Those That Wake 02: What We Become (5 page)

“I’m sorry,” he said, for no reason other than he knew it fixed things sometimes.

“
I’m
sorry, Josh. It’s my fault. It’s bringing back some stuff.” And then, shaky, “Stuff I thought I was through with.”

“Are we going to talk about that stuff?” He invited as casually as he could.

“No.” She may have been shaky, but her response was definite.

He held her in the quiet room, expecting there might be hard tears. But they just sat like that, for minutes.

“So, just what the hell did your mother say to you?”

Laura laughed harshly.

“She gave me some advice. And I’m going to take it.”

Laura sat on the big, plush yellow sofa chair across from the neatly dressed girl in an office chair. In a sense, Laura was looking into her own future. Having already declared her psychology major and intending to follow up her degree with postgraduate work, it wasn’t more than four or five years before she was going to be sitting on the other side, looking at a young freshman come to pour out her anxieties.

The office, in the basement of the student services building, was carefully modulated to present a tone of informal but caring concern. A trickle of light poured in from the high window, illuminating the small bouquet of geraniums, chosen to evoke neither thoughts of death (lilies) or romance (roses), two primary reasons a distraught college student might show up for free counseling. There was a teddy bear on the secondhand wooden shelf with all the worn psychology texts, and by the clock on the desk was a small base into which you could easily slide in or remove a nameplate. The one there now read
TERRI
.

“How are you doing, Laura?” Terri smiled softly, and it was the element that completed this bizarre feeling Laura had of entering a performance.

“I’ve been better,” she said, settling in.

“How are classes?”

“Classes are fine,” Laura responded. “It’s my boyfriend.” She regretted it instantly. “Sort of.”

“A breakup?”

“No, no. Nothing like that. It’s not my boyfriend, really. It’s . . . he’s more like the focus of something else. Something’s getting me down, and I’m putting it on him. I guess.”

“All right,” Terri adjusted her steel-rimmed glasses. Her hair was pulled into tight braids, and she wore a blouse and slacks, working hard to kill her looks and appear professional. “What’s your boyfriend’s name?”

“Josh,” Laura said, with a strange quaver in her voice that she hadn’t put there intentionally. Taking the cue, Terri twitched a smile, trying out a touch of female camaraderie, and pushed ahead.

“College is a different experience than high school, and relationships can grow and deepen, and sometimes it can be scary. Do you feel serious about Josh?”

Laura stared back at her, struck dumb with the realization that she didn’t know the answer.

“Do you feel serious about him, and that’s not familiar to you?” Terri offered.

“No. I know what a serious relationship feels like.”

“So, Josh isn’t your first serious boyfriend?”

Except he was, really, if you were going to get right down to it. There had been Ari, of course, but she refused to count that douchebag. And her senior year of high school—the second half of it, anyway—she could look back on, pick out certain memories, but she could not make a smooth narrative of them. Individual memories floated about, but when she tried to arrange them relative to one another, they wouldn’t hold. She would get trapped in an endless maze with no exit, chasing through those memories for . . .
something
that was always an inch out of her grasp, a blur on the edge of her vision. But it had become a compulsion; she couldn’t stop herself. This was what had led to the anger, the panic attacks, and finally the syncope, or loss of consciousness—it had proven a cold comfort that she could diagnose it herself.

“Josh is my first serious boyfriend,” Laura admitted to Terri. “But I . . .”—she was parsing it out as she spoke the words—“already know what serious feels like. I . . . already know.”

“Like recognizing the taste of something and not remembering when you tasted it before?” Terri suggested.

“No.” She was immediately certain. “No, not like that. Like recognizing the taste of something but knowing that you’ve
never
tasted it before. I don’t remember it, but I
feel
it.”

“Memories can fool us,” Terri said.

“We’re made of our memories
,
” Laura said, something rising from deep inside her. “We
are
them. If I can’t trust my memories, who am I?”

“It can happen to any of us,” Terri said, catching a whiff of something much deeper here than she had expected. “But I can see how it would leave you feeling confused.”

“I’m
not
confused,” Laura said heatedly.

“I’m sorry, Laura. Why don’t you tell me how you feel?”

“Angry.” Laura shook her head to cancel that response. She searched inside her skull for the answer, and she realized in a revelatory flash that that was the very problem. She didn’t know exactly what she was feeling, not now and not months ago when she’d had her “episodes.” She wasn’t being made to feel angry. She didn’t know what she was feeling, and
that
made her angry. Laura’s eyes rolled up to the ceiling, and her head swung back and forth, the muscles in her neck cording with the tension of trying to delineate the phantom emotion. It was something weird swirling inside her, an untouchable ghost that was always at the corner of her mind’s eye, poking and prodding, but never in front of her where she could grab it and hold it.

Or not.

Again a small revelatory shudder.

Not like a ghost. Not like something swirling. Like nothing. Like a huge hole right in the middle of her. No wonder she had chased through that maze of memories, never able to grasp what she was looking for. What she had sensed there was nothing at all.

“Empty,” Laura said, almost a sob—not of sorrow, but of relief. “I feel empty.”

Terri nodded again, clearly somewhat relieved herself.

“Is this something you’re picking up from Josh? Do you feel like the relationship is empty?”

“Josh isn’t empty,” Laura said. “I am.”

But Josh was empty. It felt like the floor was dropping out from under her when she realized it. Josh was a person, of course, perfectly kind and warm. But she was using him to fill the emptiness, and it wasn’t working, at least not anymore. So he
was
empty, empty to her.

It was all crashing down on her here, even though she had felt silly coming into the free clinic, like she was above it, too smart for it. Apparently, what she needed was the context, and maybe even a little gentle prodding from Terri.

Terri was saying something else, but Laura just stood up, her face a dazed mask.

“I’m ready to go now,” Laura told her.

“Are you okay, Laura?” Terri asked with unveiled concern. “What just happened for you?”

“I realized why I came.” She looked up at Terri. “But thank you. You got me where I needed to go.”

“Um, all right. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“We’ll see.” She came to the door and stopped and turned. “Hey. Do you know any famous librarians?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Any famous librarians.”

“Not really,” Terri said after a brief thought. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I just got a weird note about a librarian a couple of days ago.”

“From Josh?”

“No,” Laura said, perplexed. Why would Josh send her a note about librarians?

“Oh. Who sent it? Maybe they know.”

“Who sent it?” Laura echoed, poised at the door.

“That seems like the natural question,” Terri said.

Yes. Yes, it did seem like the natural question, didn’t it?

ROSE WATCHED MAL FIGHT HIS
nightmares. There was no rest for him even in sleep. The muscles in his face danced, deepening his scowl. Low grunts and snarls escaped as he wrestled them until, sweating, he roused himself.

His dark head—short black hair, dark eyes, brooding countenance—pulled slowly upward, followed by his powerful torso, slim at the waist, wide at the muscular shoulders, like a
V
of swelling strength, until he sat on the edge of the cot, minutely swaying. His arms were shot with veins and hard muscles, his torso packed solid and flat. But for Rose, what always kept her attention rapt were the scars.

The scars were Mal’s living history, a road map of where he’d been and what he’d done wrong, and to Rose, they were a constant fascination not for what they revealed about him—he seldom accounted for any of them—but that they were evidence he had a history at all. He had dropped into her life fully formed, without a clear past, and what she’d learned about him in the time since was that he might as well have existed in the world itself the same way: without real identity, without acknowledgment that he was a person who had done things, been registered in places, had ever been known by anyone else.

The cords and planes of muscle flexed instinctively in his recovering body; she realized she was fascinated by the imperfections because they seemed to make him more powerful still. They painted an image of a boy leaning into a fierce wind, pushing through a whirlwind of sharp, flying debris all his life, and managing to move slowly forward despite it.

“Breakfast,” she said to him, nodding with her chin at the aluminum lumps sitting on the cracked table by the bed.

His eyes took them in bleakly, and, as though facing up to an unpleasant necessity, he straightened his body and took the food.

Two huge hamburgers dripping with cheese, from the greasy old kitchen where she worked until early mornings, came out of the bag. He wolfed them down, wincing whenever a bite made its way to the right side of his jaw. The pain was enough to make the stoic face grimace, but it was not enough to slow down consumption, and in less than two minutes, both burgers were gone.

Sometimes she watched him work his body: pushups, crunches, shadowboxing, isometrics until his body was covered in glistening sweat and his muscles trembled as if minor earthquake tremors were running up and down his body. And still he pushed himself on, all the while his face flat, his eyes always brooding. Such effort, such commitment, never released outward. She watched him work his body, she watched him struggle with his nightmares, she studied the flat face and the brooding eyes, and she knew that something had reached inside of Mal and pulled something integral out of him, leaving a gaping hole where his will to reach out to other people—to
her
—should have been. What, she spent many restless hours unable to sleep wondering, had pulled it out of him? What had it left behind?

He blinked now, as if the eating the hamburgers had left him in a daze, and before he could ask, Rose pulled a tall bottle of water out of the rickety miniature fridge that always hummed too loudly. He drank down half the thing, came up for air, and finished off the rest, wires of blood stretching from his mouth into the water as it quickly disappeared. Then, finally, he looked at her with something that resembled full awareness.

“Nightmares again,” she said. It was not a question but an invitation; one that was, as usual, roundly ignored. She adjusted. “You’re not squinting anymore.”

“It’s dark here.”

“Still.”

“Better. It’s better.” To prove it, he stood slowly and straightened himself without using a wall to lean on, then held himself up in place, towering over her, cross-legged on the dirty floor.

“Are we going somewhere?”

“Not yet.”

She chewed on that for a moment. She hadn’t been completely sure he was lucid when he spoke of taking her somewhere, had hoped in asking just now that he wouldn’t even know what she was talking about.

“Why not now?” she asked, not wanting to seem as though she was resisting the idea.

“I think . . .”—he searched inside his own skull—“some things are going to happen first.”

“What things?”

He was pacing slowly from one end of the small, cold room to the other, reacquainting himself with his own equilibrium. His slight limp—he’d had it since she knew him—was heavier now.

“You need some sleep,” he said.

He was putting her off, but she was exhausted. She always came back from work that way. Whatever else they were waiting for, she couldn’t possibly guess. It was certain they weren’t waiting for him to get the medical attention he needed. He’d come home bloody and barely on his feet before and never did any more than sleep it off.

She came to her knees and reached aching arms to the cot and slithered into bed. The last thing she saw before she closed her eyes was Mal taking a gentle jab at his shadow and nearly falling over backwards.

Rose’s eyes came open, and she only realized a knock on the door had woken her because Mal’s face was turned toward the door, his body frozen halfway through a pushup. His body, supported by knuckles on the rough concrete, tightened.

She sat up and waited with him. Instead of the second knock she was expecting, though, a voice sliced sharply through the door.

“Open it, Mal.”

She watched Mal bring himself to his feet with a muffled groan and, again, sway briefly, before stepping forward and opening the two locks that held the metal door closed.

When Mal had slurred out the bit about the people who wanted him to find something, Rose had imagined a loose-knit gang of the sort he routinely faced down in the park: kids, dirty and mean-looking, flunkies of some psychotic twenty-year-old drug dealer who fancied himself a mastermind.

The two men on the other side of the door were dressed in rich, dark blue suits more expensive than Rose’s apartment and all the others on the same floor. But while the suits fit the men like they’d been stitched around them, the men did not really fit the suits. Their faces were blunt, unsubtle, harsh; one wore thick white bandages on his nose and had a red and black bruise under one eye that made part of his face look like raw meat. The muscles of their arms, torsos, and legs were so thick, it looked as though their flesh had been packed with liquid metal.