by Bliss Goldstein

My daughter’s room pulls me down the hall, as if she is the sun and I am caught in her gravitational field. I peek inside, expecting to see the little table with the dancing monkey she’d painted on its top, but it isn’t there. Then I remember. The monkey isn’t gone; it’s tucked away under the house waiting my daughter’s return.

I will myself to approach my daughter’s closet and open the white folding door. Whatever is in that closet is the final tether to the daughter I once had before she went no-contact. The closet door remains as it has since she left my life six years ago: shut. I imagine reaching for the handle, an electric current buzzing my fingers. I do, but don’t, want to see the remains inside.

Maybe I will find a diary behind a pair of scuffed boots, spelling out in detail how I’d failed her. When my daughter took her light with her, I was cast into a darkness I couldn’t anticipate and didn’t understand.

Would I read her diary to find clues to her disappearance?

I wasn’t that kind of mother six years ago; I wouldn’t be that kind of mother now. Several friends have suggested I show up on my daughter’s doorstep and pound on the front door, demanding answers. I’ve resisted, wanting to respect her boundaries.

And I haven’t given up hope that one day my little monkey will return.

I retreat down the hallway to my bedroom. In the bathroom mirror I stare at my shapeless pajama top with horizontal black stripes slashed over a white background—less zebra than felon. I might as well be holding up a sign with my name and birthdate on it, a startled expression on my face, presumed guilty of crimes I didn’t know I’d committed. How easy it would be for an outsider hearing this story to cast me in the role of the unreliable perpetrator who must have done something unforgivable to wind up in solitary.

In the mirror, the ghost of my twenty-six-year-old daughter, the age she was when I last saw her, emerges behind me nodding her head slowly. She raises an accusing finger. A gavel pounds in the distance.

I turn off the bathroom light.

As if I’m wearing night vision goggles, the image of my daughter at nine-years-old glows in front of me. She’s wearing the traditional white Gi, uniform with a white, cloth belt cinched around her waist. I see us standing inside another bathroom, the zendo’s bathroom before the karate awards ceremony begins. Without warning or intent, I’d leaned against the light switch and plunged us into darkness.

My daughter squealed. I didn’t say a word—just reached for her hand. I wanted her to become a strong woman, who, like her foremothers, could handle life’s surprises with grit. Her hand gripped mine. I breathed deeply; then she joined me and we breathed together in the dark.

I wonder what my daughter saw when I flicked the light back on: a loving mother making the most of a teachable moment or a wicked witch who cast her into darkness without explanation.

The gavel pounds twice.

I close my eyes and my nine-year-old daughter fades away. I decide to return once again to her bedroom. The carpet feels rough under my bare feet. My ears ring. I recall how I’d sung my baby to sleep with You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, pausing for her response, please don’t take my sunshine away. The sound of her sweet voice is haunting. I block out the chorus and keep treading.

By now moonlight streams through the windows lining the short hallway. Six years is a long time to keep my daughter close to me by imprisoning what remains. I’ve put off exhuming the last traces of her life for too long. I’m ready to see what’s in her closet.

Perhaps I will find a pile of dirty clothes with mysterious stains that fill me with retrospective worry. Maybe a Liz Phair poster yellowed with age that evokes bittersweet melancholy as I remember how we once sang together deliberately off-key. Or a row of books about dead queens that reminds me I can’t ask her what she’s reading now.

She won’t call me back.

It’s been six years since I’ve heard her voice.

I flick on her bedroom light and step inside.

In front of the closet door, I take calming breaths as I’d taught my daughter to do. I relax and recall the feel of my seventeen-year-old daughter’s long gibbon arms winding endlessly around me. I hear the echo of her unladylike hoots of laughter when she was home from college and we’d watch “The Bachelor.” With such sweetness on the brain, my mouth fills with the taste of the apple pie she baked for me Mother’s Day six years ago. I didn’t know it would be my last meal, the one we’d share together before she cut off contact.

Squaring my shoulders, I remind myself that I am a strong woman from a line of strong women. I tug open the door.

A layer of dust covers the naked bar where her clothes once hung. The scent of fir trees from the soap she loved is gone. Her books are gone. Her posters are gone. She is gone. I can see now that what we once had is never coming back, regardless of whether or not she does.

I’m surprised I don’t feel the devastation I’d braced for moments ago, just a small, mouselike sadness I will always carry with me.

I squint, and see again her overflowing closet with its tower of books on the floor, the many posters. The plaid shirts and jeans she once favored as a child sway together as if on monkey bars. I hear myself calling her to come home. It’s dark and time for supper.

Then I turn off the light.

Image: by Peter Dyllong vis Pexels