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The Pedestal Magazine -Ellen Birkett Morris - Lost Girls
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Ellen Birkett Morris - Lost Girls |
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When I was eighteen, thirteen-year-old Dana Lampton disappeared from the strip mall across from her family’s apartment. My mind should have been on other things--guys, college, getting past the guy checking IDs at the door of the dance club, but Dana’s disappearance caught my attention. We lived in the same neighborhood and the nearness of the crime creeped me out.
The truth is, as a kid I was sure that I would be that girl. The capture of heiress Patty Hearst made kidnapping real to me. Forget the fact that my family had trouble putting together enough money to take a family vacation or buy a new car, much less raise a pile of ransom money. After Patty was taken any middle-aged man walking down my street with his hands in his pockets was cause for alarm.
I almost freaked when my new friend’s hippie dad pulled up to the yard where we were playing and yelled for us to get into the van. I had images of child slavery rolling through my head. I’d be kept in some commune, forced to mix batches of granola and make homemade yogurt day and night.
I even dreamed about being kidnapped. My captor bore a striking resemblance to the television character Archie Bunker. In the dream, his mother, a kindly gray haired lady, offered me cake. I woke up in a cold sweat convinced I had tasted the icing.
As time passed I realized that I was just too damned old to be kidnapped anymore. Dana had taken my place. When she came up missing, the FBI combed every inch of the field next to the strip mall. The local paper ran her picture once a week for the first year.
When I saw her parents on the television, arm in arm, united in their grief, I had a flash of envy. My parents had divorced four years before, wrapped up in their own private passions and pain. I tried to figure out high school politics and keep my grades up. They requested my presence for drunken midnight weeping sessions and second marriages. I always showed up.
Years went by and still there was no sign of Dana. I wondered, why her? I could only guess it was an accident of timing. Who knows how often we cruise the aisles of the grocery store next to a sex offender or drive away from the convenience store as a robber pulls into the lot?
Yet I can’t seem to forget Dana. Each birthday I do a quick calculation comparing her would-be age to my own. Every few years, I walk to a bare patch in the middle of the field by the strip mall and leave something for Dana-- tampons, an old set of car keys, a graduation cap. She’ll be 21 this year. Tonight I’ll leave a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. By morning it’ll be gone.
Ellen Birkett Morris’s short fiction has appeared in Mindprints and Literary LEO. She was a finalist for the 2004 Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize. Her essays have appeared in The Writing Group Book (Chicago Review Press) and The Girls' Book of Love (Little Brown & Co.). She also works as a freelance journalist and is the recipient of numerous Society of Professional Journalists awards. She resides in Louisville, Kentucky.
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