was pinned up into a chignon. The likeness was not good. Lee had neglected, in ten years of marriage, to take a close-up picture of Peggy. All his snapshots were from a distance, his wife holding a child or underexposed in the light of a campfire.
The ad appeared many times in newspapers all over the state. missing person, it announced, with a generous reward.
Thousands of people saw it, but no calls came in. Simple, truthful, educated people, the kind who could read and believe a newspaper, sipped their coffee and felt sorry for the parents whose daughter had run away. Not patronizing the haunts of runaways—heroin shooting galleries and red-light districts and whatnot—themselves, the upstanding citizens had no cause to examine their consciences for signs of Peggy.
Nor would they have found anything anyway. The runaway was keeping a very, very low profile.
She couldn’t help herself. Life with Lee had been so drab that running away had a bounden duty to be exciting. She felt she had a right to ask that much. That was why the dramatic flight, the abandoned houses, the new identity.
She hoped he would hunt her with all his might so she could spite him and laugh. Yet she was not in a hurry to deal with stress. Her game was to be invisible. She knew Lee well, and by heading southeast, she had hidden in the folds of his own cerebral cortex. She knew he felt contempt for her. He would imagine her growing old in food service somewhere along Route 1, at Allman’s or the Dixie Pig, dreaming of New York City, never getting the money together to get past DC. He would never imagine her fleeing a rural backwater for its murkier depths.
She was right on all counts.
Lee’s first stop, Transient City: Fredericksburg, an hour south of Washington, DC, on Route 1. Home ownership rate 5 percent. The local gentry had surrendered to solvent government employees and Beltway bandits. Sold every stitch of land, skedaddled to Stafford County or points west. The city was a half-empty ghetto with foreign immigrants. The place you would fetch up if you were trying to get over the Mason-Dixon Line and failing, in Lee’s opinion.
He had lunch at Woolworth’s without seeing his wife. He sat down on a bench in front of a gift shop (the new suburbanites still came into town when they needed kitsch) to wait for her.
He was like a man buying the first lottery ticket of his life. He reads the notice on the back warning him that the odds against him are twelve million to one, and he concludes that he has a chance of winning.
Lee looked up and down the street, watching for slight women with brown hair. He watched for women with blond children. He watched for anyone at all. It was a quiet afternoon, paced by the rhythm of traffic lights. He stood up and walked, thinking he might ask after her, if he happened to see her kind of store. He walked the length of town and as far as the railroad tracks. Ice cream, real estate, musical instruments. Porcelain figurines and teacups. He shook his head at his own dumbness, got back in the car, and sat.
He imagined doing the same thing in Fairfax, Manassas, Reston, Falls Church—all the sprawling towns where he and Peggy knew no one. Where she was driving around in a candy-apple-red ’66 Fairlane. Why was he looking for her, when he could be looking for that car?
He drove to AAA in Richmond. He acquired maps of the state that showed every gas station. He needed a map because without zoning, businesses could crop up anywhere. Almost at random, you might see a barber pole or a green sign with yellow block script announcing the Department of Motor Vehicles. A one-and-a-half-lane highway would round a blind curve and there you were—already past it—the town you were looking for with its post office, gas pump, and population of four.
He returned to northern Virginia, where gas stations grew thick on the ground. But the second day of searching brought no sign of Peggy. Neither did the third.
From being mired in lottery-style thinking, Lee drifted toward magical thinking. He no longer demanded that divine providence reveal Peggy and Mireille in an instant. He was certain if he tortured himself long enough, quizzing gas station attendants on whether they’d seen a conspicuous car containing a woman and a little girl, his persistence would be rewarded. The car was black now, and the woman was routinely addressed as “sir” because she’d given herself an inept crew cut, but he didn’t know that.
His task would have been easier if he’d ever granted her a credit card beyond the one for his father’s Amoco station. It had his own name on it. He discovered it in his wallet, transferred there from hers. It was her way of telling him she had gone through his wallet and taken nothing. She didn’t even have a bank account. Financially, she existed as a tax deduction. A deduction Lee would go on taking whether she lived with him or not. It was only fair. She was much more expensive after she left than before.
Stillwater Lake retreated far from the bamboo grove. It stood in yellowish-gray mud streaked with reddish brown that looked to Lee like diarrhea. The shore went out for forty yards and down six feet before the first puddles appeared. The standing water was almost white, writhing solid with mosquito larvae like maggots in a corpse.
The college could not be relied upon to fix the lake. What it had lost in aesthetics, it had gained in acreage. The lakeshore was the property line. The administration planned to build a spacious campus center on land that used to be underwater. Lee’s parents told him to wait a couple of years for grass to grow and he wouldn’t know the difference.
But the level kept dropping. The college hired a civil engineering bureau to produce a hydrogeological report.
Stillwater Lake, the engineers said, was unnatural, built using a method commonly used to create cattle watering holes in areas without streams. But on the much, much larger scale made possible by slave labor. The Great Pyramid of puddles, concocted from a limestone depression by a forgotten megalomaniac. The lake bed was thousands of tons of clay, dug from riverbanks farther east, plastering an enormous hole.
Occasionally the lake would burp. A bubble of methane would rise from some unseen cavity and a circular wave would race toward the gloppy shores. Lee had not seen it happen because he was unable to look directly at the lake. It pained his retinas. He expected it to heave and drain completely any day now.
He could identify the culprit. He would have known her anywhere, kneecapped her with a high-powered rifle at four hundred yards. He knew everything about her. Except where she was.
The next year, Karen was four years old going on five and still blond. Nonetheless, registering her for first grade as a black six-year-old was easy as pie.
Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people. Virginia was settled before slavery began, and it was diverse. There were tawny black people with hazel eyes. Black people with auburn hair, skin like butter, and eyes of deep blue green. Blond, blue-eyed black people resembling a recent chairman of the NAACP. The only way to tell white from colored for purposes of segregation was the one-drop rule: if one of your ancestors was black—ever in the history of the world, all the way back to Noah’s son Ham—so were you.
Meg felt very clever as she handed over the birth certificate. The races of the child’s parents were marked right on it: colored and colored.
When the clerk saw on the slip of paper that that Mrs. Brown was colored, she glanced up in surprise. But a close look revealed that it was true. Meg’s coarse curls and knobby heel bones were dead giveaways to the connoisseur. The daughter was one of those pallid, yellow-haired black kids you sometimes see. Frog-belly white, no trace of pink, curly tendrils all around her hairline. Probably anemic and undernourished—a lot of rural black kids had worms—but very close to passing. “Was she premature?” the clerk inquired. “She’s so little.”
“She’s
