False Memory

by Meli Raine

  To find a stretcher being loaded into the back of an ambulance, rose petals and stems everywhere.

  Chapter 26

  Dad.

  My hand goes to the door, the bile rising up my sternum and into my throat as I struggle to take in the flashing lights, the vertigo that strikes like a viper, fangs sinking in with venom that makes me feel separated from my body, unholy and floating above it all.

  Dad appears, breathless and red faced–but on both feet.

  “Mrs. Martinez,” he says as he huffs. “Came into the shop to buy a funeral arrangement. Priest at St. John’s died. She was holding some roses and talking about her late husband when her eyes just rolled back in her head and she went down like a sack of potatoes, honey.” Dad’s sad, dark-circled eyes meet mine. “I caught her. She’s a twig, so tiny since her cancer. She was breathing when they got her on the stretcher, though.”

  “Thank God, Dad! I thought–I thought–” Black spots dot my vision along with electric lightning bolts, golden and silver at the edges. My head is its own fireworks display. It’s the Fourth of July in Lily’s head all the time. Whee!

  “Honey, honey, come inside,” Dad urges, looking at Duff with disapproval as he moves to my left side.

  “We need to get her away from the blinking lights,” Duff tells Dad as he turns into a wall for me, shielding the flashes. I lean into Duff, grateful. Each pop of light is a dagger to my temples. Muscles in my jaw move of their own volition, sending nerves tingling, shooting pain through the bones of my face.

  “Got it,” Dad says, holding the main door open as I walk in.

  And start to shake.

  No one has made me come back here. Months ago, Duff and Silas brought me here and questioned me, Mom and Dad standing guard. It was a role reversal, my parents acting as my security team, Silas and Duff the threat. Nothing I said then made a difference. I kept my mouth shut about Romeo, but the entire time in the shop I stared at the cracked concrete, wondering how Mom and Dad got all my blood out of it. Bleach? Acid treatment? What did it take to completely erase all traces of my downfall?

  Because we know that after he shot me, I fell–hard–head cracking open on the concrete, whatever bits weren’t shattered by the bullet giving way when I hit the ground.

  My eyes jump to the spot again as I breathe, the naturally perfumed air making my stomach squeeze itself like a wet washcloth.

  What happened to me feels like it’s been completely scrubbed. Like it didn’t happen.

  Like I’m supposed to forget it ever happened.

  “Sit, Lily,” Dad insists, grabbing the heavy wooden chair we keep close to the door for any customers who need a break, a moment’s rest. It’s hard, the seat curved and varnished, but it does the trick. My shaking slows down, Duff bent to watch me.

  “Do I need to snag those paramedics before they drive away?”

  I cover my eyes again, the staccato visual assault from the emergency lights still too much. “No. I was worried about Dad and now I don’t need to be.”

  “Worried about me? What on Earth for?”

  “I saw an ambulance, Dad. You had a heart attack nine months ago.” Because of me.

  “Pfft,” he says dismissively. “I’m fine.”

  “Open-heart surgery!”

  He thumps his chest like a silverback gorilla. “Better than new! The scars make me manlier.”

  I can’t help myself. I look at Duff’s eye.

  Dad notices and laughs.

  Duff joins in.

  “Stop it, you two!” I say, cranky and irritated. “It’s not funny.”

  They laugh harder.

  “Jerks,” I mutter.

  Dad slows down but wipes his eyes, deeply amused. “Sorry.”

  No apology from Duff.

  He just shrugs.

  “Poor Mrs. Martinez,” I say, trying to distract myself as the ambulance finally pulls away, the assault of lights ending in fifteen seconds or so. I look up at Dad. “Is she going to live?”

  “Of course!” he says in a too-cheery voice.

  “Dad.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Pretend everything’s going to be fine. Life doesn’t work that way.”

  “It damn well should!” he announces, as if telling the world to get its act together. “Mrs. Martinez should be fine.”

  “I hope so. But she’s eighty-seven.”

  “Spring chicken.”

  “Dad,” I groan.

  “Are you here to argue about Mrs. Martinez or for some other reason?”

  “I’m here because I wanted to talk to you without Mom around.”

  Dad blinks fast, confusion filling his eyes, but he reins it in quickly. “Oh! Then good timing. She won’t be here for a few hours. Gwennie’s in the back, though.”

  Inhaling slowly, I let the familiar scent of the shop creep in, the very act of breathing the air a source of comfort and fear. Rhonda warned me in our very first PT session that our five senses store pain in different ways. That we think of touch–physical sensation–as the only real form of pain, but it’s not. Our eyes, ears, noses, tongues, all act as memory banks, retrieving past experiences and solidifying present ones to create a database of encounters with people, places, objects.

  Gunmen.

  My first twenty-three years were built here, flower by flower, plant by plant, my babyhood spent in bouncy seats while Mom worked the register, my toddlerhood spent learning not to touch geraniums. I was helping to organize shipments by kindergarten, running errands to buy ribbon at the sewing store down the street by eight. Who I am is permanently entwined with this place, this air, this source of financial security and repository of hard work.

  If a place had DNA, The Thorn Poke is my third helix.

  “You want a latte?” Gwennie appears, looking at Dad, waving quickly at Duff and me. “Because I’ll go on a coffee run and leave you alone.” Her palm is out in the universal teenager gesture of Bribe me while I pretend to offer you help.

  Dad falls for it hook, line, and sinker, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out his wallet. He hands her a twenty. “You know my order. Lily?”

  “Cinnamon latte, almond milk.”

  Gwennie makes a face.

  “But you know all about water waste and almond harvests!” she hisses, suddenly animated. The bookish girl with glasses and braces takes me on. “Why can’t you drink coconut milk? Or cow’s milk?”

  “Because I like almond milk.”

  “You’re contributing to climate change!” she screeches as she clutches Dad’s money.

  “I’ll take on the karma,” I say drily. Duff holds back a laugh.

  “Duff?” she asks, turning to him. “What’s your drink?”

  Dad stiffens.

  “I’m fine.”

  “He’s too good for our coffee,” I sniff.

  Dad’s eyebrows go up. “Too good for what?”

  “He doesn’t like the coffee at Hot Cup of Hope.”

  “What?” Gwennie gasps. “Why not?”

  A shrug greets her. “We all have preferences.”

  Her eyes widen as if he’s just made the wisest statement she’s ever heard. “We do! That’s right!” Huffing, she storms off down the street, making a sharp right out the door.

  “Fifteen,” Dad mutters under his breath. He grins at me. “Remember when you were like that?”

  “I was never like that!”

  “Sure you were. Slave-free chocolate was your big issue.”

  “Still is!”

  “Your poor mother and all those contraband candy bars. You banned her from eating her favorites.”

  “Contraband!” I shout, shocked by Dad’s admission. “You mean you broke the rules?”

  Duff looks at Dad and says, “I see the resemblance between her and Gwennie now.”

  “You stay out of this!” I grumble at him.

  Dad gives Duff a grudging smile.
>
  “I didn’t come here to be made fun of,” I say as I start to stand, eyes darting to the counter.

  The counter.

  Where Romeo shot me.

  My legs feel like they’re filled with novocaine, sacks of goo covered by thin skin. The room spins, the harsh scent of concrete seeping up like the individual pieces of sand and dirt are separating, all magnetically drawn to my nose at the same time. My stomach clenches, then twists, and all my skin rises ten inches above me, a sheet, a raincoat, a shroud.

  Warm, strong hands go around my waist, my ribs, holding me up as I sag. “Lily,” Duff says, and then I’m up, cheek against the white cotton shirt he wears under his suit jacket, the seam of the pocket sliding against the bridge of my nose. Burrowing in, I let my muscles go slack, let my body feel as heavy as my soul does.

  Sinking, sinking, sinking into his arms, I feel cold and abandoned when the loveseat behind the curtain makes contact with my ass, my hamstrings, the backs of my knees, my elbows. A blanket, murmured deep voices, and then:

  “Helllllllo? Are you open????” calls out an old woman’s voice. “My sister is in the hospital and I need an arrangement.”

  “I got her,” Duff tells Dad.

  “Hospital?” Dad asks. At first, I think he’s repeating the customer. Then I realize he means me. That I should go to a hospital.

  “Not yet,” I murmur. “I just can’t smell the concrete much longer. It hurts.”

  I feel them frown. Feel it, even through closed eyes.

  “Smelling concrete?” Dad says to Duff. I open my eyes. There are four men standing there. I squint.

  Two. Down to two.

  “Tommmmm?” whines the woman on the other side of the shop.

  “It’s Mrs. Xin. She’ll be quick. Second time this week she’s come in. Always gets red roses with white carnations.” Dad’s eyes beg me to be okay.

  I wave him off.

  He retreats, calling out Mrs. Xin’s name, doing all the right schmoozing steps to get a customer on their way, sale closed, flowers out the door to do their duty.

  Speaking of duty, Duff’s watching me like I’m his life’s sole mission.

  “Quit staring.”

  “I’m not staring. I’m watching.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Threat level.”

  “You think I’m a threat?”

  “You’re dangerous, Lily.”

  “That’s right! In hand-to-hand combat I might scratch you. Ouch.” I hold up my bad arm and fake-bat at him. It barely flutters.

  He lets out a funny laugh. “You don’t need a hospital.”

  “I don’t. But I do need that latte from Gwennie. Where the hell is she?”

  “She’s fifteen. Probably ran into a friend and they’re Snapchatting or something.”

  “Snapchat is so last year, Duff. Smoke Signals is the new Snapchat.”

  “There’s an app called Smoke Signals?” The grin that accompanies that response makes me smile back.

  “Perfect for you, Duff. For people who blow smoke up someone else's ass.”

  “There she is,” he continues. “Feisty Lily. Don’t make me take you to the hospital.”

  I look around, the couch soft and sunk in under my bony butt. It feels both comforting and claustrophobic here at the shop. You don’t spend your entire life in the flurry and fun of a family-owned small business without it being in your cells, deep and enmeshed. I can’t think of my history without The Thorn Poke.

  But what do you do when that history is embedded with trauma? Blood trauma.

  My eyes skitter to the concrete floor, willing the blood to appear. A stain, a smear, a discoloration–anything that says to me Yes, Lily. Yes, it happened. Yes, it’s real. This really happened.

  Because something that bad should leave a mark.

  Someone trying to kill me should leave a trace.

  “You’re reliving it,” Duff says, his voice pain filled and empathetic.

  “Of course I am.”

  “You’re not the only one.”

  Shock makes my neck jerk back, which makes my temples pound. Nerve pain is insidious, taking over my cognitive abilities, slicing off a big piece of my neurological pie like a glutton, digging right on in without care for anyone else’s portion.

  “You?”

  “This place,” he says, looking around, voice down to a whisper. “It haunts me.”

  I shiver. “You’re creeping me out.”

  “I’m not the one who is creeping you out, Lily. You’re remembering what happened to you that day.”

  “Not remembering. Reliving.”

  “Places hold more than memories. They have their own echo. The past is back there, but we can hear it in the present. Sound carries that far. Especially the sound of trauma.”

  His scar draws my eyes to it. “You speak from experience.”

  “I do. I wish you didn’t have to.”

  “But I do, too.”

  “Then I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know, Lily.”

  “No. But you’re saying it in a different way. You make me feel understood. You’re the only person who does, Duff.”

  Chapter 27

  He leans in, the sound of his breath like the ocean. The flowers in the shop obscure his scent, the too-clean air making me lightheaded, but not in a dizzy way. It’s too much oxygen, too much freshness for a place that holds so many good memories and one really, really horrible one.

  But those eyes.

  Those eyes make that worst memory feel like it’s part of me. Like it’s okay to be part of me. Like being shot can be two different truths, the horribleness of it acknowledged in the open, the hard fight back to normal a spoken truth as well.

  We can hate our horror and at the same time, we can love who we become as a result of it.

  I’m breathing slowly, watching him, wondering if I’m making up all these feelings in my mind. In my heart. In the narrowing space between us, where a kiss is what I want and a kiss is also a terrible idea.

  What we want and what’s good for us don’t always overlap.

  Shaking his head, he pulls back, running one palm over his temple, fingers gripping his scalp as he turns, eyes troubled. So I wasn’t imagining it. He felt it, too.

  Raw, searing interest, pure and completely unfiltered, reflects out from those bright blue eyes.

  I send it back in full.

  Someone clears his throat. We both look up.

  Dad.

  I forgot about Dad.

  “Mrs. Xin,” Dad says, eyes bouncing between Duff and me like he’s a metronome and the tempo’s picking up, “has been flowered. What’s going on back here?”

  “Nothing,” we say in unison, Duff’s word flat, mine guilty.

  Dad nods. “Fine. Lily, how do you feel?”

  “Traumatized,” I admit. Dad gives Duff a sharp look.

  “Too soon?” he says to me, but his eyes are on Duff.

  “Too everything. I hate him so much.”

  “Hate who?”

  “The man who shot me. He–he took this away.” I lift my weak hand and wave it around. “I can’t even walk into The Thorn Poke without freaking out.”

  “Oh, honey.” Dad sits down on the edge of a folding chair. Duff looks at me, then Dad, and quietly steps through the curtain, turning around to scan the back room, a final work gesture. Always on duty, he can't even leave without visually securing the space. As I watch him, I see a glimmer above the doorway. A fish-eye lens.

  A camera.

  “You really did put the cameras in,” I marvel.

  “Of course,” Dad says, instantly defensive. Blustery, even. “Screw Big Brother.”

  How Duff manages to keep a straight face is beyond me. Duff is Big Brother.

  Sort of.

  Who, exactly, does he work for?

  Duff finishes his sweep and turns.

  There is a precision to men who guard others for a living. It’s a must. A job requireme
nt. But that’s not all it is. If it were, every vigilant person would be suited for security work.

  They’re not.

  Vigilance has to be balanced with judiciousness. Awareness. Responsiveness instead of reactivity. People like Duff are a rare breed. They know instinctively when to act and when to bide their time. All the skills training in the world can’t make a person like him.

  Nature vs. nurture rears its head in the strangest places.

  I know this. I know it intellectually and I know it from my time in the coma, from my recovery, from this strange sense I have where I can read situations, people, tension. That my father doesn’t like Duff is obvious to me, radiating off Dad like an aura.

  Duff has an aura, too.

  And it has nothing to do with my father.

  “Lily. Honey. Why are you here?” Kind, loving eyes meet mine. I've been the object of Dad's affection since the day I was born, and I know it in my bones.

  “Am I not wanted here?”

  “Of course you are. I can tell something's bothering you. You wouldn't have come here when Mom's not around. What is it? You can tell me anything.”

  My eyes go to the spot on his chest where his heart beats, steady and full, under his shirt. Can I? Can I really tell him anything? The stress of my situation gave my father a heart attack.

  I gave my father a heart attack.

  No.

  Romeo did.

  This is all Romeo's fault.

  “I–I just want Mom to back off. She's smothering me.”

  He smiles, a sad and admiring look I can't decipher. “Your mom doesn't know any other way to be.”

  “I'm serious, Dad. It's not cute. It's stifling me. I feel like I can't breathe around her. She's trying to tell me what to do with every second of my life. She even wants me to get Duff off my detail and switch to Romeo.”

  “Romeo?” Dad's look changes like someone snapped their fingers on his mood. “What about him?”

  “Mom says he calls every week. That he cares about my safety more than Duff.” I'm on very, very shaky ground here.

  “Do you think that's true, Lily?”

  “How would I know? I barely see the guy.”

  “Duff's with you nonstop.”

  “I meant Romeo.”