She spent several hours walking the city streets, going some other way when she heard footsteps or shouting. She tried calling home from a pay phone, using coins she knew she’d taken from her mother’s purse before leaving Cannon Beach, which she now felt very bad about. She was not someone who stole. But the phone had rung and rung at the house in Portland, then gone to the answering machine. It was the middle of the night, okay, but there was a phone right there on their bedside table. Why wasn’t Daddy at home? She tried calling Mommy’s cell, too, but for some reason kept getting the number wrong. She knew it, she knew that she did—she’d gone to a lot of trouble to learn it by heart a couple of months before—but now it seemed to have dropped out of her head. She tried a few numbers that sounded right and woke up a few angry people, but none of them was her mom.
So she kept walking. She felt sometimes like she was looking for something, and at one point she found herself walking up a long and really steep hill and into an area where there were nice, big houses. She stood opposite one of these for a while, in the darkness, but it just made her feel angry and sad. When it got really cold, she found an alleyway back toward downtown that had a deep doorway some distance along it, and she sat huddled up in her coat. The doorway smelled of old pee. She meant to stay awake, but she couldn’t. She was exhausted with all the walking. With pretending that she wasn’t really, really scared.
She fell asleep, but it was not a good sleep. Things kept coming into her head and going around and around. Some made her happy, like a dream full of glimpses of little girls, pretty and smiling, and another of her sitting in a chair in a nice house with a view over the bay. Some were sad or frightening, like one where she was running along a concrete path down near the water itself, out of breath. She liked dreams, normally. They could be funny and interesting. These were not. They were like she was channel-surfing and found some new batch of channels that hadn’t been there before. Some did seem a little familiar, from years back, from when she’d wake in the night to find that Mom or Dad had run in to see why she was making that noise. Other were dark and noisy and grown-up…not nice. She never quite saw anything that she shouldn’t see, but she believed that if she watched for long enough, she…would.
For most of the time Madison spent in the doorway, she wasn’t even really sure if she was asleep or awake. But after a while it seemed to her that she was, and that it had started to become light, and she left the alleyway and started walking once more.
As soon as the stores opened, it got easier. She followed where all the people were going and found herself in an open area in downtown. Across the street was a Barnes & Noble. She went inside and knew she’d be okay for a while. You could spend as much time as you liked in a bookstore, as long as you had a nice coat. She looked at books and then at the magazines. When someone with a name badge came over to ask if she was okay, she said yes and then waved over the man’s shoulder as if to someone on the other side of the store. The man smiled and left her alone after that. He was nice and reminded her of Uncle Brian.
There were some other girls about her age in the section, but they looked kind of weird to her now, after her dream. She felt that she was looking at them for a little too long. So she went up to the Starbucks and bought a water and a coffee and two things to eat. She did this without planning it, but when she got to the cash register, she realized that it had been clever. What a grown-up girl Maddy was, being allowed to go to the counter on her own, watched over by a mother sitting…just over there! She drank the coffee and ate the carrot cake and put the water and the granola bar in her pockets, which were now getting a bit overstuffed. Good to be prepared, though.
She had provisions. She was doing okay.
She went back up to the children’s section and found a seat, then got out the battered notebook and leafed through it, hiding it inside a Richard Scarry.
The more Madison read from the notebook, the more different she felt. She couldn’t understand why. The notebook was not laid out like a story. It wasn’t as if it started out at the beginning and went from there, and you could follow what was going on, and then it ended—which was the case with all the books she’d encountered so far. Except for the really baby books, which had always driven her father nuts: Molly the Mouse gets out of bed, Molly stands on a hill near some flowers, Molly goes and looks at the sea with her friend Neville the Narwhal…The End. Her dad used to rant and rave about these books, saying there was no actual story and where the hell had Neville suddenly come from anyway? The notebook was like that. Just a bunch of stuff, with no shape, no beginning, no end. The big difference was that the baby books went all out to make things as clear and simple as possible. The hill would be big, the flower would be obvious and super-bright, Neville the from-nowhere Narwhal would fill most of one page. The whole point of them was to teach you how to read, to find out which words meant what.
The notebook wasn’t like that. A lot of the time, it seemed that whoever had written it had put things in a way that you weren’t supposed to understand, unless you knew what it was talking about in the first place:
I have always lived here.
For a long time trees were the only story.
But then the invaders came: breaking down the door as if it never occurred to them other people already lived here and called it home. I will be brief, the detail left as an exercise for the not-so-gentle reader.
In 1792, Vancouver and crew first enter Puget Sound. In 1851, claims are laid by the members of the Denny party. The local Duwamish and Suquamish Indians provided food for the settlers at Alki Point during the hard winter of 1851/2. You might have thought they would have learned their lesson by then, but I guess they just weren’t very smart. Chief Seattle at least had the wisdom of many lives, and encouraged “Doc” Maynard to join the settlement in 1852, knowing his friend was conversant with local lore, and might help preserve the integrity of this special place. Maynard staked the mudflats which are now Pioneer Sq and the International District, a curious choice, one might think. Denny/Bell/Boren took the ridges around Elliott Bay (now Downtown, Denny Triangle, Belltown), and in October 1852 one Henry Yesler arrived with a sawmill, looking for a site. After this the town started to grow. King County was created Dec 22, 1852, and in 1853 came a visit by the Territory’s first governor, Colonel Isaac Stevens—his mission to remove the tribes from their lands. In 1854, Seattle gave the speech which comes as close to telling the truth as anyone ever has out loud. Paleface did not get the message, naturally. Paleface never fucking does.
In 1889 the town was razed, the blaze allegedly starting from a glue fire in a cabinetmaker’s workshop. Though is it not more likely it was a last attempt to prevent a permanent settlement from covering the site? It was too late. Nobody thought to question why the Lushootseed name for this village had been Djijila’letc, “the crossing-over place”—because surely that referred only to the path across the inlet that could once be found there at low tide. It is still there, that place, the land around it charged now with the blood of the departed hosts.
I like to think I have done my part.
It was all like that, a list of things and facts. It looked as if it had been written in a hurry, too, and some words seemed to have lots more of some letters—i, and j, for example—than they should, and she didn’t really understand about apostrophes, but she knew you didn’t have them in the middle of long words.
She kept reading nonetheless, letting her eyes run over the red-brown ink, finding it obscurely comforting. There were pages with names, too, and addresses, but none of them meant anything to her either.
In the end she found herself on her feet again and back outside in the square. She noticed that there was a small mall on the other side of it, but she knew that it would feel strange going in there without her mom, and as soon as she realized this, she felt more like herself than she had in two days, and she started to cry.
It was as if something had been held down inside her and then set free, and suddenly her eyes were running with tears, her face cramped with a cry she could not get out, her chest hitching up and up as if it would never go down again, as if it would keep going until it burst.
Everything came at her at once. The realization that she was miles from home and her mom and dad and had no idea where she was. She could suddenly remember more about the last couple of days, but as if from a different perspective: Things that had seemed okay now seemed wrong and frightening. Sneaking past her sleeping mother and stealing her change, being on the bus to Portland and feeling excited but bad and confused, being in the car of the nice lady who had agreed to take her to Seattle because of a long story Madison had told her but then had started to look at her funny and gone off to the restrooms holding her cell phone and…
No, she couldn’t remember that part. But everything else she could, momentarily. Including…
Her mom’s cell-phone number.
Bang—suddenly there it was, right in the middle of her head, as if a cloud had moved out of the way.
Madison stopped crying, glanced around quickly, trying to spot a pay phone. She started running fast along the sidewalk, spinning around, looking for somewhere she could make a call. Finally she spotted one across the street and darted straight off the curb. Horns blared, and a yellow cab had to swing out to avoid plowing into her, but she kept running. At the other corner of the square was a bank of phones, and she knew she had to get there before she forgot the number again, before the cloud came back. The bottle of water fell out of her pocket, but she kept going, running directly toward the phone at the end, hands already reached out for it, going through the number again and again in her head….
But by the time she’d punched two of the numbers, the rest of it had gone.
She shouted in frustration, smacking the phone viciously against the wall. Where had the number gone? Why had it gone?
“Hey,” a passing man said. He was big around the stomach. “Careful, there. Or—”
Madison swung around to look at him, and he stopped talking, very abruptly.
“Get lost, fat boy,” she snarled, and he stared at her, eyes wide, before hurrying on.
Madison was aghast. She’d never been that rude to an adult before—or to anyone, in fact. Ever. Not even in her head. That was worse than with the man at the airport. What was wrong with her?
She was motionless for a moment.
Then she blinked and put the phone carefully back on its cradle. She suddenly felt very clear in the head. She no longer wanted to call her mother. There was another number she could use, she remembered—one written on the white business card tucked in the front of the notebook. But she’d called him once before, and he’d been extremely bossy. For reasons she didn’t understand, she also had a sense he was untrustworthy.
She turned from the phone and looked out across the square. It seemed odd to her that she’d been crying moments ago. Now everything seemed fine. She was away from home, away from Mom, from Dad, from everything that said she was a little girl and could be told what to do. For some months now, she’d been prey to a sense that it didn’t have to be this way. That she had power. That people could be made to do what she wanted for a change. Sure, she’d get in touch with Alison and Simon. She wanted to ask them some things. But it didn’t have to be right this minute. She was hungry again, and she knew what she wanted, and it was not a granola bar. She wanted a man-size breakfast, eggs easy up, home fries and hot sauce. She knew the place to get it, too.
She set off down the street toward the market. Her stride was long and her head held high, and now if people noticed her, they didn’t wonder what such a young person was doing out by herself or where her parents were—but instead what was it about this little girl that made her look so self-possessed, so grown-up, so whole.
I was in Seattle over an hour before we were due to meet. I used some of the time in a book and record store on Fourth. I went into the jazz section, found the clerk who looked least like he’d rather be snowboarding, and got my cell phone out. I played him one of the MP3 files I’d transferred from Amy’s phone. The clerk stooped with his ear cocked, listened for barely two seconds, and then vigorously nodded his head.
“Beiderbecke,” he said. “‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find.’ A classic. And so true.”
He led me into the section, ran his hands down the CDs as if down the spine of a man he loved, and plucked one out. The cover showed a black-and-white-era guy holding some kind of neo-trumpet device. I allowed the clerk to sell it to me.
“Such a shame,” he said as we waited for my card to be authorized. “Bix, I mean. A prodigy. Could barely read music but played like an angel. Dead at twenty-eight. Drank himself to death.” And then he sighed, as if it had been a personal loss.
I walked up Pike Street to the market and got a place at one of the tables outside the Seattle’s Best across the street. I was still early. Fisher had refused to tell me anything more on the phone, probably judging—correctly—that he wouldn’t get to see me in person if he told me what he knew. My head felt empty and bright. The atmosphere the previous evening had been stilted. I could not help feeling that Amy was being more normal than usual. She’s one of those people who can grab random handfuls of ingredients, throw them up in the air, and have them land in bowls looking good and tasting great. Last night the food had been barely edible, and I don’t think that was just a result of the churning in my stomach. Afterward she worked in her study for a while and emerged later seeming distracted. When I had a cigarette out on the deck toward the end of the evening, I watched through the window as she sat flicking through coffee-table books, as if looking for something she couldn’t find. I’d seen her like this a few times over the last couple of years, but when I asked her if she was okay, she always said yes.