On June 3, 2003, a little Maryland girl had disappeared from a campground in the Shenandoah Valley while vacationing with her family. Apparently, there’d been some controversy over the way the police had dealt with her disappearance, and that’s where Anna came in. I found her in the very last sentence.Anna Knightly, spokesperson for the Missing Children’s Bureau, defended police handling of the case. “Issuing an Amber Alert with only a physical description of the child would have been inappropriate,” she stated.

This couldn’t be our Anna, but I checked Google for her name, anyway. The name Anna Knightly was more common that I could have guessed. Anna Knightlys were breeding dogs, blogging about counted cross-stitch and teaching school. I added the word missing to my search and up popped an article I hadn’t even known I’d been looking for. It appeared in the Washington Post on September 14, 2010—the day Noelle killed herself—and the headline read New Director Named for Missing Children’s Bureau. The article was brief and to the point.Anna Knightly has been named director of the Missing Children’s Bureau. Ms. Knightly has worked with the bureau in various capacities since 2001, inspired by the disappearance of her own infant daughter from a North Carolina hospital. She has been committed to the cause of reuniting missing children and their parents since that time.

I sat back in my chair, an icy sweat breaking out all over my body. I didn’t really believe Noelle’s half-written letter until that moment. I couldn’t picture her stealing a pack of gum, much less an infant. I couldn’t imagine her living a life of lies. Yet here it was. Here was the proof.

Now, what was I supposed to do with it?



23

Noelle


Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina

1989

“Hey, Galloway Girls,” Sam said from the back door of the little oceanfront cottage, “here’s my contribution to dinner tonight.”

Flanked by Emerson and Tara, Noelle walked across the musty-smelling living room and peered into the bucket Sam was holding. Four sad-looking, silver-scaled fish lay one on top of the other in the bottom of the bucket.

“Wow, excellent!” Tara said.

“What are they?” Emerson asked.

“Fish.” Sam grinned proudly.

Emerson swatted his arm. “I meant what kind.”

“Who cares.” He laughed. The four of them had been at the beach for two days and his skin was already a rich caramel, his eyes the color of the sky behind his head.

Noelle could see that at least one of the fish was still alive and laboring to breathe. She shuddered and raised her eyes from the bucket to Sam’s face.

“You’re a brute, Sam,” she said.

Sam looked in the bucket himself. “I don’t think they suffered too much,” he said, but now he actually looked a little worried and that touched her. Sam was a softie.

He leaned over to peck Tara on the cheek. “I’ll clean them out here,” he said. “I just wanted to show them off first.”

The oceanfront house on Wrightsville Beach was small and funky and perfect. Tara and Sam had the largest bedroom, while Emerson had the nicest of the smaller ones. She’d suggested that she and Noelle draw straws for it, but Noelle told her to take it. She would do anything for Emerson. She said it didn’t matter which room she had and that was the truth. She was happy just to be at the beach with friends she’d come to love over the past ten months. She would never have the tight, freshman roommate bond that existed between Tara and Emerson, since she was three years older and had spent the year as their RA, but both of the younger women had become the closest friends she’d ever had. Early on, she’d worried that they’d think she was insinuating herself into their lives, but she gradually felt their genuine affection for her. They accepted her, quirks and all, the way few people had.

In some ways, though, she was even closer to Sam.

It turned out he’d been a teaching assistant in her Medicine and the Law course early in the semester and she discovered he was far more than just a pretty face. While her professor focused on how medical personnel could protect themselves from lawsuits, Sam seemed more concerned about the patients and Noelle loved that about him. He became a part of her world both in the classroom and out. They’d fallen into a pattern of meeting at the restaurant in the student union during their break after class, and she’d tell him about patients she was working with in her clinicals and he was always fascinated. Always concerned. She’d thought of lawyers as calculating hustlers who twisted the truth to suit their clients’ needs, but Sam would never be that sort of lawyer. She hoped law school wouldn’t jade him. He’d be going in the fall and she warned him at least once a week to hang on to his values the way she’d hung on to hers during nursing school.

Their conversations in the student union would occasionally stray from the professional to the personal, and she’d share with him things she usually kept to herself. Her father’s desertion. Her mother’s midwifery. She’d point out the handful of men she’d slept with, as well as the men who wanted her whom she’d turned away, disinterested.

“You like the kooks,” he said to her.

“What do you mean?”

“The guys you’ve slept with.” He nodded toward one of them who was sitting at a nearby table, hunched over a book, his waist-long braid over his shoulder. “They’re outside the norm.”

They were. So was Sam, in his own way, and if he had not already been taken she would have hoped for something more with him. She knew he was attracted to her, yet his commitment to Tara was as strong as if they’d been promised to each other at birth.

Things would be so different in the fall, and that’s what made this summer and her time with her friends so precious. In the fall, Sam would be in law school at Wake Forest and she’d be heading to midwifery school in Greenville. While she was excited about getting closer to her goal, she felt a profound sadness at the thought of being apart from Emerson, Tara and Sam.

Especially, of course, Emerson.

Although her mother knew she’d befriended Emerson, she thought Noelle had made a sort of peace with the whole situation and could leave it alone. She would leave it alone, yes. She had no desire to hurt anyone. But peace? Peace was impossible.

All during the year, she’d hoped that Emerson’s parents might visit her from California and Noelle would finally get to meet her birth mother. That never happened. Once, Emerson’s grandparents visited unexpectedly from Jacksonville, but Noelle arrived back in the dorm mere minutes after they’d left. Ironically, she’d felt relieved. She was afraid that a surprise meeting with her grandparents might have caused her to blurt out something she’d later regret. She wanted to meet them, but she needed to be prepared.

The fourth night in the cottage at Wrightsville Beach, Noelle woke up with a start. She lay quietly in the darkness trying to figure out what had jolted her awake. Voices? The phone? Everything was so still.

Suddenly, though, her bedroom door flew open.

“Noelle, wake up!” Sam moved toward her bed. He shook her shoulder, and she sat up, brushing her hair back from her face with her hands.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Emerson’s mother’s dead!” he said. “She—”

“What?”

“Her father just called. They were riding bikes and she was hit by a car. Emerson is—”

“Oh, no.” She swung her legs over the side of her bed and pulled on her shorts, her hands shaking. This couldn’t be happening. “Where’s Emerson?”

“She ran out to the beach.” Sam headed for the living room. “She’s hysterical. Tara’s gone after her and I’m on my way out there.”

“I’m right behind you,” she said.

They ran through the living room and onto the porch.

Sam pushed open the screen door and Noelle followed him out to the beach. She couldn’t absorb this. Her mother dead? No, no, no.

The air was like tar, thick and black, and the sea was so calm that they could hear Emerson before they saw her. The keening tore at Noelle’s heart. They found her sitting in a crumpled heap in the sand, Tara cradling her in her arms like a child.

“I can’t believe it!” Emerson wailed. “I can’t believe it!”

Noelle and Sam dropped to the sand next to them, wrapping their arms around both Emerson and Tara. Sam and Tara murmured words of comfort, but Noelle had no voice. It was caught fast in her throat and she was glad of the darkness so she could shed her own tears for the mother she would never have the chance to know.

None of them slept that night. There were a dozen more phone calls, arrangements being made, flights being booked. Tara decided she would fly to California with Emerson. Noelle somehow missed the information about Emerson’s grandparents picking them up for the drive to the airport, so she was the one who opened the cottage door and came face-to-face with a man whose vivid blue eyes were very much like her own. She knew instantly who he was and she stood frozen in the living room, her hand locked on the doorknob.

“I’m Emerson’s grandpa,” he said. “Are they ready?” He had starbursts of laugh lines at the corners of each eye as though he laughed often and hard. He wasn’t laughing now, though.

Noelle’s mouth was dry as sand. She knew she should say something—I’m sorry for your loss—but the words wouldn’t form. “I’ll get her,” she finally managed to say. She turned around and saw Sam walking toward the door. “Tell Emerson her grandfather’s here,” she said, heading for the bath room. “I don’t feel well.”

She’d wanted to hug Emerson and Tara goodbye. Instead, she stayed in the small bathroom, sitting fully dressed on the toilet, waiting for them to leave. She heard muffled voices through the door. Voices belonging to her sister. Her grand father. She sat there alone as the sound of slamming car doors sifted through the screen of the bathroom window.