I was five when it happened, so most of my earliest memories were of going door to door in Arcata neighborhoods with Dad and handing out her missing person flyer. We knocked on every door, and if nobody answered, we left one for them, making sure we didn’t skip a house. Dad taped elaborate maps on our living room walls, keeping a color-coded record of where we’d been and where we still had to go. People criticized him for taking me with him on his searches, but they would’ve criticized him no matter what, since they found fault with everything he did back then. No one cared that he’d passed the polygraph. They still saw him as a suspect.

We knocked on doors for almost two years. Every year, on the day she went missing, they ran her story, airing some of the original footage of Dad pleading for her return. They talked about the grim statistics of missing people—how the longer they were gone, the less likely you were to find them alive. But Dad didn’t care about the statistics. He never had. Everyone said it was impossible that she was still alive. They obviously didn’t know as much as they thought, because we were headed to the hospital to meet her.

I leaned forward in the car and put my hand on his shoulder, wishing I could crawl into his lap and stay there. He squeezed my hand without turning around. “You okay, Pumpkin?” he asked.

“I’m fine, Dad,” I said.

Of course I wasn’t fine. We both knew that, but what was I supposed to say? I was on my way to meet a mother whose mythical legend had framed my childhood. There weren’t any words for that.

I didn’t remember much about her, since I was so young when she had gone missing, but Dad was full of memories. He knew her almost as well as he knew himself, since they’d grown up together and been high school sweethearts. He shared his memories with me constantly, trying to make them my own. Over the years, she had become like my favorite character from a movie that I’d seen over ten times and studied until I knew every line by heart. I stared at her pictures until I’d memorized every inch of her face. Every curve. Each line. My favorite picture was in a yellow wooden frame on the nightstand next to my bed. She was standing underneath a sparkling waterfall and staring off into the distance, like she had a hilarious secret, a wide grin on her face and a twinkle in her eye. Dad always said she’d had an infectious laugh, and I could almost hear it when I looked at that picture. My heart quickened at the thought of hearing her laugh myself. Would she still laugh? A shiver went through me. The police had said she had a baby with her. That only meant one thing.

TWO

MEREDITH

NOW

Someone needed to say something. Anything. Scott hadn’t spoken for over two hours. Not since we’d left California and crossed the Oregon state line. I had made some silly comment about how beautiful the mountains looked, but it had come out sounding like I was trying too hard, but I talked when I was upset. I couldn’t help it. That was how I worked through problems. Usually Scott was the same way. It was one of the things I loved the most about him and what had drawn me to him at the bereavement support group where we’d met.