Chapter 58
I wore my hair like that for most of my childhood. Chin length with bangs. I never thought much about it. But seeing it in this photo, it strikes me how much it adds to the sense of innocence. I look like a porcelain doll.
Everyone else in the photo is an adult, and they are fussing around me.
I sit in the back of an ambulance, with a blanket wrapped around my small body.
My mother’s arms are around me. My father is talking with a police officer.
An EMT appears to be asking me a question.
Various others are off to the side, with expressions of worry and anger.
The article is titled “Lost New Jersey Girl Is Found Alive.”
I don’t want to believe it. For so many reasons, I don’t want to believe it.
My heart breaks for the little girl in the photo.
For the thought of her alone in the woods, for twenty-four hours.
I imagine my own unborn child, eight years from now, lost in the woods.
It’s almost too much to bear. I remember it now.
Just like all the other memories here at Wildwood.
It has surfaced, and now I can see disjointed images of it.
Following the woman, long, curling hair down her back, out the front door.
Of course, it wasn’t my cousin Anna; the woman was too tall.
Why hadn’t I realized that? I remember walking through the woods, the look of my small, pale feet on the forest floor.
I remember her saying, The woods are safer.
And, Come with me, it’s important. I remember coming to and finding Ezra’s normally stoic face close to mine.
His face was wrought with a mix of emotions that even now I can’t decipher.
I remember the look of relief on Mathilde’s face when she saw him carrying me, a look that was quickly replaced by ferocious anger when I told my tale.
And now I know, with dead certainty, that shortly after this photo was taken, these events transpired, that my family piled into the Oldsmobile and sped away from Wildwood, never to return again.
I sit on the bathroom floor a while longer, holding the article, staring off into nothing.
The memory, now so concrete in my mind, feels like one of those dead bodies found in the Hudson, weighted down with cement by mob bosses for years until something happens that snips the rope and the body bobs to the surface, dark secrets and all.
I’d once heard more than fifty bodies are discovered each year in the Hudson.
How many more memories are going to surface and shake me to the core?