For twenty long years, I fell asleep every single night fully convinced that my baby girl was kidnapped right off our garden in Cairo. Then suddenly, a postcard landed in my mailbox. On one side of it, there was an Egyptian postmark, while on the other – the return address of some place located just three miles away from my Ohio home. At first, I thought it was just one more sick-minded prank by a person who wanted to reopen the painful wounds of my past. However, the information that I received after going to the address mentioned in the postcard made me realize that I have been cheated by one person whom I trusted my life.
The postcard itself was wild. It had that Cairo postmark, but the address written on the back was just a quick drive from my front door.
No greeting or a signature at the bottom of it, just a single sentence written in cramped block letters: “Come alone if you still want the truth about Tara.”
Tara was my daughter. She simply disappeared without a trace when she was eight years old while we were in Egypt. And now, twenty years later, here I am, driving a car towards this dodgy line of storage spaces for rent, with my heart pounding wildly inside my chest, reading the piece of paper lying next to me over and over again. I located unit number forty-two. I grasped the cold metallic doorknob, took a deep breath, bracing myself for whatever horror scene, and opened the door.
I collapsed straight down to the ground as I lost my knees.
The woman sitting there on a folding plastic chair near a couple of cardboard boxes was an exact reflection of me, the same eyes, that’s for sure. And all she did was sit there and stare at me, as if trying to figure out for if she absolutely hated me or not.
“You came pretty fast, Cassidy,” she said while making direct eye contact with me.
By then, I had trouble getting enough air into my lungs to say anything else. “Tara?”
She began trembling slightly, but stayed seated without even moving an inch. “I just needed to know if you’s come or not,” she said.
Before you start getting a grip of the situation, you must know that the story dates back to twenty years ago. Back then, I was married to a man named Grant, who was a journalist. At one point, he got offered a very lucrative overseas position, and as a result, the entire family had to pack everything and leave for Egypt. There we found a rather comfortable second floor apartment above a beautiful courtyard garden, which Tara loved and where she played almost every afternoon. In that moment, I honestly believed that we were happy.
It all changed after that fateful Tuesday, when I kissed Tara goodbye and left for work. Grant chose to stay behind because he was going to write something that day. He told me: “Don’t worry; I’ll keep watch over her.”
But when I pulled up to the building that evening, there were police officers all over the place. It was then that Grant told how Tara got out in the garden to play, and the next moment, she was nowhere to be seen.
For weeks, we searched high and low for my baby girl, but to no avail. No sightings, no random tips, no Tara. She simply vanished. In public, Grant was an absolute wreck, crying, and telling everyone that this was his fault, but as soon as we were alone in the apartment, he’d go completely silent and wouldn’t utter a word. Finally, after a year of madness, we decided to leave everything behind and go back home without our child. Not surprisingly, our marriage crumbled very quickly afterward.
Over the next twenty years, Grant basically turned our absolute worst tragedy into a full-blown career. He penned bestselling novels and delivered emotional lectures around the nation on grief and bereavement, while I remained home in suspended animation hoping for a miracle. That miracle showed up when that postcard landed in my mail slot.
Tara sat inside the dusty old garage of the rented car with me as she began telling me how she truly believed that I simply left her alone in Egypt. She rummaged through one of the boxes before bringing out the collection of letters that she had sent to me every year on her birthday from the age of nine to the time that she turned eighteen. Letters that I had never even seen before in my life. And then she dropped a bomb.
It wasn’t some stranger who dragged her away from the garden. It was Claire, my husband’s best friend. On that very night when our daughter disappeared, Grant had gone straight over to Claire’s apartment and instead of taking Tara back to me, he stared into her eyes and told her that I left both of them.
Claire raised Tara under an entirely made-up identity. Just days before Claire died, the guilt overwhelmed her, and she confessed everything. Grant needed to escape his marriage, needed to run off with Claire, and Tara was part of his plan. The only problem is that he was far too much of a coward to take on the reputation of being the bad guy who abandoned his family in a foreign country.
“He chose himself,” Tara whispered.
That night, Grant was in town, running an enormous promotional party for his new book, called The Daughter I Lost in Cairo. Tara had checked the advertisement on her cell phone.
“That book made him a lot of money,” she said.
I looked at her and replied, “Actually, Tara, he made his millions by hiding you.”
An hour later, we went directly to his book-signing event. He was standing up at the podium, speaking to the crowded room of people when he began reading an emotional excerpt concerning the profound grief associated with losing a child. In the middle of the reading, Tara got up and walked to the front of the aisle.
“I just wanted to ask a quick question,” she said. “Is that passage before or after the part where you left me stranded at Claire’s apartment?”
Dead silence fell upon the room. Tara marched up to the podium, placing Claire’s note and her collection of birthday letters.
“My name is Tara,” she said loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. “And I’m the daughter that he claimed had been abducted in Cairo twenty years ago. But he didn’t lose me. He kept me hidden.”
A reporter from the front row shot straight up on his feet and demanded Grant to confirm whether he’d deny the allegations made against him. He remained standing as though caged and kept mumbling something like he just tried to shield everyone from the truth.
I stepped up beside Tara and stared at him, saying, “Your only concern was saving your image. In the process, you ruined our lives.”
That night after the show, Tara came to my apartment. I went into the closet and took out an old cedar box I had carried with me in all those years since then. Inside the box was her ribbons, her tiny little red shoes, an old card with a pancake recipe we used to cook together, and several missing person flyers, which had now turned frayed and cuddly with age.
“I never let go of anything about you,” I told her.
For twenty long years, I hated Egypt because I thought it took my baby away from me. But the desert didn’t take her—it was a disgusting, selfish lie that stole her childhood. But the truth finally caught up, and it brought my daughter right back to my kitchen table.
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Bored Daddy
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