The Likeness

In the gaps the static roared in my ear, a long muted sound like a seashell. I wished I knew more about Australia. I thought of red earth and sun that hit you like a shout, twisted plants stubborn enough to pull life out of nothing, spaces that could dizzy you, swallow you whole.

She had been ten the first time she ran away. They found her inside a few hours, out of water and crying with fury by the side of the road, but she did it again the next year, and the next. She got a little farther each time. In between she never mentioned it, gave him a blank stare when he tried to talk about it. He never knew what morning he would wake up and find her gone. He put blankets on his bed in summer and none in winter, trying to make himself sleep lightly enough to wake at the click of a door.

“She got it right when she was sixteen,” he said, and I heard him swallow. “Nicked three hundred quid from under my mattress and a Land Rover from the farm, let the air out of the tires on all the other cars to slow us down. By the time we got after her she’d made it to town, ditched the Land Rover at the service station and got a lift from some truckie headed east. The coppers said they’d do their best, but if she didn’t want to be found… It’s a big country.”

He’d heard nothing for four months, while he dreamed of her thrown away on some roadside, picked clean by dingoes under a huge red moon. Then, the day before his birthday, he’d got a card.

“Hang on,” he said. Rustling, a bump; a dog barking, somewhere far off. “Here we go. Says, ‘Dear Dad, happy birthday. I’m fine. I’ve got a job and I’ve got good mates. I’m not coming back but I wanted to say hi. Love, Grace. P.S. Don’t worry, I’m not a pro.’ ” He laughed, that gruff little breath again. “Isn’t that something? She was right, you know, I’d been worrying about that-pretty girl with no qualifications… But she wouldn’t have bothered saying that if it wasn’t true. Not Gracie.”

The postmark said Sydney. He had dropped everything, driven to the nearest airfield and caught the mail plane east to put crappy photocopied fliers on lampposts, HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? Nobody had called. Next year’s card had come from New Zealand: “Dear Dad, happy birthday. Please quit looking for me. I had to move because I saw a poster of me. I AM FINE so knock it off. Love, Grace. P.S. I don’t actually live in Wellington, I just came here to post this, so don’t bother.”

He didn’t have a passport, didn’t even know how to set about getting one. Grace was only a few weeks off eighteen, and the Wellington cops pointed out, reasonably enough, that there wasn’t much they could do if a healthy adult decided to move out of home. There had been two more cards from there-she’d got a dog, and a guitar-and then, in 1996, one from San Francisco. “So she made it to America in the end,” he said. “God only knows how she got herself over there. I guess Gracie never did let anything stand in her way.” She had liked it there-she took the tram car to work, and her flatmate was a sculptor who was teaching her how to throw pottery-but the next year she was in North Carolina, no explanation. Four cards from there, one from Liverpool with a picture of the Beatles on it, then the three from Dublin.

“She had your birthday marked in her date book,” I said. “I know she would have sent you one this year too.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Probably she would.” Somewhere in the background, something-a bird-gave a loud witless yelp. I thought of him sitting on a battered wooden veranda, thousands of miles of wild stretching all around him, with their own pure and merciless rules.

There was a long silence. I realized I had slid my free hand, elegantly, into the neck of my top, to touch Sam’s engagement ring. Until Operation Mirror was officially closed out and we could tell people without giving IA a collective aneurysm, I was wearing it on a fine gold chain that used to be my mother’s. It hung between my breasts, just about where the mike had been. Even on cold days, it felt warmer than my skin.

“How’d she turn out?” he asked, at last. “What was she like?”

His voice had gone lower, rough at the edges. He needed to know. I thought about May-Ruth bringing her fiancé’s parents a house plant, Lexie throwing strawberries at Daniel and giggling, Lexie shoving that cigarette case deep into the long grass, and I had absolutely no clue what the answer was.

“She was still smart,” I said. “She was doing a postgrad in English. She still didn’t let anything get in her way. Her friends loved her, and she loved them. They were happy together.” In spite of everything the five of them had done to one another in the end, I believed that. I still do.

“That’s my girl,” he said, absently. “That’s my girl…”

He was thinking about things I had no way of knowing. After a while he took a fast breath, coming out of his reverie. “One of them killed her, though, didn’t he?”