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  • Runaway Mother
  • Jody Keisner (bio)

In 2002, a forty-two-year-old mother in Pennsylvania vanished shortly after dropping off her children at school one morning. A sentence from a 2013 CBS News article reads, "She left the half-done laundry, the defrosting dinner and her daughter and son, then 8 and 12 years old," as if she disappeared into thin air while slogging through domestic tasks. Instead of writing, "The laundry was left half-done, the dinner defrosting" et cetera, the author makes Brenda Heist the subject—"She left." The choice makes it clear that hers isn't the story of a woman who's been abducted or murdered, like Police Detective Sgt. John Schofield said law enforcement commonly assumes when a mother goes missing. Brenda disappeared of her own will. After ditching her 1998 Mercury Mystique in a parking lot, she thumbed rides to South Florida with three strangers who'd earlier found her sitting on a park bench, distraught over the bleak financial and housing situation that would result when she and her husband divorced. Until she reappeared eleven years later, no one else besides the fellow hitchhikers knew Brenda was alive, choosing to leave her household chores half-done, her children half-grown.

The year Brenda left her family, I was half-heartedly waiting tables at a blues and barbeque joint, whole-heartedly fooling around by an office door with a manager who snorted cocaine from a shelf in the dry foods storage room. Neither marriage nor motherhood appealed to me, a recent college graduate with no career prospects but with a desire to live alone and independently, paying rent in five-dollar bills and, soon enough, sneaking drinks during shifts and sniffing the manager's cocaine. Many nights I passed out on my couch after partying into twilight with the other waitstaff. But by the time stories [End Page 127] of Brenda Heist made national news over a decade later and began popping up in my social media feeds, I was three years married to a man who'd never once tried drugs and parenting a two-year-old girl with nut-brown hair and gray-blue eyes that were just like mine. I had two more degrees in hand and worked full-time as a college writing instructor. Splendid, fifty-year-old trees had drawn us to a house in the suburbs, a thirty-minute commute into artsy downtown Omaha. Things had fallen into place. Occasionally I drank a glass of wine with dinner, my drug experimentation long behind me. I thought I knew who I was—a fulfilled mother and wife, a dedicated professional, a trustworthy friend—and I felt happier than I ever had before in my adult life.

One night after my daughter's bedtime stories, instead of zipping her into a sleep sack and helping her into her crib, I held her on my lap in a rocking chair. Splinters of light filtered through her curtains with the muted warbling of songbirds in the old ash tree outside her bedroom window. She rested her head on my shoulder. We gazed at each other. Sloppily, she kissed my neck. Her small face in the near-dark entranced me. Afterwards, while she slept and my husband watched TV, I ran outside, giddy with dopamine and love, and into the vacant street and looked heavenward and hollered, "Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!"

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The radical changes in who I was and whom I became during those eleven years didn't surprise any of my family and friends, who attributed the transformation to my having emotionally matured, finally learning—as my parents said—"who you really are." Sergio Chejfec writes in The Planets, translated by Heather Cleary, "Identity is gradual, cumulative; because there is no need for it to manifest itself, it shows itself intermittently, the way a star hints at the pulse of its being by means of its flickering light. But at what moment in this oscillation is our true self manifested? In the darkness or the twinkle?" Chejfec's book tells the tale of a person who has vanished, referred to as M, and the grief his departure causes his...

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