I pocket the quarters and open the file again. Clipped just inside is a photo of two children in dress clothes against a swirling blue background, the kind you’d get done in a Sears Portrait Studio in a shopping mall. The boy must be Cameron’s brother, about ten in the picture, with a starched white collar, jet-black hair, and slightly crooked front teeth. But it’s three-year-old Cameron I can’t look away from. Brown eyes like saucers under dark, feathery brows. Her face round and brave, and so precious it’s hard for me to breathe right, looking at her. The fierce set of her chin, as if she’s challenging not just whoever stands behind the camera but the whole day and everyone who’s part of it. Her hair in a fountain held off her face with a white plastic butterfly clip. Her dress made of white lace and cotton, and her smile wide open. Her light right there, pure and bright as the fucking sun. No victim sign. No bat signal. Just a little girl, Lisa Marie Gilbert, born March 20, 1978, the first day of spring.

(forty-one)

Driving fast in a straight shot up Highway 101, Cricket and I hit Ukiah just after four with all the windows down. Hap had always called Ukiah a cow town, too small for culture and too big to have any kind of charm or quaintness. I never corrected him, nor did I tell him what I remembered from living here myself, twice, in two short placements, each less than a year. My memory of that time was frayed, even then. Just small shreds of images, a first-grade teacher who wore dark flesh-colored nylons and drank Tab at her desk, a mother in a filmy yellow nightgown, on the couch drinking peach schnapps from a coffee cup all day long, a February afternoon when some kids on the bus jeered and told me my brother smelled like pee. He wasn’t really my brother, and I was the one who smelled, actually, but I’d only slid down in the seat with my book and disappeared.

—

I come off the freeway to a string of fast-food restaurants next to check-cashing places, a Walmart Supercenter, and the Bartlett pear factory, recognizing nothing, thankfully. The section of town beyond Ford Road where Cameron spent her early years stands between the freeway and the fairgrounds. I pass Vinewood Park, a chunk of dry grass ringed by low-slung ranch houses, most of which have seen better days. The park looks thirsty and dejected, the squared-off playground studded with one of those climbing gyms made from recycled tires, and a badly oxidized swing set.

Cameron would have played here, though, as Lisa, the same way we played in a drained swimming pool and thought it was wonderful. She wouldn’t have seen any of the dinginess, because no one ever does until they’re on the outside of a place, looking in.

—