Look at the black and white five-year-old photos of Tommy on the milk carton and know better. He is with your daughter. They are safe. Don’t let the parents from counseling pay the funeral home to bury Dana in that mahogany size 2 casket (tell the family it’s not her body) and shake your head at every reheatable pity casserole lining your fridge. Tell yourself there’s no way Heidi drowned. She was the best swimmer in the third grade, and your daughter knew her since preschool. Children do not die. They are not abducted. “Missing” is a word used for their stuffed animals lost in the dark or their first cat, Pounce De Leon, you hit with the minivan. Hold your head high and scan police photos of suspects with a sad shake of your head. Keep waving to those neighbors pretending to clip hedges while they whisper behind your back about sons and daughters, those poor dears, the name Rosa stuck to their dirty lips as they tell you how sorry they are while watching their own children play.
You are smarter. Smarter than your family with their weak smiles and weaker prayers, smarter than the cops or the undertaker (a boozer by the smell), than your own spouse cold asleep in bed (hate him for sleeping, hate yourself for being awake and just as useless). Children are not really missing. Auntie Crow has taken them under her wing.
You first suspected the old crone of stealing your children before Rosa had even stepped into that silver Pontiac on the way home from school, which was so unlike her that it couldn’t be true. She knew to stay away from strangers. No candy. No puppies involved. It had to be the work of Auntie Crow. You were in the garden when it happened. You wore the woven sunhat Rosa used to mock with her father (how softly he sleeps now), and you were bent over the blue-tipped hydrangeas on the side of the house, loaded down by the heavy green water pail. You looked up to the street where no one walked. A breeze flicked your long hair into your mouth, and you had to shield your eyes from the sun. But you knew. In that still-second moment of sun touching road, in that heavy leaden air, you knew what would happen before there was anything to happen. Rosa was with her friends that afternoon, Harley and Izzy, lolling behind in her plaid school uniform. The girls had once again commented on her choice of beaded hair ties and her lack of lip-gloss during their presentation on the Egyptians. Rosa would not live that down. The other girls skipped ahead and whispered to one another, casting glances back at Rosa and laughing at her. Rosa must have blamed you. You would not let her wear lip anything, and how stupid could you be? You’ll be sorry! she’d yelled at you that morning, stomping down the stairs when you took away your red lipstick from her. You didn’t believe her threat at the time; she always said you’d regret it when she didn’t get her way, your spoiled little doll. But you believe her now.
While the two girls laughed and walked ahead, Rosa kicked her black shoes so they’d scuff. She planned to take your pearl necklace to school the next day as well as seven or eight sprays of your Chanel No. 5 perfume—better than sticky cherry lip gloss anyway. She looked up from the curb to see her friends laughing and racing across the street as the sign switched from a flashing red pedestrian to halt. Harley and Izzy waved goodbye, backpacks and all. You will hate those girls for the rest of your life, and when Harley mentions Rosa in her high school valedictorian speech with a single tear rolling down her tight, teenage cheek, you will wish her all the pain in the world, the universe—Ebola, gout, infertility, a long and slow life alone without the ability to ever cry, once, for herself or for your daughter. The Pontiac was said to have pulled up soon after Harley and Izzy left Rosa, but don’t believe these lies. No man with a ginger beard has your little girl. He does not touch her white Hanes underwear with Rosa written on the back label. His breath does not smell of cigarettes and pine nuts. She is with Auntie Crow, living in a shabby sweet cottage in the woods. Even though you love your daughter, even though every sunset drains what little left of your marrow there is, do not hate Auntie Crow. She is taking good care of Rosa and the others.
Rosa now plays with Felix, a boy from Washington. Be grateful. He is a better friend than she’d ever had in those two bitches. Felix chases her in the halo of light circling the wooded clearing. He tries to grab her even longer black ponytail and fails because she’s gotten so fast from outdoor living, and you know she thinks she’s little Laura Ingalls because you used to watch Little House on the Prairie with her when she was home from school sick. Nature has cured Felix as well. He was an asthma- and allergy-ridden boy, exhausted by the thought of tag on the playground blacktop during recess. With Auntie Crow’s gentle nod from the cottage steps, he runs again and his heart pumps loud, his lungs inflate to hot-air-balloon proportion, and his breath releases a cool winter mint on Rosa’s cheek as he tackles her into the downy green grass. Rest assured. He will never need that EpiPen again, so when you meet his parents at the support group every Tuesday, even though the counselors are telling you lies, telling you that your children are missing, dead, gone, to mourn for them, feel free to tell Felix’s parents to throw that wretched yellow plastic pen away, that they can let go because Felix is cured and wouldn’t he, with his nervous smile and square glasses, and Rosa with her cherry-spot cheek, make the cutest pair someday? Don’t tell them your wedding plans on the first or even fifth visit; you know it’s silly to plan the lives of children, and his parents are still mourning an imaginary accident, their boy stung by bees, found dead in the gravel road outside the school fence. Curse the support group for filling their heads with lies, but keep going, Tuesday after Tuesday, alone. When his parents say they don’t know what he was doing there, when they blame a group of boys who probably dared him into that tree, when they blame themselves for not making sure he had his EpiPen that morning (they found it that night in the laundry), then and only then can you tell them about Auntie Crow.
In the forest, Auntie Crow calls her children back to her with a simple hand wave, and they pour onto that gray porch in the sunshine woods in the middle of nowhere. Auntie considers herself lucky to have all those children. And she has no favorites. Truly. She loves Felix and Rosa and even Jonah who’s stopped swearing and Marnie who can now ride Bonnet, Auntie’s faithful Clydesdale, whenever she wants, and Quinn and Deon and Luke and so many others. Rosa is an inch taller and reaches up to Auntie’s large hip, the slick dark of Auntie’s skirts folding over Rosa like a blanket. Rosa still wears her black shoes and the pine floors creak a happy tune, like Snow White’s dwarves whistling at work, as the children begin their duties.
Rosa stirs a steaming pot of stew on the stove, smelling the thick herbs and mushrooms Andrey foraged that afternoon with Kent and Vinny. Rosa wishes she was as tall as Andrey so she could find the rare herbs, the colored ones that Auntie Crow fawns over, but Auntie Crow says Rosa will be a better cook than Andrey will ever be. When Rosa sips from the stew spoon, she knows Auntie wasn’t lying (she never would; not to your daughter). And besides, Rosa thinks, Andrey will grow and leave soon like the other children who get too big. Rosa thought this idea would make her happy, but she stirs the pot with a quiet sadness for all the children Auntie Crow has kissed back into the world of adulthood. She knows someday Auntie Crow will make her leave, but she never wants to go. From her flowered stool in front of the kitchen window, she can see a doe gnawing grass on the lawn, and a squirrel scattering up the big tire-swing tree by the lavender patch. This is Rosa’s home.
Felix is on dish duty, soaping and passing white china beside her to Paula, and none of them ever question how such a tiny-looking house on the outside fits the several hundreds or thousands or millions of them inside. Auntie Crow passes by in the kitchen, kissing Rosa's head with her thin, brown lips. She lets the younger children like Rosa set the long log table, chop carrots. Outside, the older children skin rabbits for the stew on the porch. Harry runs in and out the screen door with a bowl of meat to add for supper. Auntie leaves them to their business; she does not raise her voice, has never had a need, and Rosa watches her old, smooth hips climb the wooden stairs, and only for a moment, a flicker of sunlit white grass outside, does Rosa remember a woman with black hair who used to walk upstairs with a wicker hamper basket. The thought would make her sad if it weren’t so brief. She has Felix try her stew, and he says he cannot believe how amazing Rosa’s gotten at cooking, and what does Rosa do? She shrugs with a toss of her hair, already so good at flirting, your little girl.
Upstairs, Auntie Crow tends to the babies. They line the attic in rows of pastel-colored bassinets with the sun setting behind white-curtained windows. She does not step into the room but hangs one arm on the doorframe. Every babe is fast asleep, every cradle swaying back and forth and all the mobiles circling above their heads custom and specific to each child, from Ethan's space theme to the menagerie above Sarah. Auntie Crow holds one finger to her lips when Layla, third down, row two, opens her mouth into a whine. The girl settles back into her dream, any memory of her parents a white-hot page flapping around in her tiny, soft head.
When Auntie Crow comes back downstairs, dinner is ready, set, and the children sit around the table. Rosa holds hands with her friend Zara. Later that night, when everyone else is asleep and Auntie Crow rocks on the porch in her knitting chair, Rosa, belly full and shirt rolled up over her tan stomach with the breeze from the open window prickling her, will tell Zara and the ceiling about her dreams. Rosa will talk the way she talks, which is in excess, nonstop, about wanting to climb to the top of the big tree and see everything for miles, which must include the pyramids somewhere far off, and learning to trap squirrels and rabbits even though she’d rather name them and maybe she wants to be a veterinarian, which would be really cool because she’d be in charge of Bonnet the horse and get first dibs riding, and they’d be so close everyone would just call them Ronnet, and does Zara smell pine nuts? Nuts would be so good for tomorrow’s salad.
Rosa finally quiets, burrowing into her cool cotton sheets in bed while the two girls listen to the silent blue night and a single squeak from Auntie Crow’s rocker outside. Zara says Rosa would be a great veterinarian. Totally the best because she’s super smart and not like Connor, who Zara actually thinks is pretty cute. They’ll laugh with mouths covered to not wake the babies upstairs, though neither can remember if the babies have actually ever cried. Zara will ask if she can be Rosa’s vet assistant, and Rosa says she’ll think about it, and they’ll think and talk about everything, everything but you.
They are better off without you.
You are not Auntie Crow. You cannot knit millions of stylish glittery flaring skirts before the moon hits night. You cannot call woodland creatures to your doorstep with a pat of your bony knee. You cannot speak ten languages, one of which is extinct, or talk to the black crow that sits on her shoulder at twilight, and you don't wear starry, sky-colored skirts that make your daughter safe. You cannot keep her safe. You never could. Admit it. To yourself, to your darting husband who stares at his cereal in fear of you every morning. All you do is moan and curse and know that you were home in your garden when she was taken, that you even had a car, a goddamn car, which she could have stepped into with her swishing pigtails as she hiked up that first big step with her backpack dangling. You do not deserve her. You lost the rights to her. You had your chance. All ten years of them, every day, every possibility to take a fucking ten-minute drive to her school, lift her small legs into your car, and drive her down that hill to home, safe in your front seat and not with some stranger. You lost her, your daughter, your Rosa, you lost all of her. You sniveling, pathetic woman, you never really deserved a daughter like Rosa, the beautiful girl with the long, black hair and crooked laugh who knew the names of the planets before her fifth birthday. Look in the mirror and see a woman not good enough to keep her own child. Any child. A weak woman. A whining woman. A woman who couldn’t even pick her daughter up from school. And when you look up at your own speckled ceiling at night, know Auntie Crow is shaking her head at you, fingers whittling a letter opener though they don’t get mail; there’s no address. You’ve tried.
So talk about your dreams. Talk about them to the empty air, to your husband dead asleep and snoring beside you, to your twitchy therapist Dr. Oppenheimer, to Felix’s parents before they stop showing up to group sessions. Let the words fall out to anyone with ears. Show up to Rosa’s school unwanted. Hold out her pictures you keep in your wallet but don’t let anyone touch those pictures, even though you have copies. The school secretary will expect you at lunch every day while she takes out her turkey and avocado sandwich and chews slowly, nodding her hair-bun to your stories about Rosa on Auntie Crow’s homestead. She won’t ask questions at first. No one will. She just repeats that she’s sorry, so sorry for your loss (what loss?). But after two months, the principal, a middle-aged woman in a gray pantsuit and maroon lipstick stuck to her front tooth, will ask you, very sweetly, to come into her office during one of your talks with Secretary Lisa. You are more than glad until the principal’s veined hands fold in front of you on the mahogany desk, and she asks how things are going at home. You break before you even knew you could.
You thought you were going to tell her about Auntie Crow, about how Rosa’s riding horses and getting a much better education than this expensive private school could offer (a low blow, but necessary), but instead your body buckles, your ribs crunch into yourself, and you inhale a scream that stifles and cuts your throat. You have no home. You say these four words aloud in English, in Spanish, until your face is purple. The principal is pulling her chair back, hands in front of her body like she pulled the pin to a grenade and doesn’t know what to do with you, you, the starved and rabid animal wailing in front of her mahogany desk. You are panting. Your eyes are red and running, and if you could, you would howl, let loose to every instinct and pain in your body, and you think at that moment that you know why wolves howl, a cry to the moon to find their lost pack, how easy for those dumb, hairy beasts. But in your head you hear the bit of the phrase you didn’t say aloud, those extra two words that rattle in your mind and make you lose breath the second before you push them back: without Rosa. You have no home without Rosa. When you hear that line complete in your mind, you lose it again, and the principal has just enough time to call your husband who will pull up in that fucking car that you should have used to drive home your daughter that day, and he will insist that you go to the hospital. You’re calm before they open the clear panel doors and give you a tranquilizer, calm even as you wonder, in the car ride home, if the Pontiac played the same song, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” with Rosa sitting in the backseat.
You won’t mention Auntie Crow to others for a long time again, but within the hour after the tranquilizer, you'll remember the truth: Auntie Crow took your baby. Your baby is without you, but fine. Take a deep breath. Go back to your garden and pull weeds and even the healthy plants and rebuild. Your husband will join you next spring, his hands big and clumsy, and you'll swap the hydrangeas for roses. Look at his face when his hands prick thorns. See the sweat weaving down the grooves of his forehead. See the tears forming, hear his single sniff. This man not two feet from you, your husband, is like looking at an old photo you don't remember taking. Realize you've forgotten his hooked nose, his hair now gray-eaten at the temples, forgotten his face altogether and meeting him drunk at a sophomore college dance, your wedding in his family's church in Odessa where his awful drunk brother called you a crazy bitch, your husband insisting on building Rosa’s crib to ensure it was the safest possible, and you laughing at your engineer husband when it fell apart months before Rosa was born.
All of this comes through a glass, like watching animals at the zoo, two creatures pawing and laughing, two animals who cannot possibly be the same creatures sitting in your garden now, pulling weeds. When he looks away, realize you are a terrible person. But don’t dwell; let that hate go, at least on the outside. Take his hand. At night, you’ll hold that hand for once and let him cry out everything he’s been holding in, even though he resists at first. Give him time. When he’s ready, he’ll speak, and he won’t stop. Listen to all his regrets, his memories of her laughing and how she could have been anything, so smart, so much passion, while you stare at the ceiling. And when he leans over to you at night, let him take you, and it will be better.
Your house with the blue shutters and willow tree where she scraped her thigh will never be home again, but it will be a place you and your husband can live. You’ll buy matching rockers for the front steps and never tell him the real reason why, but he’ll enjoy nights drinking wine with you all the same. While you two swing back and forth together, you will wonder if he is wishing he could have picked her up from school one last time, imagining himself appearing at the top of the street with her in the passenger side, pulling into the driveway, her young body safe behind metal and glass. This is what you think of most: that single drive home. Second is all the years in between, the scars she’ll gain, how Auntie Crow will teach her on being a woman, how she’ll be loved by someone other than you until she’s grown and ready to come back to you.
So when you see Rosa years later, all grown up wearing black leggings, a red skirt, and tiny plaid backpack, popping spearmint waiting for the bus to pick her up, restrain yourself. Do not shout her name across the crowd of rain-jacketed onlookers. Do not run so hard to her that your lungs squeeze and burn like lemons. And, please, in the name of all those gods you prayed to for the last decade and more, do not tell her she is your lost daughter, that cherry spot on her cheek the proof, and smell the rain wet on her hair or, worse, pull out one of those hairs to keep for yourself (tuck the two strands in your pocket). Auntie Crow is careful. The girl will not remember you, how you read her Peter Rabbit year-round or her pink plush doll Poptart Sprinkle that you replaced eight times before she reached the age of two.
It’s been a while since she’s seen you, and you probably wouldn’t recognize yourself either. Pull yourself off her beautiful new woman body one stiffened arm at a time. Inhale the scent you know must be too much orange and musk perfume. Forgive her when she calls you a crazy psycho bitch and shoves you into the nearest man wearing headphones attached to nothing. He might say he’s sorry, but those two words mean nothing to you. You are deaf to them or were until this moment. Walk back to Rosa, slow now, wallet open in one raised hand, laddering down pictures of her from when she was a baby to her last fifth-year school picture. Start with “I’m sorry.” Let those two words bleed from lost days and weak arms and a broken tongue you wish could capture everything you imagined and rehearsed saying to her. Teenage Rosa will let you get close enough to show her the photos. She might understand or pretend to understand your story and nod in silence while you babble about her lost teeth and how she begged you to get her ears pierced after Maisy Reinbold did in second grade. Keep talking. She's really starting to believe. The tamales and blue ice cream every birthday, how she would touch herself in public at age four just to make you embarrassed because she'd done it once while watching cartoons and you'd yelled and then she knew she had control, and all the times you took her to see the chimps at the Campton zoo or had to haul her tiny ass out of church because she’d sigh and cry the whole hour. Say you regret spanking her. That you tried to be a good mother. Blush a little, and teenage Rosa will know you are telling the truth. You can tell by the way her eyelids relax over those honey-browns and the way she pats and holds your shoulder as the bus rears to a stop on the curbside.
You're still holding those photos from your wallet like Exhibit A as she steps onto the bus. Follow her. Sit next to her. Talk over her polite smile, her half nods, and her blaring headphones all the way from Elm to 53rd, leaning over on that cracked blue cushion so she can really see the resemblance in the photos as you hit another pothole. See the birthmark? Do you see? But don’t stop talking. Auntie Crow has given her back, and though her memory of you has faded, it is not altogether gone. It’ll take time, and driving her home is all you wanted anyway.
Kyle Teller writes fiction and poetry exploring the body, identity, and magic. She graduated with an M.F.A from Eastern Washington University. Currently, she teaches at the University of Kansas while working toward her Ph.D. in Creative Writing. Her works appear in The Pinch and Whiskey Island.