Well . . . I guess she isn’t that smart. Otherwise she wouldn’t have thought she could get away with kidnapping somebody’s kid and pretending she was her own. And then there was the confession, also not a smart move. If she hadn’t admitted to the cops that she stole me, maybe none of this would have happened.
No. If I hadn’t taken that stupid job in the coffee shop, then she wouldn’t have gotten caught. Harper Mom never would have seen me. So if I’m going to start pointing fingers, it’s totally my fault Sharon got caught.
I keep thinking about how Harper Mom knew it was me. Wondering. It’s kind of amazing. I’ve seen the pictures in the living room of me when I was a baby. Babies don’t look like people. I wouldn’t have known those pictures of that girl were me except that Jojo told me.
That’s not true. I would have known, or at least been suspicious. The little girl in the Georgina pictures looks like the little girl in the Lilla pictures.
I wonder where those baby Lilla pictures are. In one of the moving boxes, I guess. Mom never put them in picture albums, but she had little photo boxes to protect them. I kind of want to find them and compare a picture of baby Lilla to baby Georgina.
Because maybe it’s not true? Maybe they’re not the same kid? Maybe there was a mistake with the DNA test they ran when they swabbed my mouth?
I hang my head, fighting another wave of tears. It doesn’t matter how much I want it to be true, I know it’s not. Mom . . . Sharon told the police that she kidnapped me at a parade on St. Charles. She knew too many details. She knew the date and the time. She was telling the truth.
I really am Georgina Elise Broussard.
I frown. Who names a little baby a ridiculous name like that? It’s too big for a baby. Too pretentious. Pretentious was a word Mom liked. She used to use it all the time when she talked about the customers at the restaurants where she worked.
A lady walks past me on the sidewalk and I watch her. She’s carrying groceries and she’s on her cell. She smiles at me as she passes, then goes on with her life as if nothing has happened. As if I’m not living in the upside down, like the place in that TV show Stranger Things. Mom and I watched it on Netflix. In the show, these kids find a dimension on Earth parallel to the one humans live in. I guess word hasn’t gotten through the neighborhood. I guess no one knows about the crazy woman who used to live here who kidnapped a baby.
And suddenly it makes sense to me now why Sharon was never friendly with our neighbors. She never had friends who came to the house or that she met for a drink. We always rented, often moved twice a year.
If you kidnap a kid, you wouldn’t want anyone to get too close to you.
The weird thing is that, looking back, I realize that Mom didn’t really encourage me to have friends, either. I mean, she didn’t discourage it, but she always made me feel like she was my best friend. The only best friend I needed.
I guess that lady who just walked by, and is now going into her own shotgun house, doesn’t know that the landlord changed the lock on our door.
My house key didn’t work.
I panicked when I found out I couldn’t get inside the house. I was afraid all of our stuff was gone: the pictures of the toddler who didn’t know she’d been kidnapped, my phone charger, Mom’s knives.
I ran around to every window, trying to look in. I couldn’t see in the front windows because there are accordion blinds. They were here when we moved in and Mom said they were nice ones. That they provided decent privacy. But in the back of the house, I could see through the back door window. It’s covered with a curtain . . . well, a dish towel I hung over it. But through a little crack, I could see into my bedroom. I could see my bed, made, just like I left it. I could see my wooden cigar box on my nightstand where I was keeping the tips I earned at the coffee shop. We bought the box at a garage sale the weekend we moved in. I didn’t know what I was going to put in it. I just liked it because it said “Queen of Cuba.” I thought that was funny for the name of a cigar company. It was only five bucks, so Mom bought it for me.
So our stuff is still here. The landlord hasn’t sold it all or thrown it in a Dumpster. But I can’t get to it. I can’t get inside.
I look up and watch a car drive by. I don’t know what to do now. I really, really wanted to go inside. I mean, I know I can’t stay here. I know I have to go back to my upside down. I have to figure out how to be their Georgina. And maybe still be me. But I just want to walk through the rooms one more time. Because even knowing what I know now about Sharon, I know I had a good life with her. I know I was happy. That was real, even if the part about how I became Sharon’s daughter wasn’t.
Supposedly someone is coming to the house to get some of my things. The social worker with the unfortunate name, maybe. But I don’t think anyone has any intention of letting me back in the house. Shoot. If the cops or the social worker or whoever don’t move fast, I bet the landlord will sell our stuff. He’ll sell my mom’s knives; they were expensive. Like hundreds of dollars apiece.
I guess the cops told the landlord that Sharon and her daughter, who wasn’t her daughter, wouldn’t be coming back. Why he changed the lock, I don’t know. Obviously Mom isn’t getting out of jail anytime soon.
I watch another car go by.
I should probably walk to the streetcar and head back to the fancy house on the fancy street where I live now. I don’t know what time it is, but I bet it’s sometime after three. Harper Mom probably lost her shit when she came home and found out I was gone. I wonder if she called the cops. Of course there’s no way they’d do anything about a teenager missing for a couple of hours, but still . . .
Now I feel bad. I should have left a note. Told them I’d be back. Because where am I going to go? It’s not like—
“Hey.”
A man’s voice startles me and I look up. It’s Remy. I come up off the step, suddenly scared and I don’t even know why. It’s not like he’s a scary guy.
He looks at me and I look at him. He comes over and sits down on the step of our pretty mint-green shotgun where I’ll never get to live now. He takes his cell out of his pocket and texts something. Texting Harper, I’m sure. He puts his phone back in his pocket before he says anything else.
“We were worried about you.” He doesn’t sound angry. Or even particularly upset. He pats the place beside him on the wooden step.
I sit down again. Stare at my backpack at my feet. “I’m sorry.”
“You can’t just take off like this, Lilla. You have to tell us where you’re going. It’s what you do when you’re part of a family. We let each other know where we’re going to be. So no one worries. And that goes for the adults in the family, not just the teenagers. If you’re expecting me home for dinner and I have to work late, I’ll text one of you.”
I bite down on my lower lip. Am I being a baby about this? A part of me wants to lie down on the little grassy patch in front of my green shotgun and cry. A part of me wants to run out into the street and scream. I’m just not sure who I would scream at. I know this is Sharon’s fault, but it’s Harper’s, too. If she’d just walked out of the coffee shop and not said anything to anyone, nothing would have had to change. Sharon wouldn’t be in jail and I wouldn’t be sitting next to a stranger who’s my dad on the steps of my house, locked out. Locked out of my old house, locked out of my old life.
When I speak, I don’t sound like me. My voice is shaky. “She wouldn’t have let me come if I’d told her.”
He’s quiet for a minute. Then he says, “You’re right.” He looks at me. “But we could have figured something out. We could have talked about it. Together.”
“I’m old enough to ride the streetcar in the middle of the day,” I argue. As if that’s an excuse for leaving the way I did. Because I know it was wrong. What Remy is saying about families is true. I know that because Sharon and I had the same deal. She’d text or call and let me know when she was heading home at night, when she was stopping at the market, or whatever. And I
would let her know when I got home from school. When I left work at the coffee shop. When I was on the streetcar, joyriding. That’s what she used to call it. “I like to ride the streetcar. My mom . . . Sharon, used to let me ride by myself.”
A couple on bicycles go by. He’s wearing a pink helmet. She’s wearing a black one. I wonder if they accidentally got the wrong helmets or if it’s some kind of private joke. Mom and I talked about getting bikes. I wanted to ride to school, but she wasn’t sure if it was a good idea. She said biking in a city could be dangerous. She thought I was safer on the sidewalk, but she said we’d revisit the conversation. Remy is watching the bicyclists, too. So we sit there in silence. There’s a breeze. The leaves on the bush between us and the next house are rustling. The temperature is starting to drop. It’s actually getting a little chilly.
“So what’s going on?” he says. “Harper said you were upset this morning.”
I want to say, “Upset? No, duh. I’m upset about this whole fiasco. Who says a kid who was kidnapped but never knew it should be returned to her birth parents when she’s sixteen years old? Who decides that? Why didn’t anyone ask me?” But that would definitely be childish. And just dumb because I know you can’t let a kidnapper keep the kid, no matter how nice she was to her or how much she loved her.
“It’s her birthday,” I say.
He looks at me. “Sharon’s?”
I nod, looking straight ahead, not at him, because I’m afraid I’ll start to cry. “She . . . we were going to go out to dinner tonight. Some restaurant she wanted to try.”
“You came here to feel closer to her.”
“I guess.” I hesitate. “I wanted to go inside. I have a key. I wanted my . . . my phone died. I don’t have the charger. I wanted to charge my phone in case—” My voice catches in my throat and I fight the tears because I don’t want to cry. I’m tired of crying. “In case she tries to call me,” I whisper.
He exhales. “Ah, Lilla. I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“Why didn’t she call me?” I hear myself say. I wipe at my eyes. “Maybe they won’t let her use a phone? In jail?”
“Maybe,” he says.
Then he’s looking at me again and I feel like he wants me to look at him. Slowly I turn my head. His eyes are teary. I didn’t know guys cried. “Maybe she doesn’t know what to say to you. Or maybe—”
He keeps looking at me, and for some reason it makes me feel better to see that he’s sad, too. That he gets why I’m sad. And I think to myself that maybe it might be nice to have a dad. Sharon always said I didn’t need one. But what if she was wrong?
“Maybe she thought it would be better for you if she didn’t contact you,” he says.
I look down at my backpack. “I need to talk to her. Why won’t you tell me where she is? I want to talk to her.”
“As I said, I don’t know where she is. As for you having contact with her, I think we’re going to have to talk about that.”
“You mean you won’t let me. Harper doesn’t want me to ever see her again.”
“I mean we’ll have to talk about it. After you get to school. After things settle down. Right now we’re all pretty overwhelmed. It’s been hard for me to keep this private and out of the news. It’s the kind of story people love to read about. Hear about.”
It had never occurred to me that my picture could have been on the front page of a newspaper. Or Sharon’s. Or both. I can’t think about that now. I already feel like my head is going to explode.
We sit there without saying anything. I feel he’s waiting on me.
“I wanted her knives,” I finally blurt out.
“Her knives?”
“Her knife roll. She always carried her knives to work with her and brought them home at the end of her shift. Good chefs carry their own knives. I just . . . I wanted her knives. Before somebody throws all of our stuff in a Dumpster.”
“No one is going to throw out your things, Lilla. The social worker said you could have whatever you wanted from here.”
“I don’t know if I want any of my stuff.” I grind my sneaker into the sidewalk in front of the steps. Little bits of sidewalk are coming off. It needs repairing. The next tenant’s problem. “It’s Lilla’s stuff,” I say softly. “Not Georgina’s. Now I’m supposed to be Georgina.”
He doesn’t say anything so we both sit there for a couple of minutes. I watch the cars go by. Someone else passes us on the sidewalk in front of the house. Then Remy looks at me.
“You want the knives?”
I nod.
“Okay.” He gets up.
“But the house is locked.” I get to my feet, too. “My key won’t work. I guess somebody changed the lock.”
He’s looking up at the house. “You check the back door?”
I nod. “We didn’t have a key to it. It’s . . . was my bedroom.”
He’s still staring at the house. “You check the windows?”
Again, I nod.
“Okay.” He pushes his hands into the pockets of his khaki pants and walks away, headed around the side of the house.
I grab my backpack and follow him. We walk around the side of the house and to the back. Our trash can is laying on its side. I see the bag of garbage I took out the night before everything went down. I bet it stinks now.
He goes to the back door and stands there. There’s an old step leading up to the door but it’s broken. He looks around. Then he picks up a rock from next to the house. Someone must have tried to make a flowerbed once. Sharon and I had talked about cleaning up the little yard and growing some herbs here.
“Step back,” Remy says.
I watch him, fascinated and shocked at the same time as he breaks the window with the rock. He doesn’t seem to be the kind of guy who would break a window. You can get arrested for something like this. The old glass shatters. He looks around and so do I. We don’t see anyone. He reaches through the hole.
I cringe, afraid he’s going to hurt himself. I want to tell him not to worry about it. That I don’t care about the knives, but it’s too late. He’s already guilty of breaking and entering. He’s already committed a crime for me.
He turns the lock on the doorknob and tries to push open the door. It doesn’t budge. I remember that there’s one of those slide bolt things at the top of the door. “Up top,” I say. “It’s locked at the top.”
He feels around and I hear the sound of metal scraping metal. Then he turns the knob again and this time the door moves.
“There’s a little bookcase there,” I say. Mom and I didn’t use the door. Mom said it was okay if I put the bookcase there. She said that if there was a fire we’d be smart enough to move the bookcase to get out.
He pushes the door and I hear the bookcase slide. Things hit the floor. Books.
“There we go,” he says.
I think he’s going to walk in, but he takes a big step back. He gestures with his hand, meaning I should go inside. “You want me to wait out here while you get what you want?” he asks.
I still can’t believe he would break a window so I could get in. I can’t believe he’d take the chance of getting arrested for me. I don’t know much about a comptroller’s job, but I would guess that Tulane University doesn’t like their employees getting arrested on felony charges.
I walk up crumbling cement steps, thinking I’ll just run in and get the knives. But then all of a sudden I’m a little afraid to go inside. Afraid and I don’t know why. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid the house is haunted.
By Sharon.
By me.
By all the things I thought were true when we moved in. Things that were lies. Sharon’s lies. “You can come in,” I tell him. Because I’m afraid to go in alone.
I step into my bedroom and over the books that have fallen. It takes a second for my eyes to adjust. Then I move to the center of the room. He follows me inside.
“My bedroom.”
He looks around. Smiles. But the smile is kind of
sad. I wonder why, but I don’t ask. Too caught up in my own sadness, I guess. I just stand there and look around. I was so happy when we moved here. I didn’t even care that I had to leave my old school for a new one.
“Katrina said you could have your things. We can put what will fit in the car now, but it will probably take more than one trip.”
I stand there looking at the stuff that I know is mine, but it doesn’t feel like mine now. Because Sharon bought it all? Sharon, who was pretending I was her kid. Only I wasn’t. How could she have done this to me? She said she loved me, but how could she have loved me and done this?
“I don’t want it,” I say, grabbing my phone charger and practically ripping it out of the wall.
He watches me. “You might feel differently later, Lilla. I can box it all up. Put it in our attic. Then you don’t have to decide now.”
I don’t answer because I don’t know how I feel about that idea. Instead, I stuff the charger into my backpack. I don’t know why because I don’t even want my phone now. I walk out of my bedroom and into hers. Her bed is unmade. The Tweety bathrobe is lying on the floor. I guess they let her get dressed before they hauled her off to the slammer. I walk right through the room because suddenly I’m pissed. I’m so pissed at her that I’m glad she didn’t call. I’m glad the phone company is going to shut off our phone service.
Remy follows me.
I walk into the kitchen. Sharon’s coffee is still sitting in the coffee press. Only there’s green mold around the top of it. I look at the counter. The knife roll is sitting right there where I left it two weeks ago. I could almost swear I smell the English muffin toast I made that morning.
I’m not even sure I want her knives now. But would it seem ungrateful if I told Remy I didn’t want them? Now that he broke the law and all to get me in here.
I snatch the knife roll off the counter and turn around. “I’m done.”
“You don’t want anything else?”
I shake my head.
He glances around at the moving boxes we never unpacked, then back at me. I meet his gaze and I realize I have his eyes. He’s looking at me with my eyes. Of course, technically, it’s the other way around.
Finding Georgina Page 12