Free Where I Lost Her by T. Greenwood

because there are no children involved. She sets aside her father’s own indiscretions. Separates herself from those women, those home-wrecking women who didn’t know that you don’t sleep with men who have little girls at home. Who have families.
    And she is able to do this because she is young, and when you are young the world is a big and remarkable thing, and your actions don’t seem to have consequences that extend beyond your own fingertips. And because there are no children involved. He is only a husband, not a father. Because while one can quickly cease being a husband, it is nearly impossible to cease being a dad.
    No children involved . This is what she thinks. Because she doesn’t know. (And I forgive her this. I forgive her stupidity and shortsightedness and the simplicity with which she sees the world). Because she cannot possibly know what happened in Guatemala.
    Â 
    Jake pulls over to the side of the road behind a row of police cars.
    â€œI’ll wait here,” he says.
    â€œOkay,” I say. “It’ll just be a minute.”
    What felt private, personal last night now seems to have become public. This little girl with her tangled hair and transparent skin belongs to the world now. She is the lead story on every news station. Everyone who lives within a twenty-mile radius has a theory about where she came from, and where she has gone. Everyone is looking for her, staking claim. But I am the one who found her, the one who knelt down and tried to help her. I am the one who lost her too. She belongs to me .
    And yet, here is a man riding a horse like some medieval knight. He has arranged for a whole group of men on horseback to comb the woods, to seek her out. The horses swish their tails, and fat green flies buzz and plunder in their wake. One horse lifts its tail and shits in a steaming pile. The other rears its head. They huff and grunt, their noses dripping snot on the dirt road. Everything smells like horseshit. My nose tickles and burns.
    I walk toward Lieutenant Andrews, who is standing near the edge of the woods where the yellow tape is woven in and out of the trees like a ribbon in a child’s hair, talking to a woman I assume is a neighbor. She is in her fifties, short, dressed in a powder-blue cardigan and a straight black skirt, wearing the kind of sensible black shoes you see on waitresses.
    It becomes clear rather quickly that she’s not a neighbor at all, rather some sort of psychic who has come from Burlington to try to help find the girl. To commune with her spirit, I overhear her say to Andrews.
    Jesus Christ .
    I have the inexplicable, childlike impulse to kick her in her shins, which are knotted with varicose veins. Yet Andrews listens, nods. It pisses me off that he is more attentive to her, less dismissive of her, this quack, than he was of me last night.
    â€œOkay then, let’s take a little walk. See what you pick up,” Andrews says.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she says, pressing her palm against the air in front of her. “I need to be alone. Undistracted. If the area’s contaminated, I won’t be able to get a good read. There are too many people here.” She is shaking her head.
    I approach, ready to tell Andrews about the man in the truck, when the woman reaches out and touches my arm, startling me. I pull my arm away.
    â€œDid you keep anything?” she asks.
    â€œExcuse me?”
    I don’t know what she’s talking about. For a moment, I am confused and think of the jacaranda. I recall the purple petals, how I kept finding them later in my luggage, in my hair, their scent nauseating and pure all at once. How six months after we left Central America, when I came here to see Effie, to get as far away as I could from Guatemala, from Jake, the sight of fallen lilac petals nearly brought me to my knees.
    Her oddly coiffed hair does not move when she tilts her head and studies me. Her glasses are smudged. Her