold millions of these, thousands alone in the Northeast. Now, at closer inspection14, Daniel realized that this particular stroller had a plastic activity bar attached on the front. Trixie’s ratty security blanket was not folded up in the bottom, just in case of crisis.
Such as now.
Daniel looked down at the baby again, the baby that was not his, and immediately grabbed the stroller and starting running to the grill. Standing15 there, with a cabbage-cheeked Boston cop, was a hysterical16 mother whose sights horned in on the stroller Daniel was using to part the crowd like the Red Sea. She ran the last ten feet and yanked her baby out of the safety restraint and into her arms while Daniel tried to explain, but all that came out of his mouth was, “Where is she?” He thought, hysterical, of the fact that this was an open-air market, that there was no way to seal the entrance or even make a general public announcement, that by now five minutes had passed and his daughter could be with the psychopath who stole her on the T heading to the farthest outskirts17 of the Boston suburbs.
Then he noticed the stroller - his stroller - kicked over onto its side, the safety belt undone18. Trixie had gotten proficient19 at this just last week. It had gotten comical - they would be out walking and suddenly she was standing up in the fabric20 hammock, facing Daniel, grinning at her own clever expertise21. Had she freed herself to come looking for him? Or had someone, seeing a golden opportunity for abduction, done it for her?
In the moments afterward22, there were tracts23 of time that Daniel couldn’t remember even to this day. For example, how long it took the swarm24 of police that converged25 on Faneuil Hall to do a search.
Or the way other mothers pulled their own children close to their side as he passed, certain bad luck was contagious26. The detective’s hammered questions, a quiz of good parenting: How tall is Trixie? What does she weigh? What was she wearing? Have you ever talked to her about strangers? This last one, Daniel couldn’t answer. Had he, or had he just been planning to? Would Trixie know to scream, to run away? Would she be loud enough, fast enough?
The police wanted him to sit down, so that they’d know where to find him if necessary. Daniel nodded and promised, and then was on his feet the moment their backs were turned. He searched behind each of the food kiosks in the central court. He looked under the tables in the cupola. He burst into the women’s bathroom, crying Trixie’s name. He checked beneath the ruffled27 skirts of the pushcarts28 that sold rhinestone29 earrings30, moose socks, your name written on a grain of rice. Then he ran outside.
The courtyard was full of people who didn’t know that just twenty feet away from them the world had been overturned.
Oblivious, they shopped and milled and laughed as Daniel stumbled past them. The corporate31 lunch hour had ended, and many of the businessmen were gone. Pigeons pecked at the crumbs32 they’d left behind, caught between the cobblestones. And huddled33 beside the seated bronze of Red Auerbach, sucking her thumb, was Trixie.
Until Daniel saw her, he didn’t truly realize how much of himself had been carved away by her absence. He felt – ironically the same symptoms that had come the moment he knew she was missing: the shaking legs, the loss of speech, the utter immobility. “Trixie,” he said finally, then she was in his arms, thirty pounds of sweet relief.
Now - ten years later - Daniel had again mistaken his daughter for someone she wasn’t. Except this time, she was no longer a fouryear-old in a stroller. This time, she had been gone much longer than
twenty-four minutes. And she had left him, instead of the other way around.
Forcing his mind back to the present, Daniel cut the throttle34 of the snow machine as he came to a fork in the path. Immediately the storm whipped into a funnel35 - he couldn’t see two feet in front of himself, and when he took the time to look behind, his tracks had already been filled, a seamless stretch. The Yup’ik Eskimos had a word for this kind of snow, the kind that bit at the back of your eyes and landed like a hail of arrows on your bare skin: pirrelvag. The term rose in Daniel’s throat, as startling as a second moon, proof that he had been here before, no matter how good a job he’d done of convincing himself otherwise.
He squinted36 - it was nine o’clock in the morning, but in December in Alaska, there wasn’t much sunlight. His breath hung before him like lace. For a moment, through the curtain of snow, he thought he could see the bright flash of her hair - a fox’s tail peeking37 from a snug38 woolen39 cap - but as quickly as he saw it, it was gone.
The Yupiit also had a word for the moments when it was so cold that a mug of water thrown into the air would harden like glass before it ever hit the frozen ground: cikuq’erluni. One wrong move, Daniel thought, and everything will go to pieces around me.
So he closed his eyes, gunned the machine, and let instinct take over. Almost immediately, the voices of elders he used to know came back to him - spruce needles stick out sharper on the north side of trees; shallow sandbars make the ice buckle40 - hints about how to find yourself, when the world changed around you.
He suddenly thought back to the way, at Faneuil Hall, Trixie had melted against him when they were reunited. Her chin had notched41 just behind his shoulder, her body went boneless with faith. In spite of what he’d done, she’d still trusted him to keep her safe, to bring her home. In hindsight, Daniel could see that the real mistake he’d made that day hadn’t been turning his back momentarily. It had been believing that you could lose someone you loved in an instant, when in reality it was a process that took months, years, her lifetime.
It was the kind of cold that made your eyelashes freeze the minute you walked outside and the insides of your nostrils42 feel like shattered glass. It was the kind of cold that went through you as if you were no more than a mesh43 screen.
Trixie Stone shivered on the frozen riverbank beneath the chool building that was checkpoint headquarters in Tuluksak, sixty miles from the spot where her father’s borrowed snow machine was carving44 a signature across the tundra45, and tried to think up reasons to stay right where she was.
Unfortunately, there were more reasons - better reasons – to leave. First and foremost, it was a mistake to stay in one place too long. Second, sooner or later, people were going to figure out that she wasn’t who they thought she was, especially if she kept screwing up every task they gave her. But then again, how was she supposed to know that all the mushers were entitled to complimentary46 straw for their sled dogs at several points during the K300 racecourse, including here in Tuluksak? Or that you could take a musher to the spot where food and water was stored . . . but you weren’t allowed to help feed the dogs? After those two fiascos, Trixie was demoted to babysitting the dogs that were dropped from a team, until the bush pilots arrived to transport them back to Bethel.
So far the only dropped dog was a husky named Juno. Frostbite - that was the official reason given by the musher. The dog had one brown eye and one blue eye, and he stared at Trixie with an expression that spoke47 of being misunderstood.
In the past hour, Trixie had managed to sneak3 Juno an extra handful of kibble and a couple of biscuits, stolen from the vet’s supply. She wondered if she could buy Juno from the musher with some of the money left over in the stolen wallet. She thought maybe it would be easier to keep running if she had someone else to confide48 in, someone who couldn’t possibly tell on her.
She wondered what Zephyr49 and Moss50 and anyone else back home in the other Bethel - Bethel, Maine - would say if they saw her sitting in a snowbank and eating salmon51 jerky and listening for the crazy fugue of barking that preceded the arrival of a dog team. Probably, they would think she had lost her mind. They’d say, Who are you, and what have you done with Trixie Stone? The thing is, she wanted to ask the same question.
She wanted to crawl into her favorite flannel52 pajamas53, the ones that had been washed so often they were as soft as the skin of arose. She wanted to open up the refrigerator and not be able to find anything on its stocked shelves worth eating. She wanted to get sick of a song on the radio and smell her father’s shampoo and trip over the curly edge of the rug in the hallway. She wanted to go back - not just to Maine, but to early September. Trixie could feel tears rising in her throat like the watermarks on the Portland dock, and she was afraid someone would notice. So she lay down on the matted straw, her nose nearly touching54 Juno’s. “You know,” she whispered, “I got left behind once, too.”
Her father didn’t think she remembered what had happened that day in Faneuil Hall, but she did - bits and pieces cropped up at the strangest times. Like when they went to the beach in the summer and she smelled the ocean: It suddenly got harder to breathe. Or how at hockey games and movie theaters and other places where she got mixed up in a crowd, she sometimes felt sick to her stomach. Trixie remembered, too, that they had abandoned the stroller at Faneuil Hall - her father simply carried her back in his arms. Even after they returned from vacation and bought a new stroller, Trixie had refused to ride in it.
Here’s what she didn’t remember about that day: the getting-lost part. Trixie could not recall unbuckling the safety harness or pushing through the shifting sea of legs to the doors that led outside. Then, she saw the man who looked like he might be her father but who actually turned out to be a statue sitting down. Trixie had walked to the bench and climbed up beside him only to realize that his metal skin was warm, because the sun had been beating down on it all day. She’d curled up against the statue, wishing with every shaky breath that she would be found.
This time around, that’s what scared her most.
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colloquium
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| n.学术讨论会 | |
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aquarium
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| n.水族馆，养鱼池，玻璃缸 | |
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sneak
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| vt.潜行(隐藏,填石缝)；偷偷摸摸做；n.潜行；adj.暗中进行 | |
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sneaked
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| v.潜行( sneak的过去式和过去分词 )；偷偷溜走；（儿童向成人）打小报告；告状 | |
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supervision
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| n.监督，管理 | |
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scent
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| n.气味，香味，香水，线索，嗅觉；v.嗅，发觉 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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grill
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| n.烤架，铁格子，烤肉；v.烧，烤，严加盘问 | |
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jutting
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| v.（使）突出( jut的现在分词 )；伸出；（从…）突出；高出 | |
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juggled
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| v.歪曲( juggle的过去式和过去分词 )；耍弄；有效地组织；尽力同时应付（两个或两个以上的重要工作或活动） | |
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maneuvered
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| v.移动，用策略( maneuver的过去式和过去分词 )；操纵 | |
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shuffled
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| v.洗（纸牌）( shuffle的过去式和过去分词 )；拖着脚步走；粗心地做；摆脱尘世的烦恼 | |
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underneath
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| adj.在...下面，在...底下；adv.在下面 | |
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inspection
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| n.检查，审查，检阅 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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hysterical
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| adj.情绪异常激动的，歇斯底里般的 | |
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outskirts
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| n.郊外，郊区 | |
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undone
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| a.未做完的，未完成的 | |
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proficient
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| adj.熟练的，精通的；n.能手，专家 | |
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fabric
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| n.织物，织品，布；构造，结构，组织 | |
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expertise
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| n.专门知识(或技能等)，专长 | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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tracts
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| 大片土地( tract的名词复数 )； 地带； （体内的）道； （尤指宣扬宗教、伦理或政治的）短文 | |
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swarm
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| n.(昆虫)等一大群；vi.成群飞舞；蜂拥而入 | |
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converged
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| v.（线条、运动的物体等）会于一点( converge的过去式 )；（趋于）相似或相同；人或车辆汇集；聚集 | |
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contagious
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| adj.传染性的，有感染力的 | |
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ruffled
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| adj. 有褶饰边的, 起皱的 动词ruffle的过去式和过去分词 | |
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pushcarts
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| n.手推车( pushcart的名词复数 ) | |
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rhinestone
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| n.水晶石，莱茵石 | |
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earrings
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| n.耳环( earring的名词复数 )；耳坠子 | |
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corporate
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| adj.共同的，全体的；公司的，企业的 | |
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crumbs
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| int. (表示惊讶)哎呀 n. 碎屑 名词crumb的复数形式 | |
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huddled
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| 挤在一起（huddle的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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throttle
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| n.节流阀，节气阀，喉咙；v.扼喉咙，使窒息，压 | |
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funnel
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| n.漏斗；烟囱；v.汇集 | |
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squinted
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| 斜视( squint的过去式和过去分词 )； 眯着眼睛； 瞟； 从小孔或缝隙里看 | |
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peeking
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| v.很快地看( peek的现在分词 )；偷看；窥视；微露出 | |
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snug
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| adj.温暖舒适的，合身的，安全的；v.使整洁干净，舒适地依靠，紧贴；n.（英）酒吧里的私房 | |
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woolen
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| adj.羊毛(制)的；毛纺的 | |
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buckle
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| n.扣子，带扣；v.把...扣住，由于压力而弯曲 | |
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notched
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| a.有凹口的，有缺口的 | |
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nostrils
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| 鼻孔( nostril的名词复数 ) | |
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mesh
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| n.网孔，网丝，陷阱；vt.以网捕捉，啮合，匹配；vi.适合； [计算机]网络 | |
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carving
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| n.雕刻品，雕花 | |
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tundra
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| n.苔原，冻土地带 | |
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complimentary
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| adj.赠送的，免费的，赞美的，恭维的 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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confide
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| v.向某人吐露秘密 | |
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zephyr
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| n.和风，微风 | |
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moss
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| n.苔，藓，地衣 | |
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salmon
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| n.鲑，大马哈鱼，橙红色的 | |
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flannel
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| n.法兰绒；法兰绒衣服 | |
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pajamas
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| n.睡衣裤 | |
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touching
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| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
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