THE MOTHER WITH ONE EYE

Erin Sheridan was twenty-eight the night she crossed a lakefront bar in Bucks County to talk to a stranger who called himself Jimmy. He moved the time of their picnic by an hour, over the phone, so that nothing about it was ever written down. He asked whether she had needed to rearrange anything to come out. Then he drove her up a township road with a turned sign on it, and she turned to look back over her left shoulder, and that was the last thing that eye ever did.

She woke twenty-seven hours later in a hospital in Sellersville, blind on one side and carrying his child.

On the second day she gave a state trooper everything. A first name. An old red pickup with rust through the bed. A woman in Riegelsville who took her lunch at eleven o’clock and did not like it moved. All of it was true and none of it was enough. And when Erin said out loud that he had done this before, that he had known the road and moved the time and carried every scrap off that beach in the dark, the trooper’s pen came to rest against the pad and stayed there.

So Erin did what a metallurgist does with a part that failed. She documented the condition as received.

For seven years there is a file in the back third of her basement. Bound notebooks with numbered pages, in ink, ruled into three columns headed OBSERVED, TOLD and INFERRED. Forty-seven back roads photographed on Saturday afternoons with her daughter asleep in the car. Sixty-one index cards behind one divider, fifty-eight of them struck through. Nobody on earth knows it is down there. Not her mother. Not her best friend, who has done laundry eleven feet from the shelf.

Then a man standing outside her daughter’s school picks up a dropped mitten, hands it back over the fence, and says the child’s name.

It proves nothing, and nobody knows better than Erin what a thing like that is worth. But eleven days later a woman goes missing six tenths of a mile from a road Erin photographed four years ago and rated in her own handwriting, and the third column of a bound notebook is the only place in Pennsylvania where those two facts sit on the same page.

THE MOTHER WITH ONE EYE is a novel about the years after. About raising a daughter on your good side. About being told, kindly, by decent people doing their jobs properly, that what you know is not the same as what can be written down. And about a woman who was believed by nobody and spent eight years building the proof anyway.

A note for readers: the assault happens off the page. Its aftermath does not.