The Never List

crumpled up in my arms. She cried, and I am not too ashamed to admit that so did I. So did I.” At that he lifted his head up, put his knife in his pocket, and looked out over the hills.
    “It’s hard to explain it. Picturing the little girl you raised up out here, on the same land farmed by her grandparents and their parents before them, ending up in the arms of a sick and twisted man. A man who would hurt other girls. Almost anything would be better than thinking your daughter chose a life like that over the life you offered her.”
    I saw tears welling up in Dan’s eyes, and I had to turn and walk a few steps away. I wasn’t prepared for this much emotion, and I certainly wasn’t equipped to see the same kind of anguish I had imagined my own parents going through, all those nights I spent in that dungeon. All the nights wishing I could tell them that I was okay. Well, not okay exactly, but alive, and thinking of them.
    Tracy kept her eyes on the ground. Here was this man showing an outpouring of love such as she had never known from a parent. I could only imagine it must have hurt her to think it was wasted on this girl who walked away from it all, voluntarily, into the arms of the devil.
    But Dan stood upright and wiped his eyes. “Well, there’s nothing I can do about it now, I suppose. She’s an adult and can make her own decisions.”
    I turned around and walked back over to Dan.
    “Mr. Dunham, I know this might be a hard question, but do you happen to have those e-mails she sent you all those years ago?”
    Dan pulled himself back to reality. “Well, I know we printed them out back in the day. We can probably dig them up, but I don’t think you’ll find them to be very useful.”
    After baked ham and several kinds of deep-fried vegetables, we cleared the table and Dan brought out his old box of files. Marked on a thick folder toward the back was one word: Sylvia . He pulled it out, and her life until the age of twenty spilled out before us: her birth certificate, immunization cards, school reports, and class photos tucked in a small pink envelope.
    I picked up a photograph.
    She was a pretty girl, with sandy blond hair, blue eyes, and a forthright smile. She looked confident, appealing. Dan told me it was the photo from her junior year.
    In the next one, she had the same haircut and was only barely older, but her smile was tight and her eyes appeared to be settling on something far away. Dan didn’t have to say a word, but he lingered on that photo for a while before putting it back into the envelope with a sigh.
    Erline didn’t leave the kitchen as we sifted through these old memories. I pictured her in that kitchen alone, standing before the darkened window with a pained expression, vigorously scrubbing pot after pot, her hands red and scalded from the dishwater, as we pored over the life of her child reflected in official records.
    Finally, Dan thumbed through the last pages at the end of the file, the printed e-mails. Tracy and I looked through them but couldn’t find anything meaningful. They reminded me of Jack’s letters, poetic but nonsensical. But they were also optimistic, idealizing her new life with her leader.
    The last e-mail didn’t sound as if it would be the last one. It sounded like an enthusiastic fourteen-year-old, writing home fromcamp about finally swimming across the lake. She was thrilled to be “enveloped in this mystical and divine experience,” to have her “dreams made manifest through a true and living miracle.”
    I wished it were a letter from camp. A letter with a postmark so we could know where she went from there.
    Tracy and I declined Dan and Erline’s offer to stay the night, and instead we drove for more than an hour before finally coming to a brightly lit motel on the side of the highway. Tracy glanced over at me, and I shook my head. I couldn’t do it. She continued on, looking for something bigger and safer. We ended up driving the entire two hours back to Birmingham, where we found the sturdy edifice of a historic hotel in the center of downtown. With valet parking no less.
    I felt relieved to be ensconced in the fortlike structure of the hotel, as I dropped my bags onto the soft cream-colored carpet. The room felt like a sanctuary. The sheets of the bed were taut and crisp, the duvet thick. And the paper case of my room keycard had the passcode for the hotel’s Wi-Fi. I was in heaven.
    I picked up the remote, turned on the television, and