Alice arrived at the restaurant for the meet-up, early and unsettled from her conversation with Matt.
How was she supposed to recognize anyone? She had no idea. It was a chain place with uncomfortable booths, tin-eared circus music. No place you’d want to linger. King and Fine had built six of them in the greater Chicagoland area, not their best work.
Alice chose an empty table in a window booth overlooking the parking lot and slid in, finding the right direction to unfold her legs. After a minute of twitching, of recalling the things Matt had had the nerve to say to her, she reached for her laptop.
Jane Doe Anaho’s updates hadn’t fully loaded when Uncle Jim had interrupted her. When she got a Wi-Fi signal, Alice clicked to load the page again and watched the profile thumbnails redraw. In this view, all the Doe Pages profiles shuffled together, sorted by time of latest update. The missing got smiling snapshots, mug shots. The unidentified got drawings or clay reconstructions or generic avatars. Slab photos like Jane Doe Anaho’s were more rare, only for a clean death—recent or preserved. While the e-cemetery built on the page, row after row, Alice reached for the menu. Maybe she’d get a Chicago hot dog, now that she wasn’t starving herself into her mother’s dress.
Finally, the familiar face of 367UFNV loaded, and then right after, another thumbnail, an even more recent update.
Alice felt a pinprick of resentment for her Jane, for herself, for not holding the pole position. It didn’t matter. She clicked the newer profile photo to take a close look.
He was an MP, or Empty, in the Doe Pages parlance when they talked among themselves. He was an older man, someone’s dad probably, standing in front of a blank white wall, his arms crossed over his slim chest, his head turned. More J.Crew catalogue than mug shot, but something about the man’s face made her uneasy. She scrolled to the details.
Richard Miller. Milwaukee.
She scrolled back up to Richard Miller’s photo. He seemed familiar somehow. Last seen. Two weeks. They’d started allowing newer missing cases onto the Pages, special favors for police districts that worked closely with the site, she presumed. Still, two weeks was pretty new. She checked the metadata. Jenn herself had added it a few minutes ago.
Movement at the window caught her attention. Two women moved across the parking lot, one dark-skinned and shining with youth, bouncing ahead, the other lumbering, a distended shadow in head-to-toe black and Converse sneakers but older, gray-haired. For some reason, Alice knew these were Doe volunteers. They just didn’t make sense together any other way.
She was stashing her laptop when they appeared in the entrance. The young one spotted her at once.
“Heyyy,” she said, sidling up to Alice’s table. “Any chance you’re LuckyOne?”
“Alice Fine. You’re JuJuBee95?”
The woman sat across from Alice. “I look just like my avatar, right?” The community members used tiny pictures of cereal box characters or stills from TV shows in addition to the punny screen names. The image for JuJuBee95 was a fat yellow bumblebee. “My real name’s Juby. This is Slapdash, also known as Lillian.”
Lillian plopped next to Juby with a groan.
“We hoped you’d come,” Juby said. “We weren’t sure how many people might be in the area, but your avatar—well, we were pretty sure.”
Alice used a tiny Chicago skyline, King and Fine’s skyscraper front and center. She had always meant to hide behind that photo. What was she doing here?
“There was one guy we hoped wouldn’t show up,” Juby said, looking around the room.
“Tell her,” Lillian said. Her voice was husky, wheezy.
Juby leaned over the table. “Lillian wants me to explain that she has a lung condition that keeps her from talking that much. In person. On the site, she’s a freaking demon. We work together up Hiawatha at the hospital. Lil got me started with the Does. A year almost.”
Lillian poked Juby for a menu.
“So have you made a match?” Alice said.
“Me, no,” Juby said. “But Lil here is up in the leaderboards. She’s got two confirmed matches.”
“In fifteen years.” Lillian peered at Alice through the bottom of her glasses.
Alice reached for a menu, if only to put a barrier between them. “So . . . what do you do at the hospital?”
“Oh, never mind that,” Juby said. “We want to know about you. You and your kidnapping.”
“What?” Alice felt the world shrink down to a dime. Through the noise of the restaurant, she could hear the distant beat of black wings.
“How old were you? Were you on the Pages?”
“I’m guessing,” Lillian said. “The internet didn’t exist yet.”
“But,” Alice said. “I—”
“We saw your original post,” Lillian said. “Before you deleted it.”
“Were you on a milk carton?” Juby said.
She shouldn’t have posted that night. That Audrey person had started spouting off, and Alice had been sitting at home alone with a glass of wine and laugh-track comedies streaming continuously for company. She was new to the site, new to the idea of life without Matt. She hadn’t been thinking. She hadn’t been thinking about consequences. She’d only wanted to participate in the Greek chorus of the site—contribute something, anything, to a world that seemed to be going on without her.
The responses had come fast and rude, demanding and entitled. She’d deleted her comment and slammed the laptop closed, dread ruffling at her gut. She’d told herself it would be fine. She was proud to have survived such a thing. What was the harm? Not too many people could say they’d lived to tell that tale. The girl kidnapped by the religious cult, Elizabeth something. Her. That was it, basically. And those women in Cleveland, definitely.
The Doe volunteers, though, were hangers-on, fans of a genre, not—what was the word? She hadn’t been able to think of the right word.
She wouldn’t say victim.
“Milk carton? No. No, it wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“What’s the big deal?” Lillian said. “Jubilee could dig it up.”
“I invite her to try,” Alice said.
“Ohhh,” she breathed. “Not in the papers. Old school.” In her smug appreciation for how things used to be done right, she owned it all, as though she had lived centuries and guided generations. “Easier to be.” Wheezing breath. “A shitty parent, then.”
“My parents weren’t shitty, thanks. My dad was a cop, and—”
Alice stopped and turned toward the window. She stared into a sunburst on a car’s windshield until her eyes hurt. When she turned back, the glare burned out most of Lillian’s mild smile. “I know what you’re doing.”
“Here for the milkshake,” Lillian said.
Juby leaned over her menu. Her yearning had a wavelength that Alice could feel.
“Why do you want to know so badly?” Alice said.
“I don’t know,” Juby said. “You got away, and that’s a big deal. There are so many missing. And we plug along, hoping for a tiny bit of information, just—something—but even when we help make an identification, the person’s already a corpse.”
The waitress chose that moment to appear at Alice’s elbow. Alice placed her order and watched Juby while Lillian made her choice.
She knew the climbing panic of realization that so many people went missing and stayed that way. Working with the Does was swimming with your airway barely out of the water. You went under sometimes, or what were you? They had to take turns at despair. It was just Juby’s turn.
“The thing I don’t understand.” Lillian paused to catch her breath. “Why did they tell you?”
“Who?” Alice said. “Tell me what?”
Lillian gestured to Juby.
“Your parents,” Juby said dully. “Why did they tell you you were kidnapped?”
“You were a baby,” Lillian said. “Knowing something like that. Can give you.” Lillian looked Alice over again. “Certain anxieties.”
“Well, I was three,” Alice said. Tabletop psychiatry, her least favorite game. It was her lack of curiosity turned inward. “They didn’t have to tell me. I remember.”
They stared at her.
“You remember? You remember being kidnapped?” Juby said.
A series of errors had brought her here. They were all her errors. Until now the story had featured a kid none of them had known. Now she was the thing she hadn’t meant to be: interesting.
“Only a little,” she said. “Hardly anything at all.”
“You could—” Lillian said.
“Then why not—” Juby began.
The waitress appeared with their drinks. Alice waited her out.
“Why not—” Juby started again.
“Fine,” Alice said. “Fine. I’ll tell you to get you off my back.”
“Fine.” Juby laughed. “Didn’t you say—Alice Fine is fine?”
“Shush.” Lillian jabbed an elbow at her. “I want to hear this.”
“Like I said, there isn’t much I actually remember, but . . .” Alice looked around for escape, but the chaos of the restaurant only isolated them. “When I was three years old, I was kidnapped.” They leaned in. “My dad was a police officer—this was in Indiana—and he rescued me.”
She reached for her iced tea, thinking how many of her stories went exactly that way. She got into a scrape. Her dad got her out.
“That’s it?” Juby squeaked.
“It was only a couple of hours,” Alice said.
“But you remember,” Lillian huffed. “Being taken?”
Alice sat back. She remembered a sunny day, being held against her dad’s warm chest and rocked, cradled. His warm hand against her back. That must have been when he retrieved her. She had the memory of feeling absolutely safe and loved.
She could also remember a stranger’s arms reaching for her, remembered fighting the grasp, stiffening away. Sobbing, turning her puffy eyes from the stranger in loathing, feeling so sick and empty she hadn’t known what to do. She’d clutched her favorite little scrap of comfort blanket, and probably sucked her thumb and wet her pants and all the things a scared kid would do. She’d made herself into a fist. She had dared them.
No one had needed to tell her a thing.
“I remember,” she said. She saw the man’s hand reaching for her, then his profile as he turned to look over his shoulder. She also still recalled a few details about the house she’d been taken to. Not the taking, not the arriving, only a dumpy couch in a dark-paneled den, the TV bright in the corner, cartoons, and a mattress on the floor in the next room. There was a baby there, too. The smell of a dirty diaper hung in the air, but she was the big girl, wearing pants but forgetting and wetting herself. She might have wet herself on purpose, mad at them all. The woman, the man, the baby the woman handed him.
Alice’s memory wavered there. There was something she could almost reach—
She grasped for it. The black bird fluttered at the edges of her vision.
“Alice?” Lillian said.
She forced herself back toward their voices, the noise of the restaurant, her feet on the floor. She reached for her glass and held it. “I remember the house,” Alice said when she was sure of her voice. “The inside. I couldn’t give them many details or, like, an address.”
The other two women seemed to be holding their breath.
“It was dirty, maybe. Definitely a mess, lots of things lying around on the floor, clothes and blankets and toys. It was a couple. And they had a baby with them.”
“They kidnapped another kid?” Juby yelped.
Alice looked around. She didn’t know. She’d tried to tell the adults everything she knew. Her dad had treated her memories seriously, taking notes for the police report, asking her for any little detail she recalled, descriptions, surroundings. Even much later he would ask what she could remember, when she was eight, nine, ten, when the memory of that day had long started to fade.
“They got away,” she said.
“What about the baby?” Juby said.
He hadn’t been able to rescue the baby. He’d been so relieved and anxious to get her home to her distraught mother, who was tissue-thin at the best of times, he’d let them get away. With the baby.
That child had worried Harris Fine into a new career. Not long after Alice had been brought home safe, he’d given up his position on the force and moved them to the Chicago area to start over. A new career for him working with JimBig King, a new house out beyond the reach of the city for her mother to make into a home. A new everything. They’d needed the new start, her dad had once explained. She’d been returned safe but, as a family, they hadn’t gotten away clean. Certain anxieties. Alice put her hand, cool from the glass, to her forehead. Her inheritance, then: chronic migraines, fainting spells. The night terrors that worried Matt. She’d always had them. In her childhood, they’d shaken the house and brought her dad bounding down the hall to her. Always her dad.
Now she thought she understood better why he’d always been the one to come to her. Her mother slept well because she was medicated, and Harris Fine stood watch for them all, guarding them against disaster. Alice caught herself scratching the thin skin at her wrist. He guarded her still.
“It was their baby,” Lillian said.
“Then why would they need another kid?” Juby asked.
“You know kids aren’t kidnapped. Because they are needed.” Lillian turned on Alice, gathering breath to continue. “Nothing more known. About them?”
The couple who took her. A woman and man—
Alice heard the slow beating of the black wings and placed her palms on the table. The moment passed. She ignored the look that passed between Juby and Lillian.
This was why she didn’t like to tell the story. People were always so much more curious than she expected, and far more demanding than they had any right to be. They wanted the darkest detail. They wanted the sights and smells and the terror, packaged and delivered. And they always expected justice, expected a closed case and a mug shot of the—
Alice’s hand slid to the edge of the table and gripped.
Juby jumped. “What’s wrong? What is it?”
Lillian only stared. A plate plunked onto the table in between them. Time passed, plates were placed, reassigned.
“Can I get you ladies anything else?”
“No,” Lillian said, blocking the woman out with her shoulder. “You remembered something. You did.”
“Oh, my God,” Juby said.
“No.” Alice pushed her hot dog to the side, sick. She remembered only the feeling of helplessness. Black wings unfurled, stretched. “I can’t—it’s not—”
“That day?” Lillian said. “The kidnappers?”
Juby sat forward, ashen and concerned. This was what friendship was. It had to be. Alice felt the branches of it reaching toward her, a way out.
“I saw—” Her throat closed up, remembering the face, turned, the arms crossed. The missing man, gone two weeks, posted among this morning’s quarry on the website. “My kidnapper. I saw him this morning on the Pages. He’s a Doe.”
The black bird took flight, rushing to engulf the room, and she started to fall.