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Carrie offers weakly. “To look for him?”
    “No. You stick by me.” We walk down the boardwalk, close to the storefronts, scanning the crowds for Daniel, his lime-green swim trunks, his gray T-shirt, his thick brown curls. Of course I would lose him here; this is where I lose people. My past is leaching into my present, and even in the midst of this panic, I feel a sensation of walking a few steps behind myself.
    Carrie is dawdling. What is she doing, doesn’t she care? “Come on,” I snap at her. She stands up, and I see she was tying her shoelace.
    “Shouldn’t we call the police?” she asks.
    “Maybe. No. Not yet.” Just the thought of having to deal with the police. And how stupid I would feel if, as I suspect, Daniel is crouched behind a bench watching us. We didn’t believe him, and now we are being punished. He will come back when he feels we have received his message. But there was that salmon man with the boat.
    I cup my hands over my mouth and yell, “Daniel, we’re sorry!” A few passing faces turn to us, puzzled. Daniels, maybe, but not our Daniel. Carrie slumps at my side, almost as tall as I am, her narrow shoulders round, her chest caved in. “Daniel,” she calls halfheartedly, and it is her voice that gives me a moment of terrific clarity—my daughter calling out for my son who is lost.
    My son is lost. I’ve lost my son. When I grant my thoughts this directness, I feel as if I’ve woken up straitjacketed—that helpless, constricted terror.
    The sun has ignited the orange chemical glow where the ocean meets the sky and soon there will descend a moonless dark. Sequins on a dress passing by. Little boys who are not mine licking cotton candy off their palms. If anyone can find Daniel here, it should be me. I once knew every pier, every crawl space, every alley. And it is my fault; I am the one who brought us here. Unless this is my mother’s work, and I a dangling marionette she manipulates from some high, dark balcony. Imagine: She has stolen Daniel from me to keep me here, searching, forever. This is my punishment. She wants me to know what it is to lose a child. I swallow this thought and feel ashamed. I’ve been in Ocean Vista for hours only, and already I am trying to blame her for what is wrong with me.
    Carrie and I start by retracing our steps back out to the beach, where the tide has continued to rise. She jogs to the far pilings. I watch her slim running form in the twilight, her tangled hair switching back and forth with her gait. She comes back red-faced and shakes her head. We crouch in the beach grass to look into the sinister, bottle-strewn space beneath the boardwalk. The shadows extend indefinitely over mud putrid with dropped rotting things, a dead, spread-winged gull, twisted shapes of old windbreakers and wet cardboard, somebody’s bed. “Daniel!” we shout, and the wet space absorbs the sound so quickly that I start forgetting whether I’ve called out at all.
    When we have exhausted the dark spaces, we remount the boardwalk and stand blinking under the street lamps. Where would I go, if I were Daniel? He would know only the options visible from this spot, unless he chose to wander, but that would be unlike him. He is purposeful and decisive. Behind us, the searched beach. Ahead, a strip of storefronts: restaurants, novelty shops, candy shops, bars, pizzerias, arcades. Ocean Vista proper is visible through the alleys and down the big central boardwalk ramp: aluminum-sided buildings looking gray in the fading light, dark trees, parked cars. Over the boardwalk shops, I can see the Ferris wheel and the new spiky spinning rides. The Ocean Spirit is gone, replaced by a metal roller coaster with corkscrew loop-the-loops. I wonder how it went—a death and a lawsuit or a simple collapse. The whole thing tumbling down like Popsicle sticks.
    “Let’s check the shops,” I say to Carrie, and we dash madly from one to the next, making little bells ring as we shove open