Page 5 of The Kidnapped

“No, it’s okay. I only have two. I can get them.”

She went to turn to go, but her mother’s frail hand held on to her own.

“Mom, I’ll be right back,” she said, looking Olivia right in the eye.

The older woman nodded, and tears fell from her eyes.

Hollis grabbed her luggage and placed both bags in the living room, taking a closer look around the room. It was small. There was a sofa and a chair in the corner. The coffee table looked old but clean. In fact, everything in the room looked clean. She wondered if her mother had cleaned for her. Hollis hoped not. There was a flat-screen TV opposite the sofa that was a modest size. The fireplace looked like it had seen better days and hadn’t been used in a while. The framed pictures on the wall behind the sofa, though, were what really caught Hollis’s attention, so she walked closer, hearing her mother moving around in the kitchen. There were at least ten photos of Hollis hanging up. Her father had shown her a few pictures of her from the one photo album he’d likely swiped from the house before he took her, so she’d seen some pictures of herself as a baby, but she hadn’t seen these. Some slots in that album had also been missing photos, but she’d chalked that up to the fact that he’d never really cared much for organizing or presentation.

“That was the day we took you home from the hospital,” Olivia said, walking back into the room, carrying a tray with two teacups on it.

“Let me get that for you. I would have–”

“I can carry a tray of tea, Hollis,” she replied. “Or do you prefer Heidi? I don’t want to–”

“No, I don’t want to be Heidi. That’s the name he gave me,” she interrupted. “And I don’t know how any of this works, but I’d like to change my name, if I can. I never liked Heidi to begin with. It always felt… foreign.” She took the tray from Olivia anyway and placed it on the table. “I guess now I know why.”

“I picked ‘Hollis’ out of a baby book,” Olivia shared as she sat down on the sofa. “We didn’t know if we were having a boy or a girl, so we picked a name that we thought could work for both.”

“It’s pretty,” Hollis replied, smiling and sitting down next to her.

“Can you… Did he ever… Were…”

“No,” Hollis said, taking her mother’s hand and placing it in her own lap. “No, he never hurt me. Believe it or not, he was a good dad.” She shook her head. “We just moved around a lot, and I wasn’t allowed to join things very often. I wanted to play soccer at one of the schools, but he told me we couldn’t afford it or something. It wasn’t the best way to grow up, I imagine, but it was far from the worst. We didn’t always have a lot of money, but I never went hungry or anything. It was normal to me at the time.”

Her mother’s tears started to fall again, and she said, “That was the hardest part about not knowing: I was only ever ninety-nine percent sure you were with him. Even the FBI told me they couldn’t be one-hundred-percent sure because your father had left everything in his apartment, including his truck. They said something could’ve technically happened to both of you, but it was likely that it was him. I held on to that all these years because I hoped that if you were with him, you were at least safe. If something had happened to both of you, there was no telling what it could have been.”

“I’m okay,” Hollis said, giving her mother’s hand a little squeeze. “I had a good life, Mom. I just still haven’t really processed all of this. A little over a week ago, I was in Vancouver, checking new books into my library, and I saw my face on the cover of one of them. I thought I was crazy.”

“She asked to put you on the cover.”

“I was a blonde, white girl. That was probably the reason.”

“I don’t think so.” Olivia shook her head a little. “She put the pictures of the other children on the back cover, but she said that there was something about your eyes that she hoped would draw people to the book, and maybe they’d think of something or someone they’d seen that would help find all these kids. She does this for a living, so I just trusted her. And she was right. You saw something. You’re here.”

“She writes books about missing kids for a living? What a job,” Hollis noted.

“No. I told you; she’s a reporter. She has one of those shows. It’s been on the Crime Channel for years. Kenna Crawford. Do you not get the show in Vancouver?”

Hollis hadn’t seen the show or heard of Kenna Crawford beyond the fact that she’d seen the woman’s name on the book under the title.

“No, I don’t.”

“She did an episode on you, too. It was on parents who were still looking for their kids after decades. She talked to me about you; and another family, about their missing son. That’s how we met. Then, she asked about the book, and I said yes. She donated all proceeds from the sales to the Center of Missing and Exploited Children, so I don’t think she’s in this for the money.”

“She sounds like a good person,” Hollis replied.

“I need to call her to tell her that you found me,” her mom said, smiling at Hollis before cupping her cheek. “You found me, sweetie.”

Hollis leaned forward then and kissed her mother’s forehead before she burst back into tears for all the time she’d lost and the limited amount of time they had left together.

CHAPTER 2

“This was your room,” her mom said.

Mom. Hollis had a mom. She still couldn’t believe it. Her dad had never even shown her pictures of the woman, saying he hadn’t kept any after her death because it was too hard. That photo album he’d shown her had only had pictures of her and him together or Heidi by herself. She hadn’t wanted to cause her father any pain by bringing up her mom, so she’d only ask about her every now and then. She wanted to know if she was like her mother. He’d told her that she looked a little like her but was more like him than her mother in everything else. That hadn’t made a lot of sense to her growing up, though. For example, she loved to read. Her father hardly ever picked up a book. When he did, it was a how-to book that he needed for work. She liked the outdoors enough, but he loved it. She preferred to stay inside the cabin by the fire. He liked fishing and hunting. She’d never been able to shoot an animal and always wanted to toss the fish they’d catch back into the water. He wasn’t a clean man. She preferred things to be neat and organized. Now, she was standing in the doorway of her first bedroom next to her mother, who wasn’t dead and who had kept her room the same for thirty years.

“I know it’s silly. This is the room of a five-year-old child, and you’re an adult in your thirties now. I always felt like you were still alive out there, though. And, like I said, I’d hoped your father had you because that was the best I could hope for. I knew you were growing up. I’d celebrate your birthdays in this room. I baked you a cake and got you gifts I thought you’d like. I’ve done that every year for thirty years now. And while I knew you were a teenager and then an adult, I still couldn’t change the room. I thought that if I found you one day, you’d maybe want to see it how it was, and that if you couldn’t remember – because the therapists and doctors and officers and agents kept telling me that it was possible you wouldn’t remember me or this place – it might help you remember.”

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