She's Not There

by Joy Fielding

  “Oh, yeah. Lots more. ‘At the lab, the DNA is extracted from the cell and specific regions of the DNA are amplified by a process known as PCR, also known as polymerase chain reaction’—how’s that for a mouthful?—‘which are then examined carefully. The DNA pattern of the child is then compared to the alleged mother,’ ” she continued, putting her own emphasis on the word “alleged.” “ ‘Because a child’s genes are inherited from her biological parents, examination of the child’s DNA will conclusively determine whether the alleged mother is the true biological mother of said child.’ ” She took an emphatic bite out of the apple in her hand. “So—how do you like them apples?”

  “Very interesting.”

  “Just thought you might appreciate knowing what you’re in for.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Yeah, sure. Anytime.” She leaned forward, resting her chin on the high back of the kitchen chair she was straddling. “So, potential sister-of-mine, has being in the old house tweaked any new memories?”

  “Michelle…”

  “What? That’s a perfectly natural question. I’m just curious about whether or not being here, in this house, has jogged her memory.”

  “I wish it had,” Lili said. “I was actually hoping it might.”

  “Yeah? No such luck. I mean, you were only a baby, right? I don’t have any memories of being two either. You want to know what my first memory is?” The question was obviously rhetorical and she continued without waiting for a reply. “It’s being in Disneyland. I was three and we were in the Magic Kingdom and I wanted to go on one of the rides—think it might have been Pirates of the Caribbean—but Mother here said the line was way too long and she couldn’t stand for hours waiting.”

  “For God’s sake, Michelle, I was pregnant.”

  “Oh, right. Forgot about that. Anyway, I threw this major tantrum. I screamed so much that we had to leave. And that’s my first memory.”

  As well as her first grudge, Caroline thought. A grudge she’d been nursing ever since. God, did her list of grievances never end?

  “You want to know what else I remember?”

  Another rhetorical question. Another long-standing grudge about to be revealed. Another example of Caroline’s failure as a mother.

  “I remember the day she brought you—well, maybe you, maybe not—home from the hospital, and you were so small and beautiful and I wanted to hold you, but she wouldn’t let me.”

  “I wouldn’t let you hold her because you said you were going to throw her in the garbage,” Caroline interrupted, angry now.

  “Really? I said that?” Surprisingly, Michelle’s face broke into a wide grin.

  “In no uncertain terms. Let me have her. I’m going to throw her in the garbage.”

  And then suddenly Caroline was laughing at the memory of Michelle’s angry, scrunched-up little face, and Michelle was laughing with her, and soon even Lili was laughing. And the three women sat at the kitchen table, laughing until they cried.

  “How come you never moved?” Lili was asking.

  She and Caroline were sitting on opposite sides of the sofa bed, the bed having been pulled out and outfitted with clean white sheets and a lightweight rose-colored blanket. Lili was clutching one of two down-filled pillows to her chest, her eyes continually moving up one off-white wall and down another, skittering across the surfaces of several abstract lithographs, like a spider.

  Caroline shrugged. It was a question she’d asked herself many times over the years. “I don’t know. I thought about it a lot, even came close to selling a few years ago. But something always stopped me. Guess I just got used to being here.”

  What if Samantha came back? What if she were to come looking for me and I was no longer here?

  “I think Michelle hates me,” Lili said.

  “No. It’s me she hates.”

  “She doesn’t hate you. She loves you.”

  “Well, she has a funny way of showing it sometimes.”

  “I think she’s just trying to protect you.”

  “And I think you should probably get some sleep. It’s been a long day. It’ll be even longer tomorrow.” Caroline climbed reluctantly to her feet. While part of her desperately wanted to stay, another part of her recognized the danger of getting too attached. Could she really afford to lose another daughter, even one that was never really hers?

  “Do you have any old pictures?” Lili asked before she reached the door.

  In answer, Caroline changed direction and went to the walk-in closet opposite the sofa bed. She pulled open the bottom drawer of the built-in dresser and removed three old photo albums, two of which she’d rescued from the garbage bin at her mother’s house right after her father had moved out. Lili immediately cast aside the pillow she’d been holding to gather the albums in her lap. She opened the top one, her arm brushing against Caroline’s and sending a spasm of chills throughout Caroline’s body, like an electric shock.

  A young man and woman stared up at them from the first page of the album, their arms uncomfortably resting around each other’s waists, their faces blank. “Are these your parents?” Lili asked.

  “That’s the happy couple, all right.”

  “Your dad’s really good-looking.”

  “Yeah. He was.” The sight of her father brought tears to Caroline’s eyes. Or maybe it was the feel of Lili’s shoulder pressing against hers. She ran a gentle finger over her father’s handsome face.

  “He’s dead?”

  “Long time ago.”

  “Your mother never remarried?”

  Caroline shook her head, burrowing even closer into Lili’s side as she turned the page. “I haven’t looked through these albums in years.”

  A large photograph of Caroline’s mother holding a baby filled the center of the next page. Mary was wearing a pink-and-white-striped sundress, and her hair was styled in the familiar tight helmet of curls she still sported today. The baby in her arms was maybe three months old and almost totally bald. “Is that you?”

  “It is. Apparently I was hairless for almost a year. My mother actually took me to the doctor to make sure I wasn’t…follically challenged.”

  Lili turned toward Caroline and smiled. “Hard to believe you didn’t have hair. It’s so beautiful now.”

  “Thank you. So is yours.” She fought the almost overwhelming impulse to run her hand through Lili’s blue-tipped, shoulder-length hair.

  “It’s really different than my mother’s…than Beth’s,” Lili said, using the woman’s given name for the first time. “Her hair is much coarser than mine, much curlier. Even curlier than your mom’s. And it’s darker.”

  “And your father?”

  “He was like you were…follically challenged. Even before the chemo.” She fell silent, casually examining the next several pages: pictures of Caroline as a baby in her father’s arms, as a toddler walking with him along the ocean’s edge, then sitting proudly beside him as he held his newborn son. “And this is obviously your brother.”

  “Yeah. He was a beautiful baby. Lots of hair.”

  “Are these all of him?” Lili flipped through the rest of the album till the end. “Where are you?”

  Caroline pointed to the picture on the very last page. “I think that’s my arm.”

  Lili chuckled and opened the second album. It was filled with photographs of Steve: Steve with his mother, with his father, with both parents. There were some pictures of the whole family, although Steve was always the focus. Even when Caroline was included, she was somehow separate—standing aloof and apart, she couldn’t help notice.

  Lili opened the last album, the one Caroline had put together herself. “There you are,” Lili said, indicating a picture of Caroline in a long mint green dress standing beside an awkward-looking boy in a dark blue suit.

  “Oh, God. My senior prom. Me and Michael Horowitz. I was about your age.” She stared at the picture, then over at Lili, then back at the picture, hoping to see the resemblance her mot
her had been so sure of.

  “What do you think?” Lili asked, clearly thinking the same thing.

  “Hard to tell.”

  “I don’t really see it.”

  “Well, it’s not the greatest picture. Green isn’t exactly my color.”

  The next pictures were of Caroline’s wedding.

  “Wow—you and Hunter are sure a gorgeous couple.”

  “I guess we were,” Caroline agreed.

  “Did you get divorced because of me? Because of what happened with Samantha, I mean?”

  Another question Caroline had asked herself repeatedly. Would she and Hunter have divorced had Samantha never been taken from them? Or had what happened only speeded up the process? “I think it was bound to happen sooner or later.”

  “Because Hunter was cheating on you?”

  “You know about that?”

  “It was on the Internet.”

  “Well, I guess his cheating was part of it,” Caroline said, answering Lili’s question. “Combined with what happened in Mexico, well…People handle grief in different ways and those ways aren’t always compatible. And guilt and blame are two very powerful weapons. Weapons of intimate destruction,” she said with a wry smile.

  “But you’re friends now?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t exactly call us friends, no. But we don’t hate each other. That’s something. And of course, we have a child—children—together.”

  “Is that Michelle?” Lili pointed to a picture of a sleeping infant with both hands raised above her head, her pose identical to Samantha’s the last time Caroline saw her. She was wrapped in a blanket and wore a pink woolen cap sporting a large GAP logo. Her mouth was turned down in a natural frown.

  “That was the day we brought her home from the hospital.”

  There followed pages of pictures of Michelle as she grew from frowning infant to somber-looking child. Soon the serious-faced little girl was joined by her golden-haired, sweet-faced sister. “Samantha,” Lili said, her eyes proceeding cautiously from one photo to the next.

  Picture after picture of Samantha, Caroline realized, interspersed only intermittently with photos of Michelle. She tried to tell herself it was because Michelle would never sit still long enough to have her picture taken or had run out of the room whenever a camera materialized in her mother’s hands, or that she would always make silly faces or do something to make Samantha cry. But was that really the reason pictures of Samantha were by far in the majority?

  “I don’t have any pictures of me as a baby,” Lili said, interrupting Caroline’s reveries.

  “None at all?”

  “My mother…Beth said they got lost during one of our moves.”

  “I guess that’s possible. You said you moved around a lot.”

  “My brothers’ baby pictures didn’t get lost. Just mine.” Lili reached across the bed for her overnight bag. “There’s nothing until I was about six years old. My mother—Beth—always claimed she was hopeless with a camera.” She unzipped the top of the bag and extricated half a dozen pictures from a side compartment. “Meet the Hollister family,” she said, dropping the first photograph into Caroline’s trembling hands: Lili as a fair-haired little girl sitting beside two smaller dark-haired boys. “That’s me and my brothers. See? We don’t look anything alike. And this is my father. Tim. Before he got sick, of course. I don’t look anything like him at all. And this is my…This is Beth.” She passed Caroline a picture of an attractive woman with frizzy dark hair, wide-set eyes, and an engaging, if somewhat wary, smile. “My brothers look just like her. Don’t you think so?”

  Caroline scraped her memory to determine if she’d ever seen Beth or Tim Hollister before. She tried to picture them poolside at the Grand Laguna Hotel in Rosarito or sitting at the next table in the garden restaurant. Maybe she’d smiled at them as she passed them in the hotel lobby one afternoon. But no such memories existed.

  The last two pictures Lili showed her were of the entire family. Lili was right—she stood out like the proverbial sore thumb. Mother, father, and two sons formed a tight little group, while Lili stood shyly off to one side.

  Standing ramrod straight. Aloof and apart.

  “It’s a nice-looking family,” Caroline said, returning the photographs to Lili.

  “Do you know what she said to me? Beth, I mean? On the phone earlier, before I hung up.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That she was glad my father isn’t alive to see what I’m doing. That it would break his heart.” Her voice trembled to a stop. She took several long, deep breaths and bit down on her lower lip to still its quivering.

  Caroline said nothing. What could she say? She knew all about broken hearts. Words couldn’t heal them. She was about to step forward and take Lili in her arms when Michelle poked her head into the room.

  “So, how’s the family reunion going?” she asked. “Enjoying your little jaunt down Memory Lane?”

  “Lili was just showing me pictures of her family in Calgary,” Caroline said.

  “Would you like to see them?” Lili shyly extended them toward Michelle.

  Michelle took the pictures from Lili, studying each one in turn. “Your brothers are really cute.”

  “Yeah, they are. I don’t really look like them…”

  “No, you don’t,” Michelle agreed. “Well, it’s late. I’m going to bed.”

  “Sleep well, sweetheart,” Caroline said.

  “Aren’t you coming?”

  “I guess.” Reluctantly, Caroline walked toward the door. “Are you all right? Is there anything you need?” she asked Lili.

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “If you get hungry…”

  “She knows where the kitchen is,” Michelle said.

  “If you can’t sleep or you think of anything…”

  “She knows where to find you.”

  “I’m just down the hall,” Caroline said anyway.

  “I’ll be fine,” Lili said. “Thanks for everything. I really appreciate it.”

  “Sleep well,” Caroline said.

  “We’ll see you in the morning,” Michelle told her before shutting the bedroom door. She proceeded briskly past her mother down the hall to Caroline’s room.

  “Where are you going?” Caroline asked, trailing after her daughter into her room.

  “I’m sleeping with you tonight.”

  “What? No.”

  “What? Yes.” Michelle unfurled the nightgown she had tucked away under her arm. “Don’t argue with me.”

  “But why?”

  “Why?” Michelle repeated. “For the same reason I’m sleeping with this.” She pulled a large knife out from underneath the mattress.

  Caroline gasped. “What are you doing with that? Where did you get it?”

  “From the kitchen. Where do you think? I put it here earlier.”

  “Well, put it back.”

  “No chance. It’s staying right there.” She returned it to its previous position.

  “That’s just absurd. Don’t you think you’re being a little overdramatic?”

  “Better dramatic than dead.”

  “You can’t actually think Lili intends to harm us?”

  “I don’t know what to think and neither do you. She seems sweet enough, I’ll grant you that, but you never know. We have no idea who she really is. What if she robs us blind and takes off in the middle of the night?”

  “Then I guess you’d be right about her.”

  Michelle shook her head. “Has it ever occurred to you that I’d rather be wrong? That a big part of me hopes she really is Samantha? That I’d give anything to have my sister back?”

  Caroline took a deep breath. The truth was that it hadn’t occurred to her. She’d been so caught up in her own feelings that she hadn’t even considered what Michelle might be going through. “I’m sorry,” she said softly.

  “Apology accepted,” Michelle said, pulling back the covers. “Now can we please get some sleep?”
<
br />   When they woke up the next morning at just past seven A.M., Lili was gone.

  “Well, at least we’re alive,” Michelle said, standing behind her mother in the doorway to the spare room. “Guess we should check the silverware.”

  “Lili?” Caroline called, trying to stem the too familiar panic that was rising in her gut. “Lili? Where are you?” She raced down the stairs and into each of the first-floor rooms. “Lili?”

  “Relax,” Michelle told her as she clomped down the steps after her, Lili’s overnight bag in her hand. “I doubt she’d go anywhere without this.”

  “Lili?” Caroline called again, running back into the kitchen, her eyes searching the backyard. “Where the hell is she? Where could she have gone?”

  “Maybe I should check this thing for explosives.” Michelle began riffling through the bag. “Here’s her passport.” She opened it to its picture page. “Yep, that’s her, all right. Lili Hollister. Born August 12, 1998. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure Samantha was born in October.”

  The doorbell rang.

  Caroline froze. She pictured a policeman standing outside her front door. I’m sorry to have to inform you, but there’s been an accident…

  “The prodigal daughter returns yet again,” Michelle said, pushing past her mother into the hall and opening the door.

  “Sorry,” Lili said sheepishly. She was wearing the same jeans she’d had on the day before and a T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of Kate Moss. “I just wanted to feel the warm air. I didn’t realize the door would lock automatically.”

  “How long have you been standing out there?” Caroline asked, ushering Lili into the foyer and glancing up and down the street before closing the door.

  “Not long. I woke up really early, about five. Couldn’t get back to sleep. So I got dressed and came downstairs, waited for the sun to come out, then stepped outside and got locked out. I didn’t want to wake you up so early, so I went for a walk.”

  “A walk? Where?”

  “Just around. This is a really beautiful neighborhood.”

  “Did you see anyone?”

  “A couple of joggers.”

  “Lovely,” Michelle said. “Any of them happen to have cameras?”