and bite and kick and claw if any unknown person were to take her arm.
I doubted that Julia had disappeared at the road. It was more likely that she was hidden somewhere along the creek, scooping crayfish and minnows with my kitchen strainers. Julia has always been a child of nature, the sort who prefers animals to humanbeings. As a preschooler, she liked to stand under pine trees and serenade the mockingbirds, or sing lullabies to the house wrens that built their summer nests in the nooks of our carport. She also liked to run among flocks of starlings in our grass, as if they were a dark puddle to be stomped, raising a cloud of splashing wings.
During those preschool years, I called Julia my feral child because of her resistance to clothing and hairbrushes. Once, when I arrived at her Montessori classroom and told her that she must put away her beadwork, finished or not, she growled at meâa low, menacing animal growl. I responded as any mother would: by growling back.
In the third grade a little friend suggested to Julia that she might have an easier time getting along with the other children if she did not so often crawl on the floor, pretending to be a cat. But even at age ten, hiking through the Rockies, she twice stopped to howl into the forest, and both times I hushed her, wondering what kindred beasts she might call down from the mountains.
Back in our yard, on that April afternoon, I checked the rocky alcove where the spring that provides our drinking water drains into a little marsh full of watercress and mint. There, Julia liked to sit on the concrete slab and scoop up tiny salamanders that wiggled across her palm and plopped back into the water, external gills flared like a dinosaurâs frill. Finding that spot empty, I searched the deepest stretch of our creek, overgrown by a canopy of weed trees. Beneath those shadows, water slides down a mossy rock into a narrow miniature canyon before widening into a channel four feet deep, home to water snakes and the occasional muskrat.
Julia was not at the creek, nor was she walking the âshining path,â a trail that bisects our one unmown acre. Ten years ago John and I decided that two acres were the limit of our mowing. We let our third acre grow wild in an arboreal experiment, filledwith blackberry bushes and sumac trees and sheltered forts of cedar, where deer sleep on winter nights. Julia can point out the traces of their curled bodies.
On that April afternoon, she was not there. Back inside the house I telephoned our neighbors, a pair of elderly widows who live at the end of the shining path and who keep their door perpetually open to our girls. No, Julia had not stopped by for a visit. They would call if she appeared.
Having done all that I could, and with no real reason to believe she was in danger, I resigned myself to the fact that a fourth-grader is old enough to wander alone outside for a little while, and I lay down in my bedroom and tried to concentrate on a paperback novel. I would give Julia another fifteen minutes before I started to panic.
After ten I heard a small rustling in the closet. Probably a mouse, I thought. In the winter they occasionally scratch their noisy way through our walls and poke twitching heads from the heating vents. But the next sound was louder, heavy and shifting, too large to be a rodent. I opened the shuttered doors and found Julia hiding beneath the dresses and slacks.
Now, I understand the appeal of closets, their liminal nature and womblike darkness, the primitive call of the animal den, full of smells and secrecy and the promise of dress-up clothes. My grandmotherâs closets were otherworldly to my child-mind: large dark rooms lined in mahogany, with seersucker suits and lace dresses and light bulb cords too high to reach. Only the bravest hide-and-seek player would dare go inside and close the door.
My own closet, however, is not so intriguing. It has no whiff of Narnia, no fur coats. It is not one