In Between Frames by Judy Lin Page B

“He not come home,” Jon said, finally.   “I worry that he do something with this woman.”
     
    Sam bristled at being treated like she wasn’t even there.   “This woman,” she said, “didn’t see him at all.”
     
    “Where he go, then?”
     
    “Did he say anything about where he was going?” Miles asked.  
     
    Jon shook his head.   “Only that he want to take little girl to have fun.”
     
    Sam felt every muscle in her back seize.   “Oh God,” she said.   She ran outside, down to the beach, where the children Mabel usually played with were digging a hole in the sand.   “Alex says that if you dig deep enough, you’ll get to China,” Mabel had told her.    Sam had smiled at that story—she’d done it herself, with her friends—but there was no smile on her face as she darted up to them, searching frantically for Mabel.  
     
    “Mabel?” she asked.    “Where is Mabel?”   Then she remembered that none of the children understood English that well.   She tried again in Greek.   The children looked at each other, and then finally the boy said something in Greek.   Sam tried to follow him, but his voice was high and drowned out by the sound of the surf and all of the other voices that were also trying to tell her where her daughter was.   But by now, Jon and Miles had caught up, and Jon supplied the translation:   “Man come to take Mabel on boat,” he said.  
     
    “Oh God, I told him not to,” Sam groaned.  
     
    “You know where he is?” Jon asked, appearing hopeful for the first time.  
     
    “Yes,” Sam said.   She turned to Miles.   “Can you drive us to the market?”
     
    Miles kept his mouth shut about the picture.   It wouldn’t do anybody any good now, since it was just a photo of Stephan on a boat, and there would be no way to tell them how he’d come into its possession.   “My camera is possessed” was the truth, but it was also unbelievable—and there was no telling if the photo had somehow morphed back into the picture of the burned out shell of a building after the protests.   He didn’t dare look—he sensed that looking again would render the moment captured in the picture obsolete.  
     
    Still, as he drove to the market, with Sam in the back and Jon next to him, he wondered about the camera did and what it showed, if it meant anything, why him.   He could, he supposed, buy the idea that someone out there wanted him and Sam to get together and be happy, but then what was the picture of Stephan doing in the mix?   Did whatever was out there want them to rescue him?   Or was it Stephan’s final good-bye?   How was he supposed to make sense of any of it?  
     
    He wove the car around the perimeter of the market, and brought them up next to the pier where he saw Stephan for the first time.   Sam got out almost before he parked the car; Jon was less than a second behind her.   They raced into the little shack while he cut the engine, got out, and locked the doors.   He felt as if the situation should have been more urgent to him, but at the same time he had no idea what more he could be doing.   He felt hopeless and vaguely guilty that he’d been lulled into sleeping with Sam the night before—maybe, if he hadn’t, they would have found Stephan by now.  
     
    And then he realized that Mabel had only disappeared that morning, so Stephan, if he was “missing”, couldn’t have gone very far.   He walked down to the edge of the pier, hearing but not listening to Jon scold the owner, the owner yelling back.   The ocean stretched before him, a lazy, shimmering blue, dotted with a few fishing boats.   But there was no little sailboat, with the little orange and yellow sail, as far as he could see.  
     
    Inside the little shack, the arguing had died down, and the three—Sam, Jon, and the owner—stepped out of the shack.   Sam and Jon joined him on the pier.   “The owner says that one of his boats has been stolen, and wants