I wish his life was mine.
I look around then, guiltily, as if someone can hear me. You never know, and I even check my mouth to make sure it is closed. It is, of course. I know what words can do. I am here because of them, am hear to listen, to make sure the wrong ones aren’t said. I don’t know why 56-412 is being watched. His file is very thin, like he just appeared a few years ago. That shouldn’t be possible but with all the files SAT has, sometimes things get lost in the PDM archives.
I wish my file had gotten lost.
Still nothing from 56-412. Must be sleeping . . . no. He’s reading again. I hear the slow flip of pages turning. I sigh and close my eyes.
12.
WAKE UP.
I’m not in a chair, I’m in a bed. Ava’s bed.
I was dreaming again. I wonder why I dream the same, about the attic and the chair and the numbers. The person I never see, but listen to.
I wonder why it feels so much more real than this. Than me, here, in this room.
Because it was real.
If it was real, then how did I get here? Why am I here? I close my eyes again.
It takes me a long time to sleep and when I do, no dreams come.
13.
AFTER A WEEK OF AVA STORIES and Ava pictures and Ava, Ava, Ava, Jane tells me she has to go back to work. She says it as we’re eating dinner—pizza with pepperoni and olives.
Jane doesn’t like to cook much and besides, Ava loves pizza, loves olives. I like them both too and I am so desperate for something, anything to make sense, to feel real, to make me believe I am someone, that I am a me and not just a question mark, so I smile and Jane smiles back. It is so easy to make her happy.
“So, we have options,” Jane says. “You can try going back to school, or I can—well, there’s a group of doctors at the university hospital, and they’d be interested in seeing you.”
“All the time? Instead of school?”
Jane looks at her pizza. “It’s a neurology lab, and they’re very interested in trying to get a grant to study how memory works and they . . . they think you would be helpful to them. That they could help you remember who you are.”
I feel myself relax, an unconscious effort my body seems to know how to do even though my mind is racing and I feel anything but relaxed. I don’t know anything about me, but my body knows things. It is good at pretending. At smiling, at looking calm.
At lying.
“Help me how?”
“Well, there’d be tests,” Jane says. “If you’re interested, I’ll arrange for us to go in and talk to them.”
Testing. I remember that, remember the doctors and their machines and their needles poking me, testing me, drawing my blood and all saying everything will be fine, you’ll be fine, as if not knowing who I am is nothing.
As if they wanted me gone because they couldn’t fix me. They couldn’t even find where things went wrong. They looked at every part of me and all they could conclude was what I’d known from the moment I woke up.
I don’t know this place. I don’t know me.
I don’t think I can.
The Ava I am isn’t the Ava I’m supposed to be.
I just don’t know why I’m here. Why I’m her.
“School,” I say. “I’ll go to school.”
“Good,” Jane says, and grins at me. “I know the hospital was . . . it was hard for me to see you like that and I don’t . . . I don’t want that to happen again. And I think getting back to normal will be good. It’ll help you. Plus Sophy and Greer and Olivia have all called for you, so I know they want to see you.”
“Who?”
She blinks, then says, “Your friends,” putting her piece of pizza down on her plate and then pushing it away.
It takes her a moment to speak again, and when she does, her voice is very soft. Very eager. Very nervous. “Ava, do you—do you remember anything yet?”
I don’t know Jane, but her longing for her daughter gets to me, slides under the worry that coats me.
“Olives,” I say, and she smiles wide and brilliant, like everything is okay, but that night, as I am sitting on the floor of Ava’s room, awake again and looking into the dark, I hear her crying.
I move over to the window and push the curtain aside. Up past the broad glare glow of the streetlight, the stars shine faintly, tiny blurs of light. I see the Big Dipper and trace its shapes across the glass with one finger.
I hear Jane get up. I hear her get out of bed, pad out into the hall. I dive back into Ava’s bed, pulling the covers across myself, and close my eyes as my door opens and she looks in at me.
She goes downstairs and walks around for a while, footsteps tracing from the kitchen to the front door, the door I went out of that first night, and back again. Then there is silence, followed by a faint tapping noise. She’s on the phone. Jane always taps a pen against something when she’s on the phone.
I don’t remember her, but I am starting to know her. There is a strange sort of comfort in that.
Whoever she’s talking to must make her upset because her voice rises to a level I can hear and she says, “You didn’t tell me it would be like this. You said she’d be—hello? Hello? Damn!”
Then she cries.
I listen. Her tears sound like me, lost and scared, and I get up and go downstairs, go to her.
“Ava, honey,” she says, seeing me and wiping her eyes. “What are you doing up?”
I look at the phone, then back at her. Her gaze skitters away from mine, nervous.
We all have secrets. I wonder what Jane’s are.
I know I can find out. Not memory, something deeper, stronger. Something me. Something that knows I can gain trust. Find answers.
I smile at her. “I can’t sleep.”
“Me either,” she says, and glances at the phone, a fast, frightened look. “I guess you going back to school has got me thinking . . . do you want to look at some photos again? I could make popcorn.”
“Sure,” I say, and so I listen to her tell me stories about photos I have seen but still don’t know, listen to her tell me about Ava’s life and school.
All mine, now.
“I like your shirt,” I say, pointing at the last picture where a girl who looks like me is frowning, arms crossed over her chest as Jane grins at the camera against a backdrop of beach.
“You gave it to me for my birthday,” she says, and puts one arm around me.
It doesn’t feel familiar, but it doesn’t feel wrong either, and when I don’t move away her smile is so full, so strong, that I want to remember Ava for her. It would make her so happy, and I think it would be easy to be her daughter.
I could maybe become the Ava she wants me to be.
14.
AVA WEARS a lot of black. Her closet is full of it, and I go to school in black jeans and a black shirt with black boots whose tall, pointy heels make my ankles feel wobbly. I don’t like the clothes, but Jane is happy to see me in them, says, “Ava, honey, you look—you look like you! I guess you’ll blend right back in, won’t you?”
Blend in? If Ava wanted to blend in, she should wear brown and gray and shoes that don’t have heels that make sharp clipped noises every time I take a step. Also, her bag is covered with scrawled words like PEACE and HATE and LOVE and FUDGE! written in bright colors. It looks messy and screams “Look At Me!”
“I don’t want to take this,” I say, because I don’t. I don’t want carry it; I don’t even like it.
Jane looks surprised, but happy, and says, “Are you sure?”
When I nod she goes into her room and comes back with a simple gray bag. “I kept this after we went shopping before last term, hoping you’d—well, I guess for once we agree on something you’re wearing.”
“You don’t like my clothes?”
“Oh no, no, I—I know you like them,” she says.
“But I don’t.”
“You don’t?” she says, and when I nod her eyes widen, hope gathering, and she says, “Ma
ybe you—do you feel something when you put them on?”
More distance from who I’m supposed to be. And also, my feet hurt. “Like what?”
“Like—upset, maybe?” she says, and I realize she sees something in these clothes, sees her own memories in them and that something—whatever led me here—is tied up in an Ava she hasn’t told me about. One who dresses in clothes Jane doesn’t like.
Who goes to school and lives a life that Jane could know nothing about.
My head starts to hurt.
“No, nothing like that,” I mumble, and when she asks me if I’m fine I say Yes and Yes again and then “YES, I said YES okay?” when she asks for the third time and she flinches, but then smiles so bright and says, “That’s my girl,” happy and scared-sounding all at once and I realize she’s told me nothing but happy stories, that all I know is that Jane loves Ava and Ava loves Jane, but that can’t be all because even happiness has its tiny bits of bitter in it.
I don’t know how I know that, but I do. I can feel the beat of that truth inside me. Taste it bitter on my tongue.
Sometimes, like now, I don’t think I want to know who I really am.
15.
LAKEWOOD DAY is a series of light-colored buildings smoothed together in a circle and surrounded by neatly trimmed grass and small areas where flowers and neatly trimmed trees bloom, decorated with people standing, sitting, slouching.
All of them are talking and as Jane asks if she should come in with me, question filled with hope in her voice, I can’t do anything but stare.
Everyone seems so . . . I don’t know. Full of energy but not on edge. Ready, but not suspicious. There is ease here, there is hope and fear and lust and anger, every emotion, and so thick I can almost smell them, but one thing is absent.
Fear.
I hadn’t known I’d expected it until now, and without it, I feel . . . lost.
I don’t understand these people.
I want Jane to come with me, to be watched like the few adults I see are, to give me time to think, to understand why here, why school—and I do know that word, I do—seems so wrong.
A place so not what I understand in a place beyond memory, in a place I can’t reach but can feel.
I turn to her, but before I can speak there is knocking on the car window, not hard but eager, and I hear voices saying, “Ava!!”
“Hi, girls,” Jane says, rolling down the window and I inhale perfume and am enveloped in black-clad arms, in voices saying my name and greeting Jane, in the smell of perfume and hair; black, brown, and a shade in between, that wraps around me too.
And that’s how I meet Greer, Olivia, and Sophy. Ava’s friends.
There is more hugging as I get out of the car, hands moving away from me to wave at Jane as she drives away, and then they all step back, look at me.
“So?” one says, short but unquestionably the leader, the other two standing slightly behind her and watching her as much as they watch me. Her hair is long and black, her clothes are even more attention-calling than mine, layers upon layers of floaty, filmy black that complement her hair.
She bites her nails, though. Bites them right down to the skin. She is a leader who lives with fear.
“Hi, Sophy, Olivia, Greer,” I say, and the black-haired girl says, “See? I told you guys she’d remember us,” and then hugs me again. “Tell Olivia she owes me twenty bucks.”
I look at the other two girls. One is the first girl’s height, and has a heart-shaped face with curls ringing it. The other is taller, and seems as awkward in her all-black outfit as I feel, is looking at people walking by and watching us as she picks at the hem of her long black shirt. Her hair is straight and shiny, a dark brown that is too dull to be black, and her eyes, when they meet mine, are cool. Assessing.
“I don’t know who Olivia is,” I say, and meet the eyes of the girl with the straight hair. The one who is watching me intently. She doesn’t bite her nails at all, and she doesn’t blink when I look at her.
She should be the leader of this little group, but she isn’t.
“Told you, Greer,” the girl with heart-shaped face says, and gives me a blinding, silly happy smile that she turns on the leader. “Now you owe me.”
“No way, Olivia,” Greer says, smoothing her black hair back behind her ears. “She said our names. That counts.” She grins at me, open and sunny, but with a hint of warning.
It doesn’t bother me. I know her warning is something I can handle easily, that it is nothing but surface show—and wonder again who the Ava I’m supposed to be is.
“So, how did you know it was us?” the tallest one, the watchful one, Sophy, says, her voice quieter than I think she wants it to be.
“The clothes,” I say, watching her face. “We all look . . .”
“Totally unique, I know,” Greer says, and smiles at me for real. “We aren’t slaves to the stupid mall like some people.”
“Totally unique,” Olivia echoes. Her clothes are a match for Greer’s but catch on her curves. Of all the people who walk by and stare—and most of them do, sigh-sneering at the clothes, and then eyes widening at me—the guys always watch Olivia.
She’s looking at Greer, though, and doesn’t seem to notice.
A bell rings, loud and jarring, and a universal groan seems to echo out. I see a few instructors, standing in their classroom doorways, but they don’t look angered by the noise, just resigned.
“Do you remember your schedule?” Greer asks, tapping my arm when I don’t look at her right away. “What are you staring at?”
“No one’s in trouble for not wanting to go to class?”
Greer laughs. “If we got in trouble for that, there’d be maybe three students here. You have forgotten everything, haven’t you?”
She shakes her head at me, then says, “Don’t worry, I still love you,” and strides off into the crowd. Olivia plunges after her, but not before pressing a piece of paper into my hand and saying, “Here. I wrote down all your classes for you. My mom read this book on brain injuries last year and talked about it forever, so I figured that you might, you know, need help and—” She breaks off as Greer comes back.
“Are you coming?” she says to Olivia, and then looks at me and Sophy and says, “Ditch third, okay?”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you about that,” Olivia says, but Greer says, “Olivia, are we going now or what?” and Olivia gives me another quick smile and follows Greer, the two of them vanishing into the sea of people moving around us.
“So, see you later,” Sophy says. “You sure you’re going to be able to find your classes and stuff?” She doesn’t say what ditching third is, and I know she won’t.
“I’m fine,” I say, and when Sophy smiles at my answer, my lie, her smile doesn’t reach her eyes.
I feel a chill crawl through me because Sophy’s smile that isn’t one?
I know it.
16.
I’M EXHAUSTED by the time I’m in what I think is fourth period, confused by the hallways, by the way everyone I pass is so vibrant, so alive with their endless parade of clothes that look the same but have individual touches. Even if I wore the clothes everyone else has, I wouldn’t be able to make them my own like they can.
There’s nothing in me—no me—to draw on.
The teacher talks about government, and how it’s structured. I don’t understand any of it, and the notebooks I found in Ava’s locker (combination on the paper Olivia gave me) are empty except for tiny, simple drawings, boxes and squiggles, and the name Ethan, tucked into the corner of most pages. I write my own Ethan next to one of Ava’s.
They look exactly alike.
It’s warm in the classroom, so warm I feel my tense—very tense—body, relax a little, and the teacher is talking and talking. I rest my head on one hand and yawn.
17.
MY JAW CRACKS and I sit up straighter, ashamed of myself for almost falling asleep.
At least I’m not in school anymore. I forget that sometim
es; so much of my life was get up, eat, go to school, go to SAT youth league meetings, eat, homework, sleep. But I finished, the one lone crèche student who made it through, all those youth group projects and sessions I led about what could be done to help keep everyone safe paying off. Bringing me here, to a job. To being a listener. It’s an important job. Almost everyone keeps an eye on everyone they know for SAT, but being a listener is good. Much better than opening mail and then closing it up or spending days walking around stores trying to hear what other people say.
I look at the report. 56-412 was last reading and now—oh no. Over an hour has passed.
I did fall asleep. I check the receiver. It’s still on.
It’s still on, it’s still recording, the sounds from 56-412’s apartment being sent to the local security station and if he went out while I was asleep, if I missed something like that, I’ll be sent back to the crèche and I swore I wouldn’t go back, not ever, the only promise I’ve ever let myself believe, I was done with school I was working I was going to get an apartment, just a tiny one, and maybe, if I was lucky, get put on the list for a car, and now—
Now the attic door opens and I freeze, terrified security will have come, that something will have happened and that I’ve lost it all, this job, the life I’ve made. Any duties. All rights.
“Hi,” someone says, but it isn’t Security. They don’t greet you, they take you away with the crook of a finger.
“I found a wire in the kitchen wall,” the voice continues, and I turn, shocked because I know this voice, I’ve heard it once, twice, a dozen times or more now, muttering to himself while he reads. “So I thought I’d just come up and tell you what I’m doing today. Save you the trouble of trying to figure it out from the sounds of me putting on my shoes and things.”
It is 56-412. He is here, right here, and he is looking at me.