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Prologue
My phone starts to ring as I open the door to walk into the store. It’s buried in the depths of my bag and is difficult to find. I shove aside a wallet and a cosmetic bag, knowing the search is likely futile. I will never get to it in time.
My fingers make contact on the third or fourth ring. I fish it out of the bag, but as soon as I do, the phone goes quiet. I’m too late. A missed call notification from Sienna appears on the screen. I’m taken aback. I physically stop in the open doorway and stare down at her number on the display. Doubt and confusion fill my thoughts, because it’s just after ten o’clock in the morning and Sienna is at school, or rather, she should be. Sienna texts from school sometimes, sneaking her phone when the teacher isn’t paying attention—Can I hang out with Gianna today? I lost my water bottle. Did u buy tampons? My stupid calculator won’t work.—but she doesn’t call. My mind goes in a million different directions thinking how, if she was sick, the nurse would call and, if she got in trouble at school for something, then the dean would call. Sienna wouldn’t ever be the one to call.
I don’t have a chance to call her back. Almost immediately the phone in my hand starts to ring again and I jump from the unexpected sound of it. It’s Sienna, calling me back.
My thumb swipes immediately across the screen. “Sienna? What’s wrong?” I ask, pressing the phone to my ear. I step fully inside the store, letting the door drift closed to muffle the street noise outside, the sound of cars passing by and people on their phones, having conversations of their own. I hear the shrill, unmistakable panic in my voice, and I think how, in the next instant, Sienna is going to ride me for overreacting, for freaking out about nothing. Geez, Mom. Relax. I’m fine, she’ll say, drawing that last word out for emphasis.
That’s not what happens.
It’s quiet at first. I just barely make out the sound of something slight like movement or wind. It goes on a few seconds and I decide this must be a pocket dial. Sienna didn’t mean to call me. The phone is in her pocket or her backpack and she called me by mistake. She doesn’t even know she’s called me twice. I listen, trying to decipher where she is, but it’s more of the same. Nothing telling. Nothing revelatory.
But then, a man’s voice cuts through the quiet, his words cold and sparing, his voice altered as if speaking through a voice changer. “If you ever want to see your daughter again, you will do exactly as I say.”
I gasp. My eyes gape. I lose my footing, falling backward into the closed door. A hand rises to my mouth, pressing hard. I can’t breathe all of a sudden. I can’t think; my mind can’t process what’s happening at first. I pull the phone away from my ear, looking down at the display to see if I’m mistaken, if it’s not Sienna’s number that called but someone else. A wrong number. Because this can’t be right, this can’t be happening. This can’t be happening to me.
But it is right. Sienna’s number stares back at me from the display.
“Who is this,” I ask, pressing the phone back to my ear, “and why do you have my daughter’s phone?”
And then, in the background, I hear Sienna’s piercing scream.
“Mommy!” she bellows. It’s high-pitched, frenzied, desperate, and that’s when I know that this man doesn’t only have Sienna’s phone. He has Sienna.
Pure terror courses through my veins. Sienna hasn’t called me Mommy in at least ten years. I can’t stop thinking what horrible thing must be happening for her to lapse back into her childhood and call me Mommy. I’m completely powerless. I don’t know where she is. I don’t know how to get to her, how to help her, how to make this stop.
“Go away,” Sienna commands. Her voice trembles, so that she doesn’t sound like herself, who is usually so defiant, so sure. There is no mistaking her fear. “Leave me alone,” she demands, crying now. Sienna falters on the words, her voice cracking, so that the execution doesn’t carry the same weight as the words themselves.
Sienna is terrified and so am I.
“Sienna, baby!” I shriek. There is the sound of commotion, of muffled noises in the background—this man, I imagine, subduing Sienna, forcing a gag into her mouth so that she can’t speak or scream, and Sienna fighting back from the sound of it, resisting him.
I realize that I’m not blinking. I’m not breathing.
Tears sting my eyes. “What are you doing to her? Who is this?” I demand of this man, screaming into the phone so that everyone in the store stops what they’re doing to look at me, to stare, some gasping and pressing hands to their own mouths in shock, as if this nightmare is somehow collective. “What have you done with my daughter? What do you want from me?”
“Listen to me,” the man says back, his modulated voice unshaken and sedate, unlike mine. I still hear Sienna’s desperate cry in the background, a keening, weeping wail, though it’s stilted. The sound of it is enough to bring me to my knees, and yet I don’t know what’s worse: the sound of Sienna’s cry or the sound of it as it grows distant and then fades completely away.
“Where is she? What have you done to her? Why can’t I hear her anymore?”
“You need to do exactly as I say. Exactly. Do you understand?”
“I want to talk to my daughter. Let me talk to my daughter. I need to know that she’s okay. What have you done to her?”
“I have nothing to lose,” the man says. “You’re the only one with something to lose, Ms. Michaels. Now you need to shut up and listen to me because I don’t care one way or the other if your daughter lives or dies. What happens to her is entirely up to you.”
Part One
One
The first time I see her in the hospital is in the ICU, shortly after she’s come out of surgery. I stand at the sliding glass door, looking in on her lying on the hospital bed, hooked up to a central line, an ET tube, an ICP monitor, a nasogastric tube, more. IV lines run into her veins, pumping her with fluids, with medicine like diuretics, anticonvulsants and morphine probably. Her head is wrapped with gauze. Beneath the gauze, just hours ago, I’ve been told, pieces of her skull were removed to relieve pressure on the brain. There isn’t much to see of her face because her eyes are closed and she’s all gauze and tubes, but what I can see of her is swollen and bruised.
She’s not my patient. Another nurse, Bridget, stands in the room with her, tending to her, getting her settled, and yet I felt sick to my stomach when I first saw her lying there on the bed through the glass. I’d heard the mumble of voices already, the hushed tones whispering of what people say happened to her, of what brought her here.
I’m assigned to a few other patients today. We have thirty ICU beds at the hospital. We’re broken down into pods, with ten beds in each and a nurses’ station at the center of them. The nurse to patient ratio depends on how critical a patient is. Patients on ventilators or that are critically ill have a patient to nurse ratio of two to one, but with lower acuity patients, we might have as many as four. It’s a lot to manage. It means that, despite our best efforts, errors sometimes get made, like last week when one of the nurses gave a patient someone else’s morning meds by mistake. She realized what she’d done right after she did it, told the doctor and everything was fine, thank God. It doesn’t always work out that way.
Bridget catches a glimpse of me over her shoulder. She stops what she’s doing and steps out of the room to come stand beside me at the sliding glass door.
