Thread of Hope

FORTY-FIVE

I drove back to my hotel and showered, pulled on a pair of shorts and sat down at the desk near the far window. I wanted to make some notes about what I knew so far about Meredith Jordan.

It took me an hour and a half to record the details of every conversation I’d had involving Meredith. I created a timeline, both for my conversations and for what it looked like had taken place in Meredith’s life. I marked things I thought were important, underlined things I had questions about. I read through them again to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.

And after all that, I still wasn’t sure what I was looking at.

I called down to the concierge and asked if they had a business office where I might be able to use a computer. Five minutes later, a laptop was brought to my room with a portable printer and a ream of paper. I took another hour typing up the notes I’d made and printing them out. I spread them out on the bed and looked through them again.

Reading through my notes just confirmed something I’d already figured out. Nobody knew Meredith Jordan as well as they thought they did, which wasn’t that unusual with teenagers. They put out one image for their friends and family to see, while keeping other things to themselves. It was the unusually confident kid who could be his or herself to all people all the time. The people in her life wanted me to believe that Meredith was one of those unusual kids, but my notes were portraying a normal teenager who hadn’t been honest with everyone.

As I dressed for my dinner with Jon Jordan, my thoughts drifted to my own daughter, as they often did when I was in the midst of the menial tasks of every day life.

I wondered what Elizabeth would’ve been like at Meredith’s age. It was a fruitless exercise, trying to turn a child into an eighteen-year-old, but one I played often. She was a confident little girl, always nodding her head with authority when asked if she was okay or if she was hungry. She was happy to explain when she was upset, often placing her small hand on her hip and wagging her index finger. Even though the gesture was impolite, it was one that always made her mother and me stifle a laugh.

She was terrible at soccer, loved to dance to Springsteen, giggled when people smiled at her, cried when we got upset with her and I wasn’t sure how all that would’ve translated into her teenage years. I wanted to believe that all those idiosyncratic personality traits would’ve merged to form one of the greatest human beings ever created, but reality told me that she would’ve been as frustrating to us as every teenage daughter was to her parents. There was some kernel, though, some fraction of intuition that resided inside of me that insisted that Elizabeth would’ve been special, that I would’ve been proud of her, that she would’ve been different.

What that intuition couldn’t tell me, however, was what had happened to my daughter.