“Lots of kids are homeschooled these days. It doesn’t suggest anything sinister. And it makes sense in your case, if you moved as often as you claim.”
“It’s just that I’m so different from the rest of them. Not just how I look, but what I’m like, what I’m good at, how I feel about…I don’t know…everything. It’s like they’re on one planet and I’m on another. I’ve just never felt I belonged.”
Caroline almost laughed. She leaned against the kitchen counter, rubbed the bridge of her nose with her free hand. “You do realize you’re describing almost every teenager in America.”
“I guess.”
“What does your mother have to say?”
“About what?”
“About what?” Caroline repeated, incredulously. “About everything you’ve just told me.” There was a moment’s silence. It hovered, like an axe, above Caroline’s head. “She doesn’t know, does she?”
A long silence.
Of course the girl hadn’t confronted her mother with her suspicions. Or her plans to call Caroline. The whole idea was so ill-conceived, so far-fetched, so ludicrous.
And yet, so appealing, so comforting, so wonderful.
Her daughter. Alive. On the phone. After all these years.
Was it possible? Could it be possible?
No, it couldn’t. Even asking the question made her as delusional as the girl on the other end of the line.
“Look,” Caroline said forcefully, “I have to go. I’m already late for work.”
“No. Please don’t hang up.”
“Look, Lili,” she said, trying to keep her emotions in check, her voice as gentle as possible. “I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt here. I’m going to assume you’re just a very sensitive, lonely young lady who misses her father very much and is having trouble processing his death. Your imagination is in overdrive. But let’s look at this realistically. Just because you look more like a few sketches on the Internet than you do your family doesn’t mean…”
“We never had computers in the house,” the girl interrupted.
“I don’t understand. What’s that got to do with anything?” Caroline asked, although she did find it strange. Who didn’t have a computer in their home these days, especially if they were homeschooling their kids? “I’m sure your parents had their reasons…”
“They said they weren’t going to be one of those families who let technology rule their lives, that kids spend too much time on Facebook and looking at pornography…”
“Well, there you go. Wait,” Caroline said, pouncing on a perceived inconsistency as deftly as an early bird spearing a worm. “You told me before that you saw the sketches on the Internet. If you don’t have a computer…”
“I was at the library,” Lili explained easily. “This boy kept staring at me. He said I looked just like this girl who disappeared fifteen years ago. He’s the one who showed me the pictures.”
“They’re artist’s renderings, not photographs. They’re just projections, based on things like bone structure and shape of the eyes. No one knows how accurate they actually are. Look. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re not my daughter.”
“How can you be sure?”
Caroline said nothing. Hang up, she told herself. Hang up now.
“What if I take a DNA test?” the girl asked.
“What?”
“What if I take a DNA test?” she asked again.
“A DNA test,” Caroline repeated when she could think of nothing else to say.
“That way we’d know for certain one way or the other, wouldn’t we?”
Caroline nodded, although she said nothing. In her fantasies, Samantha simply showed up on her doorstep and fell into her waiting arms. There was an instant, instinctive connection. None of her imaginings had ever involved anything as clinical as DNA testing.
“So how would I go about getting tested?”
“I have no idea.” Caroline was reeling, her brain trapped inside a thick fog, unable to connect words or form cohesive thoughts. “I guess you’d have to contact the proper authorities,” she was finally able to spit out.
“Who are they?”
“I’m not sure. Probably the San Diego Police Department would be a good place to start.”
“I don’t live in San Diego.”
Caroline remembered the distinctive long-distance ring that had stopped her as she was heading for the front door. She should never have gone back, never have picked up the phone. “Where do you live?”
A sigh of hesitation. “I’d rather not say.”
Another sigh, this one Caroline’s. Of course the girl would rather not say. “Goodbye, Lili.”
“I live in Calgary.”
“Calgary?”
“Calgary, Alberta.”
“You’re Canadian?”
“No. I told you. We moved around a lot. We’ve been here for about two years. Before that, we lived in Seattle and before that, Madison, Wisconsin. I spent most of my childhood in Europe. We came here just before my father got sick.”
“And you’d be willing to come to San Diego?”