When I returned home, those thoughts found their way back into my consciousness, mixing with thoughts from my childhood about my profound unworthiness. I don’t know how, but they are related, these thoughts. They must be because they felt familiar, like old friends I hadn’t seen for a while but when I saw them I remembered them well and even welcomed them in no matter how terrible they were and always had been.
And they were terrible. They made me miss Emma so much. I don’t know why. Sometimes when I hear the stories leaving my own mouth, I realize that Emma was not always nice to me. But something happens when you hold someone or when they hold you. It makes you feel better. It takes away the bad feelings of being worthless.
Those days when I was home, I could close my eyes and feel Emma holding me in the middle of the night. I could also feel that sweet little baby wrapped around in my arms, so tight. I would stroke her hair, which was so soft, just like Emma would stroke mine when our mother was asleep. I longed for those things. I felt as though I would die without them, like not having food or water. Without those things, I was lost in the bad feelings and I began to worry that I would never find my way out.
The second surprise that morning was a pile of new clothing outside my door when I finally woke up. They were my size and they were very nice. A pair of lightweight khaki pants, cropped at the ankle, and a button-down shirt that I could either wear long-sleeved or short-sleeved. The sleeves had a button and little tab thing that held them rolled up. There was some nice underwear from Victoria’s Secret and a pair of flip-flops.
I brought them into the guest room and lay them on the bed. A question rushed into my brain and I knew then at that moment that the sleep had done its job and I was again thinking clearly. Very clearly.
When, exactly, had my mother purchased the clothes? They were outside my door at eight o’clock. I had gone to bed at midnight. No stores are open then. No mail is delivered then. We had not had any visitors. All of which meant that my mother had purchased or somehow obtained the clothes the day before but had chosen not to give them to me. Instead, she left me to wear her fat clothes and Hunter’s old sneakers. Since the only thing that happened the afternoon before was the visit with Hunter and his girlfriend I arrived at the conclusion that my mother had not wanted me to look nice for Hunter. And this made me smile like before. I smiled the whole time I was putting on those clothes because I understood. Just like with Hunter’s long hug, there is something about understanding that comforts me, even if I don’t like what I understand.
I found out about the third surprise when I got downstairs. Dr. Winter was waiting for me. So was Agent Strauss. They were waiting for the sketch artist to come again. My father and Mrs. Martin had been asked to gather as many pictures of Emma as they could find from the time she was born. The sketch artist was going to do some kind of time lapse image of her in case thePratts had started to run and Emma had gone with them. I didn’t like the sound of that because it meant they were still wondering why Emma hadn’t left with me—if she was staying voluntarily and if, by inference, I had not been held captive either.
They were in the kitchen with the officer who watched the house from the street and kept the media trucks from coming down the driveway. They were having coffee. Mrs. Martin was there as well, taking something out of the oven. It smelled like bananas and cinnamon. I won’t lie. That sight, and the smell of Mrs. Martin’s banana bread—which she used to make on Sunday mornings with Emma—reached inside me and grabbed my heart. I almost looked around for Emma but I stopped myself. I was so grateful then for the sleep, for the pills and wine, for Dr. Nichols.
“Good morning, sweetheart,” Mrs. Martin said. “How did you sleep?”
I told her I slept well. I thanked her for the clothes. She said we would go shopping later if I wanted, or maybe on the computer so I wouldn’t have to face the reporters. She said she didn’t get more than one outfit, because I might want to pick things out myself, from any place I wanted. She said it with a tilted head and a sweet, closed-mouth smile.
I had told people many things in the two days I had been home. In between the formal interviews with Dr. Winter and Agent Strauss were dozens of questions about my life on the island. What did I do all day? What did I eat? Who cut my hair? How did we get clothing? Did we play games or listen to music? And how did we not go crazy without the Internet or any way to reach the outside world?
It is probably hard to imagine that my life on the island after that day on the dock was anything but a constant state of urgency to escape. That every minute of every day was not spent plottingand worrying and mourning the loss of my freedom. The loss of my life. Or that the rest of it wasn’t filled with those thoughts of deserving what I’d gotten because I was so unworthy, and that I should feel grateful for the home I had been given. But human nature does not allow for that. No matter where we are and what we are subjected to, we will eventually settle into the new reality and try to find pleasure, even if it is nothing more than a warm shower or food or even a glass of water. I think if I had been kept in a cage in the darkness with nothing but one piece of bread and one glass of water a day, I would eventually have come to find happiness in that bread and that water. And so on the island, there was laughter and there was friendship and there were moments of pleasure in between the sorrow and the urgency and the self-loathing.
Mr. Martin, who has been very successful in business and supposedly very smart, asked me even more questions every time I gave an answer, especially about how Bill paid for things. Mr. Martin was very skeptical. How did they buy the island or pay rent? How did they pay the boatman? How did they pay for the gas that went into the generator and the food and the books for us to study? That required money. Money required a job. A job put you in “the system” he kept saying.
My mother had asked me about my clothes. I had shown up wearing jeans and a T-shirt from Gap. My shoes were hiking boots. I picked things out of catalogs, and the boatman would buy the clothes and bring them to the island. Or maybe they ordered them through the mail. He did not bring packages to the island. Everything was opened, envelopes gone. The address labels were always torn off the catalogs. Nothing came onto the island that had a name or an address. I knew the Pratts were called that name only because that’s what Rick called them.Mr. PrattandMrs. Pratt.
Mrs. Martin was obsessed with the fact that I had not been to a store myself since the night I disappeared. She had mentioned this to Dr. Winter the morning of my second day.
Dr. Winter, can you even imagine what it would do to someone to never leave a place? For three years… not being out in the world. Not shopping for your own food and shampoo, not going for coffee or lunch, not seeing movies? Not even shopping for your own clothes!
She said it like she felt sorry for me. But I knew what she was doing. She was trying to plant the seed that I had gone crazy because of what I went through.Can you imagine what it would do to someone?…
In the kitchen that third morning, after Mrs. Martin offered to buy me clothes and placed the banana bread on the counter, she walked to me and stroked my cheek. It made the others melt. I could see it on their faces. How nice this was, mother and daughter reunited. Mother caring for daughter. I looked at Dr. Winter. I searched her face for something, some sign of recognition. But I found nothing to comfort me that day. Mrs. Martin was very powerful and I could not forget that.
Dr. Winter was suddenly being very nice to her—and this was the third surprise. It was not a good one.
She told her it must have been very hard for me and Emma, and then she said something about how she liked to shop and would miss it very much, but anyone looking at Dr. Winter would see that she was not the sort of person who liked to shop for anything. She had worn the same jeans and the same boots and the same belt for three straight days. And her T-shirts were all the same type, as if she had found the kind she liked and then just bought a lot of them in different colors.
I didn’t like that she was being so nice to Mrs. Martin. It was making her calm, giving credence to her theory that I was crazy.I did not come back to make my mother calm. I came back to make her see what she had done to us, to make everyone see! I came back to find my sister, and time was not on my side.
There was some comfort for me that the forensic agents were all very skilled. Even on the first day, I could feel the importance of every word I said, every answer I provided. Imagine if the things you said resulted in federal agents taking to the streets and analysts scouring their databases—everyone in a large team of highly trained professionals jumping to a new task simply because you said the leaves turned orange in the fall or the air smelled of pine trees. After so many years of being powerless, of having no voice, of having no one hear me, I was overwhelmed.
Agent Strauss said he had been looking into agencies and crisis lines that claimed to help pregnant teenagers or had been investigated for illegal adoptions. And Dr. Winter told us that she had been working around the clock, tracking down her list of people from the past, people who might know something about the Pratts or Emma’s pregnancy. She had already spoken with some teachers and friends of both girls. They had all heard about Cass’s return and the desperate search for Emma, though so far none of them had anything to add that was helpful. They had been shocked to hear the truth about why we left home.
But despite all their skills, the FBI had no promising leads, even after searching up and down the Maine coastal region. There was no record of Bill or Lucy Pratt—not in the Social Security database or in any public documents they could find. They said most towns put things online now, but they were also looking at paper land records for islands, tracing ownership. They had even searched the public health records in Maine for birth certificates with the name Julia, or Pratt—girls born around the date I had given them. All of this was very time consuming and every daymattered. No one seemed to doubt that the Pratts would try to leave, and the worry this made me feel erased the relief from having all these agents working to find them. Worry, but also despair. Imagining this outcome, never finding the Pratts, never finding the baby, never finding Emma—I understood what my father had been through.
I told myself I would not be weak like my father. I would stay focused and help them in any way I could.
They had enlisted many local police to knock on doors in the villages. No one recognized the drawings that I had helped make with the sketch artist. No one could recall anyone fitting the descriptions of the Pratts or the boatman. And they had begun an investigation into the incident in Alaska, hoping to identify the boatman from his time on that fishing boat where the woman was raped.
“Having an age-progressed drawing of Emma could really help,” Agent Strauss said. People would notice an older couple with a young woman and child. More than just an older couple alone. And with my help, they could get close to a real photograph of Emma the way she looked now.
I agreed to help, of course, and went into the living room, where my mother had set out all her fancy photo albums, the ones with the brown leather bindings with the years engraved in gold. Dr. Winter and Agent Strauss followed. Agent Strauss had yellow Post-its and he said we should tell him when we saw a photo of Emma from each year since her birth—pick the best one, he said, or maybe two with one having her profile. Dr. Winter said she would do this with me while Agent Strauss and my mother went through her computer in her study for photos that were stored there. But that was just an excuse for Dr. Winter to be alone with me.
In fact, this entire project felt like an excuse. Three years was not that long. We had been almost grown when we left. How different did they think she could look? But I went along with it.
We looked at photos. We picked the best ones from each year. Dr. Winter asked a lot of questions as she saw changes in my sister. One of them caught her attention—it was the year Emma turned fifteen.
