Whole

CW: human trafficking, implied assault, emotional abuse, trauma

Nineteen hours in a car is the longest Paul and I have spent together since our divorce. It's almost nighttime. A matted stray—Lhasa apso or Shih Tzu—patters down the street, pauses to lift a leg on the SUV tire, and runs off. I'd worry it might be hit by a car if there were any traffic at all. Down the block, a peeling Victorian draws a certain kind of customer. A different tattooed, smoking, visibly armed man occupies the porch each time we drive past.

Paul stares at the mounted cell phone with his fist to his mouth and his elbow pressed into the console between us. The cramped space smells like fast food and someone else's perfume, and I can't turn around again and see the crusted Cheerios and booster seat of his do-over life.

He says, "Show me the video again."

I hit Play for the third and final time.

The video is low-quality; footage shot on an old cell phone or camera in low light. The initial seconds stretch as someone clumsily establishes the frame. I could draw the room from memory. Gray cinder walls. A chipped concrete floor. The bare stained mattress.

A young woman wearing a crop top and cotton underwear staggers into view and collapses with the practiced movements of someone who knows exactly how far she has to fall. She mumbles a string of words that, when run through an audio file analyzer, sound to me like "Mom, please help me" and to Paul like "Keep them away from me." Her words are slurred, like she's drunk or has been drugged. The video never shows her face.

Paul would recognize the scar on her right knee, but the video is shot from the left side, which is why I'm sure it's her. When her bruised low back comes into view, I say "Pause it" and wrestle a photo from my purse. It's weathered, worried over—the printout muddy from an empty cyan printer ink cartridge.

I hand Paul the photo. It's of Marianne and Avery, wearing too few clothes and too much makeup. Marianne twisted to show off the shiny tattoo I have to believe was new when it was taken. The colors are bright, the skin slightly reddened. She has always been fascinated by butterfly lifecycles and change, obsessed with the idea of one day flying away. I won't pretend I don't know what from.

​Marianne's best friend Avery didn't tell me about the tattoo until months later.

The police report listed only the scar on her knee and the white line through her eyebrow. I didn't know the tattoo existed. I didn't have to be a mind reader to know what the police were thinking when I corrected them, like I don't need to be one now, with Paul.

His jaw is set, his blue eyes—Marianne's eyes—narrowed as he examines the picture.

​"You let her get a tattoo?" he says. "She's seventeen."

"I didn't know she had it until three months ago." Almost nine months after she went missing.

"That's your undeniable proof?"

"Why do you say it like that?"

Paul returns his attention to the video. "I don't think they're the same. That one doesn't look as blue, and maybe it's more toward her hip? I don't know."

"Two girls with low-back butterfly tattoos? Really, Paul?"

"We need to be sure. Restart it."

​I hit Play.

The young woman feels too obedient to be Marianne, but that doesn't mean it isn't her.

Paul watches with his chin bent, and in the fading light of the day, I see the gray at his temples more clearly.

I ought to be numb to the assault that comes next, but can only watch it through splayed fingers. Even if that isn't Marianne, it is someone's daughter. That, alone, feels worth going in for.

Paul's anger ratchets up with each passing frame, his hands flexing on the steering wheel, his knuckles white.

I shudder at the sight of a masked figure sitting in a chair in the corner, watching.

"Didn't you have to sign something?" Paul asks. "A consent form?"

"She got it from the man she was seeing."

"Seeing?"

"He was twenty-three." He could be any of these men in the video or none of them.

"I can't believe you didn't tell me," Paul says.

"Again, I didn't know until after."

​When Marianne didn't come home from work or answer my calls. When she didn't turn up at either of our houses.

"Do you not check what she's doing on her phone, or the internet?" Paul asks.

"Like you checked with Avery's parents when you dropped her off on her seventeenth birthday?"

A scream comes from the video. Loud at first, then muffled, through either a gag or a hand.

I lower the volume.

"What does that have to do with anything?" Paul scoffs.

It was another of Avery's confessions, how she covered for Marianne. Lied to the police.

"She spent the night with him. He picked her up from Avery's right after you dropped her off. News flash, Paul. Teens need to be fact-checked."

The phantom of our ten-year marriage worms its way between us. The SUV is suddenly too small for this video, these truths, and all this blame.

The video shifts during a tense silence in which we both stare, aware, maybe for the first time, that neither of us is the better parent.

"Wait," Paul says. "Go back."

I stop the video. "How far?"

"Two frames, maybe?"

I click the ten-second icon twice.

"There," he says. "Pause it again."

He fishes a pair of readers from the glove compartment. They look off-the-rack rather than any prescription he might've gotten from an eye doctor, a sign he would otherwise deny of aging. He pulls his lower lip between his teeth and his eyes glisten as he zooms in on an elbow. I don't know why this is the detail he's so upset about, but he breaks down.

It begins with a restrained sob. A sniffle. His shoulders shrug slightly upward, and then something breaks loose. He buries his face in his hands, and I hate that, even now, he is too embarrassed to be vulnerable with me.

I set a reassuring hand on his shoulder. We loved each other once, and I wouldn't wish that grief on anyone. He leans into me, whispering apologies between hitched breaths softly enough that he can later deny it.

"It's her," he finally says, resolute in the way I both wanted him to be and didn't.

He can't tear his eyes from the phone screen.

"How are you sure?" I ask, though unlike with the tattoo, I want to believe him.

"Nine stitches," he says, and points to an overlooked detail.

If I'd seen it, I'd have known I was wrong again.

​"Marianne never had stitches," I say, which is something a father should know.

"She did." It's Paul's turn to confess. "That time Nancy and I kept her that extra week to take her to Six Flags."

"Wait, what?"

"Nancy's son had elbowed Marianne a couple of weekends before. You were threatening to withhold visitation."

I remember this. The black eye. Questions from a suspicious pediatrician. Me, always under some parental microscope.

"We bought the kids a trampoline that Friday night," Paul says, "and Marianne lost her balance. She bounced too high and launched over the side into a briar patch. It was an accident, but she ended up with nine stitches...there, above her left elbow."

The young woman in the video gasps. One of the men is cutting off her air.

"How could you hide something like that? Why didn't Marianne tell me?"

"I told her that if she did, she wouldn't be able to see me anymore."

"Paul!"

"I know, okay?" He holds up his hands in self-defense. "But don't act like this is the first time one of us put her in the middle. Like we didn't teach her to lie. No wonder she thinks the divorce is her fault."

"If anything, Marianne knows I blame you."

"Those are her words, not mine. She sees a counselor, Cath. At least she saw one when she was with us."

Us. Paul's new family. The idea of it hurts more than I want it to.

I lean back against the passenger seat, letting the truth soak in: what I knew, what he didn't. How we forced Marianne to take sides, and how that might've pushed her into the arms of the twenty-three-year-old who was the last person to see her before she went missing. There are no winners in family court. Certainly not the children.

All of this is our fault in ways almost too painful to admit, but we can't ignore it anymore.

I dab my eyes with a grease-stained napkin.

"You okay?" Paul asks.

I'm not, but this isn't about me.

It's about Marianne.

"We have a lot to make up for." To her, and probably each other.

Paul presses the release button on his seat belt. Nineteen hours ago, he couldn't be convinced the girl in the video is our daughter. Of all the leads I've run down, this one felt different. It is different. I think we are, too.

I've spent the last year believing I was the only parent willing to sacrifice everything, but this most important thing can only be done by Paul—and it is no small risk. That house. Those men.

We've split more than our household. We each hold half of our daughter's experiences and memories. Only together are any of us whole.

"You're really going in?" I wish I could go inside with him so that Marianne could see us cooperating for her benefit instead of conspiring against one another.

"You trust me, don't you?" Paul says.

I fold the photo of Marianne into his palm.

"I do, with our daughter's life."