At twelve, the riding lessons started, because she begged and kept her grades up. Dave printed off an article about Modern Pentathlon, a strange sport where athletes competed in running, swimming, pistol shooting, fencing, and riding. Supposedly, the event was modeled on nineteenth-century military training, replicating the skills a spy would need to cross enemy lines and deliver a message to his commander. Maggie read the article, her eyes growing rounder and rounder. She took up jogging in the mornings before school.
My daughter showed no interest at all in conventional sports like volleyball or gymnastics. I’d been in marching band.
When she was fifteen, Dave asked her, jokingly, as he gave our credit card number to the fencing supply company’s website—yet again—for new epee blades and shoes because she’d grown out of the old ones, “Swords and horses. Why couldn’t you have been a track star like your old man?”
She didn’t look up from her horse magazine, didn’t smile, and answered seriously, “Because when Corlath whisks me away to Damar I have to be ready.”
Dave stared at her blankly.
“I think it’s from a book she read,” I explained. She kept a stack of paperbacks by her bed. Most of them had swords, or horses, or both on the covers.
Her riding coach told Dave and me, she has a gift. She’s a natural. Even I could see it, and all I knew about horses was what I learned from Disney movies. The animals carried her around jumping courses, their ears flicked back and listening to her, though she never seemed to move while she sat on their backs, never seemed to tell them what to do. She had an uncanny way with the horses, and I thought, maybe it’s all those books about horses that gave her that sixth sense.
Her coach wanted us to buy her a horse, a big thoroughbred who’d been competing in Europe and was experienced enough to teach Maggie about advanced riding and boost her confidence. She laid out a plan, including all the expenses, showing what it would take for Maggie to ride in the world championships, the Olympics. It cost too much, of course. The horse alone cost a third of what our house was worth, never mind what it cost to keep a horse. We didn’t want to break Maggie’s heart by telling her we couldn’t help her chase such a dream—you want to support your children. Strange, though, she seemed to understand. She never asked for more than we could give.
She said, smiling wisely, “My time will come.”
When she was seventeen, Maggie disappeared.
The police found her car—she’d driven herself to a riding lesson—on the road by the lake where my family had a cabin. I couldn’t tell them why she might have gone there. They didn’t find any sign of Maggie.
It made the news for weeks, because she was young and pretty, blond and smiling. We took out a second mortgage and offered a huge reward for information. We went on the news shows—how could we not, when the cameras camped outside our doorstep? The whole neighborhood put up yellow ribbons.
It was all so exhausting. I let Dave do all the talking about how much we prayed for her safe return. Somber, he braced himself with his arm around my shoulder.
I told the police what every mother tells the police—she isn’t the kind of girl to just run away. She’s not like that. She got straight As, she took out the trash.
They just shook their heads. She’s seventeen, they said. She could have done anything. Are there any boys? Anyone she was seeing? No, I said. None. She’d never dated, which had been a vague cause of worry. Another difference between her and me that I didn’t understand. When I was fifteen I couldn’t wait to date boys, couldn’t wait to find my Prince Charming. When she was fifteen I told Dave, “The horse thing, she’ll grow out of it. They always grow out of it when they discover boys.” Except if I’d been paying attention, I’d have known that some girls didn’t. Her riding instructors, for example: devoted women who practically lived at the barn, because they hadn’t grown out of it.
No, there weren’t any boys, except for Corlath, a character in a book with a sword and a horse on the cover.
She couldn’t have run away, I told them. She was taken. Whisked away. I couldn’t say by whom.
After two years, everyone assumes that she’s dead. We wait to hear word that her body has been found by a hiker in the woods. Decayed beyond recognition, they’ll need her dental records to confirm her identity.
Dave wants to sell the house and move. I refuse, because what if she comes home? How will she know where to go? I keep her room clean and ready.
I threw all my DVDs of Disney princess movies away. I wonder if it’s my fault that she’s gone. If I’d watched her closer, made her take gymnastics instead of fencing—I’d never understood her, and she knew it somehow, and she ran away.
“She didn’t run away,” Dave says. Sometimes, lying in bed at night, both of us pretending to sleep but really staring at opposite walls and holding ourselves rigid, he says this. “She isn’t that kind of girl.”
Except that she’s gone, and is it really easier to believe that someone had taken her, had done things to her? Or that she’s locked up helpless somewhere wondering why we don’t come looking for her?
Wondering why there isn’t a prince to rescue her?
No, she wouldn’t look for a prince. She’d always carried her own sword. I’m the one who’d looked for a prince.
Every couple of months, Dave takes me to the cabin. It’s the family cabin that I share with four of my cousins—a house, really, with two stories, three bedrooms, a screened-in porch, a stone walkway leading to a tiny wooden dock jutting into the lake, where we tie up the canoes. Dave wants me to get away from the cameras, the news, the phone calls we still sometimes get from police about tips that didn’t pan out. Every time the phone rings my heart stops. Is it Maggie calling to ask us to come get her and bring her home? Or is it the police telling us that they’ve found her, or what’s left of her?
When we came here as a family, Maggie would sit out on the dock at twilight, reading a book and watching the evening mist form over the water. She said she dreamed pictures in the haze, stories from the books she read.
They found the car just a few miles away. She must be close, one way or the other.
The cabin holds as many difficult memories as the house, but I think Dave needs the quiet, the solitude, and he needs to believe that it’s me who needs the quiet.
Every time we visit, I sit on the dock, watching the mist, and wonder what she saw. Horses and swords, warriors riding out against dragons who breathed fire. Warriors with long, streaming hair, who didn’t have to disguise themselves as boys. Those are the stories she told herself—that’s what she saw in the mist. I’d sat out here when I was a girl, but if I saw pictures in the mist over the water, or heard voices calling, I don’t remember.
She’d dreamed of competing in Modern Pentathlon in the Olympics someday. I’d applauded the goal, supported her all I could, as best as I knew how—you try to support your children, even when you don’t understand their dreams or the visions they see in the mist. All that was taken away from her. From me.
Every time I sit on the dock in the evening, Dave comes after dark to help me to my feet and lead me back to the cabin. I’ve usually grown too stiff from sitting there and can’t bring myself to stand and walk away.