“Please don’t be angry at your mother. She didn’t mean…”
“I know. You don’t have to explain.”
“She loves you.”
“I know that, too. It’s just this dance we do. Guess we’ve been doing it for so long, it’s become ingrained.”
Silence.
“What is it you want, Lili? Did my mother ask you to come in here?”
“No. I was just hoping that…maybe…”
“Maybe…?”
“We could talk?”
“You want to talk?”
Caroline pictured Lili nodding her head.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“I don’t know. Whatever. I guess I was hoping maybe we could get to know each other better.”
“We don’t know each other at all.”
“I’d like to. Get to know you,” Lili said.
“Why? I doubt you’ll be sticking around long once we get the DNA results back.”
“You’re so sure I’m not your sister?”
“You have to admit it’s a long shot. But what the hell? We’ll know in a few days. No point speculating.”
“Do you remember her at all?” Lili asked. “Samantha, I mean.”
Another silence, longer than the first.
“You were five when she was taken,” Lili pressed.
“So?”
“So, you should have some memories of her.”
“Should I?”
“Don’t you?”
“I guess.”
“What was she like?”
“She was two years old.”
“Two-year-olds have personalities. Was she funny? Quiet? Did she make you laugh? Did she cry a lot? Was she a happy baby?”
Caroline imagined a look of irritation spreading across Michelle’s face. She held her breath, waiting for an explosion of sarcasm. Surprisingly, the voice that emerged was quiet and free of vitriol. “I remember this one time she found my mother’s Velcro rollers and she stuck them all in her hair, and she was running around the house wearing nothing but a diaper and my mother’s big, fuzzy pink slippers, with these crazy-looking rollers sticking out of her head at all these weird angles, and she looked so proud of herself, and my mother was laughing so hard, and I remember wishing I could make her laugh like that, and then getting angry and marching over and pushing Samantha to the floor and yanking the rollers out of her hair. And she started crying, and, of course, my mother got mad and yelled at me.”
I’d forgotten all about that, Caroline thought, tears filling her eyes as she recalled the halo of Velcro rollers clinging to Samantha’s beautiful little head and the sweet smile on her beautiful little mouth as she scurried happily from room to room. She could also see the look of rage on Michelle’s face as she pushed her sister to the floor and began tearing the rollers from her hair.
“You were jealous,” Lili said. “That’s pretty normal. I have two younger brothers, and until they were born, I was it, as far as my parents were concerned. And then along came Alex, and then Max, and I stopped being the center of the universe. It took some getting used to.”
“Is that why you’re doing this? To be the center of the universe again?”
“What else do you remember about Samantha?” Lili prodded, ignoring Michelle’s question.
“That’s about it.”
“Do you remember anything about that night in Mexico?”
Another silence, this one lasting so long that Caroline decided Michelle had no intention of answering it.
“I try not to,” Michelle said finally.
“So you do remember something.”
“I remember my mother screaming.”
Caroline felt her breath seize in her lungs and she threw her hands over her mouth in order to stifle the gasp about to escape.
“That must have been terrifying.”
“Must have been,” Michelle repeated without inflection.
“What else do you remember?”
“I remember trying to hold on to her, and her pushing me away.”
Caroline recalled Michelle’s efforts to cling to her and her own feelings of being suffocated, the panic of not being able to breathe, her irrational fear that Michelle was leeching the air right out of her body. Had she really pushed the child away?
“I’m sure she didn’t mean to…”
“Maybe not. Or maybe it didn’t happen that way at all. Maybe I dreamt the whole thing. I was a child. Children get confused. They imagine all sorts of crazy things. Look,” she continued, unprompted, “even if it did happen, I don’t blame her for pushing me away. I don’t even blame her for not loving me the way she did Samantha. I give her a hard time about it, but I understand. I honestly do. Samantha was this beautiful, really easy baby, always smiling, always happy. She was just…lovable. And I was, as my mother has been known to say, ‘difficult.’ I was whiny. I was demanding. I was clingy. In a word, I was a brat.” She paused, blowing a long, audible breath into the air. “I was a brat before Mexico. I was a brat after. I’m a brat now.”
“I don’t think you’re a brat.”
“Sure you do.”
“Brats don’t volunteer at hospices.”
“They do when they’ve been ordered to by the courts.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She hasn’t told you?”