Erasing Faith

by Julie Johnson

  They weren’t.

  “Can someone call my—” I broke off mid-sentence and glanced down at the ring on my finger. The pure-white cord had been blackened with smoke and ash. “My boyfriend?” I finished.

  Mr. Benson was silent. I looked up at him.

  “I think he’d want to be here,” I said quietly, hoping my words were true. “His name is Wes. I can give you his number.”

  I thought I saw the man’s eyes widen fractionally when I said Wes’ name, but I might’ve been imagining things. The drugs made it hard to focus my full attention on anything.

  “That’s the other reason I’m here, Miss Morrissey.”

  My eyebrows went up.

  “The man you’ve been involved with for the past several weeks…”

  He drifted off and I felt the breath slip from my lungs in a terrified exhale as I braced myself for whatever news I was about to receive. From the look on this man’s face, whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

  “He was a trained operative, stationed here for both your protection and the wellbeing of our nation as he investigated the crime syndicate.” The man’s face was blank, empty of any readable emotions. “Your involvement in this will be regarded as service to your country. You can be proud of that.”

  “You’re joking.” My voice was flat — I lacked the energy for incredulity.

  “I assure you, I’m not,” Benson said, his eyes steady. “The man you know as Wes Adams is one of our country’s greatest intelligence assets.”

  I stared at him as my mind struggled to process the ludicrous things he was saying.

  Wes was an operative? Like, a secret agent? A freaking spy?

  I almost laughed at the absurdity of his words, but my brain seemed to be disconnected from the rest of my body. My mind emptied as all thoughts fled. Silence crackled in the space between my ears like a record player left spinning long after the final track has played.

  Nothing made sense.

  We sat in silence for over a minute — an impatient man glancing subtly at his watch and the girl whose world he’d just crushed with a few careless words.

  “No,” I said finally, breaking the quiet. “That’s simply… not possible.”

  His eyes were cold. “I’m afraid it is. The man you knew doesn’t exist. You served as a vital part of his cover — nothing more. The sooner you accept that, the easier things will be.”

  His cover.

  Nothing more.

  “I want to see him.” I felt myself starting to get hysterical. “I want to see Wes.”

  God, was that even his name?

  “I’m afraid that’s not within the realm of possibility, Miss Morrissey. He’s already left on another mission. He won’t be back here.”

  He left.

  He won’t be back.

  My breaths were coming faster and faster, and I thought my throat might close under the strain of hauling air into my hyperventilating lungs. The room before my eyes began to spin and there was nothing I could do to stop it, like I’d boarded a carnival ride with no exit.

  “Your hospital expenses are being taken care of, so don’t worry about that. As soon as you’ve recovered fully, we’ll fly you home at no cost to yourself, if that’s what you wish.” The man rose and fastened the button on his ill-fitting suit jacket. “Your questions will, of course, be answered during the full debrief in a few days. I simply came here as a courtesy. After all you’ve been through, we felt you shouldn’t have to wait for an explanation.”

  What was I supposed to say?

  Thank you for ruining my life, sir.

  For taking away the one thing that mattered to me.

  For telling me it was all a lie.

  I swallowed roughly, trying to gain control over myself. It was no use — I was spiraling into a full-blown panic attack. My heart started beating at twice its normal rate. My vision was weaving in and out of focus as I watched him preparing to leave.

  “I’ll be in touch,” the man said, nodding at me and turning for the door. My heart raced even faster.

  I waited for him to spin around and smile, telling me it was all some kind of twisted joke Wes had thought up.

  He didn’t.

  I wanted to call after him, to beg him to wait. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs that this was just wrong, all of it.

  But as I opened my mouth, I was overtaken by the most intense pain I’d ever felt.

  Harsher than the smoke damage in my lungs.

  More painful than a gunshot wound to the stomach.

  A pain so great, so intense, my body couldn’t cope. My heart beat so fast, it simply couldn’t sustain itself.

  It shattered to fragments inside my chest like shrapnel — cutting me open, flaying me into a bloody mess.

  Rivers of blood filled up the hollow space beneath my ribs and poured into my lungs.

  I struggled for breath, drowning in the damage inflicted by my own shredded heart, as the dream I’d been living for the past month fizzled and faded into dust.

  Wes was gone.

  He’d never existed in the first place.

  My fingers trembled as they unclasped the horsehair bracelet he’d given me and hurled it across the room. It hit the far wall and fell behind a particleboard table, out of sight. Tears streamed down my face as I tore the dirty rope cord from my ring finger and threw it to the ground beside my hospital bed.

  Looking down at my empty hand, I felt my last vestige of hope slip away.

  The pain — inside, outside, everywhere. It was too much.

  As I let go of the dream that was Wes, as I awoke from the fantasy, I felt myself lose consciousness.

  This time, as I faded back into the dark, I prayed I wouldn’t wake up at all.

  ***

  THREE YEARS LATER

  ***

  “And I am done with my graceless heart.

  So tonight I'm gonna cut it out and then restart.”

  Florence + The Machine

  PART TWO

  New York City

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: WESTON

  END OF THE TUNNEL

  I hate that phrase.

  There’s always a light at the end of the tunnel.

  Supposedly, you’re in the darkness, and you look up and see it — a faint ring of light in the distance, marking the end of the moonless, lonely night. Drumming in the dawn.

  But my tunnel wasn’t just dark. It was an abyss.

  A tomb.

  After a while, when all my hopes for rescue missions and recovery teams had been abandoned… when I realized that my screams would never, ever be heard through the dense-packed rock blocking my path back to the surface…

  I stopped waiting for rescue.

  And I embraced the dark.

  I learned to like my cave. That bleak, bereft place became a comfort, instead of a burden.

  I stopped trying to claw my way back to the surface and wrapped myself in a blanket of shadows.

  Then one day, years and years later, when I least expected it, when I least wanted it, when I’d been alone in the dark for so long I’d forgotten what the light looked like… an explosion shook the walls of my cave, blasted open the crypt of my own making.

  And I finally saw it. The light at the end of my tunnel.

  But she wasn’t the dull glow of a flashlight I’d been expecting. Not the dim luminescence of a solitary streetlight, or the dull flicker of a lantern in the starless sky.

  She was a fucking sun-ray.

  A flare. A fire. A detonation.

  She was C-4.

  She blasted her way into my life, into my heart, and hauled me from my nightmarish void onto the streets of Budapest. I kicked and clawed at her the entire way like the wild thing I’d become in my isolation, unable to readapt to the world of the living or play well with the masses.

  She dragged me out anyway.

  She blew up my life.

  I hated her for it.

  But not as much as I loved her.

 
; Chapter Thirty-Eight: FAITH

  A CLEAN SLATE

  Time heals all wounds.

  Don’t cry because it’s over; smile because it happened.

  Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.

  I used to believe these things. Used to find comfort in the pretty words, the clever phrases. When I was eighteen, I’d walk through the aisles of my favorite superstore, cooing at the utter cuteness of every embroidered pillow and canvas mural with an inspirational life affirmation scrawled across it. In a sad, childish sort of way, it had comforted me to know that for only $19.99, I could be the proud owner of a cheap Target wall-quote sticker, that would adorn the cinderblock of my freshman dorm room and remind me every day to believe.

  In fate.

  In good.

  In love.

  As if reading a bullshit Audrey Hepburn happy girls are the prettiest sentiment on a pink duvet cover would somehow make it true.

  In case you were wondering — it doesn’t.

  And that girl, who loved those pretty phrases?

  I don’t believe in her anymore either.

  ***

  The pad of my index finger pressed firmly against the cool metal of the trigger. My eyes were unblinking, my hands steady as the shots rang out, each finding their mark in the thin red circle of the bullseye.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Four.

  Five.

  I stared across twenty feet of open space to the hanging paper target, examining the holes my bullets had made with a remote sense of satisfaction. Three years ago, I couldn’t hold a gun without shooting myself in the foot. Now, I had a license to carry concealed and you’d be hard pressed to find me without my tiny Smith & Wesson pocket pistol shoved into my purse or tucked somewhere else as I walked the streets of New York.

  I sighed when I felt someone hovering in the space behind me and reached up to remove the hot-pink shooting muffs Conor had given me when I’d first started. He’d meant them as an embarrassing joke, but I loved them.

  Pulling them down to dangle around my neck, I turned away from the target with my gun still resting comfortably in my palm and frowned at the stranger who was waiting to speak with me.

  When I first came to the range with Conor, I’d been a twitchy, trembling rookie so green it had almost — not quite, but almost — made him smile. The first time I’d shown up without him, the men who’d been practicing here for years looked at me like an unwanted interloper who was more likely to shoot one of them in the head with a rogue bullet than she was to hit the target.

  No one laughed when I walked through the doors anymore. Now, they looked at me with respect. A few of them even looked at me with more than respect, going so far as to ask me out to dinner or a drink after I’d finished for the day. I tried my best to be gentle as I let them down easy.

  I’m not dating right now.

  The lie was comfortable on my lips after using it for so long, and far easier than the truth. If I’d looked at them and said, I’ve got trust issues and a broken heart, so I’m never dating again. I plan to die an old spinster with seven thousand cats and a dried up, celibate uterus they never would’ve believed me. What sane, twenty-four year old New Yorker didn’t date?

  Eternal Singleville…. Population: me.

  My eyes scanned the guy who’d approached in a detached, cursory survey. Mid-twenties with handsome features and prominent muscles that attested to his many hours at the gym, he probably turned heads wherever he went. Before Budapest, I’d have been so flustered he was even looking at me, I probably would’ve passed out cold. At the very least, I’d have talked his ear off with a cringeworthy stream of unstoppable babble. But I was no longer that girl.

  I raised my eyebrows coolly and waited for him to speak.

  “Nice shots,” he said, flashing a mega-watt smile. “You must spend a lot of time here.”

  “Yep,” I agreed, shrugging as I flipped on the safety, stowed my gun back in its holster, and shoved it inside my black duffel.

  “Maybe we can practice together sometime?” he asked, hope plain in his voice. I couldn’t help but notice that his expression was already a little crestfallen — I think he saw the rejection in my eyes before I even opened my mouth.

  “Sorry.” I slid the strap over my shoulder and brushed past him on my way to the exit. “I shoot alone.”

  ***

  I love history.

  Ancient times. Faraway lands.

  I’ve spent hours hunched over history textbooks, pouring over facts and figures. Examining the different eras and periods.

  See, historians… we like order. We divide things into B.C. and A.D. designations. We draw lines on a piece of paper and segment the past into chunks that make our own historical consumption easier.

  The Stone Age.

  The Middle Ages.

  The Dark Age.

  We like to know exactly when things changed. The precise moment one era ended and a new epoch began. As if any amount of organization could make the brutal history of our world easier to swallow.

  If you’d charted my existence on a time line, there would be a bold red divider bisecting my life, with everything leading up to Budapest on one side and everything that came after on the other. If you were to look a little closer, you’d find the catalyst of change separating the two periods of Faith Morrissey was an infinitesimal instant of time — a single, sunny morning in Heroes’ Square when I’d fallen into the arms of a charming, crooked-grinned stranger.

  My lifespan had two distinct eras, now.

  B.W. and A.W.

  Before Wes. After Wes.

  And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to erase that line or step back over it to my life before.

  My family, my friends — hell, even my name — were all on the other side. Untouchable and unreachable.

  As far as I was concerned, as far as the world was concerned…

  Faith Morrissey was gone.

  ***

  “Fae? Are you here?”

  I broke eye contact with myself in the mirror and hastily grabbed my shirt off the bed as I listened to the slow, waddling footsteps that were making their way across my apartment. It should’ve surprised me that she was here this early on a Saturday morning, but my friend was anything but predictable these days.

  “In my room!” I called through my closed bedroom door. “Give me a sec, I’m just throwing on some clothes.”

  “Yeah… I’m not gonna make it that far. I’ll be on the couch.”

  I smiled softly at her words.

  Pulling the thin sweater down over my head, I hid the ugly scar that marred the upper left side of my stomach. Three years after surgery, it had faded from bumpy pink flesh into semi-smooth white skin, but it would never be entirely gone. I’d bear the mark of what had happened in Budapest for the rest of my life — a perfect physical manifestation of the invisible, intractable memories seared into my mind.

  I set my shoulders, smoothed my dyed-dark hair into place, and swung open the door of my bedroom. As soon as my eyes caught sight of her, sitting on my couch with both hands on her very pregnant stomach and her swollen feet propped up on my coffee table, a giggle escaped my lips.

  “Laugh all you want,” Lux grumbled unhappily. “Someday when the tables have turned and you’re the one who’s married and a thousand months pregnant, I will have no sympathy. We’ll see who’s laughing, then.”

  “I see you’re in a good mood, this morning,” I said, ignoring the familiar pang of sadness that her words inspired and forcing a cheery tone. “This very early morning, I might add.”

  It wasn’t quite seven.

  “Bash made me waffles at four a.m.,” she said a little wistfully, an involuntary smile on her face as she spoke of her husband, Sebastian. “And then I couldn’t fall back asleep so I figured I’d come harass you instead.”

  “Preggo my Eggo,” I teased, settling in next to her on the couch.


  She stuck out her tongue at me.

  It was actually pretty funny to see her in such foul spirits. Normally, Lux was a sunny blonde with an even sunnier personality — one that had shone all the brighter in the past year, since she’d married the love of her life and was now, and I quote, a thousand months pregnant with his baby. They were the perfect couple — both fair haired and fun, with big hearts and warm dispositions. They were also so obviously in love it almost hurt to look at them directly.

  “I brought breakfast,” Lux said, nodding toward the coffee cup and white paper bag on my side table, both of which were emitting delicious smells I was convinced only the bakeries of Manhattan were capable of producing.

  “Thanks,” I said, reaching out for the coffee. I felt the weight of Lux’s eyes on my face as I lifted the cup to my mouth and turned to look at her. She was watching the progress of my sip with sheer longing on her face — her eyes bright, her lips parted. When I swallowed the first scalding gulp, I thought she might start to cry.

  “You okay over there?” I asked quizzically, once my tastebuds had recovered.

  “Coffee,” she said weakly, her eyes still trained on my cup. “I miss coffee. So much.”

  “Well, it won’t be too long, now. That bun’s just about ready to come out of the oven,” I joked, eyeing her stomach.

  “Agh! Don’t say that. I’m not remotely prepared.”

  “Oh, shut up. You’re going to be a great mom, and you know it. And Sebastian is practically tailor-made for fatherhood.” I smiled at her. “Baby Jamie is one lucky little fetus.”

  “Ew, please don’t say fetus.”

  “Sorry. How about zygote?” I teased. “Or embryo? Spawn? Seedling?”

  “I will take those croissants and leave,” she warned. “Don’t test me. Yesterday, I ate an entire baguette in one sitting.”

  I laughed.

  For the next hour, I listened happily to her describe her disastrous attempts to paint the nursery a unisex color. Apparently, saffron orange looked way better in curry than it did on the walls. Small talk with Lux should’ve been boring, but it wasn’t. For a long time, even after I’d left everything behind and moved across the country, I’d thought I would never have this again.