The Lost and the Found (7 page)

Laney leaned close to me, and I could smell toothpaste on her breath. “Why do you think he let her go? It's weird, isn't it?” she whispered, eyes wide.

“Fuck off, Laney.” Martha's timing was impeccable.

Laney flinched and turned to face Martha. “Excuse me, but this is a
private conversation.
”

Martha stood next to me and smiled sweetly. “I don't think so. In fact, I don't think it counts as a conversation at all when you just talk
at
someone. So why don't you leave Faith alone and go and cry over some Cambodian orphans or endangered pygmy elephants? Or endangered Cambodian pygmy elephants who also happen to be orphans.”

Laney was too shocked to speak. Her mouth opened and closed again.

Martha crossed her arms, looking like a burly bouncer. Martha is tall. Sturdy. Intimidating if you look at her in the right light. “Go. Away.”

Laney looked to me for help, eyes pleading. “I was just trying to…I really do care, you know.”

I nodded.

Laney fled, her gaggle of friends enveloping her, sweeping her away, and shooting us dirty looks at the same time.

Martha waved at them before turning to me. “You're welcome.”

“Thank you.”

We hugged. It's quite nice having your own personal bodyguard.

Martha and Thomas stuck to me like superglue for the rest of the week. If one of them wasn't with me, the other one was. Laney wasn't the only one who wanted to talk to me; the teachers were at it, too. At least I'd missed the special assembly they held on Monday.

It should have been nice, and I shouldn't have minded the attention. But it wasn't nice, and I did mind. I just want to be left alone. It's bad enough having photographers and camera crews stationed outside our house night and day—and a police car down the street—without being scrutinized at school, too. Hopefully things will get back to normal soon. Whatever normal is.

“L
aurel! Laurel! How does it feel to be coming home? Laurel! Can you tell us…?”

The front door closes, muffling the shouts from the yard. The curtains are already closed, but you can still see the flashes from the cameras. I wonder why they're still snapping away—there's nothing to see now that she's safely inside.

Dad locks the door and leans against it. “So much for them giving us some privacy,” he says. He was interviewed on the news last night—
on the eve of Laurel's homecoming
—and he'd asked for exactly that: privacy. Unfortunately, it seems that's the one thing the media is unable (unwilling) to give.

Mom's clasping her hands together and looking anxiously at Laurel, who is standing rooted to the spot, looking around the room, taking it all in. A teddy bear is nestled in the crook of her arm. It's battered and worn, and I can smell it from here. It also seems to be missing one arm. Barnaby has been through more than your average bear.

I bet the photographers got a shot of Laurel clutching the bear. That will be
the
photo—the one that will be on the Internet in a matter of minutes, on the news in a few hours, on the front page of the papers tomorrow morning. Maybe they'll print the old photo of Barnaby the Bear next to the new one. Maybe they'll use the word
poignant
a lot and draw ridiculous parallels between the bear and Laurel.

The noise from outside dies down. Laurel (and Barnaby) and I sit on the sofa and Dad takes the chair next to the fire. Mom makes tea. I notice Laurel staring at the mantelpiece—there's a picture of her, aged five, right in the middle. There's a picture of me around the same age, just off to one side. There are no pictures of my parents. In the old house, we used to have a photo of the two of them on their wedding day on the mantelpiece. They looked young and kind of drunk, both of them raising glasses of champagne to the camera. I wonder what happened to that picture.

Mom wanted to put up a “welcome home” banner, but I managed to convince her it would be tacky. It's the kind of thing you do when your daughter's come back from her gap year in Nicaragua or from a stay in the hospital, not when she's been kidnapped and repeatedly raped by a psychopath.

Laurel likes tea. Smith brought her tea when she was feeling sad. He said,
The world always looks brighter when you've got a mug of tea in your hand.
Mom was horrified when she heard that; she says almost exactly the same thing. When she was with him, Laurel always drank out of the same bright yellow mug with a smiley face on it, until she dropped it one day. It smashed on the concrete floor. Smith slapped her so hard she fell and cut her hand on one of the broken shards of mug. He stitched up the wound himself, doing such a good job that you can barely even see the scar on her palm. The police wondered if that meant that Smith might have been medically trained, but Laurel said she didn't think so. He had several huge medical books that he used to refer to whenever she was ill.

Mom comes back in with the tray and hands around the mugs. Laurel's is red, with her name on it. Her face lights up when she sees it, then she looks to Mom for an explanation. Mom nods in my direction.

“I…I thought you should have your own mug. It's the same as mine.” I hold mine up as proof. My mug has a chip on it, and the
i
in my name is starting to wear off.

Laurel looks at her mug as if it's something precious and miraculous. Then she looks at me in pretty much the same way. “Thank you, Faith. That's”—her voice catches—“really kind of you.”

I shrug. “It's no big deal.” But I'm really pleased she likes it. Everyone should have their own mug; it makes tea taste so much better.

After tea, we all head upstairs to show Laurel her room. Mom clears her throat as she steps back to let Laurel go first. “I'm so sorry we moved, Laurel….I always wanted you to come home to your own bedroom….That's how it was supposed to be.” She doesn't look at Dad, and he doesn't look at her.

Laurel doesn't seem to notice the awkwardness, though. “I don't mind at all.
This
is home. Wherever you are.” She couldn't have said anything more perfect. Mom's eyes glisten with tears.

“Well, what do you think?” I wish Mom didn't sound so needy. The room is nothing compared to the presidential suite—for one thing it has a single bed instead of a king-size one—but it's a whole lot better than where she was before. With
him.
A camp bed and a dirty sleeping bag. A bare lightbulb. Mice. Cockroaches.

Laurel spots him immediately. “You found him!”

I shrug again. I seem to be doing a lot of shrugging these days. “I thought you might like to have him.”

“I can't believe it! He looks exactly like…He looks the same!” She shakes her head and kneels down to inspect the night-light; she touches his head with a certain reverence. She looks up at me, eyes shining with unshed tears. “Is it really okay if I keep him? I don't like the dark.”

I nod. “Of course it's okay!”

Mom crouches down next to Laurel. “You can leave your door open at night, if you like. That way you'll get the light from the landing, too.”

Dad says, “Why don't we leave the girls to it? Faith can show Laurel everything she needs. I'll bring up the bags in a bit.”

Laurel sits on the bed, moving her hand back and forth across the duvet cover. Her other hand still clutches Barnaby. “It's nice. This room, I mean.”

I sit down next to her. “Mom was worried you'd hate it. She says we can redecorate anytime you want.”

“Why would I hate it? It's perfect….A room of my own.”

She sets Barnaby the Bear down on the chair in the corner. I want to tell her that he could really use a bath, but it doesn't seem like the right thing to say.

Mom's thought of everything. Toiletries and pajamas and a hairbrush. There's even some brand-new makeup on the dressing table. Laurel touches everything, as if to make sure it's all solid and real and isn't going to be taken away from her at any second. She spends a long time looking at a tube of foundation, and it hits me: she won't know how to use makeup. I explain what everything is and tell her I'll show her how to use it all. “Not that you need makeup. You're beautiful without it.” I feel my cheeks flush.

“I'm not beautiful,” she says flatly.

“You are.”

Laurel shakes her head and moves from the dressing table to the bedside table. There's a cell phone—an old one of mine, with a new SIM card. “Is this for me?” I nod, and she picks it up. I show her how it works and scroll through the numbers I've already added to her contacts: me, Mom, Dad. I probably should have added Maggie Dimmock, too.

“See? You can call me anytime.”

Laurel presses a button, and my phone buzzes in my jeans pocket. I take out my phone and say hello. She says hello into her phone, and we both laugh.

“Where's your bedroom?” she asks.

“Right next door. Want to see?”

My room has a lot of stuff in it. More stuff than a room this size should probably have. Mom's always trying to get me to throw things out or give them to charity, but I like it this way. There's something comforting about it. I don't like getting rid of stuff; I don't like throwing memories away.

“Wow,” says Laurel.

“Sorry it's such a mess.”

She shakes her head and turns around, trying to take everything in. There are pictures all over the walls—photos I've taken, pictures cut out from magazines. You can barely see the walls underneath. I realize there are no photos of Laurel, and I wish I'd thought to put one up before she came home.

On the desk there are three rows of little toys from Happy Meals and cereal boxes. They're lined up like little soldiers. There's a stack of shoe boxes on the floor next to the desk. Laurel doesn't investigate, but I wonder what she'd make of a box full of sugar packets and cubes. For a while it was a bit of an obsession of mine. I only stopped collecting them last year.

Laurel asks me about some of the pictures on the walls, which means I end up talking about my favorite films and bands. It's easy to forget that she has no frame of reference for most of the things I talk about. She doesn't seem to mind that I keep having to go off on tangents, that I keep having to explain more and more things before I go back to telling her what I wanted to tell her in the first place. She just takes it all in. She seems to concentrate hard on what I'm saying. She really listens; I like that.

Laurel has seen
some
films. Occasionally, Smith would bring an old TV and video player and hook them up in the basement. (Who has
videos
in this day and age?) Laurel says it only happened once a month, or even less often than that. There was no rhyme or reason to it—it didn't seem to be a reward for good behavior. The films she watched were all really old—
Mary Poppins
and
The Sound of Music
and one called
One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing,
which she particularly liked.

“Is this your boyfriend?” Laurel points to a photo next to my bed. It's the last thing I see before I turn off the light at night.

“Yeah, that's Thomas.”

“He's very good-looking.” Thomas
is
good-looking, but not in an obvious way. He
looks
like he writes poetry. His hair is too long, and he's pale and interesting rather than tanned and chiseled. There's something gentle about his features—a softness that I like. When he first turned up at school, you could tell none of the boys were threatened; there's nothing remotely alpha male about Thomas. But something strange happened within days: girls were drawn to him. Some of the most popular girls in my grade started trailing after him, offering to show him around the school and help him “settle in.” He saw straight through them, politely declining their advances, preferring to spend time alone. Then he started following me around.

I didn't even notice at first; Thomas is very good at skulking. But then I realized that I was seeing him
all
the time—in the corridors, in the library, in the courtyard. I mentioned it to Martha one day, and she rolled her eyes at me. “
Finally.
I was wondering when you were going to notice.” She was the one who encouraged me to talk to him, although “Why the hell are you stalking me?” probably wasn't quite what she had in mind.

Thomas was startled when I confronted him in the library, but he didn't try to deny it. He said, “I think you're interesting.”

“Look, if there's something you want to ask about my sister, just do it.” It happened all the time—people staring and whispering. It got to a point where I almost preferred the ones who were brazen enough to actually talk to me about it—like Laney Finch.

Thomas just stared at me.

“Well? I have better things to do than stand here being gawked at, so if you don't mind, I'm just going to go.” I wasn't usually quite so rude, but something about his face riled me.

“Why would I want to ask about your sister?”

I crossed my arms and waited.

He closed his notebook and waited, too. Eventually, he broke the stalemate by asking a question I'd never been asked before: “Who's your sister?”

I think it was those three words that did it for me. I'm not saying I fell head over heels in love with him as soon as he said them, but they unlocked something inside me. They made it possible for me to not hate him, to start sort of liking him, to start really liking him, and finally, after a few months, to maybe sort of almost love him. None of that would have been possible if he hadn't asked me that question.

Thomas has lived in more countries than most people have been to on vacation—he's an army brat. He moved here when his parents retired a couple of years ago. He doesn't like to talk about the army thing—it doesn't exactly mesh with his strictly pacifist views.