I am not a superstitious woman. I walk on lines, I don’t knock on wood. But I do fear for my children, yet unborn. I worry what may happen.

Here is a story that haunts me. A recent news run, channel 13. I am on the treadmill, running a slow mile. Above me there is a dated boxed television. Jeanette reports live from Osceola county: “We’re getting updates that the hacker infiltrated the baby monitor. The parents heard him say, ‘I could take your baby, if I wanted to.’”

I imagined then: my husband and I, two glasses of wine into post-work. The television on, the dog walked, the baby asleep—then, panic. A voice invades our house. How, how? The police can’t say.

Anxiety is this caged thing inside me. It flaps and hawks and gravels. It anchors talons in my lungs, so that I cannot breathe. It is not a beautiful feathered thing, but clipped. A bird of prey feasting between the rods of my rib cage.

*******

“We must practice,” says my mother. “Drill time.”

She lines us in the kitchen. She tells us to scream, scream loudly, scream with all we have. We blink at first. Is this an opposite game? Where’s the “Be quiet!”—where’s the “Calm down now”?

This is after “the incident.” After a roly-poly cop came to our door, interviewed my sister—age eight. She is a fragile thing, my sister. Wheat-haired and gentle, a sing-to-herself type. This day, she strolled along the sidewalk alone, only to shriek back inside. “There was a man. In a car. He stopped, asked for directions. Then he leaned over. He could have had a gun! He leaned over so I couldn’t see.”

Did I believe her, at ten? Does it matter anymore? My mother believed. She called my father. She called the police. The car, of course, was long gone, but they took the description, gun and all.

Now we practice screaming.

“Let the neighbors hear!” roars my mother. I stand, feet apart on the marble. I pull my shoulders back: I scream at the rafters. I shout FIRE, I shout THIS IS NOT MY MOM, I shout from my toes, from my secret places, I shout because I know that my mother’s fear is not death, so much, as pain before death—that her fear is compounded by having daughters. This is a world in which mothers fear for their daughters. My brother once—at two—disappeared. Toddled down the highway alone, in diapers, because he wanted to visit a friend. A kind stranger returned him. My mother was relieved, but not panicked. He was a baby, but a boy. My sister and I? Girls. We heard the warnings: “If a man tries to take you, don’t go with him. There are videos of girls who go with them. Girls, if a man tries to take you, what do you do?”

“Don’t go!”

“Yes! You fight and scream and kick him. You be dead weight. You make it hard for him, girls. It’s better for him to kill you, than hurt you, then kill you.”

I am ten. I do not yet know what type of hurt she means. I imagine all the worst pains I can: skinned knees, needles in the arm, a broken leg un-set. A hand over flame. Hunger.

**********

This is an age-old story. Ancient Egyptians wrapped babies in blue cloth, believing that would ward off evil. In the Middle Kingdom, midwifes wielded birth tusks, traced magic circles around women in labor. They banished malevolence with ivory. The Pueblo believed that road runners—eyes like a moon in wax—were medicinal, could ward off evil spirits like a rabbit’s foot. Mothers have long searched for the recipe for safety: they have pinned feathers to a baby’s cradleboard. They have prayed away witches and daemons who snatch infants in the night. They have placed turquoise amulets around children’s necks. Anything for their babies. Wish-bones, crystals, prayer books, rosaries. A baby monitor.

********

Central Florida in the early 2000s. Disney is the epicenter. Suburbs sprawl: all stucco and red roofs, the sky fringed with palmetto. And all through Altamonte Springs, on every lamp post and telephone pole, on every cafe bulletin, she was there.

MISSING Since January 24, 2006

Name: Jennifer Kesse

Age: 24

Description: 5’8”

Shoulder length sandy blonde hair

I watched her face wither on the posters, month after month, some half torn by hurricane winds, others half-covered by posters for missing cats. To this day, she remains on the FBI’s Most Wanted/Missing list.

“She was too beautiful,” my mother used to say. It was dangerous to be young and beautiful.

Before I’d memorized states and capitals or entered in my first spelling bee, I could tell you the details of the Elizabeth Smart case. I knew that Natalie Holloway vanished in Oranjestad, Aruba. The details were drilled into me like rote memorization: a graduation trip, too much drinking, parties with strangers, disappearance. I knew the risk of hitchhiking.
I feared every mysterious van parked on my street, thinking any utility vehicle could be the perfect place to hide a child.

“Some girls are stupid,” my mother told me. She’d pulled up a security video of a girl at an ATM. When a man approached and took her by the elbow, she followed. “What did she do wrong?”

“She just went,” I said.

“She just went. Never just go. Do you know what happens to girls who go?”

I didn’t. But I would dream about it: in one long and endless race, I saw myself running in the night through our suburban Florida neighborhood, past tile roof houses and piles of palm fronds, I ran and ran, refusing to look over my shoulder at the white van that quickly gained on me.

*******

I am in my MFA program in Orlando when I first see the ghosts in my writing. I am twenty-three, married, a feminist, a Christian. I am not yet a mother, but I have recurring nightmares of motherhood. Childbirth and stillborn flesh, SIDs and infant-snatching. In my stories there is this, too: a child left in a hot car, a missing baby, death by housefire.

This is what haunts me. Less the missing child, perhaps, than the present and searching mother. Jennifer Kesse’s parents on my home TV, begging for any information about their daughter, saying they’ll leave no stone unturned.

Perhaps this is why there are days when I do not want children at all, when I fear that I will always grieve the time I had before them. Days when I dread the weight of caring for a full and tiny person. Dread the love that looks like fear.

*******

In our kitchen on that hot summer day, my feet on the white tile, I scream until my throat aches. I scream my fears into the air and try not to imagine my face on a poster tacked to a lamppost. My sister, beside me, is ashen. Our voices scrape the ceiling.

But what I remember most is my mother: her black hair falling around her shoulders as she, too, roars with all her might. Her hands are fists, her eyes are closed. And the sound we make is almost musical, so loud, I think, that the neighbors might call the police. Mine is a mother who knows too much, whose fear has crystallized, taken the shape of the thing she loves. A mother who’s seen so many news reports, that she can imagine, in brutalizing detail, a child-shaped hole in her life. She will do anything to save them, this mother. She will say prayers. She will install monitors. She will helicopter. She will rehearse terrors to prepare them, to prepare herself.