The Lost Girl (12 page)

“Ray won’t look at her, it’s weird.”

“
Shhh
, she’ll hear you.”

I realize the last conversation is about me, and my face goes warm. I hastily look down at my copy of
Wuthering Heights
. I try to focus on it, shut out my awkwardness, my anxiety, but distracting myself from the classroom only makes me think of my guardians. Of Mina Ma. Of Sean. I swallow back my longing for my cottage by the shore of the lake. I can’t bring myself to accept that that life is over. That I will never see them again. I
can’t
accept that.

I know
Wuthering Heights
backward by now, so I don’t find the lesson hard. I stay quiet and let Mrs. Singh pick on others for answers to her questions. It cheers me up a little, knowing that I know as much, if not more, than they do about the book.

I try to imagine what Sean would say to this, his good-humored mockery, his wry voice in my ear. But it’s hard. I’m painfully aware that Sean is not really standing by my shoulder. I know the air rustling by my ear is not the sound of his breath. I imagine Mina Ma snapping her fingers in front of my nose, saying, “What use is this? Is it helping you? Get back to their world, child.”

So I push them away. My chest aches for them, but I pretend it doesn’t. Pretending has begun to get easier.

By the time the last bell rings, I am thoroughly drained by the day and the effort of being alert and tense all the time. I collect my things and follow Sonya to the buses. She gives me a hug and races off to catch her bus, at the front of the line outside the gates. Mine is fifth in line. I hover by the gates, waiting.

A familiar face joins me. “Hi,” I say to Nikhil. “How was your day?”

“It was okay,” he says. “How was yours?”

“It could have been a lot worse,” I tell him truthfully.

“Must be hard to pretend.”

I hesitate, then say, “I don’t know if it’s all right to talk to you about your sister, or if it’s too hard—”

“It’s all right,” he says. His eyes are like an undisturbed pool of water. “I don’t mind. But don’t ask me if I miss her or if I’m sad. Those are dumb questions.”

I acknowledge that. “I was only going to say that your mother’s told people Amarra had a head injury and now has trouble remembering some things. It’s made it a bit easier for me to get away with mistakes.”

“Mom believes you’re Amarra,” says Nik, starting toward our bus, which has drawn up level with the gates. “She says she’s not stupid; she knows you’re different. But she says she really, truly sees Amarra when she looks at you. She says she’s still here.”

“Your father doesn’t agree.”

“No,” says Nik, “but he won’t tell her that she’s wrong. He says that if we force her to believe something else, it’ll just cause her a lot of pain.”

“What do
you
think?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I want her to be here, but I don’t think she is. At least not the way Mom thinks she is. She’s not
you
.”

“Do you resent me because of that?”

“No, but Dad does. He doesn’t like looking at you.” He catches a glimpse of my expression, and a tiny frown skitters over his brow. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“He doesn’t
mean
it,” Nikhil offers. “It’s not his fault. You don’t know my parents. You don’t know how much they loved my sister.”

“Don’t I?” I ask him. “I know they loved her so much that I was made.”

He smiles.

We’re at the steps of the bus when I stop, like I’ve walked into a wall. Ray is a few feet to my right, and he’s crouching down to talk to Sasha. My pulse jolts in panic, and I clutch the strap of my schoolbag very tightly. Sasha knows I’m not Amarra. She calls me by that name, but she knows. What if he asks her? What if she tells him about my “holiday” and my mysterious arrival with a strange man?

“Sash!” Nik calls, and I almost faint with relief. “Come on, we have to go!”

“Okay,” she says brightly. “Bye, Ray!”

He watches them as they get on the bus, then turns his gaze on me again. I can’t move. I don’t know what to do. Every instinct wants to run, but I know that’s not what she would have done.

Ray gives me a sad, confused look. It’s familiar by now: that look of someone searching my eyes for something. I try to look relaxed, shy, happy. But it’s so hard. He’s searching for her in me and I’m terrified that if he looks long enough he’ll realize she’s not there.

I know what I’m supposed to do. I can’t
kiss
him. But I could go to him, touch him. Only I don’t know if I want to touch him or not. I don’t know how to feel about him.

I compromise by standing still.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” I say.

A conflicting mixture of emotions cross his face: relief, and delight, and confusion.

“I thought you might be angry,” he says. “I could have gotten you killed.”

I make myself smile. Her smile, practiced from photo-graphs. “I don’t do angry.”

“Well, you
should
. I’m so sorry.”

“It was an accident,” I remind him. There’s perfect truth to that, because I was there too. I was watching as she died.

He shuffles his feet. “Are you okay? I heard about your head—”

“It’s made my memory fuzzy,” I say, taking the only route I can. “I have blanks, bits I can’t remember, especially the last year. I know you. I know that we . . . that you and I—well, you know. We were together. But there’s so much that’s foggy, and the doctors say it could be weeks before it starts coming back. I just . . . I can’t remember
us
as well as I should.”

My heart is pounding so fast I’m afraid I might faint. The words trip out, much too quickly, but he doesn’t question me.

“Sorry,” I add softly.

“It’s okay,” he says. He very carefully takes my hand. I swallow. “We could go out sometime this week, just to talk? You can ask me questions and I can tell you stuff you’ve forgotten. Amarra,” he says, and his voice is so tender, so desperate to believe every word I’m telling him, that it’s agony to listen to him. “I love you. I’ll always love you. But right now we don’t have to be what we were. We can start again if you want.”

This is it. This is why I came here. This is what I was woven to be. She loved him and I must give that a chance.

There is only one answer I can give him.

“Yes,” I say. “I’d like that.”

His eyes light up. I feel so guilty I could break something.

“Saturday?” he asks.

I nod.

“Okay.” He glances at the bus. “You better get on or they’ll leave you behind.” He kisses me on the cheek, so lightly his lips are a breath. I blush.

I reach for the handle by the bus step, but before I can leave him behind, he says, “Amarra?”

“Yeah?”

“It
is
you, right?”

My heart plummets.

Lie
.

I have to.

Lie
.

I force a smile. “See you tomorrow,” I say. And I get on the bus.

5
Glass

A
fter dinner that night, I sit at Amarra’s desk, studying a picture of Ray pinned to her wall. It’s the same one Erik gave me months ago. Is it possible to look at a picture of somebody, over and over, and learn to love them?

When Alisha flitted into the room earlier to present me with a shiny new phone, she hinted that she blames Ray for the accident. He was driving. She also hinted that despite these feelings, she won’t stop me from seeing him. It means she asks the occasional awkward question: How is he? Has he recovered from the accident? She knows he had a couple of fractures. Are we going out? Why don’t I invite Sonya and Jaya over? She’s trying not to push me, but she’s anxious. She wants to see more of the daughter she knew, to reinforce her belief that she’s still here.

She will be thrilled when I tell her I’m going somewhere with Ray on Saturday. I stare hard at the photograph, as if it can give me answers. Can I love him?

Love
isn’t so simple. It’s not a word I can throw around.

I think of Sean. I miss him so much it’s an ache, a longing that starts in my belly and chews its way up into my throat. He’s my best friend, my only real friend. But was it ever anything more than that? There were so many half moments, so many almosts. And he made it clear that he was not going to break the laws for it.

I can’t keep doing this. I have to stop shrinking back. I have to stop clinging to the world by the lakes, the guardians and Mina Ma and Sean. I’m here now. I am somebody else now. I’ve got to be better.

There’s a sound above me. I glance up. This is an old colonial house, and you can hear every creak and scrape. This sounded like it came from the attic. I haven’t been up there yet.

I leave the room and head for the steps. The stairs don’t creak beneath my feet. I have always been unusually light footed. I hover outside the attic door. It’s slightly ajar. I can hear movement: the rustle of jeans, the sound of feet against the floorboards. I peep through the gap.

I see beautiful things. Paintings of mermaids, of rich colors, oils, sunsets and dark pirate ships on bleak seas. A woman standing on a cliff, watching an empty horizon, waiting. A sense of adventure stirs in my chest. I imagine sailing into open seas, seizing my fate in both hands. I imagine swashbuckling battles, swords and cutlasses and battle scars. I imagine desire, the raw passion of falling into bed after a long reckless day and kissing somebody. I think of lips touching the bent crook of my elbow, and I wonder where that memory is from.

I focus on the woman and the bleak gray horizon. I feel a pang as though I’m that woman and it’s
my
skirt and
my
hair blowing in the wind. Then I blink and make myself step back from it, out of it, and I realize the woman looks uncannily like Alisha. Standing there, watching the emptiness. Waiting for something to come. Me? She wanted Amarra to come back so badly.

There are sculptures, too. A Greek goddess holding grapes. A pair of lovers who are neither mortal nor immortal but somehow both, fused together, crowns of leaves and twigs in their hair. The sculptures are clay, marble, and paper. No candle wax, but that was always
my
silly quirk. Paper birds, looming and enormous. I wonder if they will carry me on their backs, and if we can possibly soar out into the farthest reaches of the sky, until we’ve been swallowed up by the stars. Or will I need my own wings?

In the middle of these stories and this beauty is Alisha, and she’s like a work of art herself. She moves around an enormous sketch on an easel. There’s a look of such fierce concentration on her face that she’s lovelier than usual.

I want to stand in the doorway for days, feasting on the beauty and absorbing every last bit of it. One look hasn’t been enough, but I don’t want her to see me here.

On my way back to my room, I stop in a pool of light spilling out of Neil’s study. He’s at his desk, examining papers with his glasses pushed up his nose. I think of all the times Amarra wrote about sitting with her father.
“We studied the fall of Rome today. I polished a really old knife in the study. Dad told me all about the Crusades.”
She loved it, every minute of it.

I wonder if I ought to go in. Would it comfort Neil to have an echo of his daughter help him? As though he senses my gaze, Neil glances up. He seems surprised.

“Come in,” he says in a friendly way.

I nod, going into the room. He gestures to the chair near his, on an adjacent edge of the desk, and shows me the papers.

“It’s not very exciting, I’m afraid. They’re copies of letters.” He waves a magnifying glass at me. “It’s slow work because my eyes just can’t concentrate on text this small for long.”

“I could read them out to you if you like,” I offer.

He considers me for a minute. “I think we both know that wouldn’t interest you for long.”

“No,” I try, “really, I—”

“I was her father,” he says, gently interrupting me. “Believe me, I’d know her if I saw her.”

I try to say something, but no words come out.

“Your gestures and mannerisms are different,” he says, “and you have a different vocabulary. You do a good impersonation of her smile, but it doesn’t look quite right. Your voice is the same voice, but it
sounds
different if you listen hard enough. I have no imagination,” he adds ruefully. “When my sisters and I were young, they loved magicians, but I always saw through the tricks. Amarra was like that, too. She had a clear-eyed way of looking at the world. She saw through the smoke and mirrors so many of us construct.”

“What about Nikhil?” I ask.

Neil smiles faintly. “Too smart for his own good, quite frankly. He sees clearer than any of us. But he’s also a dreamer like his mother. He sees, but feels more.”

I can’t help noticing his repeated comparisons. Amarra was
like
him. Nik is a dreamer
like
his mother. He probably doesn’t mean to, but he’s underlining the similarities between them. Highlighting the crisscrossing lines that link their characteristics, personalities, mannerisms. Showing me
they’re
the family and I am not part of it.

“I’m doing my best,” I say.

“I have no doubt that’s true,” he says, quite kindly. “I don’t mean to criticize you. But I’m too practical
not
to look and listen. I could have convinced myself I saw her. I could have tried. But that’s not who I am.”

I feel defeated, hurt at being so summarily dismissed. I can’t help respecting him at the same time. He’s not trying to be hurtful, he just loved his daughter.

“Give me a chance,” I say, trying not to sound fierce. Keeping my voice quiet, level, like hers. “You might be surprised.”

“Okay,” he says.

As I turn to go, he adds something unexpected.

“Do you have a name?”

“That’s not giving me a chance. . . .” I falter.

A sad smile elongates his features. “Until I see differently, don’t I owe us both the courtesy of calling you by your own name?”

I suppose that’s true.

“Eva,” I tell him.

He nods. “You are important,” he says. “Even if I can’t quite believe my daughter survived, like my wife does, you’ve still given us reason to hope for something
more
. For life beyond death. It’s why we wanted you in the first place. For that hope. And the absence of loss.”

I look closely at him for a moment. For a man who claims to believe his daughter’s dead, he’s certainly not letting her go. She’s still here, in everything he does.

When I return to Amarra’s room, I stare down at the snake on my wrist. I want to tear it out of my skin, strip away the tattoo and everything else that Amarra did and made me do too. I look into the mirror and wonder if I am looking at her. What is this power the dead have over the ones they leave behind? It’s strange and beautiful and frightening, this deathless love that human beings continue to feel for the ones they’ve lost.

“Where are you?” I ask her. “You haven’t really gone, have you? I had this idea that I might be free if you were dead. But I’m not free; you’ve managed to trap me anyway. I’ve got to live your life and be you better than you ever were. Are you laughing? You’ve done it; you’ve died but you’ve stayed. You
must
be laughing. . . .”

•••

Jaya’s back in the school the next day. I have no choice but to sit next to her on the bus. “Hey, you,” she says, holding out her arms to hug me. A lump lodges in my throat. She’s so happy to see me, so sincerely and openly concerned. It’s devastating.

“Hey,” I say. I almost add “Are you better now?” but realize who I’m supposed to be in time. I say instead, “Feeling okay? Or were you trying to skip out on your test yesterday?”

She laughs. “Oh, please, that’s a Sonya kind of thing to do. Yeah, I’m fine now, what about you?”

“I . . .” I find myself telling her the truth. “. . . feel a little shaky.”

She nods. “Of course you do! It was such a horrible thing to happen. It’s going to be a while before you’re back to normal.”

She’s so understanding, so quick to excuse my behavior, it makes me feel guiltier. If she only knew.

Later in the day, at lunch, someone pulls out the chair next to Jaya and sits down across from me. I look up, and my heart jerks in shock: Ray.

Oh, God. How am I supposed to face all three of them at the same time without slipping up?

“Hi,” he says, smiling at each of us, his eyes lingering on me. I look away. His hopeful, careful expression is too much for me. I can’t forget how happy he looked when I agreed to go out with him over the weekend. Or how he asked me if I really
was
Amarra.

Why would he ask such a question? Why would he imagine I might be anything else?

“Um,” says Sonya, looking so astonished and irritated it’s rather funny. “What the friggin’ hell are you doing?”

“Eating lunch with you,” he says. “Are you eating your tomato? May I?” He picks it out of her sandwich before she can say a word. Her face turns a worrying shade of purple, and I bite back a smile. It’s quite obvious Ray is deliberately annoying her to amuse himself.

“Why would you want to eat here?” she demands. “I thought you didn’t like me!”

“I don’t,” he says, “but I can put up with you for half an hour.”

“Unsurprisingly, I still don’t like
you
, either.”

Ray ignores her and tweaks Jaya’s nose. “Hey, Jay-Jay. Skipped a test yesterday, did we?”

She rolls her eyes and giggles in spite of herself. “Go away, Ray,” she says, though her voice is friendly.

“Yeah, please,” says Sonya.

“Why don’t we ask Amarra what she thinks?”

“We already know what she thinks,” says Sonya irritably. “Amarra never minds who sits with us, so don’t think you’re special just because you’re her boyfriend. We need our girl time, you know.”

“Hang out in the bathroom, then,” says Ray. “I won’t bother you there, I swear. I’m too manly to risk it.”

“I doubt that.”

“Want me to prove it?”

Jaya and I laugh. I can’t help it. Even with my nerves strung so tight, I have to laugh at Sonya squawking and covering her eyes while Ray pretends to reach for his fly. He abandons the subject and goes back to his lunch, winking at me. I try to stop staring. I must have more of Amarra’s hormones than I thought.

As the lunch bell rings, I wonder if I made a mistake, agreeing to see Ray on Saturday. Maybe if I’d backed away, said my head was a mess and I needed time, I would be safer. I’d be less likely to expose myself. He
asked
me if I was really her. I wish I knew what he meant by that. But it’s too late to back out now.

I’m keenly aware of how dangerous this is. This illusion is fragile as the most finely blown glass, and at any moment it could shatter and cut us all.

When I get home that evening, all I want to do is go to bed, but I have to keep Amarra’s face on for a while longer. Then I retreat to her room for a few precious hours on my own. When I sleep it’s a deep, dreamless sleep. Peaceful.

And in the morning, it starts again.

I get through the rest of the week as best I can. I eat lunch with Amarra’s friends, sometimes with her boyfriend. I sit in her classes and enjoy some of them. I laugh and play with her sister. I feel guilty every minute, but lucky too, because this is my life now and it’s not really as bad as I’d worried it would be. The days congeal together, setting a pattern for the next few weeks, maybe months, and each day I learn a bit more about these people, this world, and the girl whose many roles I’m supposed to play. Sean, the theater boy, would say that rehearsals make you better at your part, and I guess he would be right to say so. Each day, I learn my lines a little better.

Each day, I lie better.