A girl went missing in the summer of 1991. She was twenty years old. The posters went up on every pole in town, and her mother kept the porch light burning, and the county said what counties always say, that girls like her run off all the time.She was Ethel Cain, the preacher’s daughter, raised in Shady Grove, Alabama, in a house where the Lord watched from every wall. Whatever that town believed, it believed about her first. She wore it the way children wear what is handed down to them, without being asked.She lived on small wants. Paperbacks read twice over, the radio after midnight, rain crossing the field toward the house. She wanted a porch of her own someday and somebody gentle on it, and she never once apologised for wanting.Most of all she lived for one boy. The two of them drew up a whole life the way teenagers do, a house, a field going gold in the evening, names for the dogs. They never got to keep any of it. She kept the drawing anyway, folded small, for the rest of her life.And one morning she went the way the roads go out there, west. Everything she owned rode beside her on the bench seat. She never wrote and she never called, and if you had seen her face in the rearview you would have known she was not running away from her life. She was running toward it.The search thinned out by winter. Men with flashlights gave way to men with paperwork, and the posters faded on their poles until the rain took them down. Her mother never stopped looking. Neither did the girl stop going. Giving up was the one thing that town never managed to teach her.
What came back was never the girl. It was a tape, left behind in a house in Nebraska, dust thick on the shell, her summer recorded over one of her father’s sermons.
