The Passage by Justin Cronin

kept her jacket on the table, as if she were used to leaving places in a hurry. She seemed healthy, if a little thin. Her pants were too short and stiff with dirt. When the little girl had finished her snack, every bite, Lacey took the chair beside her. She asked her if she had anything in the bag she wanted to play with, or a book they could read together, but the little girl, who hadn’t spoken a word, just nodded and passed it from her lap. Lacey examined the bag, pink with some kind of cartoon characters glued on—their huge black eyes reminded her of the girl’s—and remembered what the woman had told her, that she was taking her daughter to school.
    She unzipped the bag and inside found the stuffed rabbit, and the pairs of rolled-up underpants and socks and a toothbrush in a case, and a box of strawberry cereal bars, half empty. There was nothing else in the bag, but then she noticed the little zippered pouch on the outside. It was too late for school, Lacey realized; the girl had no lunch, no books. She held her breath and unzipped the pouch. There she found the piece of notebook paper, folded up.
    I’m sorry. Her name is Amy. She’s six years old
.
    Lacey looked at it for a long time. Not the words themselves, which were plain enough in their meaning. What she looked at was the space around the words, a whole page of nothing at all. Three tiny sentences were all this girl had in the world to explain who she was, just three sentences and the few little things in the bag. It was nearly the saddest thing Lacey Antoinette Kudoto had ever seen in her life, so sad she couldn’t even cry.
    There was no point in going after the woman. She’d be long gone by now. And what would Lacey do if she found her? What could she say?
I think you forgot something. I think you’ve made some mistake
. But there was no mistake. The woman, Lacey understood, had done exactly what she’d set out to do.
    She folded the note and put it in the deep pocket of her skirt. “Amy,” she said, and as Sister Margaret had done all those years ago in the yard atthe school in Port Loko, she positioned her face close to the girl’s. She smiled. “Is that your name, Amy? That’s a beautiful name.”
    The girl looked around the room, quickly, almost furtively. “Can I have Peter?”
    Lacey thought a moment. A brother? The little girl’s father? “Of course,” she said. “Who is Peter, Amy?”
    “He’s in the bag,” the girl stated.
    Lacey was relieved—the girl’s first request of her was something simple that she could easily provide. She removed the rabbit from the bag. It was velveteen plush, worn smooth in shiny patches, a little boy rabbit with beady black eyes and ears stiffened by wire. Lacey passed it to Amy, who placed it roughly on her lap.
    “Amy,” she began again, “where did your mother go?”
    “I don’t know,” she said.
    “How about Peter?” Lacey asked. “Does Peter know? Could Peter tell me?”
    “He doesn’t know anything,” Amy said. “He’s stuffed.” The little girl frowned sharply. “I want to go back to the motel.”
    “Tell me,” Lacey said. “Where is the motel, Amy?”
    “I’m not supposed to say.”
    “Is it a secret?”
    The girl nodded, her eyes fixed on the surface of the table. A secret so deep she couldn’t even say it was a secret, Lacey thought.
    “I can’t take you there if I don’t know where it is, Amy. Is that what you want? To go to the motel?”
    “It’s on the busy road,” the girl explained, tugging at her sleeve.
    “You live there with your mother?”
    Amy said nothing. She had a way of neither looking nor speaking, of being alone with herself even in the presence of another person, that Lacey had never encountered. There was something even a little frightening about it. When the girl did this, it was as if she, Lacey, were the one who had vanished.
    “I have an idea,” Lacey declared. “Would you like to play a game, Amy?”
    The girl eyed her skeptically.