“Be good for the nice lady, baby. Mama will come back real soon.”

I have said those words in my head so many times they don’t sound like words anymore. They sound like a door closing. Which is what they were.

My name is Jolene. I’m thirty-five. I live in Decatur, Georgia, with my husband Curtis and a rescue dog named Biscuit who is afraid of thunderstorms and ceiling fans. I am telling you this because somebody needs to hear it and I have been quiet about it for thirty years and I cannot be quiet anymore.

—

I was five years old. It was July. I remember because the pavement was hot enough that I could feel it through my sandals. My mother put a grocery bag in my hands, the brown paper kind, and told me we were going on a trip. I was excited. I had never been on a trip before.

There was a green Buick in the driveway. I didn’t recognize it. There was a woman in the driver’s seat I had never seen before. She was maybe forty at the time, thin, with short brown hair and a cigarette between two fingers. She didn’t smile at me. She didn’t say hello.

My mother walked me to the car. She opened the back door and put me in. She buckled my seatbelt. I remember her fingers on the buckle. Her nails were painted pink. I remember that because it was the last time I saw her hands.

She leaned in and kissed my forehead. She said, “Be good for the nice lady, baby. Mama will come back real soon.”

Then she closed the door.

The car backed out of the driveway. I turned around in my seat and watched my mother standing on the porch. She was waving. She was smiling. I waved back until we turned the corner and I couldn’t see her anymore.

She did not come back real soon. She did not come back at all.

—

The woman’s name was Darlene. She lived in a double-wide outside Macon with a chain-link fence and a yard full of dirt and a dog that barked at everything including me.