Cole
My alarm went off at five p.m., waking me from what had been a sadly short nap. When I came home Sam had been in his room doing homework. I’d knocked, told him I was going to take a nap, then stumbled into the bedroom where I collapsed onto our uncomfortable discount mattress we’d bought at Big Lots when we first moved to Alabama.
I yawned. Naps rarely left me feeling refreshed, but I was so consistently short on sleep that I sometimes needed them just to function. I sat up, then got up from the bed. I hated having a mattress on the floor. It reminded me of summers in the North Georgia mountains when I was a kid. It reminded me of being poor.
I hadn’t bothered to change out of my uniform when I got home, because I had to go back in for shift change. Three nights a week, go in for shift change. Work six days a week. Sleep every once in a while. Last night third shift had called (at two in the morning) because they couldn’t figure out where the damned to-go cups were, and apparently their eyes weren’t functioning enough to spot them in the place where I put them every single day.
Sitting here and bitching to myself wasn’t going to do me any good.
I got up and walked down the wood paneled hallway. All it needed was orange carpet to finish the look of 1970s working-class near poverty. As I walked into the kitchen I reminded myself to call the landlord again tomorrow to complain about the broken front window and the rotting wood on the front porch. We had rented this house sight unseen before moving from Virginia, and the photographs shown by the management company had artfully concealed those shortcomings. Not that we could afford much better. But still.
I knocked on Sam’s door as I passed.
“Yeah?” Sam’s tone of voice was annoyed. When did teenagers become so antisocial? Was it just built into their DNA that when they turned fourteen they became unfit to live around other human beings?
“I’m going to make dinner, you’ll have to come out of your cave soon.”
“Okay.” For a second I put my hand on the doorknob and thought about pushing Sam to open the door. No … I would give him a few more minutes. Then we could have dinner, clean up together, and maybe I could persuade him to play a game of chess before I headed off to work.
I sighed when I entered the kitchen. My coffee cup from this morning. Sam’s plate from last night, three pieces of pizza crust still on it. Sam never ate the crust. Yesterday’s breakfast dishes, all were piled in the kitchen sink. In the middle of the floor was a bottle of Mr. Clean, a scrub brush, and a towel. Half the floor had been scrubbed clean, and the other half still had a slight layer of grime.
I smiled slightly as I picked up the cleaning supplies from the middle of the floor. That explained why Erin had smelled vaguely of citrus as we drove to the airport last night. She’d been scrubbing the kitchen. Not that I wanted to see her on her hands and knees scrubbing anything, but it was good that she was doing something. She’d been so hideously depressed, and truth be told, so had I. I felt almost as if a cloud had been lifted by Jeremiah’s words last night, a cloud of despair.
I quickly washed the dishes, scrubbing the rings of coffee at the base of yesterday’s mugs. Then I filled up the pot with water and began preparing dinner.
Every day we were in Oxford, I was vaguely reminded of my years growing up. Not because of the landscape—Oxford was largely flat—but because of the poverty. The gun stores and pawn shops and title pawn and check-cashing places; the liquor stores and beat-up pickup trucks took me back to summers in North Georgia. With the exception of his year-long deployment in Lebanon, Dad spent most of my childhood at sea six months out of the year. Whenever his deployments carried into the summer, Mama would pack me off to his relatives in Banks County deep in the back woods.
Daddy’s family owned a five-acre plot of mostly woods at the end of a three-mile-long dirt road with ruts deeper than drainage ditches. Grandma lived in a rounded steel single-wide marked with large swaths of rust and peeling paint. I had often been reluctant to go over to her place. Aside from the six chihuahuas she kept fenced in the kitchen causing the entire place to reek of urine and shit, she also hoarded everything from newspapers to tin cans, all of it in stacks and piled to the ceilings in the tiny rooms.
Daddy’s brother-in-law Big Bill lived in the double-wide next door with his wife (Dad’s sister) Donna. Big Bill didn’t do much. Like his deceased father-in-law, his primary contribution to the economy was the purchase of Budweiser and moonshine. Somewhere along the years he had built a rickety front porch attached to the double-wide, and most summer days he could be found on that porch lounging in a metal-framed lounge chair, shirt off, a beer resting on his rounded belly. Bill was prone to using his fists on people too small to defend themselves, like his wife and son. I remember him lecturing about being “in the big house.” Lucas followed in his footsteps and was in prison much of his adulthood. Sadly, I ended up using a lot of Big Bill’s lessons when I went to prison.
I never knew if Mama realized what her brother-in-law’s behavior was like when left alone. In polite company he generally behaved well enough, and Donna certainly wasn’t going to say anything to anyone. I still vividly remember one summer night when I was twelve years old, Big Bill burst into the trailer, raging and so drunk he was stumbling.
The second he came through the front door, Donna realized how things were. She screamed, “Run!” at Lucas. We didn’t hesitate. Both of us ran for the back door even as Big Bill yelled, “I’ll kill you, you little shit!” as he lunged at Lucas. We made it out the door and scrambled between the cinderblocks underneath the double-wide. For the next twenty minutes or maybe it was twenty hours, we heard Donna screaming. Lucas covered his ears and buried his face in the dirt, sobbing. I lay on my back, looking off into the darkness, swearing that I would never live like my family.
Three years later, I was fifteen when Lucas got his driver’s license. That summer, Daddy was in the Persian Gulf again, and a week after school got out I was on a Greyhound bus bound for Georgia. Usually Donna picked me up at the bus station, but that summer it was Lucas, sitting behind the wheel of an ancient Ford pickup. I grinned when I got in.
“You got your own truck?” I scanned the interior, with ripped upholstery and an obviously broken eight-track player.
“Hell, yeah,” he replied. “Got it for just five hundred dollars. Still needs work, but it runs.”
“Awesome.”
“You getting a car when you turn sixteen?”
“Not unless I can find a job. Daddy sure as shit ain’t gonna pay for it.”
“We’re gonna swing by the house so you can say hi to Mama before Big Dick gets home.”
I snickered at Lucas’s name for his Dad. “Things been better? With him?”
Lucas shrugged. “Shit.” He pronounced it shee-it.
Aunt Donna was, as usual, tired and looked overwhelmed, when we came in the house. But she paused long enough to kiss me on the cheek. “Good to see you, Cole. Your Mama doin’ okay? Yeah? Y’all skedaddle, I’m tryin’ to get this floor clean. Dinner’s at six.”
Big Bill ignored me when he got home, which I far preferred to him paying attention to me. By eight, he was asleep in his chair, a beer perched precariously on his stomach. Lucas tiptoed over to his dad, apparently in an effort to extract the beer and place it on the side table. But when he touched the can, Big Bill stirred and put his hand on the beer.
Lucas stepped back. “Mama, we’re headed out.”
“Where you going this time of night?” she asked.
“Party over at Brian Wilkes’ place. Don’t worry, his mom don’t tolerate no pot or nothing.”
Donna looked doubtful. But she nodded. “Y’all go on. Behave yourselves.”
We were halfway out the door when Big Bill stirred, letting out a grumble. Then we heard a loud curse. “Son of a BITCH!”
My eyes swept back to Big Bill, who was sitting up, eyes wide now, beer running down the bottom of his shirt and pants. His face contorted with rage, eyebrows coming together, lips scrunching together in a mean look, like an old man with no teeth. His eyes fixed on Donna.
She started backing toward the kitchen. “Let me get you a towel,” she mumbled.
“Bitch!” he cursed. “Why the hell you let that happen?”
“Bill, we tried to get the can from ya. Lucas here tried to get it and put it on the side table. But you wouldn’t let go.”
He stalked toward her. “Are you talking back to me?”
Dread was sweeping over her face. “Bill, you leave me alone.”
Lucas, standing next to me, let out a curse. “Fucking asshole, leave her alone. It was your damn beer.”
Big Bill froze in place, his back suddenly tense. Then he turned toward Lucas. “What the fuck did you just say?”
Donna grabbed at him. “Bill! Leave him alone—”
Her words were cut off in a gurgling scream when he elbowed her in the nose. She fell back onto her ass in the kitchen, blood spurting from between the hands she held to her face.
“Asshole!” Lucas shouted. Then he charged at his father.
Big Bill might have been a drunk and flabby, with a giant belly, but he was strong, with the strength of a boa constrictor. He swung at Lucas, connecting with Lucas’s cheek with a loud crack! Then he swung again with his left hand, connecting with Lucas’s other cheek.
“I’ll fucking kill you, boy,” Big Bill threatened, his voice low and full of rage. He shoved the dazed Lucas up against the wall.
I looked around in a panic, urgently, as Bill’s hands closed on his son’s throat.
Baseball bat. There was an aluminum bat in the hall, leaning against the corner next to Lucas’s door. I ran for it and hefted the bat then walked back into the living room. Bill was holding his son against the wall, Lucas’s face turning bright red at the neck where his father gripped him.
Donna grabbed at his arm, screaming, “Leave him alone!”
In five quick steps, I approached, bringing the bat behind me like I was ready for a grand slam. Then I yelled, “Big Bill!”
Bill turned his head toward me, rage on his face.
I swung.
The bat connected at Bill’s temple with a loud pop, bouncing his head back like a bowling pin. Big Bill collapsed to the floor.
“Oh my Lord, you killed him!” Donna screamed, dropping to her knees next to Big Bill. “You killed him!” She leaned over her husband, crying, apparently losing any interest or concern for Lucas, who was now standing off to the side gasping and sputtering as he tried to regain his breath. “You killed him!” she accused again.
Lucas, recovering, muttered, “He ain’t dead. He’s too damned mean to die.”
He wasn’t dead, but he did end up spending a week in the hospital. And for the rest of that summer, the bastard kept his distance from me, and I kept myself armed with a six-inch knife at all times.
I hated the Deep South, and I’d been perfectly happy living in Metro DC. But the loss of my job had brought me back down here, not far at all from those mountains in North Georgia. I never wanted to come back, I never wanted to do a lot of things. But here I was. I had to make the best of it, and do the best I could for Erin and the kids.
The kids.
I closed my eyes and unusually, said a quick prayer. Unusual because I never prayed. But for Brenna, I could do it.
Where was she? Every day for two years I had asked that question. I’d never realized what it meant to be a parent who had lost a child. Missing. Not knowing if she was dead or suffering or … what? It changed everything. I had a gaping wound that never scabbed over, never healed, never stopped hurting. It was made that much worse by the fact that for most of the first year she was gone, I was unable to do anything, locked away in a cell.
I ached to go now, to leave everything, to walk away from our jobs and school, take Sam and drive to Portland. Never stop until we found her.
Instead, I strained the spaghetti and put it on the plates, put them on the table, and called out. “Sam? Dinner!”
Sam’s door opened, and he came shuffling down the hallway. I had my back to him, pouring glasses of lemonade as I asked him, “How was school today?”
When I turned around, I saw his face and froze. His nose was swollen and red, and he had a nasty bruise forming underneath his left eye. I set the drinks on the table and approached him. “Christ, what happened to you?”
Sam seemed to shrink into himself as he slipped into one of the chairs. “I got in a fight.”
The words that came out of my mouth were worthy of my father. “Well, I sure hope the other guy looked worse.”
Sam’s face went through a progression of expressions, ending on a hurt look.
“Shit. I’m sorry, Sam. That’s something my father would have said to me. I didn’t mean it.” I sat down in my seat. “Are you okay? Who was it?”
My words seemed to sink in, but he didn’t answer right away. I waited, watching. Finally he said, “Nobody. It doesn’t matter.”
Both of us started to eat, but I pressed the issue. “It does matter, Sam. Are you being bullied? Tell me what’s going on.”
Sam didn’t respond. He just sat there eating and ignoring me.
“Come on, Sam. Talk to me. I can’t help you if you won’t tell me what’s going on.”
“I didn’t ask for your help.” His tone had a sense of finality to it.
How was I supposed to respond to that? I didn’t at first. I ate and studied my sons face. He was so small for a sixteen-year-old, it was a little unnerving. It begged the question, what kind of an asshole beat up a kid half his size? Because I seriously doubted there was anyone Sam’s size at his school.
I decided to try again. “Listen, I know I haven’t exactly been the most available lately.”
At the word lately, Sam’s mouth curled up in a look of contempt. I paused for a second, knowing that lately was probably the understatement of the decade. “Look … I screwed up bad after Brenna disappeared, and I work so much lately we hardly ever do anything together. I’m sorry about that, Sam. But give me a chance. Tell me what happened.”
Sullen. “Leave me alone.”
Crap. I took another bite of my food then chewed, not knowing what to say. Or if there was anything I could say. I swallowed, and I thought. Like I often did lately, I felt like a failure. Sam’s reaction reminded me so much of Brenna in the weeks and months leading up to her disappearance, it made my heart ache. Hollow, empty. I sighed. I wasn’t going to be able to force Sam to communicate. I would just have to be patient and keep trying.
We ate the rest of the meal in silence. Finally, he said, “May I be excused?”
“Yeah,” I said vaguely waving. “I’ve got to go back to work in about forty-five minutes. Want to play a round of chess first?”
“Nah, I’m tired. Thanks, though.”
Sam left his plate at the table and walked away. Normally I might have prodded him to scrape it off and put it in the sink, but now wasn’t really the time for that, was it?
Instead, I stood up and washed the dishes, sprayed down the counters and wiped them, and then checked my watch. I didn’t have to leave for twenty minutes, but that was an awkward amount of time. I sat down on the couch and picked up the book I had been starting and stopping for the past two weeks. I read two pages but stopped when I realized that I hadn’t comprehended a word.
My eyes drifted to the shelf under the coffee table. I hadn’t realized that Erin had put our photo albums there. I slid the top book off the stack and lifted it up, laying it on top of the coffee table. It was brown faux leather with fake gold etching, and the words, Family Memories, stamped in the center. I opened the album.
It was like being punched. The first photograph was an eight by ten of Brenna and Sam running side by side on the sidewalk in front of our old house. Not the huge house … no, our first home. The one we loved. Our old house. Brenna was dressed all in black, with long flowing sleeves, and a peaked witch’s hat. Her face was painted green, and in the midst of the makeup her smile gleamed, except for the one missing front tooth. In the picture, she was seven years old. Her left hand was gripped around Sam’s right as he ran beside her. Sam had dressed as a ladybug, an occasion which had provoked an argument between me and Erin. In retrospect, I felt like an asshole. I’d argued that he should have a boy costume.
Why couldn’t I just let the kid be a kid? In the photo, Sam had a fiendishly large smile for a ladybug, and both of them looked thrilled as they carried their plastic jack-o’-lanterns on their way to collect candy.
I didn’t realize I was crying. But somehow, while I sat there staring at the picture as it blurred, Sam walked in the room and said, “Dad? Are you okay?”
I looked up, and my vision blurred, and for a second Sam looked like Brenna, then he looked like the little boy he had once been, and I choked a little as I said, “Yeah.” But it was obvious that wasn’t true, because more tears were running down my face.
I couldn’t remember ever having cried in my adult life except the night after they found Brenna’s smashed cell phone. “Shit. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to … I miss her too.”
Sam swallowed and looked anxious, like he just didn’t know what to say. I didn’t either. There was nothing in the parental manual my dad passed down that gave any precedent or instruction for this. Finally I said, “I’ve got to head into work. I’ll be about an hour, you want to come with? I can get you some hash browns or something if you want.”
Sam shook his head. “I’m really tired, I want to head to bed. I just came out to say … I’m sorry for being rude at dinner.”
I wiped my face with my left hand and stood, placing my right hand on Sam’s shoulder. “It’s okay. I love you, you know.”
He ducked his head in acknowledgement.
Five minutes later I left for the restaurant. I was hoping to get in and out of there relatively quickly, but that would depend somewhat on my staff. I needed to do an inventory in the back, and that could be time-consuming.
I drove with the windows down, savoring the cool breeze that portended the end of summer. I caught the faint scent of honeysuckle as I left our neighborhood, the smell reminding me of my childhood. The flower hadn’t grown in our area of Virginia, and so I’d never shown my kids how to pluck them and suck the juice out. I felt oddly sad about that. There were so many things I wanted to show them and teach them. And the flowers … I remembered them from before adolescence, before hearing Big Bill beat up his wife, a time when things were simpler.
It took ten minutes to get to the restaurant. After I pulled into the parking lot, I sat in the car and looked through the windows at the scene inside. Second shift was still on the floor, and the cook was busy scrubbing the floor behind the counter. Two men who appeared to be in their late forties or early fifties sat in one of the booths. They looked vaguely familiar … I must have seen them on another night during shift change. Hunched over the low counter was an older man in his late seventies named Harold. Harold came in twice a day, at one p.m. and eight p.m. He always ordered the same thing: a sausage biscuit, the biscuit cooked on the grill so long that it was as hard as a hockey puck. Harold liked to tell stories and often talked about local politics and scandal, as well as long-past races at Talladega. Even though I was from the South, his Southern accent was so thick, and he spoke so quietly, it was difficult to understand anything he said.
I got out of the car and did a quick once-over of the parking lot. It had been swept, and it looked like second shift had washed the windows. I entered the front door just as Linda Poole, the third shift cook, came out of the back room. She was working with Dakota tonight.
I waved as Linda called at a near-shout, “Hey, boss!”
I checked out the restaurant. Second shift had actually done a great job, it was very clean. I thanked them then got started with the process of changing out and counting the drawer. As I entered the back room carrying second shift’s register drawer, I saw Dakota standing at the mirror tying on her apron.
“Hey, Dakota. How are things?” I only half expected an answer.
But she surprised me when she gave me a huge smile and said, “Guess what?”
“What?”
“I passed my GED!” As she said the words she smiled even wider.
I set the drawer down on the surface of my desk and said, “That’s great!” I gave her a high five. Then I sat on the stool in my office. Before I started counting, I said, “So what are your plans? You going to apply at the community college?”
Doubt immediately clouded her face. “I’m wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“If you need some help figuring that out, I’m happy to talk you through some of it,” I said. “You’re a smart kid and your baby will be a lot better off if you can get any college at all under your belt.”
Her face crinkled up in a surprised smile. “You’d do that?”
“Yeah. I’ll bring my laptop in some afternoon, and we can sit down here at the restaurant and look at the local colleges. I bet you could get a Pell Grant to pay for your classes. But for now, it’s shift change, head on out front.”
Once the drawer was changed, I headed to the back room and began my inventory. Along with everything else, one of my job requirements was to inventory everything in the store three times a week. When I first started, the process would take a couple of hours. But I had it down to a science now and could usually finish the job in under fifteen minutes.
I was standing in the deep freezer, wishing I had brought a coat to work, when I heard Linda’s voice. “Boss? Can I talk to you for a second?”
I held a finger up in the air and said, “One moment.” I only had three items left on my checklist. I got them written down then stepped out, latching the freezer and then the walk-in refrigerator behind me. “What’s up?”
She squirmed a little. “You know I don’t like to make trouble…” she trailed off.
“What is it, Linda?”
She jerked her head towards the front of the restaurant. “It’s those assholes in the booth again. They’re bothering Dakota.”
I shook my head. “What are you talking about?”
“They come in about once a week. If she’s working, they always give her a hard time.” I had a sinking feeling.
“What kind of a hard time?”
“They just say mean things to her.”
I stepped out of the stockroom and look toward the small window in the door to the front of the restaurant. I didn’t see Dakota out there. I turned around, about to ask Linda where the hell Dakota went, but then I saw her, standing near the lockers, her back to the room. She had her head down, shoulders hunched over, hands at her side bunched into fists.
I motioned to Linda to get back out front—we didn’t leave the front of the restaurant empty when there were customers in the building. She went without saying anything.
“Dakota?” I asked.
She spun around, a fierce expression her face. But the expression was belied by the tears that marked her cheeks. She was crying. “Cole, I know the customer’s supposed to always be right. But I’m not waiting on those two anymore. I won’t do it. I don’t care who they are, you can fire me.”
“Jesus. What happened? What did they say?”
Her expression twisted into anger. She spoke in an accent, mocking the thick Alabama twang that was common in the area. “How’s your crack baby, SHANEEKWA? Or is to Toowanda? How’s your little nigger baby?”
She burst into open tears.
“Are you kidding me?” I said.
She shook her head. “No. They come in here all the time. It’s always something.”
“Not anymore,” I muttered. “You stay here, I’ll take care of that bullshit.”
I walked through the door to the front of the restaurant, accidentally banging the swinging door into the counter. Linda jumped. I approached her.
“Listen,” I said. “Can you just verify … they say those kinds of things regularly to her?”
“All the time, Cole.”
I frowned then nodded and walked around the counter to the two men at the table.
At a closer look, I could see one of the men was younger than I’d originally guessed. He had greying hair, but his skin was smooth. I’d guess he was in his late thirties. The other man was at least fifty. They looked up from their food as I approached.
“Excuse me, gentlemen. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
Both men started in shock. The older one said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
The young one said, “Hey … we were just having some fun. It didn’t mean nothin’.”
I took a deep breath. It wouldn’t do anyone any good for me to lose my temper. “You can go have fun somewhere else. You aren’t welcome here anymore.”
The older man slid out of the booth and stood up, facing me. “Son, you don’t get to decide that. You just fucked up a lot worse than you realize.”
“Sir, if you don’t leave right now, I’ll call the police. As of right now, you’re trespassing.”
I shook with anger and anxiety. Who the hell behaved like this?
The older man’s lips curled up in a contemptuous snarl. “Good luck with your career, son. Because you just ended it here.” He turned and walked away, the younger man running to catch up. Both left out the front door in a hurry.
I sighed then turned around. Linda was staring at me in open astonishment.
“What is it?” I asked.
She shook her head and smiled. “We told our last manager about it plenty of times. He wouldn’t do nothing about it. Honestly, I didn’t think you would either.”
I shrugged. “It’s my job to take care of y’all, okay? Nobody’s going to come in my restaurant and treat people like that.”
She grinned.
“All right,” I said. “Back to work.”
Erin
It was seven in the evening when I finally walked back in to the motel room. It had been an exhausting day, both emotionally and physically. I set down the two plastic bags filled with groceries—peanut butter, bread, microwavable food along with necessary toiletries. Then I went back outside and took the cardboard box out of the passenger seat of the car I had purchased that afternoon.
I wasn’t squandering the cash that Ayanna had given me. But I would use it strategically. I had paid five hundred for the 1996 Datsun with a rusted undercarriage and a malfunctioning muffler. It was highly unlikely the car would ever pass state inspection, but I had thirty days before the inspection would be due. Hopefully I wouldn’t need the vehicle that long. In the end it was far cheaper than renting.
I had made the decision to stay in this hotel, despite the apparent presence of drug dealers and God only knew who else. It seemed possible that if Brenna was to be found in Portland, it might be in this neighborhood. Back in the room, I set the cardboard box down and lifted the lid.
Inside was a flyer. Under the bold headline, HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? were side by side pictures of Brenna: one taken on her sixteenth birthday, hours before she disappeared, the other a mug shot from three weeks ago. I was still devastated by the contrast between the two photos.
But I also had new information. If pictures of her were being published in ads on the web, they might show the distinctive tattoo on her neck, or the cigarette scar on her collarbone.
I wanted a drink very badly. On the way back to the motel, I had pulled into the parking lot of a liquor store and sat there. Four, maybe five minutes. I didn’t get out of the car. Finally, I backed out and drove away.
Leaving that parking lot was one of the hardest things I’d ever done.
The clock on the microwave said 7:15. Time to call. It would be 9:15 in Alabama.
I dialed Cole’s number and waited through three rings. Finally he picked up. “Erin? Hey, give me a second, I’m just leaving the restaurant.”
He must have held the phone at his side because it sounded like he was at the bottom of a well as he gave instructions to someone to make sure the underside of something called the “dish pit” was scrubbed clean. Then, a moment later, he was back on the line.
“Sorry about that. So … tell me what happened. Did you learn anything?”
I hardly knew where to begin. I started to tell the story of my morning—the waitress in the diner who thought she might have seen someone who looked like Brenna. I’d gone back to the diner in the afternoon, but the waitress was gone until tomorrow morning. The visit to the Police Department and my disastrous interaction with Sergeant Mackey. I almost didn’t repeat the contemptuous words he had used. I raised my daughter better than that. But I was still so hurt and outraged by those words I had to say something.
“I can’t fucking believe he said that to you. Jesus Christ. Does he think she voluntarily got kidnapped?” His voice cracked as he said the words, a level of emotion I hadn’t heard from Cole in a long time.
“I did like the detective who has been assigned the case now, though. She’s young but seems to know a lot, and she’s on the sex trafficking task force here. We’re meeting for breakfast in the morning. I … I think she’s going to help.”
There was silence on the other end of the line for several seconds, then Cole asked, “Did you see a mug shot?” He sounded incredibly hesitant as he asked the question.
Tears started to run down my face. Damn it! I answered in a low, quiet voice. “She’s been through hell. She … she has a cigarette burn scar on her collarbone. And the tattoo on her neck … and wrinkles around her eyes. She looks a lot older, Cole. Like … thirty? But she was here. She was here.”
At the other end of three thousand miles of wires, Cole sniffed. He inhaled like he was going to say something, stopped and hesitated for a few seconds, then spoke in a rough, emotion-laden tone. “I was afraid our daughter was dead.”
After he said the words, Cole let out a deep cry of pain like I had never heard from him before. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I ever thought that.”
His statement was layers upon layers of pain and regret and fear, and the raw torment in his voice made me sob.
“Now is our chance,” I spoke through the tears. “We might find her. We might bring her home.”
Neither of us spoke for a very long time. But we didn’t hang up. I could hear him breathing on the line as he drove … home? That awful place in Alabama didn’t resemble a home in any meaningful way.
And maybe that was my fault. Maybe it could be home.
“How’s Sam?” The question came out in an awkward whisper.
Cole took a deep breath, and the change in subject seemed to give him a chance to collect himself. Jesus, I thought. In twenty years of marriage I had never seen my husband cry. The sound confused me, it made me want to run to him and comfort him, no matter how badly he had hurt me in the past.
“To be honest, I’m a little worried about him. He got in a fight at school today.”
“Sam?” As if there were another child we could be talking about. But when did Sam ever get in fights? “What happened?”
“He wouldn’t tell me anything. He got really defensive when I asked him and basically begged me to butt out.” Now that sounded like the Sam I knew.
“Was he hurt?”
“Swollen nose and the beginning of a black eye. I think he’ll have a pretty good shiner, but no permanent damage.”
I sighed. “Do you think we should talk to the school?”
“His counselor, maybe. He likes her.” Cole’s response was interesting. I didn’t know Sam’s counselor, nor did I know that he liked her. I couldn’t think of a time in our marriage ever when Cole had known more about the kids than I did. A flash of shame swept through me. I thought back to the past few months. I’d gotten worse and worse, hadn’t I? I’d been drinking too much. I’d hardly spent any time with Sam. What the hell was wrong with me?
“Maybe you should try that. Let me know what she says?”
“I will. Call me tomorrow after your breakfast?”
I didn’t know how to feel. Not because there was anything shocking about his request … it made sense. There was something else going on here.
“Okay. Can I talk to Sam? Are you home?”
“Yeah, hold on a minute. I’m still in the driveway.”
I waited as he got out of the car and into the house.
I heard Cole knocking, then he said, “Sam? It’s your mom on the phone.”
Silence.
A moment later Cole was back on the line. “He’s fast asleep. You want me to have him call you after school tomorrow?”
I felt a pang of disappointment but pushed it back. Sam needed his sleep.
“Yeah. I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”
“Erin…”
“Yeah?”
I heard nothing but breathing at the other end of the line for several seconds. Then he said, “Good night.”
A flash of anger swept through me, irrational I knew, but there all the same. What was I supposed to do with his behavior? Did he think a couple of phone calls was suddenly going to change his years of destruction in our marriage?
“Good night.” My response did not have the same warm tone as his. I didn’t wait for a response, disconnecting the call. Then my eyes shifted to my bag in the corner of the room, where my aging laptop was tucked away. For all I knew, she was being sold on the Internet right now. Right here in Portland.
I stood up and almost stumbled to the corner of the room, scrambling to get my laptop out of the bag. Once opened, I began my search. I started with Backpage, because that’s where most of the ads in the country were posted. But there were other sites I would check too, and there were probably local discussion boards. Over the years I’d searched through so many layers of filth and muck that I was almost numb to it.
Or at least the wine helped me feel like I was numb.
My mouse hovered over the link Escorts and body rubs for several seconds, then I clicked. The ads immediately filled my screen, most of them with photos of young women. Would I find her in here?
The language turned my stomach. I began my search. It was immediately overwhelming. More than a hundred ads were listed in the previous two hours alone. Girls and women of all shapes and sizes. The same kinds of ads as always.
** BBW Busty Girl for You $60 **
** Sugar and Strawberry Here For Your Needs * Double Your Pleasure *
** New in Town * College Girl * 18 * Two Nights Only * 180 **
I hated this. I scanned through the photos, getting angrier and angrier. Then I slammed my laptop shut.