must be it. Maybe the police will tell me, or Jack, once he gets here. They already told me I’ve been robbed of hours of my life, how much worse can it get?
I hold the spirometer in my right hand. I blow into the tube and allow my mind to go blank while I watch the red ball go up. It lingers for whatever amount of time I manage to keep it suspended. I pinch my eyes shut to will the ball to maintain its suspension. Suddenly bits and pieces of images come into focus – the empty crib, the missing bottles – as if they are captured on the back of my eyelids. My mind explodes. It disintegrates, breaks into tiny particles.
Mia isn’t with Jack. She’s gone.
The realization occurs so abruptly and is so powerful that the wires connected to my chest seem to tremble and the machines behind me pick up on it. The beeps speed up like the hooves of a horse, walking, then trotting, then breaking into a full blown gallop. Mia’s disappearance is a fact, yet it is disconnected from whatever consequences it entails, there’s a part I can’t connect with. An empty crib. Missing clothes, her missing bottles and diapers, everything was gone. I looked for her and couldn’t find her. I went to the police and then there’s a dark hole.
Like a jigsaw puzzle I study the pieces, connect them, tear them apart and start all over again. I remember going to the police precinct but after that it gets blurry – hazy, like a childhood memory. My mind plays a game of ‘Chinese whispers,’ thoughts relaying messages, then retelling them skewed. Easily misinterpreted, embellished, unreliable.
Every time I watch the spirometer ball move upwards, more images form; a bathroom stall, a mop, a stairwell, pigeons, the smell of fresh paint. Then a picture fades in, as if someone has turned up a light dimmer: fragments of celestial bodies; a sun, a moon, and stars. So many stars.
Why was I in Dover? Where is my daughter and why is no one talking about her?
As I lie in the hospital bed, I am aware of time passing, a fleeting glimpse of light outside, day turning into night, and back into day. I long for … a tidbit of my childhood, a morsel of memory, of how my mother cared for me when I was sick, in bed with the flu or some childhood disease, like measles or chickenpox. But then I recall having been a robust child, a child that was hardy and resistant to viruses, to strep throats and pink eyes.
I don’t know what to tell Jack once he shows up. They told him Mia is missing and he will question me. Jack will return from Chicago, he will ask questions, many questions. He will want to know about the day Mia disappeared. About the morning I found her crib empty. Amnesia is just another shortcoming of a long list of my other countless inadequacies. Shortfall after shortfall.
I must be insane, for the only explanation I can come up with is of my daughter and my ear, together in the same place. And above them, floating suspended like a mobile, the sun, the moon, and the stars. Bright as bright can be, surrounded by darkness. A chaotic universe illuminated by heavenly bodies.
I rest my hands on my lap. My body stills, comes to a halt. I was in an accident. I was shot or tried to harm myself. My ear is gone. There’s a hole that’s draining fluids.
I don’t care about any of that. Mia’s gone. I can’t even bear the thought of her. I want the pain to stop yet her image remains. I raise my finger to push the red PCA button, longing for the lulled state the medicine provides. I hesitate, then I put the box down. I have to think, start somewhere. The empty crib. The dots. I have to connect the dots.
After Mia was born I relived her birth every single night; her first gasp triggered by the cold birthing room, that gasp turning into a deep breath, then a desperate cry escaping her lips, her attempt to negotiate the inevitable transition between my womb and the outside world.
And every morning I realized that her actual cries reached me deep in my dreams and I woke up feeling like a million tiny bombs exploded inside my head. Then my muscle memory kicked in. Wake up, get up, feed her, change her, bathe her, rock her, hold her. Feeding and changing and bathing and rocking and holding.
I had stopped keeping track of time, the date or even the days of the week. I was unaware of whatever events might be gripping the rest of the world and I hadn’t picked up a book or a magazine in months. My life was reduced to a process of consolidating motor tasks into memory, loop-like days and repetitive responsibilities performed without any conscious effort.
As I rose from the couch, the world spun and then stilled. I listened for the echoes of Mia’s colicky morning cries, by then seven months after her birth, hundredfold replicas of her initial primal moment that visited me in my dreams. Lately her cries had been reaching me time delayed, distorted almost, as if communicating a certain distance between us.
That morning, I listened, yet the house remained silent. A sense of normality enveloped me, an image of a round-cheeked child pressed against the mattress manifested itself, an elfin body heavy with peaceful sleep. I had been waiting for this moment when Mia would wake up and not begin to scream before she even opened her eyes. Maybe today was the day, the end of her colic, the end of her constant crying?
I debated rolling over, going back to sleep, but something irked me. Shouldn’t there be cooing, babbling strung-together sounds? Usually by this time, Mia was attempting to pull herself up by the bars of the crib, her eyes rimmed with tears and rage.
Barefoot down the hallway I went and paused by her door, still ajar. I had forgotten to take my watch off the night prior and the band had left an imprint as if I had been tied up all night. It was just before nine and I’d been asleep for an unprecedented continuous six hours.
Mia’s door was cracked just as I had left it hours ago. Opening it wide enough to pass through, I entered the room. Something jabbed at me, made my heart stumble.
The Tinker Bell mobile overhead, unbalanced and lopsided, somehow imperfect, and disturbed. The room, barely lit by the sunlight spilling through the window, soundless. Her crib in front of the window. Silent and abandoned. Not so much as an imprint of her body on the sheets.
Pyrotechnics went off in my brain. I was trapped in the twilight zone, something that cannot be, I’m clearly looking at it. How can she be gone? My molars pulsated as I inspected the windows and rattled the cast-iron bars. I searched the entire apartment, rechecked every window twice. Not a trace of her.
I ran to the front door. The locks were intact, the metal still scratched, the paint still chipped, signs of my clumsy attempt to install a deadbolt. All locks were engaged and everything was where and how it was supposed to be. Except Mia.
There was no proof that anyone had been here − no footprints on the floor, no items left behind − nothing was disturbed, yet this peculiar energy hovered around me. The apartment seemed physically undisturbed, but felt ransacked at the same time.
I realized the contradiction of the moment: Mia was gone, yet there was no evidence, no clue, that someone had taken her. No shards on the floor, no gaping doors, no curtains blowing in the breeze of a window left ajar. No haphazardly bunched-up sheet, no pacifier, no toy discarded on the floor.
9-1-1.
I ran to the kitchen, took the receiver off the wall mount, and stopped dead in my tracks. The dish rack was empty. No bottle, no collar, no nipple. No formula can, no measuring cup.
I rushed to the trash. Surely her soiled diapers must
