they told me, that justice is slow but inevitable.
But now, it’s been two decades, more than half my life. I’ve stopped believing that the man who took me will ever be caught. In a way, I’ve stopped believing in the police altogether. So this is my story now, the way it always should have been.
Here are some things you don’t know: the type of mask he wore, his clothes, the words we spoke. I know these things matter to you. Reporters have been asking me about them for years. But here’s what matters to me: what I did to make myself vulnerable; what I did in that basement to survive; what I still want to say to the girl who saw the man who took me.
Because, yes, there was such a girl. I know the police have told you there weren’t any witnesses. But there was one. She was ten, maybe eleven years old.
When the police came to question me, I begged them to find her, search every house in America if that’s what it took. She knew what happened. She saw a feature of the man that I never did. But they returned a few days later shaking their heads. They claimed there was no one who’d come forward fitting the description I gave them.
Not long after, I began seeing a therapist, who ended our first session by suggesting that I had imagined the girl, that I’d invented her as a way to cope with the trauma, a way to find some hope to hold on to while I endured my basement nightmare.
When I pleaded with my parents to take me seriously, to help me look for her, to help me get the answers that only she could provide, they stared at me, a skeptical sadness in their eyes that still hurts to remember.
The police wouldn’t let me talk about her. “If she’s real,” they said, “it could jeopardize the investigation to let this go public. Think of all the crazies who would crawl out of the woodwork, claiming this girl is their daughter.”
I didn’t buy their reasons. If she’s real told me everything I needed to know.
But she was there. I’d bet my life on it. My future children’s lives.
She was not a coping strategy. She was not a dream. She was real: the girl who saw everything but never said a word.
Only sometimes, in my darkest hours, do I momentarily doubt this. Only sometimes, for a sliver of a second, do I think she might have been someone else the whole time—me. A ghost of my former self. A girl I still believed should be spared.
two
In the daylight, things are different. They always are.
Now that it’s morning, I’m less convinced that the dream was really a memory, that it wasn’t just the news story laid like a transparency over my usual nightmare, fanning the flames of my anxieties. I don’t even tell Eric about it when I say good-bye to him, hugging him especially tightly before he leaves for the hospital. I already know how it will sound. I can picture him struggling to think of a word that’s one step up from spiraling.
Even so, it’s like I’ve walked into a spiderweb I can’t wipe off, the silk of that dream sticking to my skin. As soon as Eric’s gone, I curl up on the couch, stare at my suitcase by the door, allow Astrid’s face and bent body and outstretched arms to muddle the space between me and the way back home to Cedar.
Sinking deeper into the cushions, I want to dismiss my thoughts as absurd. I want to believe that I can shrug them off to Dr. Lockwood at my next appointment. But my heart bangs in my chest, and suddenly I can’t stop thinking about one of my students—Jackson Price—the day his little sister was taken.
The two of them had been walking home from school together when Jackson heard a loud noise—“a gigantic explosion,” he claimed. He fell to the ground at the sound, and when he got back up, his sister was gone. Vanished. As if the noise had triggered her evaporation.
That’s the way he tells it, anyway. What really happened was that the kids’ ex-stepfather had jumped out from between two buildings and snatched the little girl. Jackson never remembered seeing him. He only remembered a thunderous noise, powerful and loud enough to bring him to his knees.
I didn’t need the police report to tell me there wasn’t an explosion. When I