She's Not There

by Joy Fielding

  “Mom? Mom, are you home?”

  Caroline heard the front door open and the words race through the downstairs hall and up the ivory-carpeted stairs toward her bedroom, as if actively searching for her.

  “Mom?”

  Caroline opened her mouth to speak, but thought better of it and said nothing. If she didn’t answer, maybe Michelle would assume she wasn’t home and go away. Although she knew even before she heard the footsteps on the stairs that Michelle was unlikely to give up so easily. Her daughter was as relentless as she’d always been.

  “Mom?”

  Caroline could feel Michelle standing in the doorway, peering into the darkness of the bedroom, her eyes burning into her back.

  “Mom?” Michelle said again, flipping on the overhead light. “What’s going on? Didn’t you hear me?”

  “I heard you,” Caroline said.

  “You heard me but decided not to answer?”

  “I…,” Caroline began, then stopped when she could think of nothing significant to add.

  “What’s the matter? Are you sick?” There was something vaguely accusatory in Michelle’s tone.

  Caroline shook her head. It was a tone she was used to.

  “Then what are you doing? Why didn’t you answer me? Why were you just sitting here in the dark?”

  Caroline shrugged. She hadn’t noticed the darkness. When had that happened? “What time is it?”

  “Almost seven o’clock.”

  “What are you doing here?” Caroline asked.

  “What do you mean, what am I doing here? You invited me to dinner, remember?”

  “You said you were busy.” Caroline swiveled around on the bed to face her daughter, surprised as she always was by how thin Michelle was, and biting down on her lower lip to keep from voicing this thought out loud.

  “I was,” Michelle said. “Then I thought you might…Never mind what I thought. What’s going on? Bad day at school?”

  “I didn’t go to school.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just didn’t feel like it.”

  “You didn’t feel like it?” Michelle repeated, taking a few tentative steps into the room. “That doesn’t make sense. You always feel like it.”

  “I didn’t feel like it today.”

  “Why not?” she asked again.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  Caroline shrugged. Was Michelle going to repeat everything she said? “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “I want you to tell me what’s going on. You’re acting very weird. Did you have a fight with Dad or something?”

  “No.”

  “Is this about Mackenzie?”

  “Mackenzie?”

  “Dad’s new baby,” Michelle said with more than a hint of annoyance, as if they’d been over this many times—and perhaps they had.

  “No.”

  Michelle stood at the foot of the bed, shifting from one foot to the other and looking everywhere but at her mother. “So, what happened? You sounded normal this morning on the phone when you were lecturing me about my responsibilities. And you’re dressed for work, so you were obviously intending to go.” Her eyes drifted to the newspapers strewn across the unmade bed. “Was it the article? The pictures? I mean, you can’t be too surprised. This happens every year. You’ve kind of learned to go with the flow…”

  “It’s not the article or the pictures.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve been sitting here all day and you have no idea why? I don’t believe you.”

  “Michelle…”

  “Mother…”

  “Please, Michelle. I don’t want to argue with you.”

  “I don’t want to argue with you either.”

  “Then let’s just drop it, shall we?” Caroline pushed herself off the bed and took Michelle in her arms, hoping to silence her. Instantly she felt her daughter stiffen. Caroline took a deep breath, forced a smile onto her face. “So, where do you want to go for dinner?”

  “How about that new raw place over on Bayshore?”

  “Raw? As in not cooked?”

  “It’s all organic. Very healthy.”

  “I’m sure it is. Just doesn’t sound all that…”

  “Forget it,” Michelle said.

  “No. I’ll give it a try.”

  “Never mind,” Michelle said. “I’m not very hungry anyway.”

  The words hung suspended in the air like smoke from a stale cigarette. Caroline wondered if it had always been this way between them. The truth was that Michelle had been needy and difficult from birth, characteristics that Samantha’s disappearance had only exacerbated. And the needier she’d become, the more Caroline’s resentment grew. The more she’d clung, the more Caroline pulled away. The more Caroline pulled away, the more Michelle’s resentment grew. Their relationship had devolved into a vicious cycle of push-pull, one retreating just as the other was reaching out. For every step forward, it seemed they took two back.

  My fault, Caroline thought. Everything, my fault.

  “I had a phone call this morning,” she ventured cautiously. Maybe if she stopped shutting Michelle out, her daughter would welcome her back in.

  “From…?” Michelle stuck her thumbs into the side pockets of her tight jeans, dark green eyes narrowing.

  “A girl in Calgary.”

  “Calgary?”

  “It’s in Canada.”

  “I know where Calgary is, Mother. I’m not an idiot.”

  “Of course you’re not an idiot. I didn’t mean to suggest…”

  “Who do you know in Calgary?”

  “I don’t know anyone.”

  “Is she a reporter?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “You’re not giving me a chance. Maybe if you stopped interrupting me…”

  Michelle let out a deep sigh. “Okay. Sorry. Let’s start again. You got a call from some girl in Calgary. Does she have a name?”

  “Lili.”

  “Lili…?”

  “I don’t know her last name. She wouldn’t say.”

  “She wouldn’t say,” Michelle repeated. “Is this girl the reason you’re acting so peculiar?”

  “She doesn’t think Lili is her real name,” Caroline said, ignoring Michelle’s question and looking directly into her daughter’s eyes. “She thinks her real name is Samantha.”

  Michelle’s shoulders slumped. “Shit.”

  “She thinks she’s your sister.”

  “Oh, please. Don’t tell me this.” Michelle’s eyes widened in anger. She began pacing back and forth in front of the bed, her arms shooting out in all directions, like an explosion of fireworks. “Don’t tell me you believe this crap.”

  “I believe she believes it.”

  “Mother, for God’s sake. This sort of thing happens every time they update those stupid sketches. People calling to say they’ve seen Samantha in line at the grocery store, psychics claiming they know where to find her, crazies boasting that they’re holding her prisoner in some underground bunker. You’ve been dealing with these nutcases for years. And now some girl calls you from Calgary and says she thinks she’s Samantha and you flip out? You know better than this. You know she’s full of shit. Even if she’s crazy enough to believe it…”

  “This is different.”

  “How is it different?”

  “She offered to take a DNA test.”

  “What?”

  “She thinks we should go for a DNA test, to find out one way or the other.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Michelle said, stopping dead in her tracks. “What are you saying? That she’s coming to San Diego?”

  “No.” Caroline replayed the conversation with Lili in her mind and then relayed it in its entirety to Michelle.

  “Tell me you’re not seriously considering going to Calgary.”

  “I’ve been thinking abou
t it.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “You asked what I’ve been doing all day. That’s what I’ve been doing—thinking about it.”

  “You’re not going to Calgary, Mother.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? Why not?”

  “What would be so terrible?”

  “I don’t believe this. I just don’t believe it.”

  “Think about it for a minute, Michelle. What harm could it do? I go to Calgary, I meet this girl, we do the test, we find out one way or the other.”

  “You think about it. You go to Calgary, you meet this girl, who’s probably a raving lunatic with her own agenda, maybe even a butcher knife—you ever think about that?—and you take the test and it turns out negative, which it will, you know it will, and then you come home all upset…for what? Why would you do that to yourself? To us? Again,” she added for emphasis.

  “Because that way we’d know for sure.”

  “I already know for sure.”

  “That’s because you didn’t talk to her. You didn’t hear her. There was something about her voice…”

  “Samantha was barely two years old when she disappeared. She could say ‘mama’ and ‘dada’ and maybe a few dozen other words, most of which nobody could understand—”

  “I understood,” Caroline interrupted, the threat of tears causing her voice to wobble.

  “My point is,” Michelle continued, “that there’s no way you could recognize Samantha’s voice if you heard it today. You’re fooling yourself if you think otherwise. The odds against her being Samantha are astronomical. This girl, whoever she is, be it con artist, psychopath, or just poor deluded soul, is definitely not my sister. And you’re not going anywhere near her.”

  “Sweetheart, I understand your concern and I love you for it, but…”

  “But nothing.” Michelle pushed her long brown hair away from her forehead and stared at her mother. “You’ve already made up your mind, haven’t you?”

  “It just makes sense to me, the more I think about it.”

  Michelle moved toward the phone. “That’s it. I’m calling Dad.”

  “What? No! I don’t want you to call him.”

  “Why not? You don’t think he has the right to know?”

  “We don’t know anything yet.”

  “We know you’re going to Calgary. Maybe he’ll want to go with you.”

  “He won’t.”

  “Of course he won’t. And do you want to know why? Because he’s not a crazy person, that’s why.” She lifted the phone into her shaking hand.

  “Please don’t call your father.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m asking you not to. Please, Michelle…Micki…”

  Michelle lowered the phone. “What did you just say?”

  “I…”

  “You called me Micki. You never call me Micki.”

  “I know.”

  “You hate that name.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “What—you think that if you call me Micki, I’m suddenly going to come around, that I’m that easy to manipulate?”

  “No, of course I don’t think that.”

  “You don’t think, period. Shit.” Michelle tossed the phone onto the bed. She shook her head, opened her mouth to speak, then shook her head again. “All right. Fine. I won’t call him.”

  “Thank you.”

  “When are you thinking of going?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” Michelle repeated.

  “Apparently there’s a flight in the morning that gets into Calgary around noon.”

  “I see. Have you already booked your ticket?”

  “No.”

  “But you’re going to.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have a passport?”

  “A passport?”

  “It’s Canada, Mother. You need a passport.”

  “I have one.”

  “And winter boots?”

  “Boots?”

  “It’s Canada in November. You need boots.”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “How long are you planning to stay?”

  “Probably a couple of days. I don’t know for sure.”

  “You do know this Thursday is Thanksgiving.”

  “I’ll try to be home by then.”

  “Grandma Mary is expecting us for dinner.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “I’m not going to be the one who has to explain to her why you aren’t there.”

  “I’ll be there. I’ll go, meet this girl, take the test, come home.”

  “You really think it’s going to be that easy?”

  Caroline shrugged. “Please try to understand, sweetheart. I’ve spent the last fifteen years regretting one decision. I don’t want to spend the next fifteen regretting another.”

  Michelle sank down on the bed. A noise halfway between a sigh and a scoff escaped her throat.

  “What?”

  “I was just wondering if you’d be going to all this trouble if it had been me, and not Samantha, who’d disappeared that night.”

  Caroline felt the words form a sword and pierce her heart. Instinctively, she reached for Michelle. “Oh, God. You can’t really think…”

  Michelle jumped to her feet, resumed her pacing. “It doesn’t matter what I think, does it? You’ve proved that over and over. You proved it again tonight. My opinion doesn’t matter. It never has. I don’t know why I’m surprised. I should be used to it.” She turned and bolted from the room.

  “Michelle!” Caroline raced after her daughter, following her down the hall and into her bedroom. She watched her pull an overnight bag out of her closet and toss it onto the green-and-white comforter on her bed. “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” Michelle walked to her dresser, opened the top drawer, and threw a handful of undergarments into the bag. “A couple of days, you said?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “One sweater should be enough.” She threw a navy wool turtleneck into the bag. “The jeans I’m wearing will be fine. And I have that ski jacket Dad bought me in Aspen last year. It should be in the closet downstairs. Hopefully Calgary won’t be absolutely buried in snow.”

  “Stop,” Caroline said, stilling her daughter’s hands before she could add more items to the bag. “You can’t come with me.”

  “I can’t? Why not?”

  “Because…”

  “You don’t want me to come?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “You said it yourself. It’s a crazy idea. I’m crazy.”

  “All the more reason for me to go with you.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t give me a hard time, Mother. ‘Whither thou goest,’ and all that crap.”

  “Michelle…Micki…”

  “Give it up, Mother. It’s not going to work this time. So what’s it going to be? Are we going to Calgary tomorrow or not?”

  Caroline saw the determined set of her daughter’s jaw and the angry hurt in her eyes. She knew it was pointless to argue. “I’ll book the tickets,” she said.

  “Did I tell you that Jerrod got us tickets for Dance with the Devil?” Rain said, casting her heavily blue-shadowed gaze around the table before bringing it to rest on Caroline.

  “What’s that?” Caroline asked, sneaking a glance in the direction of her suite and then at her watch. She put down her fork and pushed away what was left of her lobster dinner, which was most of it. She’d been too nervous to eat. It was almost time to check on the kids.

  “They were fine when I checked on them thirty minutes ago,” Hunter whispered under his breath, his lips barely moving. “They’re fine now. Finish your meal.”

  “Dance with the Devil? It’s only the hottest show on Broadway,” Rain said, answering the question Caroline had already forgotten she’d asked. “It’s impossibl
e to get tickets, especially on Thanksgiving weekend. But Superman here managed to do it.” She threw a proprietary arm across her husband’s shoulders, causing her breasts to all but leap out of her dress.

  “So you’ll be spending Thanksgiving in New York,” Becky said. “Lucky you.”

  Rain flashed her best veneer-enhanced smile. “What are you guys up to?”

  “My mother always has Thanksgiving dinner at her place,” Steve said.

  “You can just imagine how much I’m looking forward to that,” Becky said.

  Steve glared at his wife. “Let’s not start.”

  “Stop looking at your watch,” Hunter told Caroline.

  “You know what my darling mother-in-law said to me last Thanksgiving?” Becky said, continuing without waiting for a response. “She’d just been to a funeral and I made the mistake of asking how it had gone, and she said, and this is a direct quote: ‘It was a lovely affair. Her daughter selected a beautiful coffin. Much nicer than the one you had for your mother.’ ”

  There was a collective gasp from around the table.

  Although not from Caroline, who was used to such remarks.

  “I assure you she said no such thing,” Steve protested.

  “That’s exactly what she said.”

  “You’re exaggerating. As usual.”

  “And you’re defending her. As usual.”

  “So, what are we all thankful for?” Peggy interrupted, a forced chirp in her voice. “Come on. Three things, not including health, family, or friends. We’ll just assume you’re thankful for those.”

  “Never assume,” said Becky.

  “Oh, this is fun,” Rain said, clapping her hands. “Can I start?”

  Peggy opened the palms of her hands, indicating that Rain had the floor.

  “Well, first, obviously, I’m thankful we’ll be spending Thanksgiving in New York and not at some horrid family function, no offense intended.” Her smile drifted from Becky to Steve before ultimately landing on Caroline. “Second, I’m thankful for the new necklace Jerrod bought me.” She patted the impressive diamond sparkler at her throat. “And third, I’m thankful gray hair doesn’t run in my family. Your turn,” she said to Caroline.

  Caroline struggled to keep her hands away from her head. She’d never noticed any gray hairs, but then, she really hadn’t been paying close attention. “I’m thankful for this past week,” she said, nodding toward her husband. “I’m thankful to be celebrating ten years of relative wedded bliss,” she continued, recalling her brother’s words.