MirrorWorld Part 11

"You spoke to her?" I didn't think Allenby was capable of looking more stunned, but her face is quite pliable. "And she spoke to you? What did she say?"

I decide to skip her accusations about me being a liar and keep this conversation on track. "She told me to find Simon."

Allenby's expression freezes. "Find ... him?"

I nod. "Is he someone important?"

"He was," she says.

"Was?"

Allenby crumples in on herself. She folds her arms on the table and puts her fluffy head down. When she lifts her head again, she's got tears in her eyes. "This isn't going to be easy for either of us."

I knew Allenby before I lost my memory. There's no doubt of that now, unless she's lying, but I'm not getting that vibe. She seems truly upset. Not upset ... disturbed. "We were friends?"

Allenby thumps her head against her arms three times and then sits back up. "More than friends."

This makes me flinch. "We weren't...?"

Allenby laughs hard, releasing some of her pent-up tension. "Heavens, no!" After a moment of silence, she asks. "Shall I just come out with it all? I want it to be your choice. Do keep in mind that you, the man who feels no fear, decided to forget all of this."

"Why?"

"You might not feel fear, but you sure as h.e.l.l feel pain-perhaps more poignantly than most, and some pain can conquer even the strongest of us."

"That's why I have no memory?"

She nods. "At your request. The operation was performed here. Not that I was present for it, mind you. For all your fearless bravado, do you know how you told me? How you asked to keep your secrets and let you be? An e-mail. A G.o.d-d.a.m.ned e-mail."

Her complaints about my past actions flow through the colander of my mind. But some of the message gets stuck. "Here? Was I a prisoner?"

"Not remotely."

I shake my head. It doesn't feel right.

"Some part of you remembers," she says. "That you trust me." She points to the cupboard. "Where the gla.s.ses are kept." She waves her hand in the air, dismissing the topic. "We'll come back to that later."

"So," I say, "who are you?"

"I am ... was a friend of your mother's."

"I can't remember my mother."

"You knew what you were giving up." She looks at me with hard eyes.

I have nothing to say to this. I can't remember the me she's talking about.

"We met at university," she says. "Your mother and I. We became like sisters, and then we were when I married her brother."

"You're ... you're my aunt?"

Tears slip from her eyes, and she reaches a hand out across the table. I'm not sure why, but I take it.

She works hard to control her voice. "I'm nearly the only family you have left."

"Nearly the only family?" I ask, and then something twists in my gut. Some strange discomfort, like I've eaten something rotten. My mind may not remember, but my body does, just like it remembered where to look for a gla.s.s. The sensation moves through my torso and neck, squeezing my brain until the realization snaps into focus.

The missed detail.

"The toothbrush."

"What?"

"In the bathroom," I say. "There's a pink toothbrush."

She rolls her eyes and mutters, "Incompetents." Allenby squeezes my hand. She looks around the room like she's afraid someone could be listening. But then, believing her own claims of privacy, continues. "There's no going back from this. Not again."

"I understand."

"I'm going to tell you your name."

I nod. "Please do."

"You're not Crazy. With or without a capital C." She pauses, unsure. Whispers, "b.o.l.l.o.c.ks," and then says, "Your name ... is Josef ... Shiloh."

"Shiloh." I release her hand and stand. My first name holds little interest. But the last name ... "Shiloh." An unfamiliar rush of emotions makes me feel uncomfortable. Is this what fear feels like? I lean on the table for balance. "The pink toothbrush. It belongs to..."

She nods. "Your wife."

I all but fall back into my seat. "Wife..."

"Part of you remembered her, too. You might not remember her, but you never stopped wanting to save her, did you?"

Despite my lack of memory, I know she's right. "What's her name?"

"Maya."

"Maya," I say, trying out the name, but it doesn't sound familiar at all. h.e.l.l, my own name, Josef Shiloh, doesn't feel right. To me, I'm still Crazy.

Or maybe that's just the selfish man Allenby spoke of. My whole persona might be a fabrication. An escape. But from what? Running requires fear. What could I be afraid of?

The answer comes to me as a question.

"Who is Simon?"

Allenby looks freshly wounded by the question. This is where the story gets ugly. Where the pain begins. I can feel the invisible energy of it rolling off of her in waves. She lifts her head, twisting her mouth, and then speaks two words that radically alter the way I see the world.

"Your son."

I stare at Allenby, searching for a hint of deception. I find none.

In the past year, I haven't once considered that I might be married. The idea of having a son is so totally foreign to me. And yet I smile. "I have a son?"

Allenby does not smile.

Her gloom robs my smile as well.

"I had a son."

Her nod is subtle.

"He's dead?"

Another nod.

"How?"

"I'd rather not say."

"I don't remember it," I a.s.sure her. "I don't remember you, or Maya, or Simon. If you tell me, I'll know about it, but I won't feel it. To me, we're talking about strangers."

She blinks her tears away, looking at me with glossy brown eyes. "You feel nothing? Not even a little?"

I shake my head. It's a lie.

I feel something. I'm not sure what. The emotions aren't connected to a thought or memory. It's deeper than that. But I can handle it, and I'm sure as h.e.l.l not afraid to hear the rest, even if it was so bad that I had my memory eradicated.

"Fine," she says, sitting back. She wipes her arm across her running nose and sniffs back her emotions. "It was Maya."

"What was Maya?"

"She killed him. Your wife. Murdered your son."

"How?"

"With a shard of gla.s.s from a broken clock. It was a gift, that clock, from me." Allenby straightens her posture, steeling herself against the story. "She stabbed him fourteen times. In his arms. His chest. His stomach."

Emotions roil. I fight against them.

"She held that little boy-he was eight-in her arms and buried the gla.s.s into him over and over, into the boy who trusted her implicitly, into the son she adored with every strand of her DNA, into the young man who you would have done anything to save."

"But ... why?"

"That's harder to answer." Allenby looks up at me and seems surprised.

"What?" I ask.

She points to the right side of my face. "Your cheek."

I touch a finger to my cheek. It's wet. A single tear has fallen. "Tell me why."

"The official ruling was temporary insanity, which is actually close to the truth. Except there was nothing temporary about it. Over the months that followed, she descended into a kind of madness. She would scream until her throat went raw and she lost her voice. She would dig at her legs, exposing muscle."

"I saw the scars."

"She returns to herself on rare occasions, as she must have with you, but we've had to keep her heavily sedated. The marks you no doubt saw on her arms were self-inflicted wounds. Someone forgot to add a sedative to her IV bag. When she woke, she used her arms as a pin cushion for the IV needle. Even when she's loopy on drugs, she finds ways to harm herself."

"Is it the grief?" I ask. "Remorse for what she did?"

"No," Allenby says. There's not a trace of doubt in her voice. "It's fear that drives her."

"Fear?" From what I've observed over the past year, fear most often has a source. It could be as obvious as a man with a gun or as subtle as an idea. But what could Maya have to fear from an eight-year-old boy whom she adored? "Fear of what?"

"This is going to be hard to understand," Allenby says.

"Because I don't feel fear?"

"Because it's b.l.o.o.d.y insane."

"I lived in an asylum," I remind her. "My life-the life that I remember-is about as insane as it gets."

Allenby stands and takes the blender pitcher to the sink. Begins rinsing it out. "You're wrong about that. That capital C you're so fond of is going to feel a whole lot smaller in about sixty seconds."

"What happens in sixty seconds?" I ask.

She points to the shade-covered kitchen window. "You're going to build up the nerve to pull up that shade."

"And what am I supposed to see?"

She pauses scrubbing the pitcher. "Do you remember injecting yourself?"

I hadn't thought of it since waking, but I remember it. "Yes."

"Do you remember the hallucinations?"

"Yeah, but-"

"What did you see?"

I think about the strange, distorted darkness, lined with green.

She doesn't let me tell her. "What did you hear?"

I nearly say, "nothing," but then I remember. "Whispers."

She returns to her ch.o.r.e. "Then it worked."

"What worked?"