by Lissa Pelzer
‘That was my guess, but from where? Because no one else from around here knows her…and I mean no one. I’ve asked them all!’
Davis smirked. He was no cop, but even regular people must realize that if a middle-aged man shows them a picture of a girl and asks if you know her, almost every young guy is going to say that he doesn’t. No one wants anyone’s dad telling them they’re about to become a father themselves.
‘What’s her name and what does she look like? You want me to go over there and ask them?’ Davis knew she could work on that amnesia angle, claim the girl was getting her memory back, give them a chance to tell their side of how they knew her, before she started to tell hers.
But the guy shook his head. ‘I couldn’t tell you, even if I wanted to. She’s being treated as a protected minor, and considered vulnerable.’
‘Oh sure.’
After that, there didn’t seem much more to say. She finished her water and eager to get to bed early, paid up, said goodnight to her bar-mate and headed out to her rental car.
It was only around nine o’clock when she pulled into the motel. She could see the top of a baldhead shining behind the desk and drove around to the side.
Now that it was dark, she could take a closer look at the cameras. There was one mounted on the office wall and one under a roof overhang and Davis parked up and went into her room for the ice bucket. Then she came around the back of the motel towards the first camera, on the pretense of looking for the ice machine, and peered up under the timbers.
‘God damn it!’ She recognized the telltale sign of a single flashing red diode and the crude, glued-on look of the fittings. This camera was a dummy, put there to deter the graffiti sprayers who must have targeted this big, flat wall.
She carried on around towards reception and glanced up at the second camera. It’s hard to look at a security camera for long. The feeling of being seen to be looking is almost too much to bear, but now she knew what she was looking for, she saw it right away. And her heart sank. There was that same tiny red light.
As if she needed any more convincing, the wire, which was meant to give the illusion of traveling through the wall, had come away from the bracket and was floating in mid-air. From behind the desk, eyes and a nose appeared as the manager lifted himself out of his chair to see who was there.
Davis lifted her hand. ‘Good night,’ she called out, and she slouched off to spend a pointless night in a motel bed in the middle of nowhere.
Janine
In the mornings they had group self-help sessions. In the afternoons, she did occupational therapy. But these didn’t help her, didn’t occupy her.
Whenever the unit nurse came by, knocked on her door and told her that group therapy was on, Janine wanted to scream. So, when Lauren occasionally showed up, it was like the heavens had opened and sunbeams were raining down on her.
Today, Lauren looped her arm through Janine’s and told her they were going to the mall.
‘You remember malls, right? Well, if someone asks you, say you don’t and then I can say this is part of your therapy.’
Lauren was just being nice. She wasn’t paid to take her out and Janine was especially careful not to take her actions for granted. She was starting to understand that going around with someone with amnesia couldn’t be much fun, no matter how bubbly Lauren always acted around her. So she made a concerted effort to be cool, to not ask Lauren if she really was Janine Kenny anymore. It was best just to go with the flow. Put up and shut up.
‘Does any of this seem familiar to you?’ Lauren asked as they rode up on the escalator.
‘Kind of... stores, pizza places, plastic plants...’
‘Maybe you were here before. We should let your therapist know about it.’
‘Sure,’ Janine replied with a little less enthusiasm.
They came off the escalator and stopped outside a clothes store with a lot of black and neon in the window.
‘I thought we could take a look in here and maybe pick a few things out.’
Janine looked past the security sensors and into the brightly lit rows of imitation band shirts and leather jackets.
‘I’m not sure that’s the kind of place I want to shop,’ she said.
‘Well, let’s just have a look, shall we? I think this is exactly the kind of place you used to shop before your accident.’
Janine took a deep breath. ‘How do you know?’
‘Oh, I overheard Bryan in the kitchen. One of the kids from your old facility said you went for a job here.’
‘Maybe I was just really desperate for money!’ she said and Lauren gave her a long sideways glance.
But she went in, because, after all, Lauren was doing this to help her and for no other reason, and they both started flicking through hangers.
‘You know,’ Janine said. ‘I was thinking, how come no one has come to see me?’
Lauren carried on moving shirts and hangers even though they were obviously not in her size or style.
‘I mean, I lived in that home for most of my life and Bryan asked them to come, but no one has been.’
‘That boy came while you were still in hospital.’
She meant Chad.
‘But now that I’m getting better, don’t you think I should call the place I lived and get some old friends to come down?’
Lauren stopped flicking through the clothes. Her hand rested on one hanger as if she was trying to keep it absolutely still.
‘Maybe it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I just mean, they would have come down if they really wanted to. Maybe you don’t want to know why they didn’t and why they won’t.’
Janine felt her cheeks sting as the blood rose up. ‘You mean they don’t like me. They probably hate me.’
And for a few moments, that sensation rang true. She could feel these people disapproving of her, talking behind her back. It was the first time any sense of connection with that place had occurred. But Lauren’s voice broke the trance.
‘You ran away for a reason. The feeling is probably mutual.’
Janine nodded quickly, turned in place and looked at some stuff in the other direction. She pulled a black dress off the pole, but the length was awful and it had no shape. This was the stuff you wore if you were depressed, or if you wanted to be depressed. And although she had the feeling that her life had sucked, she didn’t think she was the type of person to put up with it, to dwell on it.
‘Hey, Honey,’ Lauren said, and she turned and held up a shirt. Lauren had started calling her Honey a while back, while everyone else still called her Janine with nearing obsessional consistency. ‘What about this?’
Janine went over. She fingered the shirt. ‘I kind of like the slashes,’ she said. ‘I reckon they’d look nice if the shirt fell off your shoulder a little, but with this tight neck, you’d just look like a crack head.’
Lauren gave a laugh and turned back to the rack.
‘And no offense, but why is everything in this store either black or a color as far away from black as possible? If you want to wear hot pink, wear hot pink, but why wear it with black?’
‘Some young people dress like this. You used to dress like this.’
‘I hear you,’ Janine screwed up her face. ‘But I have to say, I’m not sure I’m buying it. All this black – my hair my nails, these clothes – it just isn’t me!’
Lauren jammed the hanger back onto the pole. ‘Well, maybe you should. Maybe if you believed the things people told you, then your memory would start coming back more. How do you expect that to happen, when every time someone tells you something about yourself, you just deny it?’
There were barbs to Lauren’s words and Janine turned to the other rack.
‘I reckon a lot of kids down in Florida dress like this,’ Lauren said after a pause. ‘That it’s how cool kids dress, right?’
Janine glanced back. ‘Florida? What has Florida got t
o do with anything?’ But even as she said it, she saw the beach and the sea. And something else, she remembered a hot, sticky, grilled cheese sandwich in her hand.
‘Oh you know, Miami Beach... I always dreamed of going there. Art Deco buildings, galleries, great shopping...’
She knew she was floating away, but couldn’t stop herself. She could see trees and tall hotels and some other places too, busted-up houses with missing windows and narrow alleys that stank of urine.
‘Do you remember anything about Miami?’
She shook her head. Was it a trick? Bryan had told her she’d never been south of Tennessee.
‘But you could have been. I mean we don’t know who you knew around here before the accident. Like if you knew the Snells, then maybe you spent time in Florida. The father had a boat on the Keys and I reckon they’ve still got it.’
‘The Snells? You mean the crazy family? I don’t think I know them. I think I would remember that,’ she said, but she did remember the name, Snell, from somewhere and a boat, she remembered a boat. Was that nasty old man in her dreams connected to those people?
‘But I saw you just now. You remember the beach and Miami…don’t you? Sunshine... Look, you still have the left over remnants of a suntan for goodness sake.’ And she grabbed at her t-shirt and pulled at the neck.
There was a line there like a necklace, but Janine hadn’t thought of it as a tan line.
‘Okay, fine. There’s something there. But I don’t think I know the Snells. And wouldn’t they have come to see me if I was the type of friend who they took down to Florida?’
‘Well, not necessarily. They’ve got enough going on. You know, the night of your accident, Simon got shot. And the father shot himself last year. You remember me telling you that, I’m sure.’
She did.
‘Plus, they are a pretty secretive family. No one really ever knows what’s going on with them. You could even have been sleeping with Simon Snell and no one would know about it.’
‘Lauren!’
‘I only mean, it would explain why no one remembers you from around here before the accident.’
‘Or else... I’m not from around here!’ She felt her eyes bulge. It was an idea she’d been holding back for a few days. What if no one knew her because up until she got hit, she hadn’t been here?
‘No, you’ve been here. I’m sure. But look, you should just think about Florida and the Snell thing. Keep it to yourself for a while.’ Lauren leaned in. ‘Because you probably wouldn’t want anyone to know you were hanging out with the Snells, not unless you really needed then to know.’
Janine pressed her hand to her head.
‘I’m sorry, Honey. Are you feeling okay?’
‘Not really.’
‘Okay, okay. Well let’s just get you this shirt and we’ll head back.’ And she held up a black shirt with a cat’s head on it. The cat was wearing a pink bow tie. ‘This is totally a Janine Kenny shirt!’ Lauren beamed.
Bryan
Janine Kenny was still a mystery and becoming more of one as time passed. He had her blue case folder in front of him, but the more he looked at it, the more he wondered if it belonged to someone else. This was just a cracked thought and he knew that, but every time they came up blank, he liked to consider mistaken identity as an option, so as not to feel quite such a failure. He glanced at a black and white copy of her ID. He knew the picture off by heart, the small chin, and delicate cheeks were hers, but the heavy eye makeup made her look very different. She didn’t wear that now and without it, her lashes were almost blonde.
What if...
‘Stop. Stop!’ he said out loud, and went back to the folder. The answers were in there somewhere.
She had been abandoned as a child and made it into Indiana’s Child Protective Services after a series of informal arrangements. She had struggled in school and in the home and had never made many friends.
As far as extra-curricular activities went, she didn’t play any sports or do any of the usual after school stuff. No yearbook council, no debate club and no show-choir. Of the six or so yearly excursions she was eligible to join, Janine had only been on two, one to Washington DC and one to Dollywood. Meaning in her whole life, this girl had barely left Indiana.
Yet, when he tried to impress her with his Hollywood connections, she rolled her eyes and she spoke of famous people, things and foods that she’d probably never tried. Just the other day, she told him, Terence McCoy, the film producer had a mother fetish! Really, where was she getting this? And she looked at him as if it were his problem that they couldn’t work out how she knew all this stuff.
And all the time he wanted to shout, ‘False memories!’ or have her sent back to the hospital for further psychological assessment. Surely, something more than just amnesia must be wrong with her. Bryan ran his tongue over his teeth and felt the sharp points of his incisors. He pressed down and tried to get some sensation, anything to shock him back into the real world.
She was like an android, some artificial intelligence experiment. But how could Janine Kenny be forming memories without any input? She never watched TV, not since that one time when she’d seen Cassandra Stephenson, and she didn’t see a single soul outside of the care team.
And where had she been in the last three or four months since she ran away? In desperation, he asked some girls at the mall, the kind who looked like they might know a girl like Janine, but no one had recognized her. It seemed like Chad Purcell was the only person alive who could be connected to her in anyway. Bryan shook his head, if that was the case, he didn’t want to know.
Janine
She had started dreaming and remembering her dreams. Not that she wanted to. Karl, her therapist had asked her what she had dreamt about, and Janine knew she was meant to tell him everything, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell him...everything.
He got the movie trailer version only.
In one dream she was in an expensive hotel room, someplace really fancy. There had been a pair of huge French doors with heavy curtains hanging down and she was stood next to them with a glass of champagne in her hand. In her other hand, she had a small pink pill, which she slipped between her lips as she took a sip of the champagne. She had told Karl this much and then stopped.
And Karl had sat there blinking rapidly like he was having a vision himself.
‘What was the pill?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where was the hotel?’
‘No idea.’
‘Was there anyone with you?’
‘No.’
‘Janine. Why would you be in a hotel room drinking champagne on your own?’
‘It was dream – Karl!’ she said. And she had been getting these creepy vibes from him like he wanted her to tell him what else happened for his own kicks.
And he closed his eyes. ‘How does that make you feel?’ he asked dryly.
‘I don’t know.’
She didn’t tell him what came next. She didn’t tell him how she had turned around and seen a decrepit old man in a bathrobe, how she had kissed him with an open mouth and felt his tongue take up the whole of her throat until she could barely swallow. She didn’t tell him that later she’d been looking over his shoulder at a tray of crackers and olives while he held her, waiting for it to be over, so she could eat. She left out the part where he had begun to beat and kick her until she thought she would die. She didn’t say that she picked up a piece of wood shaped like a cock and beat the man until he bled from his ears, and his teeth lay cracked in pieces on the pale beige carpet.
What kind of sick person had dreams like that?
Eventually, Karl had given up asking and now they were trying something else called free association. Janine leaned back in the rehab office chair, closed her eyes and searched for things to tell Karl other than the words which came into her head.
‘Apple,’ Karl said.
And Janine would think of a girl with an apple jammed in her mouth, too big to
spit out.
‘Choke,’ she said. ‘I mean, swallow.’
Karl would write it down, always crossing and uncrossing his legs in a way that seemed like he was really uncomfortable. His discomfort made her uncomfortable too. It made her angry, but she didn’t know why. Lying back there, Janine knew, she would like to take the pen out of his hand and stab him in the throat with it.
‘Tree?’ Karl asked, and she saw blood on a forest floor, but this time she was quicker.
‘Birds.’
He nodded. A smile spread over his face. ‘Friends…’
Janine blinked.
‘Friends?’ he tried again.
She knew what he was doing, trying to get her to say the names of people she’d known, but the only name that came to her mind was – Cassandra.
Janine looked back at him as sharply as he observed her. ‘If you want me to say, Cassandra, don’t bother. I know that someone from Cassandra’s agent has called Bryan back, he told me. Cassandra Stephenson has never heard of me, of anyone called Janine Kenny.’
The pen made a scratching sound as he dragged it across the paper.
‘Girl?’
Janine felt her lips playing with a word, a name… Moon Face. Janine saw a girl with short hair and dark make-up. She looked like her. She looked a lot like her.
‘Say it,’ the therapist said, but she didn’t.
It was too precious. She wanted to keep that word to herself. ‘There’s nothing to say,’ Janine said.
‘Do you need the prompt again?’
‘No.’
‘Did you forgot it already. How does this make you feel?’ Karl asked.
And she turned and wrinkled up her nose. ‘Like I want to get out of here,’ she said. ‘How do you think?’
Karl put down the cards and leaned back in his chair. His face darkened. ‘For a moment there, we were getting somewhere, but you’ve closed up again. Did you feel yourself closing up?’
The words angered her and she didn’t answer.
‘Look at the way you’re lying. It’s all wrong. You need to uncross your ankles and uncross your arms.’ Karl waved his pen at her body. ‘There’s energy inside you and you need to let it flow for this to work.’