By V. F. Cordova

Paula has some thoughts about what happened at the playground. There are spooky things with children, she says. Kids holding conversations with unseen ghosts, kids with memories of dead people’s lives, siblings with totally opposite versions of childhood memories. It’s theoretically possible in a multiverse scenario, Paula says, that a child could be in both one place and an infinite number of places at the same time, time itself moving simultaneously backward and forward.

I suggest that Paula write a paper on this. I picture her snickering, face illuminated by her phone’s glowing rectangle. The Phenomenology of Freaky Shit, she texts back. I smile.

Or was I just wasted? You. Were. Not.

That she wasn’t there, that she’s not a mother, is no impediment to Paula’s theorizing. But if she’s expert in anything, it’s the outer-bounds of my alcohol tolerance. She’s gotten drunk with me more times than anyone. Our college years were one long rumspringa from our repressive all-girls Catholic school days. Later we both got serious and left town for our doctorates—hers philosophy, mine history—but we kept up weekly phone dates to “wine and whine.” For years we worked as adjuncts in obscure towns, bitching to each other about the apathetic students and the bad take-out and how the drive to the closest airport would be as long as the flight back home. We got tenure-track positions around the same time. Paula’s still at hers, across the country in California. It’s hard to find the time to call now, but we have this text-chain going that, printed out, could bridge the distance.

Even if you were drunk, would that explain it? she asks. It wouldn’t.

It was just three-and-three-quarters beers, on my stoop with a neighborhood mother before we’d headed over to the playground. But these were craft IPAs, expensive, high ABV, the kind in tall cans with matte-finish graphics on the packaging. I meant to keep it to three, but when I’d picked up our empties to run them inside to recycling, the heft of my neighbor’s can registered like a found twenty dollar bill in the laundry, and I’d needed those warm, hoppy suds flooding my throat for reasons I no longer really understand.

The late September air nipped for the first time of the season, and I had Josie in her bright pink parka with the miniature rainbows. “Zip your jacket!” I yelled, as she hurtled toward the play structure, a plastic castle of brown and green, with three slides and some monkey bars and a mini-climbing-wall, all soft edges and low altitude, joining the packed crowd of other after-schoolers. The neighbor who’d indulged my stoop-side happy hour branched off, and in the warmth of my mild inebriation, I surveyed the crowd. There was the woman with the stroller and the leggings and the T-shirt that read “BUT FIRST, COFFEE.” There was the bored nanny with one earpod. There was that dad who wore the beat-up green baseball cap, its brim curved like the rind on a wedge of a lime.

And then I saw Bridget. Ultimately it was Bridget that caused the distraction that kept my eyes from Josie for too long—Bridget, entering the park’s wrought iron gates with her three children—geared up for a confrontation I’d long feared was coming.

Bridget was someone I once socialized lightly with, when she was Paula’s roommate in a tiny trinity townhouse on Kater Street during our post-college years. A few months before, I’d run into her for the first time in decades at the very same playground. She and her husband had just bought a big place nearby. I hadn’t recognized her at first, her face like a half-remembered dream as she lumbered toward me in gray sweatpants. Her identity had been just on the tip of my tongue when she appreciated the need to re-introduce herself.

“I’m so sorry,” I’d said. “I’m so terrible with faces these days. Faces and names.”

“Ha!” Bridget replied. She totally got the “brain fog.” Bridget totally got the “mom brain.”

The main thing I remembered about Bridget was how one night, she got so wasted that she lost control of her bowels on the trinity’s stoop, after taking a cab home blacked-out from a one-night-stand. The next morning, Paula went out for coffee and saw their elderly neighbor hosing down the sidewalk, warning her to watch out, since someone let their dog “do its business” all over the steps. Back inside, Paula found Bridget’s shitty pants bunched up by the drain of the shower, and the two of them pieced together what had happened, and had a good laugh. But after it happened a few more times, Bridget was diagnosed with IBS, and she also quit drinking.

OMG STOP. She used to be so fun, Paula responded, when I texted her a picture I’d taken of Bridget before she saw me (Is that who I think it is??).

Bridget and I had a nice, benign chat that day. She was working for the city; three under six was a lot; they liked the new place, but sometimes thought the suburbs might have been the right move. We talked about how I’d recently “quit,” how I liked being at home, how I didn’t miss the “life of the mind, per se,” and had more time to read for pleasure now that I wasn’t grading papers. We’d followed our kids around for a while, and then when we were packing to leave for lunch, Bridget texted me her phone number.

“We should do this intentionally next time.”

“Of course!” I’d said, knowing the chances were low either of us would ever reach out. And then just after I’d wrangled Josie past the park’s gate, but before we’d crossed the street, I’d typed the following into what was supposed to be my text-chain with Paula.

Omg. All I could think about was her shitting your stoop. Also, almost didn’t recognize her after baby #3.

Then I searched for and found a gif of the character Fat Bastard from the Austin Powers franchise, and sent it to the number I thought was Paula’s. Yes, it was the scene of him on the toilet. Yes, that day, too, I’d been drinking.

Back at our apartment, my phone had buzzed. This was the text from the number I’d saved as “Bridget (Kater Street)”—ouch.

“Fuck,” I’d said, loud enough to startle Josie. Mom brain strikes again. My thoughts, in this order, were shame, genuine regret for making another woman feel bad about her body, bottomless self-loathing, and then frantic strategizing about whether there was any way I could explain it away, which there wasn’t. But my final thought, the one I decided to rest with, was how the story of the text I wrongly sent to Bridget would make Paula laugh and laugh. So I’d texted Paula a screenshot of the conversation with a shocked-face emoji and the word FUCKKKKK, which my phone had long ago learned not to auto-correct.

“Bridget (Kater Street)”—I just didn’t answer her.

That Friday at the park the day of the incident with Josie, I wondered if we could just pretend it hadn’t happened. But Bridget, seeing me, glared with the sort of contempt I hadn’t seen since right before I left my job at the college. No, I had to address this, my tipsy brain asserted. I should talk to her, apologize now, tell her I lost my cellphone or something and that’s why I never responded and tell her how very bad I felt about the very bad thing I texted. How I was in a not-good place since I stopped working.

And so I walked over to Bridget and started rambling, and she looked me dead in the eyes in front of all three of her children and the other grownups around us. “So first of all,” she said, propping her baby higher on her hip, “I’m not going to make you feel better about the shitty thing you said to me.”

“Of course, of course.” The use of the S-word in front of the kids—it seared. “And second of all. Second of all.” Her voice softened, lilting upward. “Tilly, are you sure you’re okay? Every time I see you lately, you sort of smell like a bar.”

The rusty swings rocked back and forth, back and forth, wailing like an air raid siren. The children’s gleeful shrieks rang out around us. Some of the other parents who were eavesdropping nearby moved a few feet back, as if to prove they were mature adults, giving us privacy.

“No, yeah. I’m fine,” I muttered, as I slunk away from her. The playground’s loose gravel crunched under my feet.

I went over to a bench, looked at my cellphone, and sat there for a long time. I started composing a text to update Paula, Paula who never failed to make me feel less terrible, and more like the chaotic but beloved lead character in a popular sitcom. I didn’t get to send it though, because in that moment another kindergartener appeared beside me to announce that Josie was missing. They were doing hide and seek, he said, but no one could find her.

Still nursing my humiliation, I sensed no immediate danger. The kids play hide and seek all the time, I thought, and Josie, my Josie, she’s like me, more clever than all the others. She’d find the best spot to hide, one that nobody could think of. I looked and looked with the kids, in bushes and under the slides and behind wastebins. We traced the perimeter of the park, poking around the potted shrubs lining the fencing. We traversed the adjacent baseball field, checked under the aluminum bleachers. Another parent, noticing the commotion, offered to help search, but not wanting to draw even more attention to myself after the dust-up with Bridget, I declined.

I didn’t panic until several minutes had passed, and Josie wasn’t in the enormous rolled-up gym mat on the east side of the baseball field. This gym mat, property of the recreation center next door, is a constant piece of the playground’s scenery, never unrolled. No one really knows what it’s there for. Sometimes the kids jump on the soft, bouncy foam of its surface, hurling themselves through the air and onto the grass beside it. Sometimes they crawl through its center, from one side to another about 25 feet, playing whatever kid games demand a tunnel. There, I thought, she must be in there, in that narrow crevice at the center of the roll.

As I walked toward the place I was sure she’d be hiding, the pace of my heartbeat quickened. But so certain was I that she’d be there, I didn’t run. When I arrived at the gym mat and peeked behind it and then crouched down on all fours to look through its center, I saw that it was just a hole, five-year-old-sized in radius, and empty. It was then that alternating waves of chill and feverish burning overtook me. I stood alone in the field, grasping the possibility of childlessness, disbelieving it.

Paula, regaling me with tales of intra-departmental warfare, ultra-snarky students, unmanageable publication deadlines, has assured me that I’m better off without the academy. I’m not so sure of it.

My specialty was the Korean War, bacteriological warfare, the open question of the United States’ employ of weaponized germs against civilians in the 1950s. Among those of us who study these things, there’s a split. Some believe the U.S. clandestinely peppered North Korean farmlands with smallpox-infested insects, killing animals, sparking vast famine and civilian death, destroying morale. There were accounts of unusually sickened livestock, baggies of insects falling from planes, U.S. servicemen reporting on their orders, doctors with firsthand knowledge of the disease. Others contend there was no bio-war, just a vast information war, coordinated between China, Russia, and North Korea, supported by lies told by thousands of independent actors, a massive hoax, an unparalleled campaign of anti-American propaganda.

Most of the primary sources on this topic are in folios stamped “Top Secret,” minutes of military meetings, memos of strategies, unreachable even through FOIA request, still purportedly posing a national security threat, if released, a lifetime later. I’d encourage my students: think hard about why this is.

The job at the college was the thing I’d worked toward my whole life. My colleagues were intelligent, the students inquisitive, my department top-tier. For the first time in years, Simon and I could live full-time together, in Philadelphia no less, the city where we’d both been raised. We got an apartment not far from Simon’s hospital, started our family, finally, at thirty-nine. I saw my career playing out over the course of decades, Josie attending undergraduate for free, my hair graying as I eased into emeritus status. Instead, it all imploded after I took my research one step deeper into controversy.

Had it really been so very insensitive to include in a paper examining a bacteriological warfare biolab on Plum Island, Connecticut, reference to the murkiness of the origins of Lyme Disease? Was it really so verboten to explore whether this government-run facility experimenting with tick-borne diseases capable of sickening enemy livestock had some role in the initial outbreak in Lyme, Connecticut, but fifty miles away? That a government that (maybe) de-liberately dropped plague-infested flies on North Korean civilians may also have botched domestic experiments and concealed the fallout? I say “explore” because that’s what I did in the article. No explicit conclusions were reached.

When the Chronically Ill Students Association (“CISA”) got wind of it, they wanted answers. Chronic Lyme, they said, was their condition of existence, not a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream to be profited from.

“Wait a minute,” I’d said, during our sit-down at my office hours. “I stand to make no profit.”

They scoffed. They had enough problems getting out of bed to go to class in the morning without non-scientists, arm-chair epidemiologists, toting made-up garbage about their condition. It was degrading, they said. It was delegitimizing. Come on, I told them. Didn’t they ever wonder about the origins, didn’t they want someone legitimate exploring it? “Not everyone believes Chronic Lyme is real, you know, that’s part of the problem with studying it,” I said, matter- of-factly. Josie had been up the night before with a temperature, and I was sleep-deprived and inartful. But I didn’t mean to imply, as they later claimed I did in a student paper op-ed, that I believed Chronic Lyme was in any way imaginary. What CISA didn’t need, they said, were more questions on this front. What they needed was to be taken seriously.

“But that’s exactly what I’m attempting to do!” I’d said. “That’s exactly the point of the inquiry!”

The op-ed declared that I was gaslighting them. It called for my removal. There was a sit-down with my department head and the president of the university, suggesting I move future research in a different direction. No one said CISA or the paper was the reason, but my contract wasn’t renewed for the following year.

I told people Simon was doing well enough for both of us. I told people the conceit of the working mother had been invented by capitalist manipulators hijacking feminism to bolster the free market. Paula agreed. Then I started drinking heavily. Simon would come home after a shift and Josie and I would still be in bed at 11am, playing with the iPad. He told me I needed to quit drinking during the week. He recommended I do weight-training. He said it helped the oxygen flow through your blood, got the oxytocin going. I tried it, and he was right that it made me feel good, but not like the way a drink or five or six shuts off your brain, not at all as good as that feels.

All the parents joined the search, Bridget included, their eyes serious with worry, but not emptied-out and wild like mine were. They’d sent their children home with their spouses to eat dinner. They walked through the park, parsing the ground for clues, like it was CSI, and then some volunteered to take to the streets, yelling “Josie, Josie.” They all pulled up my Instagram on their cellphones, so they could show her to strangers who may have seen a five-year-old with black ringlets, dark eyes like juicy olives, always looking away from the lens. Dusk gathered. It wasn’t long before someone told me I should probably call 911, and I did.

Two cops arrived right away, a woman and a young man with bad skin. I gave a report, shaking on the park bench, an acquaintance mother next to me rubbing my shoulders. Simon was on his way from the hospital then.

The cops didn’t ask me if I’d been drinking. My beer breath must have been masked by the feral stink of fear secreting from every pore of my body. Or Bridget had played it up to deliver maximum shaming, I’ll never know. Instead, they asked if anyone suspicious had been hanging around that day. We all looked at each other tentatively and said no. There was the one short guy, who always wore the blue tracksuit, who someone had seen on the sex offender registry once. But he hadn’t been spotted that day. The cops nodded. They wanted exact details of what Josie had been wearing, and I delivered them, repeating over and over the following ten words, as if they were a spell that could conjure her: “tie-dye shirt, blue pants, pink jacket with graphics of rainbows.”

“Ok ma’am,” the male cop said finally. “We got that.”

A cab pulled up and Simon arrived, still in his scrubs and surgical gloves, eyes darting around the scene like a caged specimen’s.

Here are some uncontroversial facts about the United States’ bacteriological warfare programs, uncontested history: the Japanese ran experiments on Chinese war prisoners during WWII, testing pathogenic weapons, living men injected with cholera, dying in cages, or cut open alive so mad scientists could document disease progress. Later we’d offer the mad scientists immunity from prosecution and place them on federal payroll, and their research would be put to work at Fort Detrick, a CIA-run laboratory in Maryland in the Forties and Fifties, examining the use of lice, ants, ticks, and mosquitos as disease vectors.

Why? What was the specific need for those vectors? History is about asking big questions, I’d tell my students. Don’t be afraid to ask them.

In the park that day I was struck by the pointlessness of these questions, struck by the utter irrelevance of anything I’d ever wondered or thought about that hadn’t served the ultimate end of loving Josie. For two years I’d languished in regret, obliterated myself, lashed out at those around me. I should have been drinking down the slipping seconds with that tiny person whose truest desire was to fly through the air on the other end of the seesaw. Instead I’d sunk down into the soil, a buried stone.

“Does she have Facebook, Instagram, any kind of socials?” The male cop asked.

“She’s five,” I said. “You’d be surprised.”

After a while, Simon left with a group to comb through our apartment, on the slim chance she’d returned there and somehow let herself in. A broader search party was making its way through the neighboring streets, organized via a link someone created that instantaneously started circulating on a South Philly parents Facebook page. The police were whispering coded things into their walkie-talkies, and it was almost totally dark. It was then that another mom taking one more pass through the baseball field shouted to us from the rolled-up gym mat.

“Here!” She yelled from the distance. “She’s in here!” As if I hadn’t looked there. I ran across the field, sprinting as I watched my child emerge from the mat with this woman, who got on her knees and hugged her. When I caught up to them, I grabbed Josie and buried her in my arms, great waves of sobs breaking forth from my face. The woman who’d found her was crying, too, and so was the female cop, though she tried to hide it. Josie seemed dumbfounded by our weeping.

“But I looked there,” I said to the crowd. “I specifically looked!”

Someone else must have looked, too, I was sure of that, but no one admitted it. When I calmed down enough to interrogate Josie, she insisted she’d been there the whole time, just waiting for the other kids to find her.

“And about how long,” the male cop asked, “would you say, was the whole time?”

“I dunno.” Josie looked at her sneakers. “Ten minutes?”

I scoffed at the inquiry. As if kindergarteners have any sense of time. She’d been missing then for more than two hours. The cops exchanged quizzical expressions. The parents said she must have fallen asleep. She must be so confused. Privately they imagined something twisted and wrong about her, some trick she’d pulled, evil at her core, or damaged.

“Are you sure you didn’t see her,” Bridget asked me, kindly, “maybe just bunched up like a pile of something?”

But her coat was neon pink, what earthly pile could she mean? I knew I’d looked in that rolled-up mat. I knew I’d seen the emptiness at its core. And Josie isn’t a liar. Or if she does lie this wicked grin overtakes practically her whole face, her ultimate tell, and she wasn’t doing that. She’d vanished. She’d vanished, and then she’d come back to me.

Weeks later, a book on sobriety and female empowerment arrived anonymously in the mail. Paula and I are convinced it came from Bridget.

If ever there was a moment for a drink . . . Paula texted.

No. I replied. Never again. Not once.

It’s been a month since I dumped all our liquor, emptied the beers that remained in the fridge that day down the drain. Still my mind, sober as a church lady’s, drifts to that afternoon, to what it means that Josie was taken and then returned. She insists that she was in the mat for “just a few minutes,” that she doesn’t understand “the big deal.” I nod, shutting down my questioning brain. It’s easier to think that I was blacked-out drunk when I looked in the mat or she was sleeping or lying than to wonder whether she disappeared and returned, in a flash, that afternoon, from some alternate universe, the rolled-up gym mat a portal of some unknowable kind. Some ideas you don’t articulate out loud. Except to Paula.

The parents of the neighborhood handle me with kid gloves now. “How’re you holding up?” they say. “Quite a scare she gave us.” As if it could have happened to anyone. Away from earshot, there are whispers, presumably. One too many. The crazy ex-professor, rumored conspiracy theorist, falling to pieces before their eyes. Let’s just hope there’s not a next time.

Now I walk with Josie to school and then I pick her up. While she’s gone all day I read for pleasure or I do weight-training or I cook for us and Simon. He’s still cold to me after her vanishing, having intuited from my shell-shocked recap of the afternoon that whatever happened was the result of my drinking and badmouthing and not paying attention and constant texting. But he is thawing. Paula says he should get over it, and I agree. The afternoon itself was punishment enough for whatever my transgressions were.

You mean seeing Bridget? Paula texts.

Josie is beside me on the couch, as I contemplate a funny way to respond to this. She is patiently waiting for me to read her a story, something involving a fish with just one enchanted scale. I give up.

Lol, exactly.

Instantly, Paula responds. Fuck Bridget.

I laugh—a long, loud laugh, as if Paula were in the room with us. But I don’t answer her. Instead, I shut my phone off. I move it across the coffee table, too far, until it falls to the rug. I read to my child.

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V.F. Cordova lives in Philadelphia, where she writes fiction while parenting two small children full time. She previously worked as an attorney handling complex disputes for a national law firm. Her stories have appeared in Chautauqua and have received commendations in contests from American Short Fiction and Glimmer Train. She is currently working on a novel about a litigious yoga cult.