by Lissa Pelzer
Janine turned her face up. ‘I’ve looked at them all.’
‘But have you looked at it today? You know, that’s why they’re up here, so you can try to recall.’
Janine looked at the picture. It wasn’t the same kid and she told the doctor that.
‘How can you be so sure?’
And now she leveled a stare at the woman. ‘It’s like this. When I look at that picture,’ her finger trembled over the sheet, ‘I feel nothing and when I think of that kid from just now, I feel something.’
‘Janine, that’s wonderful. That’s really wonderful. That’s great news.’ And she got up and started talking quickly to Lauren, and Lauren turned and went out.
Some time passed. She couldn’t say how long, but Lauren had come back in the room and had said something. She was talking about the rehab place they’d said she could move to once she had stabilized, but Janine barely heard her.
She closed her eyes and tried to bring back the face of the boy she had just seen. She saw his dark eyes and some freckles. He had large lips, puffy lips that had been parted almost the whole time he’d been here, that made her think he was scared of something. She asked him what her real name was and he’d started like she’d poked him in the ribs. He knew stuff.
But when her therapist came in shortly before dinner, Janine didn’t say anything about it. They ran through the same exercises they had been doing for weeks and Janine did them quickly because as soon as they were finished, the woman would leave and Janine wanted to be alone.
Now she closed her eyes and had her own thoughts. There was a reason she felt anxious, but she didn’t know what it was. Maybe her doctor was right. Maybe it was just the drugs.
Davis
She came downstairs into the living room of her short-stay condo and opened her laptop.
‘Another day, another dead end,’ she said into the black screen before going to the kitchen to turn on the coffee pot. She'd gone on twelve different Internet sites claiming to match license plates to people, but not had any luck. She’d considered changing the order of the letters and numbers, but that was the way to ruin. A wrong number might generate a hit and a false lead would cost her time she couldn’t afford to lose. And she knew, she never forgot details the way some people did. She wasn’t a superwoman and she didn’t have a photographic memory, but she never forgot a birthday.
Davis tapped her finger against the counter as she thought about the problem. Somehow, she needed to get back into the network, the NCIN, but wouldn’t be given access until her suspension was over. The coffee pot gurgled in a way that made her hold her stomach, but it gave her an idea. She picked up her phone and called Detective Kriegbaum.
An hour later, Kriegbaum’s car pulled up to the curb. Davis went through to the kitchen, turned on the pot she had prepared and got into position on the upholstered chair. Kriegbaum pushed open the door and the early fall sunshine shone around his silhouette.
‘I pulled something,’ she said from the couch. ‘I’m mostly fine now, but not as sprightly as I usually am.’ Her voice croaked slightly, unintended, but that was okay. ‘Come on in. Pull up a pew.’
She saw his eyes flicker, the undisguised irritation at being summoned to make a house call.
‘What can I do for you?’ he asked. ‘Got something on your mind, you want to get off?’
‘Coffee?’
‘Thank you, no.’
Davis gave out a quiet hiss to reestablish that she was still an injured woman. ‘I needed you to come down here because I’ve been having these visions.’
Kriegbaum’s shoulders went up a fraction of an inch.
She closed her eyes. ‘Sometimes, when I sit very still, I can see the rig, the one Carol Ann Baker will get into.’ Davis waited. She could hear the sound of Kriegbaum’s seat creaking as he moved forward.
‘It’s there. It’s right there!’
‘Just tell me what you see, color, design, company logo. Do you see the driver?’
Davis wet her lips. ‘I see something.’
Kriegbaum didn’t speak.
‘I see the light hitting the rig and making patterns.’
‘What do these patterns look like, squares or circles?’
Davis opened her eyes. ‘No. They are the memories reforming and coming back to me. There’s information there in my mind regarding the semi and I just have this feeling that I need to speak them out to make sense of them.’ She closed her eyes again. ‘I think someone else might understand them better than me. Have you ever heard of free association?’
‘Sure. And what, you need me to be part of this?’
‘Could you?’
He paused. He was above this kind of thing, but he felt as desperate for information as she did.
‘In that case, maybe I will take that coffee. Can I get you one?’
‘Please.’
Kriegbaum was in the little kitchen now. He would be able to see her from there, but that was okay. She wasn’t going to do anything yet. She just glanced down at his bag. It was certainly big enough to fit a laptop. Hopefully, he was the kind of cop who liked to investigate on the spot rather than in his cubicle.
The young man came back through and placed a well-used cup at her elbow. He took a quick mouthful himself and nodded.
‘Okay, let’s do this,’ he said, as if he knew already that his cup was loaded and that Davis was taking him for a ride.
She cleared her throat. ‘I see a pattern down the side of the truck, like flames on water,’ she said.
This was true. She had noticed the truck up ahead, and the expensive, customized paint job.
‘Which was more dominant, the flames or the water?’ Kriegbaum took out a blotter and began to draw. ‘Like this?’
Davis took the pad from him and turned it around. She made some vague swirls that could have been flames, could have been water. It didn’t matter, she was just killing time.
‘And what’s this?’
‘What?’
‘This figure, here, is that a woman?’
Davis hadn’t noticed it, but she had drawn a girl on one of the flames, one of those bizarrely shaped, mud flap girls with a pencil-thin waist and breasts that go from their throats to their belly buttons.
‘It could be.’
‘She’s riding the flames.’ Kriegbaum took another gulp of coffee. ‘What color is this?’
‘Red,’ Davis said.
‘Red Rider.’ Kriegbaum replied.
‘Excuse me?’
‘It’s a band.’ And he smirked. ‘Before my time.’
For a moment, Davis saw a twinkle of personality in his eye. Somewhere deep inside that mid-western cop was a human trying to get out. Then his face twitched and she realized the laxative in the coffee was starting to work. She needed to move fast.
‘Oh, I can see the back of it now,’ Davis said.
‘What’s on the back?’
‘The license plate. I can see figures. There’s a 6 and a T...’
Kriegbaum grabbed the pen. He began to write.
‘And an A...and a...wait, they’re coming.’
And to her surprise, Kriegbaum did wait. He hovered over the table. If it were her, Davis would be logged in already, checking to see if these were semi registrations or just some soccer mom’s SUV.
‘There’s something else, a 6 or an S. Jeez, it would be helpful if we could check if these digits matched the type of vehicle I’m seeing.’
Kriegbaum got the hint and grabbed his computer out of the bag with one hand. He swung it around and logged himself in.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Go on.’
Davis waited. She screwed her eyes shut.
She remembered having taken these pills herself. A punk had swung a parking bollard at her back when she was a rookie officer. It had fractured one of the vertebrae and for the next year, she had relied on Co-codamols to get her out of bed every morning. They worked well for taking the edge off the pain, but kind of interfered with other th
ings. She’d had these pills on prescription and taken them and remembered how quickly they worked after the initial twinge. They’d been in her goody bag after leaving the hospital this time, not that she’d used them.
Now she heard a deep but quiet groan from the other side of the table. She opened her eyes and saw his hand going up to the lid of his laptop. She dripped another false number into the mix and his eyes widened. One number left.
‘Yeah?’ he asked with a touch of pain in his voice.
Davis nodded her head. ‘It’s coming. I can feel it. It’s just about to explode out of me.’
‘Excuse me.’ Kriegbaum stood up. ‘I need to use your bathroom.’
‘Upstairs, first door on the left.’
He took the steps on his toes, one at a time like a stilt walker. Once she heard the door close, Davis swung the laptop around and typed in the vehicle registration.
A Sacramento address came up and a name too. Ralph Adams.
She was expecting warrants or previous records and a speeding ticket maybe, but the guy was clean. The only thing was from just a few days back. He’d been pulled over in Indiana, regarding transporting a wanted person. Davis felt her body shudder. How had they pulled this guy over and not found Carol Ann?
A flush came from the bathroom upstairs. She lifted her hands from the keyboard for a moment but didn’t come out of the page. She knew there would be more flushing. She went back to the info, noted down the city, the department, the times and officers involved. She came one step back and searched her own name and Carol Ann’s. She saw the recorded offense. She saw a list of reported sighting, some followed up, many simply noted. They all described a blonde again, except that last one, the one linked to the truck driver, Ralph Adams in Indiana.
She was about to check out Bobby Alvin when the flush went again. This time, the fine hairs on the back of her neck rose. She reckoned Kriegbaum wasn’t the type of guy to hog a bathroom. And now she heard the tap running and the drain gurgling. She backed out of the search and turned the laptop back around. She composed herself ready to show sympathy, but when Kriegbaum came down the stairs, she barely had time to say goodbye.
‘Got a call!’ he muttered as he dragged the laptop off the table and into his bag. ‘If you see that last number in any of your visions, I want you to call me, okay?’
‘Sure, sure.’
She got up, but he was already half way down the path towards his car. So Davis straightened up and stretched her arms above her head. Then she picked up her phone and called the letting agent. She had to tell him she was checking-out.
Janine
That morning, she woke up with her fists clenched and her jaw tight. She’d had a dream and woken up with a name on her lips. Chad.
She glanced at the door, afraid that someone would come in and ask her about it, because for some reason, she didn’t want to tell them that she knew who he was.
Janine got out of bed and crossed the room towards the photos. She stared into the blurred faces, expecting some of them to stand out, but they looked the same as they did yesterday. Who were all these people? They meant nothing to her. Her name wasn’t Janine and somehow Chad knew it wasn’t. These people weren’t her friends. It was like someone was playing a trick. Enough was enough. Janine reached up, pulled one down and tore it in half. Then she pulled the rest down in handfuls, crumpled them up into a ball and left it on the floor.
When her therapist came in, she noticed the missing pictures and asked what had happened.
‘They annoyed me,’ she said. ‘So, I took them down.’
‘You were annoyed?’ the woman asked as if this were a new and unstudied phenomenon.
‘They’ve been up the whole time. I’m tired of them looking at me.’
‘What other feelings do they give you – fear, regret?’
‘No. Just annoyance.’ And she stared at the woman to see if she got the idea that she annoyed her too.
The therapist drew back. She nodded her head. She wrote something down.
‘What are you writing?’ she asked.
‘Just observations.’
‘About me?’
‘Naturally.’
‘Don’t you think that’s kind of rude to write about someone and not tell them what you’re writing?’
Now her therapist stood up. ‘Hang on. I’ll be right back!’
Janine got up too and went to the window. Outside it was gray and dull. The sky hung too low over the buildings on the other side of the hospital. She had never seen any sunshine from this window. Why was there never any sunshine here? For the first time since she could remember, she looked up at the flat, black mirror of a TV hovering in the corner of the room.
She picked up the remote and began to flick through the channels, through commercials and news. She recognized the products and knew what you did with them, in the same way as she knew what commercials were and what you were meant to do it a bathroom.
‘Janine?’
None of this interested her, but she had a craving to see a talk show, something live that would feed life into the hospital room.
‘Janine?’
She turned around with the remote still in her hand and Dr. Mathers was a standing in the middle of the room.
‘I’ve heard you’re feeling different today,’ she said.
She hadn’t said that in so many words, but that was essentially true.
‘I guess.’
‘A little edgy?’
She gave a laugh. ‘I bit more awake, maybe.’
Her doctor came over. She perched herself on the arm of the stiff-backed chair. ‘You know we gave you that new drug yesterday, the one designed to get your synapses firing. Well, that’s probably what’s happening. If you feel a little uncomfortable in your own skin, you shouldn’t worry. It’s just a phase of the drug beginning to take effect.’
‘Well, I do feel something. And it’s not that pleasant.’ She turned away, flicked through the channels again until she came to a TV show full of color and noise. A fat Asian guy in novelty glasses was pouting at the camera.
‘Do you know who that is?’ her doctor asked.
‘I have no idea.’
‘His name is Maxi something. He has a web show called Maxi’s Pad.’
‘That’s the dumbest name I ever heard.’ Janine threw the remote down a little harder than she had meant to and the doctor jumped up from the bed. For a moment, she thought about apologizing, but didn’t. She thought instead about Maxi’s Pad.
‘It sounds like the kind of show that only idiots watch.’
‘You look worried,’ the doctor said. ‘You don’t like the show, maybe.’
‘I don’t give a rat’s ass about the show!’
The doctor nodded. ‘Emotions are good. Sometimes when we can’t remember things exactly as they are, we remember the way they once made us feel.’
Janine picked up the remote again and was about to change the channel, just to shut the woman up, when it cut to a segment filmed near a beach. The camera swept across a view of sand and palm trees and then into a city. For a second, she just watched.
‘It looks beautiful there, doesn’t it? That’s Hollywood, California.’
Janine turned the volume up a little.
‘You’ve heard of Hollywood, haven’t you?’
The segment concentrated on a film premier. She knew what a movie premier looked like too, the red carpet, the board put up for people to pose in front of for the cameras.
‘I bet, the place is full of jerks.’
‘Why do you say that?’
Janine didn’t answer. The beautiful and glamorous people were coming out of limousines. And Cassandra was there.
‘There’s Cassandra,’ she said, pointing up to the screen.
‘Who’s Cassandra?’
‘A friend of mine.’ And as she said the words, she understood the absurdity of them. She wanted to correct herself, but couldn’t. At least she couldn’t find the right words.
Her doctor sat up sharply. ‘Is she an actress?’
‘No. She’s no actress!’
‘But you recognize her?’
‘No, I know her. That’s Cassandra. But what the hell is she doing on TV?’
Their talking brought Lauren into the room and the doctor turned to her.
‘Hey, you keep up to date with this stuff. Who’s that actress there?’
‘Which one?’
‘The pale redhead in the white dress…’
‘Oh.’ Lauren smirked. ‘That one, yes. She’s no actress!’
Janine turned back to see that the doctor had heard her. She saw the confusion on her face and turned back to the screen. There was Cassandra. She stepped out into a thunderstorm of flashing lights, one leg poking out of her sparkling dress. She knew her. One hundred percent, she knew this girl, but she just couldn’t say how or where from.
‘A million dollars,’ Janine said under her breath.
The doctor laughed. ‘Sure, she looks like a million dollars.’
And Lauren lowered her chin towards her white candy striper tunic. She looked towards Janine as if she had spoken out of turn in a school play.
Janine didn’t care. She studied the screen. She saw the shine on Cassandra’s hair and remembered having touched it, how thick and silky it had felt between her fingers.
‘Who is she?’ the doctor asked.
‘I don’t really know,’ Lauren said. ‘But she’s the latest girlfriend of Terence McCoy. Yet another eighteen year old.’
‘So she’s someone famous who Janine could have remembered from a month ago, from before her accident.’
‘Could be, but a month ago, this girl didn’t exist.’
‘Now, that’s a ludicrous thing to say.’
‘I only mean, he discovered her at a film festival last month. Before that, she was, I don’t know what, a waitress, maybe. They’re usually waitresses, aren’t they?’
‘Then it’s just the drugs creating false memories. We’ll have to reconsider the dosage.’
Janine turned. ‘This is not a false memory. I’m sure of that.’
And her doctor came closer to her. She rested a hand on her arm. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll clear this up. What did you say her name was?’