by Joy Fielding
“Michelle…”
“There’s some pizza left,” Lili said. “I can heat it up for you.”
“Well, aren’t you just the sweetest, most thoughtful little sister in the whole universe?”
“Please don’t take your anger at me out on Lili,” Caroline implored. “It was my idea to put up the tree. My idea to decorate it. Lili said we should wait till you got home. I’m the one who said you wouldn’t be interested.”
“Because you think I enjoy being left out?”
“Because you’ve never shown any interest before.”
“Because you always made it seem like it was such a chore,” Michelle shot back, her anger escalating with each pronouncement. “Because it was so obvious your heart wasn’t in it, that there was no reason to decorate a stupid tree and pretend to be happy, when how could we be happy if Samantha wasn’t here to celebrate with us? God knows I wasn’t reason enough. God knows I never made you happy.” She tore the angel from Lili’s hand and ripped it apart, tossing what was left to the floor. “And by the way, Lili, or Samantha, or whatever the hell your real name is, just so you know, there are no such things as angels. Because there is no such thing as heaven.” She spun toward the hallway. “It’s all one big crock. A scam—just like you.”
“Micki, wait.”
“What exactly am I waiting for?” Michelle said, turning back. “For you to acknowledge that I matter as much as my sainted sister, that my actual presence is as important to you as her memory?”
“That is so unfair.”
“Is it? What’s it going to take, Mother? Do I have to disappear for you to love me?”
Caroline sank to the floor, crushing what was left of the cardboard angel beneath her weight, as Michelle ran from the room.
“It’s me…Lili. Can I come in?”
“Can I stop you?”
Caroline overheard the exchange from the doorway of her bedroom. She’d been on her way to apologize to Michelle yet again—how many of their conversations over the years had consisted of futile attempts to explain and atone?—when she heard the sound of footsteps in the hall and peeked out of her room to see Lili tapping gently on Michelle’s bedroom door.
She watched Lili disappear inside Michelle’s room before tiptoeing down the hallway, then stood with her back pressed tightly against the wall, knowing she shouldn’t be eavesdropping but unable to tear herself away.
“Are you okay?” she heard Lili ask.
“Sure,” Michelle responded. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You seemed really upset.”
“I overreacted. Not that unusual. Sorry if it worried you.”
“No, please. I’m the one who should be apologizing to you.”
“What do you have to be sorry about?”
“We should have waited till you got home to decorate the tree.”
“That wasn’t your decision.”
“Please don’t be angry at your mother. She didn’t mean…”
“I know. You don’t have to explain.”
“She loves you.”
“I know that, too. It’s just this dance we do. Guess we’ve been doing it for so long, it’s become ingrained.”
Silence.
“What is it you want, Lili? Did my mother ask you to come in here?”
“No. I was just hoping that…maybe…”
“Maybe…?”
“We could talk?”
“You want to talk?”
Caroline pictured Lili nodding her head.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“I don’t know. Whatever. I guess I was hoping maybe we could get to know each other better.”
“We don’t know each other at all.”
“I’d like to. Get to know you,” Lili said.
“Why? I doubt you’ll be sticking around long once we get the DNA results back.”
“You’re so sure I’m not your sister?”
“You have to admit it’s a long shot. But what the hell? We’ll know in a few days. No point speculating.”
“Do you remember her at all?” Lili asked. “Samantha, I mean.”
Another silence, longer than the first.
“You were five when she was taken,” Lili pressed.
“So?”
“So, you should have some memories of her.”
“Should I?”
“Don’t you?”
“I guess.”
“What was she like?”
“She was two years old.”
“Two-year-olds have personalities. Was she funny? Quiet? Did she make you laugh? Did she cry a lot? Was she a happy baby?”
Caroline imagined a look of irritation spreading across Michelle’s face. She held her breath, waiting for an explosion of sarcasm. Surprisingly, the voice that emerged was quiet and free of vitriol. “I remember this one time she found my mother’s Velcro rollers and she stuck them all in her hair, and she was running around the house wearing nothing but a diaper and my mother’s big, fuzzy pink slippers, with these crazy-looking rollers sticking out of her head at all these weird angles, and she looked so proud of herself, and my mother was laughing so hard, and I remember wishing I could make her laugh like that, and then getting angry and marching over and pushing Samantha to the floor and yanking the rollers out of her hair. And she started crying, and, of course, my mother got mad and yelled at me.”
I’d forgotten all about that, Caroline thought, tears filling her eyes as she recalled the halo of Velcro rollers clinging to Samantha’s beautiful little head and the sweet smile on her beautiful little mouth as she scurried happily from room to room. She could also see the look of rage on Michelle’s face as she pushed her sister to the floor and began tearing the rollers from her hair.
“You were jealous,” Lili said. “That’s pretty normal. I have two younger brothers, and until they were born, I was it, as far as my parents were concerned. And then along came Alex, and then Max, and I stopped being the center of the universe. It took some getting used to.”
“Is that why you’re doing this? To be the center of the universe again?”
“What else do you remember about Samantha?” Lili prodded, ignoring Michelle’s question.
“That’s about it.”
“Do you remember anything about that night in Mexico?”
Another silence, this one lasting so long that Caroline decided Michelle had no intention of answering it.
“I try not to,” Michelle said finally.
“So you do remember something.”
“I remember my mother screaming.”
Caroline felt her breath seize in her lungs and she threw her hands over her mouth in order to stifle the gasp about to escape.
“That must have been terrifying.”
“Must have been,” Michelle repeated without inflection.
“What else do you remember?”
“I remember trying to hold on to her, and her pushing me away.”
Caroline recalled Michelle’s efforts to cling to her and her own feelings of being suffocated, the panic of not being able to breathe, her irrational fear that Michelle was leeching the air right out of her body. Had she really pushed the child away?
“I’m sure she didn’t mean to…”
“Maybe not. Or maybe it didn’t happen that way at all. Maybe I dreamt the whole thing. I was a child. Children get confused. They imagine all sorts of crazy things. Look,” she continued, unprompted, “even if it did happen, I don’t blame her for pushing me away. I don’t even blame her for not loving me the way she did Samantha. I give her a hard time about it, but I understand. I honestly do. Samantha was this beautiful, really easy baby, always smiling, always happy. She was just…lovable. And I was, as my mother has been known to say, ‘difficult.’ I was whiny. I was demanding. I was clingy. In a word, I was a brat.” She paused, blowing a long, audible breath into the air. “I was a brat before Mexico. I was a brat after. I’m a brat now.”
“I don’t think y
ou’re a brat.”
“Sure you do.”
“Brats don’t volunteer at hospices.”
“They do when they’ve been ordered to by the courts.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She hasn’t told you?”
“Told me what?”
“About my arrest for driving under the influence, my court-ordered community service?”
“You were arrested for drunk driving?”
“You can add it to my list of failings. She really hasn’t told you?”
“Not a word.”
“Guess she’s too ashamed.”
“Maybe she didn’t think it was her place to tell me.”
“Maybe.”
“Will you?”
“Will I what?”
“Tell me what happened?”
Once again, Caroline found herself holding her breath. Michelle had never confided in her about any of the details of that night. While she knew the facts of her daughter’s arrest, and the fine print of the deal Hunter had worked out with the assistant district attorney, Michelle had always refused to discuss exactly what had happened, and Caroline doubted she would agree to talk to Lili about it now. She braced herself for a barrage of expletives, hoping she’d have time to make it back to her own room undetected before Michelle pushed Lili—physically or metaphorically—out into the hall.
“It’s no big deal,” Michelle surprised her by saying. “I mean, it is a big deal, I guess. It’s just not much of a story.”
Both Caroline and Lili waited for her to continue.
“I went to a party at this older guy’s apartment. It wasn’t a great party because everyone was getting high on weed, which is kind of boring. You know how it is.”
“I don’t, actually.”
“You’re kidding me. You’ve never smoked weed?”
“Never smoked. Never drank. Never…”
“Had sex?”
“What’s that?” Lili asked with a laugh.
“You’re a virgin?”
“You sound surprised.”
“You’re seventeen.”
“I wasn’t even allowed to date until a year ago.”
“Wow.”
“Not that it mattered. We moved all the time. I was homeschooled. I didn’t know anyone. So who was I going to date? It wasn’t until my father died that my mother started relaxing her guard a little. She even let me dye the ends of my hair blue. And one day I was at the library and this guy kept looking at me, and I’m thinking that he’s kind of cute and I start looking back, trying to flirt, and he walks over to me, and I’m wondering if he’s gonna maybe ask me out, and instead he says I look just like these sketches on the Internet and…”
“…the rest is history.”
“Finish your story,” Lili directed.
“Well, like I said, there’s not much to tell. Everyone’s getting high on weed, and I don’t know, weed’s never been my thing, even though I smoke—I’m sure my mother told you that.”
“She didn’t have to.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can smell it on your clothes.”
“You can? Seriously? Shit.”
“So, what happened? At the party.”
“Well, this guy I know was there. Spencer. We’d gone out a few times. Well, no. We hadn’t actually gone out. We just had sex a couple of times.”
Caroline’s head dropped toward her chest. Dear God, she thought.
“Anyway, he said he knew where the host kept his wine. And next thing I know, the two of us are in the kitchen and we’ve polished off almost this whole bottle, and our host finds us and he’s beyond furious and he orders us out of the house. Apparently it was a really expensive wine his father had been saving for years. So we had to leave, and Spencer gets into his car, and I get into mine. Ten minutes later, the police pull me over and…”
“…the rest is history.”
“It’s not like I even drink that much,” Michelle continued. “It’s just that whenever I do, I mess up big-time.”
So maybe you shouldn’t drink, Caroline thought, half expecting to hear the words emerge from Lili’s mouth. But Lili said nothing. Obviously much smarter than I am, Caroline thought.
“Anyway, my drinking days are over. I’ve learned my lesson.”
Caroline allowed herself a small sigh of relief.
“Guess I’ll have to switch to weed after all.”
Fuck.
“And my father cut some deal with the assistant D.A., and that’s how I ended up working at the hospice. I told you it wasn’t very exciting. Or noble.”
“I still think it’s pretty amazing. I don’t think I could do it.”
“It’s really not that big a deal. People die, right? You kind of get used to it. Except sometimes. Like today.”
“What happened today?”
“We got this new resident. Kathy.”
“What makes her different?”
“She’s only twenty-nine. And she’s all alone. Her mother died when she was a kid and her father remarried and she never got along all that great with her stepmother. The whole Cinderella story except she ended up with ovarian cancer instead of a handsome prince. Probably won’t even make it till Christmas. It just got to me, the unfairness of it. I think that’s one of the reasons I went so ballistic when I came home and saw you guys decorating the tree.”
“I’m really sorry about that.”
“Stop apologizing. It wasn’t your fault.”
“It wasn’t anybody’s fault.”
“Which pretty much brings us back to where we started. Seems we’ve come full circle. Time to call it a night.”
Caroline felt Lili moving toward the door and she pushed herself away from the wall, preparing to make a hasty retreat. “Thanks,” she heard Lili say.
“For what?”
“For not telling me to get lost. For confiding in me. For making me feel, I don’t know…almost like…”
“…sisters?”
“I guess.”
“You really sure you want to be part of this family?” Michelle asked.
Caroline ran down the hall to her bedroom before she could hear Lili’s reply.
She was lying in her bed, wide awake at just after six A.M., having tossed and turned most of the night, her mind vacillating between hope and despair, anticipation and dread. What would she do if the tests proved Lili was indeed Samantha? What if they proved she wasn’t?
You really sure you want to be part of this family?
Michelle’s words bounced against the side of her brain, increasing in volume with each repetition, filling her head like a stubborn cold, leaving her barely able to breathe.
Her daughter was right. The family that Lili would be returning to—if the DNA test revealed she was, in fact, Samantha—was severely splintered, if not irreparably broken. Caroline and Hunter were divorced; Caroline barely tolerated her mother; she had a strained relationship with her brother, a strained relationship with Michelle…
I’m the common denominator here, Caroline acknowledged, finally climbing out of bed an hour later, her body a collection of aches and stiff joints. Everything, my fault.
She threw a housecoat over her cotton pajamas and headed down the stairs, past Michelle’s and Lili’s closed bedroom doors. She walked into the kitchen, moving as if she were on automatic pilot, and made a pot of coffee, then poured a large mug even before the coffeemaker indicated it had finished brewing.
“Is there enough for me?” Michelle asked, shuffling into the room on bare feet and plopping down into a chair at the kitchen table.
Wordlessly, Caroline reached into the cupboard for another mug and poured her daughter a steaming cup, depositing it in front of her. “You’re up early.”
“Didn’t get a whole lot of sleep. I take it you’re not going into work today.”
“I told them I’d be out for the rest of the week.”
Michelle nodded. “Probably a good idea.” She s
ipped her coffee, offered nothing further.
“I owe you an apology,” Caroline said.
“For what?”
“Last night. The way I acted. You were absolutely right to be angry.” She opened the breadbasket at the far end of the counter, removed two slices of raisin bread, and dropped them into the toaster. “I should have waited for you to come home to decorate the tree, at least given you the chance to…”
“Say no? I would have, you know. Said no.”
“I still should have waited, given you the choice.”
“Yeah, well. What’s done is done, right? Tree looks great, by the way.”
“It does look nice, doesn’t it?”
“Except for the missing angel on top. My turn to apologize. I’ll go out later, pick something up.”
“That would be nice.”
“Except I don’t believe in angels or any of that stuff, so I’ll probably just get a star or a snowflake. Something like that. Is that okay?”
“Sounds good.” The toast popped up. Caroline put the slices on a plate, opened the fridge, took out some butter, and applied it to the two browned surfaces. “You want a piece?” she asked her daughter, without thinking. “Sorry,” she said immediately. “Forgot you don’t eat bread.”
“I’ll eat the raisins,” Michelle said.
“You mean, right out of the bread?”
“As long as they don’t have butter on them.”
Caroline studied the two slices of toast. “You can’t have the raisins. They’re the best part.” She caught Michelle’s grin as she sat down at the table and began dunking the toast in her coffee.
“Oh, gross,” said Michelle.
“You didn’t used to think it was gross.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When you were little. You used to watch me dunking my toast in my coffee and insist on doing the same thing.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s the God’s truth. I swear.”
“I don’t believe in God.”
“Yeah, well. It’s true anyway.” Caroline smiled at the memory. “You were this little thing, I don’t think you were even two years old, but even then you were very clear about what you wanted, and what you wanted was to dunk your toast in coffee, the same way I did. So every morning I’d pour a little bit of coffee into your cup and we’d sit there and dunk our toast together. And one day, I was busy doing other things, and you came marching into the kitchen, quite indignant, and demanded, ‘Where’s my coffee?’ ”