MY SON BROUGHT HIS GIRLFRIEND TO DINNER – SHE HAD THE SAME SCAR AS THE DAUGHTER I’D LOST EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO
The plate slipped from my hands when she stepped into the kitchen.
It shattered beside my feet.
“Oh! Are you all right?”
She came toward me, smiling, and for a second I saw my little girl at seven.
The same eyes.
The same crooked smile.
Then she reached for a dishcloth.
A pale, hooked scar crossed the back of her left hand.
My daughter had cut herself on a broken greenhouse pane. I had held her on my lap while the doctor stitched it.
“Mom?”
Marcus touched my shoulder.
He’d called me that since I married his father, three years after Sophie disappeared.
“This is Anna.”
I gripped the counter.
“Hello, Anna.”
Marcus fetched the broom while she insisted on helping.
I couldn’t stop looking at her hand.
At dinner, I tried to ask ordinary questions.
Her work.
Her apartment.
Where she grew up.
“A few different places,” she said. “Mostly with my aunt.”
“Your parents?”
She set down her fork.
“They died when I was little.”
“How little?”
“Seven, I think.”
My husband stopped eating.
I felt him looking at me.
“Do you remember them?” I asked.
Anna shook her head.
“I don’t remember anything before seven. There was an accident. My aunt said the doctors warned her that might happen.”
Marcus reached for her hand.
I looked at the scar again.
“What sort of accident?”
“A car crash.”
My daughter had disappeared from a summer fair.
There had been no crash.
No hospital.
No answers.
My husband gently said my name.
I stood anyway and went to the cupboard where I kept Sophie’s photographs.
When I returned, Anna was watching the doorway.
I placed a picture beside her plate.
Sophie in yellow overalls, holding up her newly bandaged hand.
Anna leaned closer.
Her fork slid from her fingers.
“That’s me.”
Nobody spoke.
Then she picked up her phone.
“My aunt has this picture too.”
“May I see a photograph of your aunt?”
She opened her gallery.
A woman smiled beside a Christmas tree.
I recognized her immediately.
She had worked at Sophie’s nursery.
She had helped distribute the missing-child leaflets.
Anna watched my face change.
“You know her?”
Her phone began ringing.
The same woman’s photograph filled the screen.
Anna looked from it to me.
Then she answered on speaker.
Her aunt spoke before Anna could say hello.
“Have you told them anything about when you were little?”
What She Said Before Anna Could Speak
Nobody moved.
Anna still had the phone to her ear. Her aunt’s voice came out small through the speaker, the way distant voices do – thin and slightly delayed, like a signal crossing a long distance.
“Anna. Have you told them anything about when you were little?”
Anna’s eyes were on the photograph.
Sophie in yellow overalls. Left hand raised. The white strip of bandage bright against her skin.
“Pauline,” I said. Louder than I meant to.
A long pause. The kind that means someone is recalculating.
“Carol?” Pauline’s voice changed. The thinness in it went harder. “Is that you?”
“Yes.”
Another pause. Longer.
“I’d like to come over,” she said. “I’ll explain everything.”
She ended the call before I could answer.
Neil reached across the table and took my hand. His fingers were cold. He’d been a police officer for thirty-one years before he retired. He knew how to stay calm and how to do it poorly, and right now he was doing it poorly.
Marcus was looking at me the way he’d looked at me once when I told him his hamster had died. That particular look of a twelve-year-old who doesn’t have the face for bad news yet. He still didn’t, really.
“Mom.” He said it carefully.
Anna hadn’t moved. Still looking at the photo.
“The bandage is on the wrong hand,” she said.
“What?”
She turned her palm up. The scar ran from the base of her index finger to the knuckle of her thumb. A pale hook.
“My scar is on the left. The bandage is on the – “
“The photo is mirrored,” I said. “It was a disposable camera. The developer printed it backwards. I noticed when it came back.”
She put her palm flat on the table.
She didn’t say anything else.
The Day Sophie Disappeared
The fair came to Lakehill Common every July. It had come every July since before I was born. By the time Sophie was seven she’d been four times. She knew exactly which rides she liked and which ones made her feel sick, and she was very firm about which was which.
That afternoon she’d wanted candy floss. I gave her two pounds and she went to the stall and I watched her go and then someone behind me asked if I’d seen where the portable toilets were and I turned around to answer because that’s what you do when someone asks you something, and when I looked back she was gone.
That’s it. That’s the whole story.
I’ve told it five hundred times. To police officers and family liaison workers and journalists and a documentary crew that never aired the episode. The story doesn’t get more complicated. I turned around to point at a sign and she was gone.
The police eventually moved their focus to her father. My first husband, Gary. We’d been separated two years. He’d had Sophie for the week before and there’d been a complaint – not from me – to the nursery. Something one of the staff had seen. Something Sophie had said.
Nothing was ever charged. Gary died of a stroke in 2014.
I never knew exactly what that complaint said.
Sophie’s nursery records were sealed as part of the investigation.
I always assumed I’d never know.
Pauline at the Search
She arrived forty minutes later.
Sixty-three years old. Heavier than she’d been, with the same pale blue eyes and the same habit of touching her collarbone when she was nervous.
I’d forgotten about the collarbone thing until I saw her do it in my doorway.
She’d done it at every search meeting. Every single one.
We had search meetings at the community center for six months. Pauline came to all of them. She helped make phone calls. She laminated the missing-child leaflets herself, three hundred of them, with her own laminator.
I had thanked her. I remembered thanking her specifically.
She looked past me at Anna.
Anna was standing in the hallway with her arms folded. Not hostile exactly. Something quieter than hostile.
“I always thought this day would come,” Pauline said.
She didn’t come in until I stepped aside.
What She’d Seen
We sat in the living room. All five of us. Neil stayed standing near the door, arms folded, his cop face fully back on.
Pauline spoke to me. Not to Anna.
“There was a complaint,” she said. “About Gary. I was the one who filed it.”
I hadn’t known that.
“I saw something. Sophie told me something, the week before the fair. I reported it. The investigator came and spoke to him, and he denied it, and they said there wasn’t enough evidence.” She touched her collarbone. “She was due to go back to him the following weekend.”
“So you took her.”
Pauline looked at her hands.
“I saw her standing by the candy floss stall, alone. You’d stepped away. I had maybe thirty seconds where I could have walked past.”
She didn’t finish the sentence.
“You took my daughter.”
“I took Sophie, yes.”
“And you gave her a dead woman’s history and told her she’d been in a car crash.”
Pauline’s chin moved. “The woman I borrowed the history from was my cousin. She died in 2003, childless. No one was going to look for a child with her name.”
Neil made a sound.
“I need you to know,” Pauline said, still looking at her hands, “that I understood what I was doing to you. I thought about you every single day. Every single day.”
“Did that help you sleep?”
She didn’t answer.
I looked at Anna.
She’d been quiet for the last ten minutes. The kind of quiet that happens when someone is running a very fast and very private calculation.
“Did you know?” I asked her.
“No.” She said it immediately. Then: “I suspected something. Last year I did one of those DNA tests. The ancestry ones. It came back with no relatives. Nothing. I told Pauline and she said there’d been a lab error and helped me request a refund.”
She said that last part flatly. The way you say something that hurts without letting it hurt in front of people.
“I kept thinking I had memories,” she said. “I told Pauline about them once, when I was about fifteen. A carousel. Someone calling my name. She said those were memories I’d made up to fill in the gaps. That the brain does that after trauma.”
A carousel.
There’d been a carousel at the fair.
Sophie had wanted to ride it on the way home but I’d said we had to leave before the queues got long. She’d argued. She’d been in a little sulk about it, actually, when she went to get her candy floss.
I’d spent years turning that carousel over in my mind. If I’d just let her ride it.
I didn’t say any of that.
What Marcus Did
He’d been quiet too. He stood up and went to the kitchen and I heard the tap running and he stayed in there for about four minutes.
When he came back he said, “I’m going to need everyone to tell me what’s happening.”
Neil told him. Carefully and in order.
Marcus sat down on the arm of the sofa. He was twenty-six years old and he looked about sixteen.
He looked at Anna.
She looked back.
Whatever passed between them in that look, I don’t have it. That part wasn’t for me.
“I’m calling my old colleague,” Neil said to Pauline. “She’ll know the right person to contact tonight.”
Pauline nodded. She’d stopped touching her collarbone.
“I want to say one more thing,” she said. “To Anna.”
Anna’s chin came up.
“I know that doesn’t cover anything. I know there’s no word for what I did to you.” She stopped. “But I didn’t lie about one thing. You were loved. Every day.”
Anna looked at her for a long moment.
“Was my name Sophie?”
“Yes.”
She nodded slowly.
“Okay,” she said.
That was all. Just okay.
The Hours After
Pauline was still there at midnight when the first officer arrived. She’d waived her right to call a solicitor. Neil sat beside me in the kitchen while they took her into the living room, and he made two cups of tea that neither of us drank.
Marcus drove Anna home around one in the morning. She stood in the doorway before she left and looked at me.
I wanted to say something the right size. Something equal to eighteen years.
I said, “I still have your yellow overalls. They’re in a box in the loft.”
She put her hand over her mouth.
Then she nodded and walked down the front path and got in Marcus’s car.
The scar on her left hand caught the porch light as she reached for the door handle.
Pale and hooked. The same as it had been at seven, in the doctor’s office, her head against my shoulder and her small weight on my lap while the needle went in and out.
I went back inside.
Neil was still at the kitchen table. The untouched tea had gone cold.
“Well,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
—
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For more family secrets and unexpected twists, read the night a husband’s ex showed up in the bedroom and the family who voted on whether a girlfriend was pretty enough to marry.
