I Answered My Own Missing Poster

The winter I was eight, I found my own face in a trash can.

It was on a missing-child flyer. The girl on it had been gone five years. She had a birthmark on the back of her neck.

So did I.

There was a reward. A number with a long row of zeros. I didn't want it.

I was cold. I hadn't eaten since yesterday.

I just wanted a mom.

So that night, with a stranger's coins, I called the number at the bottom.

A woman answered on the first ring and screamed a name at me like it was mine.

She got to say it three times.

Then a hand came out of the dark behind me and hung up the phone for me.

I ate on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Those were the nights Dot worked the register at the Red Bird truck stop. She threw out food that wasn't bad yet. Hot dogs. Bread. Once, half an apple pie.

She always used the bin by the notice board. The clean one.

I never touched the other bins. You get sick, nobody takes you to a doctor. I learned that the winter my fingers broke.

That Tuesday it was snowing. I walked the two miles from the salvage yard with plastic bags tied over my socks. Bertie locked my shoes up at night so I wouldn't run.

Run where. I was eight. I didn't know the name of one town except this one.

The hot dogs were there, still warm through the wrapper. I ate one in the dark and put two inside my coat.

Then I went back to the bin, because sometimes there was more.

There was paper. Somebody had cleared the old flyers off the notice board. A whole stack of them, shoved in the trash.

The one on top had a kid's face on it.

MISSING. Big red letters. I couldn't read the rest. I never went to school. But I knew that word.

The photo was a little girl, three years old maybe. Fat cheeks. Laughing at somebody behind the camera.

Next to the photo was a drawing. The same girl, but older. What she might look like now.

It looked like me.

Not a little like me. Like somebody had drawn my face.

Under the pictures were things I understood without reading.

A small drawing of a mark, shaped like a thumbprint, with an arrow pointing to the back of the girl's neck.

I have that mark. Bertie called it a dirt spot. She scrubbed at it hard enough to break the skin.

It never washed off.

A number with a dollar sign and a long row of zeros.

And at the bottom, a phone number.

I took the flyer to the front window. Dot looked at it. Then at me. Then at it again.

She came out from behind the counter and put coins in my hand, warm from the register drawer.

"Phone's outside. Left of the ice machine. Go on."

She didn't ask me anything.

Maybe she knew I couldn't answer.

I hadn't made a word in two years. Not since the cellar. I open my mouth and nothing is there.

The phone was freezing against my ear. I fed the coins in with my crooked fingers and matched the numbers on the flyer to the buttons, one at a time. I checked every one twice.

It rang once.

Somebody picked up before the second ring. Fast. Like she slept next to that phone.

"Hello?" A woman. Her voice cracked in the middle of the one word. "Hello? Who is this?"

I opened my mouth.

Nothing.

"Please. Please, is somebody there?"

My throat worked and worked. My eyes were burning.

So I did the only thing my throat still knew how to do.

I hummed.

The little tune with no words. I don't know where it came from. I hum it at night in the blue car, quiet, where nobody can hear.

It's the only sound I have left.

Five notes.

The woman went dead silent.

Then she made a sound I had never heard a grown-up make. Something breaking inside a person, live, right into my ear.

"Junie." Her voice came apart. "Oh God. Junie. Baby, where are you? Make any sound. Knock on something. Anything. Mommy's coming, do you hear me? Mommy is coming, I just need—"

A hand closed on the back of my neck.

"Look at this," Judd said. "The rat knows how to use a phone."

He ripped me off the curb. I twisted around and bit his hand as hard as I had teeth.

He didn't yell. He laughed.

He peeled me off his arm and held me up by the collar, my feet off the ground. Then he picked up the swinging receiver with his other hand.

The woman's voice was still pouring out of it. Junie. Junie, baby, talk to me. Junie—

Judd listened for a second.

He smiled.

"Wrong number," he said, and hung up.