Unforgettable

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Only soot and sweat came off. The scariness stayed.

  Hope meant to stay awake, think about the day, piece together the choices she had made and the choices that had been made for her. She had to concentrate on the existence of that passport. Most of all she had to—or at least ached to—think about Mitch, and love, and T-shirts … but the moment her head touched the pillow, she was asleep, and slept like one in a coma.

  Like one, thought Kaytha, looking in on her later, who did indeed suffer some traumatic brain damage.

  Chapter 6

  MITCH ACTUALLY RAN TO meet Susan as the restaurant closed. Susan’s heart leaped several stories; she could have been atop a skyscraper with joy. “Mitch,” she said, beaming at him, forgetting how tired and strained she felt.

  “Guess what!” Mitch was larger than life: his arms were thrust outward, his shoulders seemed a yard across, his grin filled the whole block.

  “What?” said Susan, wanting those arms to close around her and hug her forever and a day.

  Mitch brought his fists up in a victory salute to himself. “I have a date with Miss Amnesia. I’m taking her to the Boston Pops on Sunday.” Now he hugged Susan. “She really is Hope Senneth,” he confided, as if Susan had been worrying. “Her father showed me her passport. He’s a nice enough guy. Kind of a stick, but I was being pretty pushy and he put up with me.”

  Susan’s energy deserted her. She felt short-legged, heavy, and worthless. “She has her memory back, then?”

  “No. They’re getting a shrink to see her tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow, thought Susan. Saturday. It’ll be even busier in the restaurant on Saturday than it was on Friday. But tomorrow I won’t be able to pretend that Mitch’s picture is ever going to be in my locket.

  For Mitch, the word romance was entwined with knights in shining armor; with chivalry and valor and lost causes. He wanted heroic deeds. If Miss Amnesia was indeed an incredibly spoiled brat who faked psychological problems in order to stick it to her rich father, Mitch might not even mind. He might want her in the flames of the dragon’s mouth, just so he could rescue her. If she wasn’t going to be a memory-loss mystery, she might as well be a deeply disturbed beauty with a dreadful past.

  Susan looked at her watch. Two minutes past midnight. It’s already tomorrow, she thought.

  Mitch babbled on about another girl while he walked Susan to her MTA stop. What was it that made boys so thick? Why couldn’t they have an eensy little strand of female DNA so they could see how rude and infuriating it was when they assumed that girls loved being their buddies instead of their dates?

  “Bye, Mitch,” she said, and he kissed her good night, a brotherly peck that hurt her more than if he had just waved.

  The journey to her apartment was not through quaint historic streets on a charming street car, but a dirty, stinking commute. Susan’s block was only a few parking spaces from wealth, but nevertheless deep inside squalor. Cities were like that: the shoulders of the rich rubbed against the shoulders of the poor. College students straddled the line.

  The house in which Susan had a ground floor apartment was old: brick row house, four-story walkup, grimy little stoop in front, and old, ill-shaped windows. It was not adorable, the way the brick houses around the corner were. It was just there, getting older.

  Susan shared the apartment. It certainly wasn’t by choice. By choice she would have had a suite at The Jayquith. But Susan’s mother worked in a day-care center and Susan’s father was on the county road crew. Susan was going to college on a combination of scholarships, loans, and compromises that made her crazy. Having three roommates who were also penniless, hard to get along with, messy, and didn’t like the same kind of music—that really made Susan crazy. The only good thing about her roomies was they were hardly ever home. Like Susan, what with summer school and jobs and boyfriends (well, they were ahead of Susan on that) and the fact that Boston was very very hot in July and the tiny apartment was not air conditioned—they didn’t even have enough fans—well, Susan was the only one home.

  I could go out with Ben Franklin on Sunday, she thought, to take my mind off Mitch and Miss Amnesia. But I don’t want Ben Franklin. I want studly company. I guess that proves how shallow I really am. If I were deep and complex, I wouldn’t adore a man for his biceps.

  Susan did not want to spend the night weeping over Mitch. She had done that enough. It was so stupid! Mitch was even more stupid. He’d fallen in love with a girl who didn’t know her name, for heaven’s sake!

  Mitch’s college story was that he was an ordinary guy, had to sell T-shirts to stay in school. Susan really did have to sell T-shirts to stay in school (or in her case, wait tables), but there was something about Mitch that didn’t ring true. She and Ben Franklin had commented on it from the beginning. Mitch McKenna was somebody else.

  They’d even said it to him. Not the way you usually did when somebody was weird—Hey, Mitch, you’re something else—but instead—Hey, Mitch, you’re somebody else.

  And now Mitch had also fallen for somebody else.

  The street was dangerous, especially at this hour. In the summer, people didn’t go home to bed early, especially people that girls by themselves ought to worry about. Susan considered herself street smart, and she was careful. Laurie was visiting relatives in Maine this week, while Betsy and Jenny would probably still be out with their boyfriends.

  She unlocked the hot, airless apartment just as the phone rang. They had an answering machine, on which her most annoying roomie cooed, “Hel-lo! You have reached the residence of Laurie, Jenny, Betsy, and Suuuuusan! Oh, how we wish we were free to take your call. Please please please please please leave your number so we can get right back to you! We adore all our friends! Now wait for our cute little tone!”

  Amazingly enough, people did. Susan would have found a different set of friends. It’s half past midnight, she thought. What jerk is calling at this hour? To spare herself the shame of listening to the tape yet again, Susan picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  Nobody spoke.

  Nobody breathed.

  Nobody disconnected.

  There was a creepy waiting time, during which Susan imagined a thousand horrible things: being stalked, being robbed, being raped, being the victim of a drive-by shooting.

  She hung up fast.

  How isolated the apartment suddenly seemed. How vulnerable the ground floor windows. How dangerous the sills on which window fans were precariously set.

  She watched the phone as if it were a rabid dog, and sure enough, moments later it rang again.

  It could be a roomie needing taxi fare, a wrong number, or …

  She was incapable of listening to a ringing phone. She grabbed it on ring three. “Hello?”

  A female voice replied. Articulate, pleasant, friendly. (Probably because she hadn’t heard the recording.) “I need to reach Miss Susan Nevilleson, please.”

  “This is Susan Nevilleson.” She was down in the dumps already. Why did she keep on pretending to herself that it was going to be Mitch? The woman probably wanted to sign her up for a different long-distance phone company.

  There was a pause, just like the previous call. The caller did not breathe, did not speak. The phone line just hung there.

  The fans hummed. The refrigerator clicked. The shades hung at uneven levels, but Susan was illuminated perfectly. She felt as conspicuous as if she were in a glass shower.

  The dial tone buzzed in Susan’s ear.

  Nobody signed you up for a different phone company at this hour. Was it somebody who found a sick pleasure in learning that Susan was home alone, undefended?

  Susan hated girls who cringed over minor events. She was not going to be like that. It was just a stupid phone call. Not even any words.

  Susan tossed her hair, fluffing herself up to her pretend five foot one. To prove she was not scared, she did not pull the shades down and she did not check the locks.

  It was the knife that woke Susan up.

&n
bsp; An extraordinary, very thin, very glittering knife.

  She had the sickening thought that this knife had once hurt another human being. But it was too shiny to have been used.

  The knife flickered, and Susan was the human being it was going to hurt.

  Susan thought: It’s shiny because the owner loves that knife. That knife isn’t unused. It’s polished.

  She obeyed the knife.

  She knew from the smile on the face of the knife wielder that everybody obeyed that knife. Always had, always would.

  Hope woke up.

  She was under extremely heavyweight covers. The sheets were almost slick, a texture she did not associate with sheets, and over them were both a blanket and an ornate bedspread.

  Where am I?

  Her heart jolted.

  She could not remember last night at all. Could not piece together where this strange bed might be. Where am I? she thought again.

  And then remembered.

  Remembering being a completely new kind of thing now. A partial and clouded activity.

  It isn’t Where am I? that matters, she remembered, it’s Who am I?

  Very slowly she eased herself around in the bed. Twin bed. Ivy and violet room, quite dark. A digital clock glowing on a shared bed-table read 8:58 a.m. On the pillow of the other bed rested a tiny blonde head. No face, but a circular shaving of a snake looked back at Hope.

  Poised to strike, thought Hope. Not me, please.

  The air-conditioning in the hotel was very high, and her nose was actually cold. She burrowed beneath the covers like a child in an attic in February. The sheets, she decided, were silk.

  She got up. She had not formulated any plans in her head, but her body seemed to have plans without her: it was hurrying, eager to dress and get going and—

  She was entirely naked.

  I have no clothes, she thought.

  What a good way to keep a prisoner. She was not going to run through the lobbies of The Jayquith naked, no matter what kind of trouble that snake’s head proclaimed.

  But she was wrong. There, neatly folded, freshly washed, lay yesterday’s shorts, shirt, bra, and pants. She put them on, shivering. The air-conditioning was like winter. No wonder heavy blankets had felt so odd—it was still July! She remembered that much. She slid her bare toes into her sandals. It was so cold her feet felt thin.

  Several folding shuttered doors lined one wall. She touched one very lightly, and the closet exposed was jammed with clothing: a lot of neutrals and black. Linen, silk, cotton. She touched the closest jacket, white silk, buttonless, with sweatshirt-style sleeves.

  It was her size.

  Next to the jacket was an indigo blue evening gown. When she took the hanger off the rod, it turned out to be a jumpsuit, wonderfully elegant. A narrow waist with a wide sash and a neckline that swooped, made for fabulous jewelry.

  Her size. Her favorite color. It might have been made for her.

  Maybe it was made for her.

  She hung it back up, shocked.

  She felt as if she had stepped through a mirror, and come out into some other silvery world. A world where people actually had suites in The Jayquith, and handsome blond young men fell in love with them in ten seconds, and designer evening dresses magically appeared in closets.

  What is real? she thought.

  Which of us here is real?

  Ben had arrived on the wharf early because he could think about Susan more at that location. Sometimes he ached for her so much, he actually wanted to stand on her sidewalk, just feasting his eyes on her apartment windows.

  Why was Mitch the one with the reputation for romance, when it was Ben with the yearning heart and the aching pit in his gut?

  I’m an idiot out of a dated Broadway musical, he thought. My Fair Lady. “On the Street Where You Live.”

  He knew exactly where each of his college classmates stood on the subject of love: Ben loved Susan, Susan loved Mitch, Mitch loved Miss Amnesia. Or more correctly, the idea of Miss Amnesia. You could not really love somebody you did not know.

  Susan was such a little person. He could never say out loud that being larger than she was pleased him, because Susan would draw herself up like an animal fluffing its fur to look tougher, and announce coldly that she didn’t need a man.

  I need a woman, though, thought Ben.

  Susan wouldn’t be here till eleven-thirty. She worked both lunch and dinner, sometimes an entire twelve or thirteen hours in her desperation to salt away money for the next college year.

  Ben hated to see her work so hard. He hated to see the contrast between Susan in the morning, all bounce and laughter, and Susan in the evening, all sag and exhaustion.

  He adjusted his little glasses and his fake hair: the sideburns, the wig, the beard. He hooked his fingers in his waistcoat. He saw no tourists and so he wandered over to the restaurant to talk to Michael. Michael was pretty observant too, and knew perfectly well that Ben would want to talk to Susan.

  “She called in,” said Michael. “She quit.”

  “She quit?” Ben Franklin was stunned. “But—”

  Michael shrugged. He was clearly very angry. “She knows how busy we are. Who am I supposed to get to fill in for her? What kind of notice is this? I could not believe it when she called. First thing this morning. She’s got another job.”

  “How could she have another job?” protested Ben. “I just talked to her last night! She would have told me. She couldn’t earn more money at any job than she was earning here, what with tips, and the long hours.”

  Michael shook his head. “Who knows? I think it’s Mitch myself.”

  “You think she’s working for Mitch?”

  “No, I think she can’t stand it that he’s fallen so hard for his little memory-loss victim.”

  The last time Ben remembered feeling so bereft was the day his mother left him at kindergarten. He still remembered the shock of that: Mommy wasn’t staying and he was with all these human beings he didn’t know, abandoned in a room he’d never seen.

  Susan quitting made Ben want to quit, too.

  Why go through all this, anyway? He didn’t even want to talk to Mitch about it, although Mitch was his best friend. Mitch was so thick. He was one of those people who saw straight ahead, and never to the sides; he was a big puppy with big feet and a big sloppy grin. Lovable but dense. He hadn’t seen that Susan adored him, or that Ben envied him.

  Ben didn’t really want to call Susan either. She might spill out her heart, which would consist of telling Ben how wonderful Mitch was. Ben knew that already. Just once in his life, Ben would like to hear how wonderful Ben was. Especially from Susan.

  She won’t call me, he thought. She won’t even think of me.

  Michael said, “You want to wait tables, Ben? I’ll pay you more than the Park Service.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I don’t believe in amnesia,” added Michael. “I think the father was telling the truth when he said she was an attention-getting spoiled debutante. I think Mitch is a sucker for beauty.”

  “Aren’t we all?” said Ben quietly. He felt bleak.

  Not being able to zip in and out of the restaurant and check Susan out and tell her the day’s rumors and nonsense would make the day very very long.

  He looked remarkably like the real Ben Franklin.

  And just as old.

  Kaytha was used to strange assignments but this was stranger than most. She was hot like dry fever just thinking about it. Kaytha loved the soaps; she was just about addicted to two of them. Now she had a soap of her own.

  Amnesia.

  Pretending sleep, Kaytha studied Hope’s face and movements. Pretty as she was, Hope’s features were marred by a sort of tic. A nervous twitch of the lip; an occasional shudder. Her gaze was blurry, as if it were her eyes, and not her memory, that were on the blink.

  Kaytha could not imagine how this might feel.

  Kaytha was very fond of her own memories. She liked going back over t
hem, stroking them as if they were a pet cocker spaniel. Brushing them, cuddling them. It would be a terrible thing to lose your memories. Dr. Patel would love it if Kaytha would stop remembering; that was the purpose of all their sessions: “You have to stop thinking about these things, Kaytha; stop enjoying the memories the way you do. Time to move on, set them aside.”

  Kaytha had moved on.

  But she set nothing aside. Ever.

  Mitch opened up his T-shirt wagon. In his entire life he had never felt so cheerful. He was a buoy in the water, clanging and rolling and waiting for Hope. He changed the location of his wagon so that he could see both front and rear exits of The Jayquith.

  Mitch was not surprised when Derry came rushing over to him. Derry crewed for Lady Hope. Cute and bouncy, she’d been hired as a stewardess.

  Wait-on-you crew was always chosen for eagerness. They usually resembled puppies, or Disney World employees. Derry was a perfect fit. Freckled, enthusiastic, and certified in scuba. She was small and therefore took up little space, which was good, because the forward bunks were curved and narrow to fit the shape of the boat. She loved people, gushed over them, never tired of scrubbing windows or mopping decks or garnishing trays of hors d’oeuvres that would never be eaten because the owner and his guests were always on a diet.

  Derry’s quarters were so small that you would not think she could ever have a possession, and not more than one change of clothing. Yet Derry, like Kaytha, was a T-shirt buyer to the max.

  “Hey, Derry,” said Mitch, as she ducked under the wagon and came inside with him for a hug.

  “I’ve been fired,” she said, and burst into tears.

  “What happened?” said Mitch, moving into his consoling role.

  There were always several girls in love with Mitch. This had been the situation since school began, since kindergarten. Mitch had never known what he had to offer that other guys didn’t. For years, he actually suggested to the girls who didn’t interest him other likely and convenient boys, like Jason or Richard.