When the officer asked me how long she’d been missing, I swallowed the lump of nerves in my throat and said, “Thirty hours.”
He started to write the number down, then stopped. “It took you thirty hours to realize your daughter was missing?”
I shook my head. “I noticed she was missing when I woke up yesterday morning, but I know you have to wait 24 hours to file a missing persons report.”
“Ma’am, that’s a lie. It’s vitally important that you report these incidents as soon as possible, okay? Every hour that passes makes it that much less likely we’ll ever find your daughter.”
Anxiety clawed from my stomach back into my throat, prompting me to swallow again. Tears nipped at the corner of my eyes, my hands wrung themselves into a knot, all the warmth in my body slipped away. “I… I didn’t know… that.”
He gave me a hard, scrutinizing look, then chalked me up as one more victim of poorly-written crime shows and asked some other questions.
Ever since she was born premature, Mary had been a constant source of worrying for me. She developed too slowly, had difficulty with object permanence, found balancing nearly impossible. Her physical problems ironed themselves out with the help of frequent trips to the pediatrician’s office, making her relatively normal by the age of two, but new problems cropped up.
She liked to pull hair, strings, chains, anything that appeared to be connected to something. Especially important or sensitive things. She liked to lie—if I asked her why she kept pulling the dog’s tail, she’d throw her hands up(or hand, if one was busy holding the tail) and say, “No I not!”
Time-outs didn’t work. Scoldings didn’t work. Holding her close, explaining what was wrong, taking away toys, none of that worked. My father took her upstate for a weekend and came back with a bite mark on his hand, admitting to spanking her. Not for the bite, which had come after the spanking, but for talking back. Somewhere, somehow, she’d learned the words “asshole” and “die”, even though I thought I’d done my best to minimize exposure to coarse language.
Finally, I thought I’d found a method that worked: I told her to take a walk around the house after she broke a glass on purpose, saying to think about what she did, and for whatever reason she decided to obey. She walked from the kitchen to her bedroom to the living room to the kitchen again, over and over until she started to sniffle. I stopped her around the sixth lap and offered to put on cartoons.
Her casual, though not abnormal, cruelty lessened after that. Only a little, but it was noticeable progress, and that was enough to calm her father and me down.
Then, when she’d smacked her brother five-year-old Peter so hard he cried, she took a walk around the perimeter of the house without being asked. Within seconds, I was on her tail, red in the face, ready to lock her in her room for the next fifteen years out of an irrational parental panic.
She stopped when my shadow overtook hers, and I started talking. She wasn’t listening to me, though.
She’d noticed a bird’s nest tucked near a vent, three peeping bodies waiting for their mother. I didn’t figure out what they were until she’d popped one’s head off between her little sausage fingers.
I gave her a bath while her father made calls, trying to get an appointment with a child psychologist. I told her what she did was very, very bad and she needed to be nicer to animals, especially itty-bitty ones.
“How would you like it if someone tried to hurt you?” I said, a thin film of discipline over the well of disgust inside me.
She shrugged. Mary enjoyed shrugging, staring right at you with big empty eyes.
Those next months blurred into years, my husband, Peter, and I all struggling against the chaos that was Mary. Her new therapist explained violence was somewhat normal at this age, but her resistance towards healthy discipline wasn’t. She was tested for all kinds of disorders, ranging from ADHD to PTSD to reactive attachment disorder, and while her results never came up looking like a normal child’s, they were never conclusive as to what was going on in her mind. Soon the questions were pointed at my husband and I, then at Peter in case we were lying.
We found a psychiatrist willing to prescribe psychiatric medication to a four-year-old. The only substance with any effect was Adderall, which made her ability to hunt for bird nests a little more efficient. We then found a less trustworthy psychiatrist willing to prescribe tranquilizers to a five-year-old. We hoped that if she could just calm down a little bit, we could get something through to her. Or at least go a day without seeing blood on her face.
My sister threatened to call CPS over that when she found out. We stopped. It’s not as if the tranqs were helping; we deluded ourselves into thinking they did when she seemed less inclined to violence, but now I attribute that more to the lack of stimulants in her system.
Then, two days ago, she menaced Peter with a pair of scissors she’d stolen from her teacher’s desk—the first graders weren’t allowed to have normal scissors. She didn’t draw blood, didn’t even make contact with his skin, but it was too much. I asked her why she’d do that and she shrugged, looking at me with her empty brown eyes. It was like she wasn’t even human.
I told her to go take a long, long walk.
The officer ended his line of questioning after some amount of time I couldn’t guess. My mind was spinning, exhausted and terrified yet secretly, quietly, relieved. “We’ll do everything we can, ma’am.”
“Thank you,” I mumbled, and left the station in a daze, barely managing to open the passenger side door and take a seat next to my husband.
“Do they need to talk to me?”
“They have your number. He said they’ll call if they need to.”
We drove home, silent. There was nothing else to say.
It’s possible that I didn’t try hard enough as a mother, that I was neglectful and had somehow allowed some more nefarious abuse to slip into her life. The mere fact that my father thought it was okay to spank her was good evidence she may have been reacting to something happening I didn’t know about.
But if that were the case, it was something she refused to say even to her therapists, her brother, her aunts and uncles. There was no amount of questioning people felt was too much when dealing with her, and she answered every question, sometimes with lies, sometimes with uncomfortable honesty. Nothing to indicate trauma aside from her behavior.
And honestly, I loved Mary. I had gone through so much pain and suffering, put my husband and son through that same suffering, all while clinging to the smallest hope that someday she could be healthy and happy and friendly. I would’ve let her kill the dog if it’d meant she’d learn what it meant to hurt someone.
Peter, however, was on track to become a wonderful person in spite of his sister, and at that moment she seemed to choose him as a sacrifice.
While she walked, I came up with a plan.
I told my husband, and we cried in each other’s arms, out of mourning and relief. That what we’d never been able to admit to each other was finally in the open.
Neither of us had the strength to hurt her directly. While she slept, we put her inside of a sleeping bag, drove to a secluded riverbank, and took deep shuddering breaths as we heaved it back and forth in our arms.
It was the only way we could make sure Peter would be safe.
Of course, this decision has its own drawbacks. I’ll never be able to stop thinking about what I’d done wrong, how I could’ve stopped this, how I let myself consider hurting my own flesh and blood. Peter will grow up having to wonder if his own parents are capable of the most heinous act, and he might be subjected to a complete media circus if they find evidence against us.
And now, as I type this at night, I’m coming to believe in vengeful spirits. I don’t know how else to explain the sound of a little fist knocking on the door.