I heard the siren before I saw the lights. The authorities pulled into the driveway while I was still sitting on Sophie’s floor, the letters spread across the carpet around me.
The letter had never been mailed.
I went to the front door.
Officer Davies was in his mid-forties, calm in the way that people who see crisis regularly learn to be. He glanced past me into the house.
“You called about a missing person’s case, Ma’am?”
“I did,” I said. “I’m sorry. I think I panicked. I found something under my daughter’s bed and I didn’t understand what it was, and I called before I finished reading it.”
He studied me. “Is your daughter safe?”
He glanced past me into the house.
“She’s upstairs. She’s fine.” I paused. “She’s actually the opposite of fine. She’s been not fine for a year and I completely missed it.”
He nodded slowly. “Do you need emergency services?”
“I need a grief counselor’s number,” I replied. “For both of us. Do you have one?”
He handed me a card.
I thanked him and closed the door.
“I completely missed it.”
***
Sophie was sitting at the bottom of the stairs when I turned around.
We looked at each other across the hallway for a long moment.
“Why didn’t you mail them?” I asked.
She pulled her knees to her chest. “Because if they had sent a letter back saying they’d closed the case, it would have killed you.”
“Sophie… honey…”
“It would have killed you.”
“You were barely keeping it together already, Mom,” she said. “Every time someone said something official about Maya, you went away for days. You’d just sit in her room. You’d stop eating. I couldn’t let them send you a letter like that.”
Sophie had been protecting me.
I walked to the stairs and sat down beside her on the second step.
“You’ve been carrying the whole search by yourself,” I muttered.
“Someone had to keep track.”
No child should think that.
Sophie had been protecting me.
“That was never supposed to be your job, Sophie.”
“I know.” Her voice was very small. “But it also wasn’t supposed to be my job to grieve alone. And I’ve been doing that too.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. There wasn’t one.
I thought about all the nights I had lain awake running through theories about what happened at that camp. All the flyers I’d printed. All the search group meetings I’d driven to. And all the times I had asked Sophie if she remembered anything new, anything at all, from that morning.
I didn’t have an answer for that.
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