I felt every bit of the shirt to be sure there were no more notes. I looked at the envelope. The return address was a postal box and the zip code 87832. A quick check on my phone … Bingham, New Mexico.

All of this was just what it was: a distraction, whether welcome or not, from the terrifying situation at hand. The note was a strange affirmation of knowledge I did not have. It was easy to believe that someone was having me on. That was, in fact, more than likely, that I was the random target of some prank, perhaps one of a few or many targets. I knew absolutely nothing, but the notes were real, felt heavy in my hand, meaningful. This feeling, of course, fed my need to know something, anything at all, all the business with my child being nothing but questions. The nagging inquiry at the end of this red herring of a rainbow, though undeniably just another distraction, was epistemological. When rednecks get scared, they run to their guns. When intellectuals get scared, they run to fundamental philosophical problems: What is goodness? What is beauty? What is it to know a thing? About knowing, I was not so much interested in whether I could know some thing but in what kind of thing I could know. I knew that my cryptic notes were real, but I could not know what they meant, how they were meant, or whether they meant. I could not know whether my daughter would live into old age, but I could know what was making her ill, if only someone would tell me. Just as I could not know how a pile of bones could end up in pack rat middens in my cave, but I could know they were from a grebe.

That night Sarah cried out with a bad dream. Meg and I ran to her room the way we did when she had night terrors as a small child. She never awoke, as she never awoke then. Meg held her and rocked. I put my hand on Meg’s shoulder, as if Sarah could or would feel my hand through another body. As I touched Meg, I felt her soften, and I felt close to her like I had so long ago. In that moment Sarah was not her daughter and my daughter but our daughter, the way she had been our daughter when we first brought her home, when looking at her was akin to looking at a portrait of the three of us. Meg looked at me, and I could see the fear.

“I’m scared too,” I said.