by Nicole Maggi
I jerked upright. The cold, snowy night before me was my own. But Annabel’s memory blurred with my own, the edges of our boundaries so frayed and overlapped by now that I didn’t know where hers ended and mine began. What I did know was that I’d just seen the night of her death.
I pressed the pieces of my oboe to my chest, and the smooth rosewood calmed my heart. Why was the memory so frustratingly vague? All the other ones had been so vivid, so clear. This one was fuzzy, like a faded photograph. Was it because it was the last? Was Annabel reluctant to relinquish her hold on me, her last tenuous thread to life?
Wind gusted in through the window and blew a stack of papers off my desk. I set my oboe down with gentle tenderness and slid off the window seat. Pages torn from notebooks and articles clipped from newspapers for my current events class danced in the air. I circled the room after them, the papers as busy as my brain. What more did Annabel want from me? What did I need to do to get her final memory?
I settled all the papers back on the desk. Before I could weigh them down, one escaped. It fluttered to the floor and landed at my foot. I stepped on it to keep it still. In the slanted light from street lamps, Kitty’s face smiled up at me. My blood froze. I picked the paper up and held it in front of my face. On one side was the article I had cut out, but I had never noticed what was on the reverse side—a quarter-page notice that jumped off the page.
Have you seen this girl?
Katherine Phelps
Missing since August 10, 2013
Anyone with any information, please call 1-800-Missing
Below it was the picture of Kitty. Her eyes bored into me. She looked younger, fatter, healthier…happier. Before she’d met Jules. Before she’d met Annabel. As I stared at the notice, the image of Kitty chained to the wall in the Warehouse slowly fed itself into my vision, blacking out the paper.
This had been Annabel’s choice, the one that had haunted her the night she’d seen Tommy at All Saints. Knowing that girls like Kitty were being bought and sold on the street, could she live her life with blinders on and not do anything about it? Or could she take the blinders off and help the girls, even if that meant risking her life?
I knew what Annabel’s answer had been, because it had cost her her life. She’d escaped the Warehouse with the knowledge of what went on there, and she’d been killed for it.
But who had killed her? Was it Jules, or someone else? Why wouldn’t she give me the missing piece?
The answer came as a swift punch to my gut. I dropped to the floor, the paper gripped in my hand. How could I not have known this? How could I have felt everything else in her heart except this?
Annabel didn’t care about justice for herself. Figuring out who killed her wasn’t what she wanted me to do. She wanted me to stop what was happening in the Warehouse. She wanted me to finish what she’d started.
God, even dead, she was a better person than me.
All I cared about was getting my life back. And all Annabel cared about was getting back someone else’s life, a life she would never have.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I didn’t wait for Nate to call me. I didn’t wait for my parents to wake up. As soon as the sun was up, I was at the curb, waiting for Manny to pick me up. I told him I was sorry that he’d become my personal chauffeur, sort of. He said it was okay because if it was his own daughter who kept going on these crazy escapades, he’d want her to have someone like him looking after her. I sank low in the backseat and stared out the window. My brain had stopped working, stopped weighing each choice and each step. I was moving on instinct now, following the heart, guided by what I knew Annabel needed me to do.
Save the girls. And to do that, I had to recover the memory of her death.
Something deep inside me knew what that would cost me, but I couldn’t face that. I had to believe that she would accept something else as my sacrifice. I had to believe that she wasn’t cruel, like Nate said, and that once I did what she asked, she would reward me.
Manny said nothing when we rolled to a stop outside 826 Emiline Way once again. He just raised an eyebrow. I patted his shoulder. “Wait for me.”
“You got it, sweetheart.”
The front door gaped open. I took that as a sign and slipped inside. Snow drifted into the entryway behind me. I needed to be on the balcony again. I had recovered all the memories leading up to this; surely being in the place where she died would give me the last one. My footsteps echoed in the dark stairwell. When I finally got to Annabel’s apartment, I pushed the door open. The darkness inside the apartment was tangible. I could still feel her in here, the air thick with her presence. She was no longer an echo. She had become a ghost.
Bits of police tape still stuck out from the snow on the balcony. The metal creaked with my weight. The fearlessness that I’d felt the last time I’d been out here was gone. In its place was terror, but whether it was mine or hers, I didn’t know.
My knees buckled and I sank down, the cold, snowy iron bleeding through my jeans. I could feel her struggle in my heart, how she had fought for her life here, how in those last moments she had wanted—so much—to live. In those moments, nothing else mattered. It wrapped me like a cloak, her fierce will to survive. That will was all that had kept her alive during those long hours of lying in the snow on the ground so far below. Long enough for someone to find her so that she could give me her heart.
I pulled my gloves off and pressed my bare hands to my chest. No matter how messed up everything else was, at the root of it all was the fact that she had given me her life. She had died so I could live. I lowered my head until it touched my knees. The truth shuddered through me. She had sacrificed everything. All she was asking for was an even trade.
“No,” I whispered, hugging myself tight. “Anything but that. It’s not fair.”
But it is, the Catch answered, threading through my veins. Tears froze on my cheeks. “Just tell me,” I begged. “Just tell me, and I’ll finish it. But don’t take that from me. Please.”
Wind whipped over the balcony. A spare bit of police tape broke away and spiraled into the air, drifting down to the ground below, to where Annabel had lain for hours, her life draining away. “If you take this from me, I’ll die too,” I told her. The Catch crescendoed, louder than a symphony. “Fine,” I said, getting to my feet. “Forget it. I’m done. I’m not giving that up, and you can’t make me.”
Snow drifted down from the floor above, dappling my shoulders. I paused at the door back into the apartment. Why wasn’t she making me? Why wasn’t she just giving me the memory and taking what she wanted in return? Why was this one different?
As if in answer, the image of Tommy flooded into my mind. I clutched the flimsy door frame. Of course. She had made a choice too, her Sophie’s Choice. And that was what she was asking of me. She wanted me to choose, to want this, to know what was right in my heart and give myself up willingly. I sagged back down to the balcony. What the hell kind of choice was this, though? Keep the most important part of myself, and let Annabel’s killer go free. Let the Warehouse keep running. Let the girls be forever enslaved to Jules.
Or sacrifice that part of me that kept me Georgie, and it would all come to an end.
Well, fuck.
I almost laughed out loud. It was absurd. Only a complete asshole would choose the former. And yet…I put my fist to my mouth. A month ago, before all this had happened, I probably would’ve made that choice. I’d lived my life with blinders on, Juilliard or bust, safe inside my Brookline bubble. Having Annabel’s heart had removed those blinders and opened my eyes to the world around me.
Yes, there was ugliness, but there was also beauty. There was giving a bag of food to the homeless woman on the corner, even though you were starving yourself. There was sharing your precious strawberries with a lonely, lost girl who had nothing else to look forward to. There was being friends with another
survivor like you who told it to you like it was. If you think you’re gonna go on to do great things, then your own life, Tommy had said. But if you think you’re gonna spend the rest of your days turning tricks on the street, then the greater good.
And there was Nate.
Playing for the New York Phil wasn’t exactly turning tricks on the street, but I’d realized there was good that was greater than that dream. I straightened, my back pressed up against the door frame. I wanted to make a different mark on the world now. Something that reverberated through many people, not just me.
I got to my feet again, this time sure and steady, and went back into the apartment. “Okay,” I said to the empty room. “Okay, I’m ready.”
My body shook; I wasn’t ready, not really, to lose that part of myself. What would my life look like without it? What would tether me to myself in its absence? I took one deep breath, two, three, four, trying to make myself willing. “It’s okay,” I said to Annabel, for I could feel her inside me and all around in the air in the room. “I accept it.”
But still the memory of who killed her did not come.
I put my hands flat over my heart and moved them in slow circles. Sukha. Sweetness. With each breath, I called up Annabel’s memories, in reverse order. The balcony. Breathe. The Warehouse. Breathe. The Sutton house. Breathe. Strawberry shortcake… My jaw clenched, the breath caught in my teeth. All the other memories were signposts along the path to find her killer. What the hell did strawberries have to do with anything?
And with one devastating click, the very first piece of the puzzle that I’d gotten fell into place.
• • •
I made Manny drop me off around the corner from Nate’s. I didn’t want him to be responsible if anything happened in his cab, and I didn’t want Nate to see me pull up. I paid Manny and sent him on his way.
I rang Nate’s buzzer and listened to his footsteps in the hall. When he opened the door, his face crumpled with relief. “Jesus, where have you been? Why do you have a phone if you don’t answer it?”
My heart twisted. I was about to make him a thousand times more worried, but there was nothing I could do about it. His brows scrunched together at the empty container I held up in front of him. I hadn’t cheaped out. If I was going down, I was going whole hog. Organic strawberries from Whole Foods, imported from California, $8.99 for a pint. God, they were good. In seventeen years, I’d never known what I was missing. It was like summer on my tongue, like endless days at the beach and long nights spent gazing up at the stars.
In my other hand, I held up the EpiPen I always carried in my backpack.
“Straight into my thigh and push hard,” I told Nate just before my throat started to close up.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Every year for as long as I could remember, my father brought me to his office on Take Your Daughter to Work Day. When I was little, he’d let me color or read or do puzzles on his office floor. As I got older, though, he’d let me audit classes, listening to lectures on great literature, Renaissance painters, or neurology.
A couple of years ago, he’d taken me to the lecture of a visiting philosopher who had opened the dialogue with one simple question. “When are you happiest?”
Later, after the lecture, over lobsters at Legal Seafood, my dad had asked me the same question. “When are you happiest, Georgie?”
And I answered without hesitation. “Any time I’m holding my oboe.”
The moment the adrenaline shot through my veins, I knew my happiest was gone. I didn’t need to be reminded that I’d forgotten it. I knew, to the marrow of my bones and the bottom of my soul, that it was lost. If you were to place an oboe in my hands at that very moment, I would not remember how to play it.
• • •
“Georgie. Georgie!”
I swam to the surface, pulled by Nate’s voice. It was the only lifeline I had left. My eyelids fluttered open. “I know—”
“How could you do that?”
Nate’s face came into sharp focus. His eyes flashed, his skin mottled red and white. He cradled me in his arms, but I could feel the tension in his body. I breathed deeply and slowly as the adrenaline worked its way through me. Somewhere inside me, a deep well of grief for what I had just lost threatened to bubble over. I shoved it down; I didn’t have time to mourn.
Nate reached into his pocket. “I’m calling an ambulance.”
“No.”
“The instructions say seek immediate medical attention. I’m calling—“
“No,” I managed again. The effort of talking ached. “I had to.”
“You had to? You had to put your life in danger?” Now that things were clearer, I saw pinpricks of tears at the corner of his eyes. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“It was…a trigger.” I struggled to sit up. Nate didn’t help. His breath was very short, in and out of his nostrils. “She needed me…to be…close to death…like she was…that night.”
“No.” Nate pulled himself away from me and sat straight-backed against the stairs. It was only then that I realized we were in his hallway, just outside his apartment. The light from the chandelier winked above us. “She did not need you to do anything. You did not need to put your life at risk.”
“How is this…any different than…the Warehouse?”
“You didn’t know what we would find in the Warehouse,” Nate snapped. “This is completely different. You willingly ate something you knew could kill you.” His lips were so white that they almost disappeared into the rest of his face. “Do you have any idea what that was like? Holding your life in my hands?”
“I’m so sorry… I–I didn’t think of that.” I reached out to touch him but he swatted my hand away, hard.
“You should have!” His voice bounced off the walls. “This isn’t just about you, Georgie! I’m involved too!”
“I know that—”
“No, I don’t think you do.” He dropped his volume, low but razor sharp. “You think you’re the only one affected by this. You think you’re the only one whose life is on the line. Well, you’re not.” He shifted up a stair and pressed his hands over his face. “Every girl I have ever loved has been broken by this world. Sarah. Annabel.” He peered at me through his fingers. “You.”
“I have not been broken—”
“Georgie, I was holding you in my arms and you weren’t breathing and I couldn’t get a pulse—”
“That was the memory, not the allergy,” I cried. “I was in Annabel’s memory…unconscious…”
“But I didn’t know that!” Nate yelled. “All I knew was that you were dead in my arms and I was responsible!”
“You weren’t—”
“And all I could think,” Nate said over me, “was God, I’ve failed this heart twice.”
I looked at the floor. “I’m sorry. But I had to. I thought—”
“You didn’t think, period!”
He was right, of course. I’d stopped thinking that morning, letting the heart move me from point to point to point. I lifted my gaze to him, but he wouldn’t look at me. He stared at the wall over my head, his chest heaving. I knew he had every right to be mad, but I couldn’t wait for forgiveness. “I need my phone,” I said, looking around. “Where’s my bag?”
Finally, he looked at me. Without taking his eyes off me, he reached behind him and pulled my bag into his lap. I held my hand out for it. He dug into the front pocket and drew out my phone. I scrambled up to my knees to grab it. He stood up so fast that I fell forward onto my elbows.
“Don’t call an ambulance!” But by the time I got to him, he had already dialed.
“Liv? Hi, it’s Nate.” I breathed out. It was just my mom he’d called. “Yes, she’s with me.” He climbed higher and higher up the staircase. My legs quivered, betraying me as I tried to catch him. “Georgie had an allergic reac
tion. She’s fine. I used her EpiPen. I’m sending her home in a cab. If she’s not there in fifteen minutes, call me.” He gave my mother his number and hung up.
“Why the hell did you do that?” I shouted. I grabbed the railing and hauled myself upright. “We do not have time for this!”
He threw the phone at my feet. It bounced off the thick carpet and landed a few stairs below. “You’re done. I’ll take it from here. You’re done risking your life for this.”
“I don’t have a choice!” I climbed up to the step just below him and hit him hard in the chest. He flinched but didn’t move. “Do you have any idea how much I’ve lost?” My voice cracked as I thought of my oboe, sitting forlornly in its corner at home. “What I need to get back? I thought you understood that!”
Nate leveled his gaze at me. “I do. But I can’t lose this heart again. I thought you understood that.”
He pushed past me on the stairs and picked up my phone. I listened to him call Manny to pick me up. At least he wasn’t calling an ambulance. My body was still shaking, but whether it was from the allergy or the adrenaline or the memory, I didn’t know. It could’ve been all three, jumbled up inside me. We didn’t speak as we waited for the cab or as he put me into it once it pulled up to the curb. “Are you coming with me?”
“I’m too mad to even look at you right now,” he snapped. “Take her home,” he told Manny and slammed the door.
I watched him walk back to the house, his shoulders slumping more and more with each step he took. I knew the toll this was taking on him, because I was paying the same toll.
But as Manny turned the corner, I tore myself away from the window. My body might be jumbled, but my mind was not. “Change of plans,” I said.
In the rearview mirror, Manny raised his eyebrow. I tightened my jaw. Nate was wrong. I wasn’t done. And he couldn’t take it from here because I knew something he didn’t.
The identity of Annabel’s killer.