Quote Detail

When a child disappears, the space she__ occupied is immediately filled with dozens of people. And these people__elatives, friends, police officers, reporters from both TV and print__reate a lot of energy and noise, a sense of communal intensity, of fierce and shared dedication to a task. __ut amid all that noise, nothing is louder than the silence of the missing child. It__ a silence that__ two and a half to three feet tall, and you feel it at your hip and hear it rising up from the floorboards, shouting to you from corners and crevices and the emotionless face of a doll left on the floor by the bed. __t__ a silence that__ different from the one left at funerals and wakes. The silence of the dead carries with it a sense of finality; it__ a silence you know you must get used to. But the silence of a missing child is not something you want to get used to; you refuse to accept it, and so it screams at you.__he silence of the dead says, Goodbye. __he silence of the missing says, Find me.