19.
Ruby didn’t like to remember her years of foster care. She graduated high school and got a scholarship to study criminology
at the city university. Even before she knew what she wanted to do, she knew who she wanted to be, and that was a person who
understood what had happened to her mother. She felt she might survive the grief if only she knew.
What she remembered most from foster care was the screaming, hollow feeling inside. She wore her shoes thin with walking.
She walked every neighborhood of the city. Up and down old lanes, past homes festooned with vines, across hospital and school
lawns, her shoes growing wet. Past homes decorated for Halloween, then for Christmas and Easter, and for May Day with baskets
hanging on doors. The leaves blew away, and it was spring again. Summer and fall and an endless wheel of terror, looking for
her mother.
There were times she thought she saw her mom, and her heart would explode, and she would go running down the street to catch
the woman in the bus, or to stop the car at the light. The bewildered woman would turn, her long hair parting. It was never
Ruby’s mother.
In later years, Ruby learned that this is such a common phenomenon that it has a name: bereavement hallucination. Over half
of people who have recently lost a loved one report seeing them—a face in a crowd, or a figure sitting at a bus stop. Often
it is someone in the distance. The longer the relationship, the closer it was, the more likely the hallucinations.
But Ruby didn’t believe that they were hallucinations. She suspected that the dead were still in reach. They were there, tantalizing the living. They didn’t want to be forgotten.
It was during her years in college that she started the map. She found it in an antiques store and was drawn to its buttery
yellow surface. She hung it up in her dorm room, and the first flag she put in it was a red one for her mother.
Her mother, too, was the first person whose report she collected, from that sergeant, now retired. He had white eyebrows and
seemed to think he had done well. He had smiled at her, handing it over, as if he felt sorry for her, to have a mother who
left. Child abandonment, he had written in that report. Daughter was born out of wedlock. There was no crime, Ruby was learning, in simply disappearing, and many police assumed women did as men: They left. If anyone
had committed a crime, that sergeant had decided, it was Desirée herself. For leaving her child. If she reappeared, she would
face charges.
Ruby took all the required courses for her degree. Policing. Courts. Theories of crime. White-collar crime. There was no criminology
class, then or now, on missing women. It was like they didn’t exist. Not once, in her entire four years, did a professor even
raise the issue.
The number of flags on her map grew. She collected the names from police bureaus, calling to say she was working on her thesis,
which was about missing women. They didn’t care. Sometimes she visited police stations and dug missing women reports out of
dusty drawers, and she wrote to faraway bureaus, and soon thick packets began arriving battered in the mail from across the
country, saying postage due in the upper right-hand corner. But there were so many police bureaus. There were so many women.