The Leaving (13 page)

“You’ve been here before?” he asked.

“Not in a long time.” She looked around to see what, if anything, might have changed. “But yeah, me and Ryan used to hang out here sometimes.”

“I haven’t found anything that makes sense to me.”

He saw the tool in her hand.

“So you
didn’t
come to apologize.” He seemed confused about it, like he was a new person and hadn’t read his instruction manual yet.

“But I do want to apologize”—she gently put the cutters down—“now that I’m here.”

He waved an arm. “What are you hoping to find?”

She had been
hoping
that something would just stand out. “I thought I’d know when I found it?”

He nodded and she felt something weird between them, some kind of bond forming out of unpredictable atoms. And yet, when she thought about mentioning the note from Max—the most recent break in the case, if it was one—or the reward, she couldn’t bring herself to.

What if they’re all lying?

“Well, have a look around, I guess,” he said, and Avery turned toward a whiteboard:

AUGUST 9TH. IS DATE SIGNIFICANT?

WHY THEM?

WHY THAT DAY?

All of which were good questions, but they’d all been asking those questions for a long time and still had no answers. What she was looking for was something new or at least something that
felt
new, now that they were all back except for Max.

Lucas was flipping through a binder of clippings of some kind.

She went to the whiteboard that was divided into six boxes. Each box had a name in it, and Avery’s eyes landed on the box for “Scarlett.” She’d been over this board many times before—so many times that she could almost recite by heart the bullets under the photo of five-year-old Scarlett that was taped to it.

• SAID SHE WAS GOING “TO THE LEAVING”

• PRIOR CONTACT WITH ABDUCTOR THAT SHE MIGHT RECALL?

• MOTHER, TAMARA, SUSPECTS ALIEN ABDUCTION

• WHERE IS HER FATHER? [FBI CLEARED HIM. LIVES IN JERSEY. NEW FAMILY.]

Next to that was the box about Lucas; she knew these bullets well, too.

• ACCORDING TO RYAN, ONE WEEK BEFORE IT HAPPENED, LUCAS SAID THEY WERE BEING FOLLOWED BY A MAN CARRYING WRAPPING PAPER. THEY WERE COMING HOME FROM THE BALL GAME.

“Do you remember being followed?” she braved. “The week before?”

“No.” Lucas came to her side and stood there quietly for a second, then said, “Who knows if it was anything anyway, I guess?”

Lucas stood very close to her now—so close that she could smell his sweat, see his pores, imagine what his skin would feel like.

Sam wouldn’t like any of this, wouldn’t like how much she liked it.

She didn’t care.

It wasn’t going to be like that.

She couldn’t let it be.

She read her brother’s bullets:

• MOTHER, JILLIAN, DEPRESSED.

• FATHER, PAUL, TRAVELS FOR WORK. MOSTLY TO SEATTLE. WORKS FOR A TECH COMPANY.

• SISTER, AVERY. ONE YEAR YOUNGER.

She didn’t like seeing her name, still there in Will’s notes after all this time, didn’t like that he’d kept caring long after she’d stopped.

“What was he like?” Lucas said. “Max. Do you even remember?”

Avery turned to him. “Yes and no. I just remember everything being happier, you know? Everybody just . . . normal?”

He nodded. “We used to all be friends?”

“Me and Max and you and Ryan, yeah.”

She remembered a fort they’d built out of sheets. Flashlights under there on a rainy day, shadow animals.

“What about Scarlett?” he asked. “Were we friends, too?”

Oh please no
.

“. . . and the others?”

No no no
.

Because why would he ask about Scarlett first? Why would he separate her from “the others”?

They’d been standing
so close
in that playground.

Hadn’t they?

Were they . . .
involved
?

She said, “We knew Scarlett. I remember being sad about her being gone, but I’m not sure about the others. Why?”

Why else?

“Just wondering.” He looked away. “I remember certain things from before . . . like my dog and my brother . . . but I don’t remember any of the others in any specific way, really. You said Max and I were best friends?”

“Yeah. You were at our house
a lot
. I remember being annoyed about it. Because you were boys and you didn’t want me around.”

“What did we do? Me and Max?”

She felt like she was digging deep and hitting stone. Then felt a strange panic about how much she had forgotten, just in the course of a normal life. People who were gone only lived on in your memory if you had memories. Why hadn’t she held on tighter?

To Max.

To everything.

She said, “You made forts and tents. You played with LEGOs and action figures. All that stuff is still there if you can believe it. His room. My mother turned it into a shrine.”

“I don’t think they saved anything of mine.” He nodded up toward the house.

“Sorry,” she said. “Your father. I guess he wasn’t the most sentimental guy. Not in the traditional way.”

“Did you know him well?” he asked.

Did she? Not really. What had she been doing all this time?

“Only really through your brother. Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Seeing all this research, and Opus 6. It’s better than old toys, right? And it shows that he . . .”

“Loved you,” she said, and her face pulsed hot.

He nodded and turned away from her and sifted through some clippings. She faced the whiteboards, overwhelmed with useless facts.

“Did you really mean what you said?” He had moved over to a small
desk and was riffling through the papers there. “That you think we’re hiding something?”

Avery looked at him, felt him transforming before her eyes—from an alien fake person into a real-life boy. Someone not to fear or distrust. Someone, maybe, to . . . pity? Or love?

“I’m
really sorry
I said that,” she said, pretty sure that she meant it.

“Why the change of heart? Why trust me now?”

Why
.

Why
.

Why?

She wanted a good reason.

She said, “I guess if you really
were
hiding something, you’d come back with a better alibi—not this crazy story about not being able to remember anything.”

He nodded.

She nodded.

Some kind of agreement.

They both went back to looking around.

But she couldn’t stop herself, couldn’t hold her tongue. Needed to know whether he was with Scarlett without actually asking . . .

She said, “It seems like Adam and Sarah are a couple. Which would be really weird, right?” Her face felt hot. “Like if they somehow remembered that?”

“Yes,” he said flatly. “That would be weird.”

And the way he said it, she just
knew
.

She’d had a calendar once—one she’d made by hand with a ruler and pen. It was a countdown to the approximate day she’d be able to go away to college. She wondered where it was now. Wondered whether anything—anyone—could get her to stay.

“My father is going to post a reward,” she said. “For information leading to finding Max.”

Lucas said, “That’s great.”

“He thinks it’s just going to bring the crazy people out, but I said he has to do it anyway.”

Talking was a good distraction from feeling her heart being broken without warning. A balloon that had a tear in it before it had even had a chance to fill up and float.

“Sometimes crazy people know what they’re talking about.” Lucas was looking through another stack of papers, oblivious to the fact that everything he said or did now mattered in a new way she didn’t even understand.

“You think?” Maybe she was the crazy person here. Allowing herself to even feel . . . what . . .
attracted
to him? Like she was falling, and in a way that she’d never fallen for Sam.

“Sometimes, right?”

“I don’t know.” She flipped through some papers, too, and now couldn’t get Sam out of her mind. “
Some
crazy people think that those memories of yours are clues to some target you’re all going to blow up when you awaken from your brainwashed trance.”

He got very still, and she half wondered whether he couldn’t say for sure or not if it was true.

“You’re serious?” He sounded so innocent, almost hurt. He was that new human again. His skin not toughened in the right places.

She nodded and he shook his head, like he was disappointed in whoever was saying that—or in her—then went back to sifting.

He had his back to her so she was able to take in the whole of him. The way his shirt stretched a touch too tightly across his shoulders, the way his jeans fit just right, the way he stood—feet pointed straight ahead, perfectly aligned with his shoulders. Like a castle guard.

Beyond his sneakers, back against the wall behind the desk, an old book lay near a large clump of dust. “There’s something back there.”

She went over and bent down and couldn’t reach, so she had to get on her bare knees—rug burn—and stretch far enough that she pulled a muscle in her arm. Nerve endings in her neck woke up, annoyed.

It was an old paperback—like from the 1960s or ’70s was her best guess.

It was the kind of thing she’d find on the bookshelves in the guest room where she slept when they went to see her grandparents—small, dusty, pulpy.

When she stood and read the description, he was so close that she could hear his breathing, feel his elbow against hers, bone on bone.

I
N A FUTURISTIC SOCIETY, SCIENTISTS INSPIRED BY
F
REUD, WHO SAID THAT THERE
’
S NO SUCH THING AS A HAPPY CHILDHOOD, HAVE SET OUT TO ELIMINATE CHILDHOOD COMPLETELY
. B
EGINNING WITH SIX TEST SUBJECTS, THEY HAVE PERFECTED AN ELABORATE MEMORY-WIPING TECHNOLOGY.

N
OW THE COUNTDOWN IS ON, TO THE DAY WHEN ALL CHILDREN WILL BE SENT AWAY FOR A PERIOD OF TIME THAT WILL COME TO BE KNOWN AS
T
HE
L
EAVING.

“I don’t understand,” Lucas said.

Avery felt a singular chill run through their bodies.

S
c
a
r
l
et
t

Scarlett knew the answers to all the history questions, filled in a map of the world without blinking, and was a virtual math whiz. She imagined the others had all come back with the same skill set and liked the idea that they could all sail through high school as seniors next year, get into good colleges, and just forget about The Leaving—

         /
       /
           /
              /
   /

Forget
about The Leaving?

The thought made her happy anyway.

She had more memories from before The Leaving than she’d realized—only thought of them because Sashor had asked.

Like so:

Remembered drawing a picture book in preschool, about a girl named Jane who had a pet dolphin.

Remembered dressing up as a mermaid for one Halloween.

Remembered falling off a high pool ladder at her mother’s friend’s house—blood cutting a river down her leg.

When Sashor seemed to be done with his questions, she asked, “Do you think it’s possible we’ll start to remember? Like in a year or even ten?” Because she didn’t want to find herself, a decade from now, in that Adirondack chair, surrounded by fluffy, raked piles of red and yellow leaves, suddenly remembering the horrors of her lost childhood. That would ruin the scene entirely.

“I’m honestly not sure,” Sashor said. “There was a famous case of something called
transient global amnesia
. A man who just turned up at a Burger King one day and had no idea how he’d gotten there or who he was. He had a handful of vague memories about his life, but no one ever came forward to ID him.

“That is
really depressing
.” She wondered whether Tammy would have come to claim her at Burger King if she’d had to. “Is that what you think we have?”

She watched Sashor.

Counted his blinks.

One.

Two.

Three.

“No”—his eyes wide open and unblinking now—“I mention it only as an example of how complex and unpredictable these kinds of retrieval disorders can be.”

“Retrieval disorder,” she repeated, thinking that was a good term to describe the situation with the object inside her, too.

There was still no, well,
movement
.

Sashor said, “It’s possible the memories are still there and that your brain just can’t access them.”

“Eleven years’ worth of memories?”

Tried really hard then.

To retrieve.

Like with a long arm.

         /
  /
               /
             /

“Well, you have to remember that the average sixteen-year-old only has a limited number of memories of the last eleven years of their life as well.”

Now she felt her own blink. “How many?”

376

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