Come Back: A Mother and Daughter's Journey through Hell and Back

I can't miss this meeting, can't let the producer know anything, can't lose this job. Because I know instinctively that whatever has happened to Mia is going to cost a lot of money to fix.

Forget the new house, call the broker.

I drive to the producer's house in the hills, overlooking this huge city where Mia is doing godknowswhat. Or being done to - no, no, stop thinking, just knock on the door.

I know this book so intimately, I can respond to questions with some intelligence, even in this wretched state. But, my skin is twitching, I feel like packaged panic trying to sit still and say the right things, like, "The character's awareness of the savagery beneath the surface," and, "This society is a dead organism." Instead of things like, "My child is missing, I'm terrified."

"Claire, it's very important the audience knows that she wanted to go."

He actually says this. Of all the art my life could imitate, not this book. Just keep writing, make your head nod.

The sun breaks through and his hillside patio blazes with light-flickered leaves. We've covered everything, I'm dying to dash out of here. But, he's feeling relaxed, sociable, he says, "Let's enjoy the sun before it goes away," as he motions me to follow him to the patio. It's something he knows I enjoy and I don't want to do anything to make him suspect anything's wrong.

"Sounds lovely," I hear myself say as my body somehow locomotes itself outside. The sunlight sears my eyes, they're so raw from tears and no sleep. He sinks back into his chaise, I sit bolt upright in mine. He closes his eyes, smiles a Buddha smile. And breathes.

He's meditating.

After fifteen minutes, the time it takes to strangle a girl, to rape a girl, to push her into a dented blue van, he sighs and purrs:

"God, life is beautiful, Claire - isn't it?"

I've driven home from Coldwater Canyon a thousand times, but I can't find my way home. I'm crying and driving from one street to another like a drunken tourist. Nothing is familiar, someone switched worlds on me. The giant red circle I keep passing finally makes the trip from retina to brain and registers. The Zen Grill, we eat there all the time. I've been driving in the same one mile around my home for two hours.

My mother's waiting for me when I get home. She knew immediately something was wrong when she saw our friend waiting for her at the airport instead of Paul. She's a Holocaust survivor, she has a nose for disaster.

She hugs me but doesn't say much. She's in shock but she insists on helping. She wants to help me look, this tired woman who has already suffered the unspeakable.

I take her with me to Hollywood Boulevard. Tonight the neon, fog, and drizzle have draped this world in a pearlescent, dreamy light, like a fine tulle veil over a hard-favored bride. We cruise slowly, me looking left, her looking right, like johns looking for action through the buzz and glow. My God, all the kids. A city full of baby addicts and hookers. I had never noticed. I never had to.

We go into police stations, with my posters and questions. Police here are buried in scum and vice and angry humanity. Ranting crazies in dreadlocks, pouting whores in leather bras and purple boas, seething pimps - I've never seen so many burgundy warm-up suits. I plead with the officers for their help. They look at me like I'm nuts, like take a look around, lady, do I look like I can help you?

Please, I insist, she's not a street kid, she's a good girl, something's snapped, she's a Hopkins Academy student. This last one raises brows. It is a conservative all-girls school, one whose girls do not end up on missing posters.

When I post them, my skin crawls. The looks on the faces of sleazy bastards when they see her picture. A mother could kill them with slender, manicured hands.

I have a gut feeling she's not here. I race home to drop off my mother, then drive to Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade. It's an outdoor mall, blocks long, a favorite haunt of Mia and her friends. A sub-culture of street kids is always camped there around a fountain. Dirty, loud, addicted, faces full of steel rings, missing teeth. They've no money to buy food, but they buy hair dye, sporting cockscombs and plumages of every color. Some are smart, some drug-fried, some just "not regular" as we West Side moms say, we respectable families who cut this cobbled family a wide berth without interrupting our conversation, like stepping around dog shit. They're just part of the urban landscape, as if the fountain spawned them, as if they'd swum upstream through the sewers and came spouting out while we slept. Now, I realize there are weeping mothers from here to the Atlantic.

I push through the Friday night crowd, looking, looking, looking. I give posters to store owners, pleading have you seen her, can you watch for her? It is so easy to know which ones have children.