by Joy Fielding
Michelle shrugged, broad shoulders reaching for her ears. “Looks like the gym is on hold. Scrabble, anyone?”
—
“What kind of word is ramet?” Lili asked, studying the small wooden tiles Michelle had just laid across the Scrabble board.
“It’s a word,” Michelle answered.
“What’s it mean?”
“I have no idea. But I don’t have to know what it means. I just have to know it’s a word.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“Are you challenging me?”
Lili looked across the kitchen table at Caroline, as if appealing to her to intervene on her behalf.
Caroline braced herself. It was never a good idea to challenge Michelle. About anything.
“What happens if I challenge you?” Lili asked.
“We look it up in the dictionary. If you’re right, I lose a turn. If I’m right, you lose a turn.”
“Okay, I challenge you.”
Caroline reached for The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary on the table beside her, noting it was almost two decades out of date. How many new words had come into being since the last time she’d played Scrabble? How many had been declared obsolete? “Here it is,” she said, locating the word “ramet” between “ramentum” and “rami.” “It means ‘an individual plant of a clone.’ ”
“What does that mean?” Lili asked.
“Beats me.”
“I’m right. It’s a word,” Michelle said. “You lose a turn.” She beamed triumphantly.
Lili shrugged and Caroline smiled. Playing Scrabble had been a good idea, even though Michelle probably hadn’t been serious when she’d suggested it.
“Your turn, Mom.”
Caroline glanced down at her letters—two A’s, each worth one point, a P, worth three, a Y, worth four, an E and an I, each worth one—then back at the board, stealing a look at her watch as she lifted the P from her rack. It was almost three o’clock. She wondered what was keeping Peggy. She should have been here by now.
“Mom?”
“Hmm?”
“You’ve been staring at that letter for five minutes. Are you going to do something with it or not?”
Caroline put the P down on a space that awarded her a triple-letter score, then followed it with an I, then an E and a Y on either side of the T Michelle had used to form “ramet,” the Y landing on another triple-letter score. “Piety,” she announced. “That’s nine points for the P, twelve points for the Y, and one each for the I, the E, and the T.”
“Twenty-four,” said Lili absently as Caroline’s smile widened and Michelle’s vanished altogether. “What?” Lili asked warily.
“You’re good in math,” Michelle said. “Of course you are.”
“Not really.”
“You don’t have to try so hard.” Michelle’s frown shifted from Lili to Caroline. “She’s already on your side.”
“I’m not trying…”
“And you’re not fooling anyone,” Michelle said to her mother.
“What are you talking about?”
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“What am I thinking?” Caroline asked, genuinely perplexed.
“That this is the first of hundreds of board games the three of us will play together if your prayers are answered and it turns out that Lili is indeed Samantha. That this is what it’s like to be a normal family.” She leaned her head back and looked toward the ceiling. “Well, I hate to keep throwing a wet blanket over everything, I really do,” Michelle continued, “but we’re not a normal family. We haven’t been a normal family for fifteen years. And we can’t suddenly start pretending we are. None of what’s happened is normal. And no matter what the test results show or how fervently you pray to a God who’s obviously not there or Samantha would never have disappeared in the first place, it’s never going to be normal.” She stared at the words spread out across the Scrabble board. “And this is a stupid game.” She swept the tiles off the board with the back of her hand, sending them scattering across the kitchen floor.
Lili was on her hands and knees immediately, scooping them up.
“Leave them,” Michelle said. “It’s my mess. I’ll fix it.”
“It’s all right.”
“I said I’d do it.” Michelle quickly gathered up the remaining letters, slamming them on the table. “Told you I was a brat,” she said, plopping back into her seat.
“No,” Caroline said after a silence of several seconds. “You’re right. This isn’t normal. It’s anything but normal. And this is clearly a very tense time. We’re all a little on edge…”
“Really? Because you seem so calm.”
“It’s just my face.”
“I’m really not very good at math,” Lili said quietly.
Michelle’s lips stretched into a reluctant grin. “Have you spoken to Beth since she got back to Calgary?” she asked, returning the Scrabble tiles to their small pouch.
Lili nodded.
“How is she?”
“The same. Upset. Angry. Sad.”
Caroline pictured Beth as she’d seen her last night on the evening news, an obviously distraught woman shielding her face with her hands as she struggled to outrun the herd of reporters pursuing her.
Who are you? they’d demanded as she hurried toward the taxi idling at the corner. What’s your connection to Caroline Shipley? Can you tell us anything about what’s going on in that house? Is it true there’s a girl claiming to be Samantha?
“Is she still being hounded by reporters?” Caroline asked.
“There was this one guy who followed her cab to the hotel. He even trailed her to the airport this morning, but she wouldn’t talk to him.”
Caroline didn’t have to ask the reporter’s name. She already knew.
The doorbell rang.
“Oh, God,” Caroline whispered.
“Oh, God,” echoed Lili.
“As if,” Michelle said. “Someone going to answer that?”
Caroline took a deep breath and headed for the door, Michelle and Lili only steps behind.
“Open up, for God’s sake,” Hunter yelled from the other side as they approached.
Caroline quickly opened the door and Hunter shot inside, cameras clicking furiously behind him.
“Hunter,” one reporter called. “Look this way.”
“Can you tell us what’s happening?” another demanded.
“Do you have the results back from the lab?”
Hunter slammed the door on their questions. “What’s going on?”
“Where have you been?” Michelle asked, their questions overlapping. “I called hours ago.”
“Meetings. What’s going on?” he repeated.
“The results are back,” Caroline said.
“You have the results?”
“Peggy’s bringing them over.”
“Do you know what they are?”
Caroline shook her head.
A line of perspiration broke out across Hunter’s forehead. “Okay. It’s important to stay calm, no matter what the results show.”
Caroline could see he was saying this as much for his own benefit as theirs. “Maybe we should sit down,” she said, beckoning everyone toward the living room.
They were settling into their seats when they heard a car pull into the driveway, a door slam, and footsteps hurry up the front walk.
Caroline ran to the door and opened it, grabbing Peggy by the arm and pulling her inside the house, the reporters pelting the closing door with questions.
Can you tell us…?
Is it true…?
What’s…?
Caroline ushered her friend into the living room. Peggy wasted no time on unnecessary pleasantries. She withdrew a sealed white envelope from her brown leather bag and handed it to Caroline.
Caroline shook her head. “I can’t. You open it.”
“You’re sure? Hunter?” Peggy asked.
“You do it.”
/> Peggy tore open the envelope and removed the single sheet of paper. She scanned the page, then looked up at Caroline, her eyes filling with tears.
Caroline felt her entire body go numb. She knew that if the reporters waiting outside could see her right now, they would undoubtedly describe a seemingly calm, self-possessed woman with impeccable posture and an expressionless demeanor instead of a woman on the verge of total collapse, her stiffness the result of every fiber in her being struggling to keep her upright and in one piece. They wouldn’t understand that if she were to release the breath she was holding tight inside her lungs it would rush out of her like air from a balloon, and she would twist violently off into space, gutted and empty.
She glanced from Peggy to Hunter to Michelle to the young girl who might or might not be Samantha. Ever since Lili’s first phone call, Caroline had been cautioning herself not to get emotionally invested. She’d warned herself against letting her desire get the better of her common sense. But all that resolve had gone out the window the moment Lili appeared on her doorstep, and it had vanished altogether over the course of the last few days. Facts might be facts, but one of those facts was that she’d fallen in love. Emotions had firmly trumped common sense. One and one no longer made two. Even if the DNA tests proved conclusively that Lili was not her daughter, Caroline wasn’t sure she could survive her loss.
So she stood silent, her body rigid and ramrod straight, her face a placid mask, waiting for Peggy to speak.
They were sitting on her bed, wrapped in each other’s arms, watching the eleven o’clock news and trying to come to terms with everything that had happened since Peggy had torn open that sealed white envelope and changed their lives forever.
“Oh, God,” Peggy had said, her eyes shooting from Caroline to Lili and then back to Caroline.
“What? Tell me.”
“She’s yours. She’s Samantha.”
What followed was a chorus of gasps, as tears of relief mixed with cries of disbelief. Shocked voices overlapped; bodies swayed, rocked, clung together, before ultimately collapsing under the sheer weight of those four words.
“I don’t believe it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Is it really true?”
“Let me see that.”
“It can’t be. There must be some mistake.”
“It’s here in black and white. Look for yourselves. There’s no doubt.”
“Oh, my God.”
“It’s you. It’s really you.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
“Are you absolutely positive?”
“My baby. My beautiful baby.”
And then the voice of reality. As usual, Michelle’s: “What do we do now?”
They’d called the police. The police promptly notified the FBI. They’d all come running, their arrival triggering a frenzy among the reporters still gathered outside.
“My name is Greg Fisher. I’m with the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the agent had informed the assembled media, standing outside Caroline’s front door several hours later. “There has been a new development in the case of missing child Samantha Shipley. Please bear with us. We’ll be holding a press conference at noon tomorrow. In the meantime, we ask that the family’s privacy be respected.”
Caroline had relayed to the authorities the events of the last several weeks—that she’d received a phone call from a girl calling herself Lili who lived in Calgary with her widowed mother and two younger brothers, that Lili harbored suspicions that she was really Samantha, that a dubious Caroline had flown to Calgary to meet her but Lili had failed to show, that last week she’d turned up on Caroline’s doorstep, that they’d gone for DNA testing, that Beth Hollister had flown in from Calgary yesterday to take Lili home but Lili had refused to go and Beth had returned to Canada alone, that the tests had provided proof positive that Lili was indeed Samantha, the daughter who’d been stolen from her crib in Mexico some fifteen years earlier.
“She’s yours,” Peggy had said. “She’s Samantha.”
She’s mine, Caroline had been repeating silently all day. She’s really mine.
The FBI verified the results with the lab, then notified the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The RCMP had, in turn, informed the Calgary police, who’d quickly arrested Beth Hollister and brought her in for questioning.
She’d been protesting her innocence ever since, even when confronted by the young girl she’d insisted so vehemently was hers. Caroline was still replaying their conversation in her head hours after the fact.
“How could you?” Lili had demanded of Beth when Greg Fisher finally allowed them to speak, their conversation relayed over speakerphone in her kitchen for Caroline, Hunter, and Michelle to hear.
“I didn’t know. I swear,” Beth replied tearfully.
“You swore you were my mother,” Lili reminded her.
“I am your mother.”
“You swore you gave birth to me. I asked you—how many times did I ask you?—if I was adopted. You said no.”
“Because that’s what your father insisted I tell you. Because he said it was better for all of us that way.”
“Because he knew the truth.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“You do know. Stop lying to me.”
Piece by piece, the truth slowly emerged: Beth and her husband had been trying unsuccessfully for years to have children of their own; one day Tim had come home with the news that he’d arranged for the private adoption of a toddler, an adoption that could come through at any time; they were living in Portugal when the adoption was supposedly finalized; her husband had immediately flown to the States to pick up their little girl, a child whose mother had purportedly abandoned her.
Lili was incredulous. “You weren’t even a little suspicious? A mother just happens to abandon her two-year-old daughter at the exact same time another two-year-old mysteriously vanishes from her crib in Mexico? The timing doesn’t seem more than a little convenient? You actually believed it was a coincidence?”
“I didn’t know anything about what happened in Mexico.”
“It was all over the media. All over the world. How could you not know?”
“We were living in Portugal. I didn’t speak Portuguese. I didn’t read the international papers. We didn’t even own a TV. I was pretty isolated. Your father brought home this beautiful little girl and assured me everything was legal. I had no reason to doubt him. He had all the necessary documents…”
“But at some point, you had to become suspicious,” Greg Fisher had said from his seat at the kitchen table, his voice stopping just short of a sneer.
“I guess I knew something wasn’t right,” Beth admitted reluctantly. “But it’s amazing how you can fool yourself when you want to. I wanted to believe that my husband wasn’t lying, so I did. I wanted to believe that he hadn’t…”
“…stolen me from my crib in Mexico?”
“He didn’t do that,” Beth said with unexpected vehemence. “He was never in Mexico.”
“Then he was working with someone who was,” Greg Fisher said matter-of-factly. “Can you tell us who that might have been?”
Caroline’s body tensed as Hunter leaned forward in his chair.
“I have no idea. Tim knew a lot of people…through his business. I’m ashamed to say they weren’t all reputable.”
“So at some point you did suspect I might be Samantha?” Lili interjected.
“Not until much later. We were living in Italy. I saw a newscast. I think it was the five-year anniversary of the kidnapping. They showed pictures of Samantha. It was pretty obvious. I panicked. I confronted your father, begged him to tell me the truth. He told me I was being ridiculous and to stop talking crazy, that talk like that would only arouse unfounded suspicions and we could end up losing you, even though he swore up and down you weren’t Samantha. What choice did I have but to believe him?”
“Of course, since your husband passed away last year, we have only your word for all of this,” the agent said. “Very convenient for you, under the circumstances, being able to put all the blame on a man who’s no longer here to defend himself.”
A muffled sob could be heard on the other end of the line.
“What made you return to the States?” Fisher asked.
“A combination of things. Tim’s business…the boys…”
“You had two sons by then.”
“Yes. Once we had Lili, I had no problem at all getting pregnant. Ironic, isn’t it?”
“I’m sure the fact that ten years had passed was also a factor in your decision to come back. You assumed you were safe.”
“I assumed my husband was telling me the truth.”
“Is that why we moved to Canada?” Lili broke in, her voice an accusation. “Is that why we were homeschooled? Is that why we didn’t have a computer, why our access to television was limited, why we moved every time we started making friends? Because you assumed Dad was telling the truth?”
“We arranged our whole lives around you. We did everything we could to protect you.”
“To protect yourselves, you mean.”
It was at this point that Caroline intervened in the questioning. “Why come to San Diego? You knew we’d gone for DNA testing. You knew what the results would show. Why would you keep insisting…?”
“Because believe it or not, I was still clinging to the hope that Lili wasn’t Samantha. And I thought if I could just get her to come home with me, she would put this silliness aside, and that even if the tests showed she was your biological child that it wouldn’t matter, it wouldn’t be enough to undo the fifteen years I spent raising her, loving her…I love you so much, Lili.”
There was a second of silence.
“My name is Samantha.”
A cry shot from Beth’s lips like a bullet, traveling through the phone wires to pierce Caroline’s heart. In spite of everything, for a moment she felt genuinely sorry for Beth. She knew what it was like to lose a child.
“Of course the minute I saw you with your parents and sister, I knew who you were,” Beth continued. “Which just made me all the more desperate.”