“Nicole,” she says.
I choke on my own heartbeat. It pounds my throat closed and I can’t speak.
So I listen.
“She has real blond hair and blue eyes and lots of spirit.”
I swallow hard to open my throat. “How do you know?” I ask. The picture was black-and-white. And it gave no description of my daughter.
“He told me. He knows her from when she came to look for you.”
“Oh,” I say. My voice is shaky. I try to infuse it with casual surprise. “When was that?”
“Ummmm…” Alice says, and I can picture her face scrunched up as she thinks. “I don’t know but she just went home. They’re all done looking for you.”
And now I am relieved. I do not want my daughter to be here, to be in this town where he can see her. It’s as though in some bizarre twist of irony, my prayer has been answered, the prayer that they just let me go.
Even so, the panic is acute. My hand taps furiously against my leg to contain the energy that has nowhere to go. It wants to make my fists pound on the door. It wants to make my voice cry out for help.
None of these things are useful.
“Okay,” I say then, hand tapping, hard, stinging my leg. “Do you know what that means?”
“What?” she asks me.
I choke on the words I have to say. But I know I have to say them.
“It means that I can stay now. It means that I can come out of this room and be your mommy because they’re all done looking for me.”
She is quiet. She doesn’t believe me.
“But you just said you wanted to go home.”
Clever girl. How I hate you right now.
No, I will not. I will not hate a child. A child who is also a victim. I pull it back and turn it around.
“I know… but you are right. We can’t always have everything we want. I want to be home, but I also want to be your mommy. I can’t have both, and that’s okay. I can just be your mommy now for as long as you want. Home will always be there waiting.”
Tears, tears, tears as I choke on these words. On the hatred that keeps knocking.
“Oh,” she says now. She has perked right up. “Well, you should have wanted to stay this whole time. Because you killed your daughter and she was nine. And I’m nine! And I need someone to teach me, and you’re a teacher! You should have seen that this was your second chance.”
A piece of the puzzle falls into place.
“Who told you that?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore.”
A long breath. I swallow tears. “Why is that?” I ask. “Why doesn’t it matter?”
“Because he likes her. He likes the way she looks and the way she acts. She’s more like my first mommy.”
The next word comes out through trembling lips. “Who?”
My lips tremble because, again, they know the answer before she says it.
She says it anyway.
