According to Hannah, Lily was in on the abduction. Surreptitious emails and phone calls were exchanged. A lot of kids want to run away, I argued, but that doesn’t mean you take them up on the offer. “This wasn’t about hating your mother because she grounded you during spring vacation,” she retorted. This was about the sanctity of the shared meal, report cards pinned on the refrigerator and pinwheels in flower pots, coercing the dog into a costume for funny snaps, a home for which the sole purpose wasn’t to be a spread in a magazine. Yes, disappearing had been drastic, but Helen had been indifferent when Hannah was laid off, when medical bills piled up, when her property was foreclosed. She was living out of her car, “the Traveling Spinster.” She was forbidden to see Lily. Plus, legal recourse wasn’t available to her, because she had signed away her rights. I found myself confiding in her as I had wanted to confide in her sister. “I know how it feels,” she said, her voice wistful, intimate, “to have lost all that you cherish.”

Hannah was incantatory as an oracle as she described their route past pine tree nurseries, fields knuckled with gourds, billboards blistered on blue vistas, factories weathered as yesterday’s newspaper. Here was the alleged heartland.* Novelty, for me, has always been accompanied by the orchestra of longing. When I saw the Duomo in Florence, when I went on an elementary class trip to gaze upon the pharaohs in their sarcophagi, wonder harmonized with the wonder of why an anonymous man murdered my mother. I wished I could share these marvels with her, or at least tell her about them, and her abiding kindness would make them possible, explicable, but she was gone, which also seemed impossible, and the sensation of encountering the miraculous was diminished with anguish. So I didn’t dare skeptically pause this story of a reunion so like the sort I had fantasized about and would forever be denied.

“I forgot the appetite the world has for girls,” Hannah told me. At a McDonald’s in Ohio, they hunkered down to enjoy the heat-lamped potpourri of starch and ketchup packets and antiseptic, the crumpling of oiled wrappers, when a yellow bus unloaded a bunch of troublemakers into the parking lot. Immediately Lily was surrounded by backpacks. They played with her hair, caressed her ear, asked her to smile, and giggled at her lopsided grin. Someone produced a temporary tattoo of a butterfly. There were cries of, “Put it on her face!” She contorted head over shoulder in the bathroom to scrutinize the result, planted just below her jaw. “It’s ugly,” she decided. Soaping thoroughly, she scrubbed until it was bits of torn wings and her neck was red. That children would be casually cruel was one matter, the attention of grown men another. They stopped at a desert gas station. A wind sock flopped overhead, desolate as the horizon. When Lily went in search of Twizzlers and Slim Jims, truckers were mesmerized by her ass. “Girl,” they hollered, as if they were this moment catching on to the names for things.*