Strax Read online

“It’s not like we’re hard to find!” chuckled the guy on the other side of her, winking at the rest of the audience. They laughed; the music burbled.

  “The -” protocol sheet says that if you’re here for both days and see someone outside listed convention hours outside the center you shouldn’t approach them just because they’re making music unless their music is inviting you and what does that even mean, does that not apply at home, someone tell me how I can just make my kid’s music happy without people looking like they wish our state had laxer gun laws -

  “It’s going to come down to that,” agreed the fourth panelist. “Get to know other strax in the area. If you’re here from as far away as Mr. Cole is you’re obviously willing to put forth some effort for your child, and some of it’s going to be social effort. Maybe bring your child outdoors more often and let people come to you, if you don’t know how to close the distance yourself.”

  “But -” what if everyone who approaches us thinks we’re training Mel like she’s a puppy to keep her quiet, what if they think we hate our baby, what if they’re like that petition guy -

  “Next question,” said Cole.

  I left.

  It was probably my imagination that the music snarled at me as the door closed.

  When I got back to the “6” room that I’d left Gail and Mel in, they were gone, probably looking to see what had kept me or maybe taking Mel to the bathroom. I had the map; they could have gotten lost whichever they were doing. Great. I started making a circuit of the big room. I paused to look in the other “6” rooms in case they’d moved to a different one, but no, they weren’t with the a capella (…as much as anybody here could be a capella) choir in the one or the lap-harp-and-an-accordion in the other. The first we’d checked, still empty. Ladies’ room: line curving from it to the exit, no sign of Gail or Mel standing and waiting, and I hadn’t been that late. I wished for the hundredth time that I could have afforded to replace my phone when Mel put it in the applesauce jar instead of waiting to ask my sister for one come Christmas.

  I found Gail near some kind of photojournalism exhibit that I didn’t pause to take in. Gail wasn’t looking at it either, she was squinting into the crowd.

  She didn’t have Mel with her.

  “Gail,” I said, “where’s Melody?”

  “I thought she -”

  “You didn’t think she was with me, I told you I was leaving, I left her with you -”

  “And we went looking for you and she said Daddy and pulled away from my hand and went tearing off into the crowd, I thought she’d maybe really spotted you, but I couldn’t get through -”

  “I haven’t seen her,” I said. “I haven’t seen her since I left you in the guitar room.”

  “Oh, God,” breathed Gail. I couldn’t even hear her, but I could guess.

  “Where exactly were you -”

  “Hey, guys,” said the photojournalist. “You’re blocking my -”

  “Not now,” I told him. “Gail, where exactly were you when -”

  “You can’t,” said the photojournalist, “you can’t be in the way of the exhibit entrance -”

  “Shut up!” Gail shrieked at him. “I was just by that pillar and she went that way -”

  The photojournalist looked like she’d slapped him.

  Every other strax within shriek-detecting radius looked like she’d slapped him.

  The security guard in the convention center uniform looked like he wasn’t getting paid enough, but he stalked forward and put his hand on Gail’s shoulder. “Ma’am, going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “My daughter -” Gail began.

  “Ejection offense, it was on your protocol sheet, come with me right now, ma’am. Sir, don’t you start with me,” he told me.

  “Our daughter’s missing!” I exclaimed, but he didn’t seem to understand me over the roaring music.

  He had his earplugs in.

  “Find her,” Gail cried over her shoulder as the guard pulled her away. “I’ll be in the car, find her and we’re leaving.”

  I nodded. The convention center was big, but not infinitely big, and if she’d gotten far away from it, well -

  It’s not like strax are hard to track down -

  I tried to find another security guard, but apparently they were all placed maximally inconveniently. The photojournalist, when calmed down enough to answer a civil-by-sheer-force-of-will question, said he hadn’t seen any four-year-old black girls wearing blue or any other color outfit. The people at the other stationary exhibits nearby said the same thing. She must have been quick as a wink towards whoever she’d misidentified as me.

  I went back towards the entrance where Thalia, named for the wrong muse, had been, but she was gone, replaced by somebody else who also hadn’t seen Mel.

  Back into the center. Through it in a careful, exhaustive grid -

  Past the row of petitioners.

  The fellow in favor of banning volume-conditioning didn’t say a word to me when I walked by.

  How much of my gut feeling was about hating him for shouting at me in public about fictitious mistreatment of my daughter and how much of it was about the potentially relevant fact that he’d chosen that specific way to earn my resentment, as opposed to keying my car?

  Would someone have taken her? Would he, or maybe someone who’d heard him and believed him?

  Mel wasn’t a hiding-prone child. We never found her curled up beneath the sink or under her bed or in the washing machine. I didn’t think she’d be under somebody’s booth table or tucked into the curtain behind the band. And I’d been all over this convention center twice. And if I had to listen to the music obliviously chortling while my child was missing for another hour I was going to start climbing the walls -

  Where the hell was another security guard?

  Eyes peeled for another one of those convention center uniforms, I stalked out of the petition booth row, only to bump into Mr. Cole.

  “Mr. Thomas,” he said, politely enough. “You don’t look well.”

  “Mel’s gone missing,” I said, “Gail got thrown out, and I can’t find security and don’t know if the one throwing her out will listen to her, he had earplugs in.”

  “Missing? For how long?”

  “At least half an hour, now, I’ve been looking - you’ve seen Mel, would you recognize her if you saw her -?”

  “I think so. Not a lot of kids around. You take that half of the convention and I take this one and we meet back here?” he suggested.

  “Y- wait. I had an - argument with one of the people with the petitions, back there, earlier, he shouted at me about Mel. I haven’t got a speck of proof but -”

  Cole nodded. “You want me to talk to him?”

  “It’d be a stretch to imagine he decided to kidnap her in public, but if he’s - talking to her, trying to coach her to tell someone that she needs child protection services - I swear to God, Mr. Cole, we don’t volume-condition her, I just didn’t want to sign the man’s petition.”

  “No, I know,” Cole said. “She doesn’t look expectant when there’s a lull in her music or anxious when there’s a swell - I know you don’t. Wait here.” And he walked down the row of petitioners, and paused to sign the anti-volume-conditioning one, and I couldn’t hear a word of what he said, but I stayed put.

  And Mel popped out from behind the booth, and Mr. Cole offered her his hand, and she took it and walked with him right back to me.

  Since she’d apparently developed a propensity to run off suddenly into crowds when merely hand-held, I scooped her up off the ground. “Thank you,” I said. “What happened -?”

  “He spotted her running around lost and gave her a pretzel and asked her some questions but couldn’t get her to say anything incriminating,” Cole said. “I don’t think he’ll be a problem again.”

  “That’s good to know, but we’re not staying. Gail got booted and I’m not leaving her to sit in the car for another four hours,” I told him again. “And to be honest this entire day has been kind of a disaster even apart from the missing child.”

  “I like guitar,” said Mel.

  “Except the guitar room part,” I amended. “If there was one of those back home I’d stand in the corner being ignored every week. But.” Right. Cole was not exactly helpful in his usual territory. He’d just brought a lost kid back to her dad, not championed me in a duel.

  “That’s most of what the meetups are like,” Cole said. “First half, anyway, and most people leave after that part.”

  “Great. That would do us a lot of good if -” I shook my head, trailed off.

  “If you had a strax friend,” said Cole.

  “Or another relative or a sufficiently harmless next-door-neighbor or something or if you’d let me or Gail stand in the corner. That.”

  Cole squinted at me, then - fished in his pocket and came up with a business card.

  “If you’re in the market for a strax friend,” he said, and then he moved off into the crowd.

  I was rooted to the spot until Mel started pulling on my tie and I had to reassert sufficient presence of mind to not choke.

  And then I headed for the door, and peeled off our nametags, and put Mel’s pen back in her overalls pocket where it belonged, and met Gail at the car.

  Not quite unmitigated disaster, and - something I actually knew how to do for her.

  Mel’s music played happy bells.

 

 

  Hannah Blume, Strax

 

 

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