The Memory Thief (28 page)

“Sure. But they weren't really dreams.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'm awake when he comes. He sits on the end of my bed and he tells me things. And when he leaves, everything is all cold.”

I shiver, despite myself. “What does he tell you?”

“That he misses me. And he asks how my mommy is. And you were coming, he told me that.” Gabe's tone is defensive, like he expects me to contradict him.

I wrestle with what version of the truth to share with a four-year-old. In the end I say, “Well, my dreams are really dreams. I'm asleep, and everything. And in them, your daddy told me to come here, to find you and your mom.”

“Does my daddy come to see you a lot?”

“It's hard to explain. But pretty much … yes.”

“You're lucky,” Gabe says, hugging his teddy bear. “He's only come to see me twice.”

“I guess he hasn't come to see your mom at all, huh?”

Gabe shakes his head. “He says he wishes he could, but he can't.”

“Maybe one day he will,” I say, although I don't believe it. If Aidan could talk to Maddie himself, he would have done it by now.

“I don't think so,” Gabe says. He scoots back against the pillows and looks at me. “I'm glad you came, like Daddy said. It was a big secret to keep.”

“You did a good job,” I tell him. “Are you sure you don't want a story?”

He shakes his head again. “Go talk to my mommy,” he says.

I ruffle his hair, then get up and leave, closing the door behind me. Maddie is still standing just outside; I wouldn't have expected anything less. “You heard all that?” I say to her.

“Yes. Although I won't pretend to understand it.”

“Don't worry. I don't understand it, either.”

“Tell me all of it,” she says. “Tell me the rest.”

So we go into the living room and sit down on opposite ends of the couch, where I go through the entire story, leaving out nothing, not even Grace. She doesn't offer any comments, just stares at me like I'm a mirage. And finally I work up the courage to allude to how I feel. “I know it sounds insane,” I say. “I know you don't know me from Adam. But I just—I mean, I really—I know you're missing him, and everything, it's way too soon—but maybe one day you would consider—I'm not a bad guy, I swear, and there's the advantage that I get to reinvent myself every day …” I'm trying to make a joke out of it, but it falls flat, and mercifully, I wind down and shut up. She's still quiet, and rather than deal with the skeptical expression I'm sure is on her face—or worse, out-and-out disgust—I employ my signature sneaker-gaze.

“Nicholas,” she says, and I hear the couch springs give.

I raise my head. She is six inches away from me, looking into my eyes as if she's trying to see my soul—probing, direct, and searching. It's uncomfortable, but I don't look away. In the space between us, the air seems to heat and waver, as it does in the desert.

My eyes on hers, I reach my hand out and run my index finger along the length of her cheekbone. It seems incredible to me that I am touching her, that she is real. “Maddie,” I say, and I have the eerie sense that the words are Aidan's, that he is speaking through me. “Have faith.”

Her eyes widen, filled with an impossible amount of light. They shine, then fill with tears. Under my touch, she trembles. “How?” It is a whisper. Tears spill over, run down her cheeks. I trace their path as Grace did with mine that night, then place the palm of my hand against her cheek. The salt water seals our skin together, and she doesn't pull away.

“He misses you so much,” I tell her. I can't shake the feeling that Aidan is here, in the room with us. I can't see him, but I feel his happiness, his grief, and an undeniable sense of triumph that he was actually able to pull this off. It could just be my imagination, but from the way Maddie is looking at me, disbelief and hope clear on her face, I don't think I'm the only one.

“He told me not to worry,” she says, her voice breaking. “He wanted me to say everything would be all right, but I couldn't do it. I knew he wasn't coming home.”

“I am so sorry,” I say, without thinking. It doesn't sound like me. “Jesus, Maddie, I am.”

She just looks at me. I sit there, feeling that strange electricity, that sense of Aidan's presence. Here I am, in a Brooklyn brownstone, touching another man's wife. My head is full of someone else's memories, and only a few of my own—many of them featuring Grace, whom I have treated abominably despite my best efforts. I'm not sure why I'm here, except for the compulsion that drove me forward each day, haunting my dreams until not acting was no longer an option. I have no inkling of when my personal history may choose to make a reappearance, if at all, and no idea what will happen next. Yet somehow, none of that matters.

I love her,
I think, and emotion floods me. There's no room for anything else but how I feel. There's no need to analyze it, to take it apart. It simply
is:
exultation, lust, anticipation, and tenderness, all rolled into a wave that I'd expect to swamp me. Instead, it buoys me up, lifting me on its crest.

Slowly, slowly, she slides closer still, closing the distance between us. The air hums. It crackles. The urge to touch her is so strong it eclipses desire; it is a need, like food or water or air. Equally slowly, I lift my other hand to her face. And then I kiss her, not the awkward, getting-to-know-you kiss of two people who have just met, but an intense kiss, intimate and familiar. I feel the electricity in the air flowing through me into her, like a circuit is closing. She kisses me back, and that is when I know she feels it, too.

It's impossible, but sitting there on my parents' couch, looking into Nicholas's eyes, which are so much like Aidan's—that layered, vibrant blue—I recognize my husband. I've seen that single-minded, incisive look a thousand times, when Aidan was trying to figure out a new route or convince a donor to fund an expedition. I saw it when he was coaching me through labor with Gabriel, holding my hands and telling me I could do it, that I was strong. And I saw it when he kissed me for the first time, when he asked me to marry him, when he held me on a Colorado riverbank and pleaded with me to say yes.

I stare back, trying to figure out how this can be. I blink, hoping that will fix things. But it doesn't, and when Nicholas lifts a finger and traces my cheekbone, feather light, I feel Aidan's touch. “Maddie,” he says, his voice lower, huskier than it was before. “Have faith.”

The tears come then, filling my eyes and making their way down my cheeks. “How?” It isn't a rhetorical question. How can he know what Aidan would say to me, what he said all those years ago and again, right before he left? And if Aidan is really here, how can he expect me to have faith when everything's gone so horribly wrong?

Nicholas doesn't answer. Instead he lays his palm against my face, like Aidan used to do. “He misses you so much.”

“He told me not to worry. He wanted me to say everything would be all right, but I couldn't do it. I knew he wasn't coming home,” I say, as if Nicholas knows what I'm talking about. Maybe he does.

“I am so sorry,” he says, pain clear in his voice. “Jesus, Maddie, I am.”

I don't know what comes over me then. I know Aidan is dead. I stood at his memorial service, I mourned him with J. C. But something in Nicholas's tone, in his touch, moves me. So I slide closer to him, even though part of me thinks this is a bad idea. The air feels heavy, full of the pressing potential energy that precedes a storm. It's hard for me to breathe.

For a second Nicholas just looks at me with those foreign, familiar eyes. And then he lifts his other hand to my face. He kisses me, and that is when I fall apart. His lips touch mine, and I can feel Aidan's urgency, his fear, his tenderness. I feel him all around me, and when my eyes close and I kiss him back, he shakes so hard, it shifts the couch.

“Tell me you love me,” he says, an eerie echo of the conversation that we had the night before he left for Alaska. “Say it now so I can hear.”

“I love you,” I say, just like I did that night. My voice breaks. “I love you more than you know.”

He moves his face down to my neck, inhales like he used to when he'd come home after an early morning run and climb in bed with me. He always said I smelled like bonfires and chocolate, which made me giggle.
Basically,
I'd tell him,
you think I'm a s'more.
He'd chase me around the room, pin me down, and kiss me all over.
Yup,
he'd say, licking his lips,
Hershey's finest. But don't worry, Maddie. S'mores are some of my favorite things.
And then he'd kiss me some more, until Gabe stared at us like we were a couple of zoo animals gone rogue, and I made Aidan behave.

“You do what you need to,” he says now, “and don't you feel guilty. Don't you wait for me, because I'm not coming back.”

“What do you call this?” I retort, and he laughs. It's Aidan's belly laugh, loud and contagious.

“This?” he says. “This is an illusion, honey. An irresistible blend of stubbornness and mad freaking skills.”

It's just like him to crack a joke in the midst of our personal Hiroshima, and for a blissful second I let myself forget what's happened, why we are here. I smile despite myself, and he returns the favor, his lips curving against my skin. “That's it. That's my girl.”

I stiffen in his arms. “I told you not to go. I begged you.”

“I know. I know you did.” His hands are on my back now, running over my shirt, but not in a sexual way. It's more as if he's trying to reassure himself that he is holding me, that this is real. “I'm so sorry,” he says again, and his mouth closes on mine.

I fix this moment in my mind—the sound of his voice, the feel of his lips. And then I lift my own hands, touch his hair, his face. I half-expect to feel Aidan's dirty blond waves, the fine stubble that covers his high cheekbones. But of course I don't, and when I open my eyes I see Nicholas sitting next to me, just like he was to begin with. This is so disorienting, given everything that's come to pass, that I have to fight a wave of dizziness.

He looks at me then, like he can feel the weight of my gaze, and I have to accept the truth. This is not Aidan, no matter how much I want it to be. This is a strange man, and an even stranger situation. Until I figure out what's really going on here, I have no intention of doing something I'll regret, especially not with my son in the next room.

My palms come to rest on his chest, and I press against him, push him back. We consider each other, Nicholas and I. I don't know what he's looking for, but I'm searching the depth of his blue eyes for the spark that was Aidan, the one I was so sure I saw before. He allows this, sitting patient and still, his hands in his lap. He doesn't try to touch me again.

We sit there for a long minute, me figuring out what to do next, him letting me make up my mind. Now that we are not talking or touching, common sense rears its well-coiffed head. I'm alone in my parents' house in the middle of the night, kissing a stranger who's claiming to channel Aidan. And the bizarre thing is, I just might believe him. I know I should be frightened, but I am not, and that scares me more than anything else.

It must be eighty degrees outside, but a chill sweeps over me nonetheless. I shiver, clutching my upper arms. One thing's for sure—I have to think, and that's not going to happen with Nicholas perched on my couch. I clear my throat, imbue my voice with as much determination as I can muster, given the goose bumps that have risen all over my body, the smell of him on my skin. “You have to go,” I say.

I expect him to protest, but he doesn't. Instead he nods, stands in silence, makes his way to the door. When he turns to face me, I don't see Aidan there at all, and it occurs to me that I've lost my mind. Wordless, I close the door behind him, lock it. I lean against it, listening, until I hear his footsteps retreat down the steps and onto the sidewalk, hear them fade away.

Once I'm sure that I'm alone—except for Gabriel, that is—I wander aimlessly from one room to the next, trying to process what has happened, to make sense of it. And finally I realize there's only one person I want to talk to. I take my phone off the kitchen table and dial J. C.'s cell. It's not until the phone is ringing that I realize what time it is: three in the morning my time, which means it's 1
A.M.
in Colorado. It rings three times, then four, and I'm considering hanging up when he says, “Hello?”

At the sound of his voice, relief rushes through me, like I've been holding my breath for a long time and have let it out. It takes me by surprise, so much so that I don't say anything in response.

“Maddie?” J. C. says. “Everything all right, sweetheart?”

“J. C.,” I say, which is all I can manage.

“Yeah? You okay, babe?”

“Sort of,” I say, since I don't know the answer.

“Did something happen?” His voice is sharper now, alert.

“Um. Did I wake you up?”

“Not hardly. I'm at Roma's.” I can hear background noise now, voices and what sounds like a television.

“What are you doing?” I ask, just to keep him talking.

“Drinking beer and playing Lego Star Wars,” he admits, and I hear someone—it sounds like Roma—laughing.

“Lego Star Wars? Really?”

“I bought it for Gabe, as a birthday present for when you guys come back. But then I thought I better learn how to play it, in case he needs help or something. And Roma just happens to have a PlayStation 3.” He pauses, and I hear Roma laughing again.

“You are coming back, aren't you?” J. C. says, his voice pitched lower, more serious. “You didn't call to tell me you're moving there permanently.”

“No. That's not why I called.”

“Oh,” he says. “Good.” I hear more background noise, and then he says, “Roma says hello.”

“Tell him hi,” I say, and he relays the message.

“Why did you call then, Maddie?” he says when he comes back on the line. “Not that I'm not glad to hear your voice, but still. It's three in the morning for you, right?” He sounds wary, and I can hardly blame him.

“Something happened. Something really weird. I don't even know what to think of it. But I didn't know who else to call.”

There's a pause, and then he says, “Tell me.”

“Are you drunk?” I ask. The last thing I want is to have to repeat this story.

“Hang on a second,” he says, and I hear bottles clinking. “Roma, how many beers have I had, you got any idea?” he shouts, away from the phone.

“Since you got here? Eight? Maybe nine?” Roma yells back. For a second I imagine them—J. C. must be in the living room, since that's where the flat-screen is, and Roma is most likely in the kitchen, hunting through the refrigerator for reinforcements. It's a scene I've witnessed more times than I can count, at dozens of parties and late-night hangout sessions. I can even see Trek, Roma's huge black Lab, sprawled at J. C.'s feet on the off-white Berber carpet.

“Did you hear that?” J. C. says to me.

“Uh-huh.”

“You make the call. I don't feel wasted, or anything. But I probably shouldn't drive, and I might say a couple things I'll regret when I'm sober. So it's up to you, just like usual.” He chuckles.

I turn the situation over in my mind. Then I say, “I'll take my chances.”

“Fine. Hold on. Yo, Roma,” he calls.

“Yeah?”

“You wanna try, or should I pause this?”

“I got it,” Roma says, sounding closer to the phone. “Here. This is the last one, anyway.”

“Did he give you another beer?” I ask.

“Yep. That a problem?”

“No. I'm just trying to picture what you're doing.”

“You miss me? Never mind, don't answer that,” he says. “Let me help you out. I'm petting Trek, and now I'm walking outside, and I'm sitting on one of Roma's crappy chairs. I am opening my beer, and I am looking at the stars, and I'm wondering how many of them you can see, where you are. I'm guessing not that many.” He pauses. “I'm also thinking that I'd like to ask what you're wearing, but that would be inappropriate, so I won't. And now I'm kicking myself and wishing I would shut up already. Maybe I am drunker than I thought.”

“Maybe so,” I say, smiling even though he isn't here to see it. “And sorry to disappoint you, but I'm wearing black pants and a pink tank top. Nothing too exciting.”

“I bet you look beautiful, anyway. You look beautiful no matter what you wear,” he says, and the humor has faded from his voice. “Or what you don't wear, as the case may be. Okay, note to self: nine beers, and I lose my ability to keep my mouth shut. You have the floor.”

“I don't know where to start.”

“Why don't you start at the beginning,” he suggests. “That usually works for me.”

So I tell him everything that happened, from the moment I saw Nicholas on the stoop of my parents' house to our discussion on the couch. I leave out the very end, when he kissed me good night and I asked him to leave, since I can't imagine that that will sit too well with J. C. He interrupts a couple of times to ask questions, but other than that, he lets me tell it. It takes about fifteen minutes, and in the end even I can hear how crazy it sounds. If it weren't for the extra dishes in the sink, the second wineglass on the table, I might be inclined to think I'd made the whole thing up.

“Ohhhhh, shit,” he says when I'm done. “Where is this guy now?”

“He left. He went back to … well, wherever he's staying.”

“Did he touch you?”

So much for leaving out that part of the story. “He did kiss me,” I say. “But it wasn't him, not entirely. It was Aidan. I know how nuts that sounds, but it's true. He looked at me like Aidan used to, and he said the things Aidan said, and the way he kissed, it freaked me out completely.”

There is an ominous silence on the other end of the phone. Then J. C. says, “I'll kill him,” in such an un-J. C. kind of voice, it chills me to my core.

“Why?” I say, startled into bluntness.

“Because, Maddie. This guy is either some kind of con artist, or he's psycho, or there's something going on that I'm not nearly sober enough to consider. Or drunk enough, one of the two. Either way, he came into your house, and he fed you a bunch of lines, and then he put his hands on you. He could have hurt you, he could have hurt Gabriel. He knew you were alone, and he took advantage of you. If he comes near you again, I will fucking kill him.” He pauses. “Do you want me to fly out there? I will. I'll get Roma to take me to the airport and I'll be on the next plane out.”

“He would never have hurt me,” I say. “And I believed him. I know how that sounds, but it's true. You would have believed him, too, if you'd been there. It was … it was eerie.” I shiver. “And the really bizarre part is that Gabe knew him. He knew who he was, he recognized him. He told me he'd dreamed about him, that Aidan told him Nick was coming. Gabe asked Nick to read him his bedtime stories.”

A second silence falls, this one even more ominous than the first. Then J. C. says, “That's it. I'm booking a flight.”

“J. C., it's all right. Really. I'm fine.”

“It is most emphatically not all right. This situation may be many things, most of which I am poorly equipped to judge, but ‘all right' isn't one of them.”