The Lost and the Found

by Cat Clarke

  Something niggles at the back of my brain, like a raised hand at the back of the classroom trying to attract attention. But Kirsty is so full-on that the hand has to be ignored. “I didn’t know anything about a secret language.”

  Kirsty laughs. “Um…why would you? It was secret. That’s kind of the whole point! Poor Bry was so disappointed, though, you know? It was almost like Laurel didn’t remember her at all. And Bry prides herself on being memorable. I mean, she is, I guess, but for all the wrong reasons. I set her straight, though. Laurel’s been through a lot of shit, you know? Shit we can’t even begin to imagine. So it kind of makes sense that there’s stuff she doesn’t remember…from before. There’s only so much a person’s brain can deal with, right?”

  The hand at the back of the classroom appears again, but I can’t think straight. “I think I have to go now.”

  Kirsty looks taken aback. “Er…okay. Is it something I said?”

  “No, not at all. I just…there’s somewhere I have to be. I forgot.”

  I can tell she’s pissed off even though she tries to hide it. “Listen, thanks so much for meeting up with me. I feel a lot better about everything.”

  She looks at me like Really?

  We agree to stay in touch. I say that it would be cool if we ended up at the same university, and I actually mean it. I thank her again, then rush out the door, leaving a half-drank cup of coffee, a whole slice of carrot cake, and a slightly baffled Australian girl.

  I close the front door behind me as quietly as possible, and I listen. Nothing. Maybe Mom and Laurel have taken the opportunity to go on another one of their little mother-daughter outings. Mom probably didn’t even question why Laurel came back here last night instead of staying with me at Dad’s. I bet she wishes it were like this every weekend. Just the two of them.

  The plan isn’t really a plan as such. It’s more a vague idea of a rough sketch of a half-remembered dream of a plan. Something isn’t right—that much is obvious. I need to look in her room.

  I creep up the stairs. Somehow it doesn’t really feel like my home anymore. I don’t seem to belong here quite like I used to.

  Laurel’s door is closed, and I don’t think anything of it at first, because she’s been keeping it closed recently.

  I open the door.

  The closet is open, clothes strewn on the bed and floor. A huge backpack—an old one of Dad’s—lies on the bed. Unless Laurel is hiding under the bed, she’s not here.

  I hurry toward my room. My hand is on the door handle (my door is closed, too—why didn’t I notice that before?) when the door opens from the inside and Laurel is standing there in front of me.

  “Hi!” she says. Too loud. Forced. “I thought you were—”

  “What are you doing in my room?” I ask as she tries to squeeze past me.

  “I was just looking for…something.” She couldn’t look more suspicious if she tried.

  “What’s that behind your back?”

  “Nothing. I…Nothing.”

  “Show me.”

  For a second, I think she might try to barge past me, but we both know that I could take her in a fight.

  “Listen, it’s not what you think.”

  “Show me.”

  She holds out her hand. Five twenty-dollar bills, six tens, three fives, and a few singles. I only know this because it’s exactly how much money there was in the little tin next to my alarm clock.

  “Give me that!” I reach for it, but she puts her hand behind her back again.

  “I need it.”

  “Need it for what?”

  She looks scared. Why is she scared of me? “I can’t…Look, I have to go. She’ll be back soon. You have to let me go.” Then she does barge past me, and I don’t stop her. I just follow her back into her room and watch as she stuffs the money into the side pocket of the backpack and starts shoving clothes inside.

  “What’s going on? Is this because of last night?” I take a deep breath and prepare to be the bigger person. “You don’t have to worry about it. I’m not going to tell Mom and Dad.” She keeps on packing, but I know she’s listening. “Thomas wasn’t right for me anyway. We’d have broken up sometime…You just helped it happen sooner rather than later. Hell, I should probably thank you!”

  She stops for a moment. She’s holding the red dress, the fabric all scrunched up between her clenched fists. She throws it back in the closet. “I’m sorry,” she says. And I know she’s not apologizing about her treatment of the dress.

  “It’s okay.” I touch her arm and her shoulders slump. “You don’t have to run off, you know. People make mistakes.” I look around the room. “Do you want me to help you sort this out before Mom gets back? Where is she, anyway?”

  “I asked her to get me some cough medicine from the drugstore. I needed to get her out of the house.” Laurel sounds tired, numb. That makes two of us.

  I’m wondering whether I should hug her—whether I can bear to hug her after what she did to me—when she takes a deep breath and starts packing again. “Laurel! Stop! What are you doing? I told you, everything’s going to be fine!”

  She’s shaking her head and muttering under her breath. “I’m not…I’m not…” She starts to cry softly.

  I grab her shoulders and turn her to face me. “Laurel! Please! You have to stop this. It’s insane.”

  She looks into my eyes, and I look into hers. I see something there, and I’m not even sure what it is, but it stops me dead.

  She opens her mouth to speak, and I know what she’s going to say. I finally pay attention to the hand at the back of the classroom. “You’re not…”

  “I’m not Laurel.”

  She’s not. I know she’s not. I’ve no idea how it’s possible that I know this, but I do. Have I always known, on some level? Or was it a gradual thing? An accumulation of tiny things that don’t add up to my sister.

  She’s not Laurel.

  I’m gripping her shoulders so tightly that she has to wrench herself out of my grasp. She cowers away from me, as if she’s expecting me to hit her. The tears are really flowing now, and these sobs are coming out of her—great big gasping sobs like there’s not enough air in all the world for her to be able to catch her breath. “I’m sorry I’m so sorry I didn’t mean to I mean I did but I’m sorry.” Her hands are balled into fists, and she seems smaller than she did a minute ago—a little girl, lost.

  She’s not Laurel. I look at her and wonder how I ever could have believed she was my sister.

  Relief. That’s what I feel first, I think. It’s hard to pinpoint each feeling, though. There are so many and they’re so noisy, and they’re all bumping into one another because so many of them are contradictory. But I am glad this girl is not my sister.

  Then it hits me. If this girl is not Laurel, then Laurel is still missing. The nightmare of the past thirteen years continues. It’s bad enough knowing the real Laurel is still out there somewhere—alive or dead—and no one’s been looking for her because we thought she was home. But the thing that is unimaginable to me is that someone’s going to have to tell my parents. It will have to be me. This will shatter them into a thousand tiny pieces, and I don’t think anyone or anything will be able to put them back together again.

  A stranger is in front of me, staring at me like I’m a land mine she’s just stepped on. We’re both frozen, each of us waiting for the other to say something.

  “Who are you?”

  She shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter, does it? I’m not her.”

  My sister is still out there, and nobody knows except me. And this girl, whoever she is. I wait. Her eyes keep darting between the backpack and the clock by the bed. She keeps clasping and unclasping her hands. For the first time, I feel fear. I don’t know what this girl is capable of. I know nothing about her, except that somehow—how?—she managed to fool us all. What if this Not-Laurel girl wants to hurt me? She could have a weapon in that backpack, for all I know. But I suppose I can’t really
believe that, or I would be running down the stairs and out the front door right now.

  I take my phone out of my jeans pocket and hold it in front of me. “Tell me who you are or I’m phoning Mom right now.” My mom, I should have said. She’s mine, not hers.

  “Don’t do that! Please. I’m begging you.” Her pale face is blotchy from crying.

  I touch the screen, bring up my contacts. Scroll down to find Mom.

  “Sadie. My name is Sadie, okay? Now, please, put the phone away!” I should call Mom, get her to come home right away and deal with this madness. But I can’t do it to her, not yet. I need to find out the truth first.

  Sadie. It’s quite a pretty name, familiar somehow. A phone chimes with an incoming text, and I know it’s not mine because I keep mine on silent. The girl flinches and starts rummaging underneath the clothes on the bed until she finds her phone. “Shit. Shit. I have to go. Now. Mom’s on her way back.” My eyes bore holes straight into her brain. “Your mom, I mean.”

  “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “I have to! You don’t understand!”

  The land mine finally explodes. “You’re right. I don’t understand. How the hell am I supposed to understand some stranger coming into our family and pretending to be my long-lost sister? Pretending to have been abused! What kind of person even does that? Is it about the money? Is that it? Or the fame? Did you like being on television, telling all those lies? Were you laughing at us? Was this funny to you?” By the end of this little speech, the girl is backed up against the open closet, and I am shouting in her face. One more step and she’ll be inside the closet. I could shut her in there, find something to wedge the door closed, and wait until Mom gets back.

  The girl is breathing hard; I am, too. The seconds are ticking away.

  “Do you really want to know the truth?” the girl asks quietly.

  I nod.

  “Then come with me.”

  “Are you out of your mind?! I’m not going anywhere with you!”

  I nearly add that she could be some psycho killer for all I know, but she seems to read my mind because she says, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  I shake my head, but I step back and she moves past me to finish packing her bag.

  I stand in silence as she buckles the top, then checks to see if she’s forgotten anything. The bag doesn’t look heavy; clearly she wants to travel light. She puts on her jacket, then shoulders the backpack.

  I want to know the truth. I need to. But this is madness.

  She sees me wavering, this girl called Sadie. “You’d better decide right now, because I’m going—with or without you.”

  “What about Mom? If she comes back to find you gone, she’ll freak out. Probably call the police in two seconds flat.”

  She comes up with a plan. She’ll leave a note for Mom, saying that she’s decided to stay at Dad’s tonight. I’ll text Dad and tell him I’ll be home late. Dad will never know that “Laurel” is supposed to be at his place, and Mom won’t know that she never turned up there. Until it’s too late.

  “I don’t think this is a good idea,” I say, making one last attempt at being sensible.

  Not-Laurel/Sadie stands in front of me, too close. Family close. “I’ll make you a deal. If you come with me right now, I’ll do whatever you say. After. If you still want me to come back with you, I’ll do it. I swear.” She’s careful to maintain eye contact as I examine her face looking for the truth. I would probably believe her if I didn’t already know that this girl is the best liar I’ve ever met. But it almost doesn’t matter if she’s telling the truth or not. If she’s lying, I’ll deal with the fallout afterward. My need to know the truth—why she would do something like this, go to such extreme lengths to steal my sister’s identity—outweighs everything else.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  We’re ready in five minutes. While she was writing the note to Mom, I briefly wondered whether I should take a knife from the kitchen. Just in case, you know. But the thought of actually using it—actually stabbing it into someone’s flesh, even if that someone was trying to hurt me—was so absurd that I dismissed it immediately.

  Sadie pauses before closing the front door. She looks at the hallway and stairs with such intensity that I wouldn’t be surprised to see the wallpaper start to melt. There’s nothing much to see: shoes in a neat little row against the wall, a shopping bag and a couple of coats hanging from pegs by the door, a pile of envelopes on the bottom step. I watch as she gulps hard and clenches her jaw. I know what it’s like, trying to swallow your feelings so they won’t overwhelm you.

  We turn right at the end of the road and wait at the bus stop. “So this is where you’ve been disappearing to?”

  She looks like she’s about to disagree, to tell another lie, but I think we both realize the time for lying has passed. “Just once.”

  “Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”

  “It’s better if I show you.”

  The bus pulls up and we get on, and Sadie hurries to the back with her head down, clearly worried that someone will recognize her. Unlikely, though—she’s got her hair hidden under a black beanie and she’s not wearing any makeup. She looks like a normal girl today. One you wouldn’t even notice unless she did something to attract your attention. The only person to look up at us as we walk down the aisle is a boy around our age, but it’s the uninterested, unfocused gaze of someone whose mind is elsewhere. He’s busy talking on the phone. “Dude, awwww, dude! You would not believe what happened last night with Fat Jim! Duuuuude…for real, man, I’m not even joking!”

  Sadie breathes a sigh of relief when we reach the second-to-last row. She sits next to the window and puts the backpack on her lap; I’m tempted to sit across the aisle, but that would risk someone else getting on and sitting next to Sadie.

  It feels wrong sitting so close to her, our thighs touching. I’ve sat this close to her loads of times over the past couple of months, but we were sisters then.

  I can’t even begin to imagine where we’re going, but that doesn’t stop me from trying. A high-rise apartment in one of those rundown housing projects? One of those buildings where there is an elevator but it stinks of piss and is always broken. I’ve never been to a place like that before, but I’ve seen them on TV. I can picture the two of us walking down a corridor and standing in front of a door and the door opening and a woman standing there. I look from this woman to the girl standing next to me and back again, and I can’t believe I ever thought the girl was my sister.

  The woman—the mother, the real mother—was probably in on it. Maybe it was even her idea. She was flicking through the newspaper one day and noticed that Sadie looked a bit like the age-progressed photos of that missing girl—the one there was all that fuss about. Money—that was the motive, surely. But you’d have to be mad to think you could get away with something like this. It would only be a matter of time before someone from Sadie’s real life recognized her and phoned the police. It suddenly dawns on me that this is why Sadie kicked up such a fuss about the DNA test. The game would have been well and truly up as soon as the results came in. Looking back, it seems ridiculous that none of us were suspicious about that. We were so desperate to believe that Laurel had come home to us that logic and common sense were forgotten.

  —

  I stare out of the window. My sister is still out there somewhere. She needs me and I am off on some wild-goose chase with this unstable girl. For all I know, Laurel’s time could be running out and I am wasting it. All this time, the police haven’t been looking for her, thinking the case was all tied up neatly with a ribbon. So maybe an extra couple of hours won’t make a difference, but I’ve read enough about these cases to know that they can be—and often are—crucial.

  I won’t give up on you. I will find you. I will. I say the words over and over in my head.

  It’s strange. It’s never occurred to me before that the search for my sister was something I could be involve
d in. It was always something for other people to do, and if I was lucky, I might overhear something about it. I must have heard the phrase The police are doing everything they can a thousand times during the course of my childhood. I was a kid; there was nothing I could do to help. But I’m not a kid anymore. There must be something I can do now. I’m not stupid enough to think that anything I could do would be a match for the teams of detectives who have worked on Laurel’s case over the years. But maybe I could give some interviews, go on TV and do an appeal. Something. I could visit the countries that have had the strongest leads in the past. Talk to people.

  Someone, somewhere, knows where Laurel is. It’s just a matter of finding that someone—and getting through to them. It’s time I stopped being so passive.

  “You should text your dad.”

  She remembered this time that he’s my father, not hers. I text him. Movies with Martha is my cover story. He texts back right away, asking me to pick up some of those Cookie Dough Bites at the concession stand. He’s addicted to those things.

  “Are we almost there?” I don’t turn to look at her when I speak, so I feel rather than see the shrug of her shoulders.

  “Where are we going?” I know she’s not going to answer. There’s a stillness to her now. I can’t seem to stop fidgeting and looking around, but she is a statue next to me. If there were even the remotest chance she would tell me, I would ask what she’s thinking.

  —

  The journey is interminable. One of those bus routes that stops at every little back-end-of-beyond place you can think of. The bus is almost empty by the time Sadie reaches across to press the stop button. I look out the window for clues, still half expecting to see the imaginary high-rise building where Sadie’s imaginary mother is waiting for us. But all I can see are trees. I have no idea where we are. I probably should have paid more attention.