I start to reread my mother’s journals, but I can’t; it makes it hard to breathe. So I take out my stash of money, which is literally down to six individual dollar bills, and fold each of them into a tiny elephant. I have a herd marching across my desk.
Then I turn on my computer. I log on to the Nam Us website and click on the new cases.
There’s an eighteen-year-old boy who disappeared after dropping his mom off at work in Westminster, North Carolina. He drove a green Dodge Dart with the license plate 58U-7334. He had shoulder-length blond hair and fingernails filed into points.
A seventy-two-year-old female from West Hartford, Connecticut, who takes medicine for paranoid schizophrenia and who walked away from a group home after telling the staff she was going to audition for Cirque du Soleil. She had been wearing blue jeans and a sweatshirt with a picture of a cat on it.
A twenty-two-year-old girl from Ellendale, North Dakota, who left her house with an older unidentified male and never came back home.
I could click on these links all day long. And by the time I was done, there would be hundreds more. There are an endless number of people who have left a love-shaped hole in the heart of someone else. Eventually someone brave and stupid will come along and try to fill that hole. But it never works, and so instead, that selfless soul winds up with a gap in his heart, too. And so on. It’s a miracle that anyone survives, when so much of us is missing.
For just a moment, I let myself imagine what my life might have been like: my mother and my baby sister and I, cuddled under a blanket on the couch on a rainy Sunday, her arms around us, one on each side, as we watched a chick flick. My mother yelling at me to pick up my sweatshirt, because the living room is not my hamper. My mother doing my hair for my junior prom, while my sister pretends to put on mascara in the bathroom mirror. My mother taking too many pictures as I pin the boutonniere on my date, and me pretending to be annoyed but, in reality, being psyched that for her this moment is nearly as monumental as it is for me. My mother rubbing my back when that same boy breaks up with me a month later, telling me he was an idiot, because who couldn’t love a girl like me?
The door to my room opens, and my grandmother walks in. She sits on the bed. “I thought at first you didn’t realize how worried I could possibly have been, when you didn’t come home that first night. Or even try to get in touch with me.”
I look down at my lap, my face hot.
“But then I realized I was wrong. You could understand it perfectly, better than anyone else, because you know what it’s like to have someone disappear.”
“I went to Tennessee,” I confess.
“You went where?” she says. “How?”
“Bus,” I tell her. “I went to the sanctuary where all our elephants were sent.”
My grandmother’s hand flutters at her throat. “You traveled a thousand miles to go to a zoo?”
“It’s not a zoo, it’s like the anti-zoo,” I correct. “And yeah. I went because I was trying to find someone who knew my mother. I thought Gideon might be able to tell me what happened to her.”
“Gideon,” she repeats.
“They worked together,” I say. I do not say: They were having an affair.
“And?” my grandmother asks.
I nod, slowly pulling the scarf from around my neck. It’s so light that I imagine it would not even register on a scale: a cloud, a breath, a memory. “Grandma,” I whisper. “I think she’s dead.”
Until now, I hadn’t realized that words have sharp edges; that they can cut your tongue. I don’t think I could utter another sentence right now if I tried.
My grandmother reaches for the scarf, wrapping it around her hand like a bandage. “Yes,” she says. “I think so, too.”
Then she rips the scarf in half.
I cry out, I’m that shocked. “What are you doing?”
My grandmother scoops up the stack of my mother’s journals that are piled on my desk, too. “It’s for your own good, Jenna.”
Tears spring to my eyes. “Those are not yours.”
It hurts, seeing her with all that I have left of my mom. She’s ripping away my skin, and now I’m raw and exposed.
“They’re not yours, either,” my grandmother says. “This is not your research, and it’s not your history. Tennessee? This has gone too far. You need to start living your own life, instead of hers.”
“I hate you!” I scream.
But my grandmother is already on her way out the door. She pauses at the threshold. “You keep looking for your family, Jenna. But it’s always been right under your nose.”
When she leaves, I pick up the stapler on my desk and throw it at the door. Then I sit down, wiping my nose with the back of my hand. I start plotting how I will find that scarf, and sew it together. How I will steal back those journals.