You can’t go up there.”
Where can’t I go?
“I said stop.”
Stop what?
“I’m not going to tell you again. I want you to leave.”
Leave?
I wasn’t dreaming I was in a house with my real mom.
I was wide-awake, in a house with my fake mom.
“Please get out before I call the police.”
The police?
There was a woolly blanket over my head. No, my head was the woolly blanket. It was saying, Let me go back to sleep. Please.
“Please, I just need to . . .”
Another voice. Two voices now. One yelling at the other one to leave and threatening to call the police. The other one pleading that she needed to do something, so don’t.
One of them was my fake mom.
The other one was my other fake mom. Two fake moms.
Becky Ludlow was in the house.
“I just need to talk to her. Make her tell you . . .” Becky again.
I got off the bed. I crawled over to the door and wedged my back against it. A hundred fifteen pounds of fear against a hundred forty or so pounds of anger. Put your money on fear.
I was dressed in Laurie’s blue Costa Rican T-shirt, which I’d since appropriated. My tattoo was saying VIDI: I see you.
If I make a break for it out the window, I will (a) break my ankles; (b) break my neck; (c) break Laurie’s heart.
The one whose heart I’d broken before was still pleading to be let upstairs.
“I promise you. If you just let me talk to her, I’ll go. I promise. Just give me five minutes and after that—”
“You’re trespassing. You invited yourself in under false pretenses. I want you out.”
“I told you my daughter was kidnapped too. She was. Sarah was kidnapped.”
“You said you needed to talk to me—one mother of a kidnapped child to another. That’s what you said. I thought you were looking for a little . . . I don’t know what I thought you were looking for, but it wasn’t this.”
“I do need to talk to you—one mother of a kidnapped child to another. One mother of a kidnapped child who came back. Only she didn’t. Mine didn’t. And neither has yours.”
“Are you really going to make me call the police?”
“Listen. Do you know what it’s like? What a stupid question. Of course you do. Having to go on living? After your daughter . . . after the person you love more than life—because you do, it’s an expression people like to throw around a lot, but it’s true, you do love them more than life. I’ll tell you how I know that—because when my daughter disappeared, I stopped wanting to live, that’s how. I took sleeping pills. I woke up in a hospital having my stomach pumped and I still didn’t want to live. It’s twelve years later and I still feel like killing myself every day. You know how that feels? Opening your eyes every morning and wishing, wishing really hard, that you were dead. But there’s your husband and there’s your other child—yes, Sarah has a brother—and even though it kills you that you’d rather be dead than be a mother to your other child, that’s how you feel. That’s who you are. That’s what it’s done to you.”
“I’m sorry about your daughter. I am. But coming here and making these crazy—”
“Crazy? Yes, I’m crazy. Guilty as charged. You know how many times I saw someone—walking down the block, in an airport. Once we were at the movies, and I saw this little girl turn around in the front of the theatre. I jumped up and screamed, Sarah, Sarah, and this little scared-out-of-her-mind seven-year-old, she turns and looks at me—her mother was with her—and both of them, I saw it in their faces, they were looking at this crazy person. This lunatic. Crazy? Sure, I’m crazy. But not about this. Not about her . . .”
Her being me.
Me being wedged up against the door wishing it was thicker, not only because that would make it easier to keep her out of the room, but because it would make it easier to keep that voice out of my head. I didn’t want to listen to the voice talking about how Becky wanted to kill herself. What losing Sarah had done to her. Because she was getting to the part where she’d lost Sarah twice. And I knew what that had done to her. It had put her on a plane from Le Mars, Iowa, to here. To hiding out in bushes, chasing me down the sidewalk, talking her way into this house.
“I’m picking up the phone now,” Laurie said again. “I asked you nicely. I asked you to please, please, leave my house. You’re still here.”
“Let them come. I don’t care. I don’t. You know how I felt the day I got the call. You pick up the phone and there’s this man on the other end saying he’s a detective down at the police station, and you think it’s happened, finally, they’ve found the body, they’ve found her remains, isn’t that what they call it on all those police shows? And your heart stops, for a second it just stops, and then he tells you something entirely different than you were expecting, something so utterly impossible that you ask him to repeat it, please just say it again, because you couldn’t have possibly heard it right, could you? And he does, he does say it again, and your heart that just a second ago was stopped, was absolutely frozen, it melts, it bursts, and suddenly you’re screaming out loud, you’re on your knees and you’re screaming. For joy, for Sarah, for the mother you stopped being. Was it like that for you, Laurie? Was it the same? Did you get down on your knees and thank God, thank the police, thank the kidnapper even, because he kept her alive. Did you?”
“I’m not going to talk to you. I’m not going to share my feelings and my life with you. You’re making a horrible mistake here. This is a terrible intrusion and you’re making me call the police to have you arrested and I don’t want to do that to you, I don’t, but I’ve asked you nicely, and you won’t listen.”
“I have a picture,” Becky said.
I have a picture . . .
We’d been sitting on the back porch.
I have a picture . . .
Becky and me, cradling two glasses of homemade pink lemonade, dead quiet except for the faint sound of buzzing insects, because we were all cried out.
I have a picture . . .
Slowly swinging back and forth on a wooden chair suspended by two rusty chains that creaked every time I pushed off the porch with my naked toes. And Becky calling into the house, telling Lars to please get his camera and take a picture to record my first day home, please, because Becky said she still couldn’t believe it, she could not believe it, and maybe seeing it sitting there right in her hand would make it one hundred percent real. And Lars probably already fighting doubts of his own about what was real or not, walking out onto the porch and snapping a photo.
Click.
“A picture . . . ?” Laurie repeated dully.
“Before she left. Before Lars asked her to take a DNA test. No, I told Lars. Don’t be silly. All those memories she has. All the things she remembers from when she was a little girl—before it happened. Before he’d decided to take her to the Home Depot that Saturday morning. I never blamed him, by the way—not to his face, not once—even though I wanted to, God, I wanted to, but he took that away from me, because he couldn’t stop blaming himself. You understand? And then suddenly it didn’t matter anymore, did it, because she was back. Some sort of miracle had taken place and she was back home and all those memories that kept coming out of her—our camping trip to Yosemite, watching Finding Nemo a thousand times in her room when she had her tonsils out, the winter we built a snowman together and the crows ate the snowman’s nose—we used a big carrot and the crows ate it and she wouldn’t stop crying about it until we performed an operation and gave him a new one. Why on earth do we need a DNA test? I asked Lars, why? . . . Doesn’t she know things only Sarah would know? And Lars said it doesn’t hurt to be sure, does it? I mean, a lot of that stuff was in the papers back then. I’m just saying let’s be one hundred percent sure here, trying to be gentle with me, because he knew, knew what losing her again would do to me—even though I hated him, absolutely hated him for bringing it up. But Lars knew something was off, knew that something wasn’t right, and maybe the reason I hated him was because I knew it too, I did, somewhere I did. And this girl said okay, sure, I’ll take a DNA test, and one night later she was gone. No note, no nothing. Gone.”
“I’m sorry for you. I really and truly am sorry, but this has nothing . . . absolutely nothing—”
“I read about you in the papers. About Jenny. You’ve read articles like that, right? Articles about other children who’ve been found. Part of you thinking, well, if it could happen to them, after all this time, if their daughter can be found alive, then maybe, just maybe . . . only there’s this other part of you, this awful part, that hates reading about those other girls—about those other parents, their happiness, their ridiculous insane joy. Then I saw her picture. The picture of Jenny. My heart stopped again. It stopped. I have the picture Lars took of her. Please, just look at it . . .”
Laurie was going to look at it. At Lars’s picture. Becky and Sarah on a summer day. On a summer swing. Curiosity would make her look at it. Or maybe just wanting to get Becky out of the house. Please look, and I’ll leave. So Laurie would. She’d look.
And one look at Becky’s picture and she’d get the bigger picture. The one that had Ben telling them how he’d found his Facebook page sitting open on the computer screen in my room—all my memories in plain sight. And my slip-up about Ben scarring his hand on that Fourth of July I couldn’t have been anywhere near—that would be in the picture too, something she’d managed to turn a blind eye to so far, maybe for the same reason Becky had turned a blind eye to things she had no real desire to look at. And this bigger picture would contain a smaller one: a girl sitting on a summer porch who’d once said she was Sarah but was now saying she was someone else.
I have a picture.
“I don’t need to see it,” Laurie said.
“I’m just asking you to take one second and . . .”
“The day we picked Jenny up we took her to a doctor. Your husband was right. He was right about needing to know. We wanted to be a hundred percent sure. So we took her to a doctor and he performed a DNA test. She’s our daughter. She’s our daughter with 99.9 percent certainty. So you coming here, making these accusations—I was trying to tell you. I’m sorry the girl who came to you was a fake, I am. But Jenny isn’t. Our daughter’s back. Now will you leave . . . ?”
There was a sudden silence; there was a soft, stammered apology—there was the sound of the front door being slammed shut. There was the sound of Laurie slowly trudging back up the stairs and stopping outside my door. And then, with me lying back in bed with my eyes squeezed shut, the sound of my door opening and Laurie walking in and standing there for a while, confirming that I must’ve slept right through it without hearing a word.
Then this other sound.
After Laurie tiptoed out of the room, this other sound that seemed to be coming from the direction of my bed.
Crying.
For just one moment, I’d thought: We did go to a doctor and get a DNA test that said I was 99.9 percent their daughter? Really? We did . . . we did . . . we did?
No.
We didn’t.
Of course we didn’t.
No.