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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

one day i’m gathering red clay for autoquiltography two, the next day i’m enduring a police search that spanned hours, days, eons. my daughter - my beautiful, talented, intelligent, messy daughter was missing.

someone slipped a date rape drug into her drink, and the next thing she knew it was around 2 a.m. she called us. her dad answered. speaking very, very quietly, she asked, “dad, are you okay?”

“yes, i’m fine.”

“are you sure you’re okay?” she asked again.

“yes, i’m sure i’m fine.”

he hung up and crawled back in bed. “what was that about?” i asked.

“oh, she was just having a bad dream, i guess. she said i’d just called her to say i wasn’t feeling well.”

the phone rang again, and she explained that the first call was a ploy to get her out, away. she told them that her girlfriend had just called saying she wasn’t well. told them she needed to go outside to see if she could get better cell phone reception.

“where are you?” her dad asked.

“i don’t know,” she said. “i’m walking along a 2-lane road. it’s dark. i think i’m in coweta county, but i don’t know. i’ve been in a house that wasn’t really a house because it had no roof.”

and then we lost the connection - maybe because of cell phone coverage, maybe because of something we were not willing to name. we dressed and numbly headed out, first going by her house just in case the dream theory had been accurate.

it wasn’t.

we drove in the direction of where she thought she might be, but quickly realized that we’d be looking for a needle without even knowing where the haystack was, so we went to the police department. the search in the neighboring county was just beginning as we got there. moxie had, it turns out, tried to flag down a car as she talked to her dad the second time. the car didn’t stop, but the driver did call the local police who drove to the area in search of.

meanwhile, moxie heard something that made her think they were coming back after her. dropping her shoes, purse, and phone, she dashed into the nearby woods where she spent the next 6-8 hours laying on the ground covered with pinestraw to avoid detection. it was dark - country dark. there were no houses, no street lights, clouds between her and the moon.

back at the police department, we asked if the cell phone company couldn’t ping her phone to give us further information about her location. (we watch a lot of law and order.) tmobile held up the search for almost 45 minutes, but they eventually pinged her phone and the search shifted to another location. to have something to do, hubbie and i called her phone repeatedly in hopes that the ring wasn’t turned off, and knowing that even if it was on quiet mode, the screen lights up to indicate an incoming call. eventually we came home and hubbie continued to dial her number from here while i came back to the computer and - winning the argument with my self that asked what could they possibly do and why bother them - emailed 3 close friends, asking them to hug me, hug her, hug us. i called my son/her brother who is across the country from us. called him not because there was a single thing he could do, but because i promised him that no matter how far away he roams, he will never, ever be left out of the loop.

the police called: pinging indicated movement, the search was shifting again.

her cell phone now rang right into voice mail, indicating her battery was dead or the phone had been turned off. i didn’t know which i would rather be the case.

i got sleepy - a good sign. a welcomed sign. for all my life, whenever there’s any type of crises or emergency, if i get sleepy, it’s a sign to me that everything is going to be all right. it’s a signal from my body that has never failed me, i hoped the string of signal accuracy would remain intact.

i showered. washed my hair. changed clothes. waited.

finally, eventually, came a call that she had been found. stay tuned, they said. we’ll let you know where you can pick her up. then, about 30 minutes later, came the call saying what i’d been crafting in my head all night: “she’s here. come get her.”

she was scratched from head to toe. bruised. scraped. bitten. but she was alive and in our arms.

we left the police department and, at her request, headed right back out to where she thought she had been held, pulled over to the side of the road, and walked the edge of the woods in search of her pocketbook, shoes, and phone. seeing how unpopulated the area is, seeing how close the woods are to the road, imagining her terror, we searched in silence. finding nothing, we called off our search and headed home, listing all the things that would need to be done, all the calls that would have to be made, following the loss of her pocketbook and phone. it was the only way we could bring order to this chaos. it was something we were in control of.

bringing her to our house. i helped her wash off the grime and pick the bits of nature from her hair and dab salve on her scrapes and cuts and scratches while hubbie went back out to search the area by himself, and this time, he was successful. he found everything. . . including massive beds of poison ivy in the vicinity of where she dropped everything and ran into the woods.

despite our best efforts at prevention, last night the poison ivy erupted angrily all over her body. we dabbed on every over-the-counter remedy available, but none could match - let alone counter - the fierceness of the outburst, so this morning she went to the local doctor in search of something stronger. and though she received an injection of cortisone (that now seems to be taking effect), she was also treated in a way that made her feel humiliated and victimized again by someone who is obviously not fluent in or a graduate of sensitivity training.

but that, too, is behind us. now no more than a thread woven into this cloth of a story. a story i share not with moxie’s permission - because i didn’t ask - but with her what’s the word . . . something approaching encouragement. (brain is doing it again: closing the gate, saying that’s enough for now.) she feels that remaining silent gives away her power. and she knows that it takes so much more energy to manufacture something to explain her recent withdrawal and appearance - energy that she’d rather invest elsewhere.

we both slept this afternoon for the first time since wednesday night: and it felt good. a rich, deep sleep. like we’d fallen off the edge of the universe, free-floating in darkness where nobody could reach us. at least for a while.

yesterday afternoon, she remembered one little morsel that sent her into another chapter of post-trauma, and as we came face-to-face, as we could no longer close our eyes to the enormity of what might have happened, we went nothing short of catatonic.

but she’s here. and we will (eventually) be okay, getting back to the new normal.

whatever that is.

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