Across the long and very old Stanton Street Bridge from El Paso, Texas, is a not-so-little town in Mexico called Ciudad Juárez. Friendship Bridge, Puento Rio Bravo, Puente Ciudad Juárez-Stanton El Paso. Hundreds of women had been hunted there, on the other side of that bridge, pursued, raped, imprisoned, tortured, and killed. They were mostly dark haired and of slender build, as was my beautiful Sarah.

Time slipped away. Cliché, yes. True, yes. Days, months, life not marked by clock or calendar but by the decline of my daughter’s health. The seizures became more severe, far more frequent. Sarah would forget where she was going, what she was doing. Her friends fell away quickly; they were children. That was just as well, as their names were more and more often a mystery to her. She had not yet misplaced her mother or me in her memory, but it was coming. She would sit for hours just staring. We hired a nurse to sit beside her and stare into space with her. The stress of it all, the sadness of it all, the inevitability of it all drove a fat wedge between Meg and me. She withdrew into manic exercise, yoga and cycling. I failed at burying myself in work but succeeded at staring for long periods at the return address of the packages that had delivered the handwritten notes pleading for help.

PO Box 219

Bingham, NM 87832

I would go there.

And then there was a day when my daughter wandered from the house when no one was looking. We were always looking, but for one brief moment we each thought the other was looking, and so no one was looking and out of the house stepped our child. We searched the house over and again, then the street and the next street. Neighbors we did not know searched their yards. Meg talked to the police while I drove around. Then I thought of our trail, her talk of lions and bears, her big feet one at a time raising dust, and I went there. It was just dusk of a day that had been far too sunny, far too warm for the season. I hiked up the mountain, keeping in mind at every bend that if she had gone this way, there was no reason to believe that she would have remained on the path, and so I looked for signs, for footprints that the hard, dry surface would yield only grudgingly. Up the mountain looking for large scat that I hoped to not find, scanning the far ridges for the flash of a white tail tip, listening for rustling or perhaps even singing, as it was our habit to sing in these woods that supported bears and cats. I worried that my daughter might be running through these woods and so appeal to a cat’s instinct to chase. I imagined that she might be experiencing her first period and so lighting up the air with a pheromone enticement to a wayward bear. I distracted myself by remembering that bear in French was ours and imagined that the bear might then be ours. I paused every several hurried steps to listen, to stare ahead at the trail and to the sides for anything broken, for any transfer of soil onto plant matter on the ground. Then I heard a whistle, or at least an attempt at a whistle. I listened hard. Again. I slid down off the trail toward the sound and there she was, sitting on part of a downed tree. I worried that there might be a snake that she had not seen, and then I felt stupid and neglectful for not having worried about her encountering snakes during my climb.