3:04.
I know what time it was because I instinctively looked at the clock on Letitia’s dresser moments after I opened her bedroom door and noticed she wasn’t there. The window was open, and while the rest of her stuffed animals were lined up on the edge of the bed, in size order, Theodore Bear was gone.
Sometime earlier, I had heard her talking to Theodore quite emotionally, a fictional conversation in which he was very upset about something and she was committing to make things right. I tried my best to keep up with the conversation, through her closed door, through the mist of my household chores, but somehow I got distracted. Between changing loads in the wash and picking up toys in the living room–toys her brother left around, because she never would have been this chaotic–I’d lost track of the conversation, and then lost track that she was having one at all.
And then I noticed the silence. Heart in my stomach, I raced to her bedroom door, trying to convince myself that I was being paranoid but feeling the rising panic anyway.
At 3:04, I confirmed the worst: She was gone. Theodore was gone.
Her window opened onto a lean-to which led to the ground. This should have been Deonte’s room, specifically for this reason, but when the three of us had moved in, she had been adamant: This was her room. The color of the paint, a gentle lavender, was perfect for her. The wood flooring creaked just right. There was a closet that was big enough for her to sit inside. There were no trees outside to block her view of the morning sun. Other than the window leading to the lean-to leading to the ground, it really was perfect.
And I’d thought about rigging the window somehow, such as putting something in the frame so it would only open enough to let the fresh air in, not enough to let Letitia out, but foolish me, I’d never gotten around to it. After Jasmine had kicked me, us, me out and told me, us, me to find a new place to live, I just wasn’t thinking clearly.
It was Saturday. They were supposed to be with their Mom on Saturdays, but when Jasmine had come to pick them up, Letitia had been too preoccupied with Theodore to want to go, and when Jasmine had pushed the issue–with me suggesting a milder tack, which led to yet another argument about why our daughter is the way she is and how it’s all my fault for pampering her and and and–well, that turned into a meltdown and Letitia hiding in her closet and refusing to come out, screeching as loud as a human being can screech each time we opened the door.
So Mom and Deonte had left. That was last night, and Jasmine had failed to call today. Custody decrees aside, I think Jasmine was fine with that. She doesn’t understand her daughter. I don’t either, to be honest. This has been a challenge for both of us, but especially for her.
Somewhere in the midst of all this thinking, I had made my way through the open window. Standing on the lean-to, I looked around the neighborhood, looking for any clues. My first instinct was to go down, to track my way through the backyard, into the patch of woods to the north of the house, where she had been very clearly directed to never go.
Instead, though, I instead went up, towards the roof. Perhaps I was hoping that this would be easy, that she’d just be sitting there looking at the clouds or something. Perhaps I was hoping that the higher vantage would give me clues. Perhaps I just didn’t know what to do.
This wasn’t the first time she’d wandered off, after all. So I was still berating myself about not jimmying some way to keep the window from opening all the way.
She wasn’t on the roof, and I didn’t see any trace of her down below, with my higher vantage. The stand of trees did what trees do: Stood there, making motion consistent with the slight breeze. The leaves were thick enough that I couldn’t see inside. I could see the plastic playhouse in the backyard, its roof long gone missing, and she wasn’t in there. And now I was standing precariously on a slope twenty feet in the air, trying to suppress my panic because I needed to focus on my balance lest I slip and fall and wind up immobile-or-worse on the concrete driveway below.
I looked at my watch. 3:07. I had no idea why it was important to mark the passage of time, except perhaps to keep me moored to reality, just as I had no idea why it would be useful to call her name, standing there on the aging shingles beneath my feet, realizing–and then chastisting myself for realizing–that we’d need a new roof soon because this one was showing definiite signs of aging.
I made my way back to the lean-to, then to the ground, looking at the grass to see if there were any signs of where she might have gone. As if I were a detective and there might be footprints in the bare patches, but of course there was a chaos of footprints in the bare patches, hers and Deonte’s and Deonte’s friends’ (because Letitia didn’t have any friends that would be willing to visit her at home). But I needed something tangible to do, something that might convince me that I wasn’t a neglectful father who can’t even keep proper track of an eleven year old girl.
My emotions told me to sit on the ground and cry. My objective brain told me I had to do something, but what? Call Jasmine and have her yell at me, and then she could use this later to reopen the custody agreement, although honestly she really didn’t want anything to do with the daughter she was still using the r-word about? Call the police and then that was a potential mess on multiple levels: CPS might get involved, if we even made it past the potential nightmare of the police confronting a Black child, even as young as she was, in the middle of a meltdown?
My emotions reminded me of their option: Sit on the ground and cry. It sounded really, really tempting at this moment in time.
3:09. The watch was reminding me that, even though it felt like it had been hours since I’d opened her bedroom door, it had only been five minutes. And how long before that had I heard her talking to Theodore? It couldn’t have been long. Maybe a total of twenty minutes. She had to be less than a mile away.
Assuming nobody had found a little girl wandering the streets and decided to kidnap her into a life of….
No, I would give no quarter to that voice right now. That was far too dark.
I made my way to the stand of trees, calling her voice while acknowledging that she wouldn’t respond anyway. And now I did see clear footprints, her shoes, walking in a specific direction. The darkness in my heart lifted a little. I could see a glimmer of hope: I was at least headed the right way.
And then, they stopped. Rather, they went up to a tree in the middle of the stand, and stopped.
I looked up the tree. Ten feet up, at a joint where a limb crooked outward, I saw her. My daughter. My lovely lovely angel. Just sitting there, talking quietly to Theodore.
“Honeybear!” I called up to her, one anxiety being replaced by another: This wasn’t a safe place for her, what if she fell? Still, I kept my voice loving and sweet, hiding the more negative emotions competing for attention inside my head. “Please come down.”
Instead, she kept talking to Theodore in low tones that I couldn’t hear, the two of them carrying on a secret conversation that, for now at least, I wasn’t privy to.
“I’ve been looking for you,” I said. I wondered if I’d be able to pull her down against her will: She wasn’t that high, but high enough that a misjudgment may well hurt her. I really didn’t want to risk it.
And still, the conversation continued. She couldn’t have not heard me, and so I was left to assume that she was deliberately ignoring me.
“Honeybear peacock,” I said, my voice wavering just enough to show an anger I didn’t want her to hear, “I need you to come down. That’s not safe up there.”
“Bears love the trees,” she said flatly. “And we are bears.”
She held Theodore so he could look down at me, disapprovingly.
I pressed my forehead against the tree, reminding myself to remain calm. “Okay, honeybear, you can stay there for now, but be careful, okay?”
I sat down, my back supported by the tree, and looked at the trees around me. A spider crawled across my hand, and I let it, even though I had the urge to crush it. I was afraid of where I would go if I allowed myself even that little level of violence.
“Bears are careful in trees,” she said. “And we are bears.”
We sat in silence for a while, and when I checked my watch it said it was only 3:15. Eleven minutes of my life that could have changed everything, that could still change everything, if she continued to refuse to come out of the tree.
“Theodore misses his mommy,” she said, more quietly than her earlier announcements but still intended for me to hear.
“I’m sorry to hear that. What happened to her?”
“She left him because she doesn’t love him anymore.”
I bit the inside of my lip to keep my voice steady. I didn’t know what to say: I worried that anything that I might say would turn this into the meltdown it was lingering around, and I worried that that would lead to a fall. So at first I said nothing, letting the silence itself commit the violence of pushing the wedge even further between mother and daughter.
“Bears can be complicated,” I said at last.
“Why, though? Why can’t bears be simple? It’s not Theodore’s fault that he’s the way he is. His family should love him anyway.”
I sighed, searching again for words and realizing I just didn’t have any that fit. “Please come down, Honeybear. I just don’t want you to fall.”
“I don’t know how,” she said. I looked up again, and this time she was looking at me directly, her face wet with tears. “I’m eleven.”
Eleven. Too young for any of this. I couldn’t understand why humans had to make things so complicated, and I was much older than that.
I stood up and held up my arms, my fingertips just shy of where she was. She slid into my arms, clutching Theodore tightly by his wrist.
“I’m sorry, Papa,” she said. “Please don’t be mad.”
I held her tight, until she pushed against me and slid down to the ground. We walked back to the house together, side by side but not touching, her looking around at everything but me and me watching her the entire time.