Unbreakable. Elizabeth Norris

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      Normally I like being here. Something about the way Cee has adopted the shelter and all its inhabitants as her personal responsibility makes things feel a little less bleak. Hanging out and being bossed around makes it seem like we’re all in this together.

      But not right now. This isn’t that kind of visit.

      When she sees me, she doesn’t sugarcoat it. “There’s another missing person,” she says, her white-blond hair hanging disheveled from something that might have been a ponytail. Her gray T-shirt is dirty, and her jeans are ripped in a few places. If I’d ever wondered what it looked like to carry the weight of part of the city—the homeless part—on your shoulders, now I know.

      Our missing person this time is Renee Adams. She’s twenty-two years old, and according to the description, she’s five-four and thin, with wavy, shoulder-length brown hair, and brown eyes. The only possessions she has to her name are a white long-sleeved sweater, a pair of 7 jeans, flip-flops, a last-season Coach purse, and a gold ring. She worked downtown, and before the quakes, she lived with her boyfriend in Pacific Beach. He’s presumed dead now, and she arrived at Qualcomm after seeing that her apartment building had collapsed in on itself.

      Assigned to a cot in Club Level section 47, one of the areas reserved for single women, Renee kept to herself, spent more time sleeping than awake, and cried a lot. She was even assigned to the suicide watch list for one of the grief counselors.

      But she wasn’t in her group therapy session this afternoon. And at this moment, a little past nine thirty on Monday evening—more than three hours past city curfew—she isn’t anywhere in section 47. The all-call announcements in the stadium have gone unanswered. Her cot is empty.

      Except for the ripped sheet and a tiny, yellowed fragment that unmistakably used to be part of a fingernail.

      I hold a ruler between gloved fingers and take a picture of the measurement. The rip is four and three quarters inches long, half an inch at its widest point, and the nail looks like it might be from her thumb.

      I imagine a girl pulled off the cot, reaching out to grab on to something—anything—and catching hold of the sheet. Only sheets aren’t very strong, so it rips easily, and she leaves a tiny piece of herself behind.

      “When did she go missing?” Deirdre asks, her voice quiet but weighed down with a sense of gravity.

      I don’t look at Cecily when she says she doesn’t know. She’s trying to look calm and in charge, trying to hold it together, but her eyes are red-rimmed, and her face has that splotchy look it gets when she’s cried too much.

      Deirdre has been an FBI agent for a little more than ten years. She worked with my dad for eight of them. She doesn’t know Cecily like I do, but she can recognize undeserved guilt when she sees it. “Cecily, none of this is on you. The best thing you can do right now is give us information.” Rephrasing, she says, “When was she last seen?”

      Cecily swallows forcibly. “She missed the group meetings yesterday, too, which was why someone wanted to check on her after she missed again today. I’ve talked to everyone, and by everyone I mean everyone I could find, but she didn’t know many people, or I guess not many people knew her. So as far as I can tell, the last time anyone saw her was the group therapy meeting on Friday at four p.m.”

      Three days.

      Even though I’m in jeans and a hoodie, I shiver. My dad used to say that, in an endangered circumstance, like an abduction, if you didn’t find the person within twenty-four hours of their disappearance, the chances you’d find them alive were less than 10 percent. And those chances diminished every hour.

      “I’m going to talk to the counselor,” Deirdre says, and I can tell by her tone that she’s talking more for Cecily’s benefit than mine. We’ve been opening enough of these files lately; we have a routine. “Finish up and meet by the ramp. Cecily, if you remember anything—”

      “Of course,” Cecily says, her eyes wide and eager to please. Her blond hair bounces with each nod of her head. “I’ll tell you right away.”

      As soon as Deirdre’s out of sight, Cecily’s shoulders droop and she slumps into a seated position on the floor.

      After I snap a few more pictures and write down the remaining details—Renee’s purse is still here, overturned with a broken cell phone on the floor next to what looks like a drop of blood on the concrete—I turn and look at Cee. “I didn’t know her,” she says.

      “There are a lot of people here.” We both realize it’s unrealistic to expect her to know everyone. Even someone with the social-butterfly gene like Cee can’t possibly get acquainted with everyone in a stadium full of displaced people.

      “But I don’t know anything about her. Not really,” she says, folding her arms across her chest. “Just her name and what people have said about her.”

      I want to say something comforting—that’s what Cecily needs from me right now—but everything I think of sounds too cold. Reducing a person to a paragraph of hearsay is depressing no matter what words you use.

      “Oh!” Cecily sits up straighter. “I forgot. Someone told me they thought Renee did something with computers. You know, like, for work. They weren’t sure what, but something pretty badass. She’d said something about it one night, about missing her job, and how without computers she was practically obsolete.”

      “I’ll put it in the file,” I say.

      Cecily laughs. The bitterness doesn’t sound right coming from her. “She thought she was obsolete then. I wonder what she’s thinking now.”

      Even СКАЧАТЬ