“Mom! Why didn’t you call me right away? Oh my God!”
“I thought we would find her and you wouldn’t have to worry.” It sounds lame, but I mean it. “I’ve contacted the sheriff and we’re going to go back out and keep looking, but I wanted you to know.”
“You’re sure she ran away and wasn’t kidnapped?”
“She left a note.” I read it aloud: “Dear Nana, nobody is listening to me. I do not want to move to London, so I am running away.” My voice breaks. “Love, Jasmine.” With a howl, I cry, “She kept telling me she didn’t want to go, and I just kept telling her it would be all right!”
“Jesus.” She sounds winded. “Mom, it’s not your fault. I’ll be on a plane as soon as I can get a flight.”
“I’m sure we’ll find her or she’ll come back when she gets cold enough.”
“She could get hurt out there! She could die! Someone could kidnap her with offers of a kitten!”
Now it’s my turn to be steady. Even though my hands are shaking, I say, “This isn’t Portland.” A mountain lion prowls through my mind. Rattlesnakes. Cliffs. “She’s making a statement. We’ll find her.”
“I’m still coming home. This is insanity. If she’s so against it, I need to figure something else out.”
“We’ll find her.”
“Hanging up now, Mom. Keep me posted.”
We all eat sandwiches and gulp down some coffee and head back out. Ben forces me to sit down and take deep breaths, and then we go down to search the beach. I try not to imagine sneaker waves and riptides. We search the opposite area from where we searched earlier, a trail in the mountains riddled with cliffs, and I block visions of her falling to her death at the foot of one of those bluffs. Ben is solid and silent, and I’m grateful.
We search and call until darkness begins to fall. A frantic noise of terror grows in my brain, riddles my gut with nausea. Why didn’t I listen? Why didn’t I pay attention? Winded, I halt on the trail and bend over, hands on my knees, sobs tearing out of my chest. “I feel like I should have known she meant this,” I gasp out. Tears spill down my face. “I can’t bear it if something happens to her!”
Ben rests his palm on the middle of my back. “We’ll find her, Phoebe. She’s going to be okay.”
I let some of the terror leak out in my tears, then settle and straighten.
“We have to go back,” Ben says. “It will be dark soon.”
I stand at the top of a bluff and yell, “Jasmine!” The word flies over the shallow valley and disappears, and my heart cracks in two. “If she . . .” I gasp. “I will literally die.”
“Let’s get back to the house,” he says, and leads the way. I follow on feet that weigh a million pounds.
Jasmine!
Chapter Twenty-Four
Suze
I’m exhausted by everything—the emotional upheavals on every level, and Joel, and memories, and the terror that Jasmine might be hurt somewhere. I adore this child, and can’t bear the idea of her alone in the dark. Or worse.
The search has been called off due to rain and darkness, and I was going to stay with Phoebe, sleep upstairs so she wouldn’t be alone, but she said, “Just go home, Suze. I need to be alone.”
“Phoebe, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
She gave me a murderous look, as if somehow this were my fault. “I want to be alone.”
“Are you—”
“I can’t, Suze! I can’t talk.”
Which made me think about that letter, the letter she never gave me, and I want to shake her, but I also want Jasmine home, safe and sound, and on some level, I know Phoebe is barely hanging on. In this moment, out of respect for my long love of her, I can give her some space.
Even if a hole is burning through my chest.
Ben shook his head, so Joel drove me back up the hill. “We’ll keep calling, looking, okay? She’s somewhere. We’ll find her.”
At home, lying in the dark, I find myself praying. An actual prayer, not the wordless things I sometimes send up out of habit, the pleas or the longing, or the apology, things I can’t seem to get out of my system. Once upon a time, I liked praying. It soothed me.
So lying there on my back with Yul Brynner on my belly, purring, I pray, specifically to Jesus, the nice God, the one who loves children （all the children of the world）。 “You know where she is, Jesus. Please send extra angels to look out for her. Keep her warm and dry. Don’t let anything hurt her. Show us where she is.”