“So what do you do today?”
“I’m going to go to my mom’s house and see what files she has on the crash. What the investigators said.” She ate the bacon and watched the news. The anchor started talking about a bizarre arson case in San Antonio, ninety miles away, five homes, just built, gutted by fire. One family had already moved in, and they interviewed the woman, upset and distraught. Her name across the bottom of the screen: Brenda Hobson. Her son was in the hospital with smoke inhalation and she was begging if anyone had any information on the fires, to please contact the police.
“That is just straight-out crazy, burning down all those houses,” Adam said.
I know her name, Jane thought. Blinking, staring.
She’d compiled a list of names of people who had helped her after the crash, when she wanted to write thank-you notes, but Mom said it wasn’t necessary. Brenda Hobson was one of the paramedics who had responded to the crash.
“I’m going,” she said, full of resolve. “To San Antonio.”
“What?” Adam said, who had stopped typing on his computer to watch the news story.
“That woman was a paramedic at the crash, her house and every house around her burns down, and now someone is saying ‘All Will Pay’ on my Faceplace page? It can’t be a coincidence.”
“You don’t have a car, and I have class today,” he reminded her. “And I don’t know if talking to her is a good idea. She’s not going to be at her house, how will you even find her?”
“My mother has a car,” she said. “You have a car you could loan me, you know, if you were like a really good friend to me.”
“No, Jane. You don’t drive anymore,” Adam said. “Bad idea.”
She let it go for the moment. She had an idea. She got dressed as he turned away, pulling on jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, and she grabbed her backpack and headed out the door.
*
Rather than hike across south Austin into Lakehaven for two hours, she took a rideshare car from a few blocks away from St. Michael’s, so her mother wouldn’t see she was still on the campus, to a shopping center near her mother’s house. She had decided it would be better to approach it on foot; that way she could make a better case for borrowing her mother’s spare car to take to San Antonio to see Brenda Hobson. She would look needier. After the rideshare car pulled away, she started her short walk to her mother’s house.
Lakehaven hadn’t changed much. Lava Java was still in the main shopping center; there was still a line of cars with high school parking stickers working their way through the drive-through at McDonald’s (there was no golden-arches sign, though—Lakehaven had strict signage controls, so the fast-food joints were tastefully marked with subtle letters against cool marble). It must have been a late-start morning; she remembered the joy of those infrequent days in school, when the teachers had meetings and the school didn’t start for two extra hours. She walked past signs urging either a yes or no vote on a massive school bond. She kept her eyes to the sidewalk, not wanting to look up. She had felt nervous passing the sign that read Lakehaven, Pop. 3,975.
This was where she grew up, but now it felt like enemy territory.
She walked into an older neighborhood not far from the high school. Two turns down was the cul-de-sac, Graymalkin Circle. She stood at the circle’s entrance. She hadn’t been back since last Christmas. The houses lay ahead, both of them. Norton. And Hall. She thought of the line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona where we lay our scene…she had had to reread it to catch up for her classwork her senior year, having read it as a freshman, to finish a senior thesis for honors English on Shakespeare. She had no memory of having read it before or having watched any of the film versions, from the classic one with Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey to the modernized approach with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes.
And suddenly David, walking next to her, laughing on this sidewalk, his smile bright as the sun, walking her home not because he was her boyfriend but because he was her neighbor, braying out words from the prologue they’d studied that day as freshmen: Ancient grudge! New mutiny! Civil blood! And fatal loins! Not just loins, Jane, but FATAL loins! Poisonous loins. We’d all better be careful. Did you think we’d hear about loins in English today?
She put her hand over her mouth. David was gone.
It was a new memory. Did that really happen? Or was it her imagination stretching to bridge the gaps, the ever-dangerous threat of confabulation? She had no idea. She stood on the sidewalk, shivering, his words and laughter ringing in her ears. It would have been freshman year, right on the twilight where she began to lose her memories.
Did this mean she was breaking into the borderlands of the memories she’d lost?
If it was an emotional block, was it crumbling, now that she was confronting the crash? Or just a strand of memory, easing back into place, not to be repeated.
Oh, please, she thought. Please come back to me.
She stared at the two houses at the end of the cul-de-sac. “Bury their parents’ strife,” Shakespeare had written. That hadn’t happened.
Both yards were on an incline, studded with oaks. The houses were large even by Lakehaven standards, two stories. Her mother’s brick house had a wraparound front porch, empty now. The Halls’ house had a limestone exterior; it was a bit larger. Jane walked toward her house, but she kept her gaze on the Halls’ front door. If Perri came out of it toward her, she would be ready.
She walked past the parked car and glanced in: a backseat with blankets and duffel bags, in the driver’s seat a man working on a computer tablet. She walked on and she heard the car door open behind her.
“Jane?”
She stopped, turned. Her breath caught in her chest. Matteo Vasquez. The reporter. The last time she’d seen him here at her house was when her mother was bringing her home from the hospital. They’d cooperated with his first story about her, but not the last two in his “Girl Who Doesn’t Remember” series.
“Hi. Do you remember me?”
“Yes,” she said. “I remember you. What do you want?”
“I’m writing a follow-up story on you. It’s been two years. I would love to interview you for it. See how you are. People would like to know how you’re doing.”
“I doubt that. Get away from my house.”
“I’m on the street; it’s public property,” he said, trying to smile. He looked bad, she realized, red-rimmed eyes, in need of a haircut.
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Where are you living?” he asked. “You’re no longer enrolled at Saint Michael’s. I called.”
“Here.”
“I’ve been here for two hours and I didn’t see you walk out.”