The Barrett family is on Day 20 of a punishing, poorly coordinated search for their missing pet. This excerpt is just after Rebecca, the Mom, spectacularly screwed up a late-night attempt to lure the missing cat into the garage as a trap.
Rebecca stood in the shower. In the dark. Bryan was downstairs with a drink. No more apologies could be given, no further insight could be gained by asking 'why?'
The footage of the cat scrambling out of the garage played over and over in her mind. She stood, as wet as she had ever been, as wet as she was ever going to get, with her hands against the wall, head down, arrested by the effort they had been making to get this cat back.
If only we understood her motivations, we could just go to her and explain, she thought.
Rebecca was a practical person: if she were lost outside, it was obvious the right thing to do was to simply follow the food and walk through the door to the welcoming bosom of her family. The value of being safe and inside, was vastly better than being outside. Alone.
'She has to want to come home,' an uninvited voice offered.
Her eyelids sagged, lulled by the shower's heat and the Sisyphean task of trying and failing to connect with someone who refused to be practical.
* * *
Thirty years earlier there was another long night ahead of her that she didn't want.
Rebecca didn't want to go to the riverbank at the edge of their neighborhood. But that's where her sister was, so she had to. At dusk. Because her sister was alone. Rebecca's instincts told her to stay home. Home was safer.
Rebecca and her sister grew up in a rolling Sacramento suburb, a community of three- and four-bedroom ranch homes whose color palette ranged from taupe to peach. The curves of streets were determined by the American River bending widely around their sub-division, carrying snowmelt from the Sierra Nevadas to the farms of Central California.
Her sister, age 17, ran away, and stayed away, by walking down their street until the houses petered out and the brush took over at the riverbank, less than a mile away.
The American River's excuse for a beach was a dark sandy spit of dirt on the river's north shore. With its scrawny trees, the beach was pulled unrelentingly underwater until it was drowned. The upper portion, which resisted the eternal downward pull of the water, was rugged with an unwelcoming forest of willow whips and spikey chaparral bushes. People rode bikes along lumpy trails that washed out in wet years. Some walked their dogs off-leash. Most drove on the Interstate forty feet above, never knowing it ever existed.
Rebecca's sister walked until her feet were wet, which somehow suffocated the noises in her head that had become so overbearing. Sissy sat on the riverbank that first night and listened to the water flow past her. The water lulled her until she tilted over and slept. She stayed close to the river's sharp pebbly sand, tangled in the brush for several weeks.
As summer's humidity evaporates, a vagrant heat loiters through autumn. By then the heat devolves to become criminally dry and itchy.
Sacramento, with circles of suburbs orbiting around its downtown, is disorientingly hot and humid during its improbably long summer. The vast cubic acre-feet of airborne moisture from the convergence of the American, Sacramento, and San Joaquin Rivers feeds agriculture, but poaches its human residents. As summer's humidity evaporates, a vagrant heat loiters through autumn. By then the heat devolves to become criminally dry and itchy. Winter's grey rain deluges the valley in sheets, washing away Fall's colors, soaking through skin, and chilling bones.
But three little weeks in April redeem the River City with blooming trees and perfectly heavenly temperatures.
This secret, fleeting Spring made it possible for a girl on the cusp of womanhood, overwhelmed by her commitments, and betrayed by mis-firing synapses corroding her mind with a toxic cocktail of neurotransmitters, to lose herself in the weather's reprieve.
When the girls were preschoolers, as a young father with more house payment than spending cash, he held his daughters' hands and walked down to the sandbar to fish or play in the mud and run off their little kid energy. By elementary school, the gritty sandbar had lost its charms. He hadn't been down there in more than a decade.
Sissy and Rebecca's parents ranged over their neighborhood day and night looking for their eldest daughter, hanging up posters on poles, beating bushes, poking into garden sheds, bursting through unlocked doors, rattling neighbors. It took their father most of a week to piece together Sissy's simple route.
When her sister left, Rebecca assigned herself house duty, making dinner and doing dishes. She was actively "being there" in case her sister returned home.
On the nights her parents could find Sissy, they couldn't convince her to come home so they offered her blankets and sandwiches. She walked away. They offered fruit, candy, baked goods. Clothes. Sleeping bags. Music. A brand-new car. All were ignored.
Sissy's school friends were pressed into service. When Sissy didn't simply walk away from them, she babbled incoherently about threats they couldn't see and accused them of crimes they weren't planning to commit. Her odd affect caused confusion and distress. Some cried. All left the mudflat before making any impression on her.
In their fretful exploration of the riverbank, her parents came across a young reverend from an area church offering food and showers to those made homeless by choice or circumstance. "The Lord doesn't judge why people need help," Father Jamie assured them knowingly. He was the first to suggest mental illness to the family and offered them a deceptively simple solution: attract her with something, or someone, that Sissy wanted.
Rebecca crocheted mittens for her sister in teal blue and lined them with a fluffy fleece. A simple design with high function, just like Rebecca. She asked her parents to give them to Sissy on their next visit. Her mom implored Rebecca to take them to Sissy herself.
"I can't… I can't leave," she said. "There's so much to do here at home if you're all looking for her," gesturing to the empty house.
"But you're so important to your sister," her mom pleaded. They were sure Rebecca could break through whatever was keeping Sissy apart from them.
Rebecca missed her sister desperately. But just as desperately, she did not want to go to the riverbank. She did not want to talk to the people who lived down there. Rebecca was certain that with enough time, Sissy could become one of those people. Dirty. Unrecognizable.
Her Dad identified an abandoned horse stable at the western side of the sandbar, and based their rescue operation there: Rebecca would go find her sister, give her the mittens, and walk with her over to the defunct shed. They'd take her to a hospital from there. Simple.
The do-it-yourselfer rescue squad of parents, priest — and a neighbor who had taken an oddly keen interest — would all wait inside the shed to talk to Sissy. "It was an intervention," they said.
Rebecca located her sister that night after a frustrating game of telephone with several homeless people who overwhelmed Rebecca with their disinterest or their derangement.
Rebecca saw it for the trap it was, and understood she and her mittens were the bait.
Rebecca was briefed on the priest's improbable way to talk to Sissy. Rebecca was to L.E.A.P.
"You have to Listen, Empathize, Agree and Partner with your sister," knitting his fingers together solemnly to demonstrate their partnership, "to help her accept the treatment she needs."
"I can't be listening very well if I have to remember this stupid LEAP script," she snapped.
Rebecca located her sister that night after a frustrating game of telephone with several homeless people who overwhelmed Rebecca with their disinterest or their derangement.
Sissy stood barefoot in her nightgown at the water's edge, looking not quite at the water but at something only she could see in the middle distance, engaged in a conversation with that something. Her wavy golden cheerleader's hair was flat and grimy and brownish. Sissy was gaunt after three weeks outside. Rebecca was scandalized to realize her sister actually had been sleeping in dirt all this time. Deep scratches from the bushes were visible on her legs.
Rebecca estimated they must be a quarter mile upstream of the old horse shed, and Sissy was not playing her part in the LEAPing dialog. They were way off-script. Rebecca had to improvise.
She crept closer to Sissy, used her gentle voice, and strained to talk about the sorts of things they always talked about. Like any other day. She told her sister about kids at school doing dumb things… about an old green dress she'd hemmed for a friend to wear on a date… that her locker jammed up today… about her Chemistry test yesterday.
Usually, Sissy was a vivacious conversational partner. She wanted to talk to anyone about anything. Sissy read widely and remembered everything: facts, dates, names, faces, favorite foods, funny anecdotes. She used the motion of talking at dinner to chew her food because not even having your mouth full should slow down a good story.
Rebecca staggered under the weight of contributing so much material to a conversation. She fidgeted with the mittens and felt light-headed and zipped her windbreaker up to her throat and kicked the dirt.
"I know you're poisoning me," Sissy said in a dead-flat voice. She never broke eye contact with her invisible fixation. "I hear you thinking. You want to kill me. With that poison."
Rebecca boggled. Was she talking to me now? she thought. Are the mittens the poison? Was Sissy poisoned? Is that what happened to her? Was this one of those weird predictions from the oracles that never made sense in Greek Lit class?
Rebecca froze, clutched in a desperate paradox: she could only think of things she wasn't supposed to tell her sister. Shuddering from awkwardness, but driven forward by necessity, Rebecca reached out and touched her sister's arm to comfort her.
Rebecca found herself clutched in a desperate paradox: she could only think of things she wasn't supposed to tell her sister. Shuddering from awkwardness, but driven forward by necessity, Rebecca reached out and touched her sister's arm to comfort her. She was about to say "no, I made you these mittens. I love you and we all want you to come home."
At the touch, Sissy jumped straight up like she had been electrocuted. Her face stretched in terror and animal-like fear. "Don't you hurt me anymore!"
Rebecca would never tell anyone about that version of her sister's face, though she would see it in her dreams for the rest of her life. Any memory of that face was always accompanied by a screech that probably was not there originally. Her own horror added the sound effect.
With no regard for rocks or glass or danger, Sissy ran like the track star she had been into a dark grove of spindly trees fenced in by waist-high scrubs and curtains of willows. She ran and ran and ran southwest along the river.
Dumbfounded, mouth agape, arm reaching, feet stuck, words mute, Rebecca couldn't see her sister beyond the trees in the post-twilight gloom.
"That was my chance," Rebecca said. "And she's running away from us!" We lost her.
Rebecca pulled up short and corrected herself.
"No. I lost her."
Sissy never came home.