Justin Cronin - The Passage

Lacey , the world said to her. Lacey. Listen .

She heard it now, all these years later and an ocean away, sitting in the kitchen of the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy in Memphis, Tennessee.

She’d found the note in the girl’s backpack not long after her mother had left. Something about the circumstances had made Lacey uneasy, and looking at the girl, she realized what it was: the woman had never told her the girl’s name. The girl was obviously her daughter-the same dark hair, the same pale skin and long lashes that curled upward at the ends, as if lifted by a tiny breeze. She was pretty, but her hair needed combing-there were mats in it thick as a dog’s-and she had kept her jacket on the table, as if she were used to leaving places in a hurry. She seemed healthy, if a little thin. Her pants were too short and stiff with dirt. When the little girl had finished her snack, every bite, Lacey took the chair beside her. She asked her if she had anything in the bag she wanted to play with, or a book they could read together, but the little girl, who hadn’t spoken a word, just nodded and passed it from her lap. Lacey examined the bag, pink with some kind of cartoon characters glued on-their huge black eyes reminded her of the girl’s-and remembered what the woman had told her, that she was taking her daughter to school.

She unzipped the bag and inside found the stuffed rabbit, and the pairs of rolled-up underpants and socks and a toothbrush in a case, and a box of strawberry cereal bars, half empty. There was nothing else in the bag, but then she noticed the little zippered pouch on the outside. It was too late for school, Lacey realized; the girl had no lunch, no books. She held her breath and unzipped the pouch. There she found the piece of notebook paper, folded up.

I’m sorry. Her name is Amy. She’s six years old .

Lacey looked at it for a long time. Not the words themselves, which were plain enough in their meaning. What she looked at was the space around the words, a whole page of nothing at all. Three tiny sentences were all this girl had in the world to explain who she was, just three sentences and the few little things in the bag. It was nearly the saddest thing Lacey Antoinette Kudoto had ever seen in her life, so sad she couldn’t even cry.

There was no point in going after the woman. She’d be long gone by now. And what would Lacey do if she found her? What could she say? I think you forgot something. I think you’ve made some mistake . But there was no mistake. The woman, Lacey understood, had done exactly what she’d set out to do.

She folded the note and put it in the deep pocket of her skirt. “Amy,” she said, and as Sister Margaret had done all those years ago in the yard at the school in Port Loko, she positioned her face close to the girl’s. She smiled. “Is that your name, Amy? That’s a beautiful name.”

The girl looked around the room, quickly, almost furtively. “Can I have Peter?”

Lacey thought a moment. A brother? The little girl’s father? “Of course,” she said. “Who is Peter, Amy?”

“He’s in the bag,” the girl stated.

Lacey was relieved-the girl’s first request of her was something simple that she could easily provide. She removed the rabbit from the bag. It was velveteen plush, worn smooth in shiny patches, a little boy rabbit with beady black eyes and ears stiffened by wire. Lacey passed it to Amy, who placed it roughly on her lap.

“Amy,” she began again, “where did your mother go?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“How about Peter?” Lacey asked. “Does Peter know? Could Peter tell me?”

“He doesn’t know anything,” Amy said. “He’s stuffed.” The little girl frowned sharply. “I want to go back to the motel.”

“Tell me,” Lacey said. “Where is the motel, Amy?”

“I’m not supposed to say.”

“Is it a secret?”

The girl nodded, her eyes fixed on the surface of the table. A secret so deep she couldn’t even say it was a secret, Lacey thought.

“I can’t take you there if I don’t know where it is, Amy. Is that what you want? To go to the motel?”

“It’s on the busy road,” the girl explained, tugging at her sleeve.

“You live there with your mother?”

Amy said nothing. She had a way of neither looking nor speaking, of being alone with herself even in the presence of another person, that Lacey had never encountered. There was something even a little frightening about it. When the girl did this, it was as if she, Lacey, were the one who had vanished.

“I have an idea,” Lacey declared. “Would you like to play a game, Amy?”

The girl eyed her skeptically. “What kind?”

“I call it secrets. It’s easy to play. I tell you a secret, and then you tell me one. Do you see? A trade , my secret for your secret. How does that sound?”

The girl shrugged. “Okay.”

“All right then. I’ll start. Here is my secret. One time, when I was very young, like you, I ran away from home. This was in Sierra Leone, where I come from. I was very cross at my mother, because she wouldn’t let me go to see a carnival without doing my lessons first. I was very excited about this carnival, because I had heard they did tricks with horses, and I was crazy about horses. I bet you like horses too, don’t you, Amy?”

The girl nodded. “I guess.”

“Every girl like horses. But me-I was in love with them! To show her how mad I was, I refused to do my lessons, and she sent me to my room for the night. Oh, I was so angry! I stamped around the room like a crazy person. Then I thought, If I run away, she’ll be sorry she has treated me this way. She’ll let me do what I like from now on. I was very foolish, but that is what I believed. So that night, after my parents and my sisters were asleep, I left the house. I didn’t know where to go, so I hid in the fields behind our yard. It was cold and very dark. I wanted to stay there all night, and then in the morning I would be able to hear my mother crying my name when she woke up and found I wasn’t there. But I couldn’t do this. I stayed in the field a little while, but eventually I was too cold and frightened. I went back home and got into bed, and nobody ever knew I was gone.” She looked at the girl, who was watching her closely, and did her best to smile. “There-I’ve never told anyone that story, not until now. You are the first person I’ve told in my life. What do you think of that?”

The girl was watching Lacey attentively now. “You just… went home?”

Lacey nodded. “You see, I wasn’t so angry anymore. And in the morning, it all seemed like a dream I’d had. I wasn’t even sure it had actually happened, though now, many years later, I know that it did.” She patted Amy’s hand encouragingly. “Now it is your turn. Do you have a secret to tell me, Amy?”

The girl lowered her face and said nothing.

“Even a little one?”

“I don’t think she’s coming back,” said Amy.

The police officers who took the call, a man and a woman, got nowhere either. The female officer, a heavyset white woman with a cropped haircut like a man’s, spoke to the girl in the kitchen, while the other officer, a handsome black man with a smooth, narrow face, took a description of the mother from Lacey. Did she seem nervous? he asked her. Was she drunk, on drugs? What was she wearing? Did Lacey see the car? On and on he went, but Lacey could tell he was asking only because he had to; he didn’t think the girl’s mother would turn up, either. He recorded her answers with a tiny pencil on a pad of paper that, as soon as she’d finished, he returned to the breast pocket of his uniform. In the kitchen, a flash of light: the woman officer had taken Amy’s picture.