Neesha stared at him. “Can I ask you something?”
“Okay.”
“And will you promise to give me an answer?”
“What?”
“Why do you want to find her so bad?”
Testimonial: Evan Andrews.
Year 1994–1995. Day 322.
Mom taught me to play chess when I was six years old.
She’s told me the story a hundred times: she noticed that instead of building the pirate ship Lego set that I got for Christmas, I was organizing them by size, shape, and color, placing them on a gradient and stacking them into the sky. Our first chess set was carved out of wood and small enough to fit on the TV dinner stand in our living room. She taught me the names of the pieces by inventing characters for them: Ricky Rook sees the world in straight lines, but to Bobby Bishop, everything is slanted. All the Johnny Pawns only know how to march and kill. King Dad can’t see very far ahead, so he moves one square at a time, but Queen Mom sees everything, so she can go wherever she wants.
My first competition was the Spring Hill High School Chess Club fall tournament when I was ten. I won my first three matches but then in the finals, I forgot about controlling the center and Sandra Diver beat me in fifteen moves. I cried afterward but Mom said that I should be proud because they’d never even had a ten-year-old compete in their competition before. She took me to get ice cream and told me part of winning is losing, just like how part of waking up is being asleep in the first place. She said it was the most important pattern of all.
That was the year that I got in my first fight at school and Mom became my teacher for everything. In the morning, we would do classes in the kitchen—first English, then world history, then poetry, then math, because that one was the easiest—then in the afternoons we would watch television and play chess. Sometimes, I could beat her because she was distracted by Days of Our Lives. By the time I was ten, she could only beat me once every two hundred times we played, but she still wanted to play every day.
Some days, Mom would cry. She would tell me about all the places she used to live, and poems she used to write. She said she used to have friends, and go to parties, but now she just had a “split-level house in bumfuck nowhere.” She said her life was different now, but I always made her feel better. Playing chess made her feel better. One Sunday, Pastor Tim said people who didn’t have a true mission were wandering in the desert and would never know true salvation. Mom leaned over and told me I had a mission: I was the cure to her sick.
When I was eleven years old, the Spring Hill High School Chess Club fall tournament was on a Saturday, and I thought about it every day for the entire summer. I practiced a defense of the center so many times that I knew every permutation by heart. I even washed my chess shirt—a black T-shirt with a pawn on it that said PWNED—and took two showers, so that if they took my picture for the newspaper, I would be clean. If losing was a part of winning, today was going to be the winning part. But we didn’t get to go to the competition, because Mom didn’t feel like driving that day.
Soon after that, Dad bought us a computer to help with school, and it had a chess game on it. When that got too easy, Dad bought us an internet website that let me play chess against other masters all around the world, and before too long, RickyRook123 had the most points of anyone on the internet. QueenMom123 barely had any points but it was okay because she didn’t really like playing on the internet, she just liked playing against me.
One day, instead of doing school or playing chess, Mom woke me up early and drove us to the ocean. She said it was more important than school, and it was okay if we didn’t do math or chess today. We sat on the beach staring at the waves for almost two hours, Mom pointing out all the different ships and guessing where they were going. “That one is going to Paris,” she said, “with a brig full of bananas,” even though I don’t think she knew anything about the ships. She told me that one day I was going to be one of the people on those ships. I told her I wasn’t interested, but she said it was okay, that it was inevitable. Eventually, the waves have to go back out into the ocean, because they can’t stay trapped in the same pattern, lapping into the same shore forever. I told her she was going to be one of those ships too, but she said probably not. She said now she was a crab, living under a rock in the dirty part of Rye Beach. When we got home, my father was waiting in the living room with two police officers. She didn’t tell him where we were going and he got scared. Mom slept for three days after that.
By that time, we’d mostly stopped going to competitions, and we only did school some days when Mom wasn’t too tired. On the days where she did school, Mom usually didn’t feel like math or history, so we just read poetry and played chess. A few days after my birthday when I was twelve, a woman named Miss Sandra came to our house to watch us do school. Mom pretended to do the classes like we used to, but by lunch, she said she needed to go to sleep and Miss Sandra should leave. Two weeks later, I started going to Spring Hill Middle School.
I only went there for four days before they changed me to Spring Hill High School, even though I was only twelve. It was scary at first, because the kids were bigger and they didn’t like me very much, but every day when I got home, Mom was waiting with the chessboard on the TV dinner stand and Days of Our Lives on the television.
I got better at school. After I turned thirteen, I didn’t get in any more fights. I got an A in my calculus class and I was elected the treasurer of the chess club in an uncontested election. One day, Sandra Diver asked if I wanted to come to the Taco Bell with the rest of the chess club. Mom was crying when I got home that night. She said she was happy that I went to the Taco Bell, but sad that she didn’t have anyone to play chess with.
She started sleeping even more. Some days I would come home from school, and she would already be asleep. Some days we would start playing chess and she would quit halfway through. I started to make more friends at school. Mom started to cry a lot.
Clinical depression is a disease that affects someone’s brain and makes them feel sad, even when they want to feel happy. Sometimes, it makes them want to drive to the ocean and sometimes, it makes them want to sleep for the entire day. It’s nobody’s fault, it just happens. There’s no pattern to it, and there’s no way to make it go away.
But Mom had a cure. I was her cure.
When I was thirteen, we got a call from Redemption Prep. They saw some of my chess competitions and wanted me to come to school there. We met with Dr. Richardson at a coffee shop in Burlington and two months later, we got on the airplane to Utah.
Dad called tonight to tell me Mom’s in the hospital, but that I don’t have to worry. He asked if I wanted to come home, but tomorrow is my Analytical Reasoning test and it’s illogical to get on an airplane just to look at someone in the hospital. My summer vacation starts tomorrow, and we decided as a family that I would stay at school, instead of paying for two flights.
He said it wasn’t a big deal and that I should stay and do my test. But now I’m afraid he only said that because he can’t see very far ahead. He can’t see that we’re breaking the most important pattern of all, and now Mom’s lying in a hospital bed with no cure, and I’m in the middle of the ocean, alone.
Evan.
SOMETIMES WHEN DR. Richardson was talking for a long time, she would stand up and start walking around the room.
“Pain is the most obvious and immediate emotional center in the body. I tell you something painful, such as, you’re failing a class, and immediately, it conjures in you something that you can’t understand. Consider the saddest day of your life. Did anything else matter on that day? Could you move? What other physically indefinable concept has the ability to render you motionless, besides pain?
“Now think about that day, today. Try to live in it for a moment. You can’t, really, right? It’s not all-consuming, as it once was. Now you’re able to see it proportionally, as we see all things. No pain is too great, when compared to the scale of a lifetime.
“But the pain of that moment still exists, right? The only difference between the fact of that pain then, and the fact of that pain now, is your proximity to it. The point is this. We choose where we stand, emotionally. You have the ability to control that reaction, if only you can remember it.”
It sounded like a threat. But Dr. Richardson sat up, smiling. “Let’s do an exercise. Tell me, what was the most painful day in your life? Can you take yourself there now?”
Evan didn’t say anything. She was right; if there had been worse days of his life, he was distantly removed from them now. The only pain he felt currently was Emma’s pain, and that was the one pain he couldn’t talk about.
“Your mother passed away, five months ago.”
“Yes.”
“You wrote in your journal at the time that your mother often told you that you were the only thing in the world that made her feel better. Then you left, and less than a year later, she was gone.”
Evan blinked a few times. He’d thrown away those pages of his journal in the garbage can by the front gate, ensuring that he’d never see them again. How had they ended up in Dr. Richardson’s folder?
“Every day, you would come home, and the two of you would play chess. For people who suffer from clinical depression, patterns like this are incredibly important. I refer to them as anchors, processes and people that can keep them exactly where they are, even when things around them get stormy. But do you know what happens when those anchors go away? Do you have any idea what happens to a ship when its anchor is snapped off?
“Of course you do, you experienced it. It’s not like you believe your mother passed away from natural causes?”
Dr. Richardson watched him in the reflection of one of her photos. Her nose was angled like a bird of prey, preparing to dive. She wanted something out of him. She was pushing him for S4—Emotional feedback. She wanted him to be sad, or angry, or in pain. Instead, he ignored her.
“You weren’t there, Evan. You stayed at school for the summer, and now she’s gone. So place yourself in that hospital room. Look at her. Don’t look away. What would you say to her?”
Evan stared at the folder on her desk, left open next to where her elbows met the table. There was a photo he’d never seen before, of his mother on a hospital bed. How would Dr. Richardson have gotten a photo that he didn’t have? Why would they have kept it in his folder?
“I need an answer, Evan. That’s how we get better. That’s how we learn to control these things; we talk about them. We put ourselves in the moment, and then we remember our proximity. We control where we stand. I’m not letting you leave until you answer the question. What would you say to her?”
Dr. Richardson waited with her mouth half-open, but he had nothing for her. He couldn’t place himself in that room. He couldn’t even think about that room. There had been a time, just after May fourteenth, when all he thought about was his mother’s absence. But now his pattern had normalized without her. His existence was possible with the absence of her. The gaps had been filled. And he couldn’t go back to before that was true.
“Evan?”
“I—I . . .” He found his reprieve again. One thing had made all of it better. In one moment he’d realized he could be forgiven, given a new mission and a new path to salvation. And from that day forward, he never felt the pain again.
“Yes?”
Evan swallowed. “I’d read her a poem.”
Neesha.
SHE WENT TO the chapel early, an hour before she’d agreed to meet Evan, so she could have a few cigarettes alone to clear her head.
It had been four days, and no one had heard from Emma. The school was still searching; there were extra maintenance workers around all the time and occasionally, she’d wake up and see a dozen flashlights moving along the paths of the back lawn. Most students had decided it was no longer possible she’d just gone home, or left. In fact, everyone else at the school had, for the most part, stopped gossiping about her, because to them, there was only one logical explanation: the reason they hadn’t heard from Emma was because Emma was dead.
“Neesha!” a voice called out of the fog. She scanned the area, expecting Evan to magically be three steps behind her yet again, but he wasn’t.
“Hello?” she asked into the abyss.
Before she could react, Zaza was breaking the fog.
“What are you doing here?” she asked abruptly, smashing the cigarette.
He pointed back toward the school. “I saw you in the window. You looked sad.”
“You could see that from your window?”
He didn’t answer, instead dropping next to her on the step. “Waiting for someone?”
“Sure.”
“Well, tell me when they’re coming and I’ll disappear.”
“Don’t feel like you have to wait to make that move—”
He was unaffected. “So I was thinking . . .”
“What?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “Why not go home?”
She snorted. “Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious. I mean, if you think that’s what Emma did, then why wouldn’t you do it too? Just to be safe, maybe until it blows over?”
“I’m not going home,” she said.
Evidently he didn’t understand the finality in her voice, because he asked again. “Why not? Does your family not like you, or . . . ?”
“No,” she mumbled into her knee. “Because there’s not enough beds.”
“What?”
“My little cousin took the one I was sleeping on—there wouldn’t be a bed for me.”
Zaza rolled his eyes. “Sleep on the floor.”
“I can’t.”
He waited for her to continue. “Because . . .”
“Because on the day that I won my Little Genius award, the one that got me in here, they threw me a party, and said they couldn’t wait until they never had to work again. Because when we were moving to Salt Lake, any time someone asked my mom why we were moving, she said, ‘So our daughter can be rich and famous.’”
“Wow, sounds awful.”
“It is awful, you’re just not really hearing it. She wasn’t saying it for other people, she was saying it for me. So I would know that I was the reason we moved. And now she hates it here.”
“They tell you that?”
“No, she’d never say that, but I can tell. She hates the weather, she hates the grocery store, she hates my little niece’s teacher who teaches them math with a guitar—”
Zaza burst out laughing, then swallowed it.
“Sure, yeah, funny for you. But my whole family came to this country so I could go here, and if I fuck it up, or I don’t make all of that worth it, then why the hell did I even come here. . . .”
She trailed off into silence and they listened to the forest for a long while, the volume of the croaking bugs building in intensity.
“I’m sorry I made it seem stupid, what you were doing,” Zaza said. “I think I just worry more than you, about the worst, worst-case scenarios.”
She rolled her eyes. “How about just trusting me that I can make decisions for myself?”
Zaza exhaled. “Yeah, that too. I’m sorry for not trusting you.”
His eyes drifted out to the forest, and she used the chance to sneak a look at him. The conversation was over, and still he sat next to her. He knew everything about her operation, but it hadn’t scared him off. Either he was a very good liar, a sadistic criminal mastermind who got off on proximity to his victims, or, the increasingly likely option, he genuinely cared about what happened to her.
“So if you’re not gonna go home,” he asked, “then what are you gonna do?”
Neesha took a deep breath, balancing herself against the mountain. “I’m gonna find her. Before they find me.”
Aiden.
BY THE TIME Aiden got to practice, Coach Bryant was already screaming at the team. “Faster reactions, full-body commitments today. Anyone who doesn’t improv
e their time is running!”
Behind him, two assistants were setting up their reactive agility drills, a system of light bulbs on top of eight thin, padded poles. It was a technology Redemption borrowed from air force training exercises—the poles lit up, different colors indicating different commands: green for move to the pole, blue for move to the pole and shoot, yellow for pass to the pole, and red for engage your opponent, one on one. It was one of their many drills aimed at training the processing centers of their brains, and based on Redemption’s track record, it worked.
“Dirk and . . .” Coach Bryant glared. “Aiden. Nice of you to join us. You’re up. Let’s go.”
Aiden jogged to the three-point line, taking the right side of the court, while Dirk set up on the left. An assistant bounced him a ball. “On red, Dirk, it’s your possession. Aiden, you’re on D.”
The programming started slow, lighting poles up green on opposite sides, keeping them moving. He and Dirk flew to their respective poles, choreographed and perfectly spaced in their steps. It was their fourth year of the drills; the patterns and spacing were a part of their muscles now. Assistants watched from behind the hoop, standing over a Macintosh computer with a handheld clicker to log their times.
The lights began to accelerate, one after the other. “Faster!” Coach Bryant shouted. “Neither of you are strong enough for the league, you have to beat them to the move.”
To his left, bright green. Aiden charged around it as a yellow lit up in the corner. He slammed a chest pass off it within a second, catching the ricochet and pulling up as a pole to his left turned blue. He shot, his ball clearing the rim a quarter second after Dirk’s and rimming out.
“Come on!” Balls were back in their hands, the sequencing starting over. Green, a loop, yellow, a pass, green, another loop, green, another loop—he could feel his body wearing down, the sharp turns tearing into his most gentle tendons, over and over and over again—green, a loop, blue, a shot, yellow, a pass—he felt himself moving faster but the poles said otherwise, a yellow flashing before he had a chance to clear the last green, the cut from the fence on the back of his neck suddenly feeling inflamed—green, a loop, green, a loop, green, a loop—his jaw was clenching so hard his teeth started to grind—green, a loop, green, a loop, back and forth and back and forth and—
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