“So where the hell is my wife?” he shouted.
“That’s for you to find out,” the doctor answered firmly.
Grant stormed out. He wasn’t worried about my safety. He was furious because, for the first time, he didn’t know where to find me.
I know what happened next at the medical examiner’s office because my mother told me, and because I’ve replayed it in my mind a hundred times.
Nearly two hours from Columbus, my mother, Ruth, had spent a sleepless night. The previous afternoon the volunteer who ran the small clinic in our town had hunted for her everywhere. “Ruth, they called from the city. They say your daughter was in an accident and they need you to come identify her.”
She was 63. She froze in place. Her only daughter. Her little Naomi, the girl who used to rescue stray animals and say that someday she’d have a school where no child would feel alone.
“Until I see my daughter with my own eyes, I won’t believe she’s dead,” she said.
The next morning she set out for Columbus with Walt, a neighbor who owned a pickup truck. Out on the highway they got a flat tire, and between changing it and getting back on the road, they arrived hours late. When she walked into the Medical Examiner’s Office, she was told the autopsy had already been performed.
“So I can’t even say goodbye to my daughter?”
The staff member lowered her eyes. “We’re still verifying the identity, ma’am. Please wait for the officer in charge.”
Ruth walked down the hallway, desperate. Then she heard a voice she knew all too well.
“I’m going to find that ungrateful woman! She can’t just disappear from my house like it’s nothing!”
She looked in and saw Grant arguing with the doctor. Instantly she remembered the day of our wedding, when he had taken her aside: “You’re not going to interfere in our marriage. Naomi already has a husband. She doesn’t need her mother coming around giving advice.”
“But she’s my daughter,” she had replied.
“And now she’s my responsibility. If you want to help her, stay away.”
After that, I stopped visiting my hometown. Every month I sent money, but I never came back. Ruth had thought I was simply too busy. Now she began to suspect something far worse.
She burst into the office and grabbed Grant by the shirt. “Tell me where my daughter is! What did you do to her?”
“Let go of me, you crazy old woman!” He shoved her away. “Your daughter is alive, but missing! And when I find her, she’s going to explain a lot of things to me.”
My mother’s strength drained out of her. Alive? Her daughter was alive?
The doctor explained that another woman had been misidentified. Grant left without apologizing, and Ruth ended up on a bench, crying from relief and fear at the same time.
That was when Dr. Simon Hayes approached, a man of about 42 in a white shirt and a hospital ID badge. He was my cardiologist, and the one person I had trusted enough to call.
“Ruth? I’m Dr. Simon Hayes. I know Naomi.”
“Doctor, please, tell me where my daughter is.”
He sat beside her. “She’s alive. I spoke with her. She asked me to find you and not to let you leave here believing she was dead.”
“Then why isn’t she with me? Why is she hiding?”
Simon was silent for a few seconds. “Because she’s afraid of her husband.”
He showed her the message I had sent that afternoon, saying I was on my way to the house where I grew up. Ruth stood immediately. “We have to go back!”
But when Simon tried to call me, my phone was already off. And as they raced out of Columbus, a black car was speeding toward that same town.
It was Grant. He had figured out where to look for his wife. And he was determined to take me home, whether I wanted to go or not.
What none of us knew was that Grant would get there first.
PART 3
While Grant drove toward the town, I stood in my mother’s kitchen. I had made coffee, but my hands shook so badly I could barely hold the cup. In that house with its light-colored walls, I had learned to feel safe. Now I listened to every engine passing on the street, convinced my husband would appear.
Fifteen years earlier, I had grown up in a small farming town in rural Ohio. After my father died, my mother sewed clothes and sold baked goods to keep me in school. I looked after the neighbors’ children and organized games with cardboard boxes and borrowed crayons. Since childhood I had dreamed of opening a child care center.
At twenty-two I moved to Columbus to study early childhood education. I worked, saved, and got a small business loan to rent a storefront. I painted its walls myself and named it Little Seeds. I started with eight children; years later I employed several teachers. My mother kept the photographs of every achievement.
I met Grant at a bank, when I went in to renegotiate a loan. We collided on the way out and he dropped a folder. While we gathered the papers, he asked me to dinner. He was attentive and ran a building materials distributor. He seemed willing to help me achieve all my dreams. I agreed to marry him without imagining what was coming.
The marriage soon showed another face. Grant began criticizing my friends: one was a gossip, another was envious, another wanted to take advantage of me. Then he got upset whenever I went out with my coworkers. He demanded photos of where I was and showed up unannounced at the center.
“I’m not controlling you. I worry because I love you,” he would repeat.
I ended up drifting away from almost everyone to avoid arguments.
Every visit to my mother brought days of fighting. Grant said the road was dangerous and that the phone calls took time away from our marriage. I sent money every month, but it grew harder and harder to talk to her without him listening in. She kept every deposit in case I ever needed it.
The conflict worsened when I brought up having children.
“You already work surrounded by kids. Now you want one in our house too?” he replied, annoyed.
He didn’t want to share my attention with anyone. He insisted I keep taking birth control and began checking the packaging. I tried to explain that a decision like this should belong to both of us. He answered that he paid for the house, and therefore in it, things were done as he ordered.
One night, after an exhausting day, I forgot to take a pill. Grant found the pack and counted the doses.
“You’re trying to trick me,” he shouted.
I tried to explain it was an oversight. He grabbed my arm and slapped me. Then he said words I could never forget:
“Everything in this house is mine. Even you.”
