The Leaving Part 64

"Oh."

The flame caught.

"Apart from the ridiculous horseback-riding thing, it was the one thing I remembered right away." Kristen had her own lighter out and lit Glinda at another point. "Feeling different than all of you. And then when the memory guy asked me about kissing Lucas and Adam . . ."

"You said Sashor was hot!" Scarlett remembered.

"Objectively!"

Scarlett elbowed her. "So you do like me."

Glinda finally swooshed; they jumped back.

"I guess I was hurt or angry or something. But I'm done with that." She nodded. "You think they'll ever find him?"

There was still so much up in the air.

Charges against Lucas for the murder of John Norton had been dropped, at least, but Miranda was still in the wind.

Scarlett said, "I'm not counting on it."

"And you're okay with that?"

"I want to be?"

Kristen nudged Glinda farther away from them with a booted foot. "Why didn't I write their names down? Why didn't we keep better notes?"

The fire popped and they watched as Glinda's face became consumed. Scarlett tracked the flames as they made their way to the very tip of Glinda's magic wand, which lit, then blackened and converted to embers. Tiny, blowing orange bursts of magic that burned until they couldn't burn anymore.

I'm melting, Scarlett thought. Melting.

Lucas

Ryan and Lucas were on a way-high bleacher bench at the high school football field; the elementary school sat silent and empty past buzz-cut soccer fields.

A marching band had just heel-and-toed out onto the field. Black pants with stripes running down the side. Tall, hot-looking hats.

The members of the color guard were all carrying enormous bouquets of flowers and the instrumentalists made a block of long lines, right at the center of the field. They played a mournful song Lucas didn't recognize.

There were speakers, then, with shaky voices at a microphone on a small podium by the fifty-yard line.

Some students who spoke about gun safety.

Some parents who spoke about depression, the shooter, the counseling services available locally to anyone with thoughts of harming themselves or others.

Then the school princ.i.p.al-a woman in a red suit-talked about no lives ever being wasted.

Of young people as an inspiration to us all.

Of the heroism of teachers.

The strength of those left behind.

The cause that they all, as a community, could not forget.

Near the makeshift stage and microphone, a woman was holding up a large photograph of one of the victims of the shooting. Probably her daughter. The mother looked so sad and hollow, even now, that Lucas wished that someone could erase her grief, erase her memories-of hearing about the shooting, of hearing there were casualties, of not being able to find her daughter, of having to ID a body, of having to tell her husband, her other children if she had any, of waking up the next day and the day after that into that same bad dream.

The man beside her had one arm around her and a sign in the other that said, NEVER FORGET.

Why not forget?

Why not just black out something awful?

Like a shooting.

Or war.

Childhood, even.

Sure!

Oh.

Forgetting meant not knowing, meant ignorance, meant maybe making the same mistakes again and again.

Lucas's phone buzzed and he looked at it and didn't recognize the number. "h.e.l.lo?"

"You won't find him," Miranda said. "He's long gone."

"Who?" Lucas asked, turning away from the proceedings and looking out toward the baseball field behind the bleachers. "Who is he?"

"My father," she said.

Lucas met eyes with Ryan, who raised his brow questioningly. "Why were you watching me?"

"He needed to see how re-entry would impact the results of the treatment."

"It was only supposed to be for a few hours?" Lucas asked.

"Yes, but then Max died, and you were all traumatized again, so that had to be erased, and it took a while and then he had to erase your memory of him and the house and it just got messy, so it dragged on."

"For eleven years?" he near-screamed.

"Well, the nature of the thing changed. It was working but not consistently-and they really wanted him to get it right, and then he saw this opportunity to raise you all . . . completely without trauma. Building on some work he'd already done on me."

"What kind of work?"

"This isn't about me."

"Why were we let go?" he asked.

"Couldn't keep you forever. The plan was always to release you in your sixteenth year. It was more rushed than he'd wanted, but that was because you'd figured out who you were a few times and had somehow found a way to figure it out every day, so it was all a bit out of control at the end. You'd found the gun and all. You always were the fighter. That's why he picked you for me to keep an eye on. Figured if anybody was going to start remembering, it'd be you."

"How did he do it?" Lucas said. "How did he erase . . . everything?"

"Now, that even I don't know," she said.

"Why did you call me?" he asked.

"To make sure you knew that it wasn't all awful. We were like a big family. Except he only ever took a few of us out at a time. He always said you were foster kids if anyone asked."

"I'm going to find him." Lucas felt his disgust like a foul taste in his mouth. "I'll find you."

She said, "I won't remember you if you do."

Back home, in the RV, Lucas sorted all the photos of himself Chambers had given him into piles according to groups or general age range.

Then, when nothing jarring stood out, he set about hanging all the large photos that had been brought from the faked location of their kidnapping on the walls of the RV's main compartment. Chambers had agreed to lend them out to him.

He started to study every inch of them.

Not this again, Miranda had said when he'd taken her photo.

He understood now.

He had taken these photos, too.

There was a clue here.

That was what the tattoo meant.

He just had to find it.

Wouldn't sleep until he did.

He went over every inch of each of them.

Then did it again.

And again.

He'd done it probably twenty times by the time Ryan came to check on him.

He started to do it again anyway.

He was missing something.

He had to be.

The hot air balloon turned up nothing.

Puppy, nothing.

Horse, nothing.

Roller coaster, useless.

He always left the carousel for last. It was the most complicated, the most dense.

So much to look at.

The scratches on the teeth.

The burst of sun off the water in the distance.

Reflections in mirrors on the carousel's cylinder.

He'd already gone over this one maybe twice as often as the others.

Still, nothing.

He went back to the photos Chambers had given him and picked up the small stack he'd made of the photos from the same day.

One of him actually on that carousel horse, long arms holding on to the pole. So someone else had to have taken that.

One of the carousel from a distance.

Then a dozen more shots of the same horse as the one in the blown-up shot.