The Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond Read Free Book Online Page B

found Jake, fell in love with him, fell in love with Emma. Sometimes I get this uncanny feeling that Mom was orchestrating the whole thing from outer space, like some big cosmic joke.”
    “I wouldn’t put it past her.”
    I tell Annabel about how Emma and I got up early on Saturday to make pancakes. “I earned points for letting her crack the eggs and stir the batter. I actually thought of it that way, you know? I felt like, with Emma, I’d started with all these marks against me: I wasn’t her mother. Jake was spending time with me, when she was used to having him all to herself. I didn’t have the faintest clue how to make a little kid happy. And each thing I did correctly was a point in the positive column. I figured the more points I got, the more she’d like me.”
    “She does like you, Abby.”
    “No, that’s not even it. I wanted to make her love me. I felt like every minute we spent together was some kind of test.”
    Finally, for the first time, I tell Annabel the whole story, not leaving a single thing out: how I felt a slight tinge of happiness when I saw the dead seal pup. What a great picture it would be. What a fine opportunity to comfort Emma and teach her some sort of important lesson about the transience of life. I even tell her how I smiled at one of the guys in the parking lot—a surfer, waxing his board beside a yellow van. How my smile was maybe a tad too friendly, how I wondered, just for a second, what it would be like to kiss him.
    “It’s not a crime to think about kissing someone,” Annabel says.
    “I know. My point is, maybe I wasn’t all there. I should have been concentrating on Emma. Maybe if I’d been more focused, this never would have happened.”
    “You can’t put yourself through this,” Annabel says.
    I think of the sympathetic young policeman who tried to console me that first night at the station. “It could happen to anyone,” he said. This, I know, isn’t true. It couldn’t have happened to Annabel. It couldn’t have happened to Jake. It would not have happened to either one of them, because they would not have looked away.

10
    M Y NEIGHBOR Nell Novotnoy believes that books can save us.
    She lives next door in the loft of her dead son Stephen. Six years ago, when he died at thirty-five, he left her the loft, which he had paid off during the gravy years of the dot-com boom. Now, Nell’s wrecked face gazes out from big banners attached to lampposts all over the city. She is a spokesperson for the AIDS Walk campaign, the Quilt of Hope, and the Mothers for AIDS Research Foundation.
    She’s also a librarian and has worked at the Mechanics Institute Library on Post Street for thirty years. Every Monday, she stops by with a book she has chosen specifically for me. Thanks to Nell, I’ve been introduced to John Fante and Josef Skvorecky, Halldor Laxness and Lars Gustafsson, the diaries of Robert Musil and the essays of Edmund Wilson. Name almost any author, and she can name a title. Mention any year, and she can identify the winners of the major literary prizes.
    Six days after Emma’s disappearance, I knock on Nell’s door. Her apartment is warm and smells unmistakably of her homemade macaroni and cheese. For the past week she’s been leaving casseroles and cakes at my door, offering to do my laundry, help in any way she can. Now, she ushers me to her kitchen table, pours me a cup of coffee.
    “Talk,” Nell says, pushing a thick lock of black hair away from her face. “I’m a good listener.”
    “I keep trying to figure out if there’s something I missed that day,” I say. “Something I saw or heard but can’t remember. Something that seemed insignificant at the time but could lead me in the right direction. I feel like I’ve got this key that will unlock the mystery, but it’s buried underneath tons of rubbish, and I have no idea how to find it.”
    “Do you know what Saint Augustine said? ‘Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great…a large