Play Dates (44 page)

It was like watching a film go from normal speed to slow motion. All action, all talk, ground to a halt to look around the room for Zoë.

Delilah was being helped into her first outfit, a few tucks being strategically taken to make the blouse hang a little differently. “I don’t see her, Mia,” she shouted.

“She was just here a minute ago,” said Coco, one of the other models.

“Zoë! Zoë!” We chorused her name, first in unison; then it began to sound like a round. Show preparations were put on hold while we fanned out, the girls forming a half-dressed search party. Most of the doors on our level were locked, so there was no way she could have entered what was behind them. Lucky raced upstairs to the arena level, dashed back and reported no

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sign of her on the floor of the Garden. None of the people up there had seen her either.

Oh, God, what if she got up to the street and is wandering
around Manhattan? Or worse.
The show was due to start in under an hour. After fifteen minutes of an all-hands-on-deck search, and coming up Zoë-less, I made the phone call I’d been dreading.

Claire answered her cell right away. “Mia, I told you not to call me at work—” I gave her the news. “Mia . . . I—I—how . . . how the hell could you lose her?!” she shouted into the phone. I was sure the entire Met Museum had paused to stare at her.

“I don’t know. But I did, okay? She was here one minute and gone the next. I’m sorry! But scolding me isn’t going to find her any faster.”

“Be right there!” she said and hung up.

“I called the cops,” Claire said, bursting into the makeup room,

“and they immediately entered Zoë into their missing persons system. They said they can’t issue an Amber Alert though, unless we believe she’s been abducted.” Her body was shaking like she’d just been pulled from a frozen lake. She was too stressed to cry. “I had a bad feeling about this from the beginning, Mia. I just—I just knew something was going to happen. I felt it. How do you lose a child when she’s sitting under your nose?!”

I couldn’t help feeling defensive. “Because she’s a human being with legs and she used those legs to get up and walk away.

Look around you, Claire. It’s a madhouse in here. Which is actually par for the course, but it’s worse than usual today. I’m un-derstaffed, I’ve got a ticking clock, and I can’t have my eyes on Zoë one hundred percent of the time when I’m trying to make up a face. I’ve got a job to do here. I told her to sit right there,” I said, pointing to the metal folding chair, “and not to wander off.” Then I remembered she had said she was bored. But what was I supposed to do about it?

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“You were in charge of her,” Claire insisted. “If you’re taking care of a child, you have to have eyes in the back of your head and learn to multitask.” She continued to berate me at ninety miles per hour.

Over the headset, Lucky spoke to the stage managers upstairs on the Garden floor and told them that we were running behind schedule. “It happens all the time,” she reminded them.

“Just stall the press, and don’t let the doors open to guests until I give the go-ahead.”

“Well, here’s the high energy you asked for,” I said to Lucky cynically. I felt as badly as Claire did, perhaps worse, but we have different ways of dealing with panic. I get caustic; she gets voluble.

She refused to phone our parents right away. When she called Dennis to tell him about Zoë, Claire was practically ranting inco-herently. Unfortunately there wasn’t much the NYFD could do to help in any official capacity. And since he was on duty, he couldn’t even come down to the Garden to at least lend us some moral support.

“Where? Where would you go if you were a seven-year-old little girl?” Claire asked rhetorically. We all tried to get inside Zoë’s head.

“She said she was bored,” I repeated. “Where would a kid go if she was bored?”

“I’m just afraid she decided to try to go home by herself,”

Claire said. “She could be anywhere out there. Wandering the streets.” She began to tremble violently again. “Or worse. God-damnit, Mia!”

We paired people up and sent them out to search again. Claire and I headed off in the same direction. “How far could she have gotten?” I wondered aloud. The maze of underground walkways reminded me of some kind of modern-day catacombs.

“It stinks down here,” Claire said.

“Well, the circus is in town,” I reminded her. “I’m told it doesn’t smell so bad upstairs, but I don’t believe it.”

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“Christ! The circus! That’s right!” Claire stopped dead in her tracks. “Wait—” I was about to say something but she held up her hand like a traffic cop. “There’s something . . . I have no idea if I’m right . . . but it’s just a thought. Zoë—Zoë wrote this essay for Mrs. Hennepin at the beginning of the school year. It was—it was about a favorite memory. And it was about one of the times Scott and I took her to the circus. And she met this elephant named Lizzie.”

She grabbed my hand and began to drag me down one of the corridors. “It could be a long shot, but follow that smell!”

The sub-basement was a ghost town. The circus performers wouldn’t be in the building for a few more hours yet. There was no one around, so we really did allow ourselves to be led by the nose.

“Menagerie,” Claire kept muttering. “Menagerie. Where the hell do they keep the menagerie?”

The
click-click
of our heels on the cement floors echoed off the cinder-block walls. It was eerily quiet. We had no more clues.

Claire yanked my arm so hard it hurt. She pulled us to a stand-still. “Listen,” she said. “Let’s just listen.”

“What am I—?”

“
Shhhh
. Just listen.” She cocked her head. “Hear that?”

“No.”

Claire grabbed my wrist and set us both in motion. “I think that was a roar.”

The animal smell was getting even stronger, so I figured we were now on the right track—or at least the track Claire wanted to be on.

We rounded a corner. “Tigers!” Claire exclaimed. “Look!”

Half a dozen of the beasts were pacing restlessly behind a huge metal gate. They didn’t look happy. Outside the cage a guy dozed, slouching on a folding chair, his hat pulled halfway over his eyes. “Excuse me,” I said, waking him. “Have you seen a lit-PLAY DATES

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tle girl?” He gave me an uncomprehending look, so I repeated the question a couple more times.

“I don’t think he speaks English,” Claire said. “But I wonder what he
does
speak.” We couldn’t guess the man’s nationality.

Could have been anything from South American to Mediter-ranean to Balkan. After exhausting our command of French and Spanish, with no success, we gave up speech and resorted to sign language and wild semaphoring.

“Fuck! We’re getting nowhere,” I said.

“Is anyone here?” Claire shouted. “Is anyone here? Has anyone seen a little girl?” She paused to wait for a reply. None came.

“Okay, okay, okay, I know she’s down here somewhere,” my sister babbled. “I feel it. I can’t be wrong. I’m a mother. And a mother knows these things. Oh, God,” she added, turning to look at me, “what if—what if she—I don’t know—what if she
got eaten
or something. Or mauled. Like Roy. Or that guy up in Harlem a while back who kept a pet tiger and lied and said he’d gotten bitten by a pit bull.”

I tried reason. “I doubt she got eaten by a tiger, Claire. Okay?

We just passed their cage and I think if something had happened to Zoë, even though the guy didn’t speak any English, there’d be a whole bunch of people around, and—”

“Elephants! Remember? Where do you think they keep the elephants? It’s got to be either elephants or clowns. Those are the two things Zoë mentioned in her essay. Oh, wait—I think there was something about dogs, too. A dog act.”

“I don’t think we’re going to find any clowns down here, Claire.

Only the animal trainers seem to be on this level. And there isn’t a performance for hours, so why would the clowns be here anyway?”

“How would Zoë know that? It wouldn’t stop her from looking for them. Zoë! Zoë! It’s Mommy. It’s Mommy and MiMi. Zoë, baby, are you down here?”

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“I don’t see any dog acts, Claire.”

“
Sh-shhhhh
. Hold on a sec. Hear it? She’s crying. At least I hope it’s her.”

There was a little dogleg of a turn in the maze. It led to a cul-de-sac, where, huddled just outside the steel bars that separated a mommy and baby elephant from human traffic, was Zoë, sobbing and clutching her knees to her chest. There was a rip in her tights at the knee. Beside her sat the remains of her lunch: a half-eaten apple and part of a jelly sandwich.

“Zoë!” Claire raced over to her. “Oh, my God! Sweetheart, are you okay?” Zoë looked up and threw her arms around her mother’s neck. “It’s all right. Mommy’s here,” Claire soothed. “Mommy’s here. What happened? Did you get hurt? Who hurt you?” Claire was hugging Zoë so tightly, the kid couldn’t even squeeze out a word. “What happened? How’d you get so far away from MiMi?”

Now that Zoë seemed unharmed, Claire allowed herself, through hysterical tears, to express her anger as well. “Didn’t MiMi tell you to stay in one place and not to wander off?”

“I had to pee,” Zoë said, her voice sounding small, forlorn, and slightly guilty. From the expression on her face it looked like she might have done it in her pants by accident. Claire fished in her purse for a tissue and began to wipe away her daughter’s tears.

The front of her blouse was now splotched with her own.

“Why didn’t you tell me that?” I asked Zoë. “That you needed to pee? All you said was that you were bored.”

“You said you were busy. And you
were
really busy . . .”

“Zoë, I could have taken five minutes to go to the ladies’ room with you.”

She looked so helpless, even with her mother beside her. “I got lost,” she said finally. “I went to look for a bathroom but everything looks the same and I couldn’t find it and I was trying to get back to the room where you were, but I couldn’t find it, either.”

“Is that how you ended up here?” Claire said.

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Zoë nodded. “But by accident. Because I wasn’t looking for the animals. I was looking for the bathroom.” She started to cry again. “I found one with a picture of a lady on the door but it was locked.” She buried her face in Claire’s shoulder, embarrassed.

I looked into the cage behind her. I could swear the elephants looked solicitous. “Where’s the elephant man, as it were?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see anybody,” Zoë said. “But I saw the elephants and I wished I had peanuts to give them, but I didn’t have any. I wanted to feed them, especially the baby because he looked hungry. So I was giving him my apple, but then he touched my hand too much and I got scared. And then when I got scared I jumped away, and when I jumped, the
elephant
got scared and then the mommy elephant made a big noise, and then the noise made me more scared and I tried to run away but I tripped on the bump in the floor,” she said, pointing to an uneven patch of painted cement. “And I fell down, and my tights broke.” She showed us her skinned knee. “And I hurt myself and then I was lost and I didn’t know how to get back and find you.

And I didn’t know if you could find me and I was hungry so I ate some of my sandwich but it smelled like poopy so I couldn’t finish it and I was still hungry . . . but I couldn’t eat my apple because the baby elephant ate part of it first and I didn’t want it after that.”

Claire cupped Zoë’s face in her hands. “But you’re okay, sweetie? Apart from the skinned knee, right?”

“Unh-huh. Except I peed in my pants. But it was an accident,”

she whispered.

“It’s okay,” Claire said gently. “It’s okay. We’ll just throw them in the laundry when we get home. Do you want to stand up now?” Zoë shook her head. “Okay, then we’ll just sit here for a while until you’re ready to go, all right?” She sat beside Zoë on the floor, cradling her in her arms.

“You’re my favorite person, Mommy,” she whimpered.

“Really?” Claire burst into tears again. “Because I know I

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haven’t been around as much as I used to be. And we haven’t had too much special time together in a long time . . . I mean to do fun things, not ‘homework time’ or running back and forth to school and to all your activities. And sometimes, when I get upset with you, I feel like I’m being such a meanie that
I
don’t even want to be around me! And I know you think that all I ever seem to do some days is tell you what you have to do, or what you’re not allowed to do and I have to make you sit down and do your schoolwork when you’d rather be playing. But somebody has to be in charge of things like that, and it’s just me, now. And it’s really hard having to be the boring old mommy, sometimes.”

Zoë’s tearstained face looked up into Claire’s. “But you’ll always be my mommy. No matter what.” I watched the elephants watching them.

“That’s right.” Claire hugged her daughter. “And you’ll always be my baby. You can’t ever get rid of me,” she joked.

“And you’re not
so
boring. I just don’t like it when you make me do my math homework. And when you get mad at me.”

“I’ve got news for you, kiddo. I don’t like to get mad at you. Or anyone else. Except maybe Mrs. Hennepin. I’m finally beginning to enjoy that, actually. Although it’s a good thing that we only have a month or so to go until we won’t have to deal with her anymore. But I’ll make a bargain with you.”

“What?”

“I know I haven’t been a lot of fun lately. Maybe not even since last summer. You know, Z, it’s been tough for me, too, adjusting to things without Daddy. And having to take care of a lot more stuff than I used to do when he was around. And having to get a job, so I’m not always able to spend the kind of time with you that I’d like to. I know I’m not as fun for you as MiMi. And I haven’t been able to take you for treats and special outings and things like MiMi does. So, if you’ll be a little bit patient with me, I promise you I will try really, really hard to be ‘fun’ again.” She gave Zoë a squeeze. “So, whaddya say?”