The Year of Fog Read Online Free PDF Page A

and it took a while for her to get back to the parking lot. She’s probably standing by the car right now; she must be. I should have stayed there and waited for her.
    Jake’s phone rings twice, three times. I know that in the moment I tell him, the nightmare will become real. On the fifth ring, he picks up.
    “Abby?”
    I hear voices in the background, sports announcers, the ambient noise of a crowd. I don’t know how to begin.
    “You there?” he says.
    “I have to tell you something.”
    A wild cheer goes up from the crowd, and Jake lets out a whoop. “Delgado just hit a home run!”
    “Jake, you have to come home,” I say. Even as I say it, I’m calculating the time it will take him to drive the 270 miles if he leaves right now, if he goes over the speed limit and doesn’t have to stop for gas, if there isn’t much traffic.
    “What?”
    “You have to come home. It’s Emma.”
    “I can hardly hear you.”
    “Emma,” I say.
    The tone of his voice changes. “Is something wrong?”
    “She’s gone,” I say.
    “What?”
    “Emma. She’s gone.”
    His voice strikes a high, unfamiliar note. “What do you mean?”
    “We were on the beach. We were walking.”
    How to finish the conversation? Nothing about the moment seems real. I know there must be some appropriate words to utter, but I have no idea what they might be. This is a glitch in time, a mistake, a joke. At any moment Emma will walk through the door.
    “What do you mean?” he says again.
    “There was this dead seal, a pup. I looked away for a few seconds, I swear it was only a few seconds. Then I looked up and she wasn’t there.”
    “But…where is she now?”
    Where is she? A valid question. The obvious question. How to answer?
    “Lost,” I say. As if she simply strayed, the way children do. As if she is standing patiently at some fixed point, waiting for me. “The police are on their way.”
    On the other end, several seconds of silence. A stranger’s voice says, “Hey, man, you okay?” I will later learn that this is the voice of the hot dog vendor. Jake’s legs have given out. One moment he’s standing, mind on the game, holding up two fingers to indicate that he wants two hot dogs. Then he’s sitting on the ground—no, not sitting but kneeling, knees to the cement.
    “This isn’t possible,” Jake says. “Abby, how could you?”
    In the background there is the smack of a baseball bat, the roar of the crowd.
             
    I met Jake a year ago at the high school where he teaches. I was doing a slide presentation on the landscape photography of the Southwest for a group of juniors and seniors. Before I cut the lights, I saw a man sitting alone in the back row, looking a bit out of place. He had wavy black hair, glasses with thin silver frames, and he wore a blue button-down. When the lights came back on, he gave me a thumbs-up.
    I opened the floor for comments. There were none. The art history teacher, an anorexic brunette with very short bangs, asked a couple of predictable questions to make up for her students’ lack of interest. When the bell rang, the students rushed the aisles, jostling each other and shouting. The sudden activity stirred up unpleasant odors of adolescence—cheap perfume, hair spray, sweat, and pent-up lust. When the din cleared, the guy from the back row was standing in front of the platform.
    “You were pretty good up there,” he said.
    “You’re just being nice.”
    “Really, they’re a tough crowd. You held your own.” He reached out to shake my hand. “Name’s Jake.”
    “Should you be wandering around without a hall pass?”
    “Last period was my lunch break, and this is my prep time. I couldn’t bear the thought of sitting in the teachers’ lounge.”
    Just then the lights went off, plunging us into darkness. “Budget cuts,” Jake explained. “All the lights are on automatic timers.” The auditorium was empty save for the two of us. We both reached for the shutoff switch