When She Returned

by Lucinda Berry

It’d been eleven years since Mom had gone missing from the Target parking lot.

But I wanted him to grow and change, experience new things too. His contentment with sameness was more maddening the older I got. How could we live our lives based on decisions we’d made when we were seventeen?

One of the worst things you could do to someone in the midst of tragedy was to give them a cliché, because the intensity of the loss was too big. I’d heard it all after James died. Sometimes it was better to say nothing.

“Once you’ve told a story so many times, it just becomes the truth.” “But you passed the polygraph . . .” My voice trailed off, thick with unspoken meaning. He had passed the polygraph with flying colors; only seasoned liars could pull that off.

“It’s not that simple. You have to think of her as a domestic violence victim. Most women never leave their abusers, or if they do, it takes them an average of seven times before they’re successful,” Dean explained.