I didn't ask

On September 18, five years ago, I prepared my daughter Francesca's room. I put fresh sheets on the bed and cleaned her bureau drawers of the paraphanalia that had accumulated there during the years she been gone. I'd purchased fresh green beans, tomatoes, honey and basil at a wayside stand, and while buying a welcome home card spontaneously puchased a tiny bean-filled baby Winnie-the-Pooh.

And I waited. By 3:30 in the afternoon I'd begun to wonder why she hadn't called. Why she never answered her cell phone when I tried to reach her. Had some other unforseen emergency arisen that detained her, like the one that she'd called about the day before -- the day she was to have returned.

"I can't find my driver's license Mommy," she'd said. "I think it's in my jacket. My friend has my jacket."

She'd called again that day to say she couldn't locate her friend. Her last call, at 9:30 that night, said she  had found her license and was leaving. "But the roads honey! The roads are so dangerous -- all those leaping deer, and speeding logging trucks. It's too dangerous to drive at night. It's a five hour drive. Don't come tonight. Get a good night sleep."

She didn't respond right away. She paused. Then she said, "Okay mommy. I'll see you tomorrow. I love you."

Her pause torments me. I want to turn back the clock to ask if everything was alright. Instead I said, "I love you too," and hung up.

It was around 9:30 on September 18, 2001 when the phone finally rang. It was not my daughter. It was my son Tom.

"Mom, are you sitting down. Sit down Mom." He kept telling me to sit down.

"What is it Tom? Did you lose your job?"

"Mom, Francesca's dead. She's dead." 

Francesca had died a few hours after she'd told me she'd see me tomorrow. She died of a gunshot wound to the head. Her death remains an open case in the homicide files of the Minneapolis Police Department. On this five year anniversary the raw wound of losing her has healed somewhat. The aching void her death opened in my life has never filled.

Francesca on her last hike with me on the North Shore. She is my Girl with the Tattoos.

The place where her ashes rest -- on a knoll overlooking Lake Superior.