When your daughter is missing three years, you think about burying an empty coffin. You need a place to visit that can continue holding the emptiness for you. You wonder if this makes you a bad mother. How you think about walking into her bedroom, still hers, and burning the old unmade black sheets which then catch the comforter long left on the floor. You are transfixed by the image of the curtains rolling up the wall in strips thick with flame, taking with it that dark botanical print of scarlet mawed, waxy-leaved flowers and ponderous long-necked egrets. You always thought those curtains were bad for a bedroom. Those blossoms are ravenous with snakes and things smaller and more sinister, things you cannot see but know are there, the way we have all placed a foot into a boot a second before a huntsman spider brushes spiny legs across your bare calf, the way we have all at least once tasted milk gone solid and sour, bit into a banana the too sweet sweet of a foul-smelling bruise. And whatever took your daughter was nowhere near as obvious a threat as the dark curtains.

Three years. Why three? You should ask this. Only you have not yet puzzled about the symbolism of the three. You have not thought anything beyond the first deep jab of a sharp edged shock. The librarian’s husband was not anyone remarkable. You forgot his face a minute after looking at the missing person’s flyer, feeling fraudulent and guilty when you must look back. He’s been missing now for a week. Three years ago less a week, you had known how many hours and minutes that totalled. You thought how profound it is to know the breadth of a thing by name. You did not understand yet how time keeps its own secrets, the small ones we all keep, like how you threw your wedding band into the river so you wouldn’t have to wear something that belonged to the dead. You did not know then how close death still cleaved to you, as noticeable as the pale indent engraved around your ring finger.

You have a new ring now. And a subtle paunch beneath your navel. Your arms can lift heavier boxes and duffel bags on hikes through the woods. When you notice yourself in a mirror, enough time has passed that you feel surprised by what you see. Less often though it still happens, you remember the old things you still nurse. You carry her absence with you in a world that is not the same world where you buy the groceries and de-ice the windshield and make picadillo so spicy your husband and other daughter sweat and you remember what it was like doing shrooms.

You would have said those worlds were parallel, two realities incompatible with one another in both trajectory and location. You need them to be separate. Which is why you do not know what to do when you glimpse the round forgettable face of Jeff Poninski, or as all the middle school mothers call him, Janie the librarian’s husband, his face under that familiar heading. Missing. He had always been sort of missing. He made only a perfunctory appearance in your emailed pleasantries with Janie, I hope this finds you well. How is your husband? You want to write to her now but don’t know what to say now the old script no longer fits.

To be continued…