OUR plan was to spend just a couple of hours at the zoo and get on the road back to Los Angeles in plenty of time to miss the traffic. That was the plan. I was tired of the dead ends this case was leading me to, and I wanted to hustle things along, get back to the city and pay a visit to Thomas, whom I’d never met, and if that led nowhere, finally concede defeat and refund Heavenly’s retainer fee. That was the plan.
What was not part of the plan was panic. What was not part of the plan was standing with my back pressed against the polar bear tank, shrieking my daughter’s name. What was not part of the plan was losing Ruby.
It started like this: Peter and I watched the polar bears glide by the huge windows, their yellowish fur brushing the glass, their massive paws paddling in an aquatic ballet. The window was underground, with a fish-eye view of the tank. We could watch the bears swim from underwater. It was hypnotic. Finally, when the people behind us began expressing their impatience too loudly to ignore, we gathered up Isaac, who had been kneeling at the window in front of us.
“Where’s Ruby?” Peter said.
“She must be back at the first observation window.” The viewing area was divided into bays, each fronting its own window. We walked back to the first bay looking for her small, red-headed figure. It took all of thirty seconds for us to shift from unconcern, to alarm, to out-and-out dread. We began running in and out of the exhibit, calling her name.
“Where is she?” I screamed at Peter.
He didn’t bother to answer. The other families stared at us, their faces reflecting either concern or disapproval, depending on just how sanctimonious they were, or whether they’d ever been unlucky enough to find themselves in our shoes.
“A little red-haired girl,” I said, frantically, to the crowd at large. “Has anyone seen a little red-haired girl? Seven years old?”
“What is she wearing?” a mother holding her toddler on a harness and leash asked me.
I stared at the leash for a moment and then replied, “I don’t. . . I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what your daughter is wearing?” she said, horrified. Then she yanked on her child’s leash and turned her back.
“Peter!” I yelled as I ran from the polar bear exhibit and out into the sun. “What was she wearing? What was Ruby wearing?”
Peter was standing on the path, his head whipping back and forth. He ran a few steps up each path and then, when he didn’t see Ruby, tore back down. He carried Isaac in one arm and hauled the empty stroller behind him.
Sadie hung from my chest in the Baby Björn, my shoulders aching from the strain. Her legs danced against my belly as I ran after my husband.
“What was Ruby wearing?” I shouted again.
“Her yellow daisy T-shirt,” he said. “Come on, let’s go up the hill to the information booth. We’ll find someone and ask them what to do.”
We ran as fast as we could up the hill, our breath ragged in our chests, the stroller careening along in front of us, half of the time on two wheels. We bumped into people and didn’t even bother to apologize, so fixated were we on making it to where we could ask for help.
These times are when I regret most my career in criminal defense. Knowing too much about the evil of which men are capable is a very bad thing when your child is missing. In the moments it took to climb to the zoo information booth I saw Ruby, my little girl, in the clutches of the worst kind of madman. The kind who lurks in places where children find themselves out from under their parents’ eyes. The kind who snatches them up and steals them away. The kind who feeds off innocence and chews on the virtue of childhood. I saw all that, and more.
I saw myself, a woman who could not keep her child safe. Who could not protect her from the evil world. A woman who lost her child.
By the time we arrived at the information booth, I was crying too hard to speak.
Peter pushed aside a line of people waiting for maps and directions to the bathroom and grabbed the shirtsleeve of the young woman manning the booth. “Our daughter. She’s lost. Her name is Ruby. Please. Please help us.”
“Ruby?” the young woman said.
“Yes, Ruby. She’s seven years old.”
She smiled broadly. “Little red-haired girl?”
“Yes! Yes!” I shouted through my tears.
“Oh, Ruby’s doing fine. I bet she’s having herself an ice cream cone about now.”
“Ruby gets ice cream?” Isaac said. “That’s not fair.”
It seems that Ruby was never lost. She was just so prepared for the possibility of being lost, so well-schooled in the measures to take should she find herself lost that when she turned around in the polar bear exhibit and did not immediately see our faces, she began running up the paths, looking for someone in a uniform.
Before we’d even noticed her absence, Ruby had stomped up the hill, announced herself as lost to the fresh-faced young woman (never ask a man, always look for a woman, preferably with children) in the khaki jungle uniform (always look for a police officer or someone whose uniform you recognize), and had been taken by a special electric car back to the main station at the far end of the park.
The young zookeeper in the information booth radioed ahead to the station that Ruby’s parents had been found, and we trudged across the park. No electric car for us. We found our daughter enjoying a strawberry banana smoothie and regaling the other lost children with the tale of her pluck.
“Sweetie,” I said, once we’d hugged her and reassured ourselves that she was fine. “Next time, before you go looking for the authorities, maybe you should make sure you’re really lost. We were right there.”
“But I didn’t see you.”
“I know, and you did the right thing, but next time just yell first, okay? Call for Mama or Daddy before you go off looking for someone else.”
“There was no point in calling you,” she said with great irritation. “If I called Mama then all the mothers would have just turned around. What would be the point of that?”
“Well,” I said. “You can call ‘Juliet’ or you can trust me to recognize your voice.”
She shook her head, disgusted at this. She adjusted the San Diego Zoo cap the counselor in the lost children’s room had given her for comfort and consolation. Of the two of us, I was the one who needed consoling. Ruby seemed downright thrilled by her exploit. I, on the other hand, was ready to go home.
“I think we’ve all had enough animals for the day,” I said.