then, a skinny foot appeared against the carpet, a patch of pink polish clinging to the big toenail, and Jane let out her breath. It was only Julie. She’d crouched over her toes perfecting the pink for an hour before her birthday party, but by the middle of the summer, most of it had scraped off on the rough white bottom of the backyard pool, leaving only these little triangles around the edges. So Jane had been wrong about the fingers, seeing things again, like the spiders in the shadows. Sure enough, here came Julie, moving into the frame with her ordinary Mickey Mouse nightshirt flapping around her ordinary knees, heading toward the staircase by Jane’s room, probably just going down for a midnight snack. Jane’s matching Donald Duck nightshirt was in a brown bag waiting to be taken to Goodwill; she’d already outgrown it. Her mom said she’d be taller than Julie someday. Jane hugged her pajama’d knees in relief.
But the fingers were back, this time perched on Julie’s shoulder, clutching at the fabric of her nightshirt, her long blond hair trapped between their knobby knuckles. Jane barely had time to notice Julie’s stiff, straight posture, like that of a wide-eyed puppet, before she saw the tall man following close behind her. Julie and the strange man moved together in slow motion, as if his long arm and hairy hand were a chain binding them together.
Wake up, wake up, wake up, Jane told herself, but nothing happened. Everything was frozen, including her, like in a dream; only Julie and the man kept moving. Slow, but faster than frozen; slow, but they were almost to her room. Janie opened her mouth to scream.
Then Julie saw her.
Jane’s scream slid back down into her stomach as Julie stared straight into her closet hiding place. Jane stared back, begging Julie to tell her what to do next, readying herself to obey, to yell or cry or maybe even laugh if it was all a joke. Surely Julie wouldn’t leave her alone in this bad dream. If Julie would just tell her what to do, Jane promised silently, she would listen to her and never complain from now on.
Without moving her head, Julie lifted her eyebrows and glanced meaningfully toward the man behind her, then back to Jane, as if telling her to take a good look, but Jane didn’t want to; she kept her eyes trained on Julie instead. Girl and man turned on the landing without pausing at her door, and Jane saw why Julie was walking so stiffly: the man held the tip of a long, sharp knife to her back. Jane felt a nasty sting like a bug bite between her own shoulder blades, and her eyes filled up with tears.
They were poised at the top of the stairs when a loud tick sounded from the attic. Jane knew it was only the house settling, but the man stopped and looked over his shoulder nervously. In the split second before he looked back, Julie, as if freed from a spell, turned her head to Jane, raised her left index finger to her lips, and formed them into a silent O.
Shhh.
Jane obeyed. Julie started down the stairs, followed by the man with the knife.
And that, according to the only witness, is the story of how I lost my daughter — both my daughters, everything, everything — in a single night.
Julie’s been gone for eight years, but she’s been dead much longer — centuries — when I step outside into the steaming air on my way to teach my last class of the spring semester. The middle of May is as hot as human breath in Houston. Before I’ve even locked the door behind me, a damp friction starts up between my skin and clothes; five more paces to the garage, and every hidden place slickens. By the time I get to the car, the crooks of my knuckles are sweating up the plastic sides of the insulated travel cup, and my grip slips as I climb into the SUV, throwing oily beads of black coffee onto the lid. A few on my hand, too, but I let them burn and turn on the air conditioning.
Summer comes a little earlier every year.
I back the car out past the driveway security gate we installed after it was too late, thread through the neighborhood to the feeder road, and then merge onto I-10, where concrete climbs the sky in massive on-ramps like the ribbed tails of dinosaurs. By 8:00 a.m., the clogged-artery-and-triple-bypassed heart of rush hour, I am pushing my way into fourteen lanes of gridlock, a landscape of flashing hoods and red taillights winking feebly in the dingy morning.
I need to see over the cars, so the gas-saving Prius sits in the garage while I drive Tom’s hulking black Range Rover — it’s not as if he’s using it — down three different freeways to the university and back every day. Crawling along at a snail’s pace, I can forget about the other commuters and focus on the chipped letters mounted on the concrete awnings of strip malls: BIG BOY DOLLAR STORE, CARTRIDGE WORLD, L-A HAIR. The neon-pink grin of a Mexican restaurant, the yellow-and-blue behemoth of an IKEA rearing up behind the toll road, the jaundiced brick of apartment complexes barely shielded from the freeway by straggling rows of crape myrtles — everything reminds me that the worst has already happened. I need them like my mother needed her rosary. Hail, Mister Carwash, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Pray for us, O Qwik-Fast Printing. Our Lady of Self-Storage, to thee do we send up our sighs.
Even Julie’s billboards are gone. There used to be one right here, at the intersection of I-10 and Loop 610, by the senior-living tower wedged between First Baptist and a concrete flyover, but the trustees decided the billboards should come down five years ago. Or has it been longer? I believe it was due to the expense, though I never had any idea how much they were costing — the Julie Fund was Tom’s territory. These days, the giant, tooth-whitened smile of a megachurch pastor beams down from the billboard next to the words FAITH EVERY DAY, NOT EVERYDAY FAITH. I wonder if they papered him right over her face or if they tore her off in strips first. Ridiculous thought; the billboard’s advertised a lot of things since then. Dentists, vasectomy reversals.
A line of Wordsworth from today’s lesson plan rattles through my head like a bad joke: Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
I flip my blinker and merge onto the loop. Despite all the time I’ve spent reading and studying Wordsworth’s poetry — despite the fact that I am going to teach it in a few hours to a class full of impressionable young students and plan to continue teaching it as long as my university allows me to cling to my position without publication, committee work, or any effort besides the not-insubstantial difficulty I have getting out of bed every morning to face a world where the worst thing has already happened and somehow I’m still alive — I don’t believe in the glory and the dream. I believe in statistics.
The statistics say that most abducted children are taken by people they know; Julie was taken by a stranger. The statistics say that most child abductors attempt to lure their victims into a vehicle; Julie was taken from her own bedroom at knifepoint in the middle of the night while my other daughter, Jane, watched from a closet. And finally, the statistics say that three-quarters of abducted children who are murdered are dead within the first three hours of being taken. Three hours is just about how long we think Jane sat in her closet, rigid with fear, before rousing Tom and me with panicked crying.
By the time we knew Julie was gone, her fate was sealed.
The inevitability of it has spread like an infection or the smell of gasoline. To make myself know that Julie is dead, I tell myself she always was — before she was born, before I was born. Before Wordsworth was born. Passing the pines of Memorial Park, I picture her staring upward with sightless eyes under a blanket of reddish-gold needles. Driving by Crestview Apartments, I see her buried in the azalea bed. The strip mall with the SunRay Nail Salon and Spa yields visions of the dumpster behind the SunRay Nail Salon and Spa. That’s my visionary gleam.
I used to want the world for Julie. Now I just want something to bury.
My class — the last before summer break — passes in a blur. I could teach Wordsworth in my sleep, and although I’m not sleeping now, I am dreaming. I see the crystal blue of the pool, shining like a plastic gem, surrounded by a freshly sanded deck under the tall, spindly pines. The girls were so excited about the pool, and I remember asking Tom, the accountant, whether we could afford it. The Energy Corridor District, with its surplus of Starbucks and neighborhood country clubs, wasn’t