The Search Angel Read Free

feet. Then you’re left with no socks on a hiking trip. Or you may remember your face—soap, moisturizer, toothbrush,floss, lip balm—but neglect to consider hair. Now you’re stepping out of a shower after a windy afternoon in Chicago with no comb.
    “Trim that cool-guy stubble before we go,” she shouts to the bathroom door. “It’s prickly when it gets long and I don’t want to meet her with a chafed chin. We’re going to neck like teenagers over Louisiana. I once read in a book they had quicksand there. Whatever happened to quicksand, anyway? It’s like the Bermuda Triangle. As a danger it just sort of vanished.”
    One bag sits at the front of the lineup, smaller but most important. This taupe Gucci-knockoff carry-on is Sylvie’s. It contains the most precious cargo. Diapers. Formula. A doll. A crushable rattle. A muslin swaddling blanket. A pink ruffled dress with matching bloomers. A Kissy Kissy matching bodysuit, cardigan and hat. All sized for a child six months. They’ve been warned that Sylvie is tiny.
    “I can’t believe she’s going to be ours,” Eleanor calls to Jonathan, who still hasn’t appeared. “What am I saying? She
is
ours.”
    Angus, a massive black Great Dane that better resembles a baby dinosaur than a dog, pants at her feet, huge bony elbows and knees jutting across the foyer. His uncropped ears work to catch any sound that might signify departure. Every minute or so he whines accusingly at the suitcases—the source of his distress. If they’d just stayed under the bed where they belong, his humans wouldn’t be leaving. A growl emanates from deep within his barrel.
    “Poor baby.” Eleanor pauses to rub his nose. To Jonathan: “Don’t forget, we have to drop him off. Cab driver should love a dog this size in the car almost as much as Angus lovesthe vet.” Angus looks up at her and pleads with a thwack of his tail on the floor. “I need to get rid of my guilt. What was it you told me about dogs and their sense of time?”
    He doesn’t answer.
    “Something like, they can sense when it’s four o’clock every day but not the passing of hours, whatever that’s called?”
    Jonathan has a mind for scientific facts no matter what the species. “Linear time. That’s a construct of a more developed type of brain.”
    “Right.” She tickles the velvet of Angus’s floppy ears. “We could be gone half a day to him, right? Not a whole week.”
    Silence from behind the bathroom door.
    “Jonathan?”
    “Mmm.”
    They got the news three weeks ago. A large envelope from California, the stamps depicting the state flag. Holding her breath, she tore open the envelope and scanned the letter. It was the news they’d been waiting for. Their adoption had been approved. The baby girl she and Jonathan had only seen in one photograph was theirs.
    The infant’s story is tragic, and unusual after a quake that injured many but only killed five. The Baja California earthquake happened April 4 in Mexico, earning it the nickname the Easter Sunday Quake. The epicenter was just off the coast of the Gulf of California and while Mexico was hit hardest, with the sides ripped off buildings, fallen telephone poles, and cracked roads, it was the strongest quake to hit Southern California in eighteen years. Skyscrapers shook in San Diego. Sporadic power outtages. Broken water mains.
    In El Centro, in the far southeastern corner of California, the damage was largely limited to gas leaks, collapsed chimneys, and sheds. There were many injuries, but only one death: a young Irish-Vietnamese woman named Tia Kim, who had just moved into a forty-year-old apartment building. She’d been sunning herself on her main-floor balcony when the three balconies above collapsed on her and her three-month-old infant.
    Sylvie Kim had no father on record, though with her pale green-gold eyes, caramel freckled skin and wild kinky hair that ranged from deep brown to blond at the hairline, she was clearly a striking mix of