Missing

I was home sick from school the day she went missing.

I was faking it, really, just a little sick. A police officer came to our house around supper time with serious questions about where I had been that day and if I had been with her. My mother confirmed that I had been home sick, never left, that we had not seen her, and I nodded along. I was terrified that the police had come because they somehow knew I had faked being sick so I could stay home from school, and woo boy, was I in trouble.

She sat next to me in school. We shared the same first name and our last names started with the same letter; for the first few days some people misunderstood or misheard and thought it was I who had gone missing. Seating arrangements followed a traditional format in Mrs. McGregor’s classroom, although later in the year she went wild and rearranged our desks from neat rows into pods of four and five. I wonder if that was the only way she could cope with the desk that sat empty next to mine for weeks.

Most of us kids were too young to understand what was going on beyond the notion that someone took her away, but things changed regardless of our ability to comprehend. Our parents were immediately sucked into a shared hell and our teachers joined them there. The innocence of our idyllic community was taken with her. We weren’t safe anymore.

“Stranger danger” became a regular topic of conversation which we endured with the same enthusiasm we’d have for a lecture from our parents. Police officers spoke in every class room. Teachers, guidance counselors, administrators, and school nurses were all on constant alert. They had to because we all continued to be the chaotic bundles of self-centered energy that children are supposed to be.

Day-to-day life looked the same but you could feel a tightness. Parents spoke in hushed tones and cried when they thought the kids were out of earshot. With terror straining their vocal chords, they shrieked and hollered at us kids when we dawdled on the walk home from school. Neighborhood moms started taking turns driving us to school in the mornings, much to our delight. We didn’t know it was because they were grasping at anything they could control. We didn’t know we got those rides because it was on the way to school when she had gone missing.

The older kids were far more in tune with the chaos that followed. A girl in my neighborhood lied and said she had information when she didn’t, which got her whole lot of attention she didn’t plan for. Her grab for attention initiated a whole new round of visits from the police explaining to living rooms full of neighborhood kids why it was so dangerous to give false accounts. That girl’s parents, in their fear and embarrassment, whooped her something fierce.

A mysterious, dark blue van was allegedly seen around town the morning she disappeared. And just like that vans became the enemy and a powerful symbol of danger. Neighborhood kids made childish threats and taunts about The Blue Van like they would the Bogey Man, when it was really just the the only thing our community could point to and call “monster” in the aftermath. Everyone tried to sell their vans. Pickup trucks became the vehicle in demand for tradesmen. Owning a van labeled you a pedophile, made you a suspect, cost you work.

Investigations were carried out, but no evidence was ever found that pointed to her location or what might have happened to her. Intellectually, I know she is presumed dead, but the child within me that struggled through multiplication tables next to her in school just can’t abide the thought that she will never, ever come back.

In my mind, I can only call up two images of her. One is of her sitting to my left at our desks, head down, concentrating on what she was writing. The other is her school portrait on the thousands of MISSING CHILD posters that were hung all over town and beyond. Decades later, that same wide smile shines out from a curtain of pin-straight brown hair and surprises me sometimes in the post office or town hall. People talked about it less and less over time. Many who live here now don’t know that girl in the posters or the significance of her name.

Not long ago, I dreamed I was wandering lost in my elementary school. There were entire wings I didn’t recognize or remember, and I was the only person roaming the halls. I could see classes in session and hear the teachers giving their lessons but the doors were all locked. I didn’t want to disrupt anyone so I just kept looking for an open room. I came across Mrs. McGregor’s classroom and it was empty. There was no indication of where her class had gone.

My developing psyche had no language for the trauma of my classmate being kidnapped. It was just a thing that happened and lived in my memory. The lives of the families in our community eventually found a new equilibrium and my friends and I grew up into good, morally upright citizens - the best I think our parents and our teachers could have ever hoped for.

But a gnawing feeling persists, ever reminding me that children are taken. Our society is heaving with tragedy and I can survive it because the worst happened and we carried on. I learned how to turn off my heart and keep showing up when something horrific and inexplicable happens, because it never stops happening and no answers ever come. My life is always watching for The Blue Van, afraid to walk anywhere alone, never trusting strangers, forever wondering what danger may lurk.

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The above is a personal account of actual events surrounding the kidnapping of Tammy Belanger in 1984 and was submitted to the Yeah Write Super Challenge essay contest in July 2016. Please support the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.