Incognita

by Kristen Lippert-Martin

  The pain in her eyes moves me to a place beyond my own anger. As soon as I imagine what it would feel like to forgive her, my own pain lessens. It shouldn’t work like that, but somehow it does.

  “Maybe you guys should hug or something?” Thomas says.

  I shoot him an irritated look and then notice that he’s got one hand clamped over the other to keep the tremors in check.

  “Who is this guy, by the way?” Tai says.

  “He’s my . . . you know. He’s Thomas.”

  She gives Thomas the once-over and then looks back at me. She seems to be bracing herself for my questions, so I start with the one that sits heaviest on me.

  “Did you do it for the reward money?” I ask.

  She gives me a blank look. “There was a reward? Seriously?”

  “Yes, there was a reward! Like a huge amount of money. You didn’t know that?”

  “No, I didn’t.” She wipes her nose and makes a hiccuping noise. “It doesn’t matter. It won’t bring her back.”

  “Bring who back? My mother?”

  “No, my sister,” she says.

  “What happened to your sister?” Thomas asks.

  The phone rings and we’re momentarily interrupted so she can do her actual job. After she hangs up, she goes to the front door, puts up a sign that says “Be right back!” and motions for us to follow her into the back room.

  This area is filled with canvas bags full of dirty linens. Against one wall is floor to ceiling, row upon row of white medical coats and blue scrubs bagged in plastic. There are no chairs, so we sit on the floor.

  “If I’d known that making that call would lead to—I didn’t know. I swear.”

  I sigh. And soften. I was so ready to be angry at her. To unload on her for what she did. But now I can’t.

  “Just tell me what happened,” I say. “Why did you—”

  “Rat you out?” She says with an appalled laugh. “I did it because I was tired of getting used by you. I was angry about what happened to my sister. What you did to her. It was retaliation. Simple as that.”

  “I . . . don’t really know what you mean. Did I hurt your sister?”

  “Are you kidding me? I know what I did was wrong, but don’t pretend what you did never happened.”

  Now she looks at me squarely in the face, her brown eyes boring into me, at once glinting and full of despair.

  Thomas says, “Angel doesn’t remember a lot of things from that period.”

  “Really? That’s convenient,” Tai scoffs. “Wish I could say the same.”

  “Convenient?” I say. “You have no idea what I’ve been through.”

  Thomas puts his hand on my leg and I let the tension in my body drain away. “If you could just tell us what happened, it might help her remember,” he says. “Start with your sister.”

  Tai pushes her hair out of her eyes and then lets it fall back over her face again.

  “Tam was right out of nursing school and she’d just split from her horrible, controlling boyfriend and she got this really good, well-paying job at a nursing home over on the West Side. I was so happy for her. She was able to get her own place. And she helped me out too. I found out through her that Mr. Yee needed some help here. All the nursing home’s laundry comes here.” She looks around at all the uniforms, clean and pressed and waiting for delivery. “Then you showed up. I let you sleep back here a few times because you had nowhere else to go. Do you remember that?”

  I shake my head.

  She sighs, playing with the sleeve of a medical coat. She’s too young to sigh like that, like the whole world has tired her out for too long.

  “Anyway, you said you needed to visit someone at that nursing home but you couldn’t get in because of the high security. I guess the place was full of rich old people or something. So Tam helped you get in. I let you take one of the nurses’ uniforms from here, to make it easier for you to blend in. But then Tam’s boss found out there’d been a security breach, and my sister got fired. Her whole life went down the drain after that and you never even apologized. I didn’t see you for weeks, in fact, and I when I told you what had happened to Tam, you just shrugged and said, ‘She’s better off never setting foot in that place again.’ ”

  “I don’t remember that,” I say.

  Tai crosses her arms. I can see that it’s hard for her to keep talking about her sister.

  Thomas clears his throat. “Is there anything else?”

  Tai looks at me, her eyes leaking tears of pain and anger. “I didn’t see you again for another couple weeks after that. Not until you needed a place to stay again. I couldn’t believe you would dare ask me, but you didn’t even seem to notice that I was angry at you. You just kept telling me that you had something important to do that night. I was afraid you were planning on blowing something up but you assured me it wasn’t anything like that. I didn’t know what to believe, though. After the way you acted about Tam’s job—the way you were so numb about it—I figured you were capable of anything. You were obsessed with that Claymore guy.”

  “That much I remember,” I say. “The obsession part.”

  “I finally got you to tell me where you were going. But when I asked you what you were planning to do there, you said, ‘You’ll find out tomorrow when everyone else in the city does.”

  Part of me doesn’t want to believe I could treat someone like that. Someone who’d helped me, someone who’d suffered because of me. But based on what I remember from that period of my life, I was single-minded in my pursuit of revenge against Claymore. I don’t doubt that I tossed our friendship aside. It was all justified in my mind.

  Even now, it’s tempting to make excuses for myself. But looking at Tai, I just feel an overwhelming sense of shame. That I let myself become so hardened, so blinded. Was I so different from my grandfather after all?

  “Tai, I don’t remember any of that, but if I could go back in time and act differently, I would. I’m so sorry.”

  “And I’m sorry I called the cops that night. I swear I just figured you’d get in trouble. That’s all. And then when you just vanished—God, Angel, I thought you were dead. I thought somebody killed you.”

  “They almost did,” I say, suddenly aware that I’m rubbing the top of my head. “I hope your sister is okay now,” I add.

  Tai’s jaw clenches. The tears are back.

  “Two weeks after you disappeared, my sister disappeared too,” she says, fighting to get the words out. “Ten days later, they found her body in a Dumpster. Shot in the head. Everyone thinks her ex did it. They picked him up for questioning, but there was nothing to tie him to it. As much as I hated that guy, I don’t think it was him. I think she found something out about what was going on in that nursing home. Or at least someone thought she did—someone tied her to you and figured you two were working together. I asked about the ballistics tests and the other evidence they had and the cops told me all of it was inconclusive.”

  No evidence. No answers. No justice. It’s disgusting what people get away with. It’s like someone cut Tai’s heart out and then shrugged.

  “That’s horrible, Tai. I don’t even know what else to say other than I’m so, so sorry.”

  Thomas and I share that helpless, lonely feeling you get when you wish you could make someone feel better but know that you can’t do anything at all to ease their pain.

  Tai just shakes her head. The load she’s been carrying is so big, it somehow makes her look even smaller than she already is. Like all the hurt she’s feeling has compressed her. “That’s when I knew—I knew you were dead too. You had to be because it turned out you were right. What you’d told me about that nursing home was true.”

  “What did I tell you?”

  “You said that there was something going on in that building. Some really screwed up research. It wasn’t a nursing home at all, it was some kind of laboratory. I thought you were crazy.”

  “But now you don’t?” I ask.

  “Well, I don
’t think you were lying. Not after what happened to Tam. But Angel, where have you been? Were you hiding out?”

  I tell her briefly about some of the things that happened to me in the hospital. Not all of it—nothing about Hodges and Thomas’s connection to her. But I do tell her about the secret project called Velocius. I’m not supposed to—I swore an oath I wouldn’t disclose what had happened to me at the hospital—but considering all the ways the Feds have screwed me over in the past twenty-four hours, I figure all bets are off. Spilling their secrets gives me a grim sense of satisfaction.

  Tai doesn’t interrupt me. She just listens—her eyes occasionally going wide and her face intermittently registering complete disbelief—until I’m done. Then, finally, she says, “Soooo, they wiped your memories out?”

  “Yeah. Most of them.”

  “Well, you do seem different.”

  “How?”

  “You’re a little . . . not as spiky maybe?”

  “Wow,” Thomas says. “Hard to imagine Angel being spikier than she is now.”

  I give him a swat.

  “Yeah,” Tai says. “She was tough. She didn’t let anything get in her way. I admired her right up until she used me.”

  “I would’ve felt the same way if I’d been in your position,” I say.

  She’s back to pondering the state of my brain. “And now this veloci-whatever ability—”

  “Velocius,” Thomas says.

  “Yeah. I don’t get it. They did this thing to your brain and now it, like, takes longer for you to die?”

  I nod. Granted, it also shortens my overall lifespan, but everything has a flip side.

  “And that’s supposed to be a good thing?”

  I shrug. “Longer to die gives you more of a chance to live, right?”

  “Now I know you’ve changed,” she says. “That’s almost optimistic, Angel.”

  A sad smile flashes across her lips and is gone a moment later. I reach out and take her hand and say again, “I’m really sorry about your sister.”

  She makes a fist and knocks me lightly on the top of the head. “Thanks. And I’m sorry about whatever they did to your brain.”

  Our brief moment of reconciliation is interrupted by the buzz of an incoming text message on Thomas’s phone. He takes the phone out of his pocket and looks down at the screen. I watch his face but his expression doesn’t change. Once again he looks like he’s not fully registering what he’s seeing. That makes me uneasy. If there’s one thing I’ve taken for granted about Thomas all this time, it’s his ability to instantly understand the implications of things.

  For a split second, I try to talk myself out of it. Maybe he’s just tired, maybe he’s just thinking deeply. But this is not like his usual intense look of concentration. And I know I’m not imagining it—the blankness in his eyes. He’s trying to figure something out and he can’t.

  The phone trembles in his hand. He switches hands but that’s not much better. In a forced, falsely confident tone, he says, “Uh, Tai? Just out of curiosity. What’s the address for that nursing home where your sister worked?”

  “I don’t know the actual street address,” she says. “I could look it up. I know how to get there.”

  He holds up his phone and displays the map on his screen. “Is it on Riverside Drive?”

  She takes a closer look and nods. “Yeah. That’s it.”

  “How did you know?” I ask him.

  “This is the address for the nursing home where Sarah Claymore lives. And this,” he points to the screen, to a dot just half a block away, “is where the Radical Pacifists just told me to deliver my data at ten o’clock tonight. What are the chances those two things are unrelated?”

  Chapter 22

  The bell above the door chimes, and Tai gets up. “I gotta go out front. Angel, if you need to, you can hang out here ’til closing. On Saturdays, Mr. Yee usually makes his deliveries and then just heads home. Just try not to make much noise, or the customers might get suspicious.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  She nods and closes the door behind her as she leaves.

  In hushed voices, Thomas and I discuss our next move, and suddenly I’m fighting against a rising tide of Thomas’s doubts.

  “The problem is, we have no real data so we have no real leverage,” he says. “These Radical Pacifist guys might be dopes, but they’re gonna figure out real quick that the ‘data’ I’m giving them is stuff I just randomly cut and pasted from a 1994 study about the effects of hallucinogenic mushrooms on mice.”

  “You don’t need to give them anything. All we need to do is get you that antidote. And since there’s a pretty good chance it’s stored at the nursing home, all we have to do is get there and find it before you’re supposed to meet with the Radical Paficists.”

  “Angel . . .”

  I cut him off.

  “Do not even start with the ‘I should go alone, and you should skip away unharmed’ business. I am not having it, young man.”

  He sighs. “Angel, I don’t want to argue.”

  “I don’t want to argue either. So let’s not.”

  He suddenly looks so forlorn and scared that it pains my heart. I put my arm around his slumping shoulders. “I know you’re worried that you can’t figure all this out, but you don’t have to. Two brains are better than one and all that, right?”

  “I’m not sure my brain is going to be worth much of anything when all this is over.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  He looks down at his phone, staring at the map as if he’s hoping something will become clearer. “What if this stuff they put in me is doing damage, not just to my memory but to how I think? Real, long-term damage?”

  I take the phone out of his hand. “I came through the memory drug without any damage to my cognitive abilities. At least that’s what they told me when I had all my follow-up exams, and I think it’s true.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve got that Velocius thing going on. I don’t.”

  “Well, we’re going to get the antidote for you, so don’t worry.” I shift into planning mode. “Since the Radical Pacifists won’t be expecting you to show up until ten, we should have plenty of time to infiltrate the nursing home, get the antidote, and run for the hills.”

  “Are there hills in Manhattan?”

  “You know what I mean. Look, by the time they realize you’re not going to show up with their data, we’ll be long gone and your brain will be as good as new. Sound good?”

  “Yeah. Sure.” Thomas shoves his hands in his pockets. “It’s a good thing you’ve got a handle on this because I don’t. My handle has just about fallen off.”

  I can see how exhausted he is. I’m exhausted too, and I’m not even fighting off mind-altering gunk. We both need to recharge if we’re going to pull off a heist without dozing off in the middle of it.

  Time for a nap.

  I steer him across the room, and he lets himself be led along. “Probably best to wait until dark before we try to sneak in. Meanwhile let’s just get some rest if we can. Even your brilliant mind can’t function without sleep.”

  I push a few laundry bundles around and we both sink onto them like we’re sitting in big, lumpy beanbags. Our heads tipping back, we look up at the ceiling, which is full of water stains and crisscrossed by ugly air conditioning ducts.

  I listen to Thomas’s breathing slow and deepen, like every breath he takes is thoughtful, intentional, and cleansing. Though I would never say this out loud, I can’t help thinking that it wouldn’t be so bad for him to forget this day. To forget the way he withheld information from me, strained my trust in him, tried to push me away. I’ll make sure he doesn’t forget, though. I’ll say, “Remember that time you were all misguided and thought you were protecting me? Wasn’t that funny?”

  It’ll be a big joke between us.

  Someday.

  Gradually we both fade into sleep.

  Beside me, Thomas is still asleep. I want him to stay that w
ay for as long as he needs.

  I get up and open the door to the front of the store. I find Tai sitting on a stool behind the counter, her hands cupped around a ceramic mug that says World’s Best Golfer.

  “You get some rest?” she asks.

  “Yeah. What time is it?”

  “About three o’clock.”

  I pull up a stool next to her and sit. “Can you tell me about . . . back then? Before I disappeared. What do you know about how I was living back then and what I was doing? And be totally honest.”

  “How honest are we talking?” she asks.

  “Honest like you’re talking about me behind my back. I want to know everything, no matter how bad it sounds.”

  So she does. And it’s hard to hear, but it’s also good. All the fears I had back in the hospital, about how I might have done terrible things—I believed I was a criminal, a murderer even, and this is probably why. Even though I was desperate, I knew I was hurting innocent people. Not Claymore. He deserved what he got. But I used other people, dragged them into my revenge plot.

  As she tells me about my past self—how I used to manipulate people, how I lied and hid and said whatever I had to say to get what I needed—I get this weird sensation of things becoming clearer, almost as if someone is rinsing away a greasy film over my eyes. Or over my mind, really.

  I can’t believe I’m even thinking this, but if there was any benefit to my memory modification surgery, it was that it gave me a chance to be someone a little less ruthless. Someone who doesn’t believe the end justifies the means. Because I lived those awful means.

  So what do I do about the fact that I need help now? I’m not going to make the same mistakes I used to make. I guess I just have to ask and, if the answer is no, accept that.

  “Tai, I cannot believe I’m going to ask you for a favor after everything I’ve put you through, but . . .”

  She smiles.

  “Why are you smiling?”

  “Because at least you’re asking instead of just using me.”

  “Don’t say yes until you know what you’d be getting yourself into.”