The Stranger Game Read online

  We were arguing about a slang verb conjugation when Mom came and stood in the doorway of the den. I muted the TV and looked up, expecting her to ask us what we wanted for dinner. She had a curious look on her face. “I’ve just had the oddest call,” she began, then hesitated, looking over at Tessa, “from a children’s shelter in Florida.”

  “Cómo?” I joked. Tessa shoved my shoulder. “What did they say?”

  “Well, they have a girl there. She says her name is Sarah Morris.”

  When Mom said Sarah’s whole name, I felt a shiver run through my body. “Children’s shelter?” I repeated. “Sarah would be nineteen now, hardly a child.” I aimed the remote at the TV and turned the sound back on, wishing Mom would leave. I didn’t want to talk about Sarah, not now.

  Mom shrugged and disappeared back into her office, and I heard the printer running a few minutes later. She came back into the den and sat next to me, showing me a printed photo without a word. The image was in color, of a girl with light eyes and blond hair. Her hair was lank and hung on either side of her face, her eyes looked tired, her skin was broken out, her lips chapped and thin. There was beauty there, though weathered, older than the Sarah we’d known. I clicked the TV off and sat up, my hands shaking as I took the photo from Mom.

  “Nico, you okay?” Tessa asked, moving closer and looking over my shoulder. “Who is that?”

  Mom let out a little laugh. “She says she’s Sarah Morris.”

  We all sat silently for a moment, just looking at the photo. The girl was the right age. She looked about twenty, maybe older. I stared into the eyes in the photo, but they were flat, unreadable. Cold.

  “Should I call your father?”

  Mom knew that Dad hated to be bothered at work with every lead. I took another look at the image . . . something about her eyes. They were so blank, so empty. More brown than green now. What could do that to a person?

  “Yeah, you should call him,” I finally managed to mumble. “Because I think this is her.”

  SARAH

  THERE WERE SOME GOOD days, some okay days, in the beginning. And I still think that if I had been better at the rules, if I could have just been good, like they wanted me to be, maybe it wouldn’t have all gone wrong. But the day I woke up and the door was still locked, I didn’t know what to do. They told me to be quiet, or else. But I needed to go to the bathroom. So badly. I knocked on the door from the inside, quietly. “Hello?”

  An hour went by, maybe more. Or maybe less. When you have to go, it’s all you can think about. I tried walking around. Sitting. Lying. I knocked on the door, louder this time. “Please! I have to go to the bathroom.” Quiet. Or else.

  The day went on and on and no one came. No food. No water. And still, I had to go.

  Then I cried, another rule broken. No crying. I looked at the small pink plastic garbage can in the corner. I looked at it and looked at it and then I couldn’t wait anymore. I took the can and used it as a toilet. And oh! The relief. I felt like I could live again, like it would be all right. Even if they left me here, even if I had no food.

  I went to put the can back in the corner, but then I saw there was a little hole in the bottom, just big enough. And everything was leaking out, just like a little river. I didn’t know how to stop it. So I took off my nightgown and I put it under the can. The nightgown just got all wet, and the pee kept running down and down out of the can until it was almost empty, and all the pee was on the nightgown that was on the rug in the corner.

  I took the nightgown, wet and dripping, and shoved it deep under the bed, against the wall. And then I sat and looked out the window as hours and hours went by. I was in just my underwear when they finally opened the door. It had been a whole other day, I was so tired and hungry, and I needed water so badly.

  “What the hell is that . . .” He looked around, angry, sniffing. “What did you do?” He grabbed my arm and dragged me off the bed, across the rug that ripped at my skin, while I cried and screamed. He hit me. “You’re a dirty girl, a bad girl!” And what started as a slap turned worse, turned so bad I wished I’d never been born. “No crying. How many times do I have to tell you?”

  After that, it seemed like he had decided about me, that I was bad and could never be good. I never had a second chance. I couldn’t stop crying. No matter how hard I tried. I had failed, and I would always be bad in his eyes. And bad girls had to be punished. There were rules, didn’t you know that? There had to be rules.

  CHAPTER 4

  I CLOSED MY EYES on the flight, just for a moment, but found myself drifting into a light dreamscape. None of us had slept last night, not really. This morning we left early for the airport for our flight to Florida. The Center for Missing Children had arranged all the details. It was as if our lives had been in slow motion for the past few years, and now everything was happening all at once.

  The detectives came over just hours after Mom got the call and the photo. Then Mom’s friends from the center. Everyone was pacing around, taking over different rooms, talking on their phones. A flight was arranged. A car at the airport. The detectives spoke with the doctor at the children’s shelter in Florida. More photos were sent. More questions. Did Sarah ever break her arm? No. Did she have burns on her back? No. Did she have a scar under her chin? Yes, yes, she did! Yay for the scar under the chin! From falling off the monkey bars at school when she was five. I could tell my parents were so afraid to hope, afraid that with every question this was going to unravel like so many other leads had.

  Something felt really different this time, especially when we woke to find a news truck parked outside our house. They hadn’t been around in years, not since the early days of Sarah’s disappearance. And even then, the media had seemed a little halfhearted, questioning whether this fifteen-year-old girl was a runaway or a victim. They had lingered for a day or two, then vanished as quickly as they had come. Now, as we walked out to Detective Donally’s car, they swarmed in with cameras. Mom and Dad pointedly ignored one reporter as she asked, “Do you think you’ve finally found your daughter, after four years? Is it her? Why do you believe it’s her?” I glanced at the woman, her face caked in thick makeup, black liner around her eyes. She probably had to do that for the camera, but it made her appear witchy, her face tight and intense. “Where has she been? Do you know anything about who abducted her?” She never took her eyes off Mom, even when the cameraman switched off the bright light on his camera and lowered it to his side, watching us drive away.

  In the car on the way to the airport, Detective Donally went over everything, handing Mom a folder. “Don’t be too disturbed by what you see in there,” he cautioned, turning around in his seat. “Some of those injuries the doctor asked about may have been sustained while, uh, she was . . .” He trailed off as my mind went to the list of things my sister never had: cigarette burns on her arms and back. Broken bones. Missing teeth. The Sarah we lost had had a scar under her chin, but otherwise she had been perfect. If this girl really was her, she was coming back altered, broken.

  In the car, there had been a lot to review. The detective wasn’t coming with us—we were on our own until we touched down in Florida—so he told us what we could expect, something about a type of amnesia, how to act when we saw her. I listened, but only halfway. I didn’t want to believe anything, not yet. I looked out the window, watching my familiar neighborhood roll by.

  After the flurry of the previous afternoon and the ride to the airport, we were quiet on the plane ride. It was just like that day in the car, going to see the body. Would it be her? What if it was her? What if it wasn’t?

  Mom had taken something, a pill the doctor gave her to calm her nerves, and she collapsed in her seat, still holding Dad’s hand tightly, even as she slept with her mouth hanging open. I looked out the window again, my eyes drifting shut, trying not to think about the last day I saw Sarah. How mad she had been. I couldn’t play that old movie in my head. Not again. But the memory came anyhow. I had borrowed her gray, soft c
ashmere sweater without asking. I thought she would never notice. I had put it back into her closet, hung carefully.

  “What did you do to my sweater, Nico?” She stood in the doorway of my room, holding the sweater in one hand. It looked limp and shapeless. Had I done that? “Did you tie it around your waist? Yes, you did.” She held it up so I could see the sleeves were now somehow too long. “I told you not to do that, didn’t I?”

  I didn’t remember her saying that—although she did say I wasn’t allowed to borrow any of her clothes.

  “You’re fat, and when you tie something of mine around your fat waist, it gets all stretched out—got it?” she said.

  “I’m not fat,” I countered, eyeing her lean frame in my doorway. “Mom says you were the same when you were ten.”

  “Well, you’re not ten. You’re almost twelve. And, sorry, but I was never as fat as you. So do me a favor: Stay. The fuck. Out. Of. My. Closet.” She stepped forward with each word until she was standing over me. I waited for it: the slap, the shove, for Sarah’s eyes to rove around my room and find something precious to me and destroy it. But she kept her eyes locked on mine and didn’t move or reach out to hit me.

  “Fine,” I said, feeling my eyes fill with tears. My weight had been a problem since fourth grade. While I used to be able to wear my sister’s old clothes, suddenly, around when I turned nine, they no longer fit. Sarah went through puberty and sprouted up, growing four inches in one year. Her legs went from short and chubby to lean and shapely almost overnight. Her waist cinched in, and hours of cheerleading practice toned everything in all the right places. Her hand-me-down jeans were too tight and too long. The button-up shirts barely closed over my round tummy.

  “Sarah was exactly the same way at your age,” Mom said, taking me through the plus-size racks at the mall. “Don’t even worry about it—you’ll get your growth spurt and you’ll shoot right up, like Sarah did.”

  Mom had been right. Of course, the irony was it had happened after Sarah disappeared. I didn’t eat—couldn’t eat—for what seemed like weeks. And no one slept. Gram came to stay with us then, to help out Mom and Dad. She did the cooking and cleaning, took me to school when I finally went back. She was the one who scraped my full plate into the garbage can every night before doing the dishes, who noticed that my lunch box came back still filled with uneaten sandwiches, cookies, and chips. All the foods I had once loved, the foods that Sarah told me were making me fat, now made me feel sick. Bagels, pizza—the things she denied herself to be thin I now denied myself as if in her memory.

  Gram finally took me aside. Held me in front of a mirror, showed me my own face. “You have to eat,” she said quietly. “And get some sleep.” She patted my shoulder as I looked at myself, what I had become. Sarah had been missing for three months and the weight had slipped away from my face, the roundness of childhood was suddenly gone, and in its place I saw cheekbones. Sarah would be so proud, no longer embarrassed by her fat little sister. I also saw dark purple smears under my eyes, a pale chill on my skin, and a coldness to my expression that hadn’t been there before.

  In those first weeks, it was Grammie who took me to school every day and, I think, waited outside in her car at the gate until school let out. She was always parked in the same place, a small smile on her face like she was relieved to see me, as if I too might just one day disappear if she didn’t keep an eye on me at all times. And then I started to grow—inches, it seemed—overnight, looking more like my missing sister every day. My school uniform pants were too short and too big in the waist, sleeves pulled up to the elbows. Mom was so lost in her world of searching for Sarah she didn’t notice.

  One night, sitting at the dinner table, while I picked at my salad, she looked over at me and blinked, as if she had seen a ghost. “Have you grown, Nico? Your top doesn’t seem to fit.”

  I shrugged, not wanting to acknowledge that she was right. I had just turned twelve. I needed a bra. I needed new clothes. But somehow admitting that would be wrong—it would mean that months had gone by, it was turning from fall into winter, things were changing, including me. And Sarah was still gone.

  Before bed, Mom came into my room, carrying clothes on hangers. It took a moment for my mind to register what they were: Sarah’s uniforms, her perfectly pressed navy skirts and tailored white tops with Peter Pan collars and cuffed sleeves. “Why don’t you try these until we can take you shopping?”

  I said nothing until she was out of the room, then I carefully picked them up. I couldn’t help myself, I held the shirt to my face and breathed it in, but there was no scent of Sarah left—not even fabric softener. Then I walked next door to my sister’s room and hung the clothes back in her closet, just like they had been before—the skirts all together on one side, shirts on the other. If Sarah came back, I wanted her to know I hadn’t touched her things, that I hadn’t worn anything, not even her best stuff. I would never make that mistake again.

  SARAH

  SOMETHING WAS WRONG WITH my arm. Very wrong. It hurt so bad where he twisted and pulled on me, and I couldn’t really use my fingers. My face hurt too, but that wasn’t so bad. After a day or two, my eye opened back up and I could see again. At night, it would swell up and the headache would come back and I would have to lie on the bed in the dark and be still, very still. I would just listen to them. Fighting, always fighting. And other voices too.

  After a few days, I didn’t want to complain, but my arm just wasn’t working and when I moved it, I hurt so much I felt like I might throw up. When she saw what he had done, she was so angry. “What happened to her arm?”

  “I dunno—maybe she fell down or something, she’s clumsy.”

  “Goddamnit, now we have to take her to a doctor—her arm’s broke, you stupid shit!”

  Then the arguing. That went on for hours, it seemed like. It was night when she came back. She wrapped up my arm tight in a bandage. Then she tied a scarf around my neck and made a sling that my arm could rest in. The scarf was pink and soft. “Now you’ll eat something, won’t you? Be a good girl.” She gave me a white pill for the hurt and a peanut butter sandwich. The bread was brown and very dry, but I didn’t want to make any more trouble, so I ate it and took the pill with the milk. In my dreams, I was back home again, and everything was like it used to be. Even the feel of the soft blanket on the bed was the same, as if I was drifting back in time, back to that place, where I was little and I felt safe. As if I could.

  CHAPTER 5

  I HAD NEVER SAID the words I love you to Sarah. And I was pretty sure she had never said them to me. We weren’t a family like that. There were not abundant hugs and cuddling on the couch, like I had seen at friends’ houses. There was an occasional light hug from Mom, maybe just a loose wrap of arms around your body after a tennis match or getting a lead role in the school play. But usually it was a shoulder squeeze or a hand on the back to say good job or you are loved.

  As we were ushered down the linoleum-lined hallway of the children’s shelter, lit overhead by bluish fluorescents, this was all I could think about: How would my parents greet this person? Would they embrace her? Would I be expected to hug her, this girl who looked like my sister but who I had probably never hugged in my entire life. Would we all rush to her and pull her into our arms?

  Inside, the building was cool and had a slightly metallic smell, not like the wet heat outside that had hit us the moment we were off the plane. Back home, it was still early spring—damp and green, with clumps of snow melting and plants sprouting everywhere. Here, the air was hot and heavy, and the sun so bright I felt an instant headache the moment I walked outside the airport. I had never been to Florida before.

  I wanted to believe it was just the heat, the humidity, that made me feel light-headed. My fingers were tingling and my mouth was dry and felt pasty. Once at the shelter, we were again taken to a nondescript office, almost like at the police station, and asked to sit in green vinyl chairs and wait.

  Mom and Dad were silent unti
l I turned to Mom and confessed, “I don’t feel good.” Then she jumped into action.

  “What’s wrong? You feel sick, like, to your stomach?” She put her hand on my forehead, my neck.

  I shook my head. “I just feel funny, a headache, sort of, but . . .” I put my hand to my stomach. I couldn’t put the feeling into words. Fear? Nausea?

  “It’s probably a migraine, you know I get them all the time.” Mom opened her purse and I could see the file from the detective tucked in there. The sight of it made bile rise up my throat. What were we doing here? What was about to happen?

  Mom took a small brown prescription bottle out of her bag and opened it.

  “Don’t give her one of those,” Dad murmured, shaking his head. I thought about his Scotch bottle, in the den on the drinks cart. The first thing he did every night when he got home was put down his briefcase and pour himself a drink.

  “Just a half.” Mom tipped a broken white pill from the bottle and handed it to me. I swallowed it, dry, just as there was a quick knock on the door behind us. We all turned, startled, expecting to look up and see her—Sarah in her cheer uniform, her thick blond hair braided in a side pony, squinting at us with that look on her face: What are you doing here? as if we were an embarrassment to her.

  But it wasn’t Sarah; it was a tall woman in a gray dress, holding yet another file in her hands. She sat at the desk across from us and introduced herself. “You must be the Morris family. I wanted to review a few things. . . .” She opened the file.

  Mom seemed to vibrate, crossing and uncrossing her legs, adjusting her purse, first on one side, then the floor, then the back of the chair. She had been waiting almost four years, now this delay? This conversation? Couldn’t we just see her, talk later?