Little Girl Gone Read online

  Is it that I haven’t displayed any sense of urgency myself in the past? They must know that my injuries and all that medication made me feel as if I was in a fog. My thoughts are clearer now. I can’t think of a more serious word than kidnapped and so kidnapped is the word I use.

  He doesn’t believe me. I must make him believe me. ‘I locked the doors! No one could’ve come in – I’m sure of that. I know I should’ve … but I wasn’t … I never left the door unlocked! I checked every night.’

  ‘They’re looking for your daughter as we speak.’ He closes the cover of his notepad and slides the pen in his suit pocket. He lifts himself off the chair, sighs heavily, and pinches his lips as his kneecaps make a cracking sound. ‘We don’t understand your reasoning, Mrs Paradise. Why didn’t you get help immediately?’

  The headache that started behind my eyes has moved to the back of my head. It’s paralyzing, and the odor of disinfectant is overwhelming. There it is again. The image approaches like a set of oncoming headlights, blinding and painful, and I’m unable to look away. The blood. The memory just won’t quit. Mesmerized by the vision of crimson patches the shape of tiny feet, soaked into the sheet, I close my eyes and take a deep breath.

  ‘Please, somebody must have seen something. I can’t remember anything but I know I’ve never been in Dover. I’m bad at reading maps, I wouldn’t know how to get there. I don’t think I’d just drive up there for no reason. It’s all very confusing.’

  ‘Maybe you just drove and you decided to stop there. It may not have been your destination. Just a place to stop.’

  ‘Stop for what?’

  He ignores my question. ‘We’ll need a photograph of your daughter.’

  ‘Hundreds. I have hundreds of pictures of her. At my house. They are in a black camera bag, on memory cards.’

  ‘We found those.’ He pauses ever so slightly, then continues. ‘We need a recent portrait, you know, with her face. A likeness of her that people can recognize.’

  I must think about this carefully. ‘The flash startled her and I haven’t taken any photographs, not lately. She’s been so fussy, I didn’t want her to …’ I must be vigilant. Speak slowly. I must make sense. I must convince him. ‘I don’t have any recent photos of her. She’s only seven months old. The doctors said, they told me she … she … she’s a colicky baby. The doctors told us there was nothing wrong with her. Just a colic. It was going to pass any day.’

  ‘How old did you say she is?’

  ‘Seven months.’

  ‘Babies are colicky at that age? I have three kids. I can’t say I took care of them, but my youngest was colicky. They usually grow out of that pretty quickly.’ His brows are raised. So are his suspicions. ‘Did you take her to a doctor?’

  Pacifier, warm baths, soft blankets. Burp the baby. Hold the baby. Rock the baby. Walk the baby, drive with the baby. Soothe the baby.

  ‘They did a couple of tests for reflux disorders. She gained weight, never had a fever. He said she was fine and to wait it out.’ They also told me if I ever felt that I couldn’t cope, to go to the nearest emergency room, but I don’t mention that part to the detective.

  ‘All right,’ he says and scribbles something in his notepad. ‘How about DNA – a brush maybe? Or a bottle she drank out of? Or a handprint or a footprint? You know, those kits you buy at a department store, where you use clay and take an impression of a foot or a hand?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘A hair brush? A toothbrush? You know those little plastic things you attach to a finger and brush their teeth?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘A diaper? There must be a dirty diaper somewhere?’

  Again I shake my head. ‘It all disappeared,’ I say it so softly that I don’t know if he heard me.

  ‘It disappeared,’ he repeats as if I just told him the day of the week.

  Why isn’t he alarmed?

  ‘Yes, everything disappeared, her clothes, her bottles. All of it, everything’s gone. Her closet was empty, her diapers were missing, her formula, her bottles. Everything.’

  ‘We are aware of that fact.’ He sits up straight and crosses his arms in front of his chest. ‘So, someone took her and that person also took her things?’ He puts his notebook away as if the ramblings of a madwoman are no longer significant enough to be written in his precious pad. ‘That’s a very odd crime. If the doors were locked all night and were still locked the morning you found the empty crib, there must be another explanation. I have to be honest with you, that doesn’t make sense at all.’

  My story not making any sense is a cruel statement. ‘I know how it sounds, but that’s all I can tell you.’

  Daniel’s face relaxes, he leans forward. ‘I can only find her if I know where to look.’ He pauses and then adds, ‘Where should I look for her?’ His voice is gentle as if he is trying to convince a child to tell the truth.

  ‘What are you trying to say? That I know where she is?’

  ‘You knew she was gone and you didn’t ask for help.’

  He’s right. I don’t know how to respond to that.

  ‘If you know where she is you have to tell me,’ he continues. ‘She’s so little, helpless, she is cold, hungry. She’s all alone out there.’

  I wonder where his out there is. I pinch my lips to keep the tears in check. I don’t want to cry in front of him. When I cried in front of Jack it made everything worse.

  ‘Did you ever feel you were capable of hurting your baby?’

  Was I capable of hurting her? I shake my head for I dare not speak out loud.

  ‘Did she cry a lot?’ he asks.

  There they are, the images emerge as if the detective hit a button and they splatter against the wall like photographs from a slide projector: Clenched fists, legs pulled up to the stomach, a baby’s tearless rage directed towards me. My love for her powerless, incapable of easing her pain.

  ‘She was a colicky baby, you know, very fussy … but I would never hurt her. She was my life.’

  Something in his eyes twitches, then he nods as if I said something he expected to hear.

  He abruptly turns around and leaves the room, as if everything I just told him is beyond what makes sense.

  Then I realize I spoke of Mia in the past tense.

  Chapter 7

  Mia Paradise Connor and I were released from the hospital five days after the delivery. Jack went back to work, took over the night feedings on the weekends, and I slept, ate and showered whenever possible.

  I was in awe of what I had created. I stared at Mia, her plump cheeks, her little bird mouth twitching in her sleep. I bathed her and padded her dry, gently rubbing lavender lotion all over her. By then she was far from the puffy-eyed, bowlegged newborn. Her curvy legs had straightened, her cone-shaped skull had rounded out, and her flaky skin was now pink and spongy.

  I loved how she studied my face, trying to memorize it, as if I was all the comfort and love she needed. She’d wake up in my arms, open her eyes, and frantically search for my likeness, immediately settling down when she recognized me.

  Mia’s cries were distinct, one seemed to complain about a minor discomfort, like a sock too tight, a jacket too warm. There was the tired cry, fussy, drawn out, telling me she was ready to take a nap. Then there was a more relentless cry that seemed to signal hunger. Nothing a bottle couldn’t fix. And then, at about three months old, another cry emerged. An abrupt cry, a cry that seemed to signal pain, as if stuck with a needle, a cry that made my heart pound in my chest, tuning out everything else. All that remained was her wailing and my pounding heart. And she suddenly shunned containment, something that had calmed her before, and protested every time I swaddled her. It seemed as if there were wires inside of her every time I wrapped her in a blanket; fists clenched, back arched, muscles tensed, limbs stiffened.

  Need to make a fussy baby feel safe? How about the age old tradition of mimicking the condition in the mother’s womb? All you need is a blanket and a clever foldi
ng technique.

  Her abrupt cry was not a mere request, but an urgent demand to fix whatever bothered her. Mia put more energy into her demands, cried more loudly, fed more voraciously, and protested more forcefully. If I didn’t respond to her needs immediately, she’d fall apart, come undone.

  She seemed to feel deeply, and therefore she reacted with fierce power when her needs were being ignored. I went into overdrive to respond immediately and I became obsessive in trying to prevent her from getting upset. She extracted every bit of energy from me, and I willingly complied, but still, she wanted more.

  I gave her all I had, yet something had gone amiss, had gone awry. I was somehow removed from the person who had entered the hospital and emerged with a baby in her arms, as if I had left one person behind and had returned home another. I woke up just as tired as I had gone to sleep and blamed it on not getting enough rest. Every waking hour was a never-ending stretch of time with the volume turned up. Chunks of sleep broken up into pieces that left me exhausted. Every day posed a new nightmare; not waking up when Mia is in distress. Jack too busy to help on the weekend. The pediatrician administering the wrong vaccine. I will feed her too often or not enough. Even though I went on with my life, took care of Mia, sang to her, gave her a bath, something felt horribly wrong. What had happened to the euphoric love I initially felt? Why wasn’t I happier? Who was this woman living inside of me?

  Every morning when I woke up, before reality closed in on me, after a peaceful second or two, a dank layer of sadness wrapped itself around me. I felt as if I was playing a role and never was that more apparent than when I met other moms at the park. They seemed more cheerful, happier and content to be mothers than I ever was or ever could be. And even so, I could have adopted their story as mine, could have pretended to be one of them. I decided to accept my lack of enthusiasm as a personal character flaw, and make up for it in other ways.

  One day during breastfeeding, Mia dozed off and unlatched. She had long unlocked her lips, but her tongue still made clicking sounds. I reached for my camera, snapped images of blue veins running across her eyelids, too small for even a thread to fit inside of them. There was a larger vein by her temple, like a widening channel of a river nearing the sea, its currents waiting to be met by the tides.

  My camera, small enough to operate with one hand, turned into my new obsession. I photographed Mia from every possible angle, perspectives of feet, toes tucked under, spread apart, soft tiny nails, bending easily, and elfin hands grasping small objects. My lips seemed to sink into her, her limbs were malleable and soft, yet the core of her body remained inaccessible to me. I attempted to capture the part of our relationship that remained inadequate, and though our bodies connected - ears folded like rose petals moving up and down as she drank from my breast, pink lips curling around the nipple – we remained strangers.

  I took close-ups of breast milk running down her cheek, towards her ear, as if the amount of milk had just fallen short of reaching its intended destination. I took shots of my engorged breasts, drops of nourishment trailing from my cracked and sore nipples.

  The camera flash irritated her, sent her into a frenzy, up a notch from her usual agitated state. She cried and wouldn’t stop as if my attempts to capture her likeness repulsed her somehow. I rocked her, allowed her head to rest on my chest. Nothing consoled her, not my songs, my gentle voice, not my nipple, nothing. She cried every single day and nothing I ever did soothed her.

  I sang to her, Sleep, baby, sleep, your father tends the sheep, your mother shakes the dreamland tree, and from it fall sweet dreams for thee, Sleep, baby, sleep.

  In what twisted universe is a mother incapable of consoling her own child? How it must feel to live in this tiny helpless body with such obvious discomfort and your mother just looks on, incapable of easing the suffering, inept to give you what you need. It was undeniably my fault. My way of making up for my shortcoming as a less than mediocre mother was by going from doctor to doctor and the same diagnosis was thrown at me as if I ought to know what to do with it: Colic. Otherwise healthy. Cause unknown. No obvious reason.

  While her constant state of crying seemed acceptable, Jack became increasingly worried about the bills and out-of-network doctors; ‘Colic,’ he said. ‘They all told you the same thing. A lot of babies are colicky. It’ll be gone before we know it.’

  Jack’s objections were logical to say the least; after all he seemed so natural, capable of bouncing her on his knee as he studied case files, putting her to sleep within minutes, never a single sound of fury directed towards him. But his logic fell on deaf ears.

  ‘I want to take her to another hospital. Maybe there are some more tests they can do? If I can’t get a referral, we’ll have to pay out of pocket.’

  I saw pity in his eyes but at the mention of money Jack stiffened. Ever so slightly, but I saw it. The way his spine straightened, his eyes narrowed. I was afraid to mention that my credit cards were maxed out.

  ‘Give it another month or two,’ he added on his way out the door, ‘she’ll be fine.’

  I nodded, even more exhausted than I had been minutes earlier, as if that were even possible. Two months, that was 60 days and 60 nights.

  ‘You know you’re nuts, don’t you?’ Jack said and slammed the door shut.

  One morning, a Saturday, too early to get up and too late to fall back asleep, I reached beside me and found Jack’s side of the bed abandoned.

  I heard a voice that almost made me panic, a high-pitched babble voice unknown to me. I got up and went to Mia’s room. There was Jack, holding Mia, a five-month-old grouchy bundle of anxieties with fingers moving around like an orchestra conductor, under her armpits.

  ‘Why won’t you sleep?’ Jack said.

  Then he switched over to a whiney, high-pitched voice. I don’t want to. I want to be awake so I can look around.

  ‘How come you can talk?’ Jack pretended to be confused.

  I can do anything, daddy. Jack, mimicking a conversation, impersonating Mia, switching from his regular tone to a squeaky voice.

  ‘Why won’t you settle down, little girl? Something on your mind?’ Jack’s facial expression was sheer concern.

  Mia’s arms were flailing, her legs kicking.

  Nothing wrong with me, daddy.

  ‘I know there’s nothing wrong with you. You’ve been fed, you’ve been changed, you’ve been burped. No need to be fussy.’ Jack then rocked her gently in the cradle of his arm, the crook of his elbow a perfect fit. ‘There you go, princess, that’s better isn’t it?’

  Much better, daddy.

  ‘Just relax, go back to sleep. Mommy doesn’t like it when you cry so much.’

  I’d go one, sometimes two days without closing my eyes. When I did sleep, I crashed. Hard and deep. And I always woke up with a start. I went from comatose to alert, as if someone had grabbed my shoulder and shaken me awake.

  Life was a blur, the bottles, the diapers, the crying. Zombie-like, I shopped for baby clothes, loaded the cart, walked the aisles, and bought multiples of everything: booties, outfits, socks. I purchased everything that promised relief from her crying; rosemary-scented satchels, calming lotion, and alarm clocks with waterfall recordings, white noise boxes, and a bear with recorded womb sounds. Regardless of how much I purchased, I never felt as if I could give her what she needed. I could buy entire stores and yet my attempts didn’t amount to anything. Because deep down inside I was a fake.

  One day, with another collection of bags in hand, I went home. Jack was in his office, talking on the phone, holding Mia in his arms. She looked peaceful and calm, her face relaxed, her lips loose. The moment I reached for her, her face tensed, her lips curled downward as if to say how dare you approach me. I immediately let go of her as if my fingers had touched hot stone.

  ‘Every time I pick her up, she cries. She hates me. What am I doing wrong? It’s me, Jack, it’s all me. I’m the one who is to blame. You are everything to her while I might as well be her nanny
.’

  ‘How do you come up with that kind of stuff?’

  ‘But she cries when I hold her. I must be doing something wrong.’

  ‘You’re not doing anything wrong. Relax, she’s just a baby,’ Jack said.

  I told Jack that I constantly worried; of someone hurting her, her suffocating on a pillow or blanket, choking on something. Jack told me to stop imagining the worst.

  ‘Don’t overthink everything,’ he said, ‘and don’t be so tense all the time,’ as if taking it in strides was going to make it better. In his world, everything was fine. In his world, children didn’t die of SIDS, didn’t choke on marbles, didn’t succumb to high fevers, didn’t suffocate on their vomit. Didn’t have mysterious illnesses that went undiagnosed until it was too late.

  There was this animal inside of me, created while she was in my womb, born on the same day Mia was born. At first, it had quivered ever so slightly, then it stirred, agitated at times, but I was able to pacify it by keeping watch. Lately it scrambled and thrashed and I was powerless. I went there. I went there all the time and then I stayed there. The thought of impending doom loomed over me, tethered like a wild animal with a rope, making it impossible for me to get away. And nothing could convince me otherwise. I didn’t want to hold her because as long as she was in Jack’s arms she was his responsibility, as if I could pass my duty like a baton on to him. On his watch, she’d be fine.