The Adoration of Jenna Fox (20 page)

Somehow I knew I would never see them again.

Something deep inside me told me they were
dead.

How? When? Before they scanned my brain, before
they removed my ten percent, did I hear someone at the hospital talking? Did
Mother sob for Locke, then Kara, at my bedside, knowing her daughter was
responsible for it all?

But I wasn't.

I couldn't have been responsible.

"It's not true," I say. "I
didn't do that. I would remember."

"You lost two friends. You may have
blocked it out."

Or someone did.

No wonder Mother and Father won't talk about
it. I killed my best friends.
High speeds and reckless driving.
Their
precious Jenna wasn't so perfect after all.

Hurry, Jenna.
Is that why the words keep circling
through me? Trying to remind me of what I did? Strangely, I feel something, but
it is not guilt. Does that make me a monster?

I remember. Something. A bit.

A black sky. Stars. The halo of a streetlight.

Here. Throw them.
Keys flying through the air. My hand
stretched out.
Hurry, Jenna.
A glimpse of the night everything changed.
Mother and Father may have blocked out most of it, but they couldn't
get
rid
of it all. A tattletale
neurochip
decided  I
would get a hooded peek of what I had done. Is the joke on Father, or me?

Mr. Bender suggests a walk in the garden. He
feeds the birds and they peck in his palm. I stretch out my palm briefly, but
again they don't come to me. And maybe now I know why.

One Simple Thing

I rip open boxes. Box after box. Books. Dishes.
Papers. Clothing. Keepsakes. I dump them out. Box. After box. After box. I
ransack. I search. I break.

None of it is mine.

I collapse in the midst of the disaster I have
created in the garage, and garbled noises crawl up my throat.

It
sounds like an animal.

I am.

I am a kept animal.

With no past but what they will give me.

And all I wanted today was one simple thing.

A red skirt.

Another Dark Place

"Floor to ceiling, don't you think?"
Claire points her laser to the ceiling and records the measurement.

"Fine," I say. I watch her, measuring
for drapes for my window. I take in the angles of the room, the slant of light
flooding through panes of glass, the planes that separate us, the irony of
drapes to create darkness.

I stare at her. My mother is an older version
of me, but she is also something I will never be. Old. My skin and bones will
not age
—my Bio Gel will simply reach the end of
its shelf life and cease to operate. If I were to marry, I would not grow old
with my husband. I could either die after two years or outlive him by a
hundred. An interesting prospect. What price did Claire pay to keep her only
child?

She sees me staring, and it makes her busier.
She chatters, fills space, is careful but does not address my gaze. She treads
even faster to keep on the surface, but somehow I don't count it against her.
She said that for months she was in as dark a place as I. Maybe staying on the
surface keeps her from returning to a place where she can't breathe. She
measures length and depth as carefully as a surgeon places a scalpel, as though
it is a matter of life and death. Maybe for her it is.

She is always careful around me. Is that why
the word hovers close in my thoughts? Careful with her movements, careful with
her words. Nothing is relaxed between us. Is she careful because she thinks I
will break? Or maybe because she will. When I am alone in the dark counting my
breaths, is she doing the same in the darkness of her room, wondering . . . was
it all worth it?

Now, with light streaming through the window,
she is busy, determined to gain control over what is natural. Each of her
movements is like a blow, a punch, a fist kneading something into shape.

"Accident," I say.

Her laser clicks off. She looks at me,
instantly pale, her eyes sunken. "What?"

"I've learned how to say it.
Accident.
I
assume that was another suggestion you and Father planted, to never bring up
the accident."

She sets her laser down on my nightstand. She
looks at me blankly. Weak.

"No," she says, easing herself down
to the edge of my bed, "I think it was something inside of you not
allowing you to say it." She nods her head, like she is plucking together
words she has been saving. "And we didn't want to push you."

"They're dead," I say.

Her eyes glisten. She holds her arms out to me,
and I slip through space like a feather on a current of wind, effortlessly
carried by the force that is Claire.

I sit on the bed next to her, feeling her arms
holding me, rocking us together in primal rhythm. "We tried to bring it up
at the hospital," she whispers, her breath and tears warm on my cheek.
"It was too hard for you. You went into distress just trying to
communicate. Shortly after, you slipped into a coma. We were afraid that we had
made it worse, pushing you too hard.

We didn't want to make that mistake
again." She pulls away and looks into my eyes. "It was an accident,
Jenna. An
accident.
You don't have to relive the details."

"Is that why you blocked it all from our
Netbook
?"

She nods again. "When you woke up, you
didn't seem to remember it. We didn't want you to come upon something
unexpectedly and have a setback."

She pulls me close again, my head on her chest.
I can hear her heartbeat. Familiar. The sound I heard in her womb. The whoosh,
the beat, the flow that punctuated my beginnings in another dark place. I had
no words for those sounds then, just feelings. Now I have both. I can remember
it as clearly as I remember yesterday.

We lie back on my pillows, holding each other
without talking, and time becomes a forgotten detail. Seconds and minutes
stretch into an hour or more. I don't want to move. Claire strokes my forehead,
dozing, the slant of light through my panes growing golden, then dim, the
afternoon passing.

"I'm sorry," I finally whisper. Sorry
for Locke and Kara. Sorry for her months of worry. Sorry for how we have to
live now. Sorry for pushing her away. Sorry that I'm not perfect.

"
Shhh
," she
says, stroking my head again. And then she adds, "I'm sorry, too."

I see the ring of swatches, sitting on my
nightstand. "The swatches," I say, "they're all blue. Do you
have any that are red?"

"Red?"

"Can I have red drapes?"

"You can have anything you want.
Anything."

I close my eyes, pressing my ear to her chest
again. Hearing the sounds, the pulse of Claire, the world of my beginnings, the
time when there was no doubt I had a soul. When I existed in a warm, velvet
liquid that was as dark as night, and that dark place was the only place I
wanted to be.

Percentages

I fold a yellowed lace tablecloth and lay it in
the bottom of a box. "I'm sorry about the vase. I
—I wasn't careful."

Lily makes a sound. I am not sure if it is a
snort or a laugh. "That's an understatement."

I heard her cursing this morning. I knew
immediately why and ran out the back door. She had discovered my rampage in the
garage when she raised the door to take the car out.

"I don't have any money, but I'll find a
way to replace it."

She doesn't address my offer. "Breaking
things seems to be your new specialty. I almost wish I hadn't left the morning
you started flipping plates for your parents."

"It wasn't amusing."

"Not at the time, I'm sure."

I close a filled box and begin filling another.
Everything in here belongs to Lily. "Why are your things out here in
boxes?"

"They were supposed to go to storage.
Before I came here, I was
—well—I suppose you could
say that I was getting out of Dodge."

"Dodge?"

"It's an old saying. It means getting out
of town before there's trouble. Except that I was getting out of the country. I
knew you were
—that your parents would be—"
She sighs and shakes dirt from a cashmere fedora. "I knew that it was
about time."

Time. Almost like a rebirth. "What was it
like?"

Lily startles. "What do you mean?"

"Did you see the construction?" It
sounds harsh. It is. It
was.

She vigorously shakes her head. "Oh, no.
Once I knew what they were up to, I stayed at my place in Kennebunk. Your
mother and I hardly talked during that period."

"You didn't approve."

She is quiet, laying the fedora in the top of a
full box and closing it. She pulls two feet of tape from the roll, the screech
cutting through the dusty silence.
"Approve
is probably not the
right word," she finally says.
"Shock,
maybe.
Or.
fear."
She thinks for a moment longer and adds, "Maybe
approve
is the right word. I don't know. It was the unknown."

I understand. It's the unknown that I fear
—the bits of memories that still have no connections;
the role I played in Kara's and Locke's deaths; the voices that linger, too
fresh; the constant game of weighing percentages, wondering if ten percent of
one thing can be worth as much as ninety percent of something else. And then
the answer that always runs through my neurons and
neurochips
:
unknown.

"That's one thing Mother and Father didn't
plan on
—the unknown. There's a lot I haven't
told them."

She perks up, looking almost pleased that I
have found fault with Mother and Father's little coup. "Like what?"
she asks.

"Remembering my baptism, and even earlier
memories."

"Are you sure?"

I nod. "It frightened me at first, but
now, somehow it comforts me. Like I have every bit of who I was, maybe even
more than the Jenna I used to be ever had. Maybe it makes up for what I've
lost. Maybe it balances the percentages?"

"Percentages!" she huffs. "Those
are for economists, polls, and politicians. Percentages can't define your
identity." She stacks books in a box and looks up. "What else haven't
you told them?"

I am still mulling over the word
identity
as
I answer her. "I hear voices."

"You mean memories?"

I hesitate. "I'm not sure," I tell
her. "Sometimes they seem too . . . fresh. Like they're whispering right
into my ear."

She stiffens. "Who?" she asks.

"Kara and Locke. At least I think it's
them."

She sits on a nearby box.

"I know about them," I say. "I
know they're dead."

"You remember the accident."

"No. I read about it. But I think I
already knew, somewhere inside. It didn't shock me when I found out. It was
more like a confirmation."

She looks up at the rafters, the air, her gaze
floating through the timbers like she has forgotten I am even there. "They
were good kids," she says.

"I didn't do it, Lily." I move in
front of her so she has to look at me. "I didn't kill them."

"It was an accident, Jenna. Unintentional,
however it happened. On that much we all agree."

I nod. But it was more than just an accident.
They would have prosecuted me, except that I was too injured for them to
bother. If the police saw me now, what would they do?
But it is still more
than that.
It runs through me, trying to connect, bits that are loose.
Neuron.
Neurochip
.
I didn't kill my friends.
Or
maybe I just can't accept that I did. Maybe that would mark Jenna's permanent
fall from perfection. I gather three scattered books from the floor and stuff
them in the box.

Lily stands, holding the flaps shut while I
tape it. "Why are you telling me all this and not your parents?"

I'm surprised she would ask. Is she testing me?
We both know the answer.

Because I always have.

I remember the weekends, taking the train to
her house. Planning all the things I would share, all the events, worries, and
mistakes I kept from Mother and Father. I saved them for Lily, because she
would listen. Sometimes a person gets tired of being fixed all the time. Where
every little problem becomes a project. Where every shortcoming needs to be
addressed. They eventually have to share with someone. My someone was Lily.

"I seem to remember that you had a high
tolerance for listening without melting down over the content." I pull off
a last section of tape and stick it to the flap. "It wears on a person,
you know, always having to be perfect. You know that one day something will
happen, some problem that won't fit into a neat little project. Something that
can't be fixed. Then where does that leave you?"