BOB DOWD

The young woman curled up in the sleeping bag underneath the overpass, next to a brindled pit bull, had dark hair and pale skin. My breath caught.

As it had dozens of times before.

Still, I circled around to look at her face. She was young, probably still a teenager.

But she wasn’t Jenny.

She wasn’t my daughter.

Even several feet away, I could smell her. There’s a certain smell of homelessness. It’s not pee. It’s just living in the same clothes. It’s not even an unpleasant smell.

The girl’s eyes flew open, and she pushed herself up on one elbow. The dog bared its teeth at me.

“I’m just looking for this girl.” I held out the flyer with three photos of Jenny. Two were real and one had been generated by a special software program that showed her with her hair chopped off and her face gaunt. The police had released it to the media on the six-month anniversary of her disappearance, figuring that if she was still alive, by now she might look nothing like the smiling, healthy Jenny in our original photos. For a few weeks, I got messages on the Facebook page I’d set up. Even though nothing panned out, it was still comforting. Our daughter hadn’t been forgotten.

“She’s about your age.” Would Jenny even recognize me now? I’d lost thirty pounds. How could I eat if I didn’t know if she was being fed? My hair was threaded with gray. How could I sleep if she might not be able to? Technically, I still wrote software manuals, but finding Jenny had become my real job.

When the police stopped actively searching for her, it felt like my heart was being ripped out. What if she was still out there, hurting, in trouble? But in their eyes, she had probably been kidnapped and killed. A few people floated the theory that she had taken the bank deposit and run, but that didn’t explain why she had left her car behind, why her phone hadn’t pinged once since that night.

But I couldn’t give up on her. What if some creep had taken her and then let her go when he got tired of her? Or if she had really stolen the money, she might have decided we had written her off. Either way, she could be too ashamed to contact us.

So every weekend and most weeknights, I searched for her. Truck stops. The Greyhound station. Malls. Parks. Strip clubs. Homeless shelters. The Amtrak station. Under bridges. By the river. In front of convenience stores.

I knew what people thought. That I was denying the reality Jenny was gone for good. More than likely dead. That it was just a way to stave off pain and grief.

But it was far from a blessing to believe—to know—Jenny was alive. Because that meant she must be going through something that I couldn’t even imagine.

At times I even wished that they would find Jenny’s body. Maybe then I could have worked toward the closure that the two therapists I’d seen talked about. I would have a grave where I could visit my beautiful daughter and mourn.

Now the homeless girl covered the dog’s snout with one hand and took the piece of paper with the other. Missing: Jenny Dowd it said at the top. It listed the day she went missing, her birth date, her brown hair and blue eyes, the scar she had on one knee, her lack of tattoos.

Jenny’s disappearance had broken open my beliefs about the world and revealed them for the lies they were. Lies about how bad things only happened to other people. About how things always turned out okay in the end.

The girl in the sleeping bag looked from the flyer to me. “Is this your daughter?”

I nodded, feeling ashamed. When you’re a father, you only have one duty, and I had failed. I hadn’t protected my child.

After Jenny disappeared, some people looked at my family with suspicion. How could a girl vanish so completely? Unless one of us was lying about what had happened. And of the three of us, it was me they side-eyed the most. I would have been just one of a long line of husbands, boyfriends, fathers, and stepfathers who had gone on TV and cried and begged for their missing loved ones to be returned. We all knew how those stories ended. With the sobbing man revealed as the guilty party.

“Yeah,” I told the girl. “Have you seen her? Or anyone who looks like her?”

In the first few weeks after Jenny disappeared, when the media was still interested in us, people reported seeing her walking in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Shopping at Hot Topic in Omaha. They caught a glimpse of her in a back room of a strip club in Boise.

Only it was never her, or by the time word reached us, it was weeks or months later. Still, I had chased after leads, used up all my vacation time. Nearly every day there was a sighting that had to be followed up, just in case it was real. Jenny could still be somewhere, wanting to come home. Maybe putting up one more flyer, calling one more senator, begging one more reporter to write a story, maybe that would make a difference.

But now I wondered if they would even be interested on the anniversary.

How long can a person live on hope?

Amy said it wasn’t even hope anymore, just stubbornness. I said that people were taking their cues from us, and that if they saw us giving up on her, they would too. Amy said that I had never been good at accepting reality, and this was just more proof. She believed Jenny must have died that first night.

Amy made that choice because otherwise she would go crazy.

But I didn’t believe Jenny was dead. Just like I didn’t believe that our marriage was. Sure, we fought a lot, but yelling at each other and throwing things was an escape valve when we were both on the verge of exploding.

Then Amy had said one of us had to leave. That she couldn’t live with my searching anymore. That she had to move on.

So I moved out. Moved out but not on. And we hadn’t yet filed the paperwork to get divorced.

My apartment complex was filled with single mothers, old people trying to stretch their Social Security checks, and other men who had suddenly found themselves alone. Like me.

Amy had started volunteering for In Trevor’s Memory. She helped other parents whose children were missing.

But when we were the ones with a missing child, we hadn’t been able to help each other.

The girl in the sleeping bag looked from one photo of Jenny to the next.

Every couple of months, a news story reinforced my belief that she was alive. A girl, missing for three years, found in a hidden basement room. A boy who went to the police after his longtime captor took another boy. A girl who swam across a lake after being held captive for months in a ramshackle cabin.

When I was a kid, my grandma would make these truly awful Jell-O desserts, pieces of canned fruit suspended in crayon-colored jelly. I felt like that. Suspended, unnatural, unable to move.

Sometimes girls I met on the street would claim that they thought they’d seen Jenny, at least long enough to get coffee and a hot meal in a restaurant that couldn’t shoo them out because they were now a paying customer.

But this girl was honest. She looked up and said, “I don’t think so.”

I focused on her for a second. She wasn’t my daughter, but she was still someone’s child. “You should go to a shelter. It’s not safe out here for you. Even with your dog.”

“But I can’t go to a shelter. Because of my dog.” I could see the girl mentally cataloging my dirty tennis shoes, my jeans worn to threads at the heels. “But if you give me five bucks, I’ll hold on to this flyer. And I’ll keep an eye out. For Jenny.”