Lamb

It was the most natural thing in the world. Days growing shorter, autumn on its way. Pretty soon breakfasts by the fire, rinsing out the mess kit in the river water. There’d be hot chocolate in the evenings. Hauling dead wood in off the riverbank and splitting it for the woodstove. He wishing they could fix her a whole Thanksgiving dinner by campfire.

“You could do that?”

“Of course I could do that.”

“With a turkey?”

“A sharp-tailed grouse. And trout from the river. And chokecherry wine.”

“Wine for us both?”

“Just a taste for you.”

And we should probably pause here to imagine too how things were going in Illinois. How Tommie’s mother would first think Tommie was at the mall or at a neighbor’s house. How then Tommie’s mother would realize she had not taken a breath for days. And she would start smoking, right away, to make every breath until she died a chore and a countdown until she could be with Tom again.

And how they would interview Jenny and Sid. Investigators, social workers, their parents all in a green-carpeted room with dry-erase boards, a coffeepot, chairs arranged in a circle. How one at a time the girls are questioned, how they cry after the same question. Was it a dare? How they’re apologetic and how when they’re flanked by their parents they seem like a couple of kids. How a social worker would ask if they understand how much danger their friend is in. How the girls will tell them every detail they can recall: how they made fake tube tops and stapled them and dotted their arms with blue-ink freckles. How they whispered their conversations about menstruating, explaining that they were talking about things Tommie wouldn’t understand. How they went bra shopping on the weekends, carried their gym clothes to and from school in Victoria’s Secret bags. Telling Tommie maybe one day she’d have a reason to go in the store too. How Jenny wrote a fake love letter from Tommie to her stepdad, Jessie, and read it out loud on the bus. How they pushed her in Sid’s basement closet with Luke Miller, then nicknamed her Prudie and told everyone she’d cried and covered her head with her hands and hid behind Sid’s dad’s raincoat. How that first day she was taken into that old guy’s car it had seemed, yes, unwillingly. The color of the Ford. The height of the man. His hair color. Who he looked like on TV. That Tommie wasn’t taking the bus anymore after that. That Jenny saw her trace the letter G on the floor with her shoe, over and over and over again, straight through a history class. How they would be looking for Geralds, Grants, Garys, Genes, Glens with registered navy blue Ford Explorers. How the social worker—with a long flat mane of strawberry blond hair graying at the temples—didn’t believe any of it. A handsome man who looks like some TV star befriends this unremarkable girl and takes her away? A man like that isn’t missed by his family? His boss? His wife, say? The whole thing told like a story made up by a child.

And let’s say Jessie stepped up to the plate, really started leading the team. Really found he missed her, really expressed how fond he was of the child, how he missed her affection. That’s what he would call it: affection. How when investigators talked to him they would be thinking he himself could have done it, he could have taken her and hidden her away somewhere, he could be that guy. How vividly he could imagine it all. How he could be a suspect. How he was glad she wasn’t his real daughter because how would he have felt, being a man himself and knowing what was likely happening to her? He could never have held that up.

And we could say too that it was all the kids talked about at school for three days, a week, even two weeks, but how—true to a promise David Lamb would make her—Tommie would become a ghost, and everyone would forget her. All but one boy, say, a friendless scrawny kid with a perpetually runny nose and zealous parents, and who’d had a secret crush on Tommie for years, sat next to her in math and always hid his pencils before class so he could ask her for one. Say Tommie never would have mentioned this to Jenny or Sid, but she always packed an extra for him. Say she even let him borrow Lamb’s little silver pencil sharpener and square-danced with him in gym class—pretending, when Jenny and Sid called for it—to be repulsed by his skinny damp hands. His life would be touched by Tommie’s disappearance, how he would come to understand that this was how the universe worked. Maybe his parents would move to Nashville or Buffalo or Dallas before he could find out what happened to Tommie in the end. He’d keep his adult life empty, steeled against perpetuating the shock and horror of finding she’d been abducted. Say that was the word they were using: abducted.