I wish my family could understand that. They always think about my death and me missing from their lives. But I had a pretty wonderful eight years with a family I loved, who usually laughed at my jokes, friends to see every day at school, pizza nights and vacations and birthdays filled with love. And I had the best sister in the world. My death was just a moment, and not even a bad one. I was joyful up until the end, then peaceful when Kiki was with me, then nothing.

I’ve been with my family ever since that day, and if they could really let go of all those feelings of guilt and sadness, they would feel me there.

That’s what I tried to tell Kiki that day she reached the Pacific Ocean. I think she finally heard me.

Found

48 | The Olanders

May 19, 2015, 12:30 P.M.

Keith’s hands grip the steering wheel as he drives faster than the speed limit, faster than is safe, the way people expect a middle-aged guy to drive an expensive sports car. He feels a twinge about how his life has turned into a cliché: a high-flying career, financial success (for now), failed marriage . . . wayward child?

“Tell me again what the police said?” Jaya asks.

Keith glances in his rearview mirror and down at the radar detector. “They picked her up this morning on the beach, alone, about twenty-five miles from campus. She was disoriented and gave them the wrong name at first, which is why it took a few hours for them to track us down. She called herself Sarah. Does that sound familiar to you, one of her friends?”

Jaya shakes her head, stares out the window. Tension fills her chest cavity and her fists clench an imaginary steering wheel as they did that day after the phone call on her way home. She feels the terror of seeing emergency vehicles parked out front, and hears the screech of her tires as she drove up onto the flower bed. Once again, she is suspended in time and space, waiting for something terrible to arrive. She forces herself to breathe deeply, even as the image of Prem’s lifeless body on the pool deck intrudes.

“Jaya.” Keith takes one hand off the wheel and places it atop hers. “I don’t know what’s going on, but it’ll be okay. If she’s in trouble, we can sort it out.” He doesn’t share what he learned on the drive over to the house, when he called the university and was told that their daughter was no longer enrolled, that she had not, in fact, been on campus in five months, ever since they saw her over winter break. Keith is wary of telling Jaya everything at once, uncertain of how much she can handle.

Jaya closes her eyes and leans her head against the cool window, repeating a mantra softly under her breath, masked by the hum of the car’s engine. In her mind, she sees young Dev spinning away from her on the merry-go-round, then Prem sailing off into the universe. Now her daughter. The distance between Karina’s life and hers is increasing with the passage of time—a runaway bunny she cannot catch.