The Elementals Read online

  Finally my eyelids got too heavy and I marked the book with Jeni’s postcard, rested my head on the pillow and turned off the light.

  As I was drifting off, I thought of how, when I was a little sleepless girl, my mom would come in my bed with me and curl up at the bottom.

  “I love you,” I’d say. “You’re the best mommy in the world.” And she’d say, “I love you more.” We went on like that back and forth. One night she added, “Someday I hope you meet a man who loves you as much as I do. Because every girl deserves that much love.” I reached out and took her hand and that was how I had been able to sleep.

  There were no nightmares then, not real ones, no malignancies, no missing girls.

  3. The residue of lonely

  I almost went on that school trip with Jeni, and the other students and the chaperone Mr. Kragen, but I got the flu at the last minute. I wonder if I’d gone, would she still be here? She would never have wandered off alone. I’d have been by her side the whole time. After what happened I wanted to go to Berkeley even more. I wanted to be where she had been—to find something, to find myself. Since she’d been gone, I’d gone missing, too.

  I woke early to avoid the boys. For the first few days I managed it but at the end of the week I came out of the shower stall and saw three massive males shaving at the sinks. They were all completely naked. One of them winked at me in the mirror and I felt my face redden as I ran out. They grunted with laughter. My embarrassment wasn’t just that I’d seen them; it was that it had excited me as much as it made me feel sick to my stomach. Not that I wanted them, but I was curious, my body was curious. I was seventeen but I couldn’t remember ever seeing a penis before. Jeni and I looked at pictures on the Internet (the nude Nureyev by Avedon was our favorite) but that was it and I’d lost interest, even in the most beautiful ballet dancer in the world, after she wasn’t there. The three naked bodies were meaty and hairy, bodies of men who could do harm if they wanted.

  They were all football players—Todd Hamlin, Jake Glendorf and Will Merrell. Lauren knew everyone’s name and talked constantly—that’s how I found out. I started getting up even earlier after that.

  I went down to breakfast in the cafeteria, where I always ate alone; no one asked to sit with me and I was too shy to introduce myself. People seemed to divide up into the usual groups right away, just like in high school—preppy kids, jocks, tech nerds, artsy and Lauren Barnes and her friends Kelly Wentworth and Jodi Bale who looked like sorority girls with their shiny hair and perfect clothes. I didn’t fit in with any of the groups and I guess I didn’t really try. In high school it didn’t matter that much because I had my mom and dad and Jeni. If she were with me everything would be different, I told myself. We’d have been roommates and eaten every meal together and taken the train to San Francisco on the weekends to see all the places we dreamed about. We would have shared iPod speakers listening to our favorite band, Halloween Hotel, and talked about indie boys and music, antique books and vintage clothes, late into the night until one of us crashed out. The other girl would have smiled to herself in the darkness as her last question went unanswered; she would be eager for morning.

  * * *

  I didn’t mind school; it wasn’t obvious, in class, that I was alone, that parts of me were gone. I could get lost in the books and the lectures and I could forget, if only for a little while, about my mom and Jeni and the way it felt to walk around that big campus by myself, like some kind of ghost.

  There were times it would have been good to really be a ghost, though. Like when I had to face the naked football players in the bathroom or run into one of them on campus where they would wink at me and wolf whistle and then laugh. My face would always flame up, reminding me, and not in a good way, that I wasn’t a bloodless ghost at all.

  After school I went on runs through Strawberry Canyon or the amphitheater-shaped Berkeley rose garden, now barren of blooms. Then I got an early dinner at the dorms, where the food was always terrible—overcooked vegetables and “mystery meat” in brown sauce. I missed my mom’s lasagnas, paellas and enchiladas so much it made me want to cry into the plate of iceberg lettuce with cold tofu that was all I could stomach. I grabbed an energy bar from the care package my mom sent, got a coffee on the way and went to Doe Library to study.

  On the weekends everything was basically the same—reading, writing and running. My big treat was dinner on Saturday night—a colossal frozen yogurt that made my stomach hurt and my hands feel like ice sculptures. If there was a party in the dorm I went just to get the free alcohol and then left.

  I talked to my parents then, too, but not usually during the week, which was strange since I had basically at least spoken to, if not seen, my mom every day for my entire life.

  I did all of these things, the things every freshman does, but there was something else I did, too, those first two months in the city of her disappearance. I searched for clues.

  Dressed in baggy jeans, striped T-shirts and sneakers, my hair in a ponytail, just like her. Hoping to lure anyone who might have wanted Jeni. But I didn’t have those dimples or those lashes, half the magic.

  The dorm across from mine could have been the same building. Every day after school I wandered those halls. I even went to the room where she had stayed and knocked on the door and asked if I could look around. Two girls wrinkled their noses at me. They were identical in stature (slight), hairstyle (bangs), even outfits, and for a moment my chest squeezed with longing for a companion, not a phantom twin. They let me look inside but it could have been any freshman dorm room, though I wanted to get on my knees and press my face into the mattress. I left and walked down the stairs, out the front door, imagining I was Jeni. Where would she have gone?

  Everywhere I went I imagined she was walking with me. I tried to see things through her eyes; it wasn’t hard. I knew how she thought. The faces she would find beautiful or interesting, the scruffy and disabled dogs she would stop to pet, the jewelry she would lift from black velvet on the street vendor’s table, examining to see how it was made, the buildings she would want to live in. I recorded anything that seemed important in the notebook I always carried. Sometimes I wrote stories trying to understand more about a world that made no sense to me.

  Once I took BART into the city, to the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park because that was the photo on the postcard she had sent me. Miss you. See you soon. The postcard had been sent from a Berkeley post office the day she disappeared and it arrived after we already knew she was gone. She hadn’t chosen a Berkeley image but a San Francisco one. We should live here someday. I wasn’t sure if she meant the city or the actual building of the conservatory; the lacy white wood-and-glass Victorian greenhouse looked like a fairy palace. I wandered around under the dome, among the orchids and across the lawn outside and even handed out a few flyers but I felt helpless and lost in the fog so I went back to Berkeley where at least there was evidence she had once been.

  Sometimes when I saw the campus police or passed the station I wondered to myself what I would say to them.

  “I want her back,” I would say. “Can you help me find her?”

  * * *

  So instead of making a fool of myself with the police, I did it with everyone else; wherever I went, that late summer and early fall, I carried a stack of flyers in my backpack. I tried to hand them out, asking if anyone had seen her face. Most people looked at me strangely and wouldn’t even talk to me. In Berkeley you learn to build a wall around yourself, to protect yourself from the onslaught of flyers and petitions and upturned palms and catcalls and insults. I did it, too. So I understood why I was being ignored but I didn’t give up. Maybe I seemed insane—paranoid, schizoid, obsessive-compulsive—padding after people, holding up the photo of the girl with the dimples and huge, dark eyes. Maybe I was.

  It didn’t matter.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Excuse me, have you seen her?”

  There was one person in my dorm—a classic goth gir
l with powder skin and bottle-black hair—who seemed interested in the picture.

  “Who is this?” she asked, taking a flyer and tapping it with bitten black nails.

  “My best friend.”

  “What happened?” Her pale face seemed to grow smaller behind her cat-eye glasses. “She looks familiar.”

  A tremor of dumb hope and shrewd fear traveled along my spine. “She was visiting here summer before last.”

  “It was in the papers,” the girl said. “I remember. I collect that stuff.”

  “Have you seen her, though?”

  She shook her head. “Sorry.” Before I could say anything else, she was gone, gripping Jeni’s picture in her hand.

  After that it seemed that whenever I looked up she was watching me from across the dining room. I heard Lauren say she was a sophomore named Coraline Grimm, or at least that was what she called herself. (Anyone who had heard of Neil Gaiman or those brothers who wrote the fairy tales was a bit skeptical.) Once when I got up to go sit with her—she looked so lonely—she swallowed her last sip of orange juice and scurried away.

  My English teacher, a grad student named Melinda Story, took the flyer graciously. Her blue eyes seemed to darken with concern and she stroked her long blond braid.

  “I heard about this,” she said, with her soft lisp that reminded me of Jeni’s.

  I stood frozen, waiting for her to go on.

  “If you need to talk, I’m here,” she said.

  So all she could offer me was sympathy and the concerned looks that she shot my way while lecturing about Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales; I needed much more than that.

  “If you have any leads for me, let me know,” I said.

  There was one other person who stopped with interest to take my flyer—the giant I’d seen the first night we’d arrived. Up close he smelled like nicotine and mold and I saw that the dark shade of his skin was from dirt. He was much younger than I’d thought, only a little older than I was. But being on the streets and perhaps whatever had brought him there had made him look like an aged man.

  When I held out Jeni’s picture, he grabbed at it, his hand almost black with grime, darker than the rest of him; he wore a sock that had been cut open to free his shaking fingers. Before I could say anything he was limping away. I ran after him.

  “Have you seen her?” I asked. “Do you remember her face?”

  He shook his head and made a moaning sound, lifting his hands to either side of his face, as if to ward off a blow. The look in his eyes is nothing I can describe, nor can I forget. It was the way I felt. It was despair.

  And after that I did what I had been avoiding—I went to see the police.

  Jeni’s missing-persons report had been filed by the San Fernando Valley Police Department even though she had disappeared here. I was interviewed by Detectives Ryan and Rodriguez then.

  Was she the type of girl that would have gone out all by herself or do you think she was meeting someone?

  This I did not know. She went everywhere only with me and I wasn’t there.

  Was she at all sad or depressed when she went on this trip?

  I knew this one: no and no. She was giddy, giggly with excitement, saddened only when I called to say I couldn’t go.

  Was there anyone she didn’t get along with?

  Not that I knew of.

  Would she have dressed differently if she was going to a party or to meet a boy she liked?

  No, she didn’t dress up. (I almost said we and added except in our dreams of tulle and faded satin.)

  Did she have a boyfriend that you knew of?

  No. And I would have been the one to know.

  When was the last time you saw her?

  This question made me pause to catch my breath as if the pleasant detectives had punched me in the stomach. They waited patiently and told me to take my time.

  It was a sunny afternoon. We’d been talking about boys in my room, filling my scrapbook with cutouts of indie film stars and musicians, planning for the trip up north.

  “What did the boys look like?” they detectives had asked when I’d calmed down and I showed them. Spiky hair, eyeliner, piercings, tats.

  “Why?” I asked. “Is this relevant?”

  “Everything is relevant,” they said.

  But that was over a year ago and I wasn’t sure the Berkeley campus police would feel the same way, at least not anymore. I knew there was an officer assigned to the case in Berkeley; Ryan and Rodriguez had given me his card.

  I wondered at the time I spoke to them how you keep your compassion at a job like that, how you keep from turning as hard as a bulletproof vest. The losses again and again.

  Officer Liu met me a few days later at a coffee shop on Shattuck. He looked so young it was disconcerting. I found myself wishing for the broad builds and lined faces of Rodriguez and Ryan.

  “So it’s been over a year now,” Liu said, scowling at some paperwork he’d brought.

  I nodded and removed my tea bag from the cup. It made a puddle in my saucer.

  “And you’re coming to me now because?”

  “I’m at school here,” I said.

  He nodded. “It’s been a year,” he repeated.

  Those were the words I’d been dreading. Why hadn’t I come here sooner? I thought of myself at home—going to school, running, eating, sleeping—how could I have done anything except look for her?

  “We’ve done everything we could. Search parties, investigations. The case is still open, though. We’re always open to new information.”

  I nodded and looked at the ovoid of his face, not knowing what to say. My cup rattled in the wet saucer when I set it down and some liquid spilled onto the table. I tried to wipe it up with my napkin.

  “Is there anything you can tell me about it?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Miss Silverman. Since you’re not immediate family there’s nothing more we can disclose. But rest assured this is being handled by experts. We’ll continue to do all we can.”

  He paid for my tea and suggested grief counseling. That was the worst part, somehow; I took it as a sign that he had given up.

  * * *

  So I continued to carry the flyers with me, stapling them to the ragged, splintering wood of telephone poles and plastering them on construction-site walls. As if they would help, as if it wasn’t too late.

  * * *

  When my eighteenth birthday came in October I could literally taste the despair on my tongue like the residue of the pistachio frozen yogurt I had for dinner that night. I’d received a card and a bunch of red and white roses from my parents. They were always giving me flowers; every birthday and holiday I got an oversized bouquet. I loved flowers but a part of me wished my parents would stop, because it made me aware of how no one else had ever even given me a single wildflower (except for Jeni—which made it even worse) but I couldn’t tell them about my ambivalence. Besides, at least I could pretend the flowers were from a boy.

  “What are you doing tonight?” my mom asked.

  “I’m kind of tired.”

  “Do you have a friend to celebrate with? Maybe your roommate?”

  Yeah right. “I might go to this dorm party.” I just wanted to get her to stop asking.

  But when we got off the phone I decided I really would go to the party in the lounge in case she asked. Even if it was just to try to wash away the taste in my mouth with some free, cheap gin, and to hand out flyers.

  Tommy Leeds was there. I’d overheard Lauren say he played bass in a punk band—not that it was hard to guess. Skinny jeans and old-school platform suede creepers that made him appear taller than he was. His almost metallic hair stood straight up in an electric shock and his eyes were always a little red. The plugs stretching out his earlobes gave me a wincing feeling but I also found myself fascinated by them.

  Tommy was in my psych class, where I was sure he would recognize me throughout the pages of the DSM (paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal,
antisocial, histrionic, avoidant, dependent and obsessive-compulsive) if he even knew I existed. This thought confirmed the paranoia at least.

  That night he was with a group of guys dressed just like him. They all looked bored.

  “Hey,” I said. “I heard you’re in a band.”

  He blinked his red eyes at me. “Yeah.”

  “What’s your name? The name?” Lame.

  “Intrepid.”

  “Cool.” I paused, not intrepid at all. “You’re in my psych class.”

  “Aw, yeah. Cool. I hate that class. I keep thinking I have all those disorder thingies.”

  I felt better then. “Yeah, me, too! I’m totally paranoid, obsessive-compulsive and dependent.”

  “Wow,” he said. “For real?”

  I realized I’d blown it. “No. I mean it’s just funny how so much of it kind of feels relevant like Ludkin says.”

  “Yeah. Whatever. Everyone’s kind of fucked up. Especially in No Cal, man.”

  I wondered what it would be like to kiss him. He smelled like gin, clove cigarettes and hairspray—we were close enough, it was hot enough, for me to tell. Maybe I hadn’t blown it. He’d said everyone was fucked up, especially here. I wanted someone fucked up to kiss me on my birthday, to sting my mouth with alcohol and nicotine. It would make things better; they couldn’t get worse.

  “Is it less fucked up where you’re from?” I asked him.

  “Yeah. Hollywood all the way, man.”

  A bang of blood at my temples reminded me of what I was supposed to be doing here at Berkeley, why I had come. It wasn’t about boys, at least not in that way. Kids from Hollywood High had been on the trip with Jeni.

  “You weren’t on a class trip here after junior year, were you?”

  He squinted at me with his eyeliner. “Yeah. It sucked. You?”

  “No. I had a friend who was.”

  An Asian girl with long pigtails, a checkered dress and cartoon-sized platform Mary Janes came up to him from behind and kissed his cheek. He flung his body around, grabbed her.

  It was no longer about a kiss. I tapped his shoulder.