The Vanishing Game (34 page)

After a while a doctor came up to me. He had kind eyes and his nametag said Dr. Brent Haberton. Motioning to a nurse, he asked her to take me to the waiting room. I followed the woman there but didn't go in, because Melody was there, sitting in a chair and crying. I couldn't tolerate being near my mother. Instead, I walked down a hallway and found a small, deserted chapel with darkened windows. I sat there for a long time, rocking back and forth, begging for Jack's life. The door opened, and I turned to see Melody come inside
.

“Jack is dead,” she said, weeping
.

I stared at her. I didn't believe it. “No,” I whispered in a low, dreadful croak
.

“First Calvert and now Jack,” she sobbed. “I've lost the only two people I ever really loved.”

How could she speak those two names in the same breath?
I stared at her with cold disgust. She grabbed my arm and said, “The police are here. I saw them at the desk. We've got to get out before they try and talk to us!”

I jerked free and slapped her so hard across the face that my palm hurt. She staggered back, surprised out of her tears. At fourteen I was taller than her, though until now she was never afraid of me. But the look on my face must have been terrible because she edged away
.

“You killed Jack,” I hissed, spitting words as if they were stones breaking my teeth. “He's dead because of you! I'm going to tell the police what you did to him. And if you stay here or ever try to see me again, I'll tell them what you did to Calvert and that lady.”

Melody gaped at me. She forgot her tears for Jack, even forgot her tears for the stupid boyfriend who had dumped her. She turned and rushed away, leaving me alone in the gloomy chapel. I sank down on the bench. There was nothing left in me, only a tattered soul with no seed of hope and no reason to live. I longed to be with Jack, and I loathed myself for grabbing the dashboard and saving my life. We had always been two parts of a whole. I didn't know how I could survive without him
.

The door to the chapel opened. I turned around, ready to lunge at Melody if she was back. Instead, an old woman walked up to me. She had papery skin and a halo of wispy hair. A cross rested atop her purple blouse next to a name tag that said VOLUNTEER, and she looked at me with sorrowful green eyes that seemed to understand. She asked if she could sit beside me, but I didn't answer. She sat down anyway. Then she told me about losing her son to cancer here in this hospital. She said many things in a gentle voice. I hardly heard them
.

After a while she stopped talking and we sat together in silence
.
As always, my thoughts cried out to Jack. I begged him to tell me that he was still alive, that this cruelest of all hoaxes wasn't real
.

“You know,” the lady said at last, “one thing I've learned is that you'll always have him with you.”

I turned to look at her and she reached out with her slender old-woman fingers, touching my temple. “You'll always have him here,” she said, and then moved her fingers to my heart. “And here.”

After a while she left me alone with my grief, and I sat unmoving inside the gloomy chapel. Her last few words kept repeating themselves in my mind. As I raised my eyes to the dark window, I saw Jack's dim reflection. Standing, I turned around, hardly able to believe he was there after all. There wasn't a mark on his forehead, no misery in his eyes, and he smiled at me
.

“Don't cry, Jocey,” I heard him say inside my head. His lips didn't move and his smile never wavered. “She's right, you know. I'll always be with you, in your mind and in your heart.”

I drifted up from the depths of slowly returning consciousness. I heard Noah's voice. His mellow tone had always drawn me in, and I let my mind travel in that direction.

“I just don't see how this can be true. I talked to Jack all the time.”

“But only on the computer, right?” Sam Marvin said. “You never got together in person, did you?”

“No.” His tone held an awkward uncertainty.

“But you weren't living that far away from each other. Didn't you want to see him?”

“Sure. We even made plans. At first I asked to visit him and Jocelyn, and meet their foster family. Jack said she didn't want to. So he and I planned for him to come here, but then stuff just kept happening.”

“Like what, exactly?”

“Car trouble. An unexpected family trip … and then he got strep throat.” Noah's voice turned sour. “But Jack e-mailed me photos of himself.”

“Probably age-enhanced. She was very skilled with digital photo editing. And Jack really wanted to have your friendship. He did whatever it took to keep your online communication going.”

“You're not making any sense! Are you talking about Jocelyn or Jack?”

“Both, because they're the same person.”

“That's absurd!”

“Let me explain. Jack died in a car accident the year after he and Jocelyn left Watertown. They were both just fourteen. Unable to deal with that terrible loss, Jocelyn erased the memory of his death and then internalized his personality within herself. It's similar to multiple personality disorder. Being twins, and as close as she and Jack were, it was easy for her to embrace his identity. That way she could keep him alive.

“So you see, when Jack worked for us, it might have been in Jocelyn's body, but she has no memory of the things he was doing. It's almost like she gave some of her brain to him, which she doesn't know anything about. Likewise, when Jocelyn was involved with her own activities, Jack's
personality wasn't present. His part of the mind was always aware of what she was doing. In a lot of ways it's like two separate beings sharing one body. He was the programmer, she was the graphic artist. Though she's the one who created them, of course. It's hard to grasp what a truly brilliant mind she has.”

“How did you find this out?”

Sam Marvin hesitated. “The private investigating firm I use for background checks is very thorough. They were able to lay hands on a copy of her therapy file.”

“You had no right to do that.”

“Hang on—Jack knew.”

“What?”

“He was starting to distrust his therapist and wanted to know what Dr. Candlar was writing in his file. In fact, he okayed our getting it. Especially since I assured him he had an important future with our company.”

“But what about Jocelyn, Sam? Look at what's happening to her.”

They were silent for several seconds, and I drifted back down into darkness, terrified to hear more.

I stood outside a tattoo shop, trying to summon the courage to go through the door. When I finally stepped inside, Beth was there. She was tattooed and pierced in ways fantastic and bizarre, her red hair buzzed as short as a man's. At first, as I pretended to look at the display case, she just stared. She couldn't believe it was me
.

Eventually I bought one of the knives, which softened her up
.
I chose a design from her books, asking her to tattoo an
X
over the small recent scar on my lower abdomen. Beth was delighted to use her needles on me. It created a bond that hadn't existed when we were kids. I lay in the reclining chair while she talked in a soothing way that was a total contrast to her tough appearance. We chatted away and I never felt a thing, which impressed her all the more. Before I left the shop, I asked her to hold on to the original
X
pattern, promising to come back for it
.

“You can't blame us,” Sam Marvin was saying the next time I woke up. “Do you have any idea what would've happened if Paul Gerard sold that list of passwords to the buyer who wanted them? Once he stole it from us, he also destroyed our other copies. We had no way to protect our clients.”

“Spy on them, don't you mean?” Noah sounded irritated. “Listen, I don't care about your problems. What bothers me is that you were willing to put her in danger.”

“It didn't seem that big a deal. We assumed Jack was handling his run-in with Gerard okay. The next thing we knew, he sent us a phony death report and disappeared. Jocelyn had no idea about any of it, either. She truly believed Jack had died. We didn't want to lose the data she stole back from Gerard but couldn't figure out where she'd hidden it. Then she drove up here to Watertown earlier this
week. We were sure she was going to the place where she'd stashed it. Instead, she started following you.”

“Following me? Trying to find Jack, because to her he's real?”

“Right.”

I lay still, listening to the conversation. Inside me was a tight knot of grief for Jack. The pain was as fresh as the day it happened, all the horror of what Melody had done to him weighing heavily on me. And yet there was a difference between accepting this loss now and accepting it back then. I had become stronger—more able to withstand the heartbreak that would have destroyed me when I was fourteen. Something in me—maybe spurred on by the danger from ISI—must have known that this was the time to let go.

For weeks now, I realized, Jack had been tearing himself away from me. I thought about school. The counselor had called me into her office because my English teacher, Ms. Chen, had noticed that all my poems were about death, loss, and grief. She showed them to the counselor.

“My brother died, so why shouldn't I be sad?” was all I would say. After that I refused to talk about it, explaining I had my own therapist outside of school.

Everyone, including my foster parents and friends, seemed concerned because of how depressed I acted. But they were all clueless about what was really happening inside me. In some twisted mental way, I had come to believe that Jack's death had taken place mere weeks ago—not years in the past.

Slowly opening my eyes, I blinked to clear my vision. I sat up and my head throbbed.

Noah came and knelt on the floor beside me, trying to hide his unease. “How are you feeling?”

Sam Marvin said, “Zach, get her a drink of water, will you?”

Zachary Saulto was focused on his laptop. He glanced at me with a closed expression before heading down the hall. I heard him turn on the faucet in the bathroom.

“Are you okay, Jocey?” Noah asked.

“Apparently not.” I felt humiliated by the truth of what I really was.
Oh, Jack!
I sobbed inside. The loss of my brother was a pain I physically felt.

Saulto came back. He squatted down and held out a glass of water. “Here you go, Jaclyn.”

“Jocelyn,” I corrected.

“Jocelyn … Jaclyn … Jack. It's all the same thing, isn't it?”

The glass shattered in his hand. Startled, he dropped it and stood, cursing and holding a cut finger.

“That's enough, Zach,” Sam Marvin said. He turned to me. “Please stay calm, Jocelyn. I know this is all very confusing. If you could just let me talk to Jack for a minute, I really want to ask what's going on with him.”

There was a loud crack and the mirror exploded, raining glass onto the floor with a tinkling sound.

He looked at me with a firm expression. “You've got to stop.”

After a silence that lasted several seconds, Noah said, “What's going on?”

“Don't you know? You're the one who used to live with her. She has telekinetic abilities.”

I shook my head. “That's a lie.”

“It's time you accept the truth, Jocelyn. Who do you think kept stopping the fires at Seale House when you were kids? Or blew up those lightbulbs in the lamps the night you left? And what do you think saved you from Gerard this morning?”

Could he be right? The rational part of my mind pushed the thought away.

Noah glared at Sam Marvin. “Wait a minute! Even if that's true, how could you possibly know all that stuff?”

Sam didn't answer.