“Mommy, will you buy me a strawberry cake?”
The voice came from inside my dead daughter’s closet.
My knees struck the carpet before I understood that I was falling. For one impossible second, I could hear nothing but the freeway outside our apartment and the violent beating of my own heart.
Exactly two years had passed since we buried Chloe.
Two years since leukemia took our only child after months of chemotherapy, blood transfusions, sleepless nights, and prayers that seemed to disappear into the hospital ceiling. Lucas and I had sold our suburban home, drained our savings, and borrowed money from anyone willing to answer the phone.
None of it had saved her.
At least, that was what I remembered.
That morning, on the anniversary of Chloe’s death, Lucas had left before sunrise for a construction site across Phoenix. I had stood in the kitchen long after he left, staring at the closed door to Chloe’s room.
I had not entered it in nearly a year.
Her dolls still sat on the shelf. Her crayons remained inside a purple box on the desk. The pink princess dress from her last birthday hung in the closet beside clothes she would never outgrow.
I had reached for that dress because I wanted to wash it.
Then the clothes moved.
A little girl stepped from the darkness.
She looked about six years old. Long brown hair fell over her thin shoulders. Her eyes were large and frightened. Beneath her chin was a tiny mole I had kissed thousands of times.
She was wearing Chloe’s pink princess dress.
“Mommy, I’m hungry,” she repeated.
I screamed and stumbled backward.
The girl moved toward me, and instinct took over. I pushed her away. She fell onto the carpet and began to cry.
The sound was not ghostly.
It was the frightened cry of a real child.
I crawled toward her and touched her arm. Her skin was warm. I could feel the pulse beating beneath it.
She scrambled away and ran into the living room. I followed, barely able to breathe. She climbed onto the couch, picked up the remote, and pressed three buttons without looking.
The television changed to the cartoon channel Chloe had always watched.
I turned toward the shelf above the fireplace.
The urn was gone.
For two years, it had stood beside a framed photograph of Chloe wearing a yellow sunhat. I remembered holding that urn against my chest after the funeral. I remembered Lucas taking it from me when I refused to put it down.
Now there was no urn.
In its place stood several photographs I had never seen.
In one, Lucas sat in a seafood restaurant beside the little girl. In another, they rode a carousel at an amusement park. The third showed them standing near a lake with Lucas’s sister, Rebecca.
I turned the amusement-park photograph over.
“Sunday with the family. Three weeks ago.”
The words were in Lucas’s handwriting.
My hands shook so badly that I almost dropped my phone. Lucas answered on the fourth ring.
“Come home immediately,” I said. “Who is that girl, and where are Chloe’s ashes?”
Silence.
Not confusion. Not disbelief.
Silence.
Then Lucas spoke in a low, urgent voice.
“Lock yourself in the bedroom, Mariana. Don’t hurt the girl. I’m on my way.”
He ended the call.
He had not asked which girl.
He knew.
The child watched me from the couch. Her knees were pressed together, and her fingers twisted nervously in the skirt of the princess dress.
“Who are you?” I whispered.
Her face crumpled.
“I’m Chloe.”
Half an hour later, Lucas rushed through the front door. His work shirt was soaked with sweat, and white construction dust covered his boots.
He saw the girl and immediately pulled her into his arms.
“Daddy,” she sobbed.
The word cut through me.
“Tell me the truth,” I demanded.
Lucas turned toward me, still holding her.
“Mariana, Chloe is alive. She recovered six months ago. You’re the one who doesn’t remember.”
The room seemed to tilt.
“I saw her body.”
“That never happened.”
“We had a funeral.”
“No, we didn’t.”
“There was an urn on that shelf.”
“There was never an urn.”
He spoke slowly, as if explaining something to a dangerous stranger.
“You had a severe breakdown while Chloe was receiving treatment. You became convinced she had died. You created memories that weren’t real. I sent her to stay with Rebecca in Flagstaff while you received psychiatric care.”
I stared at him.
“You let me believe my daughter was dead for two years?”
“You wouldn’t accept anything else. Every time I tried to bring Chloe home, you terrified her.”
The girl buried her face in his chest.
“If you frighten her again,” Lucas continued, “I’ll call an ambulance. They’ll take you back to the hospital.”
That night, we sat around the kitchen table pretending to be a family.
Lucas watched every movement I made. The girl kept her eyes on her plate.
Then she picked up a slice of carrot. She carefully nibbled around the edge until only the center remained, then ate it in one bite.
My fork slipped from my hand.
Chloe had done that since she was two.
“Who taught you to eat carrots that way?” I asked.
The girl’s eyes filled with tears.
“Nobody.”
“Where did you learn it?”
“I always do it.”
“Enough,” Lucas warned.
But the child looked directly at me.
“Forgive me, Mommy. I know you spent so much money trying to make me better. Do you not love me anymore because we’re poor because of me?”
Lucas stood so quickly that his chair fell backward.
“That’s enough, Mariana!”
“I didn’t say that to her.”
“You’re upsetting her.”
He pulled the girl away from the table and took her into Chloe’s room. A moment later, I heard the lock click.
I went to my bedroom and closed the door.
Maybe Lucas was right. Maybe I had created a funeral inside my mind. I had been hospitalized after my second attempt to end my life. There were weeks I remembered only in fragments.
But grief could distort memories. It could not create physical objects.
I remembered the weight of the urn.
I remembered rain striking a black umbrella at the cemetery.
I remembered a nurse named Evelyn removing the IV from Chloe’s hand after her heart stopped.
Most of all, I remembered the body.
I had touched my daughter’s cold cheek and whispered that I would find her again.
Near midnight, Lucas entered carrying a glass of water and two white pills.
“Your medication,” he said.
I stared at the tablets in his palm.
“They don’t look like my usual pills.”
“The pharmacy changed the manufacturer.”
I pretended to swallow them and hid them beneath my tongue. When Lucas went to shower, I wrapped the pills in a tissue and slipped them into my purse.
Then I opened the drawer where we kept important documents.
My medical records were gone.
So was Chloe’s death certificate.
At the bottom of the empty drawer lay a business card.
DR. ADRIAN KELLER
DESERT HORIZON BEHAVIORAL HEALTH
A handwritten note covered the back.
“If she remembers the funeral, increase the dose.”
I heard the shower stop.
I returned the card, climbed into bed, and closed my eyes.
Lucas came in several minutes later. He stood beside me long enough to confirm that I appeared asleep.
Then he made a phone call from the hallway.
“She saw the photographs,” he whispered. “No, she doesn’t remember everything. But we’re running out of time.”
A pause followed.
Then he said something that turned my blood cold.
“If Mariana finds Evelyn, we lose the money—and we both go to prison.”