He nodded. “They think it was really him. But I don’t know. Nothing was familiar at all.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“They found a gun there and I feel like it’s going to have my prints on it.”
Not at all the conversation she’d been expecting.
She said, “Why would you think that ?”
“It turns out I know how to load a gun.”
She tried to picture it.
Couldn’t.
“I’m confused,” she said. “If you don’t think it was the place—”
“I think the gun is going to have my prints on it but that it’s a setup. I think the whole location was staged.”
“Who would even be able to do that, though?” He was suggesting some kind of crazy conspiracy theory. And people who believed in all that were, well, kind of crazy, right? Backward Beatles records about Elvis. Smoke on the grassy knoll.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I know it sounds crazy. Maybe I’m wrong.”
She didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t even try. The surface of the pool shimmered like fish scales.
“What do you remember most about your childhood?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t even know where to start.” She recrossed her legs, switching which ankle was on top. Her bones hurt.
“Try.”
She closed her eyes. A few eager memories were already there, shouting pick-me-pick-me. “Playing with my neighbors, drinking nectar huckleberry blossoms. Riding our bikes. Playing at the beach. I remember being bored a lot. I remember sleepovers with my cousin . . . or actually I remember looking forward to them more than I even remember what we did. I remember having to get picked up from kindergarten because I fell during recess and hurt my knee really bad and couldn’t stop crying. I remember a lot of daydreaming. Wanting to be famous. Like a rock star or an Olympic figure skater. I think I only gave up on that last one last year.”
He sat up and sat sideways on his chair, smiling. “But what’s your single most vivid memory of your childhood?”
The memories quieted; none stepped forward. “I don’t know. I feel like I’ve been asked that before and wondered why it would matter?”
“It matters because I’m asking.”
“But what would it mean?”
“Just try. Most vivid.”
“I remember going to Mexico with my parents. They let me buy a pi?ata. It had its own seat on the plane home.”
“That’s not it. Try again.”
That panic started to peek around the corner again. This shouldn’t be hard. She had to remember. She said, “A vacation in Maine where I played video games in an ice-cream shop. It was the first time my parents let me go out on my own with my cousin.”
“Not it. Try again.”
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
Racing around her mind, grabbing at anything of value, like a Supermarket Memory Sweep. “Getting stung by a bee. I felt something on my leg and went to scratch it and got a handful of bee. I screamed.”
“You could just keep going and going, couldn’t you?”
“I don’t know. I guess?” It felt like they were having a fight and she wasn’t sure why. But yes, memories were lining up at the checkout now, waiting their turn.
That time she made a massive sand castle with her father, the way he’d taught her to drip sand to form towers.
The night her parents had a party and she and Max crept halfway down the stairs to peek at the dancing, at the wine being poured.
The time she fell down the back stairs, slid on her back, couldn’t breathe; the panic in her mother’s eyes.
The first time she went off the high diving board at the pool where she’d learned to swim, the way she’d felt like she’d never make it back up to the surface in time and might die.
If he hadn’t asked her, would she have remembered any of that ever again?
And if not, wasn’t that terrifying?
Lucas said, “You really can’t think of your most vivid memory?”
And something inside her snapped. “I remember The Leaving, okay? Is that what you want me to say?” It felt like she’d pulled a muscle she hadn’t even known she’d had. “I remember standing at the bus stop for like an hour. There was a tree there that I was trying to climb and I thought it was fun. But then the crying started and then my mom sobbed for days and nothing was even allowed to be fun for a long time. I remember being on the news in my pajamas. I remember that more than any good day or Christmas or birthday, okay?”
“You don’t even know how lucky you are.” He shook his head. “I want my life back.”
“So start living it.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“It is easy,” she said. “All anyone is trying to do is to move on from their own crappy situation or baggage.”
“There has to be more to life than that.”
“Says who?”
He looked at something far away. “On the way here, I was thinking these crazy things, like how we’re going to find some pill or magical cube. Something that will bring it all back, like my whole childhood will come rushing into me and I’ll feel complete again, like I can move on.”