My legs are stiff as we walk. They don’t work right. My knees lock and I trip, but he holds on to my arm. He leads me to the house where he unlocks the door, and we go in, into a dark living room. He reaches down and turns on a lamp, filling the room with light. “Do you remember our house?” he asks, talking fast, excited, his eyes bright.
I’ve never been here before.
“Sam?” a woman’s weary voice calls out. “Is that you? Where have you—”
She comes into view, standing there in her pajamas, the hall behind her dark. Her eyes bulge, her mouth drops open and she gasps.
“What’s going on?” she asks, her voice now strained. She doesn’t know where to look first, at him or me. “What is that on your clothes? Is that—”
It’s blood.
His voice is loud. “Look who’s here,” he says, laughing like he didn’t hear her, like he doesn’t care that he’s covered in someone else’s blood. He grins like a madman. “Look who I found.”
She gives a slight headshake, pulls her eyebrows together and asks, “Who did you find?” her face blank.
He gives a strangled laugh. “Kylie. It’sKylie, honey.”
She looks again, running her eyes over and examining me. “That’s not her,” she says.
He drags a hand through his hair, his smile fading. He looks at her in disbelief. “What do you mean it’s not her? Of course it’s her.”
He turns to me, his voice desperate, insistent. “Show her. Show her your necklace.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about. I shake my head. He says, “The one that was in the picture of you. The one we gave you, honey.” He gets flustered when I don’t know. He motions to a picture above the fireplace of this man, this lady and a little girl, of them making silly faces. In it, the girl wears my gold necklace, the one Daniel gave me, the one I threw away. “That necklace. Show her, Kylie. Show her you still have it.”
But the woman doesn’t care about the necklace. She says, “I’d know my daughter anywhere, and that’s not her.”
He looks harder, and this time, he starts to second-guesshimself. He finally sees it. I’m not who he thinks I am. I’m not the person he wants me to be.
He gets choked up, he cries big, fat tears.
“Oh my God. It’s not her. It’s not her,” he sobs over and over again to the woman, and then, to me, “You look so much like her,” he says, reaching a hand out to touch my hair, though I recoil. I pull back so hard my head slams into the wall, seeing Emily’s body heave on the porch floor as he hit her again and again with that bat. “You look so much like my baby girl. Oh God.” He sobs, dropping his head into his bloodied hands. “What have I done?What have I done?”
“What are we going to do with her?” he asks after a minute.
He won’t look at either of us. He can’t.
They talk about me like I’m not in the room with them.
“I don’t know,” she says, shaking her head.
“Well, we can’t just bring her back. She’s seen my face. She saw what I did to them.”
“To who? What did you do, Sam?” she asks, though she sees the blood all over him and knows.
He shakes his head. Even he can’t say.
She says, “Just give me a minute to think.”
“We need to get rid of her before someone comes looking for her. If they find her here...”
“I know.”
They lead me down some dark, unfinished stairs. They open a panel in the wall and leave me in the basement crawl space.
Because now that I’m here and after what he’s done, they can’t just let me go.
Courtney
