by Cat Clarke
If you saw that little girl, you’d probably think she was the cutest little girl you’d ever seen. Chances are, you have seen her. The photo of blond-haired, gap-toothed, polka-dot-dressed, teddy bear–cradling Laurel Logan has surely been printed in almost every newspaper in the world (probably even the Uzbekistan Times, now that I think about it). You must have seen the polka-dot ribbons that people used to wear, or the ones they tied to trees all along Stanley Street. I think it was Mom’s idea, that polka-dot campaign. Anyway, two hours after Mom took that photo, Laurel was gone.
I was also in the original photo: four years old, cute in the way that all four-year-olds are, but nothing special. Not like her. Frizzy brown hair, beady little eyes, hand-me-down clothes. I was playing in a sandbox in the background, slightly out of focus. That’s how it’s been my whole life: in the background, slightly out of focus. You hardly ever see that version of the photo—the one where I haven’t been cropped out.
Laurel would be nineteen years old now. An adult. My brain struggles with that concept. Of course we’ve all seen the age-progressed photos. The last one was four years ago: Laurel Logan at fifteen. None of the images ever look quite right, though. You can see that they’ve taken that photo—the photo—and done some computer wizardry, but the results are always weird in some way. They never end up looking quite like a real person.
—
I’m looking at Mom, and she’s looking at me and she’s still holding back. There’s some small part of her that doesn’t believe it can be Laurel. That won’t allow her to fully believe that the nightmare could finally be over. She’s had her hopes raised and dashed so many times before.
I realize she’s shaking and I take hold of her hand to steady it. “Are they sure? How do they know?”
“I have to phone your father. Natalie said she’d call him, but I thought it would be best if I did it. Do you think he’ll be at home, or should I try his cell first?” She looked at her watch, too big for her wrist. “Michel’s probably on his way over here by now anyway. You should still go….I’m not leaving you here by yourself….I’ll call as soon as I know more….”
“Mom! Stop! Just stop talking for a second. How do they know it’s…her?” For some reason I can’t seem to say her name.
“Remember she hurt herself the day she was…Natalie says she has a scar on her cheek! After all these years…” She shakes her head in disbelief as she squeezes my hand tightly. “And there’s something else. She’s got Barnaby!”
It’s her. My sister has come home.
—
There were lots of photos of Barnaby in the newspapers, too, at first. I don’t remember, of course, but I’ve done enough research that I could probably write a book about what happened. Mom and Dad gave Laurel a teddy bear for Christmas—six months before she was taken. I got a bear, too. I lost mine years ago.
Mom and Dad took us to one of those shops where you can customize your cuddly toys. Apparently, Laurel took ages, making sure her bear was just the way she wanted it. You can record a voice message that will play every time you squeeze the toy’s tummy. Laurel was too shy to do it herself, so Mom and Dad did it for her. Her bear said: Merry Christmas, Laurel! Lots of love from Mommy and Daddy! I recorded my own message, babbling some nonsense about a teddy bear’s picnic.
Laurel’s bear was brown and extra fluffy. He was dressed in blue dungarees with a red-and-white-striped T-shirt and a blue hat with his name embroidered on it. Laurel didn’t have to think long about the name—she said “Barnaby” as soon as they asked her.
Barnaby the Bear is unique. Even if there happened to be another bear with the same dungarees and T-shirt and hat and embroidery, there is only one bear in the whole wide world that has a message from my parents recorded on it. And when Laurel was taken, Barnaby was, too.
It was a tiny crumb of comfort to my parents, I think. Knowing that wherever she was, Laurel wasn’t alone. She loved that bear. She carried him everywhere and told him all her secrets. Depending on her mood, she would sometimes insist that he had his own chair at the dinner table. I can picture that, if I close my eyes and really try. But I’m sure the details are wrong. Like all my memories of Laurel, this one is secondhand. It doesn’t even count as a memory, does it?
Sometimes I lie in bed at night and try to clear my head of everything. I empty my brain bit by bit—Mom and Dad and Michel and school and Thomas and Martha and what I had for dinner. I let all of it leak out of my ears and onto the pillow, leaving nothing but blankness. Then I wait for her. For a real memory—one that’s mine and only mine and not something I’ve read in the newspaper or on the Internet or something that my grandparents told me.
Sometimes it works. I can see her laughing, and I know it’s really her—it’s not from one of the three home-video clips that the whole world has seen, or from any of the other videos I used to watch over and over again until I mouthed the words coming out of Laurel’s mouth when she had her first pony ride and was scared she was going to fall off. This laugh is different—it’s just for me. Secret laughter between sisters. And she has two clips in her hair—they’re shaped like stars, and they shimmer in the sunlight.
That’s it. That’s all I have: a laugh and a couple of hair clips. That’s all I was left with for thirteen years. But now she’s back.
Mom comes back into the kitchen after phoning Dad. She’s been crying a lot—her face is red and blotchy. Clearly she didn’t want me to hear that conversation. I’m not sure why.
Then it hits me. “Is she hurt?” I can’t believe I didn’t think to ask before.
“What?” Mom’s distracted, trying to find her car keys. They’re on the shelf in the hall, exactly the same place they always are.
“Is she hurt? Is there something…wrong with her?” It’s a perfectly reasonable question.
“No! The police said she’s in remarkably good health, considering…”
I wait, but Mom doesn’t finish her sentence. She’s too busy trying to fix her makeup in the hall mirror.
“Mom? I’m…I’m scared.”
She turns to me, and I can tell right away that she doesn’t get it. “Scared? Whatever for? There’s nothing to be scared of, Faith. This is…well, it’s a miracle, isn’t it?” She makes a face at the mirror and adds a slick of lipstick to her chapped lips. “There.” I stare at her as she stares at her reflection. “Do you think she’ll recognize me?” she asks in the smallest voice imaginable.
The doorbell rings. There are a few possible answers to Mom’s question, but only one that’s honest. I go and stand behind her, and our eyes meet in the mirror. I tuck a few strands of hair behind her ear. “Of course she will, Mom.” Honesty isn’t always the best policy.
Her face lights up and she turns to hug me tightly. “My baby’s coming home,” she whispers. The mean, twisted little voice in my head—the one I have to silence every single day—whispers something so pathetic and selfish that it makes me want to hug Mom extra hard and never let her go: What about me? I’m your baby, too.
—
Michel already knows; Dad must have called him in the car. He says “I can’t believe it” at least three times in as many minutes. While Mom’s filling him in on the rest of the details, he keeps on glancing over at me.
Mom seems to have forgotten her feelings about Michel. She hugs him, the first time I’ve ever seen her do that. Michel’s as surprised as I am when she launches herself at him. She babbles away, barely pausing for breath. She’s usually painfully polite—but distant—toward Michel, and I hate her for it. Especially because he never has a bad word to say about her. He just shrugs it off like he doesn’t mind one little bit. Sometimes I wish I could be more like him (“be a little more French,” he says).
Michel tells Mom that we’ll wait at the apartment for news. We were supposed to be going to a new exhibition at the art gallery, but he says we can go next week or the week after.
“Maybe the three of you can go, when Laurel’s back with
us?” Mom says this as if it’s a normal thing to say.
Michel moves his head, and you can tell Mom interprets it as a nod, but it wasn’t one. “You’d better get going, Olivia. John will be there soon.” That was exactly the right thing to say to get Mom out of the house—she won’t want Dad to get there first.
The good-byes are awkward. Mom seems to have remembered that hugging Michel is not the kind of thing she does, and she doesn’t seem to know what to say to me. The moment is too big, so she settles for kissing me on the cheek and telling me she loves me.
“I love you, too, Mom. I hope…” Now it’s my turn to leave a sentence hanging in the air. Mom just nods as if she knows exactly what I wanted to say. But she doesn’t.
I hope it’s really, truly, definitely her. I hope she recognizes you after thirteen years even though I have my doubts. I hope you don’t die in a terrible car crash on the way to the police station. I hope things are going to change around here but not too much. I hope you don’t forget all about me once you’ve got your perfect daughter back.
Maybe the sentence was finished after all: I hope.
—
Michel drives carefully—both hands on the steering wheel, checking his mirrors all the time. I always feel safer in his car than I do in Dad’s. “How are you doing, ma chérie?” Michel knows that I like it when he speaks French, so he indulges me once in a while.
I close my eyes and listen to the traffic. How am I doing? An hour and a half ago, I had a pretty good idea how this weekend was going to play out: the exhibition with Michel; meeting up with Dad for a café lunch; baking in the afternoon; takeout and film tonight; an early start on Sunday morning and off to the food market with Michel, where he miraculously transforms into the most French person you could ever imagine (wearing a beret, for crying out loud), ramping up the accent and charming all the women into buying our (admittedly amazing) macarons; back home on Sunday evening to slump in front of the TV with Mom.
The routine of the weekend is comforting to me. Michel and Dad’s place feels like home. I’d have asked to move in there full-time if I hadn’t known it would break Mom’s heart. Plus I’m pretty sure Dad wouldn’t be all that keen on having me around all the time. Being a weekend dad suits him perfectly, I think.
I was eleven years old when my parents got divorced. Apparently, most kids are upset when their parents split up, but I wasn’t. I don’t remember crying at all. Not even when Dad drove away with his car packed full of his belongings. Mom still finds it strange that I didn’t react how a normal kid would (should) react. You’d think she’d be relieved that I wasn’t upset. Surely it showed that I was remarkably well adjusted for my age, understanding and accepting that my parents could never be happy together after what had happened to Laurel.
Dad’s bisexual—always has been, as far as I know. Mom knew that he was bi when they met in college and fell “head over heels in love with each other.” The only reason I know this is because she talked about it in an interview a few years ago. Dad was not happy about that. She was on a mission, though—a mission to set the record straight. So many awful things had been written about them both—and about Dad in particular (LAUREL’S DAD IN GAY ROMP!)—that she wanted to tell the truth. The papers always say he’s gay—they never bother to get it right. And back then they said that he pretended to be straight and lured my mother into marrying him because he was desperate to have children. For a while the media was obsessed with the fact that Laurel was adopted. They wanted to know WHY.
I was a miracle baby. Something to do with a very low sperm count (gross) on Dad’s side and something wrong with Mom’s ovaries. The chances of them conceiving naturally were minuscule. Technically I shouldn’t even exist. I often wondered how they really felt about that. Mom usually sticks to the whole “miracle baby” spiel, saying how blessed she and Dad felt to have two beautiful daughters. I’ve never asked her for the real story because I know she’d never tell me the truth.
So for a few years the papers liked to make my father out to be some kind of depraved sex fiend. The GAY ROMP headline came after he was photographed coming out the front door of Michel’s apartment building three months after they started dating. Not exactly the news story of the century.
It was hard on Michel, but he doesn’t like to talk about it. I have no idea why he got involved with my dad in the first place. Surely any sane person would run a mile from someone with that much baggage. But Michel is a Good Person. The best person I know, probably. He’s a veterinarian; I think it’s probably a prerequisite that you have to be nice to be a vet. You have to be caring and sympathetic and not mind being puked on by a parrot.
Dad’s okay, too, but I’ll never understand what Michel sees in him. Michel is very, very good-looking. He has good skin and messy black hair and permanent stubble. If he were a couple of inches taller and a lot more vain, he could have probably been a model. Dad’s not ugly or anything; he looks like you’d expect a man called John to look. Boring hair, regular enough features, pale skin, slightly too thin, shoulders permanently hunched.
“Faith? Are you okay?” Michel asks again.
I still don’t have an answer, so I decide to go down a different route. “I had sex with Thomas last night.”
I have my very own spot on the sofa at Michel and Dad’s apartment. They’ve got one of those huge corner sofas, and my spot is right in the corner, where I can look out the window and see the canal. I always try to sit in corners when I can. I didn’t even realize it until Michel pointed it out to me one day. Then Dad laughed and said it was true, and that I’d been doing it since I was a little girl. He stopped laughing when I said that maybe I didn’t like having my back to the room because photographers have a nasty habit of popping up from nowhere and snapping away. I like to see them coming, at least.
Michel’s made us both a cup of tea, and I’m sitting in my usual spot; the sun is streaming through the windows and Tonks, the cat, is curled up on my lap. (Michel is a massive Harry Potter fan; Dad barely even knows who Harry Potter is.)
“So…you and Thomas…?”
“Yeah, me and Thomas.”
“That’s big news! How are you feeling about it all?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. Good, I think. It was…nice.”
“Wow. That bad? You mean the earth didn’t move and angels didn’t sing and there were no fireworks?” I shake my head. “Well, that’s exactly how your first time is supposed to be—average at best. God, I remember my first—”
I stick my fingers in my ears. “La-la-la, I’m not listening!” I only take my fingers out when I’m sure that he’s stopped talking. “I don’t want to hear about you having sex, because that makes me think about Dad having sex, and that’s just…” I shudder and make a gagging sound.
Michel smiles at me. “Oh, right, so I have to sit here and listen to you, but you don’t want to hear about the time when Jean-Luc waited for me in the changing rooms after soccer practice and—”
I throw a pillow at Michel’s head and laugh so hard that Tonks leaps from my lap and stalks off without a backward glance. It feels so good to laugh with Michel, even though I know he’s only trying to distract me from thinking about what’s happening at the police station.
“Seriously, though, are you okay about all this?”
“Okay about what? Losing my virginity or Laurel?”
Michel shrugs and smiles. “Both, I guess.”
“I’m okay.” I nod as if to reassure myself. “Yeah, I’m okay. I think I love Thomas and I think he loves me, and we’ve been together forever, so there really wasn’t any reason not to have sex. And I think I’m going to like it. We just need to practice a bit more…and find somewhere a bit better than the back of his van.”
“Romantic,” Michel deadpans.
“As for Laurel…well, I’m happy, of course.”
Michel shuffles over to sit right next to me. “You don’t have to pretend with me. You know that, don’t you?”
I do know that. I’ve always been honest with him. I don’t know what it is about Michel, but I’ve trusted him almost since the day we met. I can tell him anything, and he would never even dream of telling Dad. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. “I’m scared, Michel.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“You know that thing they say—be careful what you wish for? I’ve wished for this my whole life, it seems. I’ve dreamed of this day, but I suppose I never really thought it would happen. I mean, at the time I thought I believed it would happen….It’s only now that I realize I was so sure she was gone forever. Does that make sense?”
Michel nods.
“I’ve been in her shadow ever since she was taken. You know how much I’ve hated that everything is always about Laurel. And that I couldn’t have a normal childhood like everyone else. But now that she’s back, it’s all going to be different, isn’t it? And maybe…I don’t know…maybe I’ll realize I was sort of okay with being in her shadow after all.”
Michel puts his arm around my shoulders, and I lean my head against his. “It’s okay, you know? Whatever you’re feeling is okay. There’s no right way to feel about this. It’s hardly a normal situation, is it?”
Normal. I’ve always been jealous of normal. Boring too. I’d have been perfectly happy with the most boring, normal childhood you can imagine—like Martha’s. Nothing remotely interesting has ever happened to anyone in Martha’s family, and she doesn’t even realize how lucky she is.
Michel’s phone rings, and it’s Dad calling from the police station. Michel looks at me guiltily, and I can tell we’re both thinking the same thing: he really should have called me first. Michel’s end of the conversation mostly consists of “yes,” “okay,” and “I see”; it’s not particularly enlightening. I leave the room to look for Tonks and find her under the duvet in my room. I scratch her head until she forgives me for spooking her.
