Pop culture is obsessed with missing girls.

We worry over them, we absorb their narratives, we let their mysteries dominate our dinner conversation.

But rarely do we follow through with the nearly-always-tragic result.

The aftermath isn’t quite as titillating as the disappearance.

That’s whereSaint Xcomes in.

First, they tell themselves not to panic.

Their daughter must have simply gone off somewhere on the resort grounds.

It is a large property and there are any number of places she could be.

Perhaps she has gone for a jog, or to smack tennis balls against the backboard at the courts.

Surely she will come groggily across the sand anytime now, and how furious they will be!

But she is in none of these places doing none of these things.

Everything but Alison is forgotten.

Breakfast, lunch…Claire is starving but says nothing.

Word spreads quickly among the guests.

“Did you hear?

That pretty girl with the auburn hair is missing.”

“The one with the scar?”

“They’re saying she never came home last night.”

The police are summoned.

The time for the family’s flight home comes and goes.

On the balcony, a mother watches the sun go down, then sinks to the floor.

She crouches on hands and knees and dry-heaves over the cool terra-cotta tiles.

A father goes to her, holds her.

He tells her that everything could still be okay.

Everything could still be okay.

Hearing these words echoed back to him from his wife, a father breaks down.

They remain on the balcony, intertwined, for some time.

From inside, where she has been set up in front of the television, Claire watches her parents.

Later that night, they put her between them in their bed.

It is her father’s hand, checking for the rise and fall of her breath.

Claire lies awake, eyes wide open in the dark.

Alison slept late the next morning.

She drank a fruit punch.

“He was after her all week,” the mother interrupts.

“That blond boy.

He couldn’t leave her alone.”

As she speaks, a film reel of horrible possibilities flickers through her mind.

What if she’d misjudged him?

How had she allowed herself to forget that in the end a mother has only one job?

Suddenly she cannot breathe.

The warm tropical air clogs in her throat.

A porter is sent to the local chemist’s to collect it.

The doctor pulls the father aside.

“Give yourselves some time and space.”

“Everyone here could be anyone.

You could be anyone.”

“I’ll go now, sir.”

“It’s so awful, what’s happened.

The thing is, we can hear them,” the husband says.

“Going through…what they’re going through,” the wife adds.

(He will turn out to be right.

The manager upgrades them to a private villa.

The rest of the guests do their best to balance concern with the pleasure of their days.

They do not know the girl, after all.

Their worry is tinged with excitement.

“They say the police are questioning that blond boy.”

“Did you hear they’re talking to the skinny one and the fat one?”

“I heard the police picked them up for something the night she went missing.

People are saying they spent the night in jail.”

“It’s always the pretty ones, isn’t it?”

The island is turned upside down with searching.

Members of the civil service are given days off to join the search.

Prop planes loaned from a larger island nearby scan the shallow seas.

The search turns up answers to other, older mysteries.

A wedding band is found in the dusty lot behind Paradise Karaoke.

But no sign is found of Alison.

“I don’t understand.

What’s taking so long?

Where is she?”

“I assure you we are deploying every available resource.

Our officers are working in fifteen-hour shifts.

We are coordinating with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“But this island is tiny.”

The father squints at the chief of police.

“Why the hell can’t you find her?”

The actor’s girlfriend finally persuades him, grudgingly, to charter a boat to Faraway Cay.

(“I love reggae.

That whole rasta spirituality, you know?

I’ve always found that so interesting.”

“I’m an L.A. girl.

He knew she’d tell these men this; she mentions Kentucky to anyone who will listen.

His childhood was not a happy one.

Each time the boat lofts over a swell, time becomes a glass cube he’s trapped in.

She’s right it is beautiful.

The cliffs are covered in green growth, a color so vivid it seems to cast out vibrations.

The beach is a crescent of sand so brilliant he has to shield his eyes.

Palms curve outward in invitation.

When the ocean slips from view he feels like himself again.

(The trees are silk-cotton, and have stood for centuries.)

A few stark, knotty trees jut from the cracked earth, leafless and stunted.

Lizards that seem made of nothing but dry air scuttle in and out of the scrub.

A small white butterfly floats over the hot earth.

Not far from the path, a cluster of goats snort and chomp at the scrub.

“Gross,” the actor says.

“I think they’re cute.”

“I think you’re cute.”

The path descends back into dense and steamy thickets.

He smells growth, soil, sweet wet rock.

He hears falling water.

Around a bend, and there it is.

The water sluicing down the rocks is glitter and mist.

The pool into which it tumbles is utterly circular and glassy.

“You like it?”

But then he looks at her and sees that there are tears in her eyes.

She laughs at herself, wipes them away.

“I know I’m a sap.”

He has been unkind.

All she wants is his happiness.

Is that so terrible?

He takes her in his arms, feeling the blunt realness of her.

What the hell is wrong with him?

Where is the problem here?

He surrenders to it.

They swim together to the very center of the pool.

The water is so crisp and clean you could understand how a baptism could change everything.

He squeezes his hands together and squirts her.

“Hey,” she splashes back.

He wraps his arms around her.

“You’re mine.”

She shrieks and kicks and protests with delight.

“Let me go!

Let me go!”

He makes a silent vow.

From now on when she asks for things he will do them, give them, say them.

They swim to the waterfall.

They dunk their heads beneath the rushing water and let it pummel them.

They slip behind the curtain of water.

She reaches for him but he shakes his head.

“Lie back,” he says.

He cradles her head as she lies against the wet rocks.

When she comes, her cries are lost in the roar of water.

After, they float, spent and open on the surface of the pool.

“They’ll be waiting for us,” he says finally.

“Do we have to?”

Together, they stroke toward the edge.