On a mild April morning, when I was five years old, I walked out our patio door that backed up to the mountain foothills and got lost in the desert for four days and three nights. I was found ten miles away in a sandy wash in between a couple of boulders, and for weeks I was a local media sensation: nightly news, helicopters, search crews, homemade cards from my kindergarten class, including Mrs. Maggiano, a teacher who’d showed no fondness for me prior to my disappearance. When asked if I’d remembered anything, I would say it felt like a dream, like fragments of a puzzle I couldn’t quite piece together. But that wasn’t the truth.

My mother would recite the story at dinner parties, whenever there was a need for interesting conversation. Maybe she tried to disarm the gossipers and get ahead of the story, relieve some of her guilt, but after a decade or so, each retelling began to sound more like a dark comedy. She’d be buying a pair of earrings at a department store, leaning into the salesperson with a conspiratorial whisper: She was abducted by coyotes when she was five. The conversation always ended with, Sadie could have died. But she’s a survivor.

When I returned to school, I told my classmates I was half coyote, that I was raised by a pack. I howled until they believed me. I howled and was sent to the principal’s office. I howled under full moons, when my parents began arguing, when I had no words for this malaise I carried throughout my childhood. I howled for reasons I still don’t understand.

My parents finally divorced when I was ten, which left me — with my mother’s face — in her custody; and my brothers — with his face — left in my dad’s custody. I know my father would have left sooner if I hadn’t put a spotlight on my family. After the story settled down and my safe return grew less sensational, my mother was no longer invited to neighborhood bridge nights. No one trusted their kids to come over and play at my house. There were rumors my mother was a day drinker, a pill popper. Why else would it take her seven hours to call the cops? How did she not know her daughter was gone? The police were called when my father came home from work. It was getting dark and he asked, Where Sadie? And my mother, head buried in a book, dishes in the sink, my brothers playing tackle football outside, waved him off and said, Probably in her room or with the boys.

I bought my mother five more years with a man she didn’t love, who didn’t love her back. I bought her five more wasted years.

The press called me Coyote Girl and so did my classmates after a comment I made about following the coyotes to find water. They’d whisper it before the bell rang, in the halls, in the bathroom, just as I’d enter a stall. I’d pick up my feet, hear a new pack of girls say: Coyote Girl must be in here, it smells like wolf crap. She howls, you know. She goes into the desert at night to visit them. And then I’d howl and scare the shit out of them. I’d howl until I was alone in the bathroom with my eyes closed, imagining those nights in the desert, how the stars appeared chiseled into the slate black sky, the moon casting its blue light, softening the cacti and dry brush. How it felt like anything was possible, like all anyone needed in this world was a small sliver of moonlight.

When dad left us, I found mom wedged between her bed and nightstand where she thought no one would find her. I curled up with her and licked her arm, put my ear to her heart to hear it beat. She cried long and slow, like a cub when she needed to howl. So I howled for her, for her generation that mistook strength for suffering and silence for grit. Then she said so quietly I thought I imagined it, I am so sorry, my love. You could have died out there.

That was the last time I howled.

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I married a man who’d never heard of Coyote Girl. He grew up three states away. He knew the story because of my mother, and I told him she was prone to exaggeration. The older my mother got, the more she forgot everyday stuff — where the car keys were, the passcodes for everything, how a flame on a stovetop needed to be watched — and began to fixate on the event, seeing it with startling clarity, remembering the smallest of details.

“Sadie, you wore that green corduroy coat the day you disappeared. It had a little rainbow on its collar and a torn pocket. Do you remember when you came back you thought you were a coyote? You’d sniff all your meals; you’d try to eat raw meat.”

“Yes, Ma.”

“In those days, kids used to play outside until it was dark. In those days, kids were independent — no phones, no tablets, no twenty-four hour entertainment babysitters.”

“And that’s how latchkey kids ended up with their pictures on milk cartons, Ma.”

“The day you left was the day I knew your father was cheating on me.”

“Oh,” I said. What do you say to a secret you already knew?

She grabbed my hand. “I was so distracted, so distraught, you could have died.”

“But I didn’t, Ma. I didn’t.”

“I don’t mean just that day. I mean all the days in between; the little deaths that come with living every day. You could have died, but you didn’t. You were always more alive than anyone.”

And I wondered if she knew, had always known, the real story of why I’d walked deep into the desert when I was little, that I’d heard my father arguing with her that morning, saying he wanted to leave her and I thought if I left them both, they would find me — together. But then I got lost for real as I wandered down the dry riverbeds kicking sand and rocks, snapping off branches of the palo verdes, and by night I made myself small like a rock, like in that book my mother would read to me where a donkey named Sylvester had a magic pebble, and wished he was a rock when confronted with a hungry lion. In his panic to escape, he made a foolish wish that had cost him years of remaining a rock with the magic pebble beside him until his parents decided to picnic on that very rock, pick up that very pebble, and place it on him so he was able to wish himself back into the donkey he was. And so, I found the biggest rocks I could and hid between them, thinking my parents would find me, they’d feel bad about losing me, about losing each other, and they’d come looking and I’d have my wish.

On the first night I went missing, a light rain fell, and I no longer cared about the plan, about the wish. I was hungry and thirsty and lost, and all I wanted was my mother. A pack of coyotes wandered down the wash, looking for pockets of water. I saw where they drank and followed their movements, and at night, they’d come back and sniff around me, paw at the boulders, howling for hours as I wedge myself further and further into the crevice.

After that first night, I wasn’t afraid of the coyotes. I howled with them, straight up at the moon. I howled so long and hard, chasing all the fear out of me until there was nothing left but longing and regret and a small sense of peace. Later, I was found by the sheriff’s dog who’d sniffed me out ahead of a search party.

“Do you still howl?”

“No, Ma. I’m a grown woman. Grown women don’t howl.”

“We should,” she said. “We should howl and get lost and find ourselves again and again.”

She closed her eyes and a nurse came to say her visiting hours were almost over, but I could stay the night if I wanted. My mother didn’t have much time left. Her vitals weren’t good. She had survived a stroke, a fall, a bout of cancer, and the gradual breakdown of her body. After my mother fell asleep, I lay beside her on the hospital bed, hearing her breath slow into a shallow rattle, then sync with mine, turning into a quiet, but growing howl.

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