Find Your Mother

Chapter One: The Light Goes First

The light went first, the way it always did in October on the Oregon coast — a long gold hour that collapsed into gray in the space of ten minutes.

Nicki Firth had her tripod planted at the elbow of the Oxbow Bay boardwalk, where the planks bent north and the harbor opened like a cupped hand. Fishing boats nodded at their moorings. The cannery's tin roof held the last of the sun. She had shot this exact view four hundred times in three years and she still came back, because the water never repeated itself.

"Two seconds," she murmured, and pressed the shutter.

The frame she wanted was a slow one: thirty seconds of exposure, so the chop would smooth into something like poured milk and the harbor light out on the jetty would smear into a warm streak. She counted it down in her head. Twenty. Fifteen. Somewhere behind her a gull screamed and a car door thumped shut.

Her phone buzzed against her thigh. She ignored it. Ten. Five.

It buzzed again, and again, three times in a row, which meant either her sister or an emergency, and with Sophie the two were often the same thing.

The shutter clicked closed. Nicki pulled the phone out.

Tilda: *there are cops at the door*

Tilda: *two of them*

Tilda: *nicki where are you*

She stood there for a full second, maybe two, aware of the cold coming off the water and the ache in her fingers from the tripod's metal, and in that space something in her chest went very quiet, the way a house goes quiet when the power cuts out.

She left the tripod. She actually left it — three hundred dollars of aluminum standing alone on the boardwalk — and ran with the camera banging against her ribs, up the wooden steps, across Front Street, past the shuttered ice cream window and the laundromat with its one working dryer, six blocks uphill to the little blue house on Alder Terrace with the sagging gutter Paul kept promising to fix.

A sheriff's SUV sat at the curb with its lights off. Two deputies stood on her porch, and Tilda stood in the doorway in a hoodie and sweatpants, arms crossed so tightly it looked like she was holding herself together by force.

"Mrs. Firth?" the taller one said.

"Yes." Nicki's voice came out wrong. "Yes. What happened."

"I'm Deputy Nash. This is Deputy Ochoa. Could we come inside?"

"Just tell me."

Nash glanced at Tilda, then back. He had a young face and he clearly hated his job in that moment. "Your husband's vessel — the *Kittiwake*, registered to the Coastal Research Trust — was located about ninety minutes ago, roughly five miles west of the bar. A crabber spotted it and radioed it in. The Coast Guard boarded her at seventeen forty."

"Okay," Nicki said. "Okay. And Paul?"

"The vessel was empty, ma'am."

The word *empty* did something strange in her ears. It arrived and then arrived again, an echo without a room.

"Empty," she repeated.

"Engine was running. Wheelhouse door open. No one aboard." Ochoa spoke gently, and she was the one who looked at Tilda properly. "There's an active search underway. Two cutters, a helicopter out of North Bend. Water temperature's around fifty-two degrees, so time matters, and they're moving fast."

Tilda hadn't moved. Fourteen years old and taller than Nicki by an inch, with Paul's dark eyebrows and someone else's mouth. Her phone hung forgotten in her hand.

"He was doing water samples," Nicki heard herself say. "That's all. He does it twice a month. He was going to be back by three."

"Yes, ma'am. We'd like to ask you some questions, if you're able."

They came inside. Nicki put the kettle on because her hands needed a task, and the kettle screamed, and she forgot about it until Ochoa reached past her and turned off the burner.

What time had he left? Six twenty, maybe six thirty; she'd heard the truck. Had he seemed upset? No. Yes. She didn't know. He'd been quiet for a couple of weeks, but Paul was often quiet — that was the shape of him, a man who processed things underwater and surfaced later with conclusions. Was he a strong swimmer? Yes. Did he take medication? Blood pressure. Had he ever spoken about hurting himself?

At that one, Tilda said, "No," fast and flat, from the doorway.

"No," Nicki agreed. "Absolutely not."

Nash wrote it down anyway.

At ten fifteen, a third car pulled up. The man who got out wore a rain shell over a shirt and tie and carried a slim leather folder instead of a clipboard, and Nicki understood without being told that his arrival changed the category of the evening.

"Detective Gil Padilla," he said. "County. I'm sorry to be in your house tonight."

He was maybe fifty-five, gray at the temples, with the unhurried manner of a man who had learned that speed made people lie. He didn't sit until she sat. He didn't take notes for the first ten minutes; he just listened, and when he finally opened the folder his questions were narrower than the deputies'.

Did Paul ever take the *Kittiwake* out alone?

Always. Sampling was a solo job on the short runs.

Did he file a float plan?

With the Trust, yes. He texted it in.

Did he text it in this morning?

Nicki didn't know. Padilla wrote that down.

"Was anyone expecting to meet him out there?"

"No," she said. "Who would meet him? It's the ocean."

Padilla's pen paused, just briefly, and she would think about that pause for weeks afterward.

He left at eleven with the number of a victim advocate and instructions not to talk to reporters. At the door he turned and said, "Mrs. Firth. Don't go down to the marina tonight. There's nothing there for you and there'll be people with cameras by morning."

"I have a camera," she said, absurdly.

Something almost like a smile crossed his face and vanished. "Then you know what I mean."

When the door closed, the house was so quiet Nicki could hear the refrigerator working.

Tilda was standing at the kitchen window with her back to the room, looking at the black rectangle where the harbor should be.

Nicki crossed the linoleum and stopped an arm's length away, which was the distance they had negotiated over two years without ever discussing it. Close enough to be present. Not close enough to be presumed.

"They're searching all night," Nicki said. "Helicopters have infrared. If he's in the water with a vest —"

"He wouldn't wear a vest," Tilda said. "He never wears the vest. He says the sampling rig snags on the straps."

"I know."

"I told him it was stupid."

"It was stupid."

Tilda's shoulders jerked once. Then she turned around and Nicki saw that her eyes were dry, and that frightened her more than crying would have.

"Are you going to call my grandmother?" Tilda asked.

"In the morning. Do you want me to call her tonight?"

"No." A beat. "She'll come and clean things."

"Then we'll wait," Nicki said, and Tilda nodded and went upstairs, and her door clicked shut with the particular softness of a fourteen-year-old who has learned not to slam.

Nicki sat at the kitchen table until two in the morning with her laptop open and her camera still around her neck. At some point she took the card out and loaded the last frames, and there it was: the long exposure, the harbor smoothed to milk, the light on the jetty stretched into a golden line across the water.

She had taken it at 5:48 p.m.

The Coast Guard had boarded an empty boat at 5:40.

While she had been standing on the boardwalk counting seconds, holding perfectly still to make the ocean look calm, her husband had already been eight minutes gone.

She deleted the photograph. Then she went into the trash folder and restored it, because she was not, whatever else she was, a person who destroyed evidence of the truth.

Outside, the fog came in and swallowed the streetlights one at a time, from the water upward.