by Cat Clarke
A teddy bear, missing one arm.
I stare at the mound of earth.
I fall to my knees in front of my sister’s grave.
ONE MONTH LATER
My sister has been dead for just over four months. I have been mourning her for one month. Apart from Sadie, I am the only person in the world who knows that Laurel Logan is dead. I intend to keep it that way.
These are the facts as Sadie told them to me that night. I have no way of knowing if she lied to me about any of it. I have no choice but to trust her version of events. Well, there is a choice. But the idea of telling my parents, calling the police, and sending them to that awful house is too horrific to contemplate. I keep picturing my parents standing over that shallow grave, knowing their little girl is in there. The body—my sister’s body—would have to be dug up. Examined and tested and touched by strangers. No.
No.
I have to trust what Sadie told me. I have to. And any questions I might want to ask must remain unanswered: she’s gone.
Sadie was the first girl the monster took. She was not the last. Something drove him to take my sister. Another little girl, younger this time.
Sadie hated my sister. She was jealous of her. Little girls like attention—that’s what she told me. Sadie used to pinch Laurel and pull her hair. Once, after about six months together, Sadie pushed Laurel into a wall. Laurel lost a tooth. Smith punished Sadie; she didn’t say how.
My sister didn’t hate Sadie. She clung to her whenever she got the chance. “Will you be my new sister?” she asked as the two of them lay in the darkness. My sister slept on the cot, Sadie now relegated to the floor.
Every night, Laurel talked about her family. She talked for hours and hours, in between fits of tears. At first, Sadie stuck her fingers in her ears and told Laurel to be quiet. But eventually she came to like Laurel’s stories. She looked forward to them. She didn’t have any stories of her own; most of her memories were unhappy ones.
Sadie built up a picture in her head—of me and Mom and Dad and our home. Laurel told her about a night-light called Egg, about playing in the sandbox with her little sister. She said that Sadie could borrow Barnaby the Bear if she ever felt like she needed a hug.
They lived together for thirteen years, spending almost every minute of every day together. Except for the times when the monster took Laurel upstairs.
I asked Sadie why he kept her around, once he had Laurel. “Why didn’t he just kill me? That’s what you’re really asking, isn’t it?” Sadie said. “I don’t know. I think…I think he was sort of lonely.” It scared me when she said that; it almost sounded like she felt sorry for him.
Eventually, Sadie stopped hating Laurel. Time and Laurel’s goodness wore her down. Laurel let Sadie sleep next to her on the cot, the two girls often falling asleep in each other’s arms.
Laurel never gave up hope. She knew we would be looking for her. When the monster told her that we didn’t care about her, that she had a new family now, she shook her head, mouth clamped stubbornly shut. She knew we loved her. That comforts me, when I’m lying awake in bed at night, wondering whether I’ve done the right thing. Her belief in us was unshakeable, right to the end.
I asked Sadie what Laurel was like. “She had a good heart,” she said simply. I pressed her for more details. “There was…It was like she had a light inside her. Something pure and good that I never had.” The age-progressed photos didn’t do her justice. Sadie said the two of them looked similar, at first glance. Laurel was more fragile, though. She was weaker than Sadie. She got sick a lot. And of course she never saw a doctor.
They were happy sometimes. When the monster left them alone. He would leave them alone for twenty-four hours or more on a regular basis. On those days, they would be hungry, but they never minded that. They were safe, at least.
They made up stories together. They pretended they were princesses, locked up in the dungeon by an evil ogre. Laurel made up a story about Sadie coming to live with our family. She said they would share a room, like sisters. That was Sadie’s favorite story.
I asked about the scar on Sadie’s cheek—the one that matched the scab that Laurel had when she was taken. She didn’t want to tell me at first, but eventually I got it out of her. Laurel had been sick for over a month—headaches and vomiting. Smith was getting frustrated, so he took Sadie upstairs. He cut her hair and dressed her up in my sister’s clothes. But that wasn’t good enough: he wanted his Laurel substitute to look exactly like her. He cut her cheek with a kitchen knife and said, “There, that’s better.” She didn’t say what happened next.
Things changed as the years passed. Sadie told me that the sexual abuse stopped when Laurel reached puberty. By that point, the monster hadn’t abused Sadie for years—not sexually, at least. Both girls were convinced that he would bring home another little girl one day, but he never did. Sadie could never quite decide if she was relieved about that.
I forced myself to ask more questions I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answers to. I asked if Laurel had been scared. I asked if she remembered us—remembered me—after all those years away from us. I asked how she died.
The answers:
Sometimes. She never got used to the darkness.
She never forgot us. Never stopped talking about us.
The last question was the only one Sadie couldn’t answer. I didn’t believe her at first; I was sure she was lying to protect me. She insisted she was telling the truth. “One morning she just didn’t wake up,” she said, eyes pleading, begging me to believe her.
I couldn’t accept it. “People don’t just die,” I said. But of course they do. People die every day. Old people and middle-aged people and young people and babies. And who knows what kind of health problems Laurel might have had, living the way she did? Maybe if she’d had access to proper medical care she would still be alive, but it’s pointless to think that way.
—
My sister was an hour away from home when she died. She’d been an hour away from us for thirteen years, and we’d had no idea.
The monster was inconsolable. He kept on saying, “I loved her,” over and over again, clutching my sister’s body in his arms. He blamed Sadie. He shook her and shouted at her to tell him what she’d done. She cowered in the corner under her filthy blankets. She didn’t cry. She was in shock.
Smith made Sadie dig the hole to bury my sister. She was the one who arranged the smooth little pebbles around the mound of earth. She found the sticks to make the cross. Smith wanted to bury Barnaby the Bear with Laurel, but Sadie begged him to let her keep the bear. He wouldn’t listen. He said Laurel needed Barnaby “to help her sleep well.” But he left Sadie alone to fill in the grave. He left her out there all by herself, to shovel soil on top of my sister’s body. Sadie took the bear from the grave and hid him under some leaves.
It’s strange, that I forgot all about Barnaby. That should have been the first thing I thought of when Sadie told me she wasn’t Laurel. I should have realized there had to be a connection between the two of them, but I didn’t. Maybe my brain didn’t want me to realize there was a connection. Maybe it was desperate for me to believe that my sister was still out there somewhere, waiting for us to find her.
Sadie killed the monster three days after Laurel died. “I should have done it sooner. We could have got away,” she said. I told her she needed to stop thinking like that. I told her I didn’t blame her. I said the words I forgive you repeatedly, until she listened.
—
The plan emerged in my mind almost fully formed, minutes after seeing my sister’s grave. It sprang from one thought: that I never, ever wanted my parents to feel what I was feeling. They would never recover.
It was getting late. The last bus back to town was in less than an hour. It wasn’t easy to persuade Sadie to come back with me. She wanted to stay there, figure out her next move. “I’m not leaving you here,” I said. “That is not an option.” I told her the plan. We would get the
bus home. I’d tell Dad that I’d invited Laurel to the movies at the last minute and she’d decided it’d be easier to stay at his place rather than going back to Mom’s.
Sadie backed away from me, and I was scared she was going to bolt into the woods. I wouldn’t let that happen, though. I would chase her down and drag her back with me, if that was what it took. But it didn’t come to that. I talked her into it, made her see sense. I managed to make her understand that she didn’t stand a chance without my help.
We didn’t say a word to each other on the bus back to Dad’s house.
—
It took us four days. We could have used more time, but the police were coming to do the DNA test on Thursday. She had to be gone by then. I pretended to be sick and stayed home from school. Mom didn’t even question it, especially once Sadie/Laurel agreed to stay home and look after me. Mom was going to be busy all week—she was planning some big charity dinner or something.
Money wasn’t a problem. Sadie had her share from the book deal, and I had a decent amount in my savings. I withdrew that and gave it to her. She didn’t want to take my money, not at first. But I knew she’d need every penny she could get. She wouldn’t be able to go abroad, which made things more difficult.
That left two problems. Problem one: the fact that she was one of the most recognizable people in the country. Problem two: my parents would want to look for her. Obviously.
The first problem was solved easily enough. At least I assume it was solved, because I’ve been checking the Internet every day since she left, half expecting to see that someone’s spotted her. A pair of scissors and some brown hair dye in the dead of night. But even with short brown hair, she was still too easy to recognize. She let me shave her head. The effect was startling. She looked like a skinny, beautiful boy.
The issue of my parents was trickier. They’d only just got their daughter back. Were they really going to just sit back and accept losing her again?
I wrote the letter, and Sadie copied it in her own handwriting, under strict instructions not to change a single word. It was vital that the letter did its job. Sadie kept asking me if I thought it would work. “Of course it will work,” I said, even though I couldn’t possibly know. It took me two hours to get it right, to strike the right balance. It was horrible, writing that letter. I just had to keep telling myself that I was doing the right thing—that I was doing this to protect them.
—
I said good-bye to Sadie just before five o’clock in the morning the Wednesday after Thomas’s party. We were in my bedroom and she’d just done a final check of her backpack. We’d gone over it again and again, making sure she had everything she needed. There was one last thing I wanted to give her.
“What’s this?” It was wrapped in a T-shirt of mine that I knew she loved. “Egg!” The penguin night-light. The one Laurel had talked about so much that Sadie had been able to describe it down to the tiniest detail. “I can’t take this. Or this,” she said, holding out both the night-light and the T-shirt.
“I want you to have them.” She shook her head, but I was ready for that. “Mom would expect Laurel to take the night-light with her. So you might as well take it so I don’t have to chuck it in the trash. Besides…I think Laurel would want you to have it.”
Sadie gave me this look, like she knew exactly what I was playing at, but she nodded and wrapped the penguin in the T-shirt and managed to fit him in a side pocket of the backpack. “Thank you,” she whispered. And it seemed like she wasn’t really thanking me for the night-light or the T-shirt. It was a bigger thank-you than that, weightier somehow.
“Right,” she said. “I’d better get going.”
“Okay. Okay,” I said, and I suddenly felt panicky. There was no way this plan was ever going to work, so why were we even trying? It was madness. What if we’d forgotten something? “Are you sure you’ve got everything? And the map? You know where you’re going? We can go through it again if you like. We’ve got plenty of time before Mom gets up.”
Sadie put a hand on my arm. “It’s okay. I know what I’m doing. Everything will be fine.”
There were so many questions I hadn’t thought to ask about Laurel, and this was my last chance. But if I started down that path, I’d probably never stop. The more Sadie told me, the more I wanted to know. I would never know enough about my sister, about how she lived. And how she died.
There was one question I could ask, though. Something I needed to know before she left. A selfish question. Silly, really, given everything that’s happened since. But I asked it anyway as Sadie was shouldering the backpack, testing the weight. “Why did you kiss Thomas?”
Sadie stopped and stared at the wall for a second, as if the answer might be written there. But then she looked at me. “I needed you to hate me.” I clearly had no idea what she was talking about, so she elaborated. “I knew I needed to leave before the police came over. But I couldn’t make myself actually do it. I…I like it here. A lot. I thought it would be easier if you pushed me away. I was right.” She smiled ruefully. “You should probably know that he didn’t kiss me back.”
I thought about that for a second. It made a weird sort of sense. But there was something bothering me, like a pebble in my shoe. “How did you know I was going to walk in and see you two?”
She gave me this strange look, like she knew I’d caught her. “Okay, maybe there were two reasons. I wanted to see what it felt like. With someone…someone who wasn’t Smith.”
There was nothing I could say to that. Not one single thing.
I’m not sure who initiated the hug. Maybe me, maybe her. Or maybe we both had the same idea at the same time. It didn’t feel strange to be hugging her. It didn’t feel like hugging a stranger. And when it came down to it, I really didn’t want to let go. She was the first to pull away.
“I’m sorry. About everything. I never meant to hurt anyone. I hope you know that.” There were tears in her eyes. In mine, too.
I nodded. “You…you take care, okay?”
“I will.”
She walked over to the door, then turned. We looked at each other in silence for a moment or two. If everything went according to plan, I would never see her again. She smiled sadly, and it made me wish for things I could never explain, even to myself. She spoke softly. “You know something? I liked being your sister, even for a little while.”
She closed the door behind her. I listened for her footsteps on the stairs, but I heard nothing. I went over to the window and watched her walk down the street. She didn’t look back.
“I liked being your sister, too,” I whispered.
If saying good-bye to Sadie was hard, watching my mom read the letter was worse. I thought she would never stop crying.
“Did you know about this?” she said, holding my shoulders and shaking me. I didn’t break.
“No, I swear. I had no idea.” Mom phoned Dad, and he arrived within twenty minutes, face still creased from sleep. He didn’t cry. He was too stunned, I think.
I watched as they read the letter again, heads close together. I had to remember to ask to read it myself. I wasn’t supposed to know every word by heart.
Dear Mom, Dad, and Faith,
I have to go away for a while. I’m sorry. I know this won’t be easy for you to understand, but I need you to know that it’s the right thing for me. It’s what I want. I need some time to find out who I am and what I want to do with my life. I need to be alone. I’m sorry I can’t explain it better than that.
Please don’t blame yourselves. Coming home to you was better than I could have ever dreamed. You are the best family in the world. I am so lucky to have you in my life.
I’m excited about the future. About going to new places and making new friends. Meeting people who have never heard of Laurel Logan. A fresh start. I want to see if I can stand on my own two feet. I’m sure you can understand that.
Please, PLEASE don’t come looking for me. I beg you. I need to do this, and I need
to do it without your help.
I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone. But I will come back to you, one day. I love you all.
Laurel
Reading it again, over the shoulder of my sobbing mother and frozen father, it didn’t seem good enough. Not even close. I should have said more, really laid it on thick. It was too short, too stilted.
I’m not sure my acting was up to much. I didn’t even manage to cry.
“How could she do this to us? I don’t understand.” Mom fell into Dad’s arms. He murmured words of comfort. I took the letter, stared at it just for something to do.
Mom pulled away. “I can’t lose her again, John. I…I just can’t. We need to phone the police. She can’t have gone far. Let me find that…Where’s that number again?” She opened the kitchen drawer where all the takeout menus and random scraps of paper are stored.
“Stop,” said Dad, but Mom didn’t listen, so he had to go over and close the drawer and take her hands in his. “Stop. We have to…” He swallowed hard. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but we have to let her do this. She’s nineteen, Olivia. She’s an adult. This isn’t about us. It’s about what’s best for Laurel.”
“And you think what’s best for her is being out there all by herself?” Mom shouted. Her face was red and wet with tears that she didn’t even bother to wipe away. “Anything could happen!”
“You mean something worse than what’s already happened?” Dad said quietly.
That’s what did it, I think. She didn’t come around to the idea right away, but she at least started to listen. I put the kettle on, trying to ignore the mug with Laurel’s name on it when I opened the cupboard.
We sat around the kitchen table, talking things through. Mom had the idea of calling Laurel and begging her to come home. Dad didn’t object. Mom was the only one who was surprised when we heard the phone ringing upstairs.
Three hours later, my parents had both agreed to abide by Laurel’s wishes. “We owe it to her,” said Dad. “She’ll come back when she’s ready. And we’ll be here waiting, ready to welcome her back with open arms. That’s all we can do.” He didn’t sound convincing—or convinced—but it was a start.