The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.
~Joyce Carol Oates

I was eating lunch when our second daughter, Melissa, surprised me by stopping by our house. I hadn’t seen her in weeks, and her sudden appearance made me wary. She had been an extremely difficult teenager, and she wasn’t living with us at that time. She was couch surfing at friends’ houses, as best I could tell. It wasn’t a lifestyle that suited her very well. She was always thin, but now she looked gaunt.

“Do you want a turkey sandwich?” I asked.

“No, thanks,” she said, barely pausing as she walked toward the stairs. “Mom, I’m going to Florida with two boys I met from Arkansas.”

When I got to her bedroom, she was stuffing clothing into a backpack. There was nothing I could do to stop her. She was eighteen, so she wasn’t asking for my permission. She was telling me her plan. Nothing I said even garnered a response. I followed her out to the car waiting in the driveway.

Two young men immediately jumped out of the car. They came forward to shake my hand. I looked at the young man who seemed to be more approachable. He introduced himself as Doug.

“I’m just not comfortable with any of this,” I said.

“I understand, ma’am,” he answered. “But I want to assure you that we gave up our serial-killing ways two years ago.”

Dumbfounded, I blurted out, “What if you change your mind?”

“No, ma’am, them days are done.”

And with that, they were gone.

Eventually, I learned that the two boys were college students on summer break. They were driving cross-country, camping and sightseeing along the way. By September, Melissa and Doug were dating, and they settled back in Arkansas where he was beginning his senior year.

The following spring, Melissa called and asked if she and Doug could stay with us for the summer. We live on Cape Cod, which is a resort area, so they hoped to get high-paying summer jobs in restaurants to save money for Doug to go to graduate school. Even though our relationship with Melissa had greatly improved in our nine months apart, my husband and I hesitated. We didn’t really know Doug, and the memories of Melissa’s bad behavior in high school — the drinking and drugs especially — were still fresh in our memory.

Every time my husband and I discussed whether to let them stay with us, we came to the same conclusion: It just wasn’t worth the risk. We still had two younger children at home, and they didn’t deserve a return to the chaos from the past.

When our oldest daughter Jess offered to let Melissa and Doug stay with her, it seemed like the perfect solution. She had an apartment on Main Street, where she lived with her boyfriend and an infant daughter.

Everyone felt pretty good about the decision until one day shortly before Melissa and Doug arrived. Jess called to tell me they had decided to put them in the sunroom on the first floor, instead of the second bedroom upstairs as originally planned. They were afraid Melissa and Doug would wake up the baby if they went out at night or stayed up too late.

As soon as Jess said the word “sunroom,” I felt deeply uneasy. I pictured the sunny space with a tile floor and miniature cathedral ceiling. It was a very pleasant room, so I couldn’t put my finger on what was making me feel such discomfort. I didn’t say anything to Jess, but the feeling didn’t leave me after I hung up.

My husband was home at the time, sitting in the living room with me. He overheard my end of the conversation. We were both pretty quiet for a few minutes. After all the hours of discussing the reasons they couldn’t stay with us, the decision for them to move in with us took about three seconds.

“Jess and Chris are going to put Melissa and Doug in the sunroom at their apartment,” I finally said. “I don’t know why, but I just don’t feel comfortable about that.”

“Do you want them to stay here with us?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He said okay, and I felt relief, but it didn’t eliminate all my uneasiness.

It turned out to be a strangely idyllic summer. Melissa and Doug were fun to have around. They worked hard at their jobs, but also helped around the house. On their one night off from work every week, they walked our younger children down to the local ice-cream shop for a cone.

That summer ended up being a time for us to repair our relationships and our family. We quickly grew to love Doug as a member of the family. His sense of humor alone won us over.

Then in mid-July, we got a phone call at 2 a.m. from Jess. She was crying so hard that it was hard to understand her. Eventually, I figured out that a drunk driver who was being chased by the police came barreling down the road across from their apartment at a very high speed. Rather than turning left or right onto Main Street, he crashed right into their apartment. They were asleep on the second floor, so they were okay, but the apartment was in shambles.

My husband drove over to pick them all up. We pulled out the sleeper sofa in my office and set up the pack-and-play for our granddaughter, but none of us slept at all that night. The next day, I went with Jess to survey the damage and help her pack some things so they could stay with us while the apartment was repaired.

What I saw made my stomach drop. There was a large, sedan right in the middle of the first-floor sunroom. If Melissa and Doug had stayed in the sunroom for the summer, they would have died.

I don’t know if it was mother’s intuition or angels who whispered in my ear, but I’m so grateful that I paid attention. Melissa and Doug didn’t end up together in the end, but they both moved on to happy relationships with other people. Now I have my daughter, safe and happy, living just one town away where she is raising my two amazing grandchildren.

— Laurie Higgins —