Centralia (30 page)

“So you decided to give me a new memory.”

“That’s simplifying it, but yes. Physically you made a complete recovery, maybe even in better shape than you were before, if that was possible. Emotionally you were stable. You just had no memory. Your mind was a complete blank.”

“And what about my family? Did you contact them?”

Nichols sighed, ran the toe of his shoe in a line in the dirt. “You had no family, Peter. Your father walked out when you were ten and was never seen again. Your mother and little sister were both killed in a car accident.” Nichols hesitated, stared at Jed as if giving him a moment to process this new information. “You were raised by your aunt in Wisconsin. She died of cancer when you were nineteen. She was the only family you had until the Army became your family. And after your injury and recovery, we retrained you. That’s what the Centralia Project was all about. You were the first and the best until bits and pieces of your past started resurfacing. We tried to weave them seamlessly with the imprinting we were doing, but there’s no substitute for the real deal. Finally we had to retire you.”

“Jed.” It was Karen. For a moment, he’d been so absorbed in trying to process this new rendition of his past that he’d almost forgotten the two of them were standing there. “What about us? This man says you’re some stranger named Peter Ryan, but look at us.”

Nichols’s eyes twitched between mother and daughter. He shifted his feet in the leaves and adjusted his collar.

But as Jed turned his gaze, though his eyes saw two strangers, his soul recognized two people who truly loved him.

“You’re Jedidiah Patrick,” Karen said. “Papers can say anything. We’ve got a stack here with yet another name on them. I don’t care what you remember or what you’ve been told. We’re standing here, in the flesh, and telling you who you are. And whose you are. And I know one thing: you don’t belong to him.”

Nichols caught his attention. “Peter, there’s no conflict here. They’re only telling you what they think is true. But they don’t have all the answers. I told you they’re actors. They’ve been scrubbed too. Don’t you see? They’re only regurgitating the reality we put in their heads. How else could we guarantee their performance would be convincing? They’re not trying to deceive you. They’re just
 
—”

“Enough! I’ve listened to too much already.” Holding the papers in one hand and the rifle in the other, Jed kept his eyes on Nichols as he said, “Karen, take Lilly and head down the mountain.”

Karen started to protest, but Jed silenced her. “Please, Karen. I’ll catch up with you.”

She and Lilly left, and Jed stood statue still until he no longer heard their footsteps. He then balanced the rifle against his leg while he grasped the papers in his hand and crumpled them into a small ball.

“Lies,” he said. “More lies.” He tossed the ball of paper onto the ground.

There was no mistaking the truth of what he’d seen in Karen’s eyes, of what he’d felt in her kiss, in the touch of her hand on his face, the feel of her body against his. Abernathy had told him the truth, the complete truth, and it had opened a floodgate of memories. His past was coming back to him in streams of revelation.

Jed reached into his pocket and lifted out the flash drive Abernathy had handed him. “I have some insurance of my own.”

Nichols eyed the drive. “What do you think that is, son?”

“The truth. About you, Centralia, everything. It’s all right here and I’m going to blow it wide-open.”

Nichols shifted his weight and forced a smile. “Is that what Abernathy told you? Maybe Habit? They’re both liars, you know. Abernathy is a traitor, convicted of treason. It’s only because of me that he’s still alive. Did he tell you that? They were gonna give him the death penalty and I saved him, convinced them that exile would be just, fair.”

“Just like I should be grateful for the way you saved me? Well, I didn’t see you jumping to anybody’s aid a few minutes ago.” Jed nodded toward the soldier near his feet, then held the drive higher. “We’ll find out who was lying, won’t we?”

Nichols started to advance, slowly and carefully on the rugged terrain.

Jed pointed the rifle at Nichols, who stopped and raised his hands, stepped backward, and almost fell.

“Peter, wait. Please. You have to listen to me. Listen to the truth.”

“Take out your wallet,” Jed said.

Nichols hesitated.

“Now! Do it.”

Nichols reached inside his jacket and pulled out a black wallet.

“Throw it to me.”

Nichols tossed the wallet to Jed.

“Now your phone.”

Nichols retrieved his phone.

“Throw it to me.”

He complied.

Jed picked up the phone and wallet, wincing from the stabbing pain in his left arm. “Now, turn around and get on your knees.”

“You can’t do this, son,” Nichols said.

“On your knees. Now.”

Nichols’s face twisted into an awful scowl. “If you’re going to kill me, do it while you look me in the eyes. This isn’t how you were trained.”

Jed walked to Nichols and stopped no more than six feet away. “Fine. Get on your knees facing me.”

Nichols straightened his back and glared at Jed.

Jed swung the butt of the rifle around and caught Nichols along the side of the head. He listed to the side, stumbled, and struggled to regain his balance. While he was fumbling, Jed shoved Nichols with his foot. Nichols fell and landed on the ground, facedown.

Quickly Jed put a foot on Nichols’s back and the barrel of the rifle to his head. “You know what I’ve been trained for. Kill without mercy, without remorse. You put that in my head, didn’t you?”

“So do it!” Nichols hollered. His voice had a defiant edge, but Jed could feel the man’s shoulders quaking.

Jed pulled the rifle away and lifted his foot. “I guess I’ve been reprogrammed. Roll over.”

Nichols turned over on the ground. His face was red and wet from tears and sweat. Fear widened his bloodshot eyes.

“Don’t try to follow us,” Jed said. “Let us disappear. Leave us alone.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“If we meet again, I’ll look at it as self-defense and I won’t hesitate to kill you.” Jed turned and left, not looking back once to see if Nichols had climbed to his feet.

The map Habit had given Jed led to a large stretch of forest in the Coeur d’Alene National Forest near the Montana state line. A small cabin sat miles off any regularly traveled path, tucked into a clearing and surrounded by towering spruce and fir trees.

Jed, Karen, and Lilly gathered around an outdoor fire, something they’d been doing every clear evening since arriving at the site two months ago. The fire writhed and gyrated, sending sparks crackling into the chilly night air. Above, a cloudless sky shimmered with millions, maybe billions of stars. Jed was no longer wearing the sling to support his left arm. The shot was a flesh wound, a lot of blood loss and torn tissue, but nothing more. Stitches, the sling, and a robust course of antibiotics had made it just about good as new.

Once a week they all trekked into the town of Coeur d’Alene for groceries and other supplies they needed and to pick up reading material at the library. Other than that, the remote homesite was where they spent all their time, away from people, away from cameras, and miles off the grid.

Karen leaned forward and poked at the fire with a stick. Firelight reflected off her face, softening the corners of her jaw and smoothing the roundness of her cheeks. She was a beautiful woman, caring and patient. They’d spent every day talking, reviving memories, reliving moments, laughing, crying, holding each other. So much had returned to Jed, but there were still whole blocks of missing time, absent memories. And occasionally the imprinted memories would interfere in disjointed segments and disorient him. But he was learning to decipher the difference between the reality past and the manufactured one, developing ways to cope with the false memories. And always there was the truth, the deeper truth that no amount of brain manipulation had managed to entirely scrub out of him.

Karen poked at the fire again and said, “I keep thinking, how do we know they won’t find us here?”

She’d mentioned similar concerns several times before. The captivity she’d endured and her inability to protect Lilly from harm had left scars that would take a long time to heal, if ever.

Jed broke a stick and tossed half into the fire. “If we’re careful and limit our exposure, we’ll be okay. This place is a speck on a map, one in any number of hunting and camping sites just like it. The forest is dense and desolate. It’d be like finding one particular pine needle in a forest of pines.” He looked at Lilly, who smiled at him. Her smile always gave him strength, for it radiated confidence
and certainty, faith and trust. “We’ll be fine,” he said. “We just need to stick together.”

“The money will run out eventually,” Karen said. “And then what will we do?”

Jed dropped the other half of the stick into the fire and watched as the flames received it. “We won’t run out. I think I should look for a job next week.”

Karen looked up, her eyes wide. “What? How? Where?”

“The people here don’t know me as Peter Ryan or Jed Patrick. They only know me as Eric. They don’t know where we’re from or anything else about us. I’ll get a job lumberjacking. I think I’d like that.”

Karen was quiet for a long moment. Finally she said, “I don’t like it, but if you think it’s safe . . .”

“It’ll be all right,” Jed said. “Besides, the townsfolk will begin to wonder where we got all our money from if I don’t soon go to work. They’ll start talking, getting curious. Better to avoid giving them reason to take a second glance at us.”

Lilly rested her head on Jed’s arm. “It will be okay, Mommy. Daddy will be careful and God will be with us. Just like he always has been.”

Karen had told Jed how he’d encountered Jesus, how he had come back after his first tour in Afghanistan a changed man, solemn, introverted. Dark thoughts had tormented him, pushed him inward and haunted him with nightmares. She told him how she’d urged him to read the Bible and how under compulsion he’d complied. It was there he’d found the light and the hope it brought. He remembered most of it now. The scrubbing Nichols had done had tucked it into a dark and remote corner of his mind. But it was still there, and nothing Nichols did could erase it.

They all sat quietly while time passed slowly and the fire danced before them, crackling and popping to its own disjointed beat.

Karen eventually lifted her face and said, “Jed, I’ve been thinking a lot about the dream you said you used to have and about the last room, the empty one.”

“Yeah?”

“You know how you said you thought it meant your past was gone, that there was just nothing there?”

“That’s what I thought at the time, but I’m not sure what it means now. Why? What are you getting at?”

She jabbed at a glowing log, and sparks floated into the night air ten feet or so before cooling and disappearing. “Well, maybe it didn’t mean your past.” She paused but Jed could tell she wasn’t finished, that her mind was churning with some thought that had been bouncing around in there for days, ever since he told them about the recurrent dream he’d had. “I mean, the house kinda reminds me of a book, and each room is a chapter or a bunch of chapters. And what if the last room is the last chapter and it’s blank because God isn’t finished writing it yet? For any of us.”

Jed had to pause and reframe the entire dream. She was right, of course. Jed had been spending too much time looking back, trying to relive the past, when it was now time to look forward. God wasn’t finished with him yet; his story was still being written.

Karen pulled her eyes away from the fire and fixed them on Jed. She stared at him for a long time, seeming to read his thoughts. Finally she just smiled at him and went back to studying the movement of the flames.

Lilly half giggled and sighed loudly. “Do you know what would be really cool?”

Jed smiled. “What would be really cool, kiddo?”

She giggled again. “If you two got remarried.”

Karen looked at Jed, firelight dancing on her face, and at that moment he almost lost himself in her eyes. “I think that’s a great idea.”

“But we’re already married,” Karen said.

“And I even remember most of it.” Jed laughed and pulled Lilly close. “Would we get married as Eric and Angie Bingsley?”

“No. As Mom and Dad.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Mom and Dad? That would look awfully silly on a marriage certificate.”

Lilly was quiet for a time, staring at the flames and thinking. “You could just renew your promises. It would be like a new beginning.”

Jed and Karen looked at each other, grinning softly.

That new chapter, unwritten, blank, waiting for words to be penned.