“Manny Wolf’s?” I guessed. Manny Wolf’s was a steak house in Midtown that offered enormous portions on white tablecloths. My father had been a regular for decades.
My mother laughed lightly—where else? She sat down across from me and popped off one of her heels, then the other, groaning as she kneaded the ball of her foot with her thumbs. She had her ankle balanced on her knee, the sole of her foot turned up, when she said, “Do you remember cutting your foot on the beach in Sanibel Island when you were little?”
I chased a piece of carrot around the bowl. “Sanibel Island? As in Florida?”
“Yes,” my mother said with a palpable sense of dread. It was how children sounded when asked if they knew what they did wrong. When they were caught, red-handed, drawing on the cream-colored sofa with crayons.
I set down my spoon and looked at her, realizing I was in the middle of something. “You said it was my first time in Florida when I went to visit the campus.”
My mother turned away from me with a quiet moan. “When you were four years old,” she began, “we went to Sanibel Island for a vacation.” She frowned, remembering. “The beaches were terribly rocky.”
I almost laughed. My mother stayed in some of the nicest hotels in the world, and yet she always had a comment. But this wasn’t a review. The terribly rocky beach was the inciting incident.
“You cut your foot, and I took you back to the hotel for a bandage,” she continued. “You were bleeding quite a bit, and I didn’t want to track it onto the hotel carpet. I set you down on a lounge chair by the pool for all of sixty seconds while I ran inside to ask for bandages.” She crossed her arms and gave herself one fortifying squeeze. You can do this. “When I came back, you were gone.”
We stared at each other across the kitchen table. There was a dull ache in my rib cage, like an old injury that throbs in the drop of barometric pressure right before a storm hits.
“What happened to me?” I asked in a mechanical voice.
My mother got up from the table and came back with a bottle of gin and two glasses. She poured each of us a medicinal splash. I actually drank mine. “You were found by a park ranger four days later, wandering some place called the Robinson Preserve?” She turned up a palm—maybe I knew it now, after living in Florida the last few years? But I shook my head. I had never heard of it, though once I got back to Tallahassee, I’d go to the lobby of Tina’s hotel and request one of the tourist maps of Florida, where I’d locate the waterfront farmland near the southwest border. Robinson Preserve was five hundred square acres of uninhabited swampland and mudflats.
“It was two hours away from where we were in Sanibel. You should have been covered in bug bites. Dehydrated. Weak. But you were fine. Happy, even. Pamela, I—” She stopped. Considered how to say the rest. I was remembering what I looked like as a child when I was happy. I had curly hair at that age. Cut at my chin. Dimples then too. They faded sometime in high school, around the same time the curls grew out, as if the biology of womanhood mandated a disposal of frivolity. My mother had been the one to point out that the dimples had disappeared. I knew it would happen once you lost the baby fat, she’d said with relief. I hadn’t known dimples were a thing one should hope to lose.
“I accepted,” my mother was saying in a somber stranger’s voice, “that you were dead on the third day. I’d let you go. I know you’ve probably felt some distance from me over the years, and while it is no excuse, I think a part of me has always been afraid to get too close to you again. I’d already lost you once.” One black mascara tear escaped an eye. My mother wiped it away expertly, without leaving so much as a smudge.
“Why wasn’t I covered in bug bites?” I felt a distinct lack of fear. Like I had been watching a scary movie all my life, suspended in the anticipation of encountering the monster, a disquiet far worse than any kelp-strung swamp creature could engender. I was in the next part of the movie now, the part where I knew what I was up against, what I had to do to survive.
A tremble of my mother’s lips, almost a pitying smile for me. No satisfying answer could be supplied. “That’s the mystery, Pamela. There’s no way you could have gotten to where you were on foot. Someone took you. But when we asked you what happened, if anyone hurt you, you would just point to the wound on your foot and say ouch. You had been hurt by someone, I’m sure of it, but your mind seemed to have confused the source.”