Sadie St. Claire stood on the top porch step, a purple backpack in her hand and a smile on her face. 

She looked exactly like she had six years ago: same long red hair, scattered freckles, and gray-blue eyes. She even had on the same pair of black overalls and too-small red converse as she had when she left. She should have been eighteen, but in the doorway, there was a twelve-year-old girl. 

The woman, Elizabeth St. Claire, stood on the other side of the doorway. Her hand gripped the doorknob as she stared at the girl. Her knuckles turned white with her face. 

“Can I come in?” the girl asked questionably. 

Elizabeth pulled her hand off the doorknob. The spiraled design carved into the metal knob was imprinted on her palm. 

She nodded slowly, pulling her daughter towards her and burying her face in Sadie’s hair. It still smelled the same- something like cinnamon.   

“Is everything okay?” Sadie asked. Her words were muffled in her mother's red wool sweater.

Elizabeth finally pulled away and looked her in the eyes. “Yes. Everything’s okay.”

Elizabeth couldn’t keep herself from falling back into that night, the first of November, six years ago. Sadie, she was exactly the same. She had gone to a sleepover. She hadn’t disappeared. Why were there all these memories, of years of days without her, when here she was? 

Was she crazy? Were each one of those wretched days somehow insane products of her imagination? 

They all felt so real, but so was Sadie. 

Everything made no sense, she thought it might be a dream. But somehow it all felt like it fit, like a puzzle piece, like she shouldn’t be surprised that her supposed-to-be eighteen-year-old daughter was there, exactly the same as she was when she was twelve. 

“Where did you go?” The words shot out of her mouth like bullets. She immediately wished she hadn’t. Her daughter would definitely think she was crazy if she explained.

Sadie cocked her head. “You know where I went. I slept over at Vera’s. I told you!” 

Elizabeth collapsed onto the couch. She knew it hadn’t been a dream. There were all too many things, the missing person posters with a picture of Sadie at Niagara Falls that she frantically plastered in store windows and stapled to telephone poles, the searches through the nearby woods with the police, yelling her name until she lost her voice. The days that turned into weeks that turned into months that turned into years of nothing but sadness, and regret, and hope, that one day she might turn up at her doorstep like she just did.  

And now, there she was, sitting on the broken la-Z-boy with a bag of Cheetos, licking bright red powder from her fingertips. 

“Mom, are you ok? You look super spacey, it’s weirding me out.” 

Elizabeth’s vision blurred and she shook her head. “I’m fine,” she said. Sadie gave her a look but didn’t pay much mind to it.

Elizabeth unfolded herself and stumbled to the kitchen. She unzipped Sadie’s purple backpack, left crumpled on the tiled floor. She spilled the contents onto the floor. A hairbrush with a blue plastic handle, a denim jacket, and clothes from the day before. A jar of navy blue nail polish. A polaroid camera and a picture of two girls; Sadie and her friend.  Sadie was mid-laugh, her nose scrunched up and her eyes all squinty. In sparkly silver gel pen, the date was written: 11/1/16. 

Elizabeth stared at the silver of the date like the sparkles might hold some sort of answer. 

“Mom?” Sadie asked. Elizabeth threw her stuff back into her bag and yanked the zipper. 

“What?”

“Can we go to the mall? You said we could go last week.”

Elizabeth felt lightheaded. “Did I?” She didn’t remember saying that. “Of course we can.”

The whole car ride there, Elizabeth stared out the window ahead of her, every few seconds glancing at Sadie to check if she was still there. Sadie adjusted the radio dial, spinning past static and news shows. 

“There’s nothing good on,” she grumbled. 

After twenty long minutes they pulled into the parking lot. Sadie rolled up her window and jumped out. 

“Are you sure you’re feeling ok?” she asked, slamming the car door. 

“Of course! Where did you want to go?” Elizabeth said as she locked the car. 

Walking through the mall, Sadie fingered pairs of jeans and sweaters at store after store. They stopped for soft pretzels that were way too hot and burned their tongues. Elizabeth sat across from her at a frozen yogurt store. A college age waitress with too-much bright blue eyeshadow and shiny lip gloss took their orders. Elizabeth ordered strawberry, and lemon, “for her,” as she nodded at Sadie. The waitress raised her over-plucked eyebrows, but she didn’t say anything, just nodded and smiled. 

The other customers shot her looks as she laughed and talked to an uneaten cup of lemon fro-yo.

Sadie stopped at a small store at the top of the escalator. It had a boutique-y feel, with vintage purple wallpaper and hanging lights in red glass, but the shoes were modern, with knee-high boots and platform sneakers. 

Sadie excitedly picked up a pair of boots and held them up for her mom to see. They were a brilliant iridescent blue color that shifted to blue and green in the fluorescent light. Sadie pulled them over her socks and tightened the laces that went up her ankle. She turned her foot around in the light. 

“What do you think?” she asked her mom excitedly.

“They look great on you,” Elizabeth said. 

“Can I get them? Please please, please? Look at them!”

Elizabeth agreed, of course, she wouldn’t be able to say no. They paid and walked out of the store, Sadie already wearing her new boots. They talked about little things. How warm it was for November, how Sadie would look with bangs. Stupid little things, things that didn’t matter. Elizabeth felt herself believing that nothing had ever happened. Maybe Sadie did just go to a sleepover. She convinced herself it had all been some crazy dream. Her daughter was here. She could look at her right now and watch as she holds up a pair of earrings in a mirror and asks if they bring out her eyes. 

She didn’t remember, but she had been in that same store two weeks ago. The cashier knew who she was.

He exchanged a glance with his coworker and whispered, 

“That’s the woman I told you about- the one with the missing daughter.”

The other cashier made a face of pity in Elizabeth’s direction.

“Why isn’t she in a hospital?”

“No one thinks she needs to go. She isn’t hurting anybody. It makes her happy, I guess.”

“So she just imagines it all?”

“Guess so.” 

Sadie St. Claire was never never declared dead, but no one had heard from her in six years. 

She’d gone to a sleepover on November 1st and never came home. 

It had torn Elizabeth to pieces. Sadie was the only person she really had, a steady rock in her life. Her husband had died almost a decade ago and she never was close with the rest of her family. Elizabeth cared about her daughter more than anybody else, even more than herself. After Sadie went missing, Elizabeth refused to eat for weeks. She wouldn’t leave the house and nobody came to help her. Her siblings gave up after a few weeks. She was too stubborn. The police had investigated and searched for years, but with nothing, except her purple backpack found on the road from her friend’s house. Elizabeth had begged them to look more, to not stop until they found her daughter, dead or alive. She always believed her daughter was out there, that someday she would come home. Her siblings tried to get her to have a funeral but when they brought it up she would scream at them, saying she wouldn’t accept her daughter being dead, not until they found her body. Then, and only then, would they plan a funeral. 

They tried to give Sadie’s clothes to Goodwill but again, Elizabeth refused. She said, she’ll come back one day, I know she will. But part of her just needed some piece of her daughter to hold onto. Now they hung in the closet in between Elizabeth’s, covered in six years worth of built-up dust and grime since she refused to wash them. Then, a year after her disappearance, Elizabeth’s episodes started. They were short at first, and felt more like a dream. But as time went on, they became so vivid, that even though Elizabeth knew her daughter went missing, she believed she was there, 

Three weeks ago, Sadie had shown up at her doorstep.  Six weeks before then, she’d shown up again. Same black overalls and red converse. They’d always come to the mall and walk around talking to no one, laughing and asking questions as the other customers whispered about her from behind the clothing racks. She was always oblivious. Sometimes someone would get her out of it, maybe because someone called the police and they snapped her out of it, maybe because she realized herself, and she would break into tears in the shoe store. Most of the time people would just watch. The next morning, she’d always forgotten. It became routine, and no one saw a reason to try and get her to stop, because it always made her happy, even for just one day. 

She didn’t remember it after. 

She never remembered. 

No matter how many times she came back for Elizabeth, Sadie St. Claire never really came home from that first night of November. 

Elizabeth had forty pairs of lace-up boots stacked in Sadie’s closet.