Maud waited. For the first time in years, she took vacation, letting a sub cover her route. For the first time in years, Maud hadn’t wanted to keep moving. She wanted to keep still. For two weeks now, she had stayed on the sofa. She sat, reclined, lay down flat. She rose to use the bathroom and to get snacks from one of the many containers people had dropped off, but mostly she stayed still. She slept, on and off, kicking her blanket on and off. She watched television. She watched the walls. She watched her hands and feet. She watched the driveway, waiting for Gil Alvarez to arrive with the news. She watched the clouds, the mailbox, the oil stain under her sedan. She watched the window itself, where the husk of an insect hung from a spiderweb in the corner. The same window where she’d watched and waited on the last night.
That night, she’d woken with a start, groggy, the room gray and dim, the sky nearly dark. 5:10 p.m., the stove clock read. The hard rain had turned to a drizzle. She found Jess’s note and sat on the couch with a sigh. Frustration tinged with relief. At least she’d left a note this time. Her headstrong, independent girl. Tomorrow, they’d go get a Christmas tree. Pull out the decorations buried somewhere in the storage shed. She still needed to buy presents. She’d been too upset and distracted to shop. Maud flipped the porch light on, and then she took a shower to shake off the bleariness and chill in her bones. She even took time to diffuse her hair with the blow-dryer.
At six thirty, she put out fixings for their dinner. Grilled cheese and tomato soup: warm food for a rainy night. She dumped the soup in a pan and put it on the stove to simmer. She slapped thick slices of cheddar between the bread, buttered one side—extra butter for Jess’s sandwich. She checked the window. The rain was a mist now, seeming to float rather than fall. She held her elbows. Almost two hours. She should be home now. Her stomach began to flutter with worry, even as she told herself, Come on, Maudly. She’s fine. She’s a smart kid. Out for a walk. Maybe she’s with a friend.
Except Jess didn’t have any friends. Not now.
At seven, she began to make calls. She called the Patty Melt, but it had already closed. She called Hector Juarez. No, Jess wasn’t with Angie. Angie and her friend Rose were there, watching a movie. Wait, Rose had seen her earlier. At the Patty Melt. She’d come in for fries. Around five. Maud called Esther. No, Esther hadn’t heard from her—she’d call if she did, and she’d call and check back. Maud called Iris. No, Jess hadn’t been to the orchard. She’d keep an eye out and call if she saw her.
Around seven thirty, Maud turned off the burner under the soup, covered the buttered bread and cheese with foil. She grabbed her keys. The flutters in her stomach had turned to clenching, even as she assured herself she was being overprotective, paranoid, worried for nothing. Any second Jess would walk in the door. She left her own note: “J-bird: went out to look for you. Worried, dang it. Stay put.”
She drove the short way to town, down Roadrunner to Quail Run instead of her normal route, the longer back way that would dump her out on the other side of the District near the post office, avoiding campus traffic. Coming up on a low dip in the road, she stepped on the brakes as her headlights showed a slash of water in the road. She turned on her high beams. The stream was low and running slow, more mud than water. Must have been rushing through at some point but then slowed once the rain let up. That was the way of flash floods: come in a flash, gone in a flash. She let off the brake and drove across it at good speed, the tires splashing but firm on the pavement.
In town, she drove slowly through the puddled streets, wrapping her arms around the steering wheel and peering through the windshield. No one out walking. She drove onto the high school campus, onto the Syc campus, turned around in the Woodchute’s parking lot, deserted but for one car. She stopped at the Pickaxe, even though Jess wouldn’t have been allowed in. Neither the bartender or any of the three people nursing drinks had seen her. She stopped in the one fast-food restaurant open near the highway. No one there had seen her, either. She drove through the neighborhoods. She stopped in front of the Newells’. No porch light. No Christmas lights. Dark house. No sense in knocking on that door.
Back home, she flew inside and called out Jess’s name. No answer.
No blinking button on the answering machine, but she pushed play anyway. No messages.
She waited until midnight, Jess’s official curfew, to call the police. Seven hours after she went out, five hours after she said she’d be home.
At midnight, she opened the front door and stood on the threshold, calling her daughter’s name.
No answer.
No answer ever again.
As she waited, sometimes she answered the telephone, which had been ringing like gangbusters. She told the callers, No, thank you, I’m fine. I appreciate that. No, I don’t need anything. Thank you for calling. She told the newspaper, No comment. When Gil called with updates about what stage the forensic anthropologists had reached, she listened and said, I see, and, Okay, good to know. She told him, I appreciate it, Gil. Thanks for calling. Sometimes she held the phone up to her bad ear so all she could hear was the vibration of voices against her cheek. She thought about the calls she’d made that long-ago night, the calls she’d received from Esther and Iris and Hector, checking in. She thought about how phone calls themselves had changed: caller ID, voice mail, ringtones, cell phones that fit into front pockets. She thought about the bulky answering machine and its tin-can message. You know what to do, so do it. Maud did know. She waited.
About the waiting, people said, This must be so hard, but after eighteen years, a few more days were a drop in the bucket. She’d been through it before. Whenever bodies were found in Arizona, or across the United States, Jess’s file came up in the Missing Persons database. Most of the first tests ruled her out—the timing, the sex, the age. One time, Maud did have to look at the objects of a young female victim to see if she could identify them. A necklace with a gold half-heart. Jess would never have worn such a thing. No, the hard part had already happened: the years of not knowing even though, deep down, she knew. The years of hoping, of imagining otherwise, despite every intuition to the contrary. Hope: humans’ greatest strength and their greatest flaw. Hope had saved her, but it also kept her in limbo, kept her from moving forward. Kept her right here, waiting.
This time, Maud wasn’t really waiting. She already knew. She knew the moment she kneeled in the dry wash with Gil and saw the bone protruding from the earth, and again when she returned and walked through the wash. Some part of her had always known. The part of her that knew the sun would rise and set each day, perhaps, or the part that understood the earth was spinning on its axis even though she couldn’t see it spinning, couldn’t feel it move at such stunning speed.
Jess wouldn’t have run. Maud had always known that. Of course she would be nearby.
Gil had said they couldn’t guarantee they’d be able to identify the body. He noted how much time had passed, the harsh sun and hard rains, mineral and acid levels, the tendency of animals to dig and scatter bones. He’d raked his fingers through his hair and said, “We don’t know if we’ll find answers, Maud.” He’d reached out and touched her shoulder in his calm way.
Maud had her answer, whatever the tests revealed. It was what she had known all along.
Jess wouldn’t have run.