News stations interviewed us.
Volunteers handed out flyers.
People searched wooded areas and drainage canals.
Police followed hundreds of tips.
Most led nowhere.
Some were cruel.
A woman once called me at two in the morning and claimed Nora was standing beside her.
She demanded money before she would tell me where.
Police traced the call.
The woman had never seen my daughter.
Another man claimed he had picked Nora up hitchhiking three states away.
It wasn’t her.
We investigated friends, teachers, distant relatives, neighbors, classmates, and people she had spoken to online.
Nothing gave us an answer.
And through all of it, one photograph became the image everyone associated with Nora.
I had taken it about forty minutes before she vanished.
She was standing barefoot in the sand, squinting into the sun and raising one hand toward the camera.
“Mom, stop.”
I had laughed.
“Just one.”
“You said that five pictures ago.”
She was wearing the turquoise cover-up my mother had made for her.
My mother had sewn clothes most of her life.
She made that cover-up earlier that spring after Nora saw something similar in a shop window.
On the first day of our vacation, Nora caught the lower corner on a piece of driftwood and tore it.
She was devastated.
My mother repaired it that evening.
Instead of simply sewing the rip shut, she embroidered a tiny yellow sun over the damaged spot.
The sun came out slightly crooked.
Nora laughed when she saw it.
“It looks ruined now.”
Mom smiled.
“It looks unique.”
Nora touched the yellow stitching.
“I think I like it better this way.”
Inside the bottom hem, my mother had embroidered Nora’s initials.
N.V.
That detail was included in every police bulletin.
For eight years, nothing came of it.
My mother died three years after Nora disappeared.
She never stopped believing her granddaughter was alive.
The last Christmas we had together, she gave me a small box.
Inside was a spool of the same yellow thread she had used on the sun.
“I bought too much,” she said.
I knew that wasn’t why she had kept it.
I still have that spool.
By the eighth anniversary of Nora’s disappearance, I had learned how to function.
I wouldn’t say I learned how to live normally.
There is no normal after your child disappears.
There is before.
And there is after.
