The Lost and the Found (5 page)

S
he hesitates for a second, this new sister of mine. Then she runs over from the window, and she hugs me tightly, and I stagger backward a couple of steps, but she doesn't let go. Mom and Dad hang back for a second or two; they have the biggest smiles on their faces. I've never seen them smile like that before. They can't resist for long, and they soon pile in so that I'm right in the middle of this big, laughing, crying, disbelieving family hug. There's a wholeness, a completeness, a certain symmetry to it. It amazes me.

After a while, we disentangle ourselves and step back and just look. Mom and Dad are looking from Laurel to me and back again. Laurel is staring at me as if she can't quite believe I'm real, and I'm staring at her because I can't believe how beautiful she is even though I always knew she'd be beautiful. I had a picture in my head of what she would look like, and it never quite matched the age-progressed pictures the police came up with, but it was actually pretty close to the girl standing in front of me.

She's a couple of inches taller than me—about five foot seven. Her hair is a little longer than shoulder-length; it looks like she cut it herself. Her eyes are very blue. She's not wearing any makeup and her skin is slightly greasy and sallow, but her beauty still astounds me. The scar looks a little like a silvery white teardrop on her cheekbone.

She's skinny—the hoodie and jeans she's wearing are hanging off her. That's when I realize that the clothes she's wearing are mine. There's nothing I can say about that without it sounding petty and wrong. I want to make a joke about it—because it's such a classic sisterly sort of thing (
Moooooom, she borrowed my jeans without asking
again
!
)—but this probably isn't the right time. I don't mind that she's wearing my clothes, but it would have been nice if Mom had bothered to ask me. Knowing her, she's already got some big shopping spree planned for Laurel. She's always wanted a daughter to go shopping with, and I have never been that daughter.

“You're so grown up!” Laurel smiles through her tears.

Dad's got his phone out of his pocket. He wants to take a photo. Laurel and I stand in front of the sofa, and she puts her arm around my shoulder, and we smile for the camera. We have to keep smiling a little too long while Dad presses the wrong button and accidentally starts recording a video of us, but he manages to get it right eventually.

“Right,” Mom says. “We're going to go out and get some coffee and leave you girls to it.”

I'm panicking slightly at the thought of being left alone with Laurel, but at the same time I know it will be easier without Mom and Dad here, watching everything, trying to record it for posterity. They dispense more hugs before they leave. It looks like we're going to be a huggy sort of family from now on.

Laurel curls up in one corner of the sofa, tucking her bare feet beneath her. I sit on the armchair next to the sofa. I haven't had a chance to look around the presidential suite, but it's obviously bigger than my house.

Laurel notices me looking around. “It's too big.”

“What?”

She fiddles with the cuffs of her (my) hoodie. “I wish it were smaller. I'm used to…”

Oh god. She's been locked up in a basement for thirteen years. It stands to reason that big spaces would freak her out. “You should say something. Tell Mom. They'll get a smaller room for you, no problem.”

Laurel shakes her head. “Mom really likes it.”

It is unbelievably odd to hear someone else calling my mother “Mom.” And I can't get my head around the fact that I am sitting in this ridiculously opulent hotel room, talking to my sister.

“This is weird, isn't it?” Sometimes it's just best to get these things out in the open and acknowledge the awkwardness before someone else does.

Laurel smiles. “It's definitely weird.”

We sit in silence for a moment or two. Laurel stares at the door, and I wonder if she's trying to work out when Mom and Dad will be back. Maybe she'd have preferred it if they'd stayed. They seem to know the right things to say and do; clearly I do not.

“I'm glad you're back.” It's a banal thing to say, but it's important that I say it out loud. It's important that she hears it. Laurel smiles again. Her teeth are perfect. “Your teeth are perfect.”

“Um…thanks?” She's looking at me as if that was a weird thing to say, probably because it
was
a weird thing to say.

“Sorry…I was just…It's just that I was thinking that you haven't been to the dentist, and here's me going every six months or something and having fillings and braces and…Okay, I'm going to stop talking now. Sorry.” What is
wrong
with me?

Laurel doesn't look at me like I'm crazy. She doesn't look at me at all. “I brushed my teeth for five minutes, three times a day. Mouthwash and flossing, too. It was one of his rules.”

Oh god. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to…”

“It's okay. I'm going to have to get used to talking about it, aren't I? I only brushed my teeth for a couple of minutes last night. Same this morning. And I haven't flossed.” Finally a ghost of a smile appears on her face, and I breathe again. “You don't need to worry, you know. I can talk about it. About…him.”

If the things that had happened to her had happened to me, I don't think I'd ever talk about them again. “I can't even begin to imagine what you've been through.” Yet more banality.

“Good. You shouldn't have to.” She goes to bite her nails and then stops herself, tucking her hands inside the sleeves of the hoodie. I wonder if that was another one of his rules. “Anyway, I want to hear about you. I've got some catching up to do, haven't I? How about you tell me every single thing you've done in the last thirteen years?” She laughs at the alarmed look on my face. “I'm kidding! Sort of.”

“Um…where do you want me to start?”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to put you on the spot.” She stares off into space again, and I'm not sure where she's gone, but I'm almost certain I should be glad that I can't follow her there. “You know…no matter how bad things got, I was always glad he took me and not you. Whenever I was scared or couldn't sleep, I thought about you.”

I've read articles asking that question: why her and not me? Most people seem to think it came down to age or hair color. I was four years old with brown hair; Laurel was six years old with blond hair.

I used to have recurring nightmares of a man standing over the two of us. The sun was always behind him, so his face was in shadow. He would lead Laurel away by the hand, and I would go back to playing in the sand. Sometimes I would run after them and ask for an ice cream, and the man would take my hand, and the three of us would walk down the road together.

“Have you still got that night-light?”

I have no idea what she's talking about, and she can tell from the look on my face.

“The penguin one? With the red hat and scarf? You had this weird name for it, but I can't seem to…”

All of a sudden, I can picture it, crystal clear. “Egg!” Laurel nods vigorously, eyes bright, and we both laugh at the miracle of a shared memory.

How could I have forgotten about Egg? For years I couldn't get to sleep without that penguin's tummy glowing from the corner of the room. Egg was the only thing protecting me from the monster under the bed and the monster in the closet. And then he was the only thing protecting me from the monster in the front yard—the one who led little girls away by the hand and made their families sad.

Laurel tells me that she used to think about Egg when she couldn't sleep, when she felt suffocated by the darkness around her. She would try to picture him in her mind, focusing on every little detail. “Sometimes it felt like I could actually
see
him—but only if I concentrated really, really hard. Those were the best times. I was able to go to sleep then. But sometimes I couldn't quite remember the exact shade of red of his hat, or the shape of his beak didn't feel right.”

I nod as if I understand. And I do understand, in a theoretical sort of way. But I'll never truly understand what she's been through, will I? Even if she was to tell me every single thing that happened to her, I will never really
know.
I'll never know what it's like to be locked in a pitch-black basement, scared and alone—or even worse: scared and
not
 alone.

L
aurel is disappointed that I have no idea what happened to the night-light, so I tell her we'll look for it when she comes home. “Home,” she says. “I like the sound of that.”

She asks me about school, and it all sounds amazing and interesting to her because she can barely even remember going. I ask her if she can read, then I apologize because it seems like an insensitive question. Laurel doesn't mind, though. She learned to read and write. She learned pretty much all the same subjects I did. I ask how that's possible, not bothering to hide my skepticism.

“He taught me.”

“Like…proper lessons?”

She nods. “He hated ignorance. He said there was no excuse for it.”

“So you had textbooks and everything?”

“Some. Mostly he had his own handwritten notes. A colored folder for each subject.”

It's too bizarre to get my head around. The idea of this monster—this
psychopath
—teaching her math and grammar and science. He brought her novels to read, too—but only if she was good. She didn't go into detail about what being “good” entailed. A couple of years ago, he taught her how to use a computer, saying everyone needed to be able to use computers in the modern world. He wired up an old desktop one for her. It wasn't connected to the Internet—obviously.

We talk and talk, and gradually I begin to build up a picture of her life for the past thirteen years, and she begins to build up a picture of mine. We swap information, filling in the gaps, asking questions and answering them. I steer clear of anything that I think might upset her, though, which means a lot of my questions aren't the ones I really want to ask.

Laurel finds it fascinating that I have a boyfriend. She asks lots of questions about Thomas, and I try my best to answer them. She even asks if Thomas and I have had sex. There's an awkward silence before I tell her the truth. She asks me if I liked it, and I say I sort of did. Then she goes quiet, and I say maybe we should talk about something else.

She shakes her head fiercely and says, “I
hate
it. I never want to do it again. It's disgusting.” She looks so intense and angry, and I want to kill the man who made her feel like this. No—I want to hurt him, inflict the worst sort of pain, and
then
kill him. What he did to her doesn't count as sex. He attacked and violated a little girl in the most horrifying way possible. She
must
see the difference.

“What was he like? The…man. It's okay if you don't want to talk about it.”

Laurel leans forward and grabs a sheet of paper that was facedown on the coffee table. She hands it to me without comment.

It's a drawing of a man's face. It's hard to tell how old he is—somewhere between forty and fifty, perhaps. His eyes are slightly too far apart, which is supposed to make a person look more trustworthy. His face is utterly nondescript, apart from the nose, which is big and hooked, with weirdly distracting nostrils. His hair is short and spiky. “This is him?” Laurel nods. I am looking at the man who took my sister.

“It's not quite finished. The police artist is coming back later to work on it before the press conference. The nose isn't quite right yet.” She stares at the picture, and I have the strongest urge to scrunch up the paper, to set fire to it and watch his face blacken and burn.

“What's his name?”

A faint smile appears on Laurel's face. “At first I called him Smith. He was hardly going to tell me his real name, was he?”

Smith.
Probably the most common name in the country. “At first?”

Laurel tilts her head questioningly.

“You said at first you called him Smith. What did you call him after that?”

She looks away and keeps her eyes averted from mine as she tells me the name she called him—the name he made her use even though she knew it was wrong.

“Daddy.”

My parents choose that exact moment to come back. They've brought drinks and food. When I look at the clock, I see that Laurel and I have been talking for more than two hours. Glancing out the window, I see that it's snowing, thick and fast.

I manage to get rid of the appalled look on my face while Mom and Dad take their wet coats and scarves off. They both try to hide it, but they're looking at us closely to see how things are going. Laurel and I smile to show them that things are going just fine, thank you very much. I bet Mom wanted to come back ages ago, but Dad made her wait, to give us more time.

Daddy.
The thought of her saying it to that man sickens me. I hope she hasn't told my parents.
Our
parents.

Dad starts pulling sandwiches out of a plastic bag. “Shrimp salad?” Laurel says, adding, “Eurgh!” And I make a gagging noise, and then we both laugh. Dad rolls his eyes and says, “I suppose I'll be having that one, then,” but you can tell he's delighted that we're
bonding.

Laurel and I both reach for the BLT baguette, and she insists that I have it, and I insist that
she
has it. In the end it all comes down to who's more stubborn, so of course I win. I end up with ham and cheese; it's dry and hard to swallow. I want to ask Laurel what kind of food she ate, because whatever it was, she clearly didn't eat enough of it. She makes short work of the baguette and devours a bag of chips, too. I realize that all three of us—me, Mom, and Dad—are watching her eat. Laurel doesn't seem to notice, or if she does, she doesn't seem to care.

There's a slightly awkward moment at lunch when Mom says something about this being our first family meal together in thirteen years. She apologizes that it's not something more special and says she'll cook something soon—a roast dinner, perhaps?—so that we can sit down as a family at long last.

Laurel says that would be really nice, and Dad requests roast beef. Mom blushes (I have no idea why).

“Will Michel be invited, too?” I can't help myself. Someone needs to remind them that things are different now.

For a second, the only sound is that of Laurel tearing into a second bag of chips. She says, “I hope so. I can't wait to meet him.” And Dad smiles gratefully because he knows as well as I do that Laurel has just averted an argument.

Mom says, “Of course Michel will be there,” as if that was the plan all along. As if she hadn't completely forgotten his existence for a minute there. She's a bit quieter after that, which makes me feel guilty, but I won't allow Michel to be sidelined. He's as much a part of this screwed-up family as the rest of us. And unlike the rest of us, he actually
chose
to join it.

A bunch of people turn up after lunch, and it's chaos. They're trying to organize this press conference, even though everyone's fully aware that the press already has the story. It's on the Internet, of course. #LaurelLogan is trending on Twitter. When I check my phone, I see that lots of people have messaged me. Only a few of these people are actually my friends. Martha and Thomas have both texted, and I text back to say everything's fine. Martha texts again immediately:
What's it like having a brand-new big sister?
A stranger might think she's being insensitive, but this is just Martha being Martha. I think for a second, looking over to where Laurel and Mom are talking to a high-ranking police officer. I wonder why he has to wear a uniform if he's so senior. Perhaps he thinks the uniform adds gravitas. There's another, much younger police officer standing behind the first one. He has the beginnings of a black eye, which makes me wonder if he's the one Laurel supposedly lashed out at yesterday. I must remember to ask Dad later.

Whatever it is they're talking about, Laurel doesn't look happy. She shakes her head a number of times during the conversation. Eventually, Mom puts her arm around Laurel and leads her off to the bathroom. What was all that about?

When they finally come out of the bathroom, Laurel sees me watching and aims a shy little wave in my direction. She even manages a smile.

Everyone told her that it would be better if she stayed away from the press conference. They said it would be overwhelming for her, but she was adamant that she wants to be part of it. She wants to read a statement, too. “I won't let him win,” she whispered to me. I felt something suspiciously close to pride.

I text Martha back:
I think I'm going to like it.