I waited two days before calling the woman again.
During those two days, I kept the phone close enough to reach without standing up.
I checked it when I woke.
I checked it while making coffee.
I checked it before going to bed, even though I knew a silent phone couldn't tell me anything.
I hated how quickly I had returned to waiting.
For sixteen years, I had waited for a knock at the door, a call from the police, or a stranger who knew something useful.
Now I was waiting for a woman I had met on a boardwalk to tell me what she knew about my own daughter.
I tried to make myself useful while I waited.
I cleaned out the kitchen drawer where old receipts and rubber bands had collected. I sorted papers into piles and threw away things I had carried from one year to the next without ever needing.
At the bottom of the drawer, I found a library notice with my daughter's name on it.
The paper was faded.
I remembered renewing her card twice, long after she had disappeared, because I couldn't bear to let the account close.
I held the notice for a moment.
Then I placed it with the other papers I had decided to keep.
Not everything needed to be thrown away.
But I didn't need every object to remain exactly where I had left it in 2008.
On the third day, I called.
The woman answered quickly.
"I was going to call you," she said.
My fingers tightened around the phone.
"Did something happen?"
"No. Nothing bad. I've just been thinking about our conversation."
I sat down.
"All right."
"I know you want answers."
"I do."
"And I know I can't give you all of them."
"I understand."
I wasn't sure I did, but I didn't want to make her feel that she had to defend herself.
She told me she had looked again at the photograph.
She had checked the date, too, though she had already been certain when she showed it to me.
"She's really there," I said before I could stop myself.
"Yes."
I pressed the phone against my ear.
"She's really there."
The woman didn't interrupt.
I had spent so many years talking about my daughter in the past tense that the simple fact of her existence in the present felt almost impossible to say.
I didn't know where she lived.
I didn't know whether she used the same name.
I didn't know if she had a family of her own or whether she spent her days alone.
I didn't know if she had been near Ocean City before the day I saw the bag.
But she had been there three weeks earlier, and the woman on the phone had seen her.
That was more than I had known the week before.
"I have to ask you something," I said.
"Go ahead."
"Does she know I'm still looking for her?"
The question came out quietly.
I hadn't planned to ask it. I had planned to ask about the photograph, the bag, and the circumstances that brought the two together.
But this was the question underneath all the others.
The woman took a breath.
"I can't tell you what she knows about your life now."
I looked toward the window.
"I understand."
"I don't want to give you an answer that isn't mine to give."
That was fair.
I had spent years resenting people who gave me false information, and I couldn't ask this woman to invent certainty just because I was desperate for it.
"Thank you for being honest," I said.
We sat in silence for a moment, separated by the distance between our phones.
Then I asked if she remembered anything else about the day the photograph was taken.
She said she remembered the photograph clearly.
She remembered my daughter's face.
She remembered that the bag had been with her.
Beyond that, she wasn't ready to claim details she couldn't be certain about.
I tried not to let my disappointment show in my voice.
"All right," I said. "I don't want you to guess."
"I appreciate that."
When we ended the call, I wrote down what she had told me.
I added one sentence beneath the dates.
The photograph is real, and it was taken three weeks ago.
I read the sentence twice.
Then I drew a line beneath it.
That was a fact.
The rest was still unknown.
I went for a walk that afternoon.
I hadn't intended to go far, but I kept moving until the streets were unfamiliar enough to make me pay attention to where I was going.
I passed a shop window filled with summer hats and beach towels.
For a moment, I saw the cream-colored bag in my mind, its uneven handle hanging from the woman's shoulder.
I remembered the brass keychain swinging as she walked.
I remembered the shock of recognition so strong that I had spoken before I could think.
I had believed the bag was a final piece of my daughter, something that had remained in the world after she had vanished.
Now I understood that the bag had carried me to a photograph of a living person.
It was not the same as finding her.
I needed to keep that distinction clear.
On the way home, I stopped at a bench and sat down.
A mother walked past with a young girl who was complaining about being tired.
The mother listened, shifted a shopping bag to her other hand, and told the girl they were almost there.
I looked away.
For years, ordinary scenes like that had made me angry.
I had watched other parents argue with their children over small things and then go home together. I had watched teenagers roll their eyes, slam doors, and return for dinner as if the world had never been in danger of ending.
I had wanted to tell them how easily a normal afternoon could become the last ordinary afternoon of their lives.
But I had also known that I had no right to turn every family's happiness into a warning.
I had made my own mistake.
My daughter had made her own choices.
Whatever happened after she left, I couldn't go back and change the words that came out of my mouth.
I could only decide what I would do if she ever heard them again.
At home, I took the letter from the drawer.
I read the apology I had written and crossed out one sentence.
It said that I had never stopped loving her.
The words were true, but they were also too easy.
Love was not the part I needed to explain.
I needed to acknowledge that I had been angry, that I had used my anger to hurt her, and that I had told her to leave when I should have listened.
I rewrote the sentence.
I was angry, and I made you feel as if there was no place for you in my home.
I stopped there.
My hand was shaking.
I didn't write that she should forgive me.
I didn't write that she should come home.
I didn't ask her to make me feel better about what I had done.
I folded the letter carefully and put it away.
If she ever read it, I wanted it to belong to her, not to the part of me that needed relief.
That night, I dreamed I was standing in the hallway again.
The green tank top was there.
The front door was open.
I woke before I could say anything different.
For a while, I lay in the dark and listened to the quiet house.
Then I got up, made a cup of tea, and sat at the kitchen table.
The phone lay beside my hand.
I didn't call anyone.
I didn't search for a new clue.
I let the night pass without asking it to give me something.
Click here to continue reading: PART 11: I Had Kept Her Childhood Things for Years, but None of Them Could Tell Me What She Needed From Me Now
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 10 of 12
