The Summer Before Boys by Nora Raleigh Baskin Page B

snatched and she was hysterical for hours, until a doctor was called to give her a sedative. A kid doesn’t get lost walking fifty yards to the picnic lodge, the mother kept screaming until the medicine finally kicked in and she fell asleep on a chair in the grand sitting room.
    But it turns out they can. And by the time the mother wokeup, her little girl was back in her arms. She had just taken a wrong turn. The little girl had her sweater but had somehow lost her right sneaker. Eliza told me all about it in school the next day.
    Or maybe Pam was remembering the boy who had walked back into the hotel after his parents had checked out and his whole family was in their car ready to drive away. The boy said he left his iPod on the little glass table right beside the checkout counter. He ran back inside to get it, but he never came back out. That boy was found about an hour later walking down the mountain road toward the gatehouse with his headset on. He explained to everyone he decided to leave out the front door and that his parents would drive by and see him on their way home.
    â€œHe really thought his parents would just leave without him,” Eliza had told me. “Isn’t that crazy?”
    Then it was completely dark, eight o’clock, and as is the procedure, Mrs. Smith called the state troopers, who arrived with their dogs.

thirty-one
    T he officer wanted something of Eliza’s so his people-sniffing dogs could pick up her scent and begin to track her. Uncle Bruce called Aunt Louisa, who he still insisted wait at the house in case Eliza showed up there. Two neighbors had come over, made coffee, and offered to stay with her. One of them could drive something of Eliza’s up to the hotel. A pair of socks, a nightgown would be great, the officer told us. Anything that hadn’t been laundered.
    â€œWill this work?” I asked. I fished into my backpack and brought out Eliza’s sweatshirt.
    â€œDoes this belong to the missing girl?” the officer asked me.
    I nodded. But Eliza is not a missing girl.
    â€œDid she wear it today?”
    â€œYes,” I answered. “She always wears that one. It hasn’t been washed all summer.”
    Eliza’s sweatshirt was pink with a hood and a zipper. It looked suddenly so small and so pink when the police officer took it from me. His uniform was gray, and his belt was black and he had a gun.
    We were in the grand tearoom that had been closed off so that the sight of the state troopers and the dogs, and the lights, the megaphones, the maps, and the walkie-talkies that gave off periodic random static wouldn’t affect the other guests. It was clear that people knew something was going on, but so far no one had said anything. Mrs. Smith was standing by the tea tray holding her own hands tightly, as tightly as her face was pinched into an angry, worried expression.
    Steve, the night manager, was by the glass doors talking quietly with two staffers, a youngish guy and an older woman. I recognized them as trail guides.
    Uncle Bruce was poring over the open maps and I noticed for the first time the tiny shapes of flowers and vines carved into the legs of the wooden table where he was standing. Not saying a word, like he was trying to remember something. Where was that steep drop? That crevasse that someone could fall into? Where was that one spot where the trail narrows and the colored markers are most faded?
    â€¢ • •
    The Korean War is called the Forgotten War because nobody seems to care about it. It happened right after the end of World War II and before the Vietnam War. When the Korean War veterans came home from their tour of duty, there were no memorials or parades, not much on the evening news, not even any protests or demonstrations. It wasn’t even called a war. It was called a conflict. The Korean conflict.
    But if you ask me no one cares about any war.
    If it doesn’t affect them personally, they can act like it