Ten

Sam

While I dialed the combination on my locker, I spotted Ashley Prichard to my right, standing near Cody Hendricks. She was holding her phone out in front of her at a weird angle, taking a selfie. As she took the picture, she crossed her eyes and sucked in her cheeks.

Weird.

I tossed my precalculus and English books into my bag then zipped up the bag and slammed the locker shut. I had about four minutes to get to the bus, so I threw my bag over my shoulder and started to hurry down the hall.

Just as I was about to pass, Ashley stepped backwards, still shooting selfies, directly into my path. I jerked back, trying to avoid her, but it was too late. We collided, her right elbow hitting my side.

Horror sank into me as I heard the loud smack of her phone hitting the floor.

Ashley let out a screech then dropped to her knees, scrambling for the phone.

“What the fuck!” Cody shouted as I stepped back.

“I’m so sorry!” I blurted. “I didn’t mean to—”

“You asshole,” Ashley screamed. “If you broke my phone I swear to God you’ll—”

She cut herself off when Cody reached out with both hands, grabbing the front of my shirt and shaking me back and forth. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you fucking suicidal?”

I tried to pull away. “I didn’t do anything!”

From across the hall, a loud male voice called out with a tone of authority. “Cody! Let go of him!”

With a deliberate motion, Cody let go of me and took a step back. Ashley gave me a death glare and spoke in a petulant, nasty voice. “The screen is cracked. You owe me a new phone.”

The man who had spoken was a teacher I didn’t recognize. He was a tall man, with a muscular wide build not all that different from Cody’s. If I had to guess, I would have picked him for a football player. Maybe he was one of the coaches?

The man spoke in a thick rural Southern accent. “He don’t owe you nuthin’, Ashley. You stepped right into him, he was just trying to get to the bus.”

Cody opened his mouth, flailing his hands around. “Coach Braddock, that kid’s got a thing for Ashley. He was giving her pervy eyes on the bus last week. You didn’t see it but he tried to grab her ass, that’s what happened.” He gave me an angry look and started to raise his fist.

“Cody! Put your hand down and step back. Right now.”

Cody’s eyes swiveled to the coach. Then, grudgingly, he said, “Yes, sir.”

“If you plan to keep playing for my football team, you for damn sure better keep your hands to yourself and your mouth under control. Got it?”

Cody swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing down and back up again. “Yes, sir.”

“My dad is going to be so mad,” Ashley said. As she said it she gave the coach a vicious look. I knew she was kind of a bitch, but I couldn’t imagine talking and looking at a teacher that way.

The coach said, “I don’t care who your daddy is, Ashley. I’ll do my job the way it’s called for. Both of y’all get out of here.”

The coach had intervened and saved me … but at what cost? Was I going to be dealing with even worse problems from Cody later? I bet I would.

“What’s your name, kid?”

I froze at the words. “Sam.” I hated how my voice rose at the end of my name, like I was asking a question.

“You new here, Sam? I ain’t seen you around.”

“Yes, sir.”

The coach hitched his thumbs in his belt and looked at me as if I were a bug. “Well, let me give you a piece of advice. Keep your distance from Cody Hendricks. And Ashley too. They ain’t the nicest kids in the school, if you know what I mean.”

I tried to smile but failed. “I kind of sensed that.”

The coach frowned. “God don’t like a smart-ass, kid.”

I nodded. “Yes, sir. Can I, uh … can I go? I’m going to miss my bus.”

The coach waved a hand at me in dismissal and turned away. I ran for the bus, but by the time I got outside, it was too late.

Oh, man. I had planned on joining a role-play that was being organized by the Europeans in the Brigade. There’s no way I would be home in time for that. Whatever. It probably wouldn’t be the last time Cody and Ashley ruined something for me.

Dad’s restaurant was only about half a mile from the high school. I would head over there and do homework until he was ready to go home from work.

I threw my backpack over my shoulder and began walking away from the school. I wasn’t even off the school property before I saw an oversized black pickup with gleaming polished wheels pull up to the corner, driving away from the school. Cody was at the wheel, and Ashley sat beside him in the cab. That explained why I hadn’t seen either of them on the bus in the last several days. Cody either just got his driver’s license or the truck. As Cody turned left out of the school he spotted me and shouted, “Faggot!”

Where did people like Cody come from? I couldn’t understand why people were so cruel. I’d have to really keep my eyes out. Cody wasn’t going to let this go. A dull sense of dread settled in on me.

As I walked along the six-lane road, I wanted to sneeze from the pollen and dust in the air. I was sweating before I’d made it a quarter of a mile. I guessed it was ninety-five degrees out, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

I fucking hated Alabama.

I made it to the Waffle House without any further incidents. The parking lot was nearly empty. Where was Dad’s car? It wasn’t parked in the usual spot, and he didn’t typically leave before four or five. I pulled the door open and walked into the restaurant. The air-conditioning blew over me with beautiful waves of ice cold air. I shivered.

I recognized the waitress who was at that moment making salads behind the counter, but I couldn’t remember her name. She had dark hair and was probably in her early fifties. She walked with a limp, as if her left leg were slightly shorter. She was always friendly, and when I walked in she waved at me.

The restaurant was almost empty: the only customer an old man sitting at the counter, his head hunched down between his shoulders.

The waitress spoke. “It’s … don’t tell me … Sam, right?”

“Yeah,” I responded. I leaned to look in the open door to the back. “You seen my dad?”

“He had to leave early … some kind of emergency. Brian came over and covered for him.”

“Brian?”

“Oh, he’s your dad’s boss, the division manager.”

He had to leave for an emergency. Weird. Really weird.

I sighed. I didn’t want to bother Dad, especially if there was an emergency. But there was no public transportation. I sat at the counter, as far from the old man as I could get, and dialed Dad.

It rang twice, then he answered. From the background noise, I knew he was driving as soon as he said, “Hello?”

“Dad? It’s Sam.”

“Sam? Hey. Did you get the note we left?”

“What note?”

Dad sighed. “On the kitchen table.”

“Oh … I’m not home. I missed the bus. I was calling to see if you or Mom could pick me up. I’m at the Waffle House.”

Silence. For ten long seconds. Then Dad said, “Sam, your mom had to take an emergency trip. We’re halfway to Atlanta, I’m taking her to the airport. I won’t be back until pretty late.”

I swallowed. Emergency trip? “What … what trip?”

“I left you twenty dollars so you could order a pizza. It’s on the kitchen table with the note.”

I sighed. Why didn’t he answer? “Okay. I’ll walk, it’s not that far.”

“Christ, are you sure?”

What choice did I have? I felt a lump in my chest. What could be so important that they dropped everything to rush Mom to the airport? Urgently enough that they wouldn’t even bother to make any provisions for me other than leaving some money on the table.

Brenna.

That’s all it could be. We didn’t have the money for anyone to be traveling. If Mom was flying somewhere, and they were keeping it a secret, then it had to be Brenna … and it had to be bad news. Why else would they hide it?

I choked back tears. “I’m sure.” I hung up the phone. I waved and said, “Thanks,” to the waitress, whose name I still didn’t know. Then I got out of there as quickly as I could.

It wasn’t that far. I guess. Three miles? It felt like longer in the heat, as I walked past Oxford Mall, with its empty parking lots, then crossed the overpass over I-20. I stood in the middle of the bridge for a minute looking down as the traffic raced by underneath. The cars moved so fast from this perspective.

I kept walking, past the giant Indian mound, which was tied up in controversy. My history teacher had talked about it the other day. Part of the mound had been excavated to make space for a Sam’s Club, and an entire archeological site, once a village, had been bulldozed.

Alabama.

All told, the walk home took an hour. Not bad, all things considered. As I walked, I thought about Brenna. I thought about Cody and Ashley and what had happened today.

What had happened was that I’d behaved like a mouse. She bumped into me and dropped her phone, but I was the one who apologized.

Brenna would have said I needed to own it. That instead of keeping to myself, slinking through life with my eyes on the ground and my arms across my chest, that I needed to flaunt myself, own my own style, take charge.

But I wasn’t Brenna, I never had been. It made me feel guilty sometimes to think about it, but often I thought she didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. Confidence and flash only goes so far. There were very real dangers out there: dangers she’d had no idea of until two years ago, when she vanished off the face of the earth. I’d have done anything to have my sister back in my life. But whatever happened to her, it had to have been bad. It had to have been truly awful for her to never so much as send a text message, contact us online, call, nothing at all.

In my heart, I knew my sister was probably dead. But the thought seized me up, tightened my throat, made me want to fall apart. Our lives had all frozen in the moment she disappeared. Life seemed to go on around us, but me and Mom and Dad? We were all dead to the world. And I was afraid we’d never recover, never learn to live our own lives, never move on. And I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to move on. I wanted to find her, rescue her, hug her, give her life back.

My sister was perfection. Her confidence and talent. Her porcelain skin. Her infectious smile and laugh, her sense of humor. She protected my secrets. She protected me. But I wasn’t able to return that protection.

So I kept to myself. I didn’t look up, I didn’t interact, I didn’t say a word as I trudged through life.

When I finally got home, it was broiling inside the house. I turned on the air-conditioning and went to dump my books in my room.

The note was on the kitchen table.

Sam,

Your father is taking me to the airport for an urgent trip. He’ll be home very late.

Love you,

Mom

Why would they keep whatever it was so secretive? What happened?

My parents didn’t trust me at all, they hadn’t since Brenna’s disappearance. After all, she’d hinted to me that something was happening. What are you going to do when I’m gone? And I didn’t tell them. So it was my fault.

And then I did tell, and that delayed the investigation. My fault again.

As if I didn’t know that already.

How late was late? It was more than two hours to Atlanta in one direction. Plus maneuvering the airport. Traffic. I suspected late meant very late indeed.

Was it wrong for me to hope so?

I took a sharp breath. Shaking with anticipation, I closed my eyes for a few seconds. I wasn’t thinking straight. I should call. Find out how long. But I didn’t want to make them suspicious. I didn’t want to give my father any cause to wonder what I was up to. And calling them would do that.

It would be hours, whatever happened. I opened my eyes and walked to my closet. In the back, a stack of cardboard boxes contained my life from before we lived in this tiny place. I slid the top box off of the stack. The second box was labeled books. I took it out into my room and reverently laid it on the bed, carefully removing the packing tape. I hadn’t opened this box since we’d left our house in Virginia.

Opening the box revealed chapter books, books that I’d read in middle school. Carefully I took them out, setting them to the side, revealing what was underneath.

On the very top. A silk dress. Brenna had taken me shopping for it. “It’s for a costume party,” she told the women in the store. But I think maybe they knew. From the way I shook, from the way I stared, wide-eyed, at myself in the mirror.

I didn’t care.

Shaking, I quickly undressed. The dress was wrinkled, but I didn’t care. I put on the panties from the box, but I almost screamed in frustration when I couldn’t get the bra on. It didn’t fit anymore. I pulled and stretched, and finally got it on, though it cut into my ribs almost painfully. Then, slowly, I slid the dress over my head, almost getting stuck pulling it down over my shoulders.

I felt … conflicted, angry, confused. Reaching behind me, I pulled the zipper up. It was far too tight; two years had gone by and I’d grown a lot. I turned toward the mirror and cringed. I looked … ridiculous. Rage filled me when I saw that my shoulders were broadening. I’d taken the hormones until they ran out, but run out they had, and there was no money to buy any more, nowhere to have them shipped even if I could, and I wanted to scream because … I was starting to look like a boy.

I blinked my eyes, trying to shut out the cascade of emotions. The dress didn’t look right, too tight in the shoulders and chest, too loose in the hips. It was painfully obvious my breasts were nonexistent. I sat down at my desk in front of the mirror, still shaking in anger, and began to brush my hair, parting it high above my left eye. It was almost shoulder-length now. My eyes fell to my legs. The dress had been knee-length when Brenna bought it for me. Now it was at least four inches shorter. It had been a couple days since I’d shaved my legs, but I didn’t have time right now.

You need to get a haircut, Sam, you’re starting to look like a girl.

Dad said that to me the other day. I wished. I wished I looked like a girl, but a glance in the mirror showed I didn’t. I reached in my bottom desk drawer. In the very back was my makeup case.

Slowly I began to apply mascara. My eyes, a deep blue, were probably the only feature I was happy with. Very carefully, I applied eyeshadow and eyeliner, choosing a pale blue eye shadow that complemented my eyes and the dress.

I almost froze at that point. I closed my eyes, and I could feel the silk of the dress against my skin. It felt right. The last time I’d worn this we’d still lived in a fifteen-room house, and my parents would never come looking for me anyway. I didn’t think they’d seen my bedroom more than twice in the year after Brenna disappeared. But here we were living in a shoebox, and I was lucky to even have a room.

If my father came home now, I’d never have time to change and remove the makeup.

I swallowed. I stood, my heart racing, and looked at myself.

I wanted to cry. When my eyes were closed I could imagine it was the way I wanted to be. Beautiful. Or even simply pretty.

With my eyes open I saw … a boy, dressed in comically small girl’s clothing.

My eyes started to water. My hair hung all wrong. Somehow in the past two years my Adam’s apple had appeared. No matter how much makeup I wore, no matter what I did with my clothes, no matter how much I wished, it didn’t change what I was. What everyone else in the world would see me as.

A tranny.

A pervert.

A freak.

I sank back into the chair and put my head in my hands. Who was I kidding?

Some people wanted to grow up to be stockbrokers, or astronauts, or the President, and every good parent in the world would say, “When you grow up you can be whatever you want to be.”

Except mine.

Because the one thing in the world that I wanted to be was an impossibility.

Erin

I checked the time on my phone again. It was almost six p.m., and I had just an hour before my flight departed. I swallowed nervously then looked over at Cole.

“You’ll make sure Sam is doing his homework? He gets all wrapped up on his computer and forgets.”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Don’t worry about us.” He pulled the car to a stop in the check-in lane. We were surrounded by traffic: people rushing into the airport to catch their flights, police, airline employees.

I was shaking as I opened the car door. Cole got out and opened the trunk then set my suitcase on the ground. After my call to him, his boss had taken over the restaurant for the day, and Cole came home. While I got myself ready, he’d taken his laptop and pawned it, then dropped the money in the bank. It was just enough to pay for the ticket to Portland.

We met at the back of the car. I took a deep breath and looked up at my husband. He had dark circles under his eyes and a mix of anxiety and exhaustion on this face.

“Soon as I get home, I’ll put the clock on Craigslist. We should get a thousand for it … maybe more. That’ll keep you going for a while. Then I’ll … I’ll come up with something.”

I nodded. It was the only option. Hotels and travel cost a lot of money … money we didn’t have.

Tentatively, I reached my left arm out. To hug him? Our marriage had been a wreck for so long, we hardly ever touched each other. But I wanted to. I wanted to touch him.

I wanted him to touch me.

He caught the tentative motion and pulled me to him. In a rough voice, laden with emotions too complex to dissect, he said, “Find her if you can. I’ll take care of Sam.”

I swallowed back tears, wrapping my arms around him. For a second, it felt … like Cole. Like things were the way they should be.

But they weren’t. They couldn’t be.

“I’ll call. Keep you updated.”

We parted, both of us full of words we couldn’t express. Cole’s eyes met mine for a moment. I didn’t have any words for that moment, I wasn’t equipped for it. I turned, grabbed the handle of my suitcase, and walked away.

I was a mess of free-floating anxiety. It had been three weeks since she’d been picked up by the police in Portland. Three weeks. A lot could happen in that time. She might have been moved. She might … I couldn’t think of the words. I couldn’t form them in my mind. For nearly two years there hadn’t been a word, hadn’t been any news, there’d been nothing. Now, everything was thrown out there in bright relief, and the thought of what my daughter might have endured for the past two years was too horrific to contemplate.

I waited impatiently in the line to check-in, then even more impatiently in the security line. But finally I was through and on my way to the gate. The Atlanta airport was huge, staggeringly huge, and it took a while to figure out how to find the train to take me out to the gate. But finally I was there, and just in time. My flight was boarding. Thank God I’d only brought the one carry-on bag. I didn’t have time to mess with checking bags. With a last-minute ticket, I was stuck in a middle seat in the back row. I squeezed into my seat, in between a heart-stoppingly beautiful teenage girl who sat looking out the window, and a man in his early forties in the aisle seat.

I sat up straight in my seat. My chest hurt, and it was hard to swallow around the lump in my throat. I didn’t have a car in Portland, and we didn’t have credit cards anymore, so I couldn’t rent one. I’d found a cheap motel to stay near the airport, but I still didn’t know anything really. In the morning I’d have to find the police station and talk to whomever had arrested her. I needed to find out where she’d been picked up, how she looked, who she was with, and who had bailed her out. What if they wouldn’t help me? If they treated me like I was interfering? How would I handle it?

I closed my eyes, trying to focus. I’d call Wilcox back in the morning at the FBI. Maybe a push from him would help. Or maybe they’d be cooperative. Maybe I was borrowing trouble. I didn’t know. And that’s what it came down to. I didn’t know anything.

I was so wrapped up in my thoughts I paid little attention to the plane taxiing to the runway, until suddenly we were accelerating and the plane took to the air.

I closed my eyes. It’d been years since I’d been on a flight. I thought back. Brenna was five and Sam three, so that would have been around 2002. Cole had just gotten another promotion, and with the promotion came a hefty raise and a bonus. We took our first lengthy family vacation. We flew to Disney World and spent a week there.

Cole and I were still crazy in love then. But the cracks were showing. The trip was wonderful, but the flight had been laced with anxiety, my first flight since the hijackings that had turned the world upside down.

Today, Cole hadn’t hesitated when I’d called him. He’d immediately done everything he could to get me on this plane. It reminded me of when we were partners. I missed that. I missed holding hands. I missed feeling like we saw each other as equals. I missed dinner and looking into each other’s eyes across the table.

I remembered the night we met. I was a junior at Georgetown, and Angela had dragged me to a party at a friend’s house just a few blocks from campus. It wasn’t an out of control party—that wasn’t our style—though there was plenty of alcohol and loud music. Not long after we got there, Angela ran into her ex-boyfriend, and the two of them camped in a corner most of the party, leaving me to fend for myself.

I knew some of the people at the party, but it really wasn’t a crowd I ran with, so I found myself edging closer and closer to the window. I turned to the nearest small circle of people, unobtrusively joining in their conversation.

Cole caught my attention immediately. He stood on the opposite side of the circle from me. They were all women but him, and they were hanging on to his every word, which was no surprise. He was tall, well-built, dressed in casual clothes, khakis and a black polo shirt that made his shoulders look strong and sexy. He was making a point about the midterm elections which had just gone by, his hands gesturing as he spoke.

He was the same age as the other people at the party. But more confident somehow, more himself. From his clothes to his demeanor to his pale blue eyes, something about him just screamed confidence.

And of course, I was one of five girls hanging on his every word. But that didn’t last, because the next thing he said was so obnoxious that my mouth just dropped open.

“All welfare does is increase poverty,” he said. “People get trapped in a cycle where we reward them for not working. It’s a self-fulfilling negative trap and creates a whole culture of dependence.”

I raised an eyebrow as all the girls cooed around him.

“And you base this opinion on … what exactly?” I asked.

I think he liked the challenge. Because he started spouting statistics and opinions right out of the Heritage Foundation’s playbook, most of which was a load of bullshit. He ended by saying, “Look, the bottom line is, we have a level playing field. Everyone in this life has a choice to work or not work. And if you work, you get ahead, and can have a decent life. Some people just choose otherwise.”

I said, “And you don’t think there’s anything about being a white male that helps you get a leg up?” The other girls in the group gave me hostile looks.

“No,” he replied. “In fact, if anything it penalizes me. Companies get tax breaks to hire blacks and the disabled and to have affirmative action.” As he said the last two words, he used his fingers to make air-quotes.

I shook my head. “You’ve got no clue what you’re talking about.”

By this time, the girls in the group were looking at me with daggers in their eyes, because Cole’s attention was one-hundred-percent on me. It was as if he’d forgotten any of them were there.

Actually, I’m pretty sure he had, because he moved a little closer to me, which put two of the girls almost at his back.

“I know exactly what I’m talking about. I’m not in some insulated academic ivory tower, I’m out there working for a living.”

“Oh, yeah?” I asked. “So what do you do?”

“UNIX system administrator. I work for a startup in Northern Virginia.”

“Oh yeah? So where did you learn about computers?”

He shrugged. “I’m self-taught.”

“Nice,” I said. “I like that, and it fits your whole everybody can bootstrap their way up narrative. Where’d you get the computer to teach yourself on?”

His eyes widened and he grinned. “Okay, you got me there. When I was in high school, my parents got it for me for Christmas. So I guess you would say that’s a sign of what, white privilege?”

“Middle-class privilege maybe. Home computer, what are we talking, two thousand dollars?”

He nodded. “It’s not like my parents didn’t make sacrifices to make that happen, though. My Dad served in Vietnam, I’m a military brat. And for the record, my roommate at Georgia Tech was black. He got exactly the same education I did.”

“I’m sure he did,” I said.

He moved closer to me again. “What’s your name? I don’t think we’ve been introduced.”

“I’m Erin.”

“I’m Cole. You go to Georgetown, Erin?”

Two of the girls walked away, disgusted. Cole didn’t notice.

“Yes. I’m an economics major.”

A grin appeared on his face, then he leaned back his head with a full-throated laugh. “It figures I’d get into a debate with an economics major from a liberal arts college.”

I grinned. “Does that intimidate you?”

He grinned back. “Not in the least. Should it?”

“Yes. Because I’m clearly a lot smarter than you.”

He threw his head back and laughed. I won’t lie; I found his confidence insanely attractive. I wasn’t any different than the other girls who’d been surrounding him, fawning. Except they were all gone now, and somehow I was still here.

“Can I have your number?”

I laughed, a little disbelievingly. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me. I want to take you out to dinner.”

“We’d better not talk politics.”

“What fun would that be?” he asked.

I rolled my eyes. And then I gave him my number.

A few minutes after that, Angela gave me the signal … the signal we’d worked out when it was time to leave a party together. We walked back to campus, and she talked for thirty minutes straight about her ex and what an asshole he was. Then abruptly, she said, “Who was that guy you were talking to?”

“His name’s Cole. He thinks too much of himself,” I said.

She laughed. “There was a crowd of girls around him. But they all left, leaving just you. You were like a dragon slayer.”

I shrugged and smiled.

“Oh my God,” she said. “You like him?”

“A little. I gave him my number.”

She cheered.

A week later, Cole and I went out for the first time, to a play at the National Theatre, and then dinner. We did talk politics … debated them all night, in fact. We also talked careers and jobs and about our families. Cole was brilliant and erratic. He’d attended two years at Georgia Tech before dropping out to go to work for a tech startup in Northern Virginia. When he talked about the job, he was excited, his eyes gleaming. He was a believer, going on about how their work was going to revolutionize how people interacted in business. He tended to talk with his hands, waving them around in an animated fashion. It was a wonder he didn’t knock anything off the table.

Sometimes it was hard to connect those days with now. It’s like we were different people. We’d been so optimistic, so happy. Cole traveled a lot for work, even then, but when he was in town we would go out dancing or to dinner. He took me horseback riding in the Shenandoah Valley, and I took him to lectures on campus and to book signings.

We laughed all the time and made love all the time.

I took Cole to meet my parents on my twentieth birthday, right before Christmas that year. It was a five-hour drive from DC to Cary, North Carolina, where I grew up, a town derisively known in the area as the Containment Area for Relocated Yankees. The weather that Saturday morning as we drove was pleasant, unusually warm, and we rode most of the way with the windows down in Cole’s new Mustang, listening to the audiobook of The Witching Hour Cole had bought me as an early Christmas present. He knew I was a fan of Anne Rice. I’d actually waited in line for hours at Politics and Prose to get a signed copy earlier in the year.

It was early afternoon when Cole pulled the car to a stop in my parents’ driveway in North Cary. The house was on top of a hill, a two-story, white clapboard home with dark green shutters and a wide wraparound porch. Mom was a professor at NC State, and Dad a doctor on staff at Duke University Medical Center. Cary was almost halfway between the two, a nice, rapidly growing suburb.

Dad opened the door first, before we were even completely out of the car. He had a big grin on his face and walked toward me, pulling me into a big hug.

“Erin, I’ve missed you so. Happy Birthday, sweetie. And this must be Cole.”

Cole approached and put out a hand to shake. “Cole Roberts,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”

“Pleasure to meet you. Call me Carl.” He looked around, mystified, then said, “The wife is still inside. I think she’s making some kind of … um … thing … in the kitchen. Come on in.”

I grinned at Dad. My parents were unusually progressive for the Deep South. They were hippies, throwbacks to the sixties, though that didn’t interfere with their education, and they saw each other as equal partners. But my father had spent my entire life pretending he didn’t understand anything in the kitchen. He’d go in there willingly, burn food, cause things to boil over, and make a disastrous mess. My mother finally gave up and ended up taking a more traditional role in the kitchen.

As we hung up our coats, I smelled waves of garlic, and, less prominent, butter and spices. I walked into the kitchen and found my mother at the kitchen island chopping garlic.

She smiled, wiping her hands, then wrapped her arms around me. “Erin. Happy birthday. This is Cole?”

“Cole, meet my mom.”

Mom hugged him too, then said, “I hope you like garlic chicken.”

Cole grinned. “I love it, ma’am.”

My dad walked in behind us, saying, “She’s putting enough garlic in there to make sure you two don’t so much as kiss while you’re staying here.”

I blushed horribly, and Cole chuckled and said, “My intentions are completely honorable.”

That was when I heard the footsteps thundering down the stairs. Lori came flying around the corner and into the kitchen and threw her arms around me. Five foot four, just shy of eighteen, her hair was dyed a deep blue-green that clashed with her bright pink lipstick.

I squeezed her back, feeling tears prick my eyes. I missed my little sister. Flamboyant where I was conservative, Lori was gregarious and unconventional. “I missed you, sis,” she said. “We’ve got so much to talk about.”

I introduced her to Cole. Dad grabbed a couple of beers out of the refrigerator—he never had any problem finding those—and passed one to Cole. “Come on outside, Cole. I want to show you the garden.”

Dad wasn’t exactly subtle.

Lori and I sat down at the kitchen table, and she started filling me in on her senior year in high school, which sounded like it consisted of nothing but music, art, and boys. So very different from mine. I’d dated, of course, but my focus was academics and career. To be honest, none of the guys at my high school really interested me. Too much football, too much drunken partying, too many drugs. It had never been my scene.

It didn’t take long for Lori to convince me that the football crowd wasn’t a problem for her. The drugs might be another thing, but I didn’t want to push.

As Lori and I chatted, I glanced outside periodically. Dad was standing, one foot casually resting on the top of the foot-high fieldstone wall we built together when I was twelve. His face was open and friendly as he spoke with Cole. Cole had his back to me, but I could tell when he was talking, because his arms waved wildly as always.

Both of them laughed, throwing their heads back.

Lori followed my eyes and smiled. “You really like him, don’t you?”

My mother, still standing over the stove, looked over at us when Lori asked that question.

I took a deep breath and nodded. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

Looking back, Lori at that age was so like the young woman Brenna would become. When my daughter hit her early teens, Lori had been a confidante and friend to her, something I was grateful for, because she’d stopped trusting me, stopped talking to me for a long time. But all that changed when Lori broke her trust to keep her safe.

Since then, Lori and I had talked about it often enough. We’d torn it apart. We’d second-guessed ourselves and each other. For nearly six months we didn’t even speak, until Mom and Dad brought us back together. And still, I wondered if only we’d done something different, said something different, would Brenna still have trusted us? Would she have been safe? How did Cole and I possibly fail so much as parents that this happened to our daughter?

My eyes felt hollow as I stared out the window of the plane. The teenage girl next to me was watching the in-flight movie, her headset in her ears, laughing. Relaxed. Happy. Everything Brenna should be.

Two more hours to this flight, and then I’d be on the ground in Portland.

I was going to find my daughter. No matter what it took.