My 16-year-old daughter stayed up sewing a dress for a classmate and gave away the cardigan her late father had given her. Then the girl’s mother handed me a small box, and I ran upstairs to find my daughter’s window open and her bed empty. Nothing prepared me for why.
“Lily?”
I pushed my daughter’s bedroom door open with my shoulder. My right hand was clenched around a small object so tightly that my nails cut into my palm. Twenty minutes earlier, it had shattered everything I believed about my relationship with my daughter.
“Lily, wake up, sweetheart. We need to talk.”
It was early morning, barely half past six. The house was gray and cold.
“We need to talk.”
I crossed the room and yanked back the comforter.
“Lily, please. Answer me.”
The bed was empty.
The sheets were smooth and cool. Nobody had slept there.
The closet door hung open. Her sewing machine sat silent on the desk.
Then I noticed the window. It was cracked open an inch, and the curtain stirred in the wind.
The bed was empty.
I stepped closer. In the flower bed below, the chrysanthemums my late husband had planted were crushed flat.
She had climbed out.
My sixteen-year-old daughter, who still said “Mom, are we out of milk?” in the same voice she’d used at six, had climbed out of a window.
I don’t remember going downstairs. I only remember the kitchen and the two people sitting at my table. They looked up at me like they had been waiting for exactly this.
She had climbed out.
“You were right,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine. “She’s going to do it.”
***
Two days earlier, I would have sworn I knew everything about my daughter.
My husband, Daniel, died two years ago. It was sudden. After that, it was just me and Lily.
I couldn’t give her everything. We stopped taking summer trips. I picked up extra shifts at the dental office. But I made sure she never doubted she was loved.
Every night I stood in her doorway and said, “I love you, kiddo.”
Every night she rolled her eyes and said it back.
Two days earlier, I would have sworn I knew everything about my daughter.
Lily loved to sew. She started at eleven, on a secondhand machine Daniel found at an estate sale. By sixteen, she was making things I couldn’t believe came out of my kid.
