Something felt really different this time, especially when we woke to find a news truck parked outside our house. They hadn’t been around in years, not since the early days of Sarah’s disappearance. And even then, the media had seemed a little halfhearted, questioning whether this fifteen-year-old girl was a runaway or a victim. They had lingered for a day or two, then vanished as quickly as they had come. Now, as we walked out to Detective Donally’s car, they swarmed in with cameras. Mom and Dad pointedly ignored one reporter as she asked, “Do you think you’ve finally found your daughter, after four years? Is it her? Why do you believe it’s her?” I glanced at the woman, her face caked in thick makeup, black liner around her eyes. She probably had to do that for the camera, but it made her appear witchy, her face tight and intense. “Where has she been? Do you know anything about who abducted her?” She never took her eyes off Mom, even when the cameraman switched off the bright light on his camera and lowered it to his side, watching us drive away.
In the car on the way to the airport, Detective Donally went over everything, handing Mom a folder. “Don’t be too disturbed by what you see in there,” he cautioned, turning around in his seat. “Some of those injuries the doctor asked about may have been sustained while, uh, she was . . .” He trailed off as my mind went to the list of things my sister never had: cigarette burns on her arms and back. Broken bones. Missing teeth. The Sarah we lost had had a scar under her chin, but otherwise she had been perfect. If this girl really was her, she was coming back altered, broken.
In the car, there had been a lot to review. The detective wasn’t coming with us—we were on our own until we touched down in Florida—so he told us what we could expect, something about a type of amnesia, how to act when we saw her. I listened, but only halfway. I didn’t want to believe anything, not yet. I looked out the window, watching my familiar neighborhood roll by.
After the flurry of the previous afternoon and the ride to the airport, we were quiet on the plane ride. It was just like that day in the car, going to see the body. Would it be her? What if it was her? What if it wasn’t?
Mom had taken something, a pill the doctor gave her to calm her nerves, and she collapsed in her seat, still holding Dad’s hand tightly, even as she slept with her mouth hanging open. I looked out the window again, my eyes drifting shut, trying not to think about the last day I saw Sarah. How mad she had been. I couldn’t play that old movie in my head. Not again. But the memory came anyhow. I had borrowed her gray, soft cashmere sweater without asking. I thought she would never notice. I had put it back into her closet, hung carefully.
“What did you do to my sweater, Nico?” She stood in the doorway of my room, holding the sweater in one hand. It looked limp and shapeless. Had I done that? “Did you tie it around your waist? Yes, you did.” She held it up so I could see the sleeves were now somehow too long. “I told you not to do that, didn’t I?”
I didn’t remember her saying that—although she did say I wasn’t allowed to borrow any of her clothes.
“You’re fat, and when you tie something of mine around your fat waist, it gets all stretched out—got it?” she said.
“I’m not fat,” I countered, eyeing her lean frame in my doorway. “Mom says you were the same when you were ten.”
“Well, you’re not ten. You’re almost twelve. And, sorry, but I was never as fat as you. So do me a favor: Stay. The fuck. Out. Of. My. Closet.” She stepped forward with each word until she was standing over me. I waited for it: the slap, the shove, for Sarah’s eyes to rove around my room and find something precious to me and destroy it. But she kept her eyes locked on mine and didn’t move or reach out to hit me.
“Fine,” I said, feeling my eyes fill with tears. My weight had been a problem since fourth grade. While I used to be able to wear my sister’s old clothes, suddenly, around when I turned nine, they no longer fit. Sarah went through puberty and sprouted up, growing four inches in one year. Her legs went from short and chubby to lean and shapely almost overnight. Her waist cinched in, and hours of cheerleading practice toned everything in all the right places. Her hand-me-down jeans were too tight and too long. The button-up shirts barely closed over my round tummy.
“Sarah was exactly the same way at your age,” Mom said, taking me through the plus-size racks at the mall. “Don’t even worry about it—you’ll get your growth spurt and you’ll shoot right up, like Sarah did.”
Mom had been right. Of course, the irony was it had happened after Sarah disappeared. I didn’t eat—couldn’t eat—for what seemed like weeks. And no one slept. Gram came to stay with us then, to help out Mom and Dad. She did the cooking and cleaning, took me to school when I finally went back. She was the one who scraped my full plate into the garbage can every night before doing the dishes, who noticed that my lunch box came back still filled with uneaten sandwiches, cookies, and chips. All the foods I had once loved, the foods that Sarah told me were making me fat, now made me feel sick. Bagels, pizza—the things she denied herself to be thin I now denied myself as if in her memory.