Women Who Eat Chocolate

At home, I learned later, it was a maelstrom of quiet chaos. When I disappeared, they didn’t know where to look. The white adobe house by the river became a prison for my mom and brother. They wept and grieved and tried to look for me wherever they could. But the means weren’t there for a large-scale search, and they suffered silently because of my stepdad, who wouldn’t allow them to search further. Every time my mom would want to search for me, he would say, “He’s not here. You won’t find him. It’s time to let him go.” His dreams of me not being around had come true. He didn’t care that I was gone. That my mom and brother cried every day meant nothing to him.  My brother ached inside and suffered because he thought it was his fault that I was gone. “I told him to hurry – he didn’t listen. I just don’t know where he went,” he would say to my mom as they cried together silently. I try to imagine, now, what I would do if one of my kids was missing. I would go to the ends of the earth

I knew you to be there, even at three and a half years old. Those opaque, numbered days as a small child in a house of many. Sunbeams filtered through the upstairs hallway as I tip-toed down to your room, the floorboards giving me away under their hundred-year-old weight. Your room was at the end of the hall and I wanted to peak in, perhaps, and catch a glimpse of you. The ceiling light that hung just inside your door reminded me of a skeleton, plastic and groovy-looking, and I would stare at it sometimes when you weren’t there. But today you came out of your bedroom door before I could get there, and you smiled at me, bonking me on the head with a rolled-up piece of paper. This is my first memory of you. Brother. You were sarcastic and funny and sometimes I felt that you weren’t allowed to be mine, that my time with you didn’t count. You left when I was three, graduated and gone. My memories with you were limited to the times you’d come home, arms full of gifts at Christmas-time