“Oh my God.”
The baby worked one fist free of the blanket. I dropped to my knees right there on the porch, touched her cheek with two fingers, then let my hand slide down to her chest, just to feel it rise and fall under my palm. Warm. Steady. Real.
“Okay,” I whispered, though I don’t think I was talking to her so much as to myself. “Okay, sweetheart. I’ve got you. I’ve got you now.”
I gathered up the basket, checked the street in both directions — empty, of course it was empty — and carried her inside.
Five years earlier, my daughter had vanished at sixteen, in the space of one bad night.
One minute she was slamming cabinet doors because her father had forbidden her from seeing a boy named Andy. The next, she was gone so completely it felt like the house itself had swallowed her.
The police
searched. The neighbors walked the woods behind the school with flashlights. Her photograph sat taped to the register at the gas station, in the church bulletin, in the window of the grocery store, fading a little more with every passing season until somebody finally took it down.
Nothing ever came back. Not a lead. Not a sighting. Not one honest answer.
Paul blamed me first in private, and then, once he’d had enough time to build up his nerve, in front of other people.
“You should have known something was wrong,” he told me, exactly one week after she disappeared.
“I didn’t know she was leaving, Paul.”
“Yeah. You never know anything until it’s too late, Jodi.”
He said worse than that, plenty worse, in the weeks that followed — enough of it that some nights I lay awake and started to wonder if he was right.
By the third year,
