Cold Reality Settles on Petaluma’s Soul : Polly Klaas: The irony is that she lay dead while her smile sustained hopeful dreams.

Here in Sonoma County, as the facts about our missing girl began to fall into our hands, we held them at first with a strange mixture of reverence and disgust. Because they brought relief from the unbearable mystery that we have lived with for the past two months, we felt something like gratitude. They relieved us, however, by slamming us up against the other extreme: an unbearable specificity. How was it that such an infinite amount of grief and hope could be resolved into this miserable precipitate of a white Ford Pinto, Pythian Road, bits of cloth . . . ?

The relief these facts brought, as they continued to unfold, was only the relief of bringing speculation to an end, like finding a crashed airplane’s black box or receiving, after months of disquieting symptoms, a definitive diagnosis of a terminal disease. They brought no comfort. Rather, they gave rise to an endless chain of “if onlys,” and, as they began to confirm our worst fears, they meant that we must let go of other, more hopeful scenarios.

“He wanted to marry her,” my 7-year-old daughter told me several days after Polly’s disappearance. This was a terrifying prospect to her but it made a kind of sense and held a kind of promise: She believes that when a Frog or a melancholy Beast falls in love with a beautiful girl, love may transform him into a gentle Prince. “Also,” she told me, “Polly’s dog went with her.”

My daughter told me these things with such certainty that I realized she was not inventing them: Clearly, the children had their grapevine. Through a process of transmuting the horrible facts into stories they could live with, they had provided Polly with an animal friend in just the way that Disney films give every troubled protagonist a little companion, a cheerful cricket or bouncy skunk to chirp advice or wag along.

But we grown-ups, too, spun our stories. “I had a kind of dream I’ve never had before,” a friend told me. “It was so vivid. I saw a bearded man taking Polly, driving her to Napa, to a field from which a helicopter flew her to Texas. Then, at the Rio Grande, they flew her into Central America.” I, too, concocted a story. I imagined Polly fallen among evil people in a big city, forced to endure many horrors, yet with the companionship of other children and the presence of one kind, older woman. I saw this woman clearly: She was plump; she had a trace of a mustache and a long, dark braid and compassionate eyes that had seen much.

But now we know that all those weeks, Polly’s body lay under a pile of wood beside the freeway south of Cloverdale. Her body . . . words that, each time we say or hear them, give us the sensation of falling through open space to crash against hard ground. Her body . . . words that bring us to the place where all the noise about her stops, where there is only, at last, the flood of tears, or silence.

If we lived in a different moment of history, this would be the time to turn the place we live into a shrine for our missing girl. She would be--as she has been--our little goddess of the portals, watching as we go in and out of doorways, blessing us with her smile. But ours is a practical, secular age, and so the photographs of Polly have already begun to come down, now that they no longer serve a purpose.

Still, we mustn’t let this beautiful child be completely devoured by the terrible facts that sealed her fate. Surely there is something in the vision of her face--a quality of mirth; a radiant, girlish serenity--that is more real than anything that happened to her.