The first time I told the police my daughter was missing, I still expected someone to explain where she had gone.
I gave them her name, her age, and the date she had left.
I described what she had been wearing and the things she had taken.
I told them about the beach trip.
I told them we had argued.
That last part was difficult.
I tried to make it sound smaller than it had been.
We had disagreed over clothes.
She had been upset.
She had walked out.
I didn't tell the officer how deliberately I had wanted to hurt her with my final words until he asked me directly whether there had been anything unusual about our argument.
Then I heard myself repeat what I had said.
I watched him write it down.
I wanted to reach across the table and cover the page with my hand.
It was the first time I understood that words could remain after the moment that produced them had disappeared.
The officers asked about her friends.
They asked where she usually went and whether she had ever talked about leaving home.
They asked whether she had a boyfriend, whether she had money, and whether she had access to transportation.
I answered as carefully as I could.
Sometimes I knew the answer.
Sometimes I only thought I did.
My daughter had her own life by then, with parts of it that belonged to her and not to me.
I had mistaken knowing her habits for knowing everything about her.
The police began looking for her.
They contacted people she knew and followed up on information that came in.
I answered the phone whenever it rang.
I kept a notebook beside it and wrote down names, dates, and anything that sounded useful.
For a while, every new conversation gave me something to hold on to.
Someone might have seen her.
Someone might remember the beach.
Someone might have heard from her without realizing how important that information would become.
I learned to listen for hesitation in people's voices.
I learned to recognize the difference between someone who was trying to remember and someone who was trying to comfort me.
Neither was much help.
Days passed.
Then more days.
I kept waiting for the police to tell me they had found her.
Instead, they kept asking questions.
I began to understand that a missing person investigation was not a single dramatic search that ended when someone discovered the truth.
It was a long series of small efforts, most of which seemed to lead nowhere.
A person made a statement.
A detective checked it.
A possible lead turned out to be mistaken.
Then everyone moved on to the next possibility.
I couldn't move on.
Every morning, I looked at my phone before I got out of bed.
Every evening, I checked it again before turning off the light.
I didn't want to miss a call.
I didn't want the police to have to tell me that they had tried to reach me and I hadn't answered.
My life became organized around a sound that never came.
At home, I kept things the way they had been.
Her toothbrush remained in the cup beside mine.
I would see it when I brushed my teeth and imagine her coming into the bathroom half-awake, reaching for it without looking.
Sometimes I moved it to clean the cup.
Then I put it back in the same place.
It was such a small object.
That was what made it difficult to throw away.
There was no reason to believe she would use it again.
There was no reason to believe she wouldn't.
I could not make myself choose between those two possibilities.
Her room was worse.
I went inside when I needed to straighten something, then found myself touching objects I had no reason to move.
I opened drawers and closed them.
I picked up things she had left behind and put them down again.
The room still belonged to the girl who had walked out, and I couldn't bear the thought of changing it.
I worried that if I packed anything away, I would be admitting that she wasn't coming back.
So I kept everything.
Her friends came by at first.
Some sat with me and tried to talk.
Others stood awkwardly near the doorway, looking as though they had come to deliver something but couldn't remember what it was.
I asked each of them the same questions.
Had she contacted them?
Had they heard anything?
Did she ever say she wanted to leave?
Most of them gave me the same answers.
No.
Not that they knew.
I watched their faces while they spoke, searching for the smallest sign that they were keeping something from me.
I became suspicious of ordinary pauses.
I hated myself for it, but I couldn't stop.
When someone has disappeared, even silence begins to look like evidence.
The detective assigned to the case was named Pruitt.
He spoke to me with a patience I came to depend on.
He didn't promise that everything would be fine.
He didn't tell me to prepare for the worst.
He explained what they were doing and listened when I had another question.
Every few months, he gave me an update.
Sometimes there was a new detail to examine.
Sometimes there was only confirmation that the previous leads had gone nowhere.
I learned to hear disappointment before he finished speaking.
Still, I waited for his calls.
When the phone rang, I would straighten in my chair.
My pen was always ready.
Then I would hear his voice, and I would try not to sound desperate.
I asked whether they had checked every possible place.
I asked whether someone could have seen her without realizing who she was.
I asked whether the investigation was still active.
He answered as clearly as he could.
I never blamed him for not having an answer.
At least, I didn't blame him out loud.
The first year was a blur of waiting and searching.
The second year was a blur of doing the same things while pretending I had become better at them.
I learned to carry on conversations at the grocery store.
I learned to answer questions about work.
I learned how to sit at a table with other people and appear to be listening while my mind returned to July 12.
I never stopped looking for my daughter.
I checked information that came through the police.
I followed up on anything that seemed even remotely possible.
I kept notes long after the original notebook had become crowded with crossed-out names and dates.
I was afraid that if I stopped writing things down, I might lose the one detail that would eventually matter.
Every so often, someone would tell me a story about a person who had vanished and then returned years later.
They meant to encourage me.
I held on to those stories as if they were promises.
A daughter had come home after years away.
A missing man had been found in another state.
Someone had finally recognized a face in a photograph.
I would listen, then ask for details.
How long had the person been gone?
Who had found them?
What had brought them back?
I wanted every story to be a map.
None of them showed me where my daughter was.
As the years passed, I began to understand how little control I had over the search.
I could make calls.
I could answer questions.
I could keep her room ready.
But I couldn't force someone to remember seeing her.
I couldn't make a lead become evidence.
And I couldn't go back to the kitchen and stop myself from saying what I had said.
That last fact stayed with me more stubbornly than the others.
Sometimes I imagined an ordinary reunion.
She would walk through the door with the same bag.
She would look older, perhaps thinner, perhaps different in ways I couldn't anticipate.
I would ask where she had been.
She would tell me.
Then I would apologize.
In my imagination, the apology always came easily.
In real life, I had spent years being unable to apologize to a person who wasn't there to hear it.
I began writing messages to her in a notebook.
I never sent them.
I wrote that I was sorry.
I wrote that she didn't have to explain everything immediately.
I wrote that she could come home without being questioned.
Sometimes I wrote only her name.
Then I would close the notebook and put it in a drawer.
I couldn't bear to read the words again.
They made the distance between what I wanted to say and what I had said on the last day seem impossible to cross.
After several years, the people around me started changing the way they spoke about her.
At first, they asked whether there had been news.
Then they asked whether I was managing.
Eventually, some stopped asking anything at all.
They believed they were being considerate.
I knew that because a few of them explained it to me.
They didn't want to upset me.
They didn't want to bring back painful memories.
They wanted me to have a normal conversation without being reminded of what had happened.
I understood their intentions.
I still hated hearing my daughter's absence treated like a subject that had become impolite.
Her name was not an insult.
It was not a burden I needed other people to protect me from.
She was my daughter.
I said her name when I was alone.
I said it when I drove past places we had visited together.
I said it while making dinner, sometimes without realizing I had spoken aloud.
I said it because the world had become quieter about her, and I refused to let that quietness become the final word.
The police continued their work, but there were no answers.
The years added up.
The toothbrush stayed where it was.
And the cream-colored beach bag remained the last thing I could remember seeing on her shoulder.
Click here to continue reading: PART 3: The Photograph From Nevada Was Blurry, the Stranger Wanted Four Hundred Dollars, and Hope Was Becoming Something People Could Sell Me
The Last Thing I Said to My Seventeen-Year-Old Daughter Was Something I Would Spend the Rest of My Life Wishing I Could Take Back
Part 2 of 12
