SORROW WOODS (13 page)

taken, I hope she’ll be able to understand why it is I’ve done what I’ve done. I don’t expect Elodie to understand.

“Elodie! I’m here. It’ll be alright. They’ll get Mamma and then they’ll know it’s all a big

mistake. Whatever it is that they think we’ve done, we know we haven’t done it and Mamma will

know too.”

Serena screams the words over the noise of the helicopter and over her shoulder but

doesn’t get a chance to say anything more. They push her head down and, even though it looks like they’re manhandling her, they actually gently coax her into the back of the waiting police car.

Serena is still fighting as if her life depended on it. They bundle up Elodie, who doesn’t fight at all, into the back of the police car that’s idling noisily behind the one Serena is in. I watch her eyes as they follow Elodie, seeing her safely into the car, and then her green eyes snap onto mine. She

knows I can’t hear her, but she mouths the six words to me that I’ll never forget for the rest of my life.

“I. Wish. We’d. Never. Met. You.”

Before I can open my own mouth to say something back to her, the cars abruptly drive away.

I take a deep breath and look back at the shack that is now being searched by several police officers.

A tall, bald man with soft brown eyes steps up to me and tucks his hands into his bullet-proof vest.

“Mr. Matthews?”

I nod.

“Well Sir, if what you claim is true, you’ll be a hero. You know that, right?” he asks.

I shake my head. “I don’t want to be a hero. I’m not doing it to be a hero.”

He studies my face and nods. “I actually believe you. Not sure why, but I do.”

I roll my eyes. He’s no doubt read through my record. “Thanks.”

“We need to take a statement from you. Can you come down to the station with us?”

I nod. “Where are you taking the girls?”

“They’ll go to the hospital. We need to run blood and DNA tests, and they’ll be examined for

any physical or mental problems,” he explains.

“They’re not mental,” I say, following him into the car. The warmth of the vehicle bathes my

skin in a delicious heat, making me forget what I was about to say. “If that’s them, when will they be able to meet their real parents?”

He climbs into the seat in front of me and turns the heaters up even more. “Well, there are

lots of things to do in the hospital first, but we have notified both sets of potential parents of the girls. It’ll take time. It depends on how the girls handle everything.”

I nod and watch the tiny shack as it disappears from view. It takes us two whole hours to get

onto a paved road. No wonder no one has ever found them before.

Serena

It’s been two days since the police crashed into my life and shattered it into a thousand tiny pieces.

This means it’s been two whole days since I’ve seen Elodie and that kills me more than it being

nearly twenty-six days since I’ve seen my Mother, who apparently isn’t my real Mother. I stand at the window, looking out at all of the buildings and bright lights below me and sigh.

The last few days have been the hardest of my life. They’ve touched me, prodded me,

questioned me, tested me, and have made me feel like I am being accused of committing a terrible

crime. They won’t let me see Elodie; they say she’s too upset. Why don’t they listen to me when I tell them that I can calm her down? I turn around when the door behind me opens.

“Hello, Serena.”

It’s Janet, the woman who has been assigned to make sure I’m not going mad. I keep telling

her that I’m not crazy, I’m just angry. I’m angry every single second of the day. I want to run. I want to swim. I want to do something other than just sit here in this room, worrying about what I’m

supposed to do now.

Sometimes I have nightmares where I’m running through trees being chased by the police.

Sometimes I dream about swimming in the lake with Kaiden. In those dreams, Kaiden doesn’t tell

the police about me. He swims with us every single day and sleeps in our house. In those dreams,

he’s a real friend.

Sometimes I sit up in bed in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat and panting, as a

horrible feeling grows in my throat. Sometimes it feels as if I can’t breathe. Alone and angry, I pace up and down the length of my room. It consumes me. I can think of nothing else.

“Hello, Janet.”

She smiles and quietly shuts the pale wooden door behind her. I walk over to my bed that’s

covered in a blue and green coloured cotton cover and sit on the edge of the soft mattress that sinks underneath me. Janet places some brown files onto the table that’s tucked in the opposite corner of the room and sits down.

“As I explained to you yesterday, I think it’s important for you to see these before you meet

your real parents,” she says.

I open my mouth to speak but she holds her hand up.

“I know you don’t want to see them just yet and that’s fine, but I think knowing what

happened to you will help you to understand why you’re here. I think it’ll help you to understand
them
.” She pulls some papers out and spreads the sheets over the table. I take a deep breath and walk over to her.

“This picture is the one that was circulated immediately after your disappearance.” She hands

me the picture of the little girl in the pink dress that Kaiden showed me. I nod.

“This is where you were taken from.” The second photograph shows a flowery, colourful

garden with a white blanket spread out on the grass and several toys dotted around the lawn. A

small bike stands in the very back of the garden.

“She used the bike as a step to get over the fence at the back,” she tells me and my eyes move

over to the fence. I don’t remember anything. I thought looking at these sorts of pictures would

trigger a memory of my life before the woods, but there’s nothing.

“What was my name?” I ask.

“Excuse me?”

I hand the pictures back to her. “When they were taking the blood from my arm, I heard

them saying that Serena wasn’t my real name. What was my name before I was Serena?”

She looks up at me with her big grey eyes and gives me a small nod. “Your real name is Ayla

Scott.”

Ayla? I wrinkle my face up. I don’t think I look like an Ayla.

She smiles warmly at me. “Don’t you like it?”

I shrug. “I guess I’ve just always been Serena. When it’s all you’ve known for your whole life,

it’s hard to be told something else and accept it immediately.”

She nods. “You’re a smart girl. But you never went to school, is that right?”

I shake my head. “My mother answered my questions, and everything else I learned from

books. I read all the time.”

“She’s not your Mother, Serena,” she gently reminds me.

I sigh. “I know. It’s just hard to forget.”

She pushes another photograph and a collection of newspaper clippings across the table to

me. “Your real Mother is Angela Scott.”

I ignore the photograph for now, glancing at the newspaper headlines. I see the word

‘abduction’ and take a deep breath.

I was two and a half years old. It was the middle of summer and Angela Scott had decided to

have a picnic outside on a blanket. During lunch, the house telephone had rung. She walked ten

metres from the garden into the dining room to answer the phone, which turned out to be a wrong

number. When Angela Scott returned to the garden, the blanket was strewn across the grass and her daughter was missing.

Me.

I was missing.

I had been taken.

“They did several televised appeals and raised thousands of dollars to fund the search for

you, but you were never found,” Janet tells me.

She pushes the picture farther across the table to me. When I look down, I see a man and a

woman who look like they’ve been crying. They’re seated at a table covered in blue cloth with

several microphones dotted along the edge of it.

“That was taken during the one year anniversary appeal,” she continues.

The woman, Angela Scott, looks a little bit like me but older. She has light blonde hair that’s

cut just above her shoulders and bright green eyes. The man has light brown hair, blue eyes, and

looks tall, though it’s hard to tell because he’s sitting down in the picture. They both look like nice, normal people. Then again, I’m not sure what normal really is. I guess they don’t look mad or crazy, or horrible and mean.

“What’s my Father’s name?” I ask.

“Auden Scott.”

We all have names that begin with the letter ‘A’? I find that a little strange. “Wouldn’t I have

some memories of my real parents?”

“Not necessarily,” she says, “not now anyway. Back then, you probably cried for many weeks

for your real Mother.”

I don’t know what to say. How could the woman who told me she was my Mother do this to

them? How could she do it to me?

“Do you understand everything that I’ve told you?” she asks as if I’m stupid, even though

she’s said that I’m smart.

I nod. “Of course I understand what you’re telling me, but asking me to believe you is the

same as asking me to admit that my whole life has been a lie. I’m not sure I’m ready to say that yet.”

She squeezes my hand. “What are you ready to say?”

I shake my head. “Nothing.”

I don’t want to talk to her and tell her about my life in the woods. I don’t want to share my

memories of Elodie with her, or any of them. “What about my sister?”

She clears her throat. “She’s not your real sister.”

“I know that, but no matter what you tell me, I won’t stop thinking of her as my sister. We

have only had each other and I love Elodie.”

She nods. “I know you do. She was stolen from another couple just over six years ago, but

she’ll be reunited with her real parents too.”

“When?” I ask panicked. Will they not let me see her before she goes to them? Will I ever

get to see her again?

“Not yet. She’s a little more upset than you are. We don’t want her mental health suffering

any more than it already has because of all this.”

I could cry. I know that Elodie is so scared and frightened right now. She hasn’t read the

books that I have, and has even less of an idea about the real world than I do.

“Let me see her. If anyone can calm her down or make her feel better, it’s me,” I plead.

“Soon,” she says, “we need to get you and your real parents back together first.”

“I don’t wanna see them yet,” I tell her.

She nods. “I know, and I respect that. But you’re not eighteen yet, Serena, which means

you’re still a minor and therefore they are legally responsible for you. You’ll have to meet them soon.”

“They’re already here, aren’t they?” I ask, even though I’m already sure of the answer.

“Yes, they had a private plane chartered within minutes of the police telling them that they

suspected they had found you.”

“The police didn’t find me,” I remind her.

“I know. Kaiden found you. He did this all by himself,” she says, sounding like everyone

should be proud of him.

My heart thumps in my chest at the sound of his name. I can feel the itch in my fingers and

the restlessness in my legs. I push myself from off the chair.

“I don’t wanna talk about
him
.”

Janet looks up at me and blinks. “Why not?”

“I hate him.”

She frowns. “Why? He found you.”

“I still hate him. He tricked me.”

She pulls her notepad towards her and scribbles a few words onto it. I want to learn to write.

I stride up and down the room, letting the soles of my feet relish in the feeling of the thick carpet underneath them.

“Why do you hate him, Serena?” she asks again.

I really don’t like the way she puts a soft voice on when she’s trying to get me to talk to her.

“I told you. I hate him because he tricked me. He made me think he was something he

wasn’t.”

She scribbles some more and then sighs. “In what way do you think he tricked you?”

I stop walking and flop down onto the bed. I lean back and let my head rest against the

pillow. The label says it’s made from duck feathers. I have no idea why duck feathers feel so

comfortable.

I don’t want to talk about Kaiden. When I think about him and what he did the ball of anger

that thunders in my chest threatens to explode. I feel like punching something every time I think about him. “I thought he was my friend,” I finally answer.

“Why do you think he isn’t your friend anymore?” she persists.

“This,” I say with a sigh. “This is his fault. All of it.”

“You mean the fact that he solved a fourteen-year old crime and reunited two lost children

with their real parents?”

I know what she’s trying to do, but it won’t work. “He didn’t have to pretend to like me to do

that though, did he?”

“I think what he did was very brave,” she says in his defence.

“Lying to someone and pretending to be their friend is not brave. If you ask me, it sounds a

little cowardly.”

Janet sighs and continues to write. I want to read what she’s writing about me. Is she saying

that I’m mad? Is she saying that I can’t cope with the real world? Will I be like those girls in my books that are taken away because they can’t cope and people think there’s something wrong with their

brains?

“Serena, you have to try and see things from his point of view. He did what any other person

would have done that recognised you,” she says, trying to reason with me.

If only she knew. He tried to kidnap me and only got scared when he was almost killed by a

wolf. I’m not sure any other person would have tricked me into coming into the woods with them in the middle of the night.