The Leaving Part 57

"So," he said. "What's up?"

He seemed so . . . normal . . . that it irked her, and yet something about how at ease he seemed put her at ease, too. She felt like she could relax for the first time maybe since coming home. As she sat, she said, "Kristen said she remembered something under hypnosis."

"And?"

"You and me." She hesitated at having to say it out loud, but there was no way around it. "Kissing."

He tilted his head for a second, then righted it. "How do you feel about that?"

"Confused. How do you feel?"

"You want lemonade?" He stood and crossed the room to where a pitcher and some gla.s.ses sat on a tray.

"Uh," she said. "Sure."

He poured. "My mom's gone all atheist New Age-y on me and she keeps saying this thing, 'It is always now.'"

He turned to her with two gla.s.ses, handed her one, and sat. "'It is always now.' Some guru of hers says that. And that's what I've been clinging to. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life trying to figure out what happened to the last eleven years."

"Don't you want to know if it's true that you and I were together?" She sipped her lemonade; it was too bitter. "More importantly, don't you want to know who did it and why?"

"Why does it matter if we were together if we don't remember?" He drank, too. "And John Norton did it."

A girl about seven years old walked into the room; her light-brown hair was in a wet ponytail, her sundress showing bony shoulders and a pale-pink leotard underneath it. Behind her trailed another girl with darker brown hair and skin, also wet ponytails and ballet gear.

"Well, h.e.l.lo, dancers," Adam said.

"h.e.l.lo." The first one crossed her ankles and took a strand of her hair and pulled it toward her mouth, a nervous tic.

"h.e.l.lo," the other said, mimicking.

"This is my friend Scarlett," Adam said.

"You have friends?"-from the darker-skinned girl, with a tickle laugh. Gen uine curiosity. Not a sarcastic bone in her body.

Adam laughed. "Yes, I have friends." He turned to Scarlett. "These are my sisters-Belle and Nadia."

"Hi, Belle," Scarlett said. "Hi, Nadia."

They both said hi shyly, then went to another part of the room and started playing with ghoulish dolls-Goth clothes, oversize hair, red lips scowling.

"My replacements," Adam said. "The wonder twins."

"No," Scarlett said, when the meaning of the words sank in. "Don't be like that."

"It's true." He didn't seem upset by it. "My parents were so miserable for like four years after I disappeared that they decided to have another kid. And it wasn't happening, so they adopted Nadia from Costa Rica and then they got pregnant with Belle."

"Wow," Scarlett said.

"I think it was smart." He nodded. "What else were they supposed to do? Spend their whole life mourning and wishing they still had a kid? Build some crazy stone monument? Blame it all on aliens?"

"Nadia!" A woman was calling from the other room. "Belle!"

"What?" Belle said back.

"Where are your ballet shoes?" from the hall.

"In the bag!" Nadia shouted.

"Come on or we'll be late."

Belle dropped the dolls on the rug, stood, said "See ya," and left the room. Nadia followed, giving Scarlett a smile and a wave.

Adam just watched them go, then said, "They're pretty much my favorite people on the planet right now."

"Mine, too, I think." Scarlett smiled. "Speaking of which, why have you been avoiding us?"

"I don't know, Scarlett." He leaned forward in his chair. "I definitely sensed there was something maybe not great between Lucas and me. I felt tension that first night back and figured I should trust that. Now maybe we know more about why I felt that. If it's true about you and me. Did you tell him?"

"He deserved to know. We remember so little. It seems unfair to hold back anything we actually know."

He got up and went to a window, looked out. "Do you really trust hypnosis? Or Kristen?"

"I don't know," Scarlett said. "I think so. What do you trust? Who?"

He said, "I've started to trust that maybe it's okay-maybe even better than okay-that we don't remember."

"That sounds like giving up."

He got up again and picked up a guitar Scarlett hadn't noticed in the corner. It looked comfortable in his hands. His fingers knew what they were doing when they found strings and frets. He sat and started to play.

She recognized the chords right away.

Knew some of the words before he started singing them.

And started to feel ill.

Started to feel her world tilt again in a way it hadn't in days.

The song tugged at her, and not in a nice way.

It was an aggravating tug, an unwanted pull.

And after a few more lines, she felt herself burst open, like a confetti cannon.

Joy, pain.

The things you can't forget even if you tried.

Drizzling down around her, blurring the air she breathed.

With each new note, she remembered running.

Fighting.

Aching.

For their lives.

Then snapping back.

Repeating.

Aching again.

Fear.

Running.

Snapping.

Struggling.

Failing.

Giving in.

He finished the song and looked up. "It's the only song I can play full from beginning to end and it makes me want to throw up."

"Who's it by? Did you write it? What does it mean?" she asked. "It's a message for us, right? A clue? One we left for ourselves?"

"Is it?" He put the guitar down. "Because to me it feels like a warning. It's telling me to stop digging because I won't like what I find."

"We have to figure it out. What if it could somehow help explain everything and clear Lucas? You have heard that he was arrested, right?"

"Of course." He stood. "I haven't played that song for anyone else and I'm not going to."

She stood, too.

"Most people never know why bad things happen to them." He folded his arms. "John Norton did it. I've moved on."

She moved on, too, by getting up and leaving. When she was tempted to skip the bottom step out front, she caught herself, grabbed the railing, and took them one at a time.

She tried to hum the song to herself.

It was already gone.

Lucas

The local jail felt like something out of the Old West. Basic slammer. Keys on silver hoops. Lucas would be sent off to a proper prison farther north tomorrow if Ryan couldn't secure a bail bond-ten percent of the $1 million price tag the judge had put on Lucas, who was only even allowed bail and pretrial release at all because he was under the age of eighteen. Ryan was going through the motions, making calls to their father's lawyers, but Lucas wasn't hopeful. Overnight, he'd shared his small cell with a few drunk college students and a lone prost.i.tute who'd grumbled loudly the whole time about entrapment.

An officer came down the hall in the late morning, handcuffs in hand, and told Lucas he had a visitor. That didn't take long, Ryan running out of options. Since there was no real visiting room, he was escorted to an interview room.

Chambers met him outside the room, unlocked the handcuffs the escorting officer had put on him. "Ten minutes," Chambers said, and he opened the door. "I'll be back and we'll all talk."

Sashor sat at a metal table.

"What are you doing here?" Lucas stepped into the room.

"I felt bad about our last chat," Sashor said. "And I wanted to see you before you, well . . ."

Lucas took the chair across from him; it shrieked across the floor when he moved it. "Do you think I did it?"

"No." Sashor folded his hands on the table in front of him; a thick silver band on his right ring finger. "But what I think really doesn't matter. Do you think you did it?"

"No." Lucas smiled. "But what I think doesn't really seem to matter, either. This theory that I killed him and we escaped? It makes no sense. Was his corpse driving that van? Or wait, no, it was his ghost, I bet."

"I think they're still working out the details of that theory." Sashor shrugged. "I get the sense they thought an arrest might shake something loose."

"A patsy!"

"That's a word for it," Sashor said. "But in the meantime, I was talking to Chambers. He told me they a.n.a.lyzed the photos they found-the hot air balloon and carousel and all. And they found other prints from those sets, some photos of you all doing those things. Those things really happened."

Lucas had seen some of the pictures; a detective had brought them by the holding cell that morning and Lucas-at that point the only one left in there-had asked for time with them, to study them, to see if they'd help make sense of things in a more satisfying way. But hadn't been allowed. "I'm not even sure I care."

"Better to come back with a happy memory than a traumatic one, though." Sashor released his folded hands in a sudden burst.

"So I rode a carousel by the beach one day. So there are pictures of me riding a bike and holding a soccer ball and blowing out ten candles on a cake. So what?"

"Well, at least now you know it wasn't all bad."

"These people. Or John Norton, if you believe that theory. He doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt."

Sashor sat back in his chair, then had to swipe his dreads out from behind him. "How are things with you and Scarlett?"

How best to say it?

"I was mostly remembering good things-only feeling good ones; she was remembering bad."

Sashor smiled. "Sounds like me and most women I've dated."