The Year of Fog Read Free Page A

The police are already leaning toward a theory of drowning.
    Yesterday, not long after the police arrived, the Coast Guard boat appeared. I stood on the beach answering questions, watching the boat plow through the freezing water. Overhead, an orange chopper came swooping in from the north. Its nose tipped toward the ocean, and the loud thwack-thwack of the blades reminded me of movies about Vietnam. Hours later, as evening pressed in, the Coast Guard boat disappeared. The ocean was blue-black beneath a darker sky, and the wind had picked up, pushing the fog eastward. As the sand cut into my face and neck, I worried about Emma in her sweatshirt, not warm enough for this kind of wind. I hoped she had worn socks, but I couldn’t remember.
    At some point Jake arrived. I don’t remember how it happened—only that for the longest time he wasn’t there, and then, suddenly, he was. Cruiser lights flashed red and blue over the dark beach. There was the strong creosote smell of a bonfire downwind. A few surfers were coming in, their bodies slick and seal-like in black wet suits. The police questioned them one by one.
    Eventually, someone from the Coast Guard approached us. His uniform looked neatly pressed despite the fact he’d been working all day. “There’s not much we can do in the dark,” he said. “We’ll start again early in the morning.”
    “If she’s out there,” Jake asked, “what are your chances of finding her?”
    The Coast Guard man looked down, dug the toe of his shoe into the sand. “Hard to tell, depends on the tides. Sometimes, after a drowning, the body will wash up on shore, sometimes not.”
    “Emma’s terrified of water,” I said, looking to Jake for confirmation. “She wouldn’t have gone near it.”
    Sherburne turned to me. The pages of his yellow legal pad flapped in the wind.
    I explained how I’d recently taken Emma to the birthday party of a bossy girl named Melissa. Screaming children played Marco Polo in a yellow-tiled pool in Millbrae, while Emma sat cross-legged on a lounge chair, terrorizing a ladybug that had fallen into her root beer float. “She refused to go in the pool,” I said. I could see Emma in her blue bathing suit, sitting there, clear as a snapshot. Every now and then she’d squint, glance up at the glittering pool, and move her foot by a fraction, as if she might get up her nerve and go in, but she never did. In the car on the way home, when I asked if she’d had fun, she propped her skinny feet on the dashboard and said, “I don’t care for that Melissa.”
    Sherburne looked at me in a pitying way, as if to say this was no kind of proof. But from the way he lowered his head and put a hand on Jake’s shoulder, I could tell he wanted to believe me.
    “She’s a really smart kid,” I said, desperate to make him understand. “If I thought for a second she’d get anywhere near the water, I wouldn’t have let go of her hand.”
    Jake turned away from me then, toward the ocean, and I realized that some tiny part of him was actually considering it, that somewhere in his deeply rational mind this idea was taking hold as a minute but distinct possibility: Emma might have drowned.
    “I’ve got two kids,” Sherburne said. “I’m going to do everything I can.”
    Now, Jake emerges through a door, head bowed. I touch his shoulder as we cross paths. He jerks as if he has been stung, then looks at me, his eyes red and swollen. With obvious effort he moves his hand in my direction, clasps my fingers, and lets go.
    “How could you?” he said, moments after hearing the news. “God, Abby, how could you?” It was on the phone, long-distance to Eureka; his voice was shaky, he was crying. Now, I can see in his face that it’s an effort for him not to say it again—to repeat it over and over, an angry refrain. And I’m thinking,
How could I?
The guilt is a physical sensation, a constant, sickening pain.
    The polygrapher stands in the doorway, hands on his hips,