I guess he saw my eyes looking at the door, at all the locks there. He put his cigarette out. “Don’t even think about trying to run off—that arm is nothing compared to what you’ll get.” He took off his white T-shirt, stretching it over his head. His chest had lots of hair and, under that, tattoos marked his skin. I sat with him and did everything he told me to do until he heard her car in the driveway and then he said to run, run back into the room, and I better not say a goddamn thing or I would be so goddamn sorry.
The door locked behind me. When I heard the voices later, they sounded happy. They forgot to bring me anything for dinner, but that was okay. I was happy—as happy as I could be in the small room with the dark window. I thought the hurting had stopped. But I was wrong.
CHAPTER 7
THERE WOULD BE NO interviews, no media. My parents decided that right away. Sarah was too fragile, she needed to see doctors. And that wasn’t the only reason. The detectives in Florida had told us something terrifying: Whoever had taken Sarah might not have let her go. She might have escaped. If she had, they might come back for her—worried that she would remember. Worried that she was only pretending she had amnesia. They told us we weren’t allowed to say anything to anyone, even family, about her ordeal and what she could (or couldn’t) remember. This suited Mom perfectly. “Our family is our priority, not People magazine,” I heard her say into her cell on the drive home. We rode in a black SUV on the way home from the airport, Mom next to Sarah while Dad and I sat in the back.
“A press release is fine, as long as I have approval over it, but I really don’t want reporters and media calling the house or coming by,” she explained. “How can we keep our address out of print?” The years that Mom had spent helping others to get their children back were coming in handy now: training for how to handle everything that might come our way.
Sarah looked out the window at the scenery rolling by and I tried to see it through her eyes. As we left the city and came into Mapleview, the suburbs sprawled. Golf courses, playgrounds, and parks surrounded by turn-of-the-century homes on streets with names like Spring Oak and Fern Dell.
When finally the car pulled to a stop in front of our gray-and-white house, she moved to the door and looked out at the carefully manicured lawn, up at the second floor. “Do you remember this?” Dad asked cautiously.
Sarah nodded, her lank blond hair bobbing. She had barely spoken since we’d left the shelter, but now she offered up one word, “yes,” in a whisper.
The news van was gone and, while I didn’t quite know how Mom had managed it, there were no reporters waiting in the bushes for us. We simply got out of the car and went into the house. Once inside, the three of us stood and watched as Sarah moved, silently, through each room, laying her hands on things and looking out the windows. Mom couldn’t help herself and had to ask, “Do you remember this? How about this? Any of this look familiar?”
In the front room, she stopped at the piano and slowly picked up a framed photo of our family—the one that had been used on the news after Sarah went missing. “I remember that dress,” she said, running her hands over the image.
“You do? Oh, that’s so great.” Mom practically clapped and Dad was beaming. I tried to see our home as she must see it now. Two floors, spacious and decorated with Mom’s flair for beautiful antiques. The money to live in this neighborhood hadn’t come just from Dad’s work, though he made tons. Some of it was from Mom’s family too—she had grown up this way. I looked around at all the nice things we had, the beauty of our home that I took for granted. The den with a surround sound system, the kitchen full of expensive appliances and chef’s oven. What the counselor had said about Sarah being starved floated into my head as I watched her run her fingers over the fruit bowl on the marble counter—apples and pears, carefully polished. They weren’t really ever eaten, not by us anyhow. The cleaning lady just shined them up and replaced them when they went soft.
“Would you like something to eat?” Mom asked.
Sarah nodded, her eyes still darting around the room until Dad said, “Let’s sit down.”
Sarah pulled out the chair closest to her and sat down at the table while we all froze for a moment. That was my seat. Sarah’s chair was on the other side of the table, Mom and Dad on either end. That’s how it always had been since Sarah and I were little.
“Well, um, Nico, why don’t you sit here?” Dad said, pulling out the chair on the other side. The chair that had been empty for four years: Sarah’s chair.
I sat down with a stiff back, as if I didn’t really want the chair to touch me, while Mom busied herself at the counter, putting together a sandwich for Sarah. “We don’t have the kind of cheese you like,” she said, almost talking to herself.