“Danny!” Her voice was piercing, slicing through the walls and distance that separated us. “Nicky! Somebody!”
All my thoughts fled. I was out of my room and stumbling down the stairs in an instant. I found Mia standing half inside the door to the patio.
“Danny, help!” she cried.
“What is it?” I looked her over as I ran to her side, and she didn’t appear to be bleeding or broken.
“There’s a mouse in the pool!” she said.
My relief was palpable, like suddenly finding the ground under your feet after missing a step. “Jesus, I thought you were being chased by an ax murderer or something.”
But her eyes were filled with giant tears. “He’s drowning!”
“It’s okay. We’ll help him,” I said. Anything to take that look of fear out of her eyes.
She took me by the hand and led me out to the swimming pool, where, sure enough, a little field mouse had fallen in somehow. He was trying to climb out, but the tiled walls of the pool were vertical and slick. He started to swim toward the center of the pool, his head barely above water.
“Run and get the skimmer,” I said.
“I couldn’t find it!” Mia was frantic. She knelt down by the side of the pool and said, “Keep swimming, mousy! We’ll save you!” For a moment I thought of the bat who used to sleep in my window.
“We need something to scoop him up with,” I said, looking around.
“Danny!” she screeched.
I turned to look. The mouse had disappeared under the water.
“Danny, he’s dying!”
Without thinking I jumped in, caught the mouse between my hands, and lifted him up onto the warm concrete lip of the pool. Mia knelt beside him, crying and urging him in her tear-thick voice to wake up. I pulled myself out of the pool and poked the little guy. Slowly he roused, shook himself, and darted into the grass.
Mia threw her arms around me, and I patted her back.
“There, he’s okay now,” I said. “You saved him, Mimi.”
“Thanks, Danny,” she said as she pulled away. I wiped the tears off her cheeks. She was all wet from hugging me. “What if he comes back and falls in again?”
“I don’t think he’ll ever come near this pool again,” I said, “but we’ll put the cover on just in case, okay?”
She smiled. “Okay.”
I turned on the switch to roll out the automatic cover, while Mia watched carefully to make sure no field mice took a last second dive before the pool was sealed up.
“Come on,” I said. “We’d better change.”
Mia fetched me a towel from one of the downstairs bathrooms and ran upstairs to get out of her wet clothes. I dried off as best as I could in my soaking jeans and tee before stepping inside. I took the stairs two at a time, gooseflesh prickling on my arms as the air-conditioning hit me, stepped into my bedroom, and felt my heart stop beating.
Nicholas was sitting on the floor, surrounded by Robert’s notes, with my laptop open in front of him. He looked up at me with eyes that were like gasoline meeting a spark.
? ? ?
In retrospect, I’m surprised it took that long for everything to fall apart.
? ? ?
“What the fuck is this?” he asked.
“What are you doing in here?” I said.
“I was going to Dad’s office to get some printer paper, and your door was open and I saw all of this,” he said, gesturing to the stack of papers spread across the floor. “Not that I really feel like I have to answer your questions right now when you should be explaining just what the fuck you’re doing with all of this.”
I closed the door behind me and began scooping up the papers on the floor, stuffing them back into the file. Nicholas grabbed for them too.
“Stop it!” he said. “What is this?”
“I’m just . . .” I swallowed. “I just thought maybe it would help me remember, you know? There’s so much about my life from before that’s still a total blank to me, so I did some research—”
Nicholas jumped to his feet. “Bullshit.”
“It’s true!” I stepped toward him. “I wanted to understand what was happening here while I was gone, because no one will talk to me about it—”
“Stop it!” He pushed me back so violently that I hit the door with a dull thud. “You’re lying!”
We both stood there, silent, staring at each other.
“You’re a liar,” he said slowly. “And you’re not my brother.”
“Nicholas—”
“I knew it,” he was saying, more to himself than to me. “I knew it from the moment I saw you, but everyone else—I tried so hard to believe it, but you’re not him. You’re not Daniel.”
The fight went out of me. He knew. Part of him had always known. And I knew there was nothing I could say now that would make him forget that.
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
Nicholas pushed past me and out of the bedroom. He stalked down the hallway and stairs, and I ran after him.
“Nicholas, wait!” I said as he opened the front door and began to run down the driveway.
“You come any closer, and I will kill you!” he shouted over his shoulder. “I will kill you!”
I caught him at the end of the driveway.
“Let me explain,” I said.
He didn’t let me explain. He punched me.
I automatically dodged the blow, so his fist only clipped the side of my head. He cried out in fury and lunged at me, falling on top of me as I tumbled to the ground. We rolled around on the grass as he tried to hit me and I tried to protect myself. I was bigger but he was angrier, and after several minutes of wrestling and scrabbling, he got in a solid punch to my jaw. My vision went momentarily black and fuzzy, and he collapsed beside me, cradling his hand. For a long moment the only sound was our heaving breaths.
Well, at least there was one thing I was now certain of. Nicholas hadn’t been in on Lex and Patrick’s plan.
“Who are you?” Nicholas finally said softly.
“Nobody,” I said.
“Did you hurt my brother?”
“No,” I said. “I’d never heard of your brother until this started.”
“Why did you do this?”
I sat up, fingering my jaw. My knee was scraped and bleeding.
“I didn’t mean to,” I said. “It just sort of . . . got out of my control.”
“Bullshit.” Nicholas sat up too and straightened his glasses and shirt. The neckline was stretched from where I must have grabbed him. “You don’t accidentally impersonate a missing kid, you sick fuck.”
“I didn’t think it would go this far. But I . . .”
“What? You what?”
“I liked your family, okay?” The words burst out of me. “I never had anything like this.”
His face turned like he’d just encountered a foul smell, and he rose to his feet. “Oh God, spare me your pathetic sob story. I’m going to make sure you rot in jail for what you’ve done to my family.”
Every part of me ached or stung. “What about what your family has done to me?”
Nicholas stepped toward me, his hands clenching into fists. “What, house you? Feed you?”
He needed to know the truth. Whether he hit me again or called the cops, he needed to know.
“You don’t really think they believe I’m Danny, do you?” I said.
For a moment he just stared at me.