by Jeff Abbott
And then the boy I’d killed. David. He was in two pictures. One, when we were young, maybe eight, smiling, his front teeth missing. We were both in matching blue-and-white football jerseys. He had a cowlick in his dark hair, I had on a thin matching ribbon in mine—decidedly not a bow—that went with my jersey. I looked real cute. I remembered this. It didn’t come like an electrical shock. The memory was just there, as if waiting for me.
“We played flag football together. The team was the Lions.”
“Yes! When you were little, for one season. You wanted to do it because David did it and you hated to stay on the sidelines.” Mom nearly clapped her hands together. Every new memory felt like a yard of land won in a battle.
“One of the other moms didn’t want me to play,” I said. “She wanted me to be a cheerleader instead.”
Mom nodded.
“You and Dad politely told her I would play and that was the end of that.”
Our smiles were huge. But then I thought of David, dead, and the smile faded.
“There don’t seem to be a lot of recent pictures of me.” The ones with me and Kamala smiling, being sisterly, were all when I was a few years younger.
“You stepped back from a lot of activities after your father died. You felt depressed.”
Depressed. Who had I been, what sort of young woman had I been before the crash? And who was I going to be now?
“Mom, what is this suicide note the reporter talked about?”
Her face went to stone. “Never you mind that, it’s a mistake.”
“Mom. Tell me.”
“Let’s look at your clothes. And your playlist. I bet those will jog your memories.”
“Mom, tell me.”
She sat on the bed and gestured me to sit next to her. I did. She took my hand. Her own was cold yet slicked with sweat. I wanted to pull mine away but I dared not. She put her fingers under my jaw and turned me to face her. “Baby, they found a note, so they say, in the grass down the hill. Like it came from the car, there were odds and ends in the back—you know, our reusable shopping bags, a canvas folding seat I take to the football games, a couple of books…and a bunch of it spilled out as the car rolled and the windows smashed, and this note was in it. Written by you, they say. I saw it and it sort of looks like your handwriting, but none of you kids use cursive anymore, you all print the same to me, so who’s to say.”
“What did the note say?”
She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket. “This is a copy they gave me. So, as they said, I can get you help if you need it. Not the original. The police have that. Or the investigator working for their lawyer, he’s all cozy with the cops, he’s the one jabbering about it.”
“Lawyer?” I was waiting for her to hand me the note.
“Never mind that.” I had noticed Mom had a habit of mentioning unpleasant subjects, nestling them in your brain, and then telling you not to worry about them. “I think this note could wait until you’re further along in your recovery. That damn reporter. I hate him for yelling that at you.”
I held out my hand, the one that wasn’t in a cast. “What does it say?”
She seemed to take my measure. She put her gaze to the note, and read aloud:
I can’t do this. I can’t. I wish I were dead. I wish we were dead together. Both of us.
She folded the note. “Obviously this is a fake.”
I stood because I wanted to get away from the words. Then I sat down again on the edge of the bed, my legs, my brain, my heart all like water. “So. I had that note with me and I crashed my own car…”
Mom’s hand closed hard around my upper arm. “You listen to me, Jane. It’s not a suicide note. It cannot be. It just isn’t.”
Was I supposed to sleep in this room with the photo of the boy I killed looking back at me? I ached, everywhere, my head, my guts. I got up and I took down the pictures of David.
“What does that mean?” Mom asked. “Jane?”
“I think I need to lie down,” I told Mom.
“Yes. Of course. I’ll go see about dinner. People brought food here while you were recovering…before they heard about the note…”
And then they stopped was the rest of the sentence, I guessed. “People think I killed David trying to commit suicide.” The words felt like ash in my mouth.
She nodded and I lay on the bed. I thought the phone might ring, friends or neighbors calling about us, but it was quiet. I looked at the picture of my friends and wondered if Kamala and Trevor would come see me again. If anyone ever would. Finally, I slept. When I woke up I felt no mad surge of memory. I wasn’t a cursed princess waking up from a dream, back into the life I knew. I could hear Mom’s voice outside, talking with a neighbor. Loudly. Later Mom would tell me it was Perri Hall, telling Mom to tell me to stay away from her family.
8
I’M GLAD YOU agreed to meet with me,” Kevin said. Jane sat across from him, in a research room in the counseling department. “I’m going to be blunt with you. You’re a mess. You’re nearly homeless, you’ve been accused of an attempted suicide/murder, and your once-promising life is a shambles.”
“You should work with children,” Jane said.
He didn’t smile or laugh at her joke and she thought, Well, he doesn’t care about spending six weeks building rapport with me. Kevin leaned forward. “May I make a guess; you tell me if I’m wrong. The reason you don’t like therapists is because they have tiptoed around you. About the accident, if it was an attempted suicide and David Hall paid the price. I don’t think I will tiptoe around you. I take a more direct approach.”
It was like he’d sat in on her useless former therapy sessions. “OK,” she said, now hesitant, waiting to see what he’d say next.
“Maybe you are repressing the memories due to intense emotion. I think you have to be willing to explore that possibility, that it’s not purely physical.”
“I had a SPECT scan.” She waited for him to not know what it was.
But he said, after she paused, “Single-photon emission computed tomography. Measures the amount of blood flowing to different parts of the brain, to see any reduced flow to injured areas. And?”
“I had injury in my temporal lobes.”
“Where long-term memories reside. Yes. But your memories of your first years did slowly return, correct? At least that was what it said in Mr. Vasquez’s newspaper articles about you.”
“Yes.”
“Ribot’s Law. Simply put, the oldest memories tend to be the safest.”
“Yes.” She knew the name Ribot from Dr. K. Ribot had been a French psychologist who studied memory.
“Except your high school years.”
“Yes.”
“So that could be either emotional or physical. You lost your father?”
“Yes.”
“And that is when the amnesia begins, when you entered high school, a cushion of time before his death, and it includes the crash and David’s death. You are spared the memories of two terrible tragedies.”
Jane said nothing.
“So. What do you want from our work together?”
No one had asked her that in so long. She almost shivered under his stare. “I want to remember. I want to know that I didn’t kill David on purpose. That it truly was an accident. I want to be able to cope,” she said. “I want to finish school. I want to be self-sufficient. I want David…”
“David is gone.”
“I want David to not haunt my thoughts so much. I don’t want to be blamed anymore for this. In the suburb where we lived, the school we went to—I am hated. I have exactly one friend left. If it was an accident, I could be forgiven. A suicide attempt isn’t forgivable.”
“People are always going to blame you. We could come up with some strategies to help you cope with that and not let it define you. To find a safe place for you.”
“That’s a big promise, Kevin.” Because she had never learned to cope with the blame. Just shove it in the back of her
mind, where it writhed, angry and restless.
“You have a big problem, Jane. I don’t think we should think small.”
She rubbed her palms along the arms of the chair. “OK, so how do we start this? Do you analyze me from when I was born? I had a nice, boring childhood.”
She studied the shoes on his feet. They were worn, scuffed. Grad students never have money.
“Tell me about that day of the crash. I know you don’t remember it, right?”
“Is that a trick question?”
“No. But you must have been told some of it.”
“David and I left school that day at four fifteen. We were seen leaving together. He texted his parents that he was staying to work with a friend on a school project and they’d grab some dinner. We took my car.”
“Did you have a homework project with him?”
“Apparently not. We only had two classes together, choir and entrepreneurship.”
“Entrepreneurship’s a high school class?”
“At Lakehaven it is.” She paused. “A friend, Trevor Blinn, saw us leave together.”
“You were next-door neighbors. Couldn’t you simply have gone home and talked?”
“Sure. But we didn’t.”
“And there was no text or e-mail communication between the two of you that day? I understand this is how American teenagers make their plans.” He gave a gentle smile.
“No.” Jane shifted in her seat. This had started to feel like an interrogation. Most therapists tried to soften the blows of their questions. Maybe this was his style. “A girl named Amari Bowman said he passed me a note in entrepreneurship, because she sat between us. I mean, note passing isn’t something people do when you could text each other, but in that class, I’m told, we had to turn in our phones at the beginning of class and got them back at the end. We each had a slot for our phone.”
“What did the note say?”
“I didn’t keep it. I don’t know.” Her gaze had gone to the floor.
“You don’t know where this note is now?”
“I presume I threw it away. Or it was lost at the hospital when they cut my clothes off me.” She kept staring at the floor. “It probably said, ‘Meet me after school.’ Since that’s what we did.”
“So for six hours, the two of you were out and about, and no one knows what you were doing. How difficult that must be for you.” Finally, his tone of voice softened.
“We were seen around town in the course of that evening. Once at dinner. Once at a hardware store. Buying a crowbar. The receipt was in David’s pocket.”
“A crowbar.” Kevin tented his fingers below his chin. “Why would you need a crowbar?”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t found in the car with us, so I don’t know where it went. And that’s all I know. Four days later I woke up in a hospital. I didn’t remember anything. My memory began to return in the next week, though, memories up until I was fourteen. After that, nothing.”
“Nothing at all. No fragments, no bits.” His gaze met her own.
“Nothing that I could recognize as a memory.” Her stare didn’t waver from him.
He didn’t say anything, as if he was waiting for her to confess, Oh I’m just kidding. Of course I remember details, I’ve just kept them to myself.
“What is the last thing you recall before the accident?”
“Before high school started my dad and I went on a trip. Mom was working, she couldn’t go. Just the two of us, to Disney World. We had a wonderful time.” Her voice was soft. Not defiant. “David was so jealous. He wanted to go, but his parents hate theme parks. I brought him back a book on Walt Disney’s art. He liked art. He liked to draw.”
“I’m glad your last memory is a happy one. So nothing of your freshman year?”
“Not really,” but her gaze slid away from him.
“Forgive my bluntness, Jane. You don’t remember anything that would support this suicide note being legit?”
“No.”
“Have you been told of anything going on in your life that would have made you suicidal at that time?”
“No. I wasn’t in therapy. The school counselors didn’t have a record that I was at risk. I guess at Lakehaven they monitor such things, especially after a parent dies.”
“Were you with your father when he died?”
Jane ran her hand along the arms of the chair again. He’d read the articles about her, he must know what had been reported about her father’s death. But she pretended like she didn’t realize this. “He was at a house he owned over in central Austin, it had been his uncle’s, he’d inherited it, and Dad was going to put it on the market. My uncle kept guns—a rifle and several pistols. Dad was handling one and it went off and killed him.” She picked at a spot on her palm.
“I’m sorry.”
Jane shrugged. “I don’t remember it. I think that’s hard on my mom.”
“And so I guess you can’t tell me how you reacted.”
“It’s in Vasquez’s articles. I went wild for a while. Drinking mostly, but I apparently straightened out.”
“Was there any suggestion your father had committed suicide?”
Jane stared at him. “The police investigated. It was an accident.”
“And then your suicide note. I mean, people must have jumped to an unfortunate conclusion.”
“Like father, like daughter.” She stopped worrying the flesh on her palm and got up and paced over to the window. “My mother was famous—well, Internet-famous—for chronicling her every decision as a parent. She lost her husband and then nearly lost me. I heard people say she hasn’t been the same since.”
Kevin was silent for several seconds. “Let’s go back to the day of the crash. Any communications from David? He hadn’t sent you an e-mail or a text that would suggest what you two would have been doing?”
“No. My mom looked through them all, then I did, trying to jog my memory. We didn’t e-mail, or text, or have lunch together. We weren’t close the way we once were.”
“And I presume his parents checked his e-mails?”
“I presume. His mom would leave no stone unturned if she could prove it was my fault. But they’ve never come forth with any proof like what you’re asking.”
“Do you remember anything about his parents?”
The question surprised her. “That they were nice to me growing up. Until the crash. His mom hates me now. She attacked me this morning at his grave.” She related the story.
“And how did you feel?”
“I wanted to hit her. I’m horrible. She’s a grieving mother. But I just wanted her to leave me alone.”
“Do you want to prove to her you’re innocent, at least of the suicide attempt?”
“I don’t care what she thinks.” She sat back down in the chair, sighing as if bored.
“I wonder if this might be helpful. Could you write out a detailed time line for me of that evening, what is known? You gave me an overview, but I’d like to see actual times—what is known, from witness testimony or the accident investigation? Surely your mother must have papers.”
She felt a hot flash pass through her. “I’ve never wanted to look at that night. I thought the memories would just come…”
“Let us,” he said, “try to impose some order on that hazy night. Perhaps it will tell us. You were not off somewhere being unhappy and suicidal, yes? You were doing something. A crowbar implies activity. Purpose. And this was secret. He told no one, you told no one.”
She stared at his cheap shoes.
“So, we have two notes. The note he passed you, which you do not remember, and the note found at the scene. What did it say?”
“I can’t do this. I can’t. I wish I were dead. I wish we were dead together. Both of us.” It was like a morbid poem she had memorized.
“What is it you ‘can’t do’?”
“Algebra. Eating broccoli. Gardening. I don’t know.”
“The note says nothing to you.”
; “It upsets me,” she said. “Because I cannot imagine writing it.”
He switched topics. “After the crash”—she noticed he wasn’t calling it “the accident” anymore—“you must have finished high school? Did you get your GED?”
“No.” Now her gaze met his. “I went back to Lakehaven High School. I graduated.”
He looked at her with frank surprise. “Why not attend another school?”
“I thought about starting over. But I only had a semester left…and I still had friends there. I thought they would help me through it. Some did. And my mom thought…if people saw how pathetic I was, maybe they’d feel sorry for me. And in turn feel sorry for her. She was losing friendships, her standing in the community. She wanted it back.”
Kevin cleared his throat, as if embarrassed. “But you wouldn’t have remembered your earlier course work.”
“I managed to wing it. Relearn what I had to know to keep going. And I think they mercy-passed me. Keeping me back for a year wasn’t an option for my mom. But I wasn’t really prepared for Saint Michael’s. They were kind to honor my admission still.”
He looked at her with new respect. “That must have been difficult as well from a social standpoint, not remembering many of your friends or your teachers.”
“It’s harder when you kill the boy next door and the whole school wishes you’d killed yourself instead.”
He looked up at me from his notes.
“Would you give me access to your medical records? I’d like to understand the extent of your injuries.”
“No,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to. I said I’d talk to you, not unlock my life. You’re not a doctor.”
For some reason she thought she saw a flash of frustration under the surface of his face. Then the neutral expression back in place. “Would you describe your injuries, then?”
“I was in a coma for four days. I had a broken arm and a fractured collarbone. I had a severe concussion and slight brain damage in the temporal lobes.”
“David’s injuries?”
For a moment she couldn’t speak. “Both his arms and legs were broken. His face was badly lacerated. Broken ribs. His back was broken, and a lung punctured. He died at the scene.”