When I got the phone call about Savannah Taylor, the missing girl, I hadn’t thought about my Jenny for almost ninety minutes. Which was nearly a record.
Especially on a Saturday. On weekdays at the bank, I could lose myself in the minutiae of the day. Talk to customers about the houses and cars they were buying, nod along as they enumerated the merits of wrap-around porches and side-curtain air bags.
In my desk drawer was a photo of a four-year-old Jenny. She had her arms wrapped tight around my neck and her head tucked into my shoulder. Looking at that photo hurt. Physically hurt. It set off a hollow ache in my chest and stomach, even my arms and legs.
But that wasn’t the reason I had hidden it away. No, I had done it so that no one would ask about her. I’d also changed my nameplate and business cards to my maiden name, even though the divorce wasn’t finished yet. I couldn’t deal with the way people looked at me when they saw the name Dowd.
The pain was no longer fresh and raw. Now it was like a throb, as constant as the hidden beat of my heart.
I always hoped that Jenny would come to me in a dream. But she never did. Bob said she had for him. Why not me? Was she mad that I had accepted her death?
Over the past ten months, I’d gained twenty pounds. Eating mindlessly helped my brain go quiet, as I rhythmically chewed and swallowed until the bag or box or bowl was empty. And there was no point in working out, in running on a treadmill to nowhere.
No matter how I spent my time, I was always one minute farther away from Jenny. And the space between us just kept getting wider.
It wasn’t like she had fallen through the cracks. Night after night, her disappearance was the lead story on the local news and then the national news. A pretty white teen from an intact family? The media ate that up.
The cops used dogs, helicopters, psychologists, hypnotists, and even a psychic who offered her services for free. They searched creeks and abandoned buildings. Questioned known child molesters. Staked out Island Tan at the exact time and day Jenny had disappeared, questioning anyone who might have heard or seen something.
Only they turned up nothing.
They lifted hundreds of fingerprints from the tanning shop and, one by one, ran them through the system. A few turned out to belong to people with criminal records, mostly girls who had shoplifted. A sizable percentage belonged to unknown people.
It was like Jenny had been teleported into a different dimension. I still lay awake at night trying out different scenarios. Had the dad or boyfriend of a client taken sick notice of her? Or was it someone she knew well? Had someone robbed the place and then decided to take the only witness as well? Was it even possible that she had left, run off with the money from the register? But her phone never pinged, and how far could you get on a couple of hundred dollars?
At work, I sometimes let myself pretend that she was at school. On weekends, I might imagine for a few hours that she was at a friend’s house. My counselor called these thoughts “defensive delusions.”
Pretending was the only way I could summon the energy to draw up contracts or make a simple meal, but there were times the mental game was so easy it scared me.
“Is it normal?” I’d asked the counselor at our last appointment. “Is this something other people do?”
“There is no normal,” she had said. “There are only things that allow you to survive.”
Did Bob still go to counseling? Blake had gone a half dozen times and then refused to go anymore.
The day Jenny went missing was the day our family shattered. As the hours stretched into days and then weeks, I shut down. Bob accused me of being cold. Of the two of us, I’d always been the realist. Certainly, I’d have liked to imagine that Jenny had fallen and hit her head and forgotten who she was. Or that she’d been forced to steal the money or perhaps been trafficked and now was too embarrassed to come home. But of course those things weren’t true, so I’d had to accept that our daughter was dead. I wanted to believe that it happened quickly and she hadn’t suffered.
But that was probably as much a fantasy as Bob’s belief that she was alive and we just needed to find her.
After Jenny went missing, Blake started spending all his time at his friends’ houses. At first because their parents could give him the things we couldn’t—regular meals, a schedule, adults who weren’t shouting or weeping. But when we tried to resume our lives, Blake still chose to be with his friends as much as possible. I remember surfacing once to think how strange it was that we had become like distant relatives to our own son, trying to maintain contact with phone calls and regular visits.
While Blake found replacement families, I didn’t want to keep pretending that we were a real family anymore. It was just too painful. Except that once Bob moved out, I didn’t feel any better. I had craved silence, but it turned out that being alone in a quiet, empty house was worse.
The only pleasure I could look forward to was taking a small purple sleeping pill every night. Once I had emptied all those tiny pills into my palm. If my daughter was dead, I wanted to be dead, too. Something made me pour them back into the bottle.
I didn’t even feel human anymore. Most of the other humans I interacted with seemed as stupid as lambs being raised for slaughter. Not realizing their days were pointless and would soon end.
The only ones who could reach me were those parents who had survived the death of a child. For a few minutes, I could respect their pain. But even then, I found it didn’t last. Yes, your five-year-old might have died from cancer, but at least you’d been there for those last moments. At least you knew what happened. Yes, you might have lost your twelve-year-old to a drunk driver, but now you’d be able to go through all those stages of grieving: denial, anger, whatever.
I was stuck.
That’s why when I heard about In Trevor’s Memory, I knew I had to volunteer. All the volunteers had one thing in common: missing children. Some eventually found. Many not.
For another mother or father, I could be the person I had needed when Jenny was taken from us.
And now I would be that person for Lorraine Taylor.