ripped open the fridge. All the prefilled formula bottles I had prepared the night before were gone.
Back in her room, the shelves of the changing table, usually stacked with diapers and blankets, were empty. The closet door was wide open, not a hanger dangling, not a shoe left on the closet floor.
I pulled the dresser drawers open. All her clothes were gone. Every single drawer of the dresser empty. Not a button or a tag tucked in a corner. The basket on top of the dresser, where I kept the diapers and the ointment, was empty. Nothing but empty pieces of furniture.
I checked every inch of her room, every drawer, every corner of her closet. My heart dropped into my intestines. Not only was Mia gone, but so was every trace of her.
The 70th Precinct on Lawrence Avenue in Brooklyn was a five-minute walk from North Dandry. As I passed through the building’s glass doors, the front desk clerk lifted his index finger, pointed at the earpiece, indicating he was talking on the phone.
A janitor pushed a neon yellow bucket and a scraggly mop across the floor. He wore blue overalls and clear booties over his white sneakers. I watched him as he wheeled the bucket across the linoleum, mopping in circular motions, dipping the mop in the wringer and squeezing out the water.
I studied my reflection in the glass door and saw a woman rocking back and forth with the movement of the mop, cotton strings slithering over the floor, wipe, dip, wring, wipe, dip, wring.
Standing there, it was just me and the sound of my beating heart. I had rehearsed this moment countless times. What I was going to say, which words I was going to use – missing implied a moment of inattention, kidnapped was all wrong because I didn’t see anyone snatch her – I can’t find my daughter the perfect choice of words.
Footsteps jerked me back into reality. Behind me, simultaneously a door opened and a phone rang. A detective in slacks and a light-blue shirt, his tie tucked into his waistband, walked up to the counter. He was holding a short, skinny man by his tattooed upper arm. The man was almost catatonic. The detective gave him a shove to move him along, making the man’s chest hit the edge of the counter. The man had a crooked smile on his face and seemed indifferent, as if he had been through this too many times to care.
‘Get an officer to take him to booking,’ the detective said to the clerk. ‘I don’t want to see his face again until he’s sobered up.’
‘I need to speak to someone.’ My voice was loud, so loud it made the clerk look up from the phone. ‘Please, I need help.’
‘Just a minute,’ the detective said. ‘I’ll be with you as soon as I can.’ He was too far away for me to make out his name on the tag clipped to his shirt pocket. He seemed young, maybe too young. Will he understand me, is he a father, has he worked with missing children before? I wonder if I should ask for a more experienced detective.
‘I need to talk to someone,’ I repeated, even louder than before.
He stepped closer, reluctantly. ‘How can I help you?’
Words sped through my mind, then images of locks emerged, doors secured with bolts, hasps and locksets.
HELP, I screamed in my mind. I opened my mouth but no words emerged. I swallowed hard, the gulp in my throat echoed through the silent precinct hallways. I wanted to confess to whatever it was I had done, must have done, for no one disappears through locked doors or walls, especially not a baby.
Nausea overcame me. I welcomed the strangled retching, wanted to let go of the words, the confession of what I must have done. I refused to fight the heaviness in my throat. Saliva collected in my mouth and instinctively I pinched my nose to keep the vomit from ejecting through my nostrils.
He stepped backward, as if I was a contagious leper. ‘There’s a bathroom right over there,’ the detective pointed towards a door less than ten feet away.
The bathroom was vacant. I knelt in the stall and on all fours I convulsed with spasms. Ripples shook my body, my cold skin was covered in a layer of sweat. As I studied my reflection in the mirror, I rummaged through my mind for an explanation, never lifting my gaze off the stranger that stared back at me. I felt fury for the woman in the mirror, a woman with unwashed hair, her eyes sunken in and sad, the woman who had replaced the real me. I willed myself to leave the bathroom and to do what I had come here for; ask for help to find Mia.
Back in the hallway, the detective was waiting for me. ‘Ma’am?’ He seemed impatient, as if dealing with someone who had no real police business after all.
I didn’t know what to tell the detective anymore. Had someone walked through brick walls, had some ill-fated Houdini act occurred while I was sleeping? When a magician pulls an endless scarf out of a hat, everybody knows it’s a simple trick, but this was real. And I didn’t know if I was a victim or if I was guilty. A crime has been committed. But what kind of crime?
I don’t know where my daughter is.
An all-encompassing statement, implicating everything possible but not implying anything specific. No fault, no crime, no blame. Just a fact.
I don’t know where my daughter is.
I couldn’t fathom a single logical way of explaining how Mia had disappeared.
Say it, I kept telling myself, say it. JUST SAY IT. I pushed myself to speak but the woman I had become didn’t comply. There was nothing anyone could do for her.
No one can help me. No one can help me. No one can help me.
Like an oath, I repeated it three times, hoping the reiteration would conjure up some sort of sense and logic.
As I looked past the detective, down the hallway, the tattooed man from earlier darted for the front door. The detective’s eyes followed him and then he ran after him. The tattooed man, unsteady on his feet, had reached the glass door by the time the detective got a hold of him.
I focused on the floor and the tiny specks in the blue linoleum. I felt my knees weakening, I had to keep moving, keep the blood circulating through my body.
No one can help me.
I exited the precinct and kept on walking. I felt numb inside, anesthetized, yet somehow purged, ready to accept the facts. The numbness dissolved long enough to allow the gravity of what I must have done to sink in. As I passed a store window, out of the corner of my eye I saw a woman studying her hands as if she hadn’t seen them in a long time.
In that brief yet gruesome moment of clarity I realized those hands might just be the hands of a monster.
Jack arrives and he’s all business; his suit, his posture, his demeanor. The thing that strikes me is how in control he is. I used to crave his attention, his company. But not only am I disgusted by him, I can’t even conceive of ever having had feelings for him.
My hands shake at first, then my whole body trembles. Whether with fear or anger I don’t know. I fix my gaze on his anxious face. He whispers, yet his words pierce through me.
‘I
