Excerpt from "Shadows" by Alice P.

Olivia was self-righteous. Her face was severe and symmetrical, and it always looked like she was frowning slightly. Eyes dull and round, hair bright red and a painful reminder to me of her father, it amazes me that the only thing she inherited from me was my nose, tiny and flat with an air of ethnicity. In the fourteen years I had known her, the meanest I had ever seen her was when she sprinkled salt on the slugs that made their way into the damp corners of the basement because she loved to try to see shapes in the gooey puddles that formed around them.

Her drink of choice was water, at least four bottles a day, eight if she was in cross country season, and she was the only one of my children who ate their vegetables willingly. She was stubborn, but usually with good reason, her IQ a desirable 140 and her logic almost always impeccable. She was a dancer, a flutist, a history buff. My first instinct would be to say that her favorite color is purple, but thinking back, I used to be able to name her favorite colors in order, by heart: orange, green, yellow, the trademarks of spring.

I found a few lines of poetry on a scrap piece of paper in our junk drawer, and in her messy scrawl were a few glorious lines about home. I drank them in, I digested the words she spun so effortlessly, something I could never master. I must’ve stared at these lines of poetry for hours, trying to find meaning in the corners of the page, in the smudges left behind from the creases made by the clutter in the drawer, and I sat on the cold linoleum of my kitchen, wondering if this was my fault after all.

I can taste the salt in the air as I drive into town. I see children crabbing near the jetties at low tide, elderly men roasting under their umbrellas, even with coat upon coat of suntan lotion, couples padding barefoot up the sandy walk, gritty hands intertwined. I wondered if one of them could be her, if somehow Olivia could transform her fragile form and fair complexion into someone completely different, the blond toddler digging herself into an inescapable hole in the sand, the tanned man in the ice cream truck, the birds flying above the beach to the windsong to which they were attuned. I stop my car at the town store to buy the perfunctory items I would need to sustain myself for a week; milk, eggs, tampons, frozen foods, gum. I’ve been a nervous gum chewer ever since she disappeared, though I despised the rubbery inedible taste before.

I’m supposed to be here to clear my mind; my mother insisted that I get away from the home, try to enjoy myself, keep myself occupied. The truth is, she can’t deal with my grieving, and I can’t blame her. When my daughter was pronounced officially missing, I showed up at my mother’s door at three in the morning and didn’t talk for two days. She said I went straight to bed but didn’t eat or sleep. Pure shock, she told me, but I don’t believe her. I think that maybe, some part of me just wanted to pretend that I could disappear along with my daughter. On the third day of my intrusion I started baking. Even after donating most of the products of my compulsive baking, the house was still flooded with muffins, croissants, biscuits, cakes, bread, and my mother blockaded the oven before it collapsed from overuse. But I needed something to keep me occupied, so I started to clean. Floors, toilets, tables, before I moved onto the details—light bulbs, lampshades, grimy coins, and it amazed me that almost anything could be wiped clean of its scars.

When my mother grew tired of the mood changes and increasingly obsessive habits, she rented a cottage at the beach for me in New York and sent me off in her second car, and now here I am, unconsciously sobbing in the refrigerated foods aisle in the convenience store, receiving uncomfortable glances from surprised store goers. The man behind the counter presses my back with the pads of his fingertips and escorts me out, bagging my groceries for free and leading me to the passenger seat of my car. I was vaguely aware of him leaving me for a moment, telling his employees to cover the counter, before he came back and asked me where to drive. I point numbly to the street two houses down, and he drives by my silent direction without a word. Leading me inside with the same gentle hand as before, he settled me down on the couch in the sunroom, unpacking my groceries. When he comes back to the sunroom and sits down, I imagine he is Olivia, and she looks lovely in the light. Though it could be in my mind, I hear my voice saying her name, first calmly, then with a note of hysteria. She’s getting up, walking away from me, moving towards the phone, and I reach out to catch her hand and instead catch my head on the corner of the glass table. Her face, her name, her scent, they’re all in reach, and I cry out to my daughter, come back, but she can’t hear.