Sixteen Years I Didn’t Speak to My Mother. Then I Went Missing, and From Her Sickbed She Said “Go Find Her”

“Della,” someone said, gently, “maybe she just stopped somewhere along the way.

Maybe she changed her mind.”

“My daughter said she was coming,” my mother said.

“If Cora said she was coming, then she was coming, and if she isn’t here, then something has happened to her.

Now go and find her.”

So they went.

Neighbors and forestry workers spent two days working the back roads, and they very nearly missed me, because the truck had slid so far below the road and lay under so much fallen brush that from above it was almost invisible.

Sixteen years of not speaking to my mother, and the thing that turned the search parties out onto those roads was her absolute, unreasoning certainty that if I said I was coming home, I meant it.