When I was very young, just four years old, my mother disappeared. Now, when I say disappeared, I mean disappeared, as in gone without a trace. She tucked me in, got into bed with my father, and when he and I woke up in the morning, she was no where to be seen. Every stitch of clothing she owned was still there in the closet, other than the nightgown she had been wearing. No bags were missing. The car was still in the garage. The doors were all locked, and there was no sign of a struggle or any forced entry. My father didn't feel like he had been drugged. We both woke up feeling perfectly fine, until we realized mom wasn't in the kitchen making breakfast. Mom wasn't anywhere. She was just gone.
This whole incident is just on the edge of my memory, but my father, of course, remembers it all vividly, even to this day. How could he forget? The love of his life just went up in a puff of smoke, except there wasn't even any smoke to be seen.
It happened before the dawn of the cell phone, so there was no reliable way to try to reach her if she was somehow out somewhere. My dad tried calling neighbors, friends, relatives, anyone he could think of who might possibly have been contacted by her. After two hours of this, he called the police, who politely told him it was too soon to really consider it a missing person case. When he yelled at them that even all of her shoes were still here, as were her purse, keys, and all other personal effects, they decided to make a slight exception.
The cops were there within four hours of the discovery that mom was missing, and there was very little they could do. I remember how big they looked and thinking how they were going to bring my mommy home. They weren't really that big and they didn't bring my mommy home either. No one brought her home. There was no contact from anyone. There were no demands. There was no confused phone call from an amnesiac. There was no blood, no hair, no body. Nothing. She was just utterly and completely gone.
The cops looked for weeks before they gave up. My father went on for months trying to find anything about what had happened. He dug back through his memory, scouring it for any clue as to where she might have gone or who she might have talked to. There was nothing, and there was no one. After a couple years past, even he gave up. He was sad, depressed even, for a very long time, but eventually he managed to move on.
I don't know if being young made it easier or harder on me. It was certainly strange going to my first day of kindergarten and not having a mother to give me a hug and a kiss good-bye. My father did the best he could, but he was really a pretty crappy parent for those first few years, during that time when he was still looking for her. It wasn't until he gave up on her that he turned his attention to me and realized that I was hurting, too.
That was when the years of counseling started. I was a smart kid, so I'm told, but I had significant behavioral problems in school. Who could blame me? At first, I had significant behavior problems in the counselor's office as well, but they are professionals, and I didn't know enough to try to trick them into thinking I was okay when I wasn't. They knew I wasn't okay. They couldn't fix me completely, but at least they could make me a little better. And as I grew older, I learned how to pretend I was okay even when I wasn't. By the time I entered high school, I was just the same as any other kid being raised by a single parent. No one even knew how strange my mom's disappearance had been. I just told them all that she was dead.
So that was how I lived my life, being as normal as I could by more or less blocking out the fact that my mom was just gone. I had dealt with all that crap when I was young and now it didn't have to bother me anymore. I accepted that my life had been made different from everyone else's and with that acceptance, I could pretend it wasn't that different at all. I'm not sure if this is exactly how my counselors had wanted me to cope, but it worked for me so it was what I went with.
And now here I am, 28 years after that fateful night, staring right into the face of someone I've been claiming as dead since I was old enough to know to do so. And I have no idea what to say.
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It had been a night just like any other. I had tucked my little girl into bed, climbed in with my husband, turned off the light, and fallen asleep. When I woke up in the morning, I knew immediately that something was terribly wrong. My husband wasn't there, the light wouldn't turn on, and there was a thin layer of dust over everything. I made my way out to the kitchen where the lights wouldn't turn on there either, the fridge was empty, and one of the windows was even broken. My daughter's room: nothing. Everything was dark: in the house and outside the house as well. Not knowing what else to do, I went to the front door and opened it.
The beam of light that hit me was so bright that I was forced to close my eyes. When I opened them again, I was standing on the outside of the front door with my hand still on the handle. It was day time. I turned the handle and nothing happened. Then, I heard a voice behind me say, "Excuse me, can I help you?"
I turned and saw a woman, about my own age, whom I had never seen before holding a bag of groceries and walking towards my front door.
"I uh, I seem to have locked myself out," I said nervously, not sure what else to say.
"Uh..." The woman stared at me for a moment and then said, "I'm sorry, but this is my house."
I looked around. No, this was definitely my house, though the paint job looked a lot nicer that I thought it did. "I don't think so..."
The woman sighed and took a step towards me. "Look, this is my house," she said. Then she reached into her pocket and took out a strange, gray, thin brick type device. "Listen, is there someone I can call who can come get you?"
I was getting irritated now. "The man you would call would be inside that house!" I pointed behind me. "My husband, Gregory Addams. I'm Amanda Addams, and this is my home!"
The woman's eyes grew wide at that. She dropped the grocery bag and the strange device and said just one word: "Mom?" And then she passed out.
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So here we are, sitting at the kitchen table that once was hers and now is my own, an ice pack on the back of my head, staring at one another, neither one of us having any clue what to say. I mean, this is impossible. This has to be a trick. This woman is a con artist or something. I don't know what she's after, but she's after something. She has to be. Yet somehow, I know this is really her. Even though she doesn't look like she's aged a day, this has to be my mom. For one thing, she's wearing the nightgown we never found and she's barefoot. For another, well, somehow I just know.
Finally, she speaks. "So tell me again, what year is it?"
"It's 2016," I tell her. "You've been gone for 28 years."
"But I just went to bed and woke up," she says.
I shake my head, still in shock and disbelief, "Well not to us you didn't."
"Your father is he..."
"He's fine. Well, as fine as he can be considering. But, mom, I don't know if you should see him. He's remarried now. Has been for 13 years."
"Greg is..."
"I'm sorry, Mom."
She shakes her head. "I know, I'm just." She sighs, looks down, and then looks back at me. "You're four years old," she says.
"Not anymore."
"I just tucked you in last night."
"Last night 28 years ago."
"So you're..."
"Thirty-two, yup."
"And not married?"
I can't help but smile just a little at that. "Not all women get married," I say. "Even back in your day, that was true."
"Yes, I know," she says, flustered, "I just... what do you say to a daughter who was four years old yesterday and is thirty-two today."
"I don't know."
"How did this happen?"
"I don't know."
"Why did this happen?"
"I don't know."
We're silent again after that. What do you do in a situation like this? What can you do? To whom can you turn? There is literally no one else in the universe who has experienced this before. Not yet, anyway.
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