30.
That little girl was all grown up. Her name was now Emma Griffin, and she had married a man up in Alaska. She was gay but
had never come out, which plays a role in this story. Her secret lover was another teacher in their small, overheated school.
Her lover’s name was Patricia Rosner.
Patricia was curled up in a hotel bed. Both of them were attending a teachers’ conference. It was taking place this year in
hot, humid Savannah, because it was so cheap in summer, and the two of them had just finished making sweaty, slippery love.
Now Patricia was reading the local paper while drinking coffee. Her hair lay wetly at the back of her skull.
“Hey. Isn’t this guy from your hometown?” she asked. She handed over the folded paper.
The article was at the bottom of the first page.
“Oregon Man Set for Execution.”
Emma began to read it, and at the mention of Chinook, all the memories came back. The poorhouse, the green river.
She had kept that doll all these years. Now she was tucked away in the top drawer of her dresser. Even her husband knew not
to touch the Momma doll.
Mitchell Brown had been convicted for murdering a woman and making her disappear. She had not known.
“Are you all right?” asked her lover.
Emma remembered how her mother had run off. Then she thought of how Mitchell’s mom had run off, too, a few years before hers. It had been the town gossip, briefly.
“No,” she answered.
“Did you know him?”
“Mitchell?” She looked evasive. “My dad—you know.”
Patricia knew. She was the one Emma told everything, including how, when she was eighteen, under her pressing, her dad had
finally said her mother had left him after threatening divorce. In college, Emma had made some efforts to find her mom, but
all leads were dead ends.
Patricia scooched over to put her head in her lover’s lap. She stroked her thigh. They entwined fingers.
“What is it, honey?”
“Maybe my mother didn’t run away,” Emma said.
She had never said it before, not even to herself.
“This Mitchell guy was a little kid when she went—”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Oh, Emma.”
“I never really believed my dad. I mean, how many moms just disappear and never contact their kids again?”
“Did he ever file a report?”
Emma was ashamed to admit that she did not know.
“He was so angry with her for leaving. I just . . . accepted whatever he said. Then later, I had no idea how to find her.
I thought maybe she didn’t want me to find her.”
“You could file a report now.”
“Now?”
“Why not?”
The hotel phone, bland and beige, beckoned.
Patricia stretched, all pink and white, and Emma appreciated her physical form in that moment—the tenderness of flesh—but more than that, she appreciated the steel in her lover’s eyes.
People, she thought, are delicate machines. You never know when we might end.
Or begin.
She made the call.