It’s a bright, warm spring morning. And here, he muses, is Jin the well-dressed junior executive, Jin with a strong angular face and matching close-cropped haircut, come from his redoubt in Glen Meadows, avoiding brown puddles, weaving through the bric-a-brac of sweaty, plastic, smoky Chinatown on a Tuesday morning — Jin the sad clown come to chase a mime’s song. Six blocks later, he is beneath the red neon lights of what he assumes is the Chinese character for “medicine shop.” The morning has warmed up faster than he’d expected; perspiration collects at his lower back and between his shoulder blades.

He loosens his silk tie and has the sudden urge to smoke a cigarette, a habit he and Margaret gave up a year or so before Amara was born. The sudden recollection of that time — his having just received his MBA, Margaret applying for doctoral programs — leads to the realization that there was a time when Amara didn’t exist. Nothing so special about this realization, he thinks, except that for himself, her father, Amara’s entire existence — her life from her first breath in the hospital to the last morning she walked out of the house, before her abduction — is thrown into doubt, held in abeyance.

The Bus Stop, 1930
(Oil on canvas, 41 x 31 cm)
BY Clarice Beckett
Sotheby’s

He does not want to return to when Amara did not exist, and so lets his desire for a pack of smokes pass through him. The medicine storefront is in the shade; condensation still clings to its front display window, where Jin’s reflection is partial, disintegrative, like a ghost’s.

Sitting at one end of the bus stop bench is a slight young woman with a backpack caged between her legs in pink-and-black-polka-dot tights. Large headphones cover her ears; she nods along to her music. A college student, Jin surmises. At the other end of the bench sits an older man, not elderly but worn, with a face that wears the blows it has taken. Or perhaps, like a potato, he was simply made that way. In either case, his is the kind of face that does not seem to really belong anywhere. The man’s shoulders are slumped, his limbs alarmingly spare. He looks as if the college student’s sartorial energies have frightened him, for a portion of his buttocks rests suspended over the sidewalk, just beyond the bench’s far edge. Jin imagines that fourteen or so years in the future could hold a similar scene, with the young woman Amara and the old man himself — yet with the exception of their relative ages, everything about the picture is wrong: the two are mere shadows, arbitrarily adjacent.

As if cast back to him from some alternate future, this odd pair on the bench reminds Jin of a clipping from one of the weekly advertising mailings of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which he’d carried during the roughest six months in his wallet, right behind the family photo in the clear plastic sleeve. The clipping contained the Center’s slogan: Have you seen me? It included a picture of Amara, age-progressed to six from the photo of her taken on her third birthday party, snapped just a month before she was abducted. The age-progressed picture was all wrong: the ears are folded too far back; the nose widened too much, casting shadows that were never there; the teeth taking over the mouth.

Have I seen you? Only every other night, when I close my eyes, and I’m sinking, but before I sink there’s a scrap of your voice, a giggle, a strand of hair snot-glued to your pink lips, and the odd phrase you used to tell me I was being silly, “Dadsum, you’re no mommy!” because mommies are serious. And the sweat courses down my neck in the three- or four-in-the-morning silence when I jump awake, paralyzed for a few minutes before walking to the kitchen and pouring a glass of liquor, drinking it by starlight at the kitchen table, waiting for the sun to show me this face of mine that no one should ever see.

The bus comes and they board.

It was Jin’s aunt who told him about the fortuneteller. “There are fake ones, I know, but this woman is not. She is Chinese, but she also speaks Korean.” At the time, Jin didn’t care about fake or real, right or wrong — only that it was a new thing to try.

At the first meeting, Jin was struck by the fortuneteller’s lack of hair: bald, no eyebrows, not even eyelashes. They’d sat on large pillows on the floor with some lit candles between them as their sole source of light, the room being windowless. She had a soft, kind voice, like that of a contented grandmother. But something in her overall disposition remained aloof, humble and humbling, like an element of nature.