2 | Nine Months, One Red Ribbon, and a Bag of Hair
Let me tell you who Sophie is before I tell you what I found in her overnight bag.
Sophie is Daniel's daughter.
She has lived in our house on Chestnut Street for nine months.
She has her own room with pale blue walls and a shelf of rocks she collected on a trip we took to the reservoir in March, and a nightlight shaped like a small moon that she no longer needs but refuses to give up.
Her mother is Karen.
Karen does not live with us.
Karen lost custody in a hearing last winter after a string of things I will not lay out here because Sophie may read this one day, and I am not going to put another woman's worst week into print.
What I will say is that Sophie came to us in February with a plastic grocery bag of her things and one stuffed rabbit that had lost half its ear.
She did not cry when Daniel brought her in.
She stood in the doorway and took off her shoes and set them side by side and asked where the bathroom was, like a person checking into a hotel.
That night I made spaghetti.
She ate it in small bites and watched me the whole time, and at the end she said, "Thank you, Lily," and I realized she had learned my name before she had learned that she was allowed to stay.
She started drawing me in the corners of her homework.
Not in the middle.
In the corner.
Small.
A little figure in a dress with a name written under it, L-I-L-Y, and around the name, a heart drawn so carefully it must have taken her three tries.
She never called me Mom.
She calls me Lily, and I have never once asked her not to, because that is not a name you ask a child for.
Daniel proposed in July, on the back porch, after Sophie was already asleep.
We told Sophie the next morning over pancakes.
She was quiet for a minute.
Then she said, "Does that mean I get a new dress?"
So the wedding was always partly for her.
Anyone who says a wedding is only about two people has never watched an eight-year-old pick a flower girl dress and try it on three times before lunch.
The dress was white tulle with a sash, and she picked it herself at the shop in Brighton, and she wanted a bow on the back, and she got the bow.
And the woman in the lace gown, Sylvia, appeared twice in those nine months.
Both times at the front door.
Both times asking Daniel for money.
I did not think much of it.
I thought she was a difficult relative on Daniel's side.
Daniel called her an aunt.
I never asked again, which is a thing I now understand I should have done.
After the dressing room cleared out, after my mother had taken Sophie into the bathroom with a box of tissues, I went to the small room where we had stacked the kids' bags.
Sophie's overnight bag was under the coatrack.
Pink with a white stripe.
I opened it because I wanted to get her a clean shirt for the ride home.
I was already thinking about the ride home.
I was already thinking about the word arrest and what my mother meant by it.
Under the folded shirt, down at the bottom, there was a ziplock bag.
It had hair in it.
Dark, wavy hair, cut in lengths of maybe two or three inches, the exact shade of Sophie's hair, which I know because I have brushed it every night since February.
The hair was dry and the cut ends were not fresh.
I am not a hairdresser.
But I have cut tangled ends off my own hair in a bathroom mirror, and I know what a fresh cut looks like, and this was not fresh.
This was hair that had been cut weeks ago, cleaned, and folded.
And it was tied.
Around the middle of the bag, a piece of red ribbon, knotted twice, the way you would tie something you planned to keep.
I sat down on the floor of that spare room in my wedding dress, in the dark, and I held the bag up in the light from the hallway and I felt something in my chest go cold.
Because Sophie had been cutting her hair, or someone had been cutting her hair, and the bag had made its way into her things without her telling me, and I did not know when it had happened.
I brought it out to the hall and I showed it to Daniel.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he said, "That's Karen's handwriting on the sticker."
I turned the bag over.
There was a small pharmacy label stuck to the back.
It was not Karen's handwriting.
I did not say that to him then.
I wanted to see what he would do next.
I put the bag in my purse.
May you like
I walked out to the parking lot and I called Sophie's caseworker and I left a voicemail with the date, the time, and the words, "I have something I need you to see."
Then I sat in the car and watched the church doors, waiting to find out who in that building was on my side.
