I could only nod, seeing my best friend with her curly dark hair holding Sarah’s pink shirt. It was a beautiful color for Tessa. She should have it. I knew she should, but part of me, deep inside, screamed: No. Don’t. Put it back.
“What was she like, your sister? I mean, I get that she was really good at school and cheer and everything.” Tessa walked back over to the board, looking now at the photos of Sarah and her friends that were pinned there. She leaned in to look at one closely, of Sarah and Paula. “But what was she really like?”
I stood in Sarah’s room and looked at all her perfect things that went with her perfect life. She was perfect, I wanted to say. She was beautiful and smart. She always won. She always got what she wanted.
“She was awful,” I said. “She was really awful.”
CHAPTER 10
WHEN WE CAME BACK into the house, Mom reminded me that later in the day, a counselor from the Center for Missing Children would be over to meet with us. “Just to help us all get used to this. It’s a lot to handle.” She delivered the news with a sense of glee and lightness in her voice as she cleaned up the kitchen from breakfast. She lifted Sarah’s coffee mug from the table and cradled it in her hands for a moment, gazing at it as if she didn’t know if she should put it in a museum or into the dishwasher.
The last time we’d had a counselor over, it was to help us deal with Sarah’s disappearance. He had come over every day at first, then once a week, and then the sessions stopped. Those were dark days for me, for all three of us. I didn’t remember a lot of it. How we got through it. I remember being told I had to eat, and Mom’s doctor giving her some pills that she shared with me so that I could sleep. The nightmares were terrible. But, like everything else, those stopped too. Now we would be meeting a counselor under very different circumstances, and I could tell that Mom was thrilled to be a success story—to need help welcoming her daughter back into the family instead of dealing with a devastating loss.
“Tessa is going to bring by your homework assignments this afternoon, but I think Monday is soon enough to go back to school, don’t you?” Mom asked.
I nodded and picked up a bite of bagel that was left on my plate, eating it before Mom could clear it from the table.
Mom touched my arm and looked into my eyes. “I know it’s a lot, Nico, all of it. Sarah being gone, Sarah being back. I don’t want you to ever think that Daddy and I have lost sight of what’s important in all of this. Of how important you are to us. You and Sarah.”
“Mom, I know.” I shrugged. We didn’t have a lot of heart-to-heart emotional talks in our family—it made me uncomfortable.
“I mean it, Nico, I really mean it. The past few years have been hard on you—on all of us.” She hesitated. “Sometimes I think we didn’t handle Sarah’s disappearance right.”
When she said that, I shook my head. What was the “right” way to deal? What did she think she had done wrong?
Mom went on. “I know you suffered, we all did. I just . . .” She stopped for a moment before finishing her thought. “I want to handle her return right—does that make sense?”
I nodded, noticing tears brimming in her eyes. Suddenly, she smiled.
“It is going to take some time. It’s all just so strange, every little thing, I mean, look—I’m doing breakfast dishes for two girls, my girls—” She broke down, her face crumpling in before she turned her back to me and busied herself at the sink. “I’m so happy to be doing just the ordinary things, the simplest things.” She let out a light laugh. “I know I’m a silly woman.”
“No, I get it,” I agreed, thinking of how good it felt to make Sarah a cup of coffee, to grab her a pair of shoes. “I do.”
I went upstairs to my room, where I noticed my closet was still open. I pushed the door shut, thinking about how Sarah was, right now, at the police station, wearing my shoes. It gave me such an odd feeling, like I was connected to her somehow.
I went into the hallway and stood outside her door for a moment, the room that had been empty for four years. I turned the knob and went in, noticing first that she had carefully made the bed. Neat, as always, everything in its place.
On the bedside table was a book from Sarah’s shelf: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, one of Sarah’s favorites. She had made us all watch the old black-and-white movie years ago when she was working on a book report. The story was dull and forgettable—something about a guy who had killed his wife because she was cheating on him. That was the big reveal. Sarah had read the book several times, and now it looked like she was reading it again.
I moved to the desk and opened a few drawers, finding everything the same as it had been for years. The closet too was untouched. I looked at Sarah’s shoe rack, trying to decide if Mom had given her the flats from here or from her own closet, but it was hard to tell. I hadn’t memorized every pair of shoes in the closet and where they went, but now I found myself wishing I had.