I can remember praying to God, asking him to send my child home, begging for her safe return, promising my soul was his for all eternity if he would just, PLEASE, send her home.

Policemen were standing in our house, diligently listening as Linda finished telling them what clothes Cathy had been wearing, one of these officers held Cathy’s school photograph limply in his hand.  “Ordinarily,” he began to say, “we don’t start looking for missing persons until forty-eight hours have gone by, but with children, these days, of course we must take things much more seriously.”  Linda slumped down onto a chair, her face was ashen grey, her life-force seemed to just evaporate.  The policeman went on “I hope that your daughter will be home safe very soon, and that there will be nothing further for you to worry about, but, still, you were right to call us.”

A mass of disembodied neighbours’ heads voyeuristically sympathised at me from beyond the hedge, when I walked the policemen to the door.  “Has anyone seen my Cathy,” I quiveringly asked as loudly as I dared.  A-murmuring and a-mumbling came drifting off the breeze, but none of them was talking, no, they never said a word. Whispering, hissing, drifting half-imagined sound, “Poor bastards” eventually slipped out from the crowd, but when I looked among them every mouth was sealed.

Linda drifted aimlessly from one frigid space into the next, picking up things, wiping them tenderly with her hands and hugging them to her chest.  Tears falling from her face in unbroken floods, her breath just stilted gasps, her face drawn and blank.  In her eyes I saw her real belief, that our Cathy, our nine year old Cathy, was dead.

“She’s alive Linda,” I cried out, “I know she’s alive,.. Somewhere…”  Even though I couldn’t convince myself that what I said was true.

After a while there was nothing else to do, helpless, hopeless, we drifted apart, moved away from each other without any feeling.  I stood by the fire, warming myself in the memory of Cathy, while Linda hung herself on the hook of her imagined guilt, collapsing into herself, ageing visibly before me.

Sometimes you’ll never know.  Those times when no-one can tell you what might have happened, because they don’t know themselves.  That must be the hardest thing of all, the never knowing.  How can you grieve then, where do you place your flowers, what soil do you have to hold them in their place then.

We sat the full night through, not speaking not breathing never wanting each other’s comfort, just sitting still between each successive car’s passing that, one by one, made us jump at the curtain, then sit back down again to wait. 

No time for mourning this, no time for being grateful for the brief time we were allowed together.  Just time for silence, for ever lasting lonely bloody silence in an eternally empty house.

Morning cleared the rain away, the birds loosed un-melodic squawks into the air, the postman delivered who cares what through the slot in the front door.  We sat, perched on the edges of our respective seats, much as we had done it seemed as if for ever.  I knew inside almost without thought, that I would not be able to survive this as others do, while Linda just appeared to have lost her ability to produce any more tears.

A car stopped outside, I heard their footsteps dragging in the snow, the door- bell rang long and loud, unable to move, frozen to the seat, heart jack-hammer tripping, scared to let them in.

Holding each other like crutches for support, we made it to the door, unwilling to hear their words, unwilling to hear them speak, ears plugged with our own silently screaming agonies.

“It’s OK.”  The most joyous sound I ever heard. “Your Cathy’s coming home.”