The Push(65)

She looked like she wasn’t paying attention to the whispers, but I knew she could hear every word: I saw the ball in her throat slowly slide up and then down. I remembered how that felt, to be excluded. I hadn’t thought Violet cared about fitting in with the cool crowd at school. She seemed to me far more comfortable on the periphery, and mostly on her own; she wasn’t like the other girls her age. She never had been.

When we got to the farm I dropped back behind the group and watched her. She walked in lockstep with the girls from the bus, but they didn’t speak much to her. When they stopped at the entrance to the apple orchard, Violet looked around to place me. I gave a small wave from the back of the group. She flipped her ponytail behind her shoulders and inserted herself stiffly into the small group of girls who were talking loudly over the farmer’s instructions about how to pick the apples properly so the bud wasn’t damaged for next year’s crop. The teacher handed out plastic bags.

We had one hour in the orchard before they were going to teach us how to make pies. I wandered away from the other parents, who mostly kept their distance as well, and found the McIntosh trees. Several rows over I saw the red of Violet’s jacket weaving between the narrow trunks. She was alone, holding her bag in one hand and reaching with her other arm up into the branches. There was a gracefulness in her movements that surprised me. She felt the skin of the apples, looking for imperfections. When she plucked one, she would smell it and turn it around in her fingers. She looked so mature, the plumpness in her cheeks gone, the line of her jaw more prominent. Despite the budding femininity that was beginning to define her, she moved just like you. I saw it in the way she shifted her weight and how she folded her arms behind her back. But she held her head just like me—tilted, with a tendency to glance upward when she was thinking of her response to something, finding the right word in a vocabulary that seemed to grow even faster than her long legs.

The breeze picked up every so often and distracted her, wisps of her dark hair whipping across her face. She placed the bag at her feet and pulled out a hair elastic, collected her ponytail again, and then ran her hand over the top of her head. She kept her eyes on the ground. I wondered what she was looking at, maybe a bird or a rotting apple. But as I walked closer, I realized she was staring at nothing; she was lost in thought and she looked sad.

Once she sensed my presence, she picked up her bag and walked toward a clump of students who had given up on collecting, eating their apples instead. I watched her sit down and cross her legs and bite into her own.

The teacher whistled with his fingers and started to wrangle the students. I watched Violet follow her class to the barn. As I made my way inside I lost track of her in the crowd of kids and scanned the benches as the students took their seats. I saw the girls from the bus sitting together at one of the tables.

“Has anyone seen Violet?”

One of them looked up at me and shook her head. The others were spelling their names on the table with the curls of apple peel. “You guys are friends with her, right?”

Another girl glanced around the table, looking for permission to speak. “Sure. I guess. I mean, kind of.”

Two of them giggled. The one who spoke nudged them to be quiet.

My heart was pounding by then. I looked around the barn but still couldn’t see her.

“Mr. Philips, do you know where Violet went?”

“She went to the bus to lie down. She has a headache—she said you were taking her.”

I jogged out to the parking lot, but the bus driver wasn’t there and the door was locked. The lot attendant said he hadn’t seen a student wandering around. I ran to the stables at the back and asked if anyone had seen a brunette girl. I checked the hay piles on the other side of the stables and then saw a roped-off corn maze in the distance.

“Has anyone gone in there? I’m looking for my daughter.” I was yelling then. I sounded frantic. I was trying to catch my breath.

A young guy repainting the enter here! sign shook his head.

That was when I knew she had left. She was punishing me for coming. We had learned to walk wide circles around each other in order to coexist—that was our unspoken agreement. But being on the field trip violated that rule. I ran back to the barn. I found the teacher and told him she was missing, that I thought she’d left somehow. He said he’d check the premises and asked another parent to alert the manager of the farm.

He didn’t tell me not to worry—he didn’t say, She must be here somewhere.

I saw a table of boys looking around, aware that something was wrong. One of them walked over to me and asked what was happening.

“We can’t find Violet. Do you know where she might have gone?”

He was quiet. He shook his head and walked back to his friends, and they all looked over at me. I thought they knew something. I went to the table and leaned over the end and took a deep breath so my voice wouldn’t crack. “Does anyone know where Violet went?”

They all shook their heads, like the first boy, and one of them politely said, “Sorry, Mrs. Connor, we don’t know.”

I could see then they had fear in their eyes, too.

The dad I’d sat beside offered to circle the grounds with me again. By then my head was spinning. My legs were numb. I’d felt this way before, when Violet was two and had scampered too far away at an amusement park, only to be found minutes later at the cotton candy cart. That had been minutes. Minutes during which I knew she was probably safe, probably a hairline out of sight.