Seed In Remi's Mind example essay topic

English II October 23, 2003 The Prodigal Girl Remi sat up in bed, sleep falling away from her, and for a fleeting second, things were normal again. Then she remembered and it came back to her like a vice crushing her skull, bleeding dry her eyes. Natalie was still missing. She glanced at her husband, Tobi, asleep beside her, flat on his back, one giant hairy arm slung over his forehead.

His mouth was open, lower lip twitching like an insect on its way to death. She could smell the beer from the night before. Remi wondered if he was dreaming about their little girl, of all the horrible possibilities. She had the brief notion to wake him, and then reconsidered. If he was somewhere safe, in a happier place, she wanted to let him be. The kitchen was dark and as they had left it, with mugs of instant coffee on the kitchen table.

Two of them, one for each of the policemen that had been by the night before. They had been filing the missing-persons report at around five p. m. the night before; Nat's disappearance had passed the 24-hour grace period and had become an official case for the authorities. A male and female officer had come to the house to fill out the necessary paperwork. Remi did not like either of them. She did not appreciate the way one of them, the woman, had been sizing up Tobi, averting her eyes quickly when he looked her way.

Natalie was the proverbial sixteen-year old on her way to falling in with the wrong crowd. Remi did not know whom, for sure, but she did know that her gentle, jovial lamb of a child had metamorphosed into a morose young woman nearly overnight. Old friends were forgotten; their unreturned calls eventually dwindled and stopped. Natalie announced she was dropping her dance lessons because they were "ridiculous".

One hip now vibrated with a pager that materialized out of nowhere; Natalie had only a small weekly allowance. It feared Remi that someone out there was keeping tabs on her daughter. She and Tobi had frantically searched the room for the pager after Nat disappeared, but found it nowhere. Phone calls to Nat's old girlfriends, the dropped ones, had resulted in troubled silence and apologies; they had not spoken to Natalie in months. She no longer wanted them in her life, she had found a new crowd, they said.

They missed her. Remi pulled out a chair and sat down. She stared into one of the coffee mugs, at its sad gravel pooling in the base. The officer had told them that thousands of young girls go missing each year. Only handfuls were ever found.

She wondered just when they gave up on them, when those children became coffee grounds in a drained cup - forgotten, used. Old news. Yes, they could get lucky, the officer had noted. It was best to stay positive.

But with a sentence, that officer had planted a seed in Remi's mind. Over the next few days she would nurture that seed with her anxiety and it would burst from its casing and grow into a terrible fear. She didn't sleep, only scraps of shut-eye here and there, stolen moments when her brain was too tired to keep on spinning. Otherwise her mind was a cinemascope of horror-show images, Natalie's broken body splayed naked among dead leaves in the woods, her brown eyes wide open and goggling. Natalie on a cold coroner's table, a science experiment, being sliced like a bloody birthday cake. Natalie in the ground.

The bones, the skin, the hair and the fingers and the toes that Remi created with her womb and her body, placed in a box to turn to dust and decay. She couldn't bear the notion that existence was so fleeting. Or what if she was in a very precarious state while someone was hurting her, or touching the girl in her sweetest spots, taking pleasure in her humiliation and pain? Suppose they were taking away something that could not be returned or restored? In some strange way, would that be worse than death?

Natalie had been missing for seven days when the telephone rang, kicking Remi's heartbeats into a frenzied hammer. The clock on the nightstand read 1 am; they were to go down to the precinct immediately. The parents launched themselves from the bed and scrambled for clothing. In her haste, Remi forgot her shoes, and noticed her bare feet on the gas pedal when they had already pulled out of the driveway.

She was sitting on a bench, hunched over. Remi recognized her daughter's high-top boots. The officer took her by the elbow and led her over to where Natalie sat. "She was with her boyfriend, in Charleston", he said, chewing on something.

"She's no worse for the wear. He's twenty-three. Did you know your daughter was seeing a twenty-three year old man, Mrs. Manning? Star-crossed lovers, they must be". He chuckled at himself, then coughed into his sleeve.

Remi did not hear him. She was taking in her daughter's face, feature by feature, the Cupid lips, dark eyes, acne clusters around the corners of her mouth. She wanted to know that this was her child. Natalie's face was noticeably thinner, her jaw line harder than it was before. The girl looked up at her mother. The sound of the slap was a sharp crack of skin against skin.

Natalie's cheek flared red and hot and her hand rose to cover it. Shocked, she gasped and began to weep. Her father pulled her to him with his giant arms and held her as she sobbed apologies into his flannel shirt. Remi stood by trembling, unable to speak, her hand sore.

She teetered on the fine line between rage and joy. It was after 3 am when they arrived back home, and Tobi tucked his daughter into bed. He nested several stuffed animals into the bedcovers once she had climbed in. Natalie didn't argue this time that she was too old for such things. Once her husband's sandpaper snores reassured her that she was the only one left awake in the house, Remi tiptoed upstairs and into Natalie's room. The girl was lying on her side, her head resting in the crook of one elbow, sweat-pasting tendrils of hair to her forehead.

All of the tension had drained from her face, leaving it soft and slack again. She could have been eight years old at that moment, still ignorant of the evils that that waited out in the world. Remi sat down on the floor beside the bed and contemplated their good fortune with both guilt and relief. She rested her head against the mattress, and in the exquisite silence that only dawn can bring; she listened to her child breath.