It was disingenuous to blame Gonzo for Karen’s inexplicable flight. Nor could Ruth fault Karen for the ignorance of youth, any more than she could blame the influence of Karen’s older sister. So, who was at fault? How had Karen, her little helper, her effervescent thespian, she of the good grades and the agreeable personality, strayed so far, so fast? Somehow, someone had failed Karen, and Ruth was at a loss as to how to account for this. Sure, Karen had done her share of misanthropic teenage brooding, a rite of passage she and Abe had already endured with Anne, the stuff of Central Casting, really. But where were the signs of something more troubling?
On the fourth day, Karen finally phoned home. Ruth answered the call after the first ring.
“Oh, thank God,” she said upon hearing her daughter’s voice. “Where on earth are you?”
“Spokane,” she said.
“Spokane? Sweetheart, what are you doing in Spokane? Where in Spokane?”
“I’m at a diner,” she said.
“Stay where you are, we’re coming to get you,” said Ruth.
“No,” said Karen. “Look, I didn’t call to talk, Mom. I only called to let you know I was okay.”
“Karen, what’s wrong? Why did you run off?”
“It’s a long story, Mom.”
“Well, I’m ready to hear it,” said Ruth, her concern edging toward anger.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Karen said.
“Listen here, missy. You owe your mother an explanation, whether you feel like talking or not.”
Ruth knew this tack came with a risk, but how else could she demand accountability? Still, she softened her manner immediately for fear of losing her. “Are you in trouble, sweetie? What is it?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Karen, come back to the island, whatever it is, we’ll work through it.”
“I’m not coming back to the stupid rock,” she said. “I hate it there.”
“How could you hate it? It’s your home. It’s been nothing but good to you. It’s not like you’ve had it hard, Karen. What’s gotten into you?”
“I don’t want to get into all of this, okay? I’m fine, I’m safe, I just wanted you to know. I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier.”
“Do you have any idea what you’ve put your father and me through?”
“I said I was sorry.”
“Karen, we’ve been worried sick, we thought you were dead.”
“Well, I’m not. Look, I’ve gotta go, Mom. Somebody’s waiting for the phone. I’ll call you in a few days. You can guilt-trip me then.”
“Don’t you dare hang up that—”
But Karen hung up. Paralyzed, Ruth continued to clutch the humming receiver long afterward.
It was a week before they heard from Karen again. As before, it was Ruth who answered the phone before it had time to ring twice.
“Boise?” she said upon learning of her daughter’s whereabouts. “Idaho? What are you doing in Idaho? Who are you with?”
“I’m with a friend,” she said. “I’m fine. I’m just letting you know—”
“What friend?” said Ruth. “Whose idea was this?”
“Look, Mom, I’m okay. That’s all you need to know.”
“As a matter of fact, I’m gonna need to know a lot more than that, young lady. You are not an adult.”
“Close enough,” she said.
“Is that so?” said Ruth. “Well, you’re sure not acting like one.”
“I don’t wanna fight, Mom. I gotta go.”
“No, please, don’t hang up,” pleaded Ruth, willing to concede. “Do you have a place to stay? Do you need money?”
“No, I’m fine,” said Karen.
“How can you be fine?” said Ruth. “What are you doing for money?”
Ruth could hear somebody talking in the background, though the voice was obscured, the words muffled as though Karen had cupped her hand over the mouthpiece. But it was a male voice, Ruth was quite sure.
“Who is that?” said Ruth. “Who’s with you? Is that Royce?”
“I gotta go, Mom,” said Karen.
“Karen, honey, just let us—”
But before Ruth could persuade her, the line was humming a dial tone.
She was with the Holiday boy; it had to be him. The realization came as a relief. For all his faults, at least Ruth was acquainted with the boy, knew where he came from, and knew where to find his parents. Better that Karen was with Royce Holiday than all alone out there.
Ruth called Anne in Bellingham, pressing her for some word on Gonzo or his whereabouts.
“I told you, Mom. I haven’t seen him since Dad chased him off. Not even a phone call. Yeah, thanks, Dad.”
“Do you think it’s possible he ran off with your sister?”
“I mean, anything is possible with Gonzo, but I seriously doubt it.”
“Why?”
“She’s just a kid, Mom.”
“Well, he wasn’t treating her like a kid on the porch that night.”
“Whatever Dad saw that night was nothing, trust me, Mom. Geez, he was probably just teaching her how to kiss or something. Or maybe he was just stoned and kissing my kid sister seemed like a good idea at the time. Maybe Karen really did throw herself at him, who knows? He’ll try anything once. Gonzo does whatever Gonzo wants. He can pretty much be with whoever he wants, so why would he run off with Karen?”
Ruth offered only silence in lieu of a reply. Once the silence lingered for five or six seconds, Anne caught her meaning.
“Oh, c’mon, Mom, really?” said Anne. “You can’t possibly think that Gonzo is actually like…?”
“Well, I…”
Anne sounded as though she could hardly suppress her laughter.
“Trust me, Mom. He’s not in love with a fifteen-year-old. But it’s possible he went on one of his walkabouts. Last fall, he took off to Mendocino, but he likes to do that stuff solo. I mean, I suppose Karen might have tagged along. But I really can’t see it.”
“What about Idaho?” said Ruth.
“What’s in Idaho?” Anne said.
“That’s what I’d like to know. Did Royce ever say anything about Boise?”
“Why would he?” said Anne. “Isn’t it like the potato capital of the world or something? Look, Mom, believe it or not, Karen is gonna be fine. She can take care of herself.”
“You just said yourself she was a kid.”
“She’s been around enough,” said Anne.
But despite Anne’s assurances that Karen could take care of herself, there was no getting past Ruth’s motherly intuition that all was not well.
Ruth found Dick and Barbara Holiday listed in the phone book.
“We haven’t seen or heard from Royce since Christmas,” Barbara Holiday explained. “His father wasn’t happy when he dropped out of SCC. They had a bit of a row about it, but he left on good terms.”
“Has he ever expressed any interest in Idaho? Does he have friends or relatives there?”
“Idaho? Heck no. Why do you ask?”
But a brief silence was enough for Barbara to comprehend the implication.
“Surely you don’t think my son has run away with your fifteen-year-old daughter?” said Barbara Holiday, incredulous. “That seems very unlikely to me. Outrageous, in fact.”
Ruth resisted the urge to tell Barbara about that night on the porch. Such an imputation was likely to put the Holidays even more on the defensive, when she and Abe needed every ally they could find.
Abe alerted authorities in Boise, a step that did little to inspire optimism and yielded even less in the way of results. For over a week, Ruth waited by the phone, each day less rested, her nerves frayed ragged. The speculation was maddening. Was Karen with Royce, or was she with somebody else? And if so, who? Why Boise? Why not San Francisco or Los Angeles or Portland?
As it turned out, Boise was never a destination. Two weeks later Karen finally called again, this time from Helena, Montana. She sounded more unlike herself than ever, edgy, impatient, as though each mile she trekked east, each new town, each cryptic phone call, signified a further degree of separation, an estrangement beyond physical distance. Still, Ruth was desperate to bridge that distance.
“Honey, there’s something you’re not telling us, what is it?” said Ruth. “Who are you with? Who is this friend? Is this somebody I know? Is it the Holiday boy?”
“No,” she said.
“Are you in trouble?” said Ruth. “You’re not…”
“No!” said Karen, as though it was an insult to even suggest such a thing.
“Karen, honey, there’s no trouble we can’t handle together. Please, let us come get you.”
“No,” she said.
Forced to employ the heavy artillery, Ruth foisted the receiver on Abe.
“Here, your father wants to speak to you,” she said.
Abe seemed in no way prepared to confront his daughter.
“Karen, this is your father.”
“Yeah, I sort of figured that out.”
“You are to come home, and that’s an order. This nonsense has gone on long enough, your mother is on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” he said.
“And I suppose that’s my fault?”
“As a matter of fact, it is,” said Abe.
“This is your strategy to get me to come home, blame me?”
Sensing he was about to lose her, Abe eased up on the gas. “Look,” he said. “I’m sorry, whatever we did, we apologize. We’ll make it right, whatever it takes, we’ll make it happen. They’ve got counselors for this kind of thing. I’m going to wire you money tomorrow morning, I’ll find a Western Union. Just give me your word that—”
But Abe’s entreaty met with an abrupt dial tone.
Once again, he alerted the local authorities, this time the Helena sheriff’s department, to whom he provided yet another description: long, straight brown hair; brown eyes; fair skinned; about five foot four. She was dressed in jeans and a red knit sweater last they saw her. But who really knew what Karen looked like three weeks and two states later? She might have shaved her head for all they knew.
Abe sighed heavily as he replaced the handset.
“Well, so much for that,” he said. “She’s bound to run out of money soon.”
“That’s it?” said Ruth. “That’s all you’re going to do?”
“What am I supposed to do?” said Abe.
“I don’t know,” said Ruth. “Go after her?”
“What, just drive to Montana, when we don’t even know where she is?”
“She’s in Helena,” said Ruth.
“And I’m supposed to find her? She could be anywhere, it’s a city, Ruthie.”
“It’s a town.”
“And it’s six hundred miles away! She could be long gone by the time I get there. And to where? Anywhere.”
“I’ll go myself, then,” said Ruth.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.
“Then do something!”
The following afternoon, Abe met with a private investigator in Seattle named Byrd, who kept an office above a bathhouse in Pioneer Square. Byrd, squat as a cedar stump and neatly bearded, bore a striking resemblance to KIRO 7’s sports anchor, Wayne Cody. Whether owing to his tiny, unventilated workplace smelling of bromine and stale cigarettes, or the mustard stain on the front of his linen guayabera, Byrd didn’t exactly inspire Abe’s confidence.
“So, any problems at home?”
“No,” said Abe.
“How’s your relationship with the girl?”
“Fine, normal, what are you insinuating? Are you a detective or a family therapist?” said Abe.
“Just trying to get a read on the situation, Mr. Winter.”
“Well, the situation is my daughter ran off, possibly with a fellow named Royce Holiday.”
Byrd jotted down a note on a sheet of yellow paper already riddled with miscellany, phone numbers scribbled hastily, doodles in the margin. “Family acquaintance, this Holiday?”
“Of a sort, yes.”
“What sort?”
“My daughter’s boyfriend.”
“Okay, so, she may have run off with her boyfriend,” said Byrd.
“He was dating my other daughter, actually.”
Byrd arched an eyebrow and scribbled a note. “Holiday, he’s a minor, too?”
“No. He’s twenty, I think. Maybe twenty-one.”
“Do you recall your last conversation with Karen?”
Abe grew increasingly uncomfortable as Byrd piled on the questions, as though the man were cross-examining him and believed Abe was somehow culpable. By the time Abe left Byrd’s office and began ambling back to Colman Dock in the rain, his irritability had achieved such a pitch that his heart was racing. Byrd had a lot of nerve insinuating that he had anything to do with Karen’s disappearance. He had half a mind to wring Karen’s neck when they finally got her back. How could she do this to them?
It was eight days before they heard back from Byrd.
“I tracked down the Holiday kid,” he told Abe. “He’s living in a garage in Alderwood with an uncle. Says he hasn’t seen Karen in weeks, since the night you threatened him, says he hasn’t left the area. His story checks out with the uncle, who’d just as soon be rid of the kid, as far as I can tell. I poked around in Helena—hospitals, YWCA, the high school; you never know, maybe she’s got a friend there. Distributed over a hundred flyers. Now we wait. In the meantime, if you want, I can go ahead and—”
“Never mind,” said Abe. “We’ll handle it from here.”
Ruth didn’t take the news well.
“What do you mean, you called him off?” she demanded.
“We’ve got flyers all over Helena. There’s nothing to do but wait, hope somebody recognizes her, or maybe she sees herself on a telephone pole and realizes what the hell she’s putting us through.”
“What’s the matter with you?” said Ruth. “How can you be so callous? This is your daughter we’re talking about. Is this about the money, is that why you called this Byrd off?”
“Of course it’s not about the money. I’m just being realistic. What else can we do? I’m telling you, whatever is going on with her, she’ll get past it, Ruth. I promise, she’ll come home eventually.”
“And if she doesn’t? What if she’s been abducted or…?”
“Trust me,” said Abe. “She’ll be back.”
How could he be so sure Karen was in no danger? Where was the evidence? And what could it possibly hurt to have somebody out there searching for their daughter?
Karen finally called again, nine days later. This time it was Abe who fielded the call. Karen was thirty miles outside of Reno.
“You listen here, young lady,” said Abe.
But before he could berate her, Ruth wrested the phone from him with a withering glare.
“Sweetie, please, let us come get you,” she pleaded. “Whatever is going on, whatever may have happened, we can deal with it. Just tell us where you are and—”
“Stop,” said Karen. “You’re wasting your energy.”
“Why are you doing this to us?” said Ruth.
“I’m not doing anything to you,” said Karen. “Quit saying that. What I do with my life is not about you.”
It seemed as though Karen were holding them hostage, punishing them for some reason Ruth could not comprehend.
The next morning, Abe hired another private investigator, a fellow from Reno named Campion, a referral from Byrd. Campion spent two weeks beating the streets of Reno, one dead end to the next. Truck stops, motels, hostels, questioning the girls on Virginia Street. It was incomprehensible to Ruth that they’d broached the prospect of their daughter working the streets of Reno at sixteen, and it was a possibility Abe refused to entertain altogether.
“Ridiculous,” he said.
“Then where is she getting the money to live?”
“Who knows? Friends. She’ll run out of options eventually, and when she does, she’ll come home.”
Though Abe continued to insist as much for Ruth’s peace of mind, his own confidence had already begun to waver. He called Campion from the office every morning hoping for news, and invariably he’d turned up nothing. By the third week, Campion’s investigation was running on fumes.
“We haven’t got a single hit on the flyers. If she was ever here, there’s a good chance she’s gone by now.”
That served as Campion’s three-thousand-two-hundred-and-eighty-dollar explanation.
“I can keep looking, asking around,” he said. “But without any leads…”
Once again, the search was suspended. As the weeks of not knowing wore on, running into months, Karen’s absence began to tell on Ruth and Abe’s marriage. It seemed to Ruth that Abe ought to bear at least some of the responsibility for Karen’s running away. After all, it was Abe who’d admonished her so sternly that morning she stormed out of the kitchen into the rain. And wasn’t it Abe who had been the one denying Karen all along, prohibiting the rock concerts and the trips to the city with her friends? By forbidding these freedoms, by grounding her on those occasions when she did not comply, by depriving her of telephone privileges, he had as much as imprisoned her, cut her off from her friends, from the outside world she’d so longed to explore. Moreover, Abe had given Karen something to defy, to rebel against. When denying her failed to do the trick, when his authority had been found wanting, it seemed to Ruth that Abe had just given up and stopped parenting Karen altogether. That is, until the night he caught her necking with Royce Holiday and blew his top. God knows, he shouldn’t have shamed her at the breakfast table the following morning. If he’d handled the situation with a little finesse, she might have never run off.
As far as Abe was concerned, Ruth’s lax parenting was what was at least partially responsible for their wayward daughter. Maybe if Ruth had been more of a mother to Karen, instead of trying to be her friend. Instead, she indulged Karen, acquiesced at every turn, never held her accountable, always leaving it to Abe to be the heavy, so much so that it damaged his relationship with Karen. Ruth should have listened to him. Hadn’t he been right about Royce Holiday from the beginning? It was Royce Holiday’s influence, his lazy worldview, his defiance of authority in any guise, his denial of timeworn customs, that had started Anne and Karen down the wrong path. And what did Ruth do except stick up for Royce Holiday at every turn?
“Me?” said Ruth, incredulous in the kitchen after dinner, four months after Karen’s disappearance. “You’re the one who drove her off with your iron fist! All her friends went to see this Led Zeppelin, he’s apparently very popular, but not poor Karen, she wasn’t allowed, the only one. And what was the harm in the laser show?”
“It wasn’t the concerts; it was the city! I was only protecting our daughter.”
“From whom exactly, this Pink Floyd character? You treated her like a child.”
“She is a child!” said Abe. “Just look at the decisions she makes! Maybe if you might have helped me set some parameters. Maybe I did drive her off, but you might have shared the responsibility a little.”
Somehow, their marriage managed to endure these disputes, as it had endured Abe’s singular decision to uproot their lives in Seattle fifteen years prior, as it had endured his habitual absenteeism and workaholism, as it had endured Leonard Haruto. Still, the ugliness had to exact a toll.
On numerous occasions, Abe dreamed of Karen, dreams so vivid he could all but reach out and touch her. Karen sitting beside an old woman on a Greyhound bus, gazing out a rain-streaked window. Karen on a street corner, a gray kitten wrapped in her arms, asking a policeman for directions. Karen as a girl of six or seven, a purple halo of grape juice ringing her mouth, bouncing on a trampoline, laughter bubbling up out of her each time she sprung back into the air. As desperately as Abe yearned to address Karen’s visage, he was tormented by his inability to speak. Still, it was a comfort to see her.
But as the months wore on, Abe stopped dreaming of Karen and began to accept the possibility that she was not coming back, not any time soon, that she was already beyond their reach.
Though Abe put little stock in it, he accompanied Ruth to church most Sundays, holding her hand as she clung to a diminishing hope, praying with the congregation that her child would regain her senses, that she would come home, or at least let her family come to her. But there arrived no more assurances, no letters or phone calls from Karen. By fall, it seemed she was already a ghost.