I sat in a blue beach chair, the one that sits really low so that you are almost in the sand. My hair was crisp from the salt water and slightly bleached from the sun. My peanut butter and jelly sandwich was dripping onto my thigh as the hot summer air melted it faster than I could eat it. It was low tide. All of the boats sat firmly on the sand, and the tide pools and sandbars went out for what looked like miles on the bay. It was a perfect day, to say the least.
On this perfect July day on the Cape in 2008, my six year old sister Hope went missing.
That morning was a relatively normal morning. I was awoken by the aroma of bacon that filled the house. My sisters and I tiredly crawled out of bed around nine. After breakfast it was the regular hassle that my parents similarly dealt with every single morning. The checklist went something like this: Did everyone eat; brush your teeth; get bathing suits on; rarely find a matching pair of sandals; use the bathroom; grab a towel; pack lunches, water, juice, napkins and extra changes of clothes; and make sure all of the beach toys are packed into the truck. On a good morning this routine would typically take an hour. With four girls it was possible that it could surpass two.
Beach days were always my favorite days. There were infinite activities for us to do. We created giant castles that would have a river flowing all the way down to the creek. My sister Jenny loved to sculpt her legs into a mermaid fin. The twins, Hope and Hayley, would take their boogie-boards down to the water when it was high tide to body surf miniature waves. They would giggle until they were red in the face. Something we all loved to do together was look for little minnows and hermit crabs to create little habitats in the tide pools in between the sand bars.
Our annual trips to the Cape were with my dad and his girlfriend Melanie. Her family lived in various states across the country, and every year came together in the town of Eastham, Massachusetts, where they grew up. Our crowd of a family was made up of my dad and Melanie and her many brothers, sister, nieces, and nephews. Her son Brian, me, my sister Jenny, and the twins Hope and Hayley. We were pretty hard to miss.
As the peanut butter and jelly dripped onto my thigh, my dad sat next to me. He has a large build, with multiple tattoos outlining the structure of his muscles. His hair cut was always the same; an “army haircut” as I used to call it when I was little. The sides of his head were completely shaved off, with an oval of hair only on the top of his head, and a small grey patch on the very tip of his widow’s peak. His sunglasses rested just above his ears, and he had a pair of binoculars pressed up to the lenses scanning the distance of the beach for the little kids. He spotted the twins with the rest of the kids and went on eating his lunch.
A few minutes passed before my dad pressed the binoculars back up to his eyes to once again scan the beach. Most of the kids had wandered back to where we were camped out on the beach and instantly my dad knew that something was wrong when Hope was not with them.
Hope has always been a curious creature. From the minute she could start crawling she was nicknamed “Hope Houdini”. In our old house each baby gate was stacked in twos, so they became six foot gates instead of three. I distinctly remember my mom carrying Hope from the driveway into the bathroom one day like you would carry your dirty socks. She had climbed out of her crib, opened the bedroom door, crawled down the stairs, pushed down the baby gate, grabbed a bottle of sunscreen, made her way out the front door and onto the driveway, and emptied the entire bottle onto her whole body. All without making one single sound.
You could tell by his posture that he was trying not to panic. His shoulders were up and the binoculars were now pressed to his eye. Scanning the beach he slowly began to stand from the chair. Hayley, the other twin began to cry because she thought it was her fault that Hope wasn’t back with the rest of the family. This is when the time began to slow down. Looking back on it is like watching a video in slow motion.
My dad began to walk fast to the right side of the beach, and Brian started sprinting to the left. She was nowhere in sight. When my dad was sure that Hope Houdini was not off being her curious self, he calmly asked Melanie to call the police. I remember exactly what she looked like that day.
She was in a purple one piece bathing suit that she clearly wore every day that summer. Her bleach blonde hair was short but still had some small baby ringlets closer to her face, and she was most likely covered from head to toe in sand.
The minutes that we stood around feeling helpless felt like hours. Cars and beaches within a five mile radius were being searched by police. I remember hearing another officer over the intercom that the bridges were shut down. The entire area was in lockdown mode, nobody came in and nobody went out.
Everyone was very hopeful. We were each shouting out potential scenarios of where Hope could be. She liked to make friends so maybe she was playing in the sand somewhere, unaware of what was going on just feet away from where she was playing. Nothing at this point made sense and being only eleven the only thing I could think of was never seeing my little sister again. I thought of all the times that we were mean to each other even though she was so much younger than me. I thought that nothing was more important than the time that we spend with our siblings and the unbreakable bond between us.
A long hour later we heard over the walkie-talkie informed the officer that was waiting with us that Hope had been found. My dad, the strong, unemotional, calm guy dropped to his knees and starting balling.
When she had wondered just feet away from the other kids she looked back and they were already gone. She was trying to find where we were sitting but miles of the beach with the sand bars, tide pools, and anchored boats looked identical. As she started to look for our location she panicked because she couldn’t find anyone. When her adrenaline kicked in she began to run down the side of the beach looking for us. She ran five miles down to the next beach, and was found by a little autistic boy who noticed the panic in her face.
When she was returned to us she was covered in ice cream. The multicolored food coloring was dripping down her face and all over her hands, and the only thing she was worried about when she got back was making sure she told everyone how excited she was that she got to ride in the back of the police car.