“Why? It’s just a couple of blocks, right?”
“Mom’s paranoid.” I go down the steps. “Until last year, an adult had to walk me to and from school. She’s afraid I’ll get kidnapped like you did and then she’d be down two kids,” I say over my shoulder. Then I head for the street.
I hear Georgina-Lilla come down the steps behind me. I slow down a little bit. She catches up. We walk past our property, toward St. Charles.
“I don’t remember anything,” she says in this weird, airy voice. “I don’t remember you.”
I smile, glancing up at her. She’s tall. “Well, I sure don’t remember you.” I shrug. “But I was a baby when you got snatched.”
She’s quiet for a couple of steps and then she says, “But you knew about me.”
“Did I ever.” We hit the sidewalk on St. Charles and turn right. “As long as I can remember, I’ve known I had a sister. Well . . . a dead sister.”
“You thought I was dead?” She’s looking at me.
I make a face. “Don’t you read stuff on the Internet? Pervs kidnap little girls and do gross stuff to them and then they kill them. That’s what the cops thought happened to you.”
“Your mom and dad, they thought I was dead, too?” She sounds like she doesn’t believe me.
“Sure. How could they have known that crazy Sharon the chef took you and pretended you were her little girl who died?”
She stops on the sidewalk, grabbing my arm. “What?”
“They didn’t tell you?” I know I should shut my mouth now. Mom’s going to be pissed if she finds out I told. But the girl has a right to know, doesn’t she?
“No one’s told me anything,” she says. When she looks at me she seems all serious. And almost a little scared. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be her right now, which makes me glad Sharon the chef kidnapped her instead of me. Which would have been impossible, of course, because Mom was carrying me in one of those front pack things, so the weirdo couldn’t get her hands on me.
“Jojo! Georgina!” I hear Mom behind us.
“I heard Mom and Dad talking,” I say, looking up at Georgina-Lilla. This feels so weird. I mean, she’s a complete stranger, but I feel this weird . . . I don’t know. Connection to her. That’s what Aunt Annie would call it. A connection. “That’s what the cops told them.” I talk quickly because any minute now, Mom will catch up with us and she’ll give us crap about leaving the front porch without her. “Sharon’s baby died and she was at the parade and you kind of looked like her.” I shrug. “So she took you. And then she pretended you were her kid. She called you the kid’s name, gave you her Social Security number and everything.”
Georgina starts walking again. I walk beside her. It’s chilly. I wonder if she has a coat. She didn’t bring much stuff with her. Maybe that’s why she’s wearing Dad’s hoodie. I guess someone is supposed to go to the house where she used to live and get her stuff.
“And no one she knew noticed one day her daughter was dead and the next day she had her again?” Georgina asks. “Only she didn’t look the same?”
I make a face. “Sounds bat-shit crazy to me, too.”
“But we moved when I was two.” Georgina says it like she’s thinking. Then she looks at me. “Or that’s at least what she told me. Sharon. She told me I was born here in New Orleans, but we moved away when I was two to Mobile.”
I don’t know what to say because all of a sudden I feel like I might cry, I feel so bad for Georgina. Or Lilla, or whatever the hell her name is. This just sucks. It so sucks. “But . . . but she was nice to you, right? She didn’t, like . . . lock you in the closet or . . . like, make you her boyfriend’s sex slave. I’ve read stuff like that on the Internet,” I add. In case she thinks I’m just making this kind of stuff up.
Georgina-Lilla almost smiles, like she thinks I’m funny. But maybe she thinks I’m stupid. I can’t tell. “She never locked me in a closet. She never had a boyfriend.”
“Where did she say your dad was?”
“She said I never had a dad. He was just a sperm donor. She told me he was a chef.”
“Josephine!” my mother hollers.
I look over my shoulder.
She’s behind us on the sidewalk, doing her fast-walk thing. “Wait for me,” she yells.
“She loved me,” Georgina says, acting like she doesn’t even hear Mom hollering at us. “I loved her.”
I look at my sister. “I’m really sorry this happened to you,” I whisper.
Her eyes fill up with tears and she walks past me. “Me too.”
14
Harper
I knock on Georgina’s bedroom door that’s half open and give it a push. “Hey.”
“Hey.” My daughter doesn’t turn around to look at me. I can just see the top of her head, over her bed. That’s been made, I note. As if she’s a guest. Jojo hasn’t made her bed in . . . Jojo has never made her bed in her life, to my knowledge.
Georgina’s on the floor on the far side of the room, cutting in with a paintbrush around one of her two windows. Last night, she and Remy pushed the bed to the center of the room. After leaving the paint she picked out to sit in the hallway for two days, apparently she decided that today she’d paint. She made it pretty clear she didn’t want any help. Which hurt my feelings because I thought this would be a good thing for us to do together. Remy seems to have good luck getting her to talk to him when they’re doing something. Like cleaning up the dinner dishes. Last night they cut up potatoes to make baked fries and talked about malaria.
We’re on day six of the first days of the rest of our lives and I don’t feel as if I’ve made any progress with Georgina at all. She responds when spoken to, but still in as few words as possible. She’s so polite that I wish she had a little of Jojo’s mouth. Sass, I could deal with. Or even anger. But whatever feelings Georgina has, she’s not sharing them with me. With any of us.
I stand there in the doorway, trying to think of something to say. Which makes me feel inadequate as a mother. As a human being. I want so badly to connect with my daughter, who’s clearly hurting, but I can’t seem to find my way. “The color . . . I think it’s going to be pretty,” I stumble. “Especially with the white trim.”
She picked out gray for the walls. What teenager chooses gray for her bedroom walls? For anything? And the only reason she’s not painting the baseboard and crown molding black is because I suggested painting the trim would be too big a project right now. She didn’t argue with me. I wish she had. Had she put up one word of protest, I’d probably have let her paint the one-hundred-year-plus walls black and put down sod over the hardwood floor.
“You sure you don’t want any help?” I ask. “I’m pretty good with a paintbrush.” Not exactly true, but desperate times . . .
“I’m fine.” Georgina’s tone is flat.
A lump rises in my throat and I look down at my ballet flats. I thought my crying days were over when we found her. Since she arrived, I’ve been fighting a feeling of something that can’t be defined by any word but disappointment and it’s making me miserable. Feeling this way, not wanting to, is awful. What kind of mother am I to be disappointed when I’ve gotten what I prayed for all these years? What kind of human being does that make me? I keep telling myself that I didn’t expect Georgina to come running into my arms, but on some level, did I?
“I . . . I need to go into the office,” I say. “To . . . I have to make a couple of phone calls about lab work that came back and . . . note a couple of things in some records.”
She doesn’t say anything. She just keeps painting. It’s so quiet that I can hear the sound of her brushstrokes. And a lawn mower outside. I’ve been in Louisiana more than twenty years and it still seems odd to hear the occasional lawn mower in the middle of the winter. “I was thinking . . . you want to come with me? We could get lunch after. Maybe see if your dad can get away for lunch?” I throw that in, because like it or not, he seems to be the one she gravitates to. And
I’m not above bribery. I wouldn’t even be above coercion if I could find some leverage to use with her.
Again, the sound of brushstrokes.
Then she surprises me by speaking up of her own volition. “You’re working this week? Remy said you weren’t.”
I cringe when she calls him by his first name. Pick your battles, I tell myself. Remy’s advice. “Um . . . no, no, I took some time off. To be with you,” I add quickly. “I just . . . I have those phone calls to make.”
“I’d prefer to stay here.” She sounds so adult.
I exhale and walk into her room. Now that we’ve cleaned all the boxes and junk out of it, there’s almost nothing here. Georgina doesn’t own anything. I tried to buy her some things when we went shopping the other day, but there was nothing she wanted. At least nothing she would tell me she wanted. I suppose she’s waiting for her belongings from the other house. The police are supposed to let us know when and how we can collect them. I’ve been half hoping she wouldn’t want any of that stuff. Every time I look at her backpack, I have this irrational urge to throw it in the trash. I suppose it’s a representation of that woman. The woman who seems to still have a hold on Georgina, even though she’s in prison now.
Remy’s hoodie is lying on Georgina’s bed, thrown over her backpack. She’s been wearing it almost nonstop. I pick it up, lift it to my face, and smell it. It smells like him, but also . . . I breathe deeply, closing my eyes. Her, I think. Georgina. It’s not the baby smell I remember, but it’s definitely her. I lay it back on the bed.
“I’ll be fine here,” Georgina says. She still isn’t looking at me. “You won’t be gone long. Right?”
“No, not long.” I speak before I have time to think about what I’m saying. I’m just so excited that we’re having an exchange of words. Any words. Any thoughts. “An hour maybe.”
“I’ll just stay here and paint.”
I bite down on my lower lip. Remy says I need to give Georgina some space. That she needs some time and space to acclimate to her new world. He’d probably leave her alone for an hour, but I honestly don’t know if I can do it.
I watch her paint. Her strokes are long and controlled. Confident. And she’s precise. Like Remy. If Jojo and I were painting in here, we’d have the hardwood floor covered with a tarp and everything would have to be taped before we picked up a brush. I can’t help wondering if she’s done this before. In other bedrooms. Other cities. I think a lot about where she’s been all these years. What she’s been doing.
Last night, Georgina asked Remy again about that woman. She called her Sharon, at least. Not “Mom” like she had the day she arrived. She asked Remy if he knew where she was. He told her he didn’t know, which, fortunately for us, is true. Maybe the police will tell us Friday. If there aren’t privacy issues, which would be absurd, of course, considering the circumstances. Considering the fact that Sharon held our baby captive for fourteen years.
But Georgina pressed Remy. She’s a smart one, this girl. And she knows people. I can’t say she’s manipulative; that’s too harsh a word. But she knows how to handle people. How to get what she wants. She asked him if he could try to find out where she was. He responded by asking her if she thought that was a good idea.
He should have been a psychologist or a psychiatrist. He seems to intuitively know the questions to ask. It was one of the things that attracted me to him in our early days of dating. Georgina answered that she didn’t know if it was a good idea. Which later, when we were talking after the girls went to bed, he told me he found fascinating. And heartbreaking. Our conversation got a little tense after that. I told him there was no way in hell we were telling Georgina where Sharon was. Ever. That there was no need for her to know because she was never, ever going to see her again. Never have any contact with her again.
At that point, Remy lay back in bed, fully clothed, and closed his eyes. He said I need to think long and hard about that. That we needed to think about it.
Falling back on my old ways, I went into the bathroom and closed the door.
My gaze shifts to Georgina again. She’s still painting. A part of me wants to tell her to get up and get ready to go because she’s going with me. No argument. I’m the parent, here. But a part of me wants to give her what she wants. To give her anything she wants, say anything she wants so she’ll love me. Or at least look at me.
“I don’t know, Georgina,” I stall. “I don’t know if I’m comfortable leaving you here alone.”
She turns around to look at me. I can see that she’s been crying; her eyes are red and puffy. Her skin is splotchy. Which makes me want to cry.
“I’m sixteen,” she says softly. “I used to stay home alone all the time when M—Sharon worked. I’ll be fine.”
Her gaze is mesmerizing. And she’s right. She’s sixteen years old, I tell myself. Sixteen-year-olds stay home alone all the time. They babysit children. Hell, some sixteen-year-olds have children of their own. “It would just be an hour,” I hear myself say. “And then . . . maybe I could help you paint?”
She nods. Then she dips the brush carefully into the gray paint, turns her back to me, and returns to what she was doing.
I back out of the room, slipping my cell phone out of my jeans pocket.
Walking down the hall, toward the staircase, I dial Remy. It goes to voice mail. I don’t leave a message. As I go down the stairs, I glance up at the gray-haired, gray-bearded men watching me. Men I never knew. Men Remy never even knew, except his grandfather. What would the Broussard men do? Would they leave their great-granddaughter alone in the house after everything that’s happened? Would they trust that God would protect her?
When I reach the bottom of the stairs, I autodial Ann. She picks up on the first ring.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” I say quietly. I don’t want Georgina to hear me. “I have to run to the office.”
“Okay?”
I hear what sounds like dishes rattling and, lower in the background, music. Jazz. “Georgina wants to stay here,” I tell Ann.
“But you don’t want her to?”
“No.” It comes out in a whoosh of breath. “How can I leave her here? How can I ever leave her anywhere ever again?”
“She’s sixteen years old.”
I sit down on the bottom step of the staircase. The wood is worn from a hundred years of footsteps. I find that comforting; it’s one of the reasons I love this house. “That’s what she said.”
The dish clatter stops. “She wasn’t kidnapped because you left her alone,” Ann says gently.
“I know that.”
“It just happened, Harper. And it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t Remy’s fault because he had to pee.”
My throat tightens. “I know,” I manage.
“It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Bad things happen sometimes.”
“I know.”
“Georgina’s your daughter.”
Ann’s quiet for a moment, then, but I can tell from the inflection in her voice that she wants to say something else. I wait for it.
“She’s your daughter,” she says. “Not your prisoner.”
I close my eyes. “I called Remy to ask him what he thought. I’ll only be gone an hour. He didn’t pick up.”
“Remy would leave her,” Ann says. “What’s she doing?”
I open my eyes. Lift my head. “Painting. Her room.”
“Gray.”
“Gray,” I echo.
Ann sighs. I hear the dishes again.
“Harper, if you want Georgina to be a normal teenager, I think you need to treat her like one. Normal sixteen-year-old teenagers stay home alone. Of course, normal teenagers are at school on a Thursday at ten thirty in the morning,” she adds.
An incoming text beeps in my ear. I lower the phone long enough to see that it’s Jojo and then lift it again. She forgot a check for a field trip. She wants me to drop it off. “She’s going to school next week. I thought she should stay home another week, but . .
. she wants to go. She’s worried about missing classes. She’s an academic, this one.” I smile at the thought. I was that way in high school, too. I never missed a day, not even when I was sick.
“And she’s okay about transferring to Ursuline?”
I get to my feet. “No, but Remy told her we made the decision she’d go to school with Jojo and it wasn’t really up for discussion. It just makes sense for her to go here instead of across town.”
“Absolutely,” Ann agrees.
I face the staircase, glancing up. “So you’d leave her here?”
“I would. But if you can’t do it yet, Harper, you can’t do it. I’d offer to come over and stay with her, but I have a dental appointment. You know how it is with an appointment with a hygienist.”
I start up the stairs. “You cancel and it will be six months before you can get another appointment.”
“Exactly.”
Halfway up, I stop. “You think she’ll be okay?”
“She’ll be fine,” Ann assures me, sounding far more confident than I feel. “She wants to stay, right?”
“Right,” I agree. “And I’ll just be an hour.” I exhale. “Thanks, Ann.”
“Anytime, sweetie.”
I go to Georgina’s bedroom. She’s moved to the second window. I just stand there in the doorway for a moment. My anxiety is almost overwhelming. I feel short of breath and my armpits are damp. This is so hard. Why is this so hard? God brought my baby back to me. Why can’t I trust Him to keep an eye on her for an hour while I’m gone? I touch the tiny crucifix under my T-shirt. “So . . . I’m going to go to the office now.”
She turns around. “You are?” She sounds surprised that I’m actually going to leave her.
Not any more surprised than I am. “I’ll be an hour. Let me give you my cell phone number.”
Finding Georgina Page 10
