Missing Daughter by Tara Van De Mark

She went missing the day before our spring break. A picture of the effervescent young
woman flashes on my phone with a travel alert from a friend saying, OMG isn’t this where you
are going? Yes, kinda, same island but different resort. I watch a news clip. The missing young woman grew up in the town next to ours. Her parents still live there. I finish rolling my
daughter’s sundresses into packing cubes. My daughter has convinced us to dress up for the
theme nights of tropical, all-black, all-white and neon. I roll my yellow highlighter dress,
something I will never wear again but bought because, at age ten, her requests of us, her parents, have already started to fade.

As we wait in the airport lounge there is footage of the missing woman leaving the resort
at 4:15am, her arm around an unidentified guy, a group of her friends with them. A half hour
later everyone returns but her and the guy. On the plane my daughter says “ugh Mom” as I check
her seatbelt. She buckled it this time but I remind her that last trip she forgot and fell during
some turbulence. Another friend texts, I bet that guy did it. I turn my phone on airplane mode.
Our bodies smush back into the seats as the plane speeds forward and takes-off. My daughter
tucks her hand inside mine until the fastened seatbelt light turns off.

We land and two customs agents are discussing how the missing woman’s parents arrived
earlier that morning. At check-in we sip fresh passion fruit as my daughter gets her first black
independence bracelet. Now she can sign herself out of camp and roam the resort. 

Her Dad reviews the family rules as we walk to our room: only sign out with a friend, no swimming, no going into hotel rooms, and we do meals together. “I know, I know!” she says. She does know, not just because we’ve had this talk before but these are the rules followed by all the kids in our neighborhood who spend lazy Sundays hanging on monkey bars without parents hovering about.

Our suite is picture worthy. My daughter and husband head straight to the balcony to sit in oversized lounge chairs and look out at the ocean that goes on beyond sight and comprehension. I sit on our bed and wonder if the missing woman’s mom is in her room, is she
laying on her bed touching the last place her daughter slept, can she smell the paella, does she
hear the kids jump-screaming in the pool, can she see the waves continue to break on the shore?

By dinner my daughter has made a friend. Our families sit together enjoying food we
didn’t cook on dishes we neither set nor will clean as our girls braid each other’s hair. “Authorities have detained the guy, taken his passport and everything,” the girl’s mom says. I pour more wine and resist the urge to pull my daughter onto my lap and hold her like she used to demand I do in those first years of her life. It feels impossible that I had hated that closeness. Incomprehensible that I wanted my own space. My memory is tricky like that, what used to be a burden with time is washed away into a joy. I listen to our girls plotting tomorrow: plates of mango for breakfast, just a little time at camp, then mini-golf.

In the morning they head off holding hands and wearing matching pink sun hats thanks to
my husband’s inability to say no in a gift shop. Alone now, I really look at him, that man I
married. These years of parenting have depleted us. He feels like a distant relative and our
vacation like a family reunion after an estrangement. We don’t know what to say as we sit by the pool with our phones. He tells me, “the guy claims a wave hit them, he thought she made it to
shore,” and we drink coffee until lunch time.

Back at the restaurant we join the girl’s parents. The dad took a run along the beach to a
mangrove with actual crocodiles bobbing about. The girls don’t join us for lunch. No one else
seems to care, but the guacamole turns in my stomach. I circle the restaurant, then the resort,
looking for those pink hats, but they are gone. I return to the three parents relaxing. The mom is
saying, “her friends went on an excursion that morning so they didn’t report her missing until 12
hours later.” I drop my sandals on the table so I can run unencumbered.

The beach is empty except for the bulldozers that remove the seaweed so the resort can
maintain the illusion of perpetual white sand. The sun is at its highest and hottest. My skin is
burning. There is a profile of a man napping in the shade, so I wake him with a loud American,
“Hello!” and show him a picture of my daughter on my phone, her smile so full of life. He nods
and points further down the beach.

I try to run faster but the tide is in and the sand is wet and each step feels like the ocean is
trying to stop me. The black outline of snakes and crocodiles on yellow signs pass by me as I barely stifle the need to scream my daughter’s name. Then, I see a mirage of brown and green off in the distance—mangroves— and, yes, along their edge, something pink. There, in the water, I think I can make out two little bodies, splashing together, riding the waves. 

Tara Van De Mark is a recovering attorney now writer based in Washington, DC.  Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart, The Best Small Fiction, The Best of the Net and has recently appeared in BULL, Lincoln Review, GoneLawn, Citron Review, and Tiny Molecules.  She can be found at www.taravandemark.com and lurks around X/twitter and bluesky @TaraVanDeMark

17 April 2026