So I certainly didn’t want to lie to him now. But the truth? That couldn’t happen either. Crazy people didn’t continue working here, and without my job, Eric’s friendship could be in jeopardy too. Eric and I were a team. We always worked together; it was expected. It had become such an accepted truth that when Eric was out of the field with an injury for a while, everyone just assumed I was too. And they had been right. I couldn’t abandon him now after all he had done for me by admitting that I was going crazy. So I decided on a half-truth.
“I met someone,” I said slowly. I flinched as I said it. I anticipated his reaction. He wouldn’t congratulate me or tell me that’s great or it’s about time to move on. Eric knew better. But whatever he said, it would sting all the same.
“About three weeks ago?” he finally asked. I nodded. He sighed and continued, “I guess that explains it.”
We sat in silence for a while, me wishing I hadn’t said anything and Eric probably wondering what to say to a man who had repeatedly insisted he would never even consider dating again. When I sat there, stubbornly quiet and moody and obviously not going to freely offer anything else, Eric stepped lightly into the troubled waters he sensed around him.
“What happened?”
What happened? I went out for coffee, met Lottie, chased her a few blocks, found out she’s alive except she claims she’s some kind of energy life form from another planet who revives dead – apparently even dead and embalmed – bodies but apparently, got stuck with a defective one because she remembers me when she isn’t supposed to, but she never wants to see me again. What’s been happening with you?
It was taking me too long to answer. Just lie, Dietrich. Sometimes lies are better than the truth. Especially if I thought this was the truth. “I thought I saw Lottie.”
Goddamn it, I couldn’t even follow my own advice.
“Ok …” Eric said carefully. He was waiting. I had said I had met someone, after all, not that I thought I saw someone and walked away. He knew there was more. I inhaled. Now what? Could I fuck this up much more?
“I talked to her.” Yeah. I could.
“You talked to who?”
“Whom.”
“Dietrich.”
“I talked to Lottie.” How had he done that? I had been so sure that telling him the truth was the last thing I should do, and here it was, spilling out. Well, maybe not spilling out, but he was getting it out. I put my head in my hands and half-moaned, half-laughed, “Oh God, I’m going crazy, aren’t I?”
Eric was quiet for a while. That’s ok, buddy. Take your time to think about it.
“Yes,” he finally sighed, and swirled his drink around his cup. It was almost empty. He was going to start making those slurping noises soon that I despised. For once, he surprised me. He put the drink back down on my desk instead.
“You haven’t told anyone else about this, have you?”
“Of course not,” I would have rolled my eyes but they were buried in my hands.
“Alright then,” another pause. I peeked up at him to see if he was reconsidering his drink. But he was still watching me. “Well, what did she say?”
Holy shit. Eric 2, Dietrich 0.
He tried again. “You talked to Lottie, so what did she say? Did she talk about Heaven? A bright light? Did she just want to tell you she loves you, she’s worried about you? I mean, what?”
I had to look at him now. I mean, really look at him. I knew better than to think he was just fucking with me. Not about her. So he thought I was going crazy but was going to … what? Talk to me about going crazy?
“Um, no.” Ghosts. It would be easier to play along with ghosts. “Eric, it got … weird. Like, beyond seeing my dead fiancée weird.”
Eric’s eyes narrowed. “Dude, you didn’t sleep with her, did you?”
I sighed. Now he wanted to act like the Eric I expected. “God, I hate you sometimes.” He knew that wasn’t true. “She’s alive, but … not really Lottie. She claims she’s … I guess kind of like an explorer. She said she was curious about Earth anyway. And she was really upset. I mean, I think I only saw Lottie cry like that once, when her dad died.”
Eric sat up straighter and looked like he was trying to figure out a puzzle. Me? My insanity? How he hadn’t seen this coming?
“Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers?” he asked.
I slapped my desk. “I knew that was a movie. Is it any good?”
“Yeah, the original. Tell me what else she said.”
And so I did. Fifteen minutes ago, the last thing I had wanted to talk about was Lottie and this bizarre encounter and now I was replaying the entire morning, word for word, action for action. And Eric just sat there, watching me, like a mystery he was trying to figure out. When I got to the end, the part where she finally pulled away from me and opened my car door, pleading with me one last time to forgive her, before closing it behind her and walking quickly out of the parking garage, I emphasized that I hadn’t followed her because I knew she hadn’t wanted me to.
Eric had a tendency to rub his thumb and forefinger together when he was thinking, and he sat there now, rubbing, rubbing, rubbing. I wanted to know if he was deciding on what institution to have me committed to, but that’s probably one of those questions that shouldn’t be asked. Ever.
“And what have you found out since then?” he finally asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Surely you’ve tried to locate her.”
When I just stared back at him blankly, he gave me one of those are-you-having-a-slow-English-day looks. “Shit, Dietrich, are you new at this?”
“She doesn’t want me to find her. Were you listening?”
Eric waved his hand at me dismissively. “Of course, I was listening. That’s why I want to know how to find her.”
I shook my head. “No, this isn’t a game. You didn’t see her, you didn’t see how…” but he cut me off again.
“No, I know it’s not a game, Dietrich. Whoever you saw… Whomever? … Fuck, I don’t care. Whoever that was, well, there’s one of two things happening. Either she’s a damn good liar and impersonator, and don’t roll your eyes at me, I’m not done. I know, she wouldn’t have been able to fool you. So that leaves two: there’s some crazy shit going on and maybe I’m not buying her explanation, but something … I don’t know. I don’t know what it could be. But that’s why we should find her.”
“Wait, we?”
Eric narrowed his eyes at me again. “Are you sure you didn’t sleep with her?”
I threw the legal pad at him. I wanted something heavier, but I didn’t want to break my laptop. “Ow! Ok, fine. I believe you. Goddamn, you throw hard.” Eric rubbed his shoulder where the corner of the pad had hit him. I couldn’t even feign sympathy. Or interest.
I was too busy thinking of the possibilities, of what this could mean. What if I did try to find her? How hard could it be? I found people who didn’t want to be found all the time. And she had even admitted she was still living as Charlotte. Maybe her last name had changed, but I knew exactly what she looked like and I had a first name. I could do this. But she had asked me not to. So the most important question was: would she forgive me?
Eric was waiting for me, looking at me as if seeing all of those thoughts tumble through my brain. And he probably already knew it wouldn’t take much convincing at this point to reel me in. He chose his words carefully now. “Daniel has been offering you generous time off for over two years now. And he’s offered to let me go with you if you wanted to get out of Houston for a while.”
I knew about the time off, of course. I hadn’t known about his offer to Eric. Before Lottie’s death, I had been convinced Daniel hated me. His reaction to her death, the way he had acted since then, had made me reconsider a lot of things about the man who had almost certainly only grown to appreciate what I could do for him over the years rather than any genuine affection for me. But he had liked Lottie. She was impossible not to like.
“This jus
t seems … wrong. I promised her. Sort of. I don’t know, even if it’s only partly Lottie, how could I betray her like that?” I was shaking my head again. What was I thinking?
“You’re not betraying her. Lottie’s dead, Dietrich. This woman … she told you. She’s not Lottie.”
But he hadn’t seen her. He hadn’t touched her or heard her voice or smelled her, that scent of pears and honey that not even death could erase. I knew what Eric meant. His belief in the metaphysical still baffled me; how someone so intelligent, so logical and reasonable could believe in something like souls and Heaven would always perplex me, almost as much as American idioms. “She’s Lottie enough,” I finally offered. Truthfully, it was a half-assed attempt to end the discussion and he knew it. He had won. He had me. I wanted to find her.
“Maybe. But there’s only one way to find out just how much of her is still there.”
And that was how he finally convinced me. If he had been holding onto that reasoning, that line of thinking that I would never know how much of my dead fiancée had been resurrected by this …whatever this was … then he could have saved us five minutes and just started there.
“Ok, Eric. Then here’s what we know. She looks just like Lottie and is still living as either Charlotte or Lottie, and she made it sound like she was living with her friend Lydia, who looks just like Jamie. She knew she used to live in Houston, which is why she was visiting here, so she may remember she grew up in Baton Rouge and may even remember her mother moved back to Alexandria after her father died. She drove here though, and it also seemed like she was within a day’s driving distance because Lydia was expecting her. Personally, if I were trying to avoid anyone noticing me, I would avoid Louisiana altogether, and Texas, but Texas is a huge fucking state.”
Eric picked up his drink again and drummed his fingers against it. The circles of condensation had widened, forming overlapping circles of moisture. I shoved the box of Kleenex toward him and nodded toward the spreading wet pools on my desk. “How do they get around? What social security numbers do they use?” Eric asked.
“I was talking to my dead fiancée. Do you really think I asked her about fake social security numbers? Wipe that up.”
Eric grabbed a few tissues and swiped at the puddles, but his mind was still reeling with the possibilities that any of Lottie’s story could conceivably be true. “Think about it, Dietrich. What it would take for someone like that to just disappear in America.”
It certainly wasn’t impossible to live in the U.S. illegally, but I knew the complexities of it; how difficult it would be for someone to find herself suddenly in a strange world, not knowing the language or laws or customs and needing, somehow, not to draw attention to herself. Which meant if she was telling the truth, someone had already been here to help her and her friend adjust, to hide them, to integrate them into a new world.
“Holy shit,” I muttered, “how long do you think they’ve been doing this?”
Eric shrugged. “Who knows? But if any of this can be proven … Dietrich, it’s kind of a national security problem.”
“No. This is why you need to stay out of it then.”
“Oh, please. We don’t have to report her. But the others…” I stopped him. He wasn’t taking her friends away from her. “Fine, but if some Independence Day style invasion happens, I’m holding you personally responsible for not letting me warn anyone in time to stop it,” Eric pointed his empty coffee cup at me.
I had never seen that movie either.
“Deal. I mean, I’ll probably be dead, so I won’t care but you can blame me posthumously all you want.”
Eric shook his head. “You’ll live. I’ll make damn sure of it so I can rub your face in the fact that I was right and you were finally wrong about something.”
I really needed to start watching more movies.
“Ok, then, I’m ready; let’s start with a twelve hour driving distance. I’ll take the western half, you take the east,” Eric said, standing up and tossing his empty iced coffee cup into the trash.
It seemed so anti-climactic after so much wrestling with whether or not to search for her even, that his breezy decision to divide up an 1,800 mile semi-circle around Houston seemed too easy, too simple. My portion of the semi-circle meant searching through 900 miles, roughly to Jacksonville, Florida and northward to Omaha, Nebraska. There was no way she was living in Omaha. Nothing good could ever survive in Omaha.
“If she’s in Nebraska, I’m calling this off,” I said.
Eric smiled and shook his head. “Fucking Nebraska. I’m not going.”
I was bluffing. Some people were worth going to Nebraska for.
Chapter 4
Baton Rouge. It had taken three days to find her. I had been so sure that she would have avoided Baton Rouge, knowing it was Lottie’s home, and yet, she was there, living as Charlotte Martin. It had taken another two days of Eric arguing with me about leaving now versus waiting … I don’t know, a few weeks maybe? I wasn’t ready to face her. What the hell would I even say to her? But I did want to see her again, so Eric had won and we made the five-hour drive eastward on I-10 on that second day after turning up her name and address, her employer, and yes, even a fake social security number.
She and Lydia shared an apartment on Essen Lane, a busy area of the city with a major hospital right down the road and both of the major interstates intersecting the crowded, tangled street. I couldn’t imagine why she had chosen an apartment here. She knew this city, didn’t she? We hated this part of Baton Rouge because of the traffic that never seemed to let up, the construction that never seemed to end.
As I pulled onto Essen from the interstate to head toward our hotel, I couldn’t help wanting to drive in the opposite direction, to go directly to her apartment complex even though I still had no clue what I would say to her. We had talked about it on the drive and Eric was still convinced this was like talking to someone who wasn’t Lottie, that it would be so easy to just demand – and get – more answers from her.
After checking in to our rooms, Eric agreed he would wait for me rather than overwhelm her with us both showing up at the same time. It was getting close to supper time and he was hungry anyway. The thought of food made my stomach twist. I drove him down to a sushi restaurant where he picked up his order and he made half-hearted efforts to share with me. I didn’t like sushi and he knew that. Even the smell of it in my car was making my stomach heave even more and I had to roll down my window. And then to distract myself from sushi and Lottie I stupidly wondered how long we would continue using the phrase “roll down the window” when no one actually rolled down anything anymore, and what a better expression would be, only coming up with “put down the window” and how I could get it to catch on. Eric was quick to inform me some people already used that phrase. Fucking English.
Perhaps one of the few good things about living along the Gulf Coast in the summer time was how long the daylight lasted; it was past 7:30 by the time I had dropped Eric off and driven to her apartment complex, finding her new car in its parking spot – a white two door Yaris with a hatchback, something my Lottie wouldn’t have chosen because it wouldn’t easily fit car seats in the too small rear seat and getting babies in and out of a two door would be real pain in the ass – and found an empty visitor’s parking spot along the edge of the complex. Lydia’s car wasn’t next to hers, but I didn’t expect it to be. Lydia was still at work.
They both worked at the same bookstore, a job my Lottie would have loved if only because it meant being surrounded by books all day. She had always obstinately refused to let me get her an e-reader and wouldn’t use mine. She collected books like a philatelist collects stamps, but stamps were small. Stamps were light. Stamps would be easy to move in and out of apartments. She never had to move boxes of books up three flights of apartment stairs.
The joy she took, though, in finding an autographed copy of one of her favorite books, or the pure elation and adoration on her face as we waited in line
to meet one of her favorite authors at a book convention in Dallas always made me secretly happy that she wasn’t a closet philatelist. I figured when we ran out of space for her books in our apartment, I would just buy us a bigger house.
Now, as I stood outside her apartment building, taking in the New Orleans inspired wrought iron railings, perhaps meant to be reminiscent of the French Quarter, I wondered how much room she had for bookcases. If she even had the same obsessive book-collecting nature my Lottie had. I climbed the stairs to the second floor where her apartment was, swatting occasionally at one of the omnipresent mosquitoes of south Louisiana. The closer it got to dusk, the worse they would get. There weren’t many things I missed about Germany. Not being eaten alive by swarms of insects was one of them. We have mosquitoes, of course, but I have never been anywhere that is plagued with them the way this place is. I harbored a very deep suspicion that Louisiana had been cursed, much like Biblical Egypt with its locusts.
I killed another mosquito that had just landed on my forearm as I reached her door. I took a deep breath. I wanted to give myself a few minutes, collect my thoughts, make sure I knew the exact words to say and in the right tone and the right syntax, but I was growing increasingly worried that if I waited too long, I would contract West Nile. Or need a blood transfusion. Or I just really hated mosquitoes. So I knocked.
I waited, knowing there was a very good chance she wouldn’t even open the door for me. I knew she was home. The lights were on, and I could hear the muffled music she must be listening to, faintly smell the scents of the meal she was cooking for her own supper, and maybe Lydia’s. Lottie was thoughtful like that. She would have even waited for Jamie … or Lydia … to get home.
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