“No,” I answered quickly—that had been me. The time I fell down the stairs, Sarah standing at the top, looking down at me, a smirk on her face. An “accident,” just another accident. “Why?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, they think the break in her arm might have happened earlier, like ten years ago or more, from how it’s healed. But I was sure that couldn’t be right. She’s never broken a bone, from what I remember. But maybe a fracture, I mean unnoticed . . . from cheerleading, gymnastics, or something?”
I shrugged. I really couldn’t remember.
“Well, someone broke her arm.” Mom raised her voice, holding up a pile of papers. “You should see the things that have happened to her, it’s not just the burns. What they did . . .” I could tell from Mom’s face that she was talking about sex.
“Why does it matter?” I felt the words come out of my mouth and instantly regretted them.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Mom stood in front of me, her eyes narrowed.
“Nothing,” I mumbled, heading for the stairs.
“Nico, stop. I want you to explain to me what that meant, right now.”
I heard a small sound and looked up to the top of the stairs as a shadow moved there—Sarah, standing in the dark hallway, listening to every word.
“I just meant that I don’t know why this stuff matters—if she hurt her arm before or last year, who cares?”
“We are building a case against whoever did these things to your sister,” Mom pointed out. “And I want everything accounted for, every single thing they did. When this report”—she shook the papers in her hands—“when it goes to the police and the detectives, I want them to know about every burn, every broken bone, every time they raped her.” She stopped there and met my eyes, looking daggers at me. As if what had happened to Sarah was somehow my fault.
“Okay,” I said. “I get it. Maybe she did hurt her arm before—I remember her having a sling, from something—gymnastics.”
Suddenly Mom’s face changed with realization. “You know what, I remember that too—maybe it will be in the photo album, or Dad might remember. He has a better memory of these things.”
I wanted to ask her what the MRI showed about her brain damage, if they had an explanation for how she had changed so much, but Mom was already digging open the storage closet, pulling down old photo albums. And I was glad not to have asked when I saw, as I went up the stairs, Sarah’s door quietly close behind her.
CHAPTER 18
WE STARTED TO SLOWLY ease into a pattern of days as a family. I went to school, Mom stayed home with Sarah, and Dad went to work. I started to do my usual schedule again, with after-school stuff like tennis and the yearbook—everything but working at the help line. I had gotten a super-nice email from Marcia telling me to take a couple of weeks off to spend time with my family. “We welcome you with open arms as soon as you’re ready to come back, and look forward to meeting your sister,” she had written.
Sarah’s schedule was pretty full. She had doctors’ appointments during the day, mostly with a psychiatrist in the city—a two-hour round trip—but they seemed unhelpful for much other than her transitioning back into our lives.
“She still can’t remember anything, not one thing—not how they got her to Florida or how many people it was or even if they were male or female or both,” I heard Mom tell Dad one evening. The detectives hadn’t been back, but I knew that Sarah’s doctors were obligated to share their reports with the police. Any detail might be the clue that would allow them to track down her abductor or abductors.
Mom’s biggest fear was that whoever had taken Sarah let her go but might be holding other girls. Or what if they were running a ring of underage prostitutes, releasing them when they got too old to be interesting to clients? “They may have just replaced her with another girl, which means some other family out there is suffering like we were,” Mom said. Her crusade continued, looking for answers and trying to right the wrongs. It was as if she had been doing it so long, she couldn’t stop, even now that Sarah was finally home.
Part of me wished she would just let it go, so we could all move on. Sarah was back, our family was together, and I didn’t want to question where she had been or what had happened to her anymore. But it was hard for any of us to let go when we spent our days constantly reminding Sarah of things from the past: stuff she had done, what she had liked or disliked. It was all simple things, like her favorite foods, actors and singers she liked. Once we told her, she seemed to remember. “Right, I saw all of those vampire movies already,” she’d say, nodding. But I could never tell if it was true or if she just wanted us to believe that she remembered.