She answered on the first ring. She’d been waiting; I knew it to my core.
“I need to come home. I’ve got a headache.”
“Of course. I’ll pick you up.”
“I think I remembered, sort of, about him.”
“Yes, yes, yes, all right—that’s what I was…okay.”
“Come get me.”
“Ten minutes. Just wait right there.”
I ended the call and plugged back into the music. Sat on the steps with my fingers gripped around my knees. The locked muscles of my body held me like a robot. I jabbed the play button. Half-Life, track two. A brisk, more upbeat song. It pumped a blood-beat rhythm inside me, the catchy snap of verse and lyrics dancing its ring around me, blocking out my bucking, kicking thoughts.
Hadn’t I heard it before? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that this music had the power to transport me somewhere better, temporarily.
But it couldn’t hide me from the truth.
The truth that I’d killed somebody.
5
That Young Man
Anthony Travolo. In the safety of the car, I heard Mom speak the name. As soon as she said it, I wondered how I ever could have forgotten it.
Anthony Travolo. Dr. P had said his name, too, in those early sessions. I’d had the information all along. I’d been “working through it,” Mom told me in the car. That I’d been “dealing with it the best way you knew how.”
Which apparently entailed that at some point, my brain had shoved him, his name, his death, my guilt, deep into the void.
“And that’s neither uncommon nor surprising.” Dr. P spoke slowly into the phone while Mom sat upright in a kitchen chair, as if she were at church. Hands folded, listening. “You had no data chain with this person.”
“Data chain,” I repeated. I pictured a daisy chain made out of twisted, severed steel, a body mangled up inside it.
“The night of the accident, you were going to visit your aunt Gail, upstate. Apparently that young man was along for the ride. You might have been planning to drop him off somewhere. But there’s no indication that you knew him well. You both were seen out at some dance clubs. The clubs, we think, are the single point of intersection.”
“Right.” Club friends. Because I was such a club girl? That wasn’t me. Sure, I’d been to some clubs—anyone in Lafayette’s A-squad dance liked the odd night out dancing. But I didn’t have a special set of club friends. And Holden wasn’t into that scene. Neither was Rachel.
But I’d heard all of this before, and now I remembered that I had. Right down to Dr. P’s refusal to speak his given name. Never “Anthony.” Always “him” or “the person” or sometimes “that young man.” As if by my not knowing him, I was less culpable. Maybe this was why the name had slipped away from me so easily—along with the crime.
The visit-to-Aunt-Gail part wasn’t a mystery. I’d made the trip to Mount Kisco with my parents plenty of times. My dad’s only sister’s country home was one of those rustic, kick-back Adirondack-style cabins. It was a perfect place to unplug, and Aunt Gail was mellow, an easygoing host.
“Ember?” Dr. P’s voice snapped me to. “Are you there?”
“Yes.” I refocused. “But I don’t understand. I killed someone. A person is dead because of me.” My voice was more breath than sound. “It’s a major thing to forget.”
“The trauma surrounding selective recall is usually congruent with a memory disorder,” said Dr. P. “There have been many similar cases.”
“You always say that.” My voice was warning me that I was close to crying.
On the line, Dr. P suddenly seemed to remember that I was a person, not a file of case studies. “Think of it this way, Ember. Your body has taken hits that you can’t even feel in your day-to-day. For example, do you realize that you won’t have fully regenerated all of your lung tissue for seven years?”
Yes, I realized. Dr. P had only mentioned it a hundred times before. But so what? In seven years, I’ve got all-new lung tissue. In seven years, Anthony Travolo will still be dead. What kind of monster was I to have forgotten this person?
“So you need to give yourself a break. Your brain creates the shield while your body works on the repairs. And memory loss can be a natural defense mechanism to protect us from psychological damage. We never thought you’d forgotten it. Only blocked it. We were expecting this, and now you need to listen to me, Ember.” I imagined Dr. P hunkering forward in his office chair, shuffling papers, his wide shoulders up over his neck. “In recent weeks at Addington, we talked about your depression, and how much you wanted to return home. I trusted your instinct. With your parents’ concession—and several conversations about it—we thought it might be best for that particular memory, of the young man, to reawaken naturally. In an atmosphere where you felt most comfortable.”
“What happened to me at school today did not feel natural,” I told him. “No offense,” I added. I was annoyed by my shrill voice, my sarcasm. I really didn’t like to be disrespectful to Dr. P, who’d done so much for me. “I guess what I mean is my instinct was not for Claude McKechnie to give me that news.” I closed my eyes. “He’s not exactly anybody’s first pick for the circle of trust.”
“Claude might not have been the best trigger, but it seems that you transitioned smoothly. You were in complete control of the memory.”
In control? Carrying the death of Anthony Travolo around for months like an invisible skeleton wrapped around my body—this was me being smooth and in control?
Dr. P was just not helping. I told him I’d call him back later.
“Tea, sweetie?”
“No, thanks.” Ah, liquids—my mom’s cure-all for everything, including accidental homicide. I drifted into the living room, Mom softly padding behind.
“So this is why everyone’s been on eggshells around me,” I said, flopping onto the couch and curling up into a ball. “It must have been in all the papers, right? That there were two of us, and one survived?” For the first time, I wished I were back at Addington. The familiar unfamiliar of it. Home made everything too real.
“Your name was withheld because you’re a minor. Ember, you have to understand. It was an—”
“An accident, right. It doesn’t matter. I’m like Bethanne, aren’t I?” Bethanne Hill was a former neighbor who’d survived a house fire she’d started by accident, which had killed her toddler sister, Violet. It had happened over ten years ago.