Here She Lies

and zapped it away.
    A car drove toward the house and my heart raced. Was it them? Was this all a mistake? The car passed.
    Life without my daughter would be unbearable.
    “This Julie’s computer?”
    “No,” Bobby said. “She’s got an office upstairs.”
    “Mind if I take a look?” Lazare asked me. More pre-warrant permission, I guessed.
    “Go ahead,” I said.
    Bobby led Lazare down the hall. When I didn’t follow, they both turned around.
    “I’d like to shower,” I said. “I feel gross, and I need to pump.”
    “Okay,” Lazare said. “I’m not going to touch anything. I’ll just eyeball things until I hear the warrant’s gone through.” He smiled kindly and I wished he wasn’t here. If only there had never been a reason for this wise, persistent man to have entered our lives.
    They disappeared up to Julie’s lair and I to my beehive yellow room. The buzzing in my head wouldn’t stop. I was deliriously exhausted and anguished beyond anything I had ever felt before. I sat on my bed for about fifteen minutes, crying and pumping milk, then sealed a fresh bottle for Lexy and went to the kitchen to put it in the freezer. Back upstairs in my bathroom, I stripped naked and stood under the streaming hot water, wishing it could melt away my sense of weakness because what I wanted now was to be the strongest mother who had ever lived. I never gave up hope, I heard myself saying. I always knew we’d find her. When I came out of the shower I was clean but otherwise untransformed. I dried myself. Brushed my hair and my teeth. Rubbed cream into every inch of my skin. A look through my dresser drawers and closet offered nothing I wanted to put against my body; nothing from my old life, my life before yesterday, seemed credible. I wasn’t really me anymore. And who was Julie?
    Wrapped in a towel, I went upstairs to my sister’s bedroom. The office door was ajar — I could see Bobby sitting at the computer, pointing and clicking, and Lazare standing behind him, watching — and I closed it. I slid open one side of Julie’s closet and ran my hand along the edges of her hanging clothes. Her taste was simple, classic, and all the fabrics were top quality.
    Who had bought these clothes? Had she paid for them, or had I? A few still had their tags attached. I didn’t want to wear anything brand-new; I wanted something she had worn. When I saw a white-on-white gauzy outfit of baggy pants, loose Indian-style shirt and underneath camisole, I lifted the hanger off the rod. This one had caught my eye immediately during this visit’s first closet inspection, but I hadn’t dared borrow something so pristine, not around a baby. I slid the pieces off the hanger and put them on.
    Clad in Julie, I moved slowly around her room, imagining what it was like to be her. I’d always thought I knew, that we were essentially the same person, but the last two days had taught me otherwise. I was going to have to face the probability that Julie was not who I had thought she was, which therefore meant — didn’t it? — that neither was I.
    I sat down on one of the black chairs and peered into the curio table at the merged families of glass cats. Which were mine and which were hers? Then I noticed she had added a few objects and they startled me: Lexy’s red teething ring (her favorite!) and the other pair of earrings. Julie’s pair, the other mismatched set. There they were.
    I lifted off the glass top of the table and set it carefully on the floor. The stickiness of Lexy’s teether soothed me a little, helped me to feel her, and I slipped it into a deep pocket of the white slacks. Then I picked up the earrings. They settled into the creased palm of my hand, innocent little chips of rock, identical except not, because one was real and the other wasn’t. I couldn’t tell which was which. Leaning back in thechair, I lifted my hand to the window to bathe the earrings in light. After the rain, the sun seemed so raw; but I couldn’t see what Mrs. Simonoff had recognized so easily. So I turned on Julie’s bedside lamp, crouched down and put my hand under its hot halogen bulb. Here, one earring glittered magnificently, while the other stayed as dull and predictable as always. That one was my zircon.
    I pressed the post into my pierced left ear and attached the backing. Then I put the real diamond back in the curio table — rejecting the fleeting, painful notion that I could be tampering with evidence — and removed eight