by Marissa Lete
Jacob leads me down a hallway, up a hidden staircase, and down a second hallway. At the fourth door on the left, he stops and pushes it open. The room is as massive as the rest of the house, with a four-poster king-size bed in the center. Two windows with dark blue curtains pulled to the sides provide a nice view into the front yard, and a door attached to the room leads into a similarly grand bathroom with marble countertops and white tile floors. Even here, the house’s past is eerily quiet.
“I will be back in a moment with some clothes,” Jacob tells me.
When he says a moment, he literally means a moment, because I’ve barely had time to take in the massive mirror and dark, intricately carved headboard before he’s back with a stack of clothes.
“You may shower if you’d like. Maverick will come for you when dinner is ready,” he tells me, then pulls the door closed behind him. Dinner, I think, my stomach waking up with a soft grumble. How long had it been since I’d eaten?
I watch the door for a second, then carry the clothes to the bed. In the pile, I find a few different options: a pair of sweatpants, a pair of jeans, and some dark leggings. I also find a large, solid blue t-shirt and a gray and pink striped shirt. I stare at the striped shirt for a minute, an odd thought forming in my mind. Don’t I have one like this at home? I try to remember it. It’s the same one, but I hadn’t seen it since… May? Maybe?
I realize with a start that this might be my shirt. Have I been here before?
I shake the thought away, snatching the pair of sweatpants off the bed. I hesitate for a second, then grab the striped shirt, too.
After I shower, I’m too anxious to sit around in my room waiting, so I decide to explore. I peek my head out into the hallway, and when I’m sure no one is there, I walk towards the staircase Jacob had led me up earlier. When I get to the first floor, I turn left, the opposite direction we’d come from. I quickly realize that the house forms a rectangular shape, surrounding the pool in the middle.
As I’m wandering down the hallway aimlessly, I’m about to round a corner when I hear footsteps just on the other side of it. I don’t want anyone to think I’m snooping, so I whip around and dart into the closest room, shutting the door without a sound. I wait behind it for a second, and when the footsteps pass by without stopping, I let out a breath. Then I turn and look at the room I’m in.
It’s dark, so I feel along the wall for a light switch, and when I flip it, two lamps come on in opposite corners of the room. It’s an office space, with a wall of bookshelves lining one side and windows covered in thick, dark curtains on the other. There’s a desk in front of one bookshelf and a fireplace on the wall opposite of it. The desk is empty except for a small lamp, a few pens, and a notepad.
The fireplace’s mantel is covered in a variety of decorations, so I walk over to get a closer look. There are some decorative candles, a mini globe, some fake flowers, and a framed photo. I almost skim over the photo, but it catches my eye just in time.
My jaw tenses.
The photo is of me standing on a patch of grass in front of a line of trees, with Maverick next to me. He’s got his arm around me, and he’s kissing my cheek while I smile at the camera. I lift the picture and stare at it for a long moment, then reach my hand up to touch my cheek, the same spot his lips are touching in the picture.
I’ve barely had time to process what I’m looking at when the door creaks open behind me. I hurry to set the photo down where it was and turn around. Maverick stands in the doorway, looking past me at the photo. After a moment, he meets my gaze.
Neither of us knows what to say.
“I need you to tell me—”
“I think we should—” we both start at the same time.
Maverick takes in a breath. “You go first,” he says.
I don’t hesitate. “I need you to tell me who you are.”
He pauses, then takes a step forward, watching me carefully. “You don’t remember me, then?”
“No,” I say. He drops his gaze.
“I’m… Maverick,” he says slowly.
“I know your name,” I reply.
“What else do you know?” he asks, searching my eyes.
“I don’t know for sure.”
“That’s okay,” he says, taking another step closer to me. I put a hand up.
“Stay back,” I say—a little too harshly, but it stops him in his tracks. I stare at him, watching every movement. I’d heard echoes of myself talking to him, I’d listened to what the worker at Coffee and Cream had said, and now I’d seen a picture of us together. And yet, I still can’t seem to believe my eyes.
He’s taller than me, but not by much. He wears a black long-sleeved shirt that shows off his sturdy, toned frame and his hair is much longer than it was in the photo of us, nearly touching his wide hazel eyes.
We study each other for a long time until he finally asks, “What do you remember?”
I sigh, closing my eyes for a moment. When I open them, I have to blink away tears. “Remembering and knowing are two very different things for me right now,” I tell him.
He keeps his gaze on me but doesn’t respond. I don’t know how to explain to him what’s going on. That I know who he is and what we were, because I heard it happening, but I don’t remember any of it. I’m not sure there’s even a good way to explain it. What if I’m wrong? What if he doesn’t know me, and everything in the echoes was just in my head?
I take a deep, shaky breath. “This is going to sound crazy,” I tell him.
I don’t want to continue, but Maverick’s eyes fix on me, never wavering. They pull the words right out of me.
“I have this… ability,” I start, then pause. “I hear things.” I haven’t told anyone about this since my parents, and that took a long time to get them to understand. It might not make any sense to him, but I’m not sure what else to do. There are so many clues pointing to the fact that we were once a big part of each other’s lives, a really big part, and it doesn’t make sense that he simply disappeared. That I just forgot about him.
Maverick doesn’t look away from me, not for a second. He doesn’t even blink.
“Echoes. Of the past,” I continue. I close my eyes. “Wherever I am, I can hear all of the sounds made in that same spot, at that exact time during previous years.”
When I open my eyes, Maverick is still staring, but his expression softens.
I go on, the words flowing like water. “It sounds crazy, I know, but it’s something I’ve always dealt with. I can hear the past. Every conversation, door opening, footstep—any noise at all. I hear it, always.” I’m shaking as I speak. “I don’t know why, but I can’t remember you. At all. But I’ve heard you in the past. I heard you come to my house and drop off flowers when my family first moved in. I heard you ask me out. I heard us talking late in the night in my backyard. I heard you come to my house for dinner on Halloween.” I take several gulps of air, then finish with two words: “Last year.”
Maverick opens his mouth, the expression I’d seen forming earlier solidifying into what looks like realization. But then it darkens into something else, like he’s angry and sad and disgusted all at the same time. I know I should stop, but I can’t.
“I heard all of that, but I don’t remember any of it. I didn’t even recognize you when I first saw you, but when you spoke, I knew your voice. I don’t know how it’s possible, I don’t know if I’m just going crazy, or have amnesia or what. But I need to know, I need you to tell me who you are. If it’s all true.” I’m borderline hysterical now.
Maverick puts his head down, chin touching his chest. He opens and closes his mouth once, then twice, but no words come out. Then he looks up, one single word escaping his lips. “Yes.”
I wait.
“Yes,” he says again, his eyes darting to the place where the picture sits on the mantle. “What you heard did happen. There’s so much more than you know.” He closes his eyes.
“Tell me,” I plead.
He
shakes his head, his gaze dropping again. “I’m so, so sorry. This is all my fault,” his words hit me like two hands around my throat.
“Why? What do you mean?”
He’s frozen in place, and now he won’t meet my eyes. “I have an… ability, like you.” The hands tighten, stopping my breath.
“To do what?”
He finally looks at me, and his next words squeeze the last bit of life out of me.
“I can take away memories.”
Chapter 22
The world starts to spin around me, tilting, teetering until I’m falling. Maverick crosses the room in three quick strides, bracing me as I slump to the ground. My vision goes black, and my heart pumps double-time. When I open my eyes again, I’m looking at Maverick’s face through a million stars. His hand presses against my forehead for a second, then he shines a light into my eyes.
“Laura, can you hear me?”
I squint, turning my pounding head away. “Yeah,” I choke out.
“Listen, I think you’re dehydrated. And you probably need food. Let’s go eat something.”
My stomach rumbles as if on cue. “Okay.” The stars flooding my vision are still clearing. When Maverick pulls me to my feet, I’m shaking. Whether from dehydration or shock, I’m unsure. He pulls my arm across his neck, supporting me as I walk.
My thoughts are spinning so fast I can’t keep up. Over and over, all I can focus on are the words, I can take away memories.
It takes us a long time to get to the dining room—since the house is about ten times the size of my own—and the entire walk I try to formulate words. As Maverick helps me sit down at a long, elegant dining table, I finally find them.
“You took my memories away?” It’s more of a statement than a question, but I still pause, holding on to a sliver of hope that it's not true and that Maverick will deny it.
He doesn’t.
“Why?” The word comes out barely above a whisper.
Maverick doesn’t meet my eyes, he simply reaches across the table to grab a pitcher, pours water into a glass, puts it in my hand, and says, “Drink.”
I lift the glass to my mouth, gulping the water down as I think. Why would he take my memories away? Did it have to do with Alice? Did I know about something I shouldn’t have? Did Maverick decide he didn’t want to be with me anymore and erase himself from my life to avoid confrontation?
I feel a stab of pain when I think of the last scenario. It catches me off guard; I don’t remember him anyway, so why should I care?
It strikes me, too, that to any normal person, someone telling you they could take memories away sounds pretty far-fetched. But with my own strange ability and the pile of evidence I’d already witnessed, I hadn’t even given it a second thought.
A woman in an apron enters the room as I put down my water, carrying a steaming plate in each hand. She sets one down in front of each of us, smiling. “Enjoy,” she tells us before walking back through the door.
I look down at my plate: breakfast for dinner. My favorite. Two pancakes covered in only butter, a slice of bacon drenched in syrup, and scrambled eggs with a side of ketchup. I blink in surprise. “This is exactly how I like all of these foods.”
Maverick doesn’t look at me. “I know.”
Of course he knows. He knows me. But I don’t know him, and apparently, it’s because he doesn’t want me to. I’m not sure what to say to that, so we eat in silence. I should be starving, but the latest news has killed my appetite, so I end up just nibbling for a long time.
Maverick finishes his plate in mere minutes, then sets down his fork. He waits until I put down mine to speak.
“I did it to protect you,” he croaks, defeated.
I blink a couple of times before replying. “What do you mean?” I ask. To protect me from Alice? Or to protect me from heartbreak? Or both?
“It’s…” a pained expression crosses his face, and he drops his gaze. “Complicated.”
I don’t know what to say, so I just look at him, my fear deepening. What if I came all this way, digging up the past just to find out I should have left it buried? What if I have to let go of a love that I don’t even remember having? I’m not sure if that would be worse than remembering.
I look up to find Maverick staring at my striped shirt.
“This is my shirt, isn’t it? From…before.”
He nods. “You…” the corner of his mouth tilts up slightly, “…spilled some chocolate milk on it. It was pretty bad, so you borrowed one of mine. I forgot to give it back to you.”
It’s weird, listening to him tell me about something I did and have no recollection of. Almost as weird as hearing it happen myself. “So it’s all true, I really did know you.”
He nods again.
I bite my lip, afraid to say the thoughts racing through my mind. But then I say them anyway. “And then what? You decided you didn’t want to know me anymore, so you erased yourself from my life?”
Maverick’s eyes widen in surprise, and he shakes his head. “No, Laura, you’ve got it all wrong. I’ve always wanted to be in your life. Since the day I met you.”
I frown. “Then what did you mean when you said you did it to protect me? Protect me from what?”
“From me,” he stares at the table.
“What—” I begin, but he puts a hand up.
“Let me explain, it’s kind of a long story.” He pauses, waiting for me to protest. When I don’t, he launches into the story. “Last year, around the time I met you, my mom was diagnosed with an early onset of Alzheimer’s. It’s this disease, it makes you—”
“Forget things,” I finish for him, realizing the irony as I say it. The boy who can make people forget things and his Mom, who can’t help that she’s forgetting them.
“Yeah. She started to decline rapidly. She would misplace things, forget which day of the week it was, and then around December, she had to stop going to work because she would forget how to get there, or forget she had a job altogether. One day when I came home, she didn’t even recognize me.” He looks down after he says the last few words, a deep sadness in his eyes. An image of Annie’s obituary flashes across my mind.
“We tried everything, all of the remedies in the books. But nothing was helping. By the time January rolled around, I’d almost given up hope.” His eyebrows draw together and he pauses for a few seconds, squeezing his eyes shut.
“Throughout my life—because of this ability I have—I’ve been seeing this psychiatrist. Alice, the woman who kidnapped us.” I nod, trying to put the pieces together. “She specializes in people who have… special circumstances. Like us. She was the first one to actually believe that I had this ability to manipulate memories, and she helped me learn how to control it.
“When I came in for my yearly session, I told her about how my Mom was sick and I wasn’t sure what to do. Then she told me she had been researching this new drug that she thought might be able to help, but that it was an experimental drug that technically wasn’t cleared for use yet. At that point, I was so desperate that I asked if we could try it anyway. I got her to agree, and she gave us a month’s supply. Surprisingly, it worked. Mom was back to normal within a week, it was like a miracle.
“When the month was over, however, I went back to Alice and asked if she would be willing to get me some more. I was prepared to pay any amount she wanted, but she didn’t want money. Instead, she said she needed me to do something for her before I could have it. I was willing to do just about anything at that point.” He drops his head, sighing heavily.
“She told me she needed my ability to help her. She asked me to erase a few things from someone’s memory. It was a simple task, one I thought would be harmless, and I didn’t question it. I just wanted to cure my Mom. When I completed the task, she gave me another month’s supply, and everything was fine again for a while.
“But then, the month after that, I went back, and this time she had a list of people she needed me to take memories from. And n
ot only that but instead of simply erasing a few small memories, she wanted me to erase an entire person from existence.”
Maverick hangs his head in defeat. “It was so, so stupid, but I did it. I just wanted my mom to be okay.”
I try to put myself in his shoes. How far would I go to save someone I love? My mom? Dad? Grace, even? It scares me to think about what I wouldn’t do for them.
“That time, Alice only gave us enough medicine to last two weeks, so I was forced to go back to her sooner. But when I did, I decided I was going to confront her about what was going on—why she wanted me to get rid of certain people. That’s when she showed me her laboratory—the building you were locked up in. It’s where she does her research.”
I have a flashback of Alice sticking a needle in my arm, then the strange future-echoes I’d experienced. “What is she researching?”
Maverick meets my eyes, the disgust plain on his face. “Us. People with strange abilities. ‘Anomalies,’ she calls us. There are more, a lot more. She has them locked up in there like lab rats.”
“What is she hoping to accomplish?” I ask.
“She tells me she wants to find a way to block our abilities, to prevent people from using them in the wrong ways.”
I imagine a world where my “ability” could be blocked so that I wouldn’t have to listen to the echoes. It doesn’t sound too bad. Not worth kidnapping and hurting people to get it, though.
“I think there’s more, though. I think she’s up to something else,” Maverick tells me.
“Like what?”
“Weaponizing us. Finding a way to replicate certain abilities, then using them to her advantage.”
My eyes widen.
“Once I found out about everything, I told her I wouldn’t work for her anymore, but because of it, I couldn’t get the medicine for my mom.” His head goes down, a hand running through his hair. “She… passed away back in April.”
Instinctively, I reach a hand out towards his. He looks up at me when we touch, his eyes meeting mine, and my heart skips a beat. “I’m sorry,” I say, pulling back my hand and averting my gaze. I’m not sure why I reached for him like that. I still don’t know him.