A local woman missing- Mary Kubica

of wood with two thick strings that hangs from a tree. You probably
don’t remember this, but when I was three—and you were five—you
pushed me so hard I fell face-first off the swing. I don’t remember it,
either. But Dad’s told that story so many times it’s like I do. It’s like I
can convince myself that I remember what it felt like when I let go of
the strings, fell forward and face-planted to the ground. It left me with
a scar over my eye. The scar I’ve still got, but the memory of it is
gone. They’re not false memories because they really happened.
They’re just false to me. There’s a difference.
I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You probably don’t care.
When you were gone and I wanted to feel close to you, I Googled
your name. You’re all over the internet, you know. A recap, mostly, of
the last few days before you went missing. Details about the search
and what happened to Mom, potential sightings that never panned
out, like the lady who said she saw you at some IHOP in
Jacksonville, right across the street from the used-car dealer where
she worked. Dad booked a flight that very night, left me behind and
went to Florida where he searched for you for days. You never
turned up. Not a year later, some man said he spotted you at a
Safeway in Redwood City, California, and after that, a truck driver
swore he saw you at World’s Largest Truck Stop. Dad went to those
places, too, but every time he came back empty-handed and sad.
There’s a reward for your return, you know. There’s nothing people
won’t do for money, even lie.
Online there are the conspiracy theories, too. My favorite is the
newspaper article from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, 2015,
where people swear some girl in the background of a black-andwhite
photo is you. That photo is all over the internet now. That girl,
whoever she is, in famous, or infamous, or whatever. The cops were
never able to identify her, and yet there are whole sites devoted to
that picture, like Find Delilah, which some obsessed nobody started
up in the hopes of finding you and earning that reward.
Ten grand the reward is up to now. That woman who found you hit
the jackpot.
But for as much as people think the internet knows everything, the
one thing it doesn’t say is that the girl who came back isn’t the same
one who disappeared.