Free Seashell Season by Holly Chamberlin

was embarrassed to admit this to her, but I went on. “What changed was that one day when I was behind the wheel, my mind totally on an e-mail someone had sent that morning with what sounded like it might be a viable sighting, I almost caused a serious accident. The details don’t matter, but it jolted me back into a more normal and reasonable state of mind.” And this near-disastrous event was one of the factors that had led me to get my act together enough to apply for the job at Yorktide Community College and thereby reenter the world.
    Like I said, none of it was easy.
    â€œCould I look at it alone?” she asked.
    â€œSure,” I said, getting up from the kitchen table. “I’ve got some work to do in my studio.”
    I went upstairs to my studio, with the intention of finishing a few sketches, but I could do nothing but sit at my drawing board and stare at nothing, wondering what Gemma was feeling as she read through the website, wondering what would happen next.

Chapter 17
    I sat staring at the screen of Verity’s laptop for a long time, scrolling through page after page of the website, reading e-mails from people offering sympathy or what they thought might be clues as to where I was, clicking on links to what seemed like hundreds of newspaper articles about the kidnapping. I wondered if she’d kept a paper file of those articles too. And I read all of the statements she’d written, from the time the website first went up until . . . until the morning after she learned I was alive and well and living in Arizona.
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    My dream has come true. My child has been found. I offer my heartfelt thanks to everyone who has helped me to keep the flame of hope alive all these years. I’ll keep this site updated for the next few days, but for the sake of my daughter’s privacy, it will be shut down after that.
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    Most people would say that here was proof of my mother’s love for me, of her desire for my safe return. But just because she wanted me back doesn’t mean I wanted to come back. Verity is a stranger to me, in spite of the fact that she thinks she knows me. In spite of the fact that she thinks she’s got a right to me.
    As I scrolled through each page of this—this tribute—to me, I wanted to shout, I’m not missing! I never was missing! I was right there all the time, being me, with my father! But then I thought— Wait a minute, I was missing. I was missing to myself.
    And then it occurred to me, sitting there at Verity’s kitchen table in Maine. Not once in my life did I suspect that my name, or Dad’s for that matter, were false. Yeah, he’d told me he’d run off with me, but he’d also made it plain that my mother hadn’t wanted me and that with no family on either side, there was no one to come looking for us. There was no one who cared. Stupid. Why didn’t I put it all together long ago!
    Looking at all those drawings of me-but-not-me, all based on a few not very good photographs taken of me as an infant, a gallery of Gemma Through the Ages . . . It gave me the creeps. Some drawings were pretty accurate, and some were way off the mark. And none of the images looked—alive. I mean, every single image looked to me like the portrait of a dead person. Flat. False. Or maybe not a dead person but a puppet or a doll. They gave me the chills. The people who make those missing person pictures like the ones Verity had commissioned aren’t painting idealized portraits to hang in some museum. They’re essentially making shit up, aren’t they?
    Dad wasn’t one to take a lot of photos of us—now I know why—and we weren’t on Facebook (he’d tried to stop me from getting an Instagram account, but I’d figured out how to get one without his knowing; you don’t need the details), but I’d seen enough photos of myself in the early years of my life to know what I looked like in