mortgage and offered a huge reward for information. We went on the news shows—how could we not, when the cameras camped outside our doorstep? The whole neighborhood put up yellow ribbons.
It was all so exhausting. I let Dave do all the talking about how much we prayed for her safe return. Somber, he braced himself with his arm around my shoulder.
I told the police what every mother tells the police—she isn’t the kind of girl to just run away. She’s not like that. She got straight As, she took out the trash.
They just shook their heads. She’s seventeen, they said. She could have done anything. Are there any boys? Anyone she was seeing? No, I said. None. She’d never dated, which had been a vague cause of worry. Another difference between her and me that I didn’t understand. When I was fifteen I couldn’t wait to date boys, couldn’t wait to find my Prince Charming. When she was fifteen I told Dave, “The horse thing, she’ll grow out of it. They always grow out of it when they discover boys.” Except if I’d been paying attention, I’d have known that some girls didn’t. Her riding instructors, for example: devoted women who practically lived at the barn, because they hadn’t grown out of it.
No, there weren’t any boys, except for Corlath, a character in a book with a sword and a horse on the cover.
She couldn’t have run away, I told them. She was taken. Whisked away. I couldn’t say by whom.
After two years, everyone assumes that she’s dead. We wait to hear word that her body has been found by a hiker in the woods. Decayed beyond recognition, they’ll need her dental records to confirm her identity.
Dave wants to sell the house and move. I refuse, because what if she comes home? How will she know where to go? I keep her room clean and ready.
I threw all my DVDs of Disney princess movies away. I wonder if it’s my fault that she’s gone. If I’d watched her closer, made her take gymnastics instead of fencing—I’d never understood her, and she knew it somehow, and she ran away.
“She didn’t run away,” Dave says. Sometimes, lying in bed at night, both of us pretending to sleep but really staring at opposite walls and holding ourselves rigid, he says this. “She isn’t that kind of girl.”
Except that she’s gone, and is it really easier to believe that someone had taken her, had done things to her? Or that she’s locked up helpless somewhere wondering why we don’t come looking for her?
Wondering why there isn’t a prince to rescue her?
No, she wouldn’t look for a prince. She’d always carried her own sword. I’m the one who’d looked for a prince.
Every couple of months, Dave takes me to the cabin. It’s the family cabin that I share with four of my cousins—a house, really, with two stories, three bedrooms, a screened-in porch, a stone walkway leading to a tiny wooden dock jutting into the lake, where we tie up the canoes. Dave wants me to get away from the cameras, the news, the phone calls we still sometimes get from police about tips that didn’t pan out. Every time the phone rings my heart stops. Is it Maggie calling to ask us to come get her and bring her home? Or is it the police telling us that they’ve found her, or what’s left of her?
When we came here as a family, Maggie would sit out on the dock at twilight, reading a book and watching the evening mist form over the water. She said she dreamed pictures in the haze, stories from the books she read.
They found the car just a few miles away. She must be close, one way or the other.
The cabin holds as many difficult memories as the house, but I think Dave needs the quiet, the solitude, and he needs to believe that it’s me who needs the quiet.
Every time we visit, I sit on the dock, watching the mist, and wonder what she saw. Horses and swords, warriors riding out against dragons who breathed fire. Warriors with long, streaming hair, who didn’t have to disguise themselves as boys. Those are the stories she told herself—that’s what she saw in the mist. I’d sat out here when I was a girl, but if I saw pictures in the mist over the water, or heard voices calling, I don’t remember.
She’d dreamed of competing in Modern Pentathlon in the Olympics someday. I’d applauded the goal, supported her all I could, as best as I knew how—you try to support your children, even when you don’t understand their dreams or the visions they see in the mist. All that was taken away from her. From me.
Every time I sit on the dock in the evening, Dave comes after dark to help me to my feet and lead me back to the cabin. I’ve usually grown too stiff from sitting there and can’t bring myself to stand and walk away.
How long can it go on? Our lives have stuck, waiting for Maggie to come home. I could stay out on this dock for the rest of my life. Become a statue sitting here. One day Dave won’t bother coming to get me. One day, he’ll just leave, sell the house like he wants, and start a new life somewhere.
He has that luxury. Me, I’ll never have another little girl.
Dave’s gone to town for groceries. He asked me to stay in the house until he got back, but I’ve come to sit on the dock for the afternoon. I’ll get sunburned, and when he gets back he’ll yell at me for it, but I won’t be offended. He yells for other reasons. From helplessness. We’ll hold each other after he yells at me.
My skin flushes and tingles and burns in the sun, and I stay by the water, watching the sun splash flecks of gold on the tiny rippling waves. Shadows grow long, thin, and stretched, the sky turns an impossible royal blue, and the air begins to bite. This is when the mist starts to rise from the water, when the flecks of gold disappear and the water turns pewter, thick like molten metal.
Some birds cry. Bats dip over the water snatching at insects, and fish splash to the surface, doing the same.
And there is splashing, more steady than the fish, rhythmic and purposeful. Oars tucked gently into the water, not fish leaping carelessly.
Both canoes are tied to the dock. No one visits us here. Or if they do, they drive.
Someone is coming over the water, and I can’t be bothered to stand.
Then it appears, sliding out of the mist. Not a canoe but something larger, like a rowboat but stretched. It’s wood, not plastic or aluminum—boards fitted together and sealed with pitch. The bow slopes up and ends in a spiral carving.
There are four hunched figures in the boat, hidden in shadows. Not shadows—they’re wearing cloaks with hoods up. The largest of them sits in the middle and works the oars. The oars creak in the oarlocks, but the figure itself makes no sound. Another figure sits in the back, holding the long, smooth handle of the rudder. Two more sit in the front. One of them leans forward, searching. The other reaches out for her, like he’s afraid she might fall over the side.
I’m not sure why I think that figure is a woman.
I wait because I can’t not wait. Pictures in the mist, is this what Maggie saw? Had she always seen strangers, so that she didn’t think them strange and would follow them, get into their cars and let them take her away?
The boat slides up to the end of the dock. A rope is thrown out, one of the men jumps onto the dock and ties the rope to the post. The woman gets out and runs three steps, stops, stares at me.
Throws back her hood to show her yellow hair, and her face, my Maggie’s face, a little weathered maybe, and I wonder what has made her look tired.
I just stare at her.
“Mom?”
The cloak, pushed over her shoulders now, reaches to her ankles. It might be wool, thick and homespun. She wears a thick leather vest over a long-sleeved brown shirt, belted over leather pants. Her tall boots look softer and more comfortable than her usual stiff black riding boots. There’s a sword hanging from her belt by leather straps. It’s hidden in a scabbard, and seems heavier and more threatening than anything she ever used in fencing class.
She kneels in front of me. I’m hugging my knees to my chest. My muscles are frozen, but my face is wet.
“Mom?” she says again, fearfully, her voice cracking.
“You didn’t run away. I kept telling them you didn’t run away.”
“I had to go, Mom. I had to.”
