Stay With Me (2 page)

1

Nine hours earlier

The waiting room still smelled the same—stale coffee and Pine-Sol. Or maybe it was the memory she had just pushed out of her mind that was still tugging at her, the smell of it lingering. It was never easy for Brenna Spector to unweave the past from the present, but it was especially hard here, in the waiting room of her former child psychiatrist, which—outside of the collection of
Nick Jr.
magazines and
Teen Vogue
s in the rack next to the huge blue beanbag chair—hadn’t changed at all since the last time Brenna had been in here: April 29, 1988,
a rainy Friday . . .

Brenna unzipped her bag for what felt like the thousandth time this afternoon. She slipped her hand in, touched the cover of the journal.
Stay here
.

No doubt Dr. Lieberman believed his young patients found the lack of change comforting. But while Brenna was sure that this was true for the majority of them, it was quite the brain assault for someone with hyperthymestic syndrome. Brenna had been afflicted (or “blessed,” depending on your opinion) with the condition since she was eleven, and it forced (“enabled”?) her to remember every single day of her life down to the date and in perfect detail, with all five senses. Most anything could trigger a memory so vivid, it was as though she was reliving it. But going back to her childhood shrink’s office after twenty years and having it look and smell exactly the same? Come on.

Brenna couldn’t decide whether it felt more like a bizarre experiment being conducted on her by a sadist, or the world’s worst episode of
Punk’d
. But either way, the place was throwing more flashbacks at Brenna than whole season’s worth of telenovelas, and she wished she could wait anywhere else in the building—the lobby, the stairwell, the janitor’s closet. Anywhere.

Brenna had to be here, though, because her daughter needed help. Said like that, it sounded dramatic, but the fact was, Brenna’s life was dramatic. At least, it had been lately. For more than ten years, Brenna had been a private investigator specializing in missing persons cases—a job that, for a long while, had been mostly dull and researchy, spiked with occasional bouts of revelation and danger. But ever since this past autumn, Brenna had been on something of a revelation/danger streak, which had clearly taken its toll on Maya.

At least that’s what Brenna had assumed.

A week ago, over dinner, Maya had taken a bite of her chicken Parmigiana and scrunched up her face in a way that had made Brenna think maybe she hadn’t cooked it long enough.

“You okay, honey?”

“Yeah. It’s just . . .”

“Yes?”

“I think I need to see a shrink.”

“You want to see a psychiatrist?”

“You used to see one when you were a kid. How about him?”

“But why?”

“I . . . I just want to talk to somebody.”

Maya hadn’t gone into any more detail than that, and Brenna hadn’t pushed. Brenna had never said,
You can talk to me
, because even if she hadn’t remembered her own adolescence as acutely as she did, Brenna knew the situation well enough to understand that as far as this particular topic was concerned, the idea of confiding in Mom was about as appealing to Maya as anesthesia-free liver surgery with a side of Brussels sprouts.

Two weeks earlier, in Brenna’s apartment, Maya had been held at knifepoint by a crazy person. She’d pretended it hadn’t affected her, but really, who wouldn’t want to see a shrink after that? Who wouldn’t have nightmares? And who the hell would want to talk to her mother about it, when, if it hadn’t been for her mother’s aforementioned revelation/danger streak, there wouldn’t have been a crazy, knife-wielding person in the apartment to begin with?

So Brenna hadn’t asked questions. The following day, after Maya had left for school, she’d picked up the phone and tapped in the same number she’d last dialed on her mother’s robin’s egg blue rotary on May 4, 1988.
I’m a former patient of Dr. Lieberman’s
, she had said to the unfamiliar-sounding receptionist over the phone.
And my daughter needs help.

Maya had been in with Dr. Lieberman for forty-five minutes. And at the risk of sounding like Brenna’s own mother, who unreasonably expected her daughter to have developed a newfound “appreciation and acceptance” of her perfect memory every time she walked out of a session, Brenna hoped Maya was cured. She hoped, during those forty-five minutes, that Lieberman had said something—anything—to bring her back to her old self, that reasonably well-adjusted kid she was before the night of December 21, the kid whose deepest, darkest secret was the worn childhood copy of
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
she’d stolen out of a to-be-donated-to-the-library box and kept hidden in the back of her bookshelf.

I’m sorry
,
Maya
, Brenna thought.
I’m so sorry . . .

She’d had no idea crazy DeeDee Walsh would show up at her apartment when Maya was there alone. If Brenna had known that, she would have dropped the entire case, forgotten all about it, no matter how much it had to do with finding her sister. Nothing—not even Brenna’s twenty-eight-years-missing sister—was worth rushing back to her apartment at 8
P.M.
on December 21 after receiving crazy DeeDee’s text. Nothing was worth the feeling of unlocking her own door with that texted picture in her mind—DeeDee’s knife at Maya’s throat,
Brenna’s hand shaking as she slips the key in, her heart pounding up into her neck, sweat trickling down her back . . .

Stop
.
Stay here
. Brenna reached into her bag again and touched the journal. She pulled it out and opened it, slowly turning the pages, not reading them so much as looking at the letters, the soft indent where the pen had moved against the thin paper, the swirls at the ends of the Ys and Js. She imagined her sister’s hand, Clea’s hand, holding the pen, and that kept her here.

Ironic, wasn’t it? Clea, whose disappearance had been the traumatic event to trigger Brenna’s hyperthymesia in the first place. Clea—well, an artifact of Clea, anyway—keeping Brenna in the present.

The journal had turned up in Brenna’s mailbox four days ago, in a padded brown envelope with no note, no return address, and a Los Angeles postmark. She’d known who it was from and what was inside. She’d even seen Xeroxed versions of the handwritten pages. But still, when she’d opened it, Brenna had gasped.
Her journal.
The journal Clea had kept for years, before and after Brenna had watched her get into that blue car at dawn, a man she couldn’t see behind the wheel but whose voice she could hear, deep and resonant.

You look so pretty, Clee-bee
.

A man whose name was Bill. Brenna had learned this from the journal, which began when Clea was thirteen years old and ended one month after her disappearance at seventeen. So strange that he would have such a prosaic name, this shadow that haunted Brenna’s dreams, her life. Over the years, Brenna had called him so many names in her mind—The Big Bad Wolf, He Who Shall Not Be Named, Voldemort—never Bill.

Clea hadn’t revealed his last name in the journal, or why, two weeks after running off with this man she’d more than once referred to as My Great Love, she’d hit the road and started hitchhiking on her own.
I’m free now
, was all she had written on the topic.
Free and alive and hopeful, at last
.

Brenna still couldn’t bring herself to read parts of the journal. (When you remember everything you read word for word, you need to be careful.) But the pages Brenna
was
able to read consistently surprised her.

Clea had loved so many boys—loved them deeply and thoroughly and with every inch of her heart and soul—yet when the journal was being written, Brenna hadn’t known about any of them. There was her sister in her pink room with the pink shag carpet, Clea with her Elvis Costello records blasting and her Adam Ant poster on the wall. There was Clea, repeatedly telling Brenna to “stop snooping on me, weirdo.” And there was Brenna, always snooping, always spying, thinking,
I know her better than anyone. Whether she likes it or not, I do.

It had taken Brenna twenty-eight years and the strange emergence of this journal to finally realize that she
hadn’t
known her sister better than anyone.

She hadn’t known her sister at all.

Was Clea with one of those boys now? Was she alive and well, or had she perished twenty-eight years ago, one month after her disappearance, her life ending with this journal? Brenna was beginning to doubt she’d ever be able to answer that question. As close as she’d come to finally finding her sister, she still knew nothing about Clea—not from an investigative standpoint anyway. In her journal, Clea never mentioned last names. And on top of that, Clea was so given to bouts of fantasy, Brenna never could be sure which entries were real and which were 1980s-style fan fiction . . .

But Brenna did have this journal, which for whatever reason was enough to yank her out of her memories. She didn’t need any of the things she used to rely on—rubber bands snapping against her wrists, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or the Lord’s Prayer, digging her fingernails into her palms or squeezing her eyes shut like someone in the throes of seizure. All Brenna needed now to stay anchored in the present was the weight of this journal in her hands, the blue faux leather cover, gold-embossed with “My Diary.” All she needed was her sister’s handwriting, the loops and swirls of it, the bright blue and purple and red ink and all those capital letters and exclamation points, all that barely contained teenage excitement, running up and down the pages. Proof of life, Clea’s life.

Maybe that was enough.

The waiting room door pushed open. Brenna closed the journal and dropped it back into her bag and looked up at Maya, Dr. Lieberman standing behind her, a benign smile taped to his face.

“All better?” Brenna winced. “Did I really just say that?”

Maya said, “Yes. Out loud. Unfortunately.”

Lieberman smiled. “Your daughter takes after you.”

“Don’t tell her that. She’ll cry.”

Maya said nothing. Brenna watched her face. Ever since Maya had asked to see a shrink, Brenna had found herself doing that—staring at her daughter the way you’d stare at a kaleidoscope, looking for the slightest shift in the clear blue eyes.

Lieberman patted Maya on the shoulder. “She has your dry sense of humor, Brenna—that’s what I meant,” he said. “Maybe next week, we’ll get past the jokes and start talking.”

Like his waiting room, the doctor had changed very little in the past twenty years. He still had the pinkish cheeks, the toothy smile, the kind, easy voice. Lieberman had always reminded Brenna of an oversized rabbit come to life, and that was even more pronounced now, with his hair gone mostly white.

Brenna looked at Lieberman’s tie. Mustard yellow, with little hot dogs and hamburgers all over it. Yep, the fashion sense hadn’t changed, either.

“That okay with you?” she asked Maya.

Maya cracked a smile. A hopeful little smile, nothing sarcastic about it, and for a moment, Brenna was dropping her off for her first day of kindergarten—Maya in her pink corduroy jeans and her purple and pink plaid T-shirt, her pink sneakers from Old Navy and her furry orange coat—an outfit she’d chosen herself.
Maya hugging Brenna good-bye on the steps of PS 102, Maya smelling of strawberry shampoo, soft yellow hair at Brenna’s cheek, the glass doors looming so big behind her . . .

“Chamomile,” Dr. Lieberman was saying to Maya, his voice yanking Brenna back from that morning, that sweet, pink morning. It had been September 4, 2001—exactly one week before the attacks—but at the time, it was just another date for Brenna to remember, one among thousands jammed into her head and significant only as a start. A good start.

My daughter, growing up . . .

“Yeah,” Maya said. “I like all kinds of tea.”

Brenna turned to find Maya watching her.

“Try a cup of chamomile before you go to sleep, with a teaspoon of honey and some milk,” Dr. Lieberman said.

Brenna cleared her throat. “Why?”

“Maya’s been having a little insomnia,” he said. “Nothing to worry about.”

“I didn’t know that,” Brenna said to Maya.

Her gaze dropped to the floor.

“See you next week,” Lieberman said. “Same Bat Time, same Bat Channel.”

“Huh?”

Brenna said, “That line wasn’t even timely when he said it to me.”

“When did I say it to you?”

“December 8, 1982; February 21, March 9, and September 16, 1983; February—”

“Okay, okay.” Lieberman sighed. “I am officially retiring the line.”

“You’ve said that before, too.”

Lieberman smiled, shook his head. “Some things never change.”

“Most things,” Brenna said.

“That right?”

She gave the waiting room a pointed once-over. “Yep.”

Lieberman shrugged. “I’ll have to take your word for that.”

“You can’t sleep?” Brenna said, once she and Maya were in the elevator and heading down. It had been the first thing she’d said to her since leaving Lieberman’s office, Brenna trying dozens of different ways to make a phrase out of what she’d been thinking.

Maya shrugged. “No big deal.” She gazed up at the blinking numbers and, for some reason, smiled. “It’s only been a couple of nights.”

For several seconds, Brenna watched her daughter, a lump forming in her throat. “Maya?”

She looked at her.

Just say it
. “You can tell Dad.”

“Huh?”

Brenna cleared her throat. “You can tell him about what happened . . . on December 21.”

“December . . .”

Brenna closed her eyes. “It was wrong of me to tell you to keep that from him,” she said. “You can’t keep things from your father, even if those things make me look irresponsible.”

“Mom.”

“I shouldn’t have left you alone that night. That never should have happened to you. You were in my care and I let you down.”