Free Don't Try to Find Me: A Novel by Holly Brown Page B

as she followed me to the car, but I was too stupid to notice.
    No, it wasn’t only stupidity. I was preoccupied. I’d gotten that text, and my mind was elsewhere. I spent so much of this last year elsewhere. I took her for granted, assumed she’d be here with us until the day we drove her to her college dorm.
    She seemed a little edgy. I can recognize that now and understand why. She didn’t want me to go back into the house—more specifically, into the kitchen—and see her phone and her note. She didn’t want me stopping her. “Can we go, please?” she said. “I can’t be late.”
    We’re often late. It’s not always me and not always her, but it’s always someone. We both got the late gene, as we call it. It didn’t skip a generation.
    I knew I was going to be late anyway. The text superseded work.
    I should have asked: Why can’t you be late? What’s going on? It would have shown interest in her life. If she heard something in my voice, that might have made the difference.
    I put the car in reverse. She was sitting with her head low, her hair hanging down and blocking her face. She didn’t want to be seen, I suppose. Didn’t want her expression to give anything away. But she sat like that a lot.
    I was frazzled, thinking of that text and planning my next move. Meanwhile, ironically, my little girl was planning her next move, too.
    Why didn’t she talk to me? I’m approachable, I think. If she’d said she was unhappy, I would have gotten her help. If she needed me to be different, I would have tried.
    Paul and I have done our best to maintain a united front when it comes to Marley, and we’ve always been cordial to each other. But Marley told me, months ago, apropos of nothing, “I wish Dad would get angry already.” It stood out, that “already,” as if she thought he’d been waiting his whole life to explode. I know she thought he was disappointed in her. She wasn’t “excelling” in school. Maybe I should have gone ahead and undercut him in front of Marley, let her know that I disagreed with him. I thought she was already excellent.
    I wish I’d come up with something better that last morning than “When’s your next math test?”
    But it’s not like she was under tremendous pressure either. Paul didn’t make an issue of every bad grade. He talked to her about how he could “incentivize” her school performance. She could have earned anything. She just had to name her price. That’s what she ran away from?
    I think back over the years, and I know Paul and I made mistakes, but Marley didn’t want for love or attention. I read her Green Eggs and Ham six hundred times, experimenting with my silly voices until I found the ones she liked best, and when she said, “Again,” even if I’d gone hoarse, I complied. We took her on a tour of amusement parks in five states because she loved roller coasters (even though Paul and I hated them and waited for her on benches). Paul showed the patience of a yogi while teaching her to ride a bike—it took practically an entire summer. But when she finally got it, after she pulled up in front of the house, he lifted her high in the air, and her laughter was infectious. We were all cracking up, the three of us, like we’d done something great, together. I have the pictures. All that was real; it should count for something. Shouldn’t it?
    “I don’t know,” she told me that last morning. “Mrs. Dickens hasn’t announced the next test yet.”
    “We could get you a tutor,” I said, offering yet again.
    “I won’t need one.”
    I’m pretty sure that’s how she said it, that definitively. Not “I don’t need one” but “I won’t need one.” She wouldn’t need one because she wouldn’t be around.
    We pulled up in front of the school. She got out of the car and hoisted her backpack onto her shoulder. Her hair was caught underneath one of the straps. She leaned back in the car and met my eyes and said, “Bye.”
    I’ve held that