The little girl sat on the lap of the social worker in the passenger seat of a gray state car, and when it pulled up at the cottage, she was already pressing her nose against the glass. I stood on the porch in my sun hat, the red straw one, because I had been told to wear it. A heavyset woman in a blue cardigan climbed out, her name tag reading Denise Pruitt, and lifted the child onto the sand. The girl stood very still for a moment. Then she saw me, and she let out a squeal, and she ran.
She ran across the sandy path in bare feet with her yellow curls flying, straight into my arms, and I scooped her up. She smelled of baby shampoo and salt. She wrapped her arms around my neck and said, in a voice like a bell, “Lady! The red hat lady!” I held her. I could not help it. I stood in the August sun and rocked her, and I felt a small hard shell pressed against my cheek, and when I drew back, I saw that she was holding it out to me in her fist. A shell the color of a peach, with a number written on it in black marker.
“It is for you,” she said. “Mama said to give it to the lady with the red hat.” Denise Pruitt had come up behind us. She looked at the shell with a tight, strange expression. “Mrs. Ellingsworth,” she said, “may we come inside? I think there is something you ought to hear.” We sat at my kitchen table, the three of us, and the child, whose name I learned was Poppy, drank orange juice from a plastic cup and colored in a book. Denise took the shell in her hand and turned it over. “This is a telephone number,” she said.
She dialed it on her cell phone. It rang twice. A woman answered in a small, trembling voice. “Hello? Hello? Is this the red hat lady?” I felt the blood leave my face. Denise handed me the phone, and I said hello, and the voice on the other end began to sob. “Mrs. Ellingsworth,” she said. “It is Kayla. Kayla Rowe. From the church. From the summer of 2009. Do you remember me?” I stared at the wall. I said, in a whisper, “Little Kayla? With the braids?”
A kindness done years ago, when you have long forgotten it, can become a lighthouse for someone who is lost in the dark.
I remembered. Of course I did. In the summers of 2008 and 2009, my husband and I had hosted a girl from a foster home in Raleigh at our Ocracoke cottage, a quiet, thin ten year old with big dark eyes, through a program at our church. We had taught her to fish. We had bought her a red bathing suit. She had cried the whole way home, both summers. After that, her caseworker moved, and we lost touch. I had thought of her often. I had never known what happened to her.
Kayla told me now, between sobs, from a shelter for women in Hatteras where she had been hiding since Monday. She was twenty six. She had a three year old daughter. She had fled from a man named Cody Dunleavy, a violent man, who had beaten her for two years and threatened to take Poppy. On Monday night, she had grabbed her child and run down the beach to a motel, intending to flee on the ferry. But the man found her, and in the struggle at the motel, she had been knocked unconscious. When she woke in the dunes on Tuesday, Poppy was gone.
“I thought he took her,” Kayla said. Her voice cracked. “I looked everywhere. I called the police. They found nothing. Then yesterday evening a ranger called and said a little girl had been found, in the arms of a lady in a red hat. I knew. I knew it was you. Poppy has talked about the red hat lady ever since I told her the story of our summer. I drew her a picture, so she would know where to go if she ever got lost. I had no idea she had walked all the way down the beach.”
The couple at the dune, Denise explained gently, were friends of Cody, who had grabbed the child from the motel and tried to take her out of state. Poppy had screamed all the way to the ferry. The man had been arrested that morning in Cedar Island. Cody had been picked up an hour later at the house of his mother in Greenville, and he would not see daylight for a very long time. Kayla was safe. The child was safe. And all because a stranger had worn a red hat on a lonely beach and had picked up a lost child without being asked.
“But I did not do anything,” I said. “I only carried her.” Denise smiled. “Mrs. Ellingsworth,” she said, “you did the only thing that mattered. You did not walk past.” On the phone, Kayla was weeping with relief. I told her not to move. I told her to stay where she was, that we were coming. We packed Poppy into the car, with her crayons and her shell, and drove two hours to Hatteras in the afternoon sun. When we reached the shelter, a thin young woman stood waiting at the gate with a bandage on her temple.
Poppy leaped from the car. Kayla caught her, and the sound the two of them made, a high wild wail of joy, was something I will hear until the day I die. I stood on the gravel with my hand over my mouth. When Kayla finally looked up, she held out one arm, the other around her daughter, and I walked into it. For a long time we stood there in a three way embrace, an old woman, a young woman, and a little girl, on a hot summer afternoon beside the sea.
They stayed with me for the rest of August. The cottage is small, but nobody minded. Poppy slept in a trundle bed beside her mother, and in the mornings we walked the long beach together in the red hat, the girl holding a bucket. Kayla found a job in town at the library. In September, she enrolled in a nursing program in Greenville. I bought Poppy a red straw hat of her own. On the first morning she wore it to the beach, she marched down to the water, planted her feet in the foam, and announced to the whole ocean, “I am found.”