My hand halted a fraction of a second over the stack of towels in my kitchen drawer. I was about to pull out the dull sage green dishtowel that matched the stripes in its cream-colored hand towel mate, but I hesitated. Because they found another girl this week. Or rather, they found her body. The one who had been missing for so long, eyes peering from behind a shock of glossy brown hair asking “Have You Seen Me?” for over a year, was finally heard, calling her seekers to a remote, rocky grave near the Pala Indian Reservation.
And I just couldn’t bear to pick up that drab dishtowel. It was too heavy.
Heavy with a parent’s grief, heavy with generations upon generations of brokenness that plays itself out in sickness and violence, heavy with the collective load of a community that wonders if it can absorb just one more sorrow.
So I reached beyond to its neighbor, red and orange, purple and green in its vibrancy. And the colors said, “Believe in me” and I realized that I did.
And I hung the dishtowel which was more than a dishtowel on the oven door next to the pale hand towel with its heavy sage-colored stripes, to remember.
And then I realized—her name was Amber.
