Page 107 of Since She's Been Gone

“What name does she go by now?” I say.

“Sally Beans,” he says.

I open the office door. Mom’s bracelet catches on the knob, but I don’t stop. I run out of Billy’s house as fast as I can.

CHAPTER56

Day Six

IDRIVE TONORTHERNCalifornia on the I-5, the ugly way, which is the fastest way. The way that gets you there in roughly seven hours if you don’t stop. And I don’t.

The drive is straight and flat, except for the twenty-minute stretch of the “Grapevine.” Cows, smog, and faded Larry Elder for Governor signs are the only views during daytime hours, but it’s night.

I focus on the road ahead. Every mile I clock is one mile closer to seeing my mom. My precious mom. The person that loved me the most on the planet, who I’m going to save before this criminal family takes her down. This time, I’ll hug her so tightly that I’ll never let her go.

After seven hours, I finally reach the San Geronimo Valley and continue heading north until I arrive at Lucia Beach. It’s Sunday morning.

I pull over and quickly Google the local senior recreation center. If she taught psychology at the center in the other town where Billy got them to let her go, there’s a good chance she got a job doing the same thing here.

I keep driving until I reach a small one-story building perched on a foggy hill surrounded by large trees. I park in front and step inside. A group of seniors is playing Scrabble in the main hall.

I walk up to the information desk, and a young woman greets me with a warm smile, freckles covering her nose and cheeks, and a name tag on her shirt withMandihandwritten.

“Are you here to pick up one of your parents?” she asks.

YES!I want to shout.

“Not exactly,” I say. “I’m wondering if you offer any psychology classes here.”

“We did, but funny enough, the teacher just quit. She said she had a family emergency. We’re hoping to find someone to replace her.”

The tears start flowing. I haven’t slept since I returned from New York. I don’t remember the last time I ate since I was discharged from the hospital.

I sit on a beige metal fold-up chair next to the information desk and weep. Weep for every hole left inside of me since Mom was forced to disappear from life when I was fifteen.

“Are you okay?” Mandi asks me.

“No,” I say. “I’m trying to find my mom, and I think she might’ve been teaching a psychology class here, but she’s gone.”

“Oh, you’re her daughter?” she says. “She might still be here. She just left a minute ago through the back.” Mandi points to a door in the back of the center. “A man came to speak with her, and then she packed up quickly—”

I don’t wait for Mandi to finish. I run down the hall and swing open the door to a gravel road. But I don’t see Mom.

I watch from behind as an elderly woman with a short gray bob that probably just finished a round of Scrabble is about to get in her car.

But when the woman opens the driver’s side to step inside, our eyes meet.

It’s her.

She stops and drops all the papers in her arms onto the white rocks below. Her curly brown hair is gone. She has aged in the decades since I last saw her, with wrinkles and sunspots, but then she smiles at me. And I’m transported back to a time when I was a young girl, and I’d come home after school and tell her all about my life.

“Beans?” she says.

I’m unable to speak, frozen, unsure if this is really happening because it doesn’t feel real.

She runs toward me and hugs me, and that’s when I know: This is real. Her love envelops me like a superpower. A superpower that had always made me believe I could do or be anything in this world. Something I thought I’d never experience again in my lifetime. I hug her back tightly and don’t let go.

“My little Beans,” she says, a sudden sob escaping her.

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