THE CLOSET, PART 2

I don't remember if this was me, or not. I think it might have been PM. Some of us were playing hide-and-seek and after awhile we quit. No one noticed that one of us was missing. Later mom led us on a full-house search and found PM? me? I think PM sleeping on the floor of the coat closet under the short rack on the left.

"It was like the feeling she'd had once as a little girl when she hid under the front porch, behind the broken lattice, because her mother had yelled at her. She'd waited on the packed dirt through the long summer afternoon and into the evening--perhaps actually no longer than a few hours, but it had seemed endless to Lottie then--and no one came. Her mother called her once, at dinner, but then not again. Finally Lottie had crawled out and gone inside. And though it wasn't until much later that she was able to articulate the resolve she took from this event, even at the time she somehow understood the feeling, the knowledge that there was no one out there for her. That her mothering would have to come from someplace in herself."
For Love
by Sue Miller