Not Her Daughter: A Novel

by Rea Frey

  I wait five minutes, then ten. Finally, I hear something coming from the left, and I see Emma run up the drive, alone. She immediately darts into the backyard. I scramble backward, afraid to be seen, and crouch even lower, my breath fractured. An involuntary swell of protectiveness sweeps over me at the very sight of her. The red bow, the same dress, the scuffed ruby shoes. Is this her uniform? I try to remember if the other kids wore uniforms when I visited, but I can’t.

  Emma runs into the playhouse and slams the door behind her. It makes a dull thud. I peel my eyes for the sitter before I see a young woman walk up the drive with Emma’s backpack in hand.

  “Emma, I’m going inside now.”

  Emma says nothing. The sitter sighs and disappears around to the front of the house. I hear a door close. Then, Emma exits her playhouse and walks to a patch of grass. She sits and plunges her fingers into the soft dirt.

  I change my position so I can better see her. I watch as tufts of grass rise above her head and then fall like confetti. I want to talk to her, to tell her to come to the trees. I want to have a conversation. I just want to—

  The back door slams and out walks the sitter. Her arms are crossed and I can tell, even from this distance, that she looks mean.

  “Emma Grace, stop tearing up the yard. You know your mother won’t like that.”

  Emma looks up, and her hands freeze midair. She stands and wipes her fingers on her dress. She says something that I can’t hear, and the sitter nods.

  They both go inside, and I slink back. I don’t know what to do. Why is everyone so annoyed with her? Is there something I don’t see? Some hidden quality that changes her into a child monster?

  I sit for an hour. I have to pee. It is the start of summer, and the sun sets later now, but in this region, the sun is more of a concept than a given. Before dark, a car rolls up, its headlights shooting into the trees. I pull back, careful not to be spotted, even though I’m in all black. I’m getting colder; my black jeans are still wet. Night is imminent, and I have to get out of these trees before then. I’ll have to use my cell phone light to pave the way back, which will give me away to nosy neighbors. I move back to the edge of the trees and wait to see who is in the car: shitty mom or shitty dad?

  Shitty mom exits, goes to the back, unstraps baby brother, and walks around the front of the house. I hear a door shut, and then nothing. A few minutes later, a second car pulls in behind Amy’s, and I hear the front door slam.

  I listen as intently as possible, but it’s strangely quiet, no neighborhood children yammering about. I’m still for ten minutes and then the back door opens and out charges Emma—not running, sprinting—and suddenly, she is in the trees, heading straight for me.

  “Holy shit,” I whisper as I watch her, just feet from me, crouch and fold into a tight little ball. A red orb against a black, early night. She doesn’t see me. She is afraid of someone.

  Her mother rockets out the back door, the baby missing from her hip, and she yells at the top of her lungs: “Emma Grace, come here right this instant!”

  There’s an annoyed mother’s tone and then there’s this—poison mixed with something dangerous. Emma stands and teeters back and forth. She steps out of the woods as I reach for her, my hands closing in on air.

  Amy takes a few steps forward, and Emma takes one small step back toward the woods.

  “How many times have I told you not to go into those woods? Get over here right now. It’s time to go inside. I mean it.”

  She moves as deliberately as I’ve ever seen a child move, as if time has been stilled and she is a slow-motion mime.

  “Emma, now!”

  Emma walks with her head down until she is standing a foot away from her mother. I’m holding my breath, and then Amy’s hand is around Emma’s elbow, and she is shaking her until tears prick my eyes.

  “What is wrong with you? Why can’t you ever just listen? Just listen to me! Just once!”

  Emma screams something and her mother lets go, her chapped cheeks trembling with fury. She is like a cartoon—so lively, inflated, and enraged. I’m witnessing something about their relationship here. In their backyard, in Washington, I am learning the truth of their daily interactions. I watch the struggle on Amy’s face—do I walk away or do I unleash?—and I wait to see which side of this woman wins.

  She comes within inches of Emma’s face. She bends over her daughter, her stomach pressing against her tight pants. All of the complexities of motherhood fester: her anger, her contorted face, the timeline of her life. In front of her stands her beautiful, unblemished daughter, who doesn’t listen and has her whole life ahead of her. Some relationships are that simple—Amy is large, mean, and aging, Emma is young, small, and beautiful—and therefore, Emma is a reminder of all that her mother no longer has.

  Emma says something to her mother, and her mother whispers something back. I have no way of hearing, but Emma shakes her head, sits down, and starts wailing, which takes me by surprise. It’s as much emotion as I’ve seen from the girl, and then Amy is turning away while Emma goes after her, arms outstretched.

  I know all the digs, wounds, and stings that can compose a childhood, domino after affected domino tumbling down with so much heaviness. There are so many ways a mother can inflict pain: intentional, physical, subconscious, verbal. Which one is this?

  Amy pivots, towering, and then hinges at the waist, her body making a loose right angle. Emma reaches for her—an apology? a hug?—and Amy lifts her right hand and strikes the girl across the face, knocking her slight body back into the dirt. I cover my mouth with both hands and bite back my protests.

  In that lift of Amy’s hand, I feel my own mother’s fingertips across my cheek, a manicured rake of open palm to soft, young flesh. I learned subtraction from counting those imprints: 3 − 2 = 1, 5 − 1 = 4, 4 − 2 = 2, 5 − 5 = 0. Each hour, a finger would disappear, and I’d continue subtracting until there were no more left.

  Emma holds her face and screams uncontrollably, and Amy gathers herself and walks back inside. It’s then that I realize I know that cry. It hits me in a primal wave. The screams I heard are Emma’s screams. The neighborhood shrieks are hers. Emma stumbles to the door and pounds on it, claws at it, hysterical now, and I am looking for neighbors—where are the neighbors?

  I lose sight of her as she runs around to the front door and then again to the back. Finally, she sits down in the grass again. The sun begins to set as she wails. Oh, how she wails.

  Emma tugs at the green strands, her cries finally tapering off. I can barely make out a five-fingered mark, red and raw, along her cheek. Every couple of breaths, she glances over her shoulder to see if someone is coming for her, if her mother will scoop her up in a tearful apology, but she does not.

  I gather myself, my knees stiff, bladder bursting. The stickiness of her name pulls at the back of my throat. It isn’t too late to turn back now. I can retreat, get in my car, and return to regular life. I can make an anonymous call to the authorities, or her school, and hope they get this family the help they need. But I know how hard it is for mothers to change, even when the stakes are the highest.

  A shaky breath vibrates against my ribs. My ankle throbs. I blink and make my decision. I stand, every joint below my waist on fire. As though underwater, I whisper the two syllables from the trees.

  She stands—I can hear her gasp, even from this distance—and then she is moving toward the tree line, as I whisper her name again.

  “Who—who is that? Who’s there?” It is only the second time I have heard her speak. Her voice pierces my chest with its sweetness. She hiccups as she asks who’s there again, her chest shuddering in that absolute way after a hard cry. It’s all I can do not to take her into my arms, hold her close, and tell her that it’s all going to be okay.

  But I don’t. I don’t say anything. I hold steady as she looks back at her house, where there is still no movement. Maybe a door will open, maybe her mother or father will come out and pretend this arg
ument never happened and trill, “Sweetheart, it’s dinnertime! Come eat!”

  But no one comes. It is silent, so silent, and there’s only this moment, the woods, and us.

  She takes another step and another, and then she is swallowed by the trees. I stand just feet from her, shifting from foot to foot. She blinks until her eyes adjust and looks left then right. Her eyes land on me, and her little mouth shifts into an O of surprise at seeing an actual person in the woods.

  “Please don’t scream. And don’t be scared. It’s okay,” I say, which I realize is what every bad person has probably ever said to a child.

  She takes a step back out of the woods, and desperation weaves a second, tougher skin. “Wait, Emma. Please wait.”

  She turns to me, and that’s when I see it. Even in this dim light, her exceptional eyes, which are large, gray, and piercing, register a level of sadness that I recognize from my own childhood.

  I gather the words in my mouth, words that will forever change my life and hers. I reach out one hand and swallow. Night is closing in, and we have a little ways to walk, and fast. I take a breath. “Will you come with me?” I ask.

  She bobbles on her feet, left and right, her red bow fluttering in the wind. I can smell the rain before it hits; I know it’s coming. We have ten minutes, maybe fifteen, at best. She takes a fractional step forward, as uncertain as a fawn discovering her legs.

  She closes the gap and looks up at me. My hand is still extended. She studies it, her arms at her sides. I manage a smile and secure my lips against my teeth. “I just want to help you,” I say.

  I am going to take you away from here.

  She takes another breath. Her whole body balloons and then deflates. She bends the fingers of her left hand, then lifts her right toward mine.

  It makes contact. I squeeze and press her hot palm to mine. Our bodies link. Our eyes lock. She nods, and my voice catches in my throat as I begin to pull her away from her mother, her house, and her life.

  amy

  during

  The door rattles. The lock clicks.

  Richard looks up from feeding Robbie, bits of rice already latching to the hardwoods.

  “What the hell was that about? I could hear Emma screaming all the way in here. What happened?”

  “I just … can’t. I can’t do this anymore. I quit. I quit parenting.”

  “Jesus, Amy. She’s five. Stop being so dramatic.”

  Emma appears outside the dining room door, her palms slapping the glass so hard, Amy fears it will shatter into a thousand pieces. She turns and shrieks at the top of her lungs: “Go play! Right now!” Her eye twitches as she yells, a new and unfortunate habit that renders her virtually insane. Emma jiggles the doorknob again and again.

  Richard covers Robbie’s ears with his large hands. “Are you really locking our child out of the house right now?”

  Amy huffs through the living room and locks the front door too. Emma can stay out there all night for all she cares.

  “What are you doing, Amy? She’s five years old, not sixteen! You can’t lock a five-year-old out of the house.” He stands and unlocks the back door, but Emma isn’t standing there anymore.

  “Really, Richard? Our daughter is five? I didn’t know that! Thank you for reminding me.” Amy stands between the dining room and kitchen, seething, with no one else to take it out on.

  Richard knows what’s coming and turns his attention back to Robbie. He lifts him from his high chair. “Come on, little guy. Let’s get you cleaned up and ready for a bath.” He glances at her. “Go handle this, Amy. You’re supposed to be the adult here.” A litany of veggies, rice, and chicken unroll from Robert’s bib and scatter across the floor—another mess for her to clean in the list of unending messes.

  Amy smacks her hand onto the kitchen counter, her palm stinging, just as it had moments before. “That is it! I have had it!”

  Richard rolls his eyes and carries Robert to the bathroom. Amy looks at the back door, now unlocked. She should leave it alone and take a few minutes to calm down. Emma will come in, go to bed, and they will all start over tomorrow. But something in her won’t let it end at that. In three steps, she crosses to the back door and twists the gold button on the lock. She watches Emma sitting in the grass, sniffling.

  Amy stalks to the bedroom, wanting to slam the door, to splinter every inch of wood. Instead, she closes the door and kicks the bed. A searing pain shoots from her big toe to her knee to her crumbly inner thigh. “Fuuuuuck!” She throws herself on the mattress and swallows a mouthful of duvet on the way down. She screams and screams into the white cover, smelling her own acrid breath, mixed with sweat and tears.

  She is losing control, losing her mind, losing her life.

  * * *

  What feels like days later, she peels herself from the mattress, her clothes sticky, a small puddle of drool next to her ear. She’s fallen asleep, hard, which probably says more about her temper stemming from lack of sleep than anything else. She opens the door, calmer now, and vows to stay calm. She wills herself to just get through the nightly routine, have a fractured night’s sleep, and start all over again. Tomorrow will be better. She will make it better.

  She walks through the house, but it is silent. She checks the clock on the stove: nine o’clock. Has she been asleep for three hours? Where is Richard? She tiptoes down the hall and peeks into Robert’s room. Her son is asleep in his twin bed, his limbs around Richard, who is snoring beside him. She closes the door and heads back down the hall to Emma’s room, hoping she’s not still awake. She’s not in the mood for negotiations tonight.

  Her room is empty, her bed untouched. A small button of panic presses against her abdomen. Where is Emma?

  She searches under the covers anyway, sorts through her crammed closet, the bathroom, the living room, the hall closet, and even the damp, moldy garage. Would she go in the attic? No, never. Emma is afraid of the attic. She peers toward the backyard, most of it dim except for where the bulbous streetlight casts an eerie graveyard glow onto all the dirt-smattered toys.

  She exits the back and checks both cars—in, around, under—before tearing the yard apart: the crappy playhouse no one uses, the wagon, the various tools and trash. She can feel her breath in her throat, the panic a real, actual, living thing now. I fell asleep and now my daughter isn’t here.

  Her sore body strains up the sharp incline, cutting left, right, then in pointless, random circles. She hopes her knees will stay intact and not decide, right at this moment, to explode like a can of dough. Her breath is labored; it is warm out, and a new drizzle makes everything slick.

  Amy stands in the center of the yard, knowing the only place Emma could have gone, the only place she would go after an argument, is the woods. She swallows and stares, the line of brown trunks and ominous branches shooting up into the sky and then dissolving into the misty clouds.

  This has happened before; Emma has gone into the woods on two separate occasions, but she only wandered a few houses down before a neighbor returned her. What time did she leave Emma out here? Six? Did Richard not come to check on her? Did he forget to unlock the door? Surely a neighbor has her … could she possibly be in the woods somewhere, alone or asleep?

  Amy moves back inside and rummages through the junk drawer until she finds a gray, heavy flashlight. She charges back into the yard and up to the wood’s edge. She dissects the trees with pale yellow light, trying not to think of all the bad things associated with children and woods.

  The buttery light trembles as her hands shake. She steps over sticks and scours the ground for clues of any sort. She walks right, then left, and feels close to passing out. Her daughter is gone.

  “No. This isn’t … this isn’t happening,” she pants, as she heads back to the house to wake Richard. She does one more walk-through, ignoring the muddy footprints she will have to clean later, making sure Emma isn’t hiding somewhere obvious. Kids are like that: disappearing under piles of laundry, curled up in unass
uming corners, sometimes even under their own comforters, flattened, still, and so easy to miss. She turns on every light and calls Emma’s name. The syllables crack in her throat as sharp, acidic bile rises after them.

  It is all becoming sickeningly clear. Her daughter is missing, and it is her fault and her clueless husband’s, who hadn’t thought to go outside and check on her. She’d locked the door again, when she could have left it open. Because she locked the door, her daughter is out there somewhere, five years old and alone.

  before

  She was spent.

  Rather, her day was spent, and never in the way she wanted. Emma was in preschool, while Robbie was in day care—only for four hours, only four days a week—and Amy was taking a personal day from work, though there was nothing personal about it.

  She would spend her precious child-and-husband-free time scrubbing cooked oats from a cool pan, flicking dried cat food off their kitchen tile with her blunt, unpainted fingernails, doing endless loads of laundry, and then staring at the mounds of fluffy cotton and denim, still hot—especially those scalding silver jean buttons—not knowing where she was supposed to even begin with folding.

  In the timeline of her life, it was always the same—kids, work, cleaning, cooking, errands, kids—unless she took a day off, which meant there was always more in her day, not less. She was perpetually behind, no matter how she organized her days.

  On the rare mornings she let her husband take over due to her incessant complaining about never getting even one morning to herself, she’d wake early anyway, because he was doing everything just a bit too loudly. She’d stand in the center of the kitchen in her fraying, stained robe and judge her husband’s every movement, commenting without even one bit of self-consciousness, because their marriage, by this point, was based entirely on hurting each other’s feelings. She already knew how her comments translated, in his mind, as she watched him slice slightly moldy strawberries with a butter knife.