The Lost Girl Read online

  “I haven’t forgotten you completely, you know,” I feel compelled to say. “It’s just a few pieces that are missing, that’s all.”

  “Really?” There’s something challenging in the way he says this, something almost desperate in the way he searches my eyes again. My heart sinks. He’s looking for her and he’s not sure if he sees her.

  “Yes,” I say, making myself squeeze his hand, though my voice chokes on the lie. “I know I’m different, but it’s only for now. It won’t last forever.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. It’s just that you seem different. It makes me think about what you told me—”

  He stops.

  “What I told you?” I prompt, alarmed.

  “Never mind,” he says, “it’s not important. Do you want to go up to the food court? Or we can leave, go get dosas at Airlines if you want.”

  “Erm . . .” My eyes travel upward, past an escalator to the floor above us, where I can see the shiny, gleaming sign of a Crossword. I’ve obviously never been to one before, but I read about them in Amarra’s pages enough times to know instinctively that Crossword means books.

  Ray follows my gaze and starts to laugh. I notice his body relax slightly, as though I’ve done something to reassure him.

  “We can go in there,” he says, tugging my hand. “I know it’s your temple.”

  I hop eagerly onto the escalator. Amarra loved stroking the spines of books, like I do. She loved reading, loved the smell of paper. She made a face at her father’s Kindle because she didn’t think an ebook was the same. She called it cheating and made him laugh. I feel an unexpected pang in my chest. Sorrow. Loss. For her. In spite of everything.

  It occurs to me then, for the first time, that I have always been one of two. A copy. A mirage. I had her, even when I hated her.

  Now I’m alone. Singular.

  Something about the bookshop sets me at ease. It makes me feel more like myself and more like Amarra simultaneously. Consequently, Ray relaxes too, and for an hour we have fun. He affectionately rolls his eyes at my enthusiasm, and I barely notice that he’s still holding my hand as I race around the store like a chicken without a head. Ray offers to buy me a book, but I decline. I sniff the spines, which makes him laugh so hard he chokes.

  It sets me giggling too, and quite abruptly I flash back unexpectedly to another memory, of a zoo, and pulling on a boy’s hand, and popcorn, and the smell of elephants under a bright blue sky.

  I blink, trying to shake off the memory. I banish the flash of green eyes.

  Ray is watching me and I catch that flicker of suspicion again. It keeps coming and going and probably won’t entirely go away until I am flawless, constant.

  “What do you think about?” he asks. “When you go away like that?”

  “Nothing,” I say too sharply.

  His eyes narrow. I wonder if Amarra ever used that tone of voice in her life.

  “I just—” I falter in a panic, trying to recover, fix the mistake. “I just remember things. They come back to me, stuff I didn’t even know I had forgotten.”

  He doesn’t say anything for a minute. He watches me carefully. There’s nothing more I can say without sounding like I’m desperately scrambling for excuses. I think of Neil, his description of the ways I am different from Amarra, and I feel a paranoid surge of fear.

  Finally Ray says, “Stuff about me?”

  “Sometimes,” I lie, the taste sour on my tongue.

  He hesitates a moment. Then he kisses my forehead and I almost faint with relief. “Well, if it makes you feel any better,” he teases, “I only think about you sometimes too.”

  “Liar.”

  “Yeah.” He sighs. “I am.”

  I find a new book to fawn over, my hands still trembling slightly. Ray shakes his head but grins. He has no problem with reading a book, but it’s obviously not the first thing he’d think of doing on a cold rainy afternoon. Still, he makes every effort to share my enthusiasm, and if he’s bored, he hides it well. It makes me feel guiltier to see how much he loves her. It also makes me feel a stab of envy.

  He will be so angry and hurt if he ever discovers my deception. He’ll be in so much pain if he realizes she’s gone.

  He’ll never forgive me. And for some reason, that bothers me.

  Alisha rings me a little while later, to let me know she’s leaving the gallery and can come get me if I want her to. I glance at Ray, who shrugs as though to say “it’s up to you.” Amarra would want to stay out with him. But the risk is too high. The more time I spend with him, the more likely I am to take a wrong step. So I give him an apologetic smile and ask Alisha to pick me up on her way past. Ray looks disappointed, but he accepts the excuse that my mother wants me home and resting as much as possible.

  It’s raining when I get in the car, and halfway to the house there’s a patch of bad traffic, so we stay in almost the same spot for half an hour. Alisha puts some music on. Gipsy Kings. It’s not enough to drown out the honking of impatient cars and trucks. There is no such thing as a quiet, orderly traffic queue in India. I roll the window down to get some fresh air, but all I can smell is dust and gasoline, so I put it back up. In the end I fall asleep.

  The weeks following my Saturday with Ray have a certain rhythm. An exhausting rhythm. I’ve always had to work hard at learning Amarra, but there used to be breaks, respites, time to sit still and be myself with my guardians. I’ve never worked as hard at anything as I am forced to do now.

  I exchange polite conversation with Neil and painstak-ingly pretend for Alisha. I watch telly—no, TV—with Nikhil and Sasha. They treat me like me when their parents aren’t in the room, and it’s nice. Soothing. I go to school and learn. I see Ray outside of school. I try spending more time with him, which is more enjoyable than I had expected, but it only leads to the inevitable slips. In response I can only pull away, and it heightens his suspicions. Whichever way I turn, I cannot convince Ray, not entirely.

  When I can’t avoid them any longer, I go out into town with Sonya and Jaya, to Coffee Day, to a movie, to Brigade Road, where we sit on the steps of the Barista and eat flavored corn on the cob. I get through these hours by staying absolutely alert, my memory like a book I’ve propped open so that I can find answers the moment I need them. I muddle some things up, usually things Amarra never told me about, like the fact that Sonya once had a gloomy-rocker boyfriend they nicknamed Kurt Cobain. I make mistakes, but they believe me when I say my head’s still not quite better.

  I have one close shave before PE that December. It’s a chilly winter and everyone is gearing up for the Christmas holiday. In the girls’ bathroom, the talk is all about going to Goa and the beaches, who’s going to which New Year’s Eve party, who’s decorating a tree, who’s got to spend their holiday with millions of annoying aunties and cousins in Delhi.

  While I change, I put my hair up into a ponytail. I’ve had to do it since my first PE class, but it never gets any easier. Keenly aware of the accident, Amarra’s friends and classmates have restrained themselves from asking about the white gauze and surgical tape on the back of my neck. I knew their restraint wouldn’t last. After all, it’s now been more than three months since I arrived.

  “So,” says Sonya, choosing today, the last PE session of the calendar year, to confront me. “It’s time you told me what the hell that bandage is doing on the back of your neck!”

  “Sonya—”

  “I’m only asking her, Jaya. I’m just worried there’s something wrong that you haven’t told us about.” She stops in the middle of the bathroom in her bra and shorts, halfway changed. “It’s not an open wound, is it? Shouldn’t that have healed by now? It’s been months!”

  I tense. “It’s an ugly scar. I don’t like people seeing it.”

  “Since when do you care about having a scar?” Sonya demands. “You’ve never been vain in your life!”

  “Sonya, leave it alone,” Jaya says. “It’s Amarra’s
scar, not yours.”

  “But—”

  “I’ve never had a scar like this one,” I reply.

  She snorts. “It can’t be worse than the scars on your stomach.”

  I stare at her in horror. Oh. God. I had completely forgotten about the stupid scars from the time Amarra was bitten by a dog, scars I never had. I’ve been changing in front of them for weeks now and it’s obvious that no one has noticed their absence on my belly. Yet.

  “Come on,” says Sonya. “Show me? I won’t make fun, I promise. It’s not like having a scar is the worst thing in the world. You could have been dead.”

  I press my hand to the gauze, afraid she’ll try to pull it off. “No,” I say, too firmly. It’s not like Amarra at all. Amarra would have sighed and given in to avoid a silly scene. But here I am, standing my ground in a fierce and entirely un-Amarra-like way.

  “But—”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” cries a high, clear voice from less than ten feet away. “Not another spider!”

  Sonya shrieks and skitters six feet in the opposite direction. I look around. I don’t see the spider; it’s not anywhere near me. I search for the source of the cry and find Lekha, the girl who called Sam tactless on that first day. She’s sitting on the edge of a sink and doesn’t look very alarmed at all. In fact, she’s clearly fighting the urge to laugh at the ridiculous spectacle Sonya and the other girls are making of themselves.

  As the panic dies down, I can’t help glancing over at her, my brow knit in confusion. Lekha and I say hello when we see each other, and more often than not we’re the only two who raise our hands in English Lit. She seems nice. Funny. She says strange things, mixes her words up all the time. She and Amarra had known one another since they were little but didn’t often see much of each other outside school, so I’ve never stopped to think about her.

  But she has my attention now. There is no spider in the bathroom, I am quite certain of that.

  “Don’t be paranoid,” I mutter to myself. If Amarra’s best friends haven’t noticed that I’m not her, why should a classmate who barely spends time with her?

  I escape that PE class without discovery, but the Christmas break isn’t much of a break for me. I still see a great deal of Amarra’s friends, still see Ray. He seems more cautious, and it leaves me helpless because there’s nothing I can do to be more convincing.

  Over time, the strain begins to show. I never feel fully rested. The faint shadows beneath my eyes become purple bruises.

  At night, I lie awake and think about danger. A man leaning against a lamppost with an old map. The zoo. The feel of Matthew’s hand closed over on my wrist. Running off a train to Sean. Adrian Borden’s golden eyes. When I finally fall asleep, I dream of strange things. Clock towers and Weavers and hunters prowling the dark. A sad-eyed woman, asking me what my heart wants. I dream of ghosts with Amarra’s face, and green nurseries, and canals, and cities full of cemeteries and yellow fog.

  But the most unsettling dreams are the ones of hourglasses and spiders crawling up the glass. I’m always trapped in the glass and fine white sand begins to fill it up. And I know that I’m going to be smothered if I can’t break out of the hourglass in time.

  7

  Monster

  For someone so tiny, Sasha’s yawns are enormous. I can practically see her dinner. I stand at the top of the stairs while she and Nikhil watch telly below, and marvel at her.

  “Shouldn’t you be in bed, miss?” I ask with false severity.

  Sasha giggles. “It’s a Power Rangers thingy—”

  “Marathon,” says Nikhil.

  “Marathon,” she repeats. “Mummy and Dad said I could stay up and watch it.”

  I smile. Her parents spoil her rotten.

  “Do you wanna watch with us?” Sasha asks, her eyes huge with excitement. “It’s really good!”

  Nik gives me a look that says otherwise, but he’s also smiling. In the months I’ve been here, I haven’t pushed him to like me. I haven’t pressed him with attention or excessive kindness to try and win him over: it was always clear that he’s too smart to be taken in by things like that. Instead, I have had the luxury of being myself. I’ve taken pains not to act like Amarra when I’m alone with him and Sasha. It was the right thing to do. He has slowly warmed to me. One time, during a late-night movie, he even fell asleep on my shoulder. It surprised me, both that he did it and that a slow warmth filled my chest when he did.

  I curl up on the sofa next to Sasha and quickly grasp the general plot of the show: teenagers turned secret heroes make a habit of saving the world from ugly evil types.

  “Dad told me and Sash that your name’s Eva,” Nikhil says. “I don’t think he likes it when we call you Amarra.”

  I turn to look at him, my attention diverted. “It’s true,” I say cautiously. “I named myself after an elephant.”

  They love that so much, they make me tell the story.

  “He said not to tell Mummy,” Sasha says shyly when I’m finished, “but we can call you it when she’s not here, can’t we?”

  “Yes,” I tell her, “I’d like that very much.”

  “Nik says Amarra’s not coming back,” she says. “Is that true?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  She considers this for a few minutes. Then she nods and becomes deeply absorbed in the show again. I stroke her hair.

  I glance at Nik. He looks a little sad, but he smiles. “It’s a good idea,” he says, “you naming yourself. I’ve been thinking about telling my echo about it. He might like a name of his own.”

  “You have an echo?”

  “Yeah,” he says, like this should be obvious, which I suppose it should have been. Why ask for an echo for one child and not the others? “So does Sash. Didn’t Amarra ever tell you?”

  “No, she never mentioned it.” I frown. “How did your parents afford it? One of my guardians once said it costs a lot to have an echo made.”

  “The Weavers made you and our echoes for free,” says Nikhil, to my surprise. “Dad told me. He said they pick and choose how much they want to charge someone. There’s no one else out there making echoes, obviously, so they can pretty much ask for as little or as much as they like.”

  I remember Matthew and the odd way he and Alisha behaved with each other. “I suppose the Weavers liked your parents.”

  “Yeah. Weird.”

  “Is it hard?” I ask Nikhil softly. “Having an echo?”

  “Not for me. Kind of like having a pen pal. My echo is really nice. I don’t know about Sasha’s, obviously. I’ve never spoken to her.”

  “You talk with your echo? You like him?”

  Nik nods.

  I gaze at him, mystified. “But your sister hated me.”

  “I’m not my sister,” says Nikhil, “and my echo’s not you.”

  “But he might replace you someday. Don’t you hate that that might happen? That he might be here with your family?”

  “No,” says Nik, so calmly I am exasperated. “I worry about what might happen to the people who love me if I die before them. I like knowing I have someone who will try to stop them from feeling so sad if that happens.”

  I stare at him in astonishment. My heart twinges at hearing Nikhil, not even twelve years old, saying these words to me. He is so amazingly unselfish, his thoughts so clear and unconflicted. It puts me to shame.

  “I don’t think of you as Amarra, anyway,” he goes on. “So it’s not like you’ve come here and stolen us from her. I think of you as Eva. I don’t see you as someone who’s replaced her. I see you as someone different who just happens to be here. I’d think of you the same way if you were both here at the same time.” He glances up at me. “And I like you. You try so hard to make us feel better.”

  I try to smile back at him. It’s a moment I will remember later, and always. A turning point. Until now I’ve been trying to make them feel better for me. Because as long as Amarra’s family likes me and trusts that I am like
their daughter, they will keep me. But as I stare into Nikhil’s eyes, I decide that maybe it’s time to start trying for them, too. Because if I do make them feel better in some small way, him and Sasha and even Alisha, that means something. It means they need me. I’ve helped. I’ve done, if only partly, what I was woven for.

  “I like you too,” I tell Nik.

  “And me!” cries Sasha.

  “And you,” I say, mussing up her hair. I exchange a grin with Nik. “I like you best of all, Sash.”

  “Goody,” she says, content.

  I sit out the episode before going upstairs. There are only so many wisecracking superheroes and ugly villains I can cope with.

  The first thing I see when I go back to Amarra’s room is the Lake District postcard lying on her desk. Though I knew I could be punished for it, I sent Sean a birthday card in early November. A couple of weeks later the blank postcard turned up. Like old times.

  I go to bed, but when I shut my eyes I still see the postcard. The painting of the lakes and hills makes me think of home, and Sean, and Mina Ma, and it makes my chest hurt. I keep seeing them. A tourist on the street might be Erik, a man in a bookshop could be Jonathan, a flash of blond hair and I imagine it’s Ophelia. The smell of Mina Ma’s hand cream, a popular brand in Bangalore, follows me around like a pup. Once I had to switch off an episode of the BBC production of Robin Hood because the actor playing Robin had hair just like Sean’s. Every time I’m with Ray, I feel guilty, like I have broken a pact in some way, like I’m betraying them both. My past is haunting me and, like Amarra, it won’t go away.

  I can’t sleep. I can’t stop thinking about him. Frustrated, I turn the light back on and search for something to read. I’ve read every book on Amarra’s shelf at some point in our lives, so I hunt for the book Sean gave me, British Romanticism.

  It looks boring. I search for the blurb, but the back cover is blank. Touching the wrinkled spine, I notice for the first time that the cover is loose, made of old paper. I peel it away, revealing an old and tattered book beneath. The real cover has been blacked out with a thick felt tip. Bewildered, I flip through the first few pages.