Idaho by Emily Ruskovich

Author:Emily Ruskovich
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

Nine years ago, in 1997, one year after Ann married Wade, she walked into the post office in Ponderosa, and she saw the first age-progressed image of June, produced by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. The flyer showed two pictures side by side. June at nine—the age she was when she went missing—and June at eleven, the age she would be if she had lived.

The first image, which was a photograph of June at nine, was taken professionally at Hayden Charter, the school where Ann taught choir. Sitting on the stool in front of an emerald backdrop Ann remembers once sitting in front of, too, June smiled weakly, her shoulders pushed up ever so slightly as if she had been caught there on that stool when she was supposed to have been elsewhere. There was a certain uneasiness about her gentle face, too, as if she were afraid of the camera flash. Even so, she was prepared enough for the school photograph to tilt her head a little to the side, something a lot of little girls did on picture day, as if a tilted head meant “pretty.” Her dark, straight hair looked freshly trimmed. She wore a plain white collared shirt.

In the portrait beside it, which was produced on a computer but appeared to be a photograph, eleven-year-old June wore the same shirt, and nearly the same expression, except that her eyes were opened a little wider, and she seemed, in spite of these wide eyes, to be asleep. There was something absent, or nearly absent, in her expression, but it was also true that she looked, at first glance, like the girl the nine-year-old would have grown into. Only she did not lean forward or tilt her head. She did not look afraid. She looked like she was waiting, calmly, for something she had known all her life would arrive sometime soon. There was no anxiety in that face. Her hair, which in the first photograph fell at her jawline, had grown down to the middle of her chest, and was layered. There was a realistic flush on her cheeks, a resolve in her smile. All of her, so very real.

Ann had been unsettled when she saw the computer-generated image on the post office bulletin board. As real as it was, it was also a projection, a guess of life, a face manufactured out of the faces of those who had loved her.

No one but the missing are ever estimated in this way, Ann had thought. No one but the missing are granted, with such deliberate generosity, their grandmother’s smiles, their father’s chins, every trace of someone else a cry to believe in, a test of faith and a testament of family; these traits are the layers of pixels overlaid on a screen. A mother will emerge on a daughter’s face long after mother and daughter are lost to each other. Even a mother who killed: Her features are given their due; the resemblance isn’t softened because of what the mother’s done.

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