Nothing she invented survived contact with the actual sentence. *Sarah, it's me. Sarah, you're not dead. Sarah, I found the footage.* All of them absurd. All of them inadequate. Ten years of a sister's life did not fit into an opening line, and somewhere around the border Emma stopped trying to find one and simply drove, with the address Priya had finally, finally given her folded into the glove box like a passport into a country she wasn't sure would admit her.
Priya had not handed it over easily. That was in Toronto, in a schoolyard emptied of children, with two paper cups between them going cold.
"She made me swear on her life," Priya had said. "Which everyone thought was the one thing she didn't have anymore."
"I know why she left," Emma said. "I know about the merger. The forged signature. All of it. I'm not going to drag her back into any of it, Priya. I'm her sister. I just need to see her with my own eyes before β " She stopped.
"Before what?"
"Before Dad dies believing it. Before they sell the house. Before there's nothing left of us to come back to."
Priya had looked at her for a long time. Then she had written the address on the back of a grocery receipt, in pencil, slowly, like someone signing a treaty. "She teaches at the elementary school. She has the pottery studio above the bakery on Water Street. Don't go to the house first. She deserves to be standing in her own life when you arrive, not cornered in it."
So Emma did as she was told. She found the harbour town at the end of a road that gave up on pavement a mile out β a place of painted clapboard and lobster traps stacked in yards, of a lighthouse painted red and white and a harbour that smelled of salt and diesel and woodsmoke. She checked into the inn over the harbour office, a room with a sloped ceiling and a window that faced the water, and she slept the way soldiers sleep before a battle: badly, and all at once, and too early.
In the morning she walked the town the way she had been trained to walk a scene: slowly, and looking at everything twice.
The bakery was on Water Street, just as Priya said. It had a blue door and a window full of bread, and above it, up an exterior stair painted the same blue, a second door with a hand-thrown pot on the step holding a spray of dried flowers. Through the studio window Emma could see a wheel, shelves of bowls in graded sizes, mugs hanging from hooks. Glazes the colours of the sea on a grey day. Someone had hung a child's drawing in the corner of the glass β a lopsided house, a boat, three stick figures holding hands under a sun with too many rays.
She stood on the pavement with her heart going like a fist on a door and looked at that drawing for a long time.
*Three stick figures.*
The school was four streets up the hill, a low brick building with a flag and a yard and the ordinary roar of children released into a lunch hour. Emma parked the rented car where Priya had told her to β not at the gate, across the road, under the maples, where a parent might wait β and she waited.
She had imagined this part so many times that the imagining had worn grooves. In the grooves, Sarah was always twenty-nine, always in the silver-grey dress from the party photographs, always turning with that particular expression the cameras had caught under the string lights. Emma's mind, treacherous archivist, had kept her sister in formal wear for a decade.
The bell rang at three-fifteen.
The doors opened and the children came out in the universal chaos of dismissal β backpacks, shouting, a dropped mitten trodden into the mud of early spring. Teachers came out with them, shepherding, calling names. Emma scanned faces the way she scanned footage, frame by frame, looking for the one that would break the pattern.
And there β there was a girl.
Nine, maybe ten. Dark hair in a braid that had given up halfway. A red jacket too big for her, the sleeves pushed up. She came down the school steps at a run and stopped to retie a boot with the total concentration of a surgeon, and as she straightened, frowning at the knot, the light caught her face full on.
The Lindqvist chin. There was no other way to say it and no mistaking it once seen β that stubborn, slightly squared chin that ran through the family like a signature, on Robert, on Sarah in every photograph Emma owned, on Emma herself in the mirror every morning of her life. On this child, in Nova Scotia, in a red hand-me-down jacket, arguing with a bootlace.
Emma's hand found the car door handle and held on to it like a railing on a ship.
The girl finished with the lace, stood, and looked up β not at Emma; she never looked at Emma β toward the teacher coming down the steps behind the last of the children, and she smiled and said something and laughed, and the teacher laughed too, stooping to answer at the child's height, one hand resting easy and habitual on the back of the red jacket.
*Anna,* Emma thought, with the whole of her body. *Anna. There you are.*
The teacher was in her late thirties, grey threading her dark hair at the temples, a clay-flecked cardigan over her dress despite the cold. She moved through the crowd of children the way people move through water in their own harbour β known there, belonging there, a fixture of the place. She checked a smaller child's zipper. She confiscated, without malice, some treasure of the playground. She said goodbye to each of them by name.
Emma sat in the rented car across from the school gate with her hands locked on the wheel and her sister's whole stolen decade in view β the job, the town, the studio over the bakery, the child with the family chin β and discovered she could not yet do the thing she had driven four days to do.
Not today, she decided, and hated herself, and was grateful. Today she would only look. Tomorrow, she would find the courage to be looked back at.
Chapter 17: The Woman at the School Gate
The next day Emma went back at three o'clock and made herself get out of the car.