Darcey Steinke - Jesus Saves

“You know,” he said, “it's true what your mother used to say. I have no idea how the world works.”

Even from the grave her mother's endless accusations, long rooted in her father's head, grew up like goat grass through cracks in cement. Her father always countered her mother by saying she was chained like a slave to the world of things. But Ginger knew all she wanted was to be respectable, have a clean couch in her living room and a few nice dresses hanging in her closet.

“If you could have heard Mulhoffer,” her father's own voice trembled.

“Who cares.?” Ginger asked. “The man is a moron.”

Admiration filtered across his face but then the light drained out of his eyes. He'd decided there was no use trying to explain. “Of course you're right,” he said unconvincingly, his head swiveling like an adolescent's over her shoulder to the muted TV.

He bolted up and raised the volume. “Did you hear?” he asked, his eyes locked to the screen. “Another girl is missing.”

Ginger swung around on the bed, watched the video footage of police in black rain slickers being led by German shepherds on leashes through the woods.

“Who is it?”

“Shush,” her father nodded at the newscaster, a young man who jumbled his vowels and looked a little too excited as he delivered the facts. Police were searching the woods between Willow Brook subdivision and Creek Mist Condo Complex, where neighbors said kids sometimes played. The screen flashed to the house, a mint-green split-level. Press gathered under black umbrellas on the front lawn. The mother provided home-video footage; flickering and fuzzy sun dappled a picnic table covered with a red gingham cloth. And then the girl, a towheaded child with slate blue eyes in a strappy sundress, turned toward the camera. “Oh my God,” Ginger said, “I know that girl.”

Press vans lined the street in front of the girl's house, their white satellite dishes collecting cold drizzle. Inside one of the campers, a pinched-faced woman sat typing intently into her laptop computer. And inside a bland rental car, an older man talked on his cellular phone, glancing occasionally at his legal pad notes. The rain kept most of the media inside their vehicles, though she overheard two men in parkas standing outside a minivan talking about Sandy Patrick.

Smoke leaked from the carport next door to the girl's house, where a teenaged boy grilled hot dogs and filled his entrepreneurial cooler with Diet Cokes, and on the front lawn neighbors stood in little groups under umbrellas. Ginger saw two girls holding a candle and looking solemnly up at the house. A young female newscaster stood under a striped CBS umbrella and complained to the cameraman that Oprah had already offered the mother big money for an exclusive and she heard Maury Povich had checked into the Hilton out by the airport.

A truck from the local TV station was parked in the driveway. Thick black cords ran out the back end, over the cement walk and through the front door. Ginger leaned inside, saw two men sitting below six screens, simultaneously showing a woman with the same fine features as her daughter say, “. . please, whoever you are, let my little girl go. She's all I have in this world and I—.” Her mouth trembled, refused to make words, formed into the primordial O, and she stuck a Kleenex to her lips and pressed her head into the neck of the bald dentist. His little pony tail shifted, the one the girl always referred to as a rat's tongue.

The man inside the truck swiveled his chair around to face the other man sitting in front of the soundboard. “Bet you ten to one,” he said, “that little girl is already dead.”

“T-R-O-U-B-L-E!” the hippie spelled out, leaning out the screen door of his white house. The smell of rich dirt and sweet pot blossoms wafted around him. “That's what we called the spooky little girls down on the commune. There was one I remember who wore nothing but men's shirts, always had field flowers hanging out of her hair, and told everybody she was Jesus’ little sister.” The hippie shook his head. “Man, it's like I'm trying to tell you, everything is out of whack.”

“I need to keep looking,” Ginger said. She didn't have time to hear one of the hippie's apocalyptic manifestos. “Maybe she's waiting back at my house.”

The hippie looked skeptical. “Just don't call the police,” he said. “She'll turn up next week at the bus station in Palo Alto and the next thing you know we'll see her on Entertainment Tonight hanging on the arm of some movie star.”

“You think?” Ginger said hopefully.

“Sure,” the hippie said, “that's what always happened to all those girls, either that,” his loopy smile tensed, “or something else.”

No, he hadn't seen the girl, though she'd taken to calling him late in the night, singing her favorite songs to him over the telephone and asking if she could come over to score, Steve said as they stood in the living room, just inside the door. He wore a towel around his waist, seemed bored, kept his eyes half closed, his mouth slack.

“She's a freaky chick,” he said. “For all I know she could have walked into the woods and killed herself.”

“Did she say she was going to do that?”

“She said a lot of crazy stuff. How do I know?” he said, glancing down the hall, where Ginger suspected a woman waited in his bed, one of the older ladies who bought him tanks of gasoline and took him out for steak.

Her room was empty. Her sleeping bag wadded up on the bottom sheet, a fine layer of plaster dust covering everything from where the workmen were putting up drywall in the corner. Ginger flopped down on her bed. She held on to this picture, to the exclusion of any thought or sensation, the girl sprawled on her bed sleeping deeply like a child, sweat dampening the nape of her neck. But now this last hope dissolved, leaving her sick with worry. Clenching her eyes shut so hard the usual silver blackness turned to orange, she heard blood thumping in her ears. Please God bring her back and she saw the girl walking around the mall with ten dollars in her pocket for an orange julius and a pair of earrings, the girl scratching a bug bite on the back of her calf and laughing in that self-conscious way she thought of as glamorous, talking about super-models, her favorite Cindy, getting her hair soft as silk pajamas, and the aggressive way she yanked perfume samples out of magazines. If you bring her back, she prayed to God, I'll take care of her myself. She imagined him like a black hole with a swirly ghost face and a booming, computerized voice. Better to pray to Jesus and his bullet-riddled body, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.

Highway lights illuminated falling ice like patches of free-form static, and the crimson Steak and Ale sign floated up on the hill like a message from an angry God. Rain turned to ice, so the asphalt was slick as oil, and the few cars on the road slid like old dogs trying to keep their balance. Ginger's umbrella blew back with a tug. Several ribs were broken so she pitched it down into the muddy ditch. Slushy water moved sluggishly into a drainage pipe. Drops of ice hit her face in a sensation cold and sharp but not altogether unpleasant.

Mud froze up in ridges like whipped cream, made soft crushing sounds under the heels of her tennis shoes. Branches rattled against one another like dime-store wind chimes as she moved onto the dirt path past the cat skeleton and the broken-down high chair. Ice glazed the old socks and bits of newspaper, froze bugs to dead leaves, and gathered in mealy drifts on the ground.

The barn was dark. She'd half hoped Ted would be in front of the fire, reading the I–Ching and toasting marshmallows. Ashes surrounded the TV like a moat; plastic carnations scattered over the dirt floor. Moving the toe of her tennis shoe around in the ash, she felt for the deer's head, but it was gone. A sheet of newspaper fluttered at the edge of the ash, diaphanous and nuanced as a scarf, a phantom with a white face. Startled, she thought someone said something, but when she turned her head all she heard was the rain's flat report on the soggy papers in the corner. Drips formed a discordant melody and entered her mind like speech. She listened to the wind flap against the dead leaves on the forest floor. She felt stupid now for thinking the girl might be here. The hippie was probably right: she was headed for Colorado or California or anyone of those states that looked pretty in photographs. Wearing headphones, reading a magazine, the girl was probably curled into a seat on a dark and buoyant nighttime bus.