Call me crazy

But I think I have made up my mind to write a book. It's been a dream my whole life, and while I was riding my bike this morning a story idea came to me. I think I am gonna run with it. I have a page written so far. Tell me what you think of it!


Her heart raced. Her lungs tightened. Sweat covered her forehead. Her world was spinning in circles. “Jenna!” she cried with panic in her voice, “Jenna Grace where are you? Answer me, please!” A large crowd now gathered around her but they were all a blur. Then from the distance one small boy’s cries stood out from the crowd. “Mommy, Mommy,” he wailed, “he hurt her. The bad man hurt the little girl!” Samantha’s thoughts and visions now centered on the small boy and his words. She ran to him and his mother. She placed both her hands on his shoulders. Tears streaming down her face, she struggled to keep her voice calm. “Have you seen her? Have you seen my little girl? Where is she? What happened?” His blue eyes met her terror stricken green eyes, and then quickly looked back at his mother. “I was playing tag with the little blonde girl. The blue van pulled up, the bad man jumped out and grabbed her. She screamed for her mommy, so he punched her in the face. Her head went down like she fell asleep, and he threw her in the van and drove away!”

“No!” Samantha screamed as she awoke in her bed. It was the same dream again; the nightmare that haunted her for the past twenty two years. This was not just a terrible dream; this was her life. She was twenty five when Jenna was taken. Jenna would be the same age now. All the `if only’s ran through her head. “If only I hadn’t taken her to the park that day. If only I had kept a better eye on her. If I had bought her that popsicle she wanted, she would have been eating, not playing. If only I had taken her to Grandma’s and not to the park. If only I had let stay in the bath even fifteen minutes longer.”
The question of what if would always follow the question of if only. What if Jenna hadn’t been taken? What would she be like now, how tall would she be, would she still be blonde, or what would her personality be like? Would she still be able to find the funny in every situation? Would she still like spending time with her mother? Would she go to University? What would she major in? Or would she have done what Samantha did; graduate high school, marry her sweetheart, spend a few years together, then start a little family.
Samantha’s biggest what if, that consumed her mind every hour of every day, “What if Jenna is still alive?” None of James Sprague’s victims had survived, but Jenna’s body had never been found. Sprague denied ever taking her. Maybe he didn’t. The video surveillance was Jenna with some one who resembled Sprague at the convenience store a state over, but detectives said they could not prove without a reasonable doubt that it was him. What if it was some other man with Jenna, and he still had her, or had given her to some one else?
She flashed back to the first few weeks, when another mother of a missing child had told her not to believe the media really cared. More children would go missing, more murdered, bigger stories would break. And when they lay their heads down at night, their thoughts will not be about Jenna. It was all true. With in weeks Jenna was no longer in the top stories. Six months she was no longer regularly featured, a year and six months Samantha stopped getting requests for interviews. Two years after Samantha was no longer recognized on the street as Jenna’s mom. Now, twenty two years later, no one knew who Jenna Grace Thompson was, no one cared. Once the reporters left, cameras stopped flashing, people stopped searching, investigators stopped investigating, Jenna was still gone. Samantha and Brian had divorced, he remarried six years later; but refused to have another child. Samantha wondered if Brian even cared about Jenna anymore. “Oh Jenna,” she choked on her tears, “Mommy misses you so much. Oh God,” she whispered, “I can’t do this much longer. Please, please just let me die.” She now shouted in anger, “Forty seven years old, minimum wage job, no car, crappy house, no family, no friends! I had everything, everything! Then you took my everything away! I lost everything when you took Jenna from me! You betrayed me! I hate this life, this dark world, I hate everything! Why am I here?! Why did you make me live this life?”
She didn’t know who she was shouting to. Who was to blame? Who should she be angry at? Was it God, the one who kidnapped Jenna, her husband who secretly despised her for losing Jenna, or her so called friends who she never heard from after the first time she was institutionalized?
To be continued