Towering

away. I agreed to bring her back when she was seventeen.”
    I stared out at the sky, which had become gray with clouds, like a rain storm was coming.
    “I raised my daughter, your mother, a wonderful little girl, and though it was hard, I never used rhapsody again. To do so would be to approach the place where I almost lost my daughter. That thought, alone, gave me strength. Gradually, I forgot all about it. But when Danielle was about to turn seventeen, I remembered the man’s strange request. I didn’t want to give her to him. I hoped he had died, but one day, when my daughter was at school, he came to my door, asking for her.”
    “How old must he have been then?” I asked. “A hundred?”
    “That was the strangest thing. He did not seem to have aged at all in seventeen years. If anything, he seemed younger. And when I refused to open my door, he pushed it in like it was nothing. I stared and stammered, pretending I didn’t know what he meant. Then, I said no. No, of course she can’t come. And yet, I had nowhere to go. I tried to keep her inside the house, so he wouldn’t be able to grab her. But a young girl does not want to stay inside.”
    I nodded. I knew this was true.
    “My Danielle,” Mama said. “She saw a boy in the garden, and she began to sneak off with him.”
    I looked down. It was just what I had done with Wyatt.
    “I did not find this out until later. At first, when she was gone, I thought she had been taken from me. I looked all over for her, cursing myself for not sprinting her away, not protecting her better. But then, she came back, and I thought it was all right. The boy had left her, it seemed. I learned that she was having a baby, and I didn’t care, didn’t fret as any other mother would. I just wanted her to stay with me. In fact, realizing my foolishness, I made plans to move across the country, to start a new life. And then, Danielle disappeared again, this time for good.”
    I felt tears come into my eyes. Poor Mama! “How alone you must have been.”
    “I was. And the police were no help. At first, they said that Danielle must have run away. She was a teenage girl. People had seen her with this boy, and he had disappeared, so they assumed she had run off with him. However, I continued to call the police, badger them. My daughter and I may have argued, but she would never have run away. Also, I began to hear stories of other young people disappearing, including another girl from town, Suzie Mills. When I told the police this, they became annoyed. Suzie was an addict and probably dead of an overdose, they said. They had found out that Danielle was pregnant, and they accused me of killing her, because of my shame and anger. They threatened to arrest me, but I knew they had no proof because I hadn’t done it. Still, I gave up on calling them. I only hoped that, someday, she would come back.”
    Mama slowed the car, and I knew why. The road was winding here, frightening. She was weeping and could probably barely see through her tears.
    I heard her voice in the dark truck. “Then, two months after Danielle disappeared, there was a knock on my door. I opened it, hoping as I always did that it would be Danielle, returned to me. But when I looked outside, instead of Danielle, there was a blond young girl, cradling a tiny infant in a blanket.”
    I knew that was me.
    “It was Suzie, the girl who had disappeared. She was not dead, but she told me that Danielle was. She couldn’t tell me how she knew, but she knew. She thrust the baby at me and said to take it, keep it, that it was Danielle’s baby, and that the people who had killed Danielle had told her to take it and put it in the incinerator at her father’s veterinary office. She couldn’t do it. I took the child in my trembling arms, and listened as she babbled what sounded like nonsense. ‘Take the baby far away,’ Suzie said. For there was a prophecy that this baby, Danielle’s baby, would be the one to break a curse, to stop the rhapsody that had tainted the town for decades. She said that the baby’s father, whose name was Zach, had known that Danielle would be the mother of the baby that would bring it all down. He had come to her on purpose, impregnated my daughter—because his uncles were the ones who had the rhapsody. He knew how it had harmed people.
    “Suzie told me that this baby could be the one to change everything. That is why they wanted her killed. She also told me that your name was