When She Flew by Jennie Shortridge

closing her eyes for a moment before continuing. At the top, Jenkins offered a hand to help her, but she hoisted herself, her duty belt, her shotgun, and her butt up onto the platform.
    “Check it out, V,” Jenkins said.
    She turned to look behind her, then scrambled to her feet. Two sleeping platforms edged the small space, empty except for yellowed foam pads, separated by a makeshift shelf filled with old books and encyclopedias. Above the shelf, clothes hung from a series of hooks: men’s flannel shirts, a pair of army fatigues to the right, a girl’s rose-colored sweater and assorted tops and jeans to the left. Beneath the sleeping platform on that side, a pair of white Reeboks with purple hearts peeked out.
    “Nina wore those years ago,” Jess said. “That exact shoe. She loved those things.” Her throat almost closed in on itself. “We scared them away,” she said. “Damn it.”
    “Look at this,” Jenkins said. “Goddamn owl.”
    Another thick dowel protruded from the timber wall toward the front, a bird perch. Beneath it sat a newspaper-lined box with a few droppings and puffy white feathers.
    “It must be a pet,” Jess said, sighing.
    “Pretty weird pet.”
    Jess smiled. “You should have seen yourself,” she teased. “You looked like you saw a ghost.”
    “That thing was worse than a damn ghost, if ghosts even existed.”
    “I don’t know, Ellis. Maybe this place is haunted,” she teased, trying to make the mood light, but everything felt heavy. Not only her duty belt, or her shotgun, or her body. The air was heavy, the ever-graying light around them. Were they capable of handling this? What would her father have done if he’d been in this situation?
    Jess breathed in deeply, holding the stillness of the moment as long as she could. She wanted to find this girl. She had to. The thought that she had been so close and now was gone felt like punishment, somehow. This could have been her own worst nightmare: Nina could have been abducted like this if Jess hadn’t been so careful.
    She shook her head. It didn’t matter who you were; it could happen to anyone. Nina was lost to her now anyway; all Jess’s efforts to protect her had failed.
    After Jess made Rick move out, Nina had just hated her—angry, tearful accusations were their only communication for months. Even though just nine years old, Nina had a surprising capacity for fury. Where Jess had stuffed her emotions after her father’s death, Nina practically vomited them.
    As Nina entered puberty, Jess’s sense of protection went on hyperalert; she could admit this now. Sure, she’d probably been overzealous, but she’d wanted Nina to be safe. Whole and complete.
    But Nina couldn’t stand how protective Jess was. As a young teen, she started to lie about where she was going, to sneak out to see certain friends Jess thought inappropriate. She came home later in the afternoons from school, and Jess wondered if she’d been smoking pot or drinking beer. When Jess tried to clamp down on her, restrict her, ground her, Nina pulled farther away, ignoring Jess’s demands. It was tough being a working single parent. She could only keep an eye on her daughter so much, and Clara was hopeless when watching Nina.
    It all came to an end on an autumn day when Nina was sixteen. In retrospect, Jess now realized Nina had wanted it to happen. They shared the only bathroom in the house, and Jess couldn’t have missed the Clear Blue Easy package Nina left in the wastebasket.
    “It’s none of your business,” Nina had snapped when Jess confronted her after school, and pushed past Jess toward her bedroom.
    “Then why did you leave it where I would find it?” Jess demanded, following Nina to her room, holding out her arm to fend off the slamming door. “You’re not getting off that easy. What was the result, Nina?”
    Her daughter would not look at her, would not even face her. She flung her school bag into the far corner of the room, wrestled off