Not Her Daughter: A Novel

by Rea Frey

  Our eyes locked. His look of concern morphed to surprise and then outrage. “Sarah? What the fuck are you doing here?”

  I looked over my shoulder and ushered him out into the garage. “Shh! Keep your voice down.”

  He recoiled as if I’d bitten him. “Excuse me? Keep my voice down? This is my cabin, Sarah! Why are you here? Are you with someone?”

  The blonde looked uncomfortable but bit her lip in an attempt to hide an embarrassed smile.

  “I’m not here with someone. I had to get out of town for a while, and I knew you wouldn’t be here. I know it was wrong—”

  “You bet it was wrong. Do you know I could have you arrested for trespassing?”

  Dread corseted my middle. If he called the cops, they would find so much more than trespassing.

  “Sarah?”

  We all turned as if a gunshot had gone off, the garage door creaking on its ancient hinges. There, in her one-piece watermelon bathing suit, stood Emma, her face still full of sleep, her hair resting in a tangled heap at the nape of her neck. She looked from me to Ethan to the blonde and back to me again.

  “Sweetheart, can you go inside for a second? I’m just talking to my friends.”

  She nodded and retreated into the house. My guts twisted. All the blood rushed to my face. I turned, and I could see it in Ethan’s eyes. The registered shock followed by the grave realization of … her.

  He knew who she was. He knew what I’d done.

  He knew.

  amy

  during

  Amy lugs Robbie and her bag inside. Carla is on the couch, reading a magazine. She jumps like she always does when Amy barges through the door, as if she’s been caught. “Emma’s outside. I tried to get her to come in, but she won’t.”

  Amy sets Robbie down, then her bag, and arches her back as pain shoots down her legs to her feet. She feels as though she might have a partially torn Achilles tendon, sciatica, and an umbilical hernia, because there is something round and hard protruding from her belly button that juts out when she strains.

  She can’t think about any of this now, of course; she has to pay the babysitter, wait for Richard, and make sure Robbie doesn’t swallow bleach or pull the TV over on himself. She has to heat up the leftovers for dinner and deal with her daughter, who, at the moment, is nowhere to be found.

  She barely remembers the days of coming home to an empty house, pre-children, and how indulgent that now seems. There was literally no agenda, which at the time seemed boring, but now seems like the only thing worth living for. She hears Robbie start to cry from somewhere inside the house. She fishes some wrinkled bills from her wallet and hands them to Carla, who bursts out of their house as fast as she can.

  She is an odd girl, but she’s the only one they’ve got. Amy could quit her job, be home more, pick up both kids from school, but she doesn’t want that stay-at-home life.

  Robbie is in his closet. She grabs him under his chubby arms and braces herself as she lifts, carrying him to the living room to place him in front of a cartoon. Richard should be home in five minutes. He can feed Robbie tonight.

  She goes to the kitchen and sees Emma outside the window, pulling up the grass again after they have explicitly asked her not to. She uncorks the wine from two days ago, takes a whiff, and then drinks straight from the bottle. It is sour, sweet, and a bit vegetal, but she drinks it anyway and then lets out a long, juicy burp. Robbie laughs from the living room, and she smiles, because he is such an easy, quiet toddler, if not a tad dumb.

  She steels herself and glances out the window again, but Emma isn’t there. She leans forward over the sink, looks left, then right. Why had they never bought a fence? She feels the anger swirling, as it always does, and then she is out the dining room door, screaming. “Emma Grace, come here right this instant!”

  She waits—she’s in the woods, it has to be the woods—and then her child emerges from the trees, dirt-smeared and lovely, and it takes everything in her not to cry. “How many times have I told you not to go into those woods?”

  Emma stands there. She always just stands there, and just like Richard, the absence of words is the catalyst. It’s always the catalyst to her complete undoing. “Get over here right now. It’s time to go inside. I mean it.”

  Emma slows everything down—the way she has so many times—because she knows that nothing annoys Amy more than the silent treatment and moving at a glacial pace.

  “Emma, now!” A thousand curses push to her lips, and she wants to say them all. She wants to take out her shitty day and her shitty life on her unblemished daughter right here in their shitty backyard.

  Emma stops a foot from Amy, rather than just bounding inside like a normal, happy child, eager for dinner, so thankful to be alive. Yes, Mama! What’s for dinner? How hard could that be? How fucking hard could it be to just do what you are told?

  She hears Richard in the kitchen, banging pots and pans, taking out the leftovers. He won’t come out here to help her—it’s always her against Emma—never a united front as parents, never a team.

  Amy’s fingers close around Emma’s bony elbow, and she thinks about squeezing it until she hears the crack and pop of bone. “What is wrong with you? Why can’t you ever just listen? Just listen to me! Just once!”

  She is shaking her, but Emma does not break, because Emma never breaks. She smiles at her mother—she actually smiles!—and then her daughter decides to rip apart her stoic silence with this: “Because I don’t love you, that’s why!”

  Emma screams it, and now the neighbors know that her own daughter doesn’t love her, and she is so embarrassed to be spoken to this way. After all this time, after five years of feeding, providing, and keeping her alive and safe—after all this silence—this is what she says?

  Amy releases her elbow and turns. Go inside. Eat dinner. Leave her alone. But it’s not that simple—it’s never just that simple—and she turns back and leans over Emma, spitting words right back into her perfect little face.

  “I don’t love you either. I never have. Did you know that?”

  There is a beat, a challenge, and then her daughter comes unglued, shakes her head, and is screaming for Amy in a way that Amy has never heard. But she has said those awful words. She can’t take them back, and she doesn’t know if she wants to. Something has to change, and maybe this is it. She’s said the worst thing a mother can ever say to a child. The damage is done.

  Amy stomps back to the house and Emma runs after her with outstretched arms. She should feel bad, she should give her a hug, she should let both of them start over. They both deserve a break.

  She turns back—just for a moment—and sees that her daughter’s tears are fake, because she knows that forced cry (the cry when she wants a toy and doesn’t get it; the cry for constant attention; the cry when she blames Robbie for doing something he did not do), and she is so insulted that she rears back and strikes Emma as hard as she’s ever been struck. Richard is not standing at the window. If he were, he would not stand for this.

  Her hand makes contact with Emma’s soft cheek, and she’s afraid she’s split her daughter’s face into two distinct parts. She removes her hand and looks at it—half-expecting to see baby teeth and jaw adhered to the skin of her red, red palm.

  She feels the wine bubbling up her esophagus, but she swallows it and walks back toward the house. She prays there are no neighbors; that her child will stop screaming; that she will wake up from this Groundhog Day of her life to find something different in the morning.

  She steps through the door and locks it, her husband and other child looking at her with similar, worried expressions. She cannot face them now. She cannot face her daughter. She takes a shaky breath, ignoring the ferocious sting in her hand and the anger strangling her heart.

  after

  People wore T-shirts with Emma’s face, a photo taken by the school six months ago. They held banners, wore stickers and buttons, and handed out fliers. Had someone paid for those? Amy adjusted
her blouse, sweating and clammy, her makeup, applied with a sponge the size of a pancake, already slick and melting off her jaw.

  She blinked into the cameras and lights. Why were they doing this? Why did families ever do this? A kidnapper would never watch this and just hand the kid back. So who was this for? Not them. Not Emma.

  She heard the hot pop and click of the cameras, the testing of microphones, the heated lamps that were blinding. It was for them—the media—the piranhas of all tragedies of mankind.

  Frank was at the helm of the investigation and promised it would be fast and painless. But it hadn’t been painless. They had ransacked their home, bagging and tagging personal items: combs, toothbrushes, clothing, shoes, paperwork, printed emails, files. They’d searched under furniture, at the backs of drawers, and in their cars. They had dusted their entire home for fingerprints. They’d tracked more muddy footprints into her kitchen, across the backyard, and into the cloak of woods that was their best and only lead.

  Amy had frozen in the hallway on the second day when they located her stack of tapes from her past-life regression therapy sessions. Those had been hidden in her glove compartment. She watched as they sprinkled the tiny tapes into a bag, sealed it, and hauled them away. She’d panicked at what was on those tapes—the stories, the insecurities, the confessions—and how they might twist the contents to use against her.

  She’d almost told Frank as much but hadn’t. She was embarrassed to admit she’d developed a crush on him. He was in his late forties, maybe early fifties. She imagined he’d had a hard, productive life full of cases, bad news, and miracles. She wondered if he spent his summers riding motorcycles in the unforgiving sun, crashing at his lake house, all while chopping firewood and killing his dinner bare-chested with a rifle. She swallowed as she imagined his toned, furry chest. He was a widower. She knew that much about him, at least. She figured this job was all he had, and he definitely had his hands full with their case.

  This was the official press conference—the only one she had agreed to do. Richard’s emotion—which would help in a situation like this—had suddenly been wiped away as he stood beside her, stone-faced, swaying, and as uncomfortable as she felt.

  “Thank you for coming today,” Frank began. “We are here to discuss the disappearance of five-year-old Longview native Emma Grace Townsend. If you or anyone you know has information, please…”

  Amy tuned him out, pretending he was talking about someone else, somewhere else. This couldn’t be her Emma Grace Townsend. The whole world couldn’t be looking for her daughter. She hadn’t even gotten as far as thinking about Emma’s return and what that would mean too: the trauma, the aftermath, the effects, the therapy. How would they afford it? What if she was even more closed off, emotionally damaged, or physically wounded?

  Amy’s entire life would be devoted to the rehabilitation of their daughter. They would quit their jobs, go into debt, let Robbie chew on wooden spoons, and fend for himself. No, this could not take over their entire lives.

  Richard nudged her with his elbow, and suddenly, it was her turn to speak. What was she supposed to say? She looked at camera one but was directed to turn to camera two. She cleared her throat and heard herself speak, though the things she was saying were laughable. “Mama loves you. If you’re out there, come home. We need you at home. If someone out there has Emma, please bring her back. She needs her family.”

  How preposterous. No one had coached her on what to say, and as the generic pleas left her mouth, she heard a snicker from somewhere in the back of the brightly lit room. Frank squeezed her shoulder. She turned into his grip. Her eyes searched his for approval, and he nodded that she’d done just fine.

  For the next twenty minutes, they fielded questions from the media. Amy was asked about her and Emma’s relationship at least twenty times. Someone had been digging. A neighbor could have heard one of their million fights and given her up, because they didn’t like her. Someone at the school could confess that Emma was covered in bruises and wore the same dirty clothes. Carla could tell them what she was really like as a mother, how hard she was on Emma. She could be crucified.

  Finally, Frank ushered them away from the podium to the back. She collapsed in a chair and fanned herself. “God, that was awful. I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to say.”

  Richard slumped against a wall and began wailing. She swallowed the urge to slap him, to tell him to pull it together.

  Frank fired off a text on his phone. “Look, we’re getting calls from the tip line we set up. Which is a positive step. We’ll have to work our way through them, of course, to establish any validity, but there is movement.”

  “And the search party?”

  “The woods came up clean. There was activity near your yard, but that was to be expected. There were also footprints throughout the woods, but teenagers often use it to—well, they use the woods for things. And it rained, so…” Frank reddened, which Amy found adorable. Did he date? Did he have children? Were they grown?

  Richard lifted his head and wiped his eyes. “If she was in the woods, then where did she go? Was she taken from our yard? Did she just disappear into thin air? Was she abducted by aliens? What?”

  “The dogs picked up her scent very strongly near your home, but they faded off near the school.”

  “Oh my God. Do you think someone from school took her?”

  Why hadn’t she thought of that? All those smug Montessori parents judging them because their child didn’t pack an organic lunch or wear clothing woven from recycled plastic. Maybe some selfless, do-gooder mom had decided that Amy wasn’t a fit mother and taken Emma in? “Have you checked with all the families from the school? I think Richard might be right.”

  Richard stood and stuffed his shirt back into his khakis. “You know, I’ve seen some of those mothers looking at Emma and me when I drop her at school. Judging looks, you know? What if she’s with one of them? She has to be. That would explain everything.”

  Frank pocketed his phone and held out his hands, one toward each of them. “Let’s all just calm down here. We are looking into every family at the school as well as the neighborhood and the surrounding areas. We are prepared to look at all leads accordingly.” He glanced behind him, at Barry motioning for him. “I’ve got to take care of something, but I’ll see you both at the station?”

  Robbie was with Carla. It seemed that most of their free time would be spent at the station. Richard grabbed her elbow and she let him steer her toward the exit, as they both pushed through the sea of press to their car.

  She heard questions, shouts, and accusations and was perplexed at how odd the world was and yet how predictable. She should get a lawyer. Ronnie was a longtime friend and had helped with her mother’s estate after she died. He would know what to do, how to handle all this backlash. Richard locked the doors and started the car, not even bothering to buckle his seatbelt before he took off.

  “Put on your belt, Richard.”

  He did as he was told as he navigated the back roads to the station. The radio was off, and Amy could hear her pounding heart working overtime in an erratic symphony of angst and stress, beating against her ribs.

  “I just can’t believe this is our life now,” he said. “How did this even happen?”

  Amy stayed silent, not wanting to admit her role in all of this.

  “Seriously, I want to know. How did this happen?”

  “How do any tragedies happen? You’re just going along with life, la, la, la, worrying about things that don’t even matter, when boom. Tragedy strikes. And life is never the same.”

  He looked at her as he blasted over a speed bump, and they both bounced and pitched forward in their seats. “You say the most awful things sometimes.”

  “At least I’m honest,” she murmured, looking out the window as the station came into view. Just the sight of the squat brick building filled her with dread. At some point, they would get their answers in there. The police would either bring Emma home
, or give them the most tragic news a parent could ever hear.

  Amy could not deal with all this waiting. She had to do something—they had to do something—she just didn’t know what.

  sarah

  after

  Ethan turned to the girl. “We have to go now.”

  “But we just got here. What’s … going on?” She looked at both of us, obvious questions unanswered. “Ethan?”

  The way she said his name—dripping with intimacy—wrapped its jealous fist around my heart and squeezed. I tightened my ponytail and glanced down at my ripped jeans and dirty tank top. Not exactly the best reunion outfit, even in these tenuous circumstances.

  “Nothing. Sarah and her … daughter have showed up here, and I think it’s best we go.” He ushered the girl out. There was the quick engine rev, the rolling of aggressive tires on gravel. I watched the taillights snake through the long, wooded drive before I exhaled. I wanted to burst into tears, pack everything, and hide.

  He knew.

  I walked back inside with this information, the truth swirling like an internal tornado. Emma was sitting on the floor, playing with a puzzle we’d bought on the way in. “Who was that?”

  “That was an old friend. This is his cabin. I forgot to tell him we’d be coming here, so he was mad.”

  “Who was that pretty girl?”

  I bristled at the word pretty. “I think she was a friend.” Of course she was pretty. Though Ethan and I had never shared anything about our past relationships—because we wanted a fresh slate—I’d never wondered if he’d brought other women here. Had Bill welcomed other women? Had they simply laughed at the carpeted bathroom and the hairy sheets and gushed about how perfect everything was? Oh, Ethan. It’s so charming and so perfect just as it is. I could live here forever.

  The thought made me sick.

  Ethan never came here in early summer. There was always too much going on with the shop and too much to do in and around Portland; he’d always said that the cabin was best suited for cold nights and warm fires. And now he’d made the conscious choice to come here with someone else.