Alison Littlewood
My daughter vanished three years ago. I’m no closer to finding her. Every time I think I’ve found a new clue, it only puts me further away. The more knowledge I gain, the less I can believe in any of it.
She disappeared on May 13th from Central Park, a little to the north of the East 72nd Street and Fifth Avenue entrance. Anyone familiar with the Park will tell you that’s close to Conservatory Water, where you can rent remote-controlled sailboats any day as long as it’s not raining. My daughter wasn’t interested in sailboats. She preferred to sit at the north end of the lake, on a giant bronze mushroom: Alice at her back, the White Rabbit on one side, the Mad Hatter on the other, patches of their heads and arms and shoulders rubbed shiny by generations of New York children. I always thought that was fitting somehow, since Alice too had left her home in England and eventually found herself here.
One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter. I think it was the Caterpillar in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland who said that. I picture my little girl, Vivian, reaching around and breaking off a piece of mushroom, nibbling it with her front teeth, just like the time I got her to try broccoli. And I picture her shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, until she’s as small as Alice in the story, smaller even, just the right size to captain a remote-controlled sailboat and sail away, then smaller, smaller still, until no one can even see her any longer.
That day, I turned around and she’d gone. Every mother’s nightmare. There’s a rabbit hole that opens inside you, one that never seems to end, blacker and blacker, deeper and deeper. Falling, falling. There was no answer when I shouted her name. No one had seen her. There was no sign my daughter had ever even existed; she’d gone, and I hadn’t a clue where to find her.
It was a cop who spotted the bag lady a couple of streets away from the park, wearing – or trying to wear – my five-year-old daughter’s clothes. A tiny pink T-shirt with glittery stars, ripped from under the sleeve to the hem, was pulled across her shoulders, a gauzy purple skirt twisted around her leg. The clothes were dirty, half hidden by a ratty old blanket. The woman claimed she’d found the blanket by a dumpster and I always thought that was odd. She could have said she’d found my daughter’s clothes, not the blanket that no one cared about, but she didn’t.
No: those shiny pink and purple things, she said they were hers.
* * *
My husband was a cop too. I met him when he took an extended vacation in England and I moved out here for him, thrilled by the sudden new potential in my life. We separated a few years after Vivian was born; he was killed on duty not long afterwards. And I’d begun to dream of home again, little green lanes, quiet roads, all so familiar, safe; then my girl disappeared and I was forced to stay.
* * *
It’s someone from my husband’s old precinct who shares the audio with me. “Picture it,” he says. “A grown woman, sitting right there on the Alice statue.”
I don’t comment, since I’ve done that same thing plenty of times myself. It’s not illegal. Children – and kids at heart – are welcome to climb, crawl, sit on, touch the statue. It belongs to them, after all. It’s their story.
Each time I go there, I’m surprised by the size of the thing. It looks friendly, moulded to a human scale, but that sculpture is eleven feet tall. When you get up close, the mushroom is above your waist. You have to use the smaller mushrooms as steps to get up there, the bronze Dormouse on one of them always getting in your way. When you reach her, you realise that Alice is not life-sized. Even adults are like children when they’re next to her: that huge face, big eyes, wrong somehow. Central Park’s Alice is a giant. She must have been nibbling at the wrong side of the mushroom.
Picture it.
A mom – she says her name is Sandie Gordon – sits down next to Alice. She’s watching her daughter play. Her daughter is called Bree-Anne, a stupid name I always thought, but don’t say. It wouldn’t be right, under the circumstances.
Now imagine Sandie with the squeaky, whiny voice of a little kid.
Listen.
I WAS WATCHING HER. SHE’S MY GIRL, OF COURSE I WAS WATCHING HER. I DIDN’T EVEN NOTICE THE KID SITTING NEXT TO ME. I TURN AROUND, DON’T KNOW WHY, AND THERE SHE IS. SURE I WAS SURPRISED. SHE’S RIGHT THERE, A LITTLE GIRL ABOUT THE SAME AGE AS MY BREE-ANNE, SO I SAYS, ‘HEY! WHERE’D YOU COME FROM?’
SHE SAYS, “HERE, SILLY.” AND SHE GIVES THIS LITTLE SMILE, LIKE SHE’S GOT A SECRET, YOU KNOW THE ONE? SO I ASK HER WHERE SHE LIVES AND SHE GIVES ANOTHER SMILE, A WEIRD SMILE, AND SAYS, ‘UNDER THE MUSHROOM.’
I WOULDA LAUGHED, BUT RIGHT THEN, BREE – SHE’S RUNNING WITH SOME OTHER KIDS AT THE EDGE OF THE LAKE, AND SHE TRIPS. SO I’M LOOKING AT BREE-ANNE AND THIS KID NEXT TO ME, SHE SAYS, “SHE WON’T FALL.” I JUST MENTION IT BECAUSE BREE-ANNE DIDN’T, EVEN THOUGH I WAS SURE WE’D HAVE SCABBED KNEES AND TEARS AND WAILING FOR EXTRA ICE CREAM, BUT THE KID WAS RIGHT, BREE JUST CAUGHT HER BALANCE AND KEPT ON RUNNING.
On the tape, there’s a sniff. It kind of sounds like she’s being snotty about this kid, knowing better than she did about the girl not falling. But I wonder if she’s trying not to cry. I wonder if it’s really because she’s talking about Bree-Anne and wanting her and missing her and needing her and she can’t have her.
SO I SAYS TO THE KID, “THAT’S A FUNNY PLACE TO LIVE, IN A MUSHROOM. WHADDYA EAT UNDER THERE?” A DUMB QUESTION, I MEAN SHE COULD EAT MUSHROOM, BUT ANYWAYS. AND SHE SAYS, “YEARS.” JUST LIKE THAT. YEARS. LIKE SHE SITS DOWN WITH A KNIFE AND FORK AND DIGS RIGHT IN.
SO I ASKS HER HOW THEY TASTE.
SHE SAYS, “THEY TASTE JUST LIKE MILK. CAN I KISS YOU?” JUST LIKE THAT, JUMPING FROM ONE THING TO THE NEXT, LIKE KIDS DO. BREE-ANNE DOES THAT ALL THE TIME.
She sighs. I hear that quite plainly, and I don’t think anyone needs to try and explain what it means.
SO I SAYS, “I GUESS SO,” AND I PAT MY CHEEK TO SHOW HER WHERE, JUST LIKE MY GRAMMA USED TO DO. AND THE KID—
A pause. When she speaks again, her voice falters.
—I GUESS SHE DID KISS MY CHEEK. I THINK SO. ONLY, THERE’S A WORD I CAN’T GET RID OF, THAT GOES ROUND AND ROUND IN MY MIND. LATCHED. THAT’S WHAT IT MADE ME THINK OF – SHE LATCHED ON. LIKE BREE-ANNE USED TO DO WHEN SHE WAS BREAST FEEDING, SOMETHING LIKE THAT, AND THEN I SORT OF WOKE UP.
Another pause, a longer one.
NOW, I WANT TO SEE MY DAUGHTER. I HAVE TO SEE BREE-ANNE. YOU PROMISED ME.
A cop’s voice responds. He says she can’t, not just now. What he means is, not ever. What he’s not saying is, she’ll never see Bree-Anne again. She won’t even get near her, because she isn’t Sandie Gordon; she’s not Bree-Anne’s mother. That’s who she claims she is, who she seems to think she is, even who she believes she is, but it’s not her. It can’t be.
On the tape, there’s shrieking. Screaming. It all gets a bit incoherent, but it’s plain enough when she starts yelling at the cops to let her the fuck out of there, she wants her daughter, she has rights, and why don’t they just open the fucking door?
They still don’t know her real name. But I’ve seen the photographs, and it’s clear that the person claiming to be Sandie Gordon, mom to Bree-Anne, is about six years old.
It’s incongruous, even grotesque, hearing her speak, knowing what she looks like. Talking about breast feeding her daughter in that squeaky little-girl voice. Shouting. Swearing. OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR.
I picture this little girl in the park, sitting on the mushroom, watching the other kids play. Witnesses said she grabbed Bree-Anne and tried to drag her off, but Bree-Anne wouldn’t go. A passing tourist intervened. The unidentified child told him where and how to fuck himself. She said she was Bree-Anne’s mommy, and everyone could get out of her damn way. Bree-Anne was crying. It didn’t help the situation when no one could find her real mom, nor that this kid – this strange kid – appeared to be wearing her mommy’s clothes.
The cops were called, but Sandie Gordon has never been found. Bree-Anne has been sent to live with her father, who was divorced from Sandie last year. The little kid who tried to grab her is with Social Services. They’ve confirmed she was wearing clothes way too big for her – a T-shirt more like a dress, an adult’s miniskirt down past her knees. I wonder where they are now, those clothes. It hasn’t been proved that they were Sandie’s. Bree-Anne wasn’t considered a reliable witness.
I try to find out if there were DNA tests, on the clothes or the kid. They can’t or won’t tell me, but I think I know what those tests would say. I just don’t know how, or how to begin to explain. I don’t suppose anyone could.
* * *
I’ve seen some freaky stuff in New York. I know about the weirdos of this city. People who follow you, put their faces up close to yours. Kids with too much in their eyes. Adults with too little. A vagrant clutching a toy car like it might save him, or maybe a doll. Someone showing a photograph. Have you seen her? A bag lady in a gauzy princess skirt, way too small. Little boys with shaved heads, smoking, drinking, shooting up. Teenagers kicking a tramp to steal a paper cup full of change. Maybe they want to buy drugs. Maybe they’re dealing drugs. Thirteen-year-olds living alone, forging parents’ signatures, making rent. A geriatric woman in make-up that could have been applied by an infant. A pretty woman who, close up, has skin stretched taut and unnatural over her bones. Who’s to say how old anyone is anymore? You can’t judge any longer. You can’t even guess.
* * *
The bag lady wearing my daughter’s clothes had grey hair and ugly creases running down her face, her jowls sagging.
Like the kid in the audio, I screamed and swore.
“How did you get Vivian’s clothes? How the fuck did you—”
Fear froze her. Her eyes were blank with shock, her mouth hanging open. She seemed unused to being screamed at, but how could she not be, living on the streets? There was something missing in her, I could see that. It wasn’t just her expression; it was in the way she kept saying, I am Vivian, I am, I am. It was in the way she called me Mommy, Mommy, and all the time staring at me, not laughing, not smirking, not even blinking. Not looking away from me for a second.
I told her, “I’ll kill you. You say that again, I fucking will.”
That time they did run DNA tests, but they must have mixed up the results somehow. They took samples from the clothes and from the old woman – under her nails, in her hair, a cheek swab. Every single one of them was an exact match for my daughter.
They admitted they must have contaminated the samples. It was all messed up anyhow, and they had to let her go. Apart from the clothes – which she could have found, same as the blanket – they didn’t have much to go on. If she’d snatched Vivian, what had she done with her? There was nowhere she could have kept her or hidden her. And after all, the woman was mad. Mad as a hatter, but harmless as a little child.
* * *
These days, I often go to the sculpture. I climb up onto the mushroom – past that damned Dormouse – and sit and wonder where my daughter went. Is she lost in the rabbit hole? Sitting by the side of the Red Queen? Playing croquet with flamingos on a smooth lawn under a strange sun? Deep down, I know there are worse things, real things, but I try not to think about those.
Sometimes, when the sculpture is busy with kids crawling over it, mommies and daddies taking their pictures, I sit at the edge of Conservatory Water and simply stare at the bronze figures.
There is Alice, frozen forever in the act of reaching for the White Rabbit’s pocket watch, the Mad Hatter standing by. The design is based on Tenniel’s original illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but it never seemed quite right to me, and now I know why. I looked it up. The Mad Hatter is a caricature of George Delacorte, the man who commissioned the sculpture. Alice is actually the image of a girl named Donna, the daughter of José de Creeft, the sculptor.
That seems strange to me, almost sad. What must it have been like for Creeft, knowing that his daughter was always here, yet unreachable? He created this thing in 1959. No matter how she changed or grew, where she went or what she did, even after she died, she would always be here, always caught in the act of reaching for that pocket watch. Always the same, but no matter how many people look at her, they’ll see someone else; never who she truly is. Not Donna, but Alice.
But kids – maybe they do see something else.
One day, there’s a little boy. He’s pulling on his mom’s arm, pointing towards the base of the sculpture, showing her something.
“That’s funny,” I hear her say. “I didn’t notice her till you said she was there.” She shrugs before pulling her child away, suddenly keen to be gone.
I look at where he pointed. My first thought is of a missing child, but then, I’m always thinking of missing children. And I can’t see anything, only the granite base of the sculpture with the words inscribed there: ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe. Lines from ‘Jabberwocky’, Lewis Carroll’s poem, but in that second they almost seem to mean something different. Is that where Vivian has gone – into the wabe? It makes as much sense as anything else.
The next time I’m there, a dad is holding up his phone, telling his son, who’s sitting almost in Alice’s lap, to smile. When the boy clambers down, Dad shows him the screen. His son frowns.
“Where’s the girl gone?” he asks. “Where’s the girl who was sitting next to me?”
They walk off, both as confused as each other, perhaps to find the statue of Hans Christian Andersen instead: besuited, benign, civilised. Sane. Or so they probably imagine.
That boy really looked like he was chatting to someone when he was sitting on the mushroom, though. I’d told myself it was the Cheshire Cat, peeking over Alice’s shoulder – but was it?
I begin to look at photographs online. Pictures of other people’s holidays, their kids sitting in Alice’s shadow, posing, grinning. After a while, I begin to notice.
Sometimes there’s a little girl lying full stretch under the Alice statue. Sometimes it’s a woman. I stare at her face, always obscured by shadow, and feel the intensity of her gaze as she watches the world. She rarely seems to bother anyone else. Their smiles are all the same.
I picture a hazy form materialising at Alice’s side, not the Cheshire Cat, but someone. First her grin: there’s always a grin. White teeth, sharp. Can I kiss you?
What do you eat under there?
Years. They taste just like milk.
* * *
There are billboards on the streets. The latest moisturiser. A miracle diet. Cosmetics. Surgeons. Everyone wants to look younger. Even the oldest of stories knew all about that. The youngest princess, the littlest mermaid. No one cares what happens to the others. Why should they?
Women’s voices on the subway.
“Youth: it’s wasted on the young.”
“If I could be that age again, knowing what I know now…”
The women never see the little girl who steps off behind them, her hair in ribbons, and skips off towards the park entrance. A little girl who’s the exact same age she wishes to be.
But perhaps she isn’t a little girl, the youngest, a princess. Perhaps she’s really a crone, a hag, a wicked witch: a witch who drinks years.
Maybe, for some, that’s a good thing. She gives them another go-round at their lives, knowing what they know now, and still remembering their names, even if no one else can recognise them any longer. She puts things right. She puts things wrong too, but shit happens, and anyway, who can say she doesn’t enjoy that just as much, or more?
But sometimes, she might meet with a little child. She can’t drink their years. They don’t have enough to satisfy her. Instead, she feeds them: she gives them everything all in one go, year after year after year, until they shrivel and the skin droops from their bones.
I wonder how she chooses. Is she punishing the kids who notice her, who see her for what she truly is? Or does she actually think she’s making their wishes come true? Kids are different, after all. They always dream of being older. Vivian was always three and a bit, four and a half, five and three quarters, always looking ahead to the next birthday, always longing to grow up.
No one is ever happy with the age they are.
I can see why she chose the statue for her home. She’s as nonsensical as the story, as capricious as a child. Or perhaps it’s that the Alice sculpture makes people show the age they are, inside. It makes them show her their hearts.
One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.
* * *
At last, I find her. It’s easy, in the end: impossible and easy. I always knew where she lived, after all. I’d searched for her there before, many times. Watched for her. I just hadn’t looked for her the right way.
One side to make you taller, the other to make you shorter. I had begun to wonder if, in some way, that applied to her too. I’d often circled the statue, running my hand along the brim of the Mad Hatter’s hat, glancing down to read the words in the wabe, edging around the back of the mushroom and past the White Rabbit’s shoulder to the beginning again, and never arriving anywhere.
This time it’s different. I look for her in one direction and she isn’t there. Then I turn and move gyre-wards, gimble-wards, this time reading the words as they were meant to be read. I look the other way – contrariwise – and there she is.
Or perhaps the witch wanted to be found. Maybe she wanted to find me. She’s been here a long time, after all; I can see that in her face. I wonder if she was always here, even though her eyes are shiny and round and blue as a child’s. They are also as endless and deep as the rabbit hole. She might be older than the city. Maybe she came on the Mayflower, or maybe she was here before that, just a little girl in a Wonderland, waiting for someone to play with.
After all those years, maybe she needed to talk. Wouldn’t you?
She peeks up at me and slowly she grins. Her teeth are white and very sharp. She pulls herself from under the sculpture and gets to her feet, then walks past me, no taller than my waist. She steps up onto the smallest mushroom, then the next, wrinkling her nose at that inconvenient Dormouse, and sits down next to Alice. She smiles at me and indicates the place next to her. After a moment, I haul myself up and sit beside her. Together we look out over Conservatory Water, where miniature sailboats leave long white triangles reflected in the lake.
The witch lets out a long sigh. She’s wearing a blue pinafore dress, matching ribbons in her yellow hair, shiny black Mary Jane shoes. She looks about six years old.
“I get tired,” she says. “Some days, my back hurts. Some days it’s my hip. My eyesight comes and it goes. I think I might have cataracts.” She sighs again. “I really need a fucking drink.”
I feel, rather than see, her glance. She says, “That’s not why you’re here.”
I shake my head. “You know why.”
“You want her back. You want it all to be the same, but it won’t be. There’s a price.”
I nod. I already know what I might have to do. I picture the cops coming for me, but not my friends, not any longer. I won’t even recognise them. I’ll be on the ground, looking at concrete, my hands spread wide while they point their guns at my back.
“I’ll kill you anyway,” I hear myself say. “If you don’t give her back to me, I’ll kill you right here.”
I wonder if I’ve gone as mad as the Hatter to be sitting here, in the Park, saying these words. The day is cloudy but warm. Families wander the paths around me, eating ice cream, exploring little bridges and tunnels, peering at the skyscrapers reflected like ghosts in the pools. I swallow. She’s still a child. She’s always a child and here I am considering bashing out her brains on a bronze mushroom, a sculpture that belongs to children, to stories, to fairy tales.
My hands twitch. It’s obscene, but I’ll do it anyway. I will. I have to.
Then she says, brightly, “Okay.”
She flashes me a smile so white it seems to hang in the air as she shuffles to her knees and turns to stare up into Alice’s giant face. She twists to sight along Alice’s right arm, the one reaching for the White Rabbit’s pocket watch, then turns her head to look at the other.
I’d never thought much about the other, but I do now. What was it that Alice is reaching for with her left hand? Nothing but air? Is she trying to take the hand of a child, to lead them – where?
The witch reaches out as if she’ll be the one to take that huge bronze hand. But when she turns back to me, she’s holding another pocket watch. This isn’t like the other. It’s smaller. This one is life-sized, on a human scale. When I glance away it turns insubstantial, nothing but a haze, but when I look at it directly it has a sharp, bright clarity; it’s almost too bright. It glows.
She holds it out to me and I take it. The watch is as cold as ice and impossibly heavy.
Then the witch leans back, crosses her arms over her chest and slides off the mushroom. Her Mary Janes grit on the floor as she ducks under its gills and I know I won’t find her again, no matter how I search. She’s gone, nothing left of her but the memory of her grin.
But I don’t search for her. I do jump down after her, though. I’m still holding the pocket watch and I can sense all the years it holds, the hours, the minutes, captured within its smooth, cold, curved weight. I heft it higher into the air, then I flip it over and bring it down on the bronze Dormouse’s ears.
I feel more than hear it shatter, although I hear it too: a bass clang that starts low then begins to grow, louder, until it resounds in my bones, until the whole bronze sculpture chimes in sympathetic resonance. There comes a higher sound, like sproinging springs, like cogs de-cogging, and then there is silence.
I open my fingers, half expecting to see delicate golden watch parts falling to the floor, but it’s gone. My hand is empty.
* * *
For days, I wander the streets. My clothes and skin and hair become soiled with dust and disapproval and hostile glances. My skin grows dry, the lines digging in deeper around my eyes and lips. I don’t care. I don’t want to be younger. I want to be just the age I am, for how else will my daughter recognise me when she sees me again?
Then one day I’m walking along yet another city block, staring at the concrete, and an alleyway opens at my side and I turn and see her.
A little girl about eight years old, just the age she would have been if she’d never gone into the wabe, never passed beyond my reach. Vivian’s hair is the same dark brown it always was, although it’s ragged and tangled now. Her cheeks still possess the smooth curve of a child’s, but her eyes are different. There are things in them and I wonder what my child has seen in the time she’s lived alone, out here, fending for herself.
I wonder what words rung in her ears as she scavenged for food, hungry and cold and afraid.
Mommy, mommy, she had said. It’s me, I’m Vivian.
She’d sounded so scared. And I had only been repulsed by that child’s cry emerging from such a worn throat; the pink sparkles wrapped around that aging body; the little girl’s tears springing from her wrinkled eyes.
And I hear again the words I said to her in return, my daughter, my baby.
I’ll kill you. You say that again, I fucking will.
I walk towards her. She doesn’t run away from me. I don’t suppose she has anywhere to run to. Her expression doesn’t change as I put my arms around her. She doesn’t even move, not to hug me back or hold me or push me away. I rest my chin on her shoulder, ignoring the smell of her, taking in the familiar-strange feel of her. And I tell my daughter I’m sorry. I have nothing else, there isn’t anything else, so I keep on saying it, like a spell or an incantation: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I say it over and over and I don’t stop, because how could it ever be enough?
You want it all to be the same, but it won’t be, the witch had said. And she hadn’t lied to me. I’m not certain she knew how.
There’s a price.
And I know that there always will be.