You know the drill, read and review it's good to know you're out there! Enjoy.
Chapter Seven – Snatch Back
My mother hates the park.
Actually it's more of a morbid fear than a loathing. She pretends she hates it anyway. Hate is much easier to explain and justify than fear.
It seems more children, just like Abby Buckman, go missing from crowded playgrounds than anywhere else.
It appears the grandest of impossibilities, a sure fire way to get caught. There are always people everywhere, at least one pair of eyes that's bound to see something and yet no one seems to really see anything at all.
A hundred witnesses and not one clue.
Does that simply prove how self-absorbed people really are? That a child can literally disappear right under their noses and no one sees a thing.
Samantha Spade used to watch the news and blame the parents a long time ago. How could they be so careless to lose their own child? How could they turn their gaze away long enough for their child to vanish into thin air? She didn't understand at all until years later when she became the parent who by her own judgment had carelessly lost her own child.
My mother is dying as she works this case. Her composure so close to faltering.
The blonde haired, blue eyed little girl that stares down from the old whiteboard is too familiar for her liking and she's looking right at her, begging my mother to find her.
In a way every case tugs on a familiar heart string and it's my disappearance all over again no matter how different the circumstances actually are. But Abby Buckman's disappearance tugs a little harder than all the rest.
It's the visual likeness that scares my mother and strengthens her resolve to determine exactly what happened in that Central Park playground.
She feels haunted by the photo. It's all too similar to the one she recalls is buried deep in a box in the back of her bedroom cupboard. She'll find it later she decides and maybe, just maybe if her heart permits, make room for its silver frame on a table or a bookcase somewhere.
She does find the photo later. Much later, after Abby Buckman is reunited with her emotional parents and the necessary paperwork is filed.
It's just where my mother suspected, at the bottom of a box that has long since been neglected. Hidden under piles of clothes for fear of what emotions will be unleashed once it is opened.
It's Samantha Spade's Pandora's Box, with a lid at least for the time being, best left shut. The emotions will be released, to be faced one day in the not to distant future I can only hope. But today is not that day.
My mother needs that photo though, to remind herself of the differences between Abby Buckman and myself. She needs to reassure herself that she hasn't already forgotten.
It feels like a victory to me tonight.
A tiny celebration of such a seemingly insignificant step to an unknowing eye.
But in seven years there have been no photos. They were swept into a box before my mother moved to New York and have been there ever since. There have been no glances at that box that houses my entire life, or urges to delve into its various contents.
And I take my victories where I can.
The photo rests proudly on her nightstand tonight after tears are unleashed and just as quickly reigned in. The quickness of their fall into oblivion means nothing to me.
The tears were there. I recognized them. I counted each one. Accumulated them in my own heart as recognition of a triumph I'm not likely to forget.
I watch my mother while she sleeps. Smile at her from up above while a different, more naïve me, smiles at her from her nightstand. There are smiles all round tonight to keep the nightmares away.
She's taken the tiniest of steps today and it feels like the longest of miles.
For so long I existed in nothing more than dreams and memories.
And when you exist that way, what proof is there you've ever really been alive at all?
Tiny kisses are blown as they are each and every night.
And tonight a silent congratulation for a step we both needed her to take.
She did well today.