Escape from Memory (21 page)

“Do you think that’s safe?” Lynne asked. She pointed. The bullet hole was only a few inches over my head.

“Shh,” I hissed. I peeked out the bullet hole. I could just barely see Rona. “She doesn’t have the gun aimed over here,” I reassured Lynne. “She’s talking on her cell phone.”

Rona walked out of my line of vision. I heard her shout, “No!” Then there was a gunshot.

Lynne and I both dived back into the bathtub so quickly, we rocked it on its claw feet.

Outside our room, I could hear Rona shouting, but my ears were still echoing with the gunfire. I couldn’t make out the words. Then there were more gunshots. Lynne and I cowered in the bathtub like scared little puppies. I think one of us was crying, but I wasn’t even sure if it was her or me.

We heard sirens, the crackle of walkie-talkies, trampling footsteps outside our door. Still, Lynne and I huddled together, without moving, our hands over our heads.

Then we heard a knock on the door.

“Kira? Lynne? Are you all right in there?” It was Officer Lanur. “I think we’ve found a way around the window problem. You’re safe now. Come on out.”

I
T WAS A LONG TIME BEFORE THE POLICE TOLD US THAT
R
ONA AND
Jacques were dead. I think they thought we were in shock.

Maybe we were.

Lynne’s parents arrived immediately and fell all over her with hugs and kisses and repeated questions: “Are you all right? What happened? Where have you been? Oh, we were so worried!” Her mother clutched Lynne’s right hand and her father clutched her left hand, and I could tell that none of them wanted to let go, ever.

I sat alone.

Lynne’s mom reached over to me, when she remembered, but I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “Stay with Lynne.”

We were in my bedroom, where no one had stepped foot since the night before. That’s because the rest of the apartment was a crime scene. I walked out into the living room, where Officer Lanur was taking pictures of bullet holes in the wall.

“Have you found my mother yet?” I asked. “They were flying
her here. She would have left California, oh, about—” I looked at the clock, but I couldn’t make sense of it. I had no idea what time it had been when Rona called Crythe, what time Lynne and I had locked ourselves in the bathroom, what time it was now. Both hands of the clock hung strangely. I hadn’t had such trouble telling time since I was in first grade.

Oh. Someone had shot the clock, too.

“Your mom?” Officer Lanur said, as if he had forgotten there was anyone else involved. “We’ve got the FAA checking out that one. We should be getting word on her location any minute now.”

I looked around the room. Blood stained the carpet and the walls.
That will never come out
, I thought. We’d have to replace the carpet and the wallpaper. But that wouldn’t be enough to erase what had happened here. The image would stay in my mind forever.

“Why didn’t you just get a crowbar?” I asked in a choked voice. “You could have gotten us out the window. You didn’t have to come in shooting.”

Officer Lanur gave me a hard look.

“The woman—Rona?—she shot the old man,” he said. “Right after the phone call. We just came in to defend him, to protect you. But she wouldn’t stand down. She just kept shooting and shooting and shooting.”

I think maybe Officer Lanur was in shock too. He probably wasn’t used to doing anything more dangerous than getting cats out of trees.

“Why?” I asked. “Why’d she shoot him?”

Officer Lanur shrugged. “She was shouting something at the old man, but none of us could understand. It’s all on tape.
So’s the phone call, but it’s in some strange language. We’ll have to have it interpreted!”

“It’s Crythian,” I said. “I can interpret for you.”

He probably shouldn’t have given me the tape. A big-city cop would probably have ordered me out of the crime scene, sent me safely into counseling, gone to a professional interpreter who had no emotional involvement. But Officer Lanur went over to the kitchen table and tossed a tape recorder into my hands.

I hit the rewind button.

The police had begun intercepting Rona’s phone signals when she called Crythe to ask for Mom to be flown here. I listened to that call impatiently, pushing fast-forward every few seconds. And then I heard a new voice, someone tripping over his words in excitement or horror or fear.

I gasped. I dropped the tape recorder.

Officer Lanur looked back at me, then rushed to my side. He grabbed my shoulders and shook me.

“Kira! Kira!” he shouted. “Talk to me! What is it?”

His voice seemed to come from farther away than California.

I whispered back, and my voice sounded far away too, as if it belonged to somebody else. Or as if I were a ventriloquist, throwing my voice miles away.

“Mom’s plane,” I said. “It crashed.”

I
MOVED IN WITH
L
YNNE’S FAMILY THAT NIGHT
. I’
D NEVER KNOWN IT
, but Mom had made arrangements, years ago, for Mr. and Mrs. Robertson to be my guardians if anything ever happened to her.

That was good.

Lynne’s parents remind me to do my homework. They pack my lunches. They do my laundry. They tell me to shut up when I protest, “I hope I’m not imposing on you too much …”

“Come on, Kira,” Lynne teased one of those times. “What’s the difference? You practically lived over here, anyhow, before.”

And then we were all uncomfortable, remembering.

Lynne’s parents also take me to see Mom, once a week, without fail, every Sunday.

She lies in a hospital bed—barely moving, never speaking.

It’s a mental hospital, now.

“Head injuries are strange,” the doctor tells me. “Medically speaking, there’s no reason for her to be so … nonresponsive.” He isn’t quite willing to use the word “comatose.” She doesn’t fit any of their usual classifications. “Of course, the CT scans do
show some anomalies I’ve never seen before in any other patient….”

It’s the hidden computer port that confuses him. That and all the other tampering my parents did in my mother’s mind. He doesn’t believe me when I say her brain was highly unusual even before the crash. He keeps speculating about some sort of operation.

“Maybe that’s the solution,” he says, every time we talk. “If I bring in some specialists …”

I’m not sure how much longer the Robertsons can hold him off.

That’s why I am glad to be sixteen now, glad to have my driver’s license. Glad to have a car sitting in the garage, waiting.

It is spring again now. As soon as school is out—tomorrow—Lynne and I are going on a trip.

First we will kidnap Mom. Oh, we’ll sign her out—everything will be official and documented. We’re not going to be fugitives from the law or anything like that. The Robertsons will tell the doctors that she’s going to have highly qualified, specialized medical care at another facility. But the doctors wouldn’t approve if they knew what we were really doing.

Because
I’m
the highly qualified, specialized medical care. The special facility is Mom’s car. And we’ll be driving cross-country, all the way to Crythe.

No one is living there now. Those who plotted with Rona are all in jail. Everyone else is dead and gone or, like Mom, in mental institutions.

It turns out that Mom and I own the entire village.

That does not concern me.

What I want to do is to take Mom up a certain flight of
stairs, to a certain windowless room with stone walls and a pine floor. We will sit there on the floor, just her and me. And I will tell her a story. I will tell her everything I remember. And then I will give her a choice.

It is time to come back to the world
, I will tell her.
Who do you want to come back as? Toria or Sophia?

And then I hope she will find a way to give me an answer. Because I have a laptop I rebuilt, from plans I know by heart. I have computer disks filled with all the memories she might want to keep. I have everything I need to bring her back, except her decision.

Rona told me a lot of lies, but she also told me one thing that feels like the truth: You are what you remember.

Does Mom want to remember being the bystander, the little sister, the victim? Or does she want to remember being the one who feels responsible, the one who takes the blame?

Last night at twilight, when I was supposed to be at the library studying for my history final (what a joke), I walked over to Maple Street and the house where Mom and I had lived. I sat under the willow tree in the backyard and stared up at the windows for a long time. You might say I was seeing ghosts: thirteen years of me with Mom, going in and out, eating meals, talking together. Growing up. I saw Rona arriving, luring me away. Then I saw Rona, Jacques, Lynne, and me coming back, my head full of dangerous plans. And I saw bullets flying, police swarming, Rona and Jacques dying.

I didn’t see dark windows, hiding nothing, until I heard a rustle in the grass.

“Hey,” a voice called. “What is this? Hide-and-seek?”

Lynne.

“Did you ever think,” I said, “about how I’ve got to make the same decision as Mom?”

Lynne sat down on the grass beside me. Willow branches reached down to both of us.

“How do you figure that?” she asked.

“I used to think that as soon as Mom was cured, I’d ask you or her to hypnotize me, make me forget everything my parents knew. Go back to being myself. I’d be like Mom was as Sophia. Safe. Protected. Normal.”

“Stupid,” Lynne chimed in jokingly.

I frowned.

“It’s not about intelligence,” I protested. “It’s more … responsibility. Am I responsible for Rona’s and Jacques’s deaths? Am I responsible for Mom’s plane crashing? Am I responsible for the last remaining Crythians? Am I responsible for all the secrets I know?”

Lynne picked a blade of grass and peeled it down to its veins.

“It’s not your fault Rona was a trigger-happy lunatic,” she said. “It’s not your fault Jacques was so desperate to regain his memories after his stroke that he went along with her crazy plot. It’s not your fault Jacques’s old flying buddy couldn’t even take off without crashing.”

Somehow I couldn’t absolve myself so easily.

I thought about how Rona had gone to the trouble of learning Crythian, of studying Crythian customs, of mastering Crythian memory techniques during the thirteen years after the war in Crythe. Lynne and I had talked about this before—Lynne couldn’t dredge up a single shred of understanding for anything Rona had done. But I had my parents minds in mine. I knew Rona better. I knew more about evil. Now that Rona was
safely dead, I could wonder:
Had
she just wanted money? Or, before she went off the deep end, had she found some sense of belonging in Crythe and Crythian myth?

I wasn’t sure. Maybe I was just trying to make myself feel better about being fooled by her original act.

It was easier to think about Jacques. Jacques was just a pitiful old man. I could feel sad about him dying.

“Maybe if I’d come up with a different plan” I said to Lynne. “Some other way to keep you and Mom and me safe—”

“You did the best you could,” Lynne said. “You didn’t know everything that was going to happen. Even your brilliant parents couldn’t foresee the future.”

She was teasing again. It’s funny how Lynne used to be the one who was always too serious. She broke off another blade of grass to dissect.

“You know what?” she said. “I bet even if you wanted to stick your head in the sand, forget about your parents’ invention, you couldn’t. You’ve used those memories. They’re part of your mind now.”

Sometimes, even now, Lynne can still seem smarter than me. I shook my head, wanting to deny everything.

“What scares me,” I said, “is that I was ready to zap Rona’s memories. That’s what I was going to do at the end, when Mom was safe with us.” Lynne knew this, but it seemed important to tell her again. “I was going to trick Rona into exchanging her memories for those of some harmless old Crythian. And that would have been wrong. That would have been using their invention for my own personal gain.”

Lynne punched my shoulder. I think she meant it playfully, but it didn’t feel playful.

“You idiot, don’t be so hard on yourself. You were just trying to stay alive. To keep your mom and me alive.”

I stared up at the dark windows and blinked quickly, so Lynne wouldn’t see that I was crying. That’s all the Crythians were doing too—trying to stay alive through their memories, their memorizations, their Aunt Memory trainings, their endless, obsessive attention to every small detail of life. I have all that in me, but I have Willistown, too, and careless Friday-night sleepovers where we watch stupid movies that we all but forget by Monday morning. And I have friends who care about
me
, not just the convoluted secrets in my mind.

My eyes blurred, and I saw something on the steps of my old apartment that was not a memory. I saw Mom and me coming back from Crythe together. We had our arms around each other’s waists and our heads were bent together, talking. In this vision of the future I couldn’t tell if she had decided to return to consciousness as Sophia or Toria or, somehow, both at once. I couldn’t tell what I had decided about my parents’ memories either. Or my parents’ invention. But we were happy.

The Crythian motto was wrong. I am not just what I remember. I am also what I dream.