I tap tap tap on my leg because I am not sure what I am supposed to be doing.
I am not sure.
Nothing is right or wrong here. How am I supposed to make a decision when nothing is right or wrong?
“. . . and they’re getting funding for new MRIs in hospitals around the country so we can run tests. With real-world data, I could do so much.” His voice gets faraway and dreamy. I laugh. I am sitting next to a cute boy on a bench and he is dreaming of MRIs and research data.
He smiles, and then he reaches out and takes my hand. I look at our hands, together. He has seen some of what my hands can do. He is still touching me. “Fia, I . . . I think you should stay. You don’t have to go back. Ever. You never have to work for this Keane again. We’ll figure out a way to get your sister out, and you can both stay with us, with Sarah and the Lerner group. We could help so many people.”
I can see it. I can see a happy life with a happy boy. I can see the person he thinks I am when he looks at me—this wonder, this strong and brave and strange girl. He is half in love with his idea of me, and if I stayed . . . Maybe I could heal. Maybe I could turn back into the sister Annie wants me to be. Maybe I could leave the last five years behind me and never have to think about them again. Never have to be that girl again. Maybe, maybe, maybe I could really be loved by someone like Adam.
That would be nice. And easy.
I can’t feel, though. There is no right or wrong. What am I supposed to do when there is no right or wrong?
I look at our hands again and I know my hand doesn’t fit in his like it should. Someone else’s will. Someone else whose hands aren’t impossibly broken. Someone else whose soul isn’t impossibly broken.
But I want to pretend to be her.
I take my hand out of Adam’s, smile at him, and I don’t know if the smile is a lie or not. “I’m going to walk around for a little while. To think. I’ll meet you back at the building, okay?”
“Okay,” he says, and his eyes, his mouth, his words are hope.
As soon as he is gone I pull out the phone and dial Annie. It rings and rings and I tap tap tap and no one answers. I dial James. It rings and he picks up.
“Who is this?”
“Is Annie okay?”
He swears, and it makes me feel homesick. “Fia? Where are you? We know you’re in St. Louis. Give me a location.”
“Is Annie okay?”
“She’s fine. I wouldn’t let anything happen to her.”
“Bring her with you.”
“What?”
“I’m not going to do anything unless I can see that she’s with you and she’s safe. If I see you here and she’s not with you, I’ll disappear forever. You know I can.”
“Fia, please.”
“Please nothing. Do you know what they’re offering me? They’re offering me me. Free. Whatever, whoever I want to be.”
He is quiet and I wonder what his face looks like right now, whether he can still feel my lips on his like I can feel his on mine. “You can’t have that.”
“I could.”
“No, you can’t. You don’t get to choose that. I need you.”
“You use me.”
“I—yes. I use you. I need to use you. I can’t let you go; I can’t do this by myself.”
“I think we both know you are never by yourself.” The words come out stinging and petty and I hate hate hate the jealousy ringing in my voice.
“That’s not what I mean. I need your help. You aren’t like whoever these people are. You can’t just get out, pretend like none of this happened, pretend like you aren’t so far gone you can’t ever go back.”
“I won’t help your father anymore,” I say, and I know it’s true.
“I’m not asking you to help my father. I’m asking you to help me. Why do you think I’ve trained you to lie, to cheat the Readers and the Feelers and the Seers? Do you really think I am working for my father, the man who destroyed my mother? The man who destroyed you? Is that what you think of me?” He sounds hurt.
“I don’t know what to think of you.” I close my eyes, squeeze them shut, try to clear my head. I have too many feelings for and about James. “I could help people here. They’re going against your father. I could help them.”
“They’re barely scratching at the farthest parts of his reach. They know nothing about what’s going on. Do you really want to help?”
I wish he were here so I could see him to know if he’s lying. But he’s right about Sarah and Lerner, I know he is. She’s too happy, too calm. She doesn’t understand anything about what’s really going on. She hasn’t seen anything. “Yes. I really want to help.”
“Then help me destroy my father from the inside. You’re the only one who can. I’ve been building toward this for years. Years. I need you, Fia. I can’t plan things, I can’t decide things because if I do, one of his Seers might see. But they can’t see you. I’ve wanted to tell you so many times, when you’d ask me why I was working for him. It killed me that you think I’m like him. I want you to—I want you. I always have. But I couldn’t be sure, couldn’t know if you’d agree. For this to work, no one can know. They can never suspect I am anything but loyal and that you are totally mine.”
I look out at the trees, at the perfect blue of the sky. I am untethered. I am on my own track. I am no one’s.
No. I am still Annie’s. I will always be Annie’s. And as long as she is out there, she isn’t safe, and as long as she isn’t safe I can do nothing but protect her. I will always be tied to that path, to those choices, to those instincts. Even if I get her away, even if Lerner can somehow help us, Keane won’t stop looking for me. Annie will always be in danger because she will always be the only way to control me.
“We don’t get to choose happy,” James says, and I know now that he isn’t lying. That he’s talking to me in a way he won’t talk to anyone else, not ever. Because James and I speak the same language. He has lived a lie with every move and every choice and even every thought and emotion for years now. “You and me. I wish we could choose happy. I wish I could let you go. But I need you. Please don’t walk away.”
I look down at my hand, remember the way it looked in Adam’s. Think about the other life I could have. Think about how I don’t feel anything now, right or wrong, right or wrong, I could go either direction and neither is right or wrong. “Bring Annie with you. Tomorrow. Underneath the arch at noon.”
I hear a soft exhalation on his end. I picture his face. I think he is relieved and a little sad at the same time. “You’re still with me. Thank you.”
“Just bring Annie.” I hang up.
Tomorrow I will be free. Really free. Forever.
IT’S BEEN ALMOST A YEAR.
I have taken laptops, sneaked into offices, cracked safes, and gotten James into places he shouldn’t have been. I have been his “date” at political functions, at luncheons with other rich worthless people, at club after club. I have danced and sabotaged and stolen my way across Europe, and I have no idea what any of it was for. I follow instructions and turn off the part of my brain that works for myself. Off, off, off. It’s easy, really.
I am happiest and most miserable with James. Sometimes I think I love him. And sometimes I think I hate him more than anyone else in the whole entire world, because he brought me back from the darkness where I tried to end myself, but I do not know this me that has taken my place. He is kind and he is funny and he is angry and he lies with everything he is.
Nearly a year without Annie. Annie, who I was never apart from our entire lives.
She writes me, but her letters are all false cheer. In one she “decided” not to go to college because she couldn’t find a program she liked, and the Keane Foundation was “kind” enough to let her stay on. At the end of every letter she tells me she’s still planning not to plan and can’t wait not to plan with me again.
Today’s letter leaves me feeling hollow. I read it again and again, but it only makes it worse.
>
“Hey,” James says, leaning his head into my room. This Paris hotel is old in the way that it’s good to be old, apparently, and smells like money and dust. My bed is massive (I drown in it, and it doesn’t matter how big the bed is, my nightmares more than fill it) and four-postered and cold. I’m sitting in the middle of it, reading the words.
“I knocked,” he says. Then he walks in and sits next to me. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t remember this. At all. I don’t even know the girl she’s talking about.”
He takes the letter from my hands, reads it. It tells a story about Annie and Fia when they were little. Fia’s seventh birthday. Their parents taking them on a hike in a canyon near their home in the Colorado mountains (I remember the mountains, I do, they made me feel safe, I want the mountains back), where they had put together a treasure hunt, but their mom had unknowingly hidden half the clues in poison oak and within minutes they were all covered in bumpy itchy horrible rashes.
So they drove home, the mother crying and the dad laughing because he said it was the only thing he could do, and then the mom laughing so much she was still crying. According to Annie, Fia wasn’t sad, she was angry, so angry as she said, over and over, “I told you those bushes were wrong. I told you not to touch them. Now Annie’s hurt. I TOLD YOU.”
The letter said Fia knew even then what was wrong and right.
I am so filled with wrong I don’t remember what right is. I am not that little girl. I don’t want to be that little girl.
“You were young,” James says. “It makes sense that you wouldn’t remember it.”
“I don’t remember them. My parents, those people. When we had to move in with our aunt and she sold our house, it was like losing them all over again, and then when we came to the school and my whole brain, my whole soul, my whole everything was overwhelmed with this constant flood of wrong, how could I hold on to them? I don’t remember them. My parents are dead and I don’t remember them. And I’m trying to lose Annie, too.”
“Fia, come on, you—”
“If that story is true, then it’s my fault. If I could tell even then when something was wrong, then Annie isn’t the one who should have stopped them from getting in the car that day. I am. But I don’t remember—I don’t remember—if I could feel anything or not. Everything is my fault.”
I don’t realize I’m crying until James wipes a tear from my face. He pulls me close, my head against his chest and his heart is steady, steady, steady. He can’t lie with his heartbeat.
“It’s not your fault.”
“It is.”
“Did I ever tell you about my mom?”
“She shot herself.”
“She did. Did you know she started the school? Not how it is now. She wanted to reach out and help girls like her. Give them a place where no one doubted them or thought they were crazy. It used to be a very different school.” He sounds almost wistful. I have never heard this from him. And I know he is not lying. “It was her whole life. She helped a lot of girls. Then my father got involved and shifted and twisted everything in that special way he does.”
“Is that why she killed herself?”
“Yes.”
“Then why? Why are you working for your father? All this information I’m stealing for him. What is it for?”
He tenses. “Have you talked with him or anyone about what we’re doing?”
“No.”
“Good. Don’t.”
“But, James. He destroyed your mother’s school. He destroyed your mother. He destroyed me.” Because this is my question, has always been my question, will always be my question. If James works for his father, how can I not want to destroy James, too?
“Don’t do that,” he says, taking my hand in his to stop the tap tap tap. “Please just be patient and trust me. I will always take care of you. I promise.”
The wrong buzzes and fades and I want it to fade and I close my eyes and let him hold me. I let myself believe him. Because I don’t want to take care of anyone anymore. Not even me.
The wind whips my hair around as James takes the corners too fast in the tiny convertible. The roads are narrow and winding, leading back from the Greek shipping baron’s sprawling estate.
I wish I were driving. He taught me to drive and I am an excellent driver; I never want to be in the passenger seat again. But other than that, this moment is perfect. I laugh. “That was fun.”
“It was. You were amazing, as usual.”
“Expect nothing less. People are phenomenally stupid when it comes to smart phones.”
“Well, seeing as how you accomplished in ten minutes what I’d allotted two hours for, the rest of the day is officially yours. What would you like to do?”
“I want to take a nap. On the beach. And then I want to go dancing.”
“Done and done.”
The sand is blinding white and the water is an impossible turquoise. It makes me feel bad that I haven’t looked more on all these trips, that I haven’t absorbed it to describe to Annie.
Nope. No thoughts of Annie. I stretch out on my chair, let the sun soak me. It’s been so much easier, turning it all off. And it works better, too. It’s like back when they’d force me to fight. As soon as I’d give up and disengage my feelings, myself, I could go on pure instinct and everything made sense, everything was action-reaction with no thought necessary.
Being with James now is like that. I don’t have to think. I don’t have to feel. I put myself on the path he wants and just go. I’m not happy, but I’m not unhappy. I am perfectly nothing, and it is easy. James takes care of me.
“Should I call Eden to meet us?” he asks, pulling off his shirt (I love I love I love it when he does this). He’s on a lounge chair right next to mine. They are touching. We are not touching, but we could be. He never touches me without a reason.
He is very, very careful. I wish he wouldn’t be.
“Why on earth would we want Eden to meet us?” I ask.
“She might feel bad.”
“Ah, but that’s the glory of not being Eden. She can feel bad all she wants and we never have to feel it!”
“You, beautiful girl, are mean.”
I smile and pull my sunglasses down. “You love me.”
He laughs (I wish he hadn’t laughed, why did he laugh?) and leans back into his own chair. The beach isn’t crowded, but there are enough people to populate the rush of the bay with noise and laughter and it is all a happy, busy hum in the background.
I tap, tap, tap without urgency, because I am nothing and nothing matters.
“James? Is that you? I don’t believe it!” A man’s voice, with a trace of an accent I can’t place. I don’t sit up but turn my head to see an olive-skinned, dark-curly-haired guy around James’s age laugh and raise his arms as though he expects James to get up and hug him.
“Rafael,” James says, sitting up but not standing. Rafael slaps his hand on James’s back.
“It’s, what, two years? Where have you been?”
“Some of us have to work for a living, you know.”
Rafael laughs, tipping his head back, his Adam’s apple bobbing under a hint of dark stubble in the sun. Before he even looks my way I know he is wrong. Not dangerous wrong, but . . . potentially dangerous wrong. And there’s something else. The way he stands over James, the way his smile is stretched to show all his teeth. He knew James would be here. This wasn’t a chance encounter. But I don’t think it’s one James expected.
“And who is your beautiful friend? Is she—she isn’t one of those girls, is she? The ones you told me about?”
James waves a hand dismissively in the air, but I see the lines of his shoulders, they are tight. He isn’t happy, but you would never know from his voice. “I said a lot of things when I was drunk, Rafael. Which was pretty much all the time. You really believed my stories?”
“About women who can see into your head? Of course I did. It explains my ex perfectly. But you never answered wh
o your friend is.” He leans over James’s chair to mine and I feel very vulnerable laid out in just a bikini, I want to stand, to get in a defensive stance, but I don’t need to.
Not yet.
“Emilia,” I say, and he takes my hand (he shouldn’t touch my hand) and brings it to his lips.
“Charmed. So you cannot see the future or read my thoughts?”
“Judging by the way you’re staring at my chest, I’m glad I can’t read your mind.” I sit up. (Well-muscled but in a carefully sculpted way. No practical use. I could snap his wrist.) I pull my hand away.
He laughs, turns, and slaps James’s shoulders again. “I like this one. Is she yours?”
James shifts closer to me, puts an arm behind me, crossing the full length of my back. His skin is on so much of my skin, and he did it on purpose. “Yeah.”
I lean my head on his shoulder and I can’t help it, there is a smile blooming on my whole face, my whole body. I feel this smile, like I haven’t felt anything in a very long time. I am his. I am.
Tonight I am going to dance with James. Tonight I am going to dance with him and he will kiss me, and we will be together. I don’t care if there is the little wrong buzzing at the back of my head. I want this.
Rafael winks. “You always had the best taste. Come back to the yacht with me; it’ll be like old times. You can share your good fortune.”
Again Rafael smiles at me and he is wronger than wrong, but there is no danger here on this bright beach next to James. Still, my smile drops and my eyes narrow and I could break-snapbreak him.
“We have other plans.”
“Cancel them. You and I have things to discuss. So much to catch up on.” Rafael has lost the false good-natured tone of his voice; it’s brimming with intensity now.
James pretends not to notice Rafael’s mood, waving a hand in the air as he leans back in his chair and pulls my head onto his shoulder, draping his fingers on the curve of my waist and it is nice, so nice, I think I have never been this happy.