Unremembered (12 page)

‘I need your help.’

He snorts. ‘Forget it.’

‘Please, Cody.’

‘In case you haven’t heard,’ he begins, his tone more venomous than I’ve ever heard it, ‘in case you happen to have already
forgotten
the conversation that
happened outside yesterday, I’m grounded. Like for life. All thanks to you. So if you think I’m going to help you again—’

‘I just need to use the Internet,’ I interrupt.

His eyes narrow suspiciously. ‘The Internet?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re not going to ask me to take you to Guam or something.’

‘No.’ I pause, considering. ‘Unless the Internet is better there.’

Cody is silent for a brief moment and then he breaks into laughter. ‘Was that a joke? Did the infamous amnesiac supermodel actually make a
joke
?’

It wasn’t a joke. But I know better than to admit that because whatever I said clearly seems to have lightened his dark mood. So I smile and shrug my shoulders.

Cody closes his magazine, which I can now see is titled
Popular Science
, and slides off his bed. ‘Fine,’ he says with a heavy sigh. ‘You can borrow my laptop.’
He grabs a thin, rectangular metal device from the desk in the corner, tucks it under his arm, and motions for me to follow him. ‘C’mon. I’ll set it up in your room and teach you
how to use it. But don’t go looking at any porn on here. My parents have one of those cyber-nanny tracking services set up and they can see everything I look at.’ He cringes. ‘I
learned that one the hard way.’

He steps through the bathroom and into my room. I follow closely behind. ‘What is porn?’ I ask.

He chuckles and sets the laptop on my bed. ‘It’s . . . You know what? Never mind.’

He sits down and I stand over him as he flips open the device, revealing a dark screen and a black-and-silver keyboard.

‘Is this a computer?’ I ask, watching with fascination as he presses a small round button and the entire machine illuminates.

Cody flashes me a funny look. ‘Yeah.’

We wait as the screen cycles through a series of images and text. Cody’s eyes dart nervously up at me, taking in my new dress. ‘You look . . . nice, by the way.’

I smile and say thank you because it seems like the appropriate response.

He steals another peek. ‘That dress is . . .’ he starts, but his face colours and he looks away. ‘Well . . . it fits. Which is a nice change. That’s all.’

I smooth the soft purple fabric with my hands. ‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘It fits very well.’

Cody clears his throat. ‘So anyway, you type whatever you want into this little box,’ he explains hastily, pointing to the screen, ‘and Google will show you everything there is
to know about the subject.’

He pulls the computer towards him. ‘Like this for example.’ He types in:

Freedom Airlines flight 121, survivor

He presses a key marked ‘Enter’. Instantly the screen morphs into a list of results. Halfway down the page there’s a row of photographs. Of me. I recognize one as the picture
they showed on the news, and the rest appear to have been taken when I was walking from the hospital to the car the day I was released.

The day I saw the boy in the crowd.

‘Change it,’ I tell Cody urgently. ‘Put in something else. Please.’

He studies my face curiously for a moment before finally yielding. ‘OK,’ he says. ‘What did you want to look up?’

I lower my gaze. ‘Something I think I might have remembered but I’m not sure what it is.’

His eyebrows rise in interest. ‘No kidding? What was it?’

I take a deep breath and let my mind drift back to the dressing room. Although I don’t want to repeat it, I have to know what it means.

‘“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,”’ I recite, fully expecting Cody to display the same befuddled expression that I had when I first heard the
words, and to confirm what I’ve believed since then: that they don’t mean anything.

But he doesn’t.

Instead he laughs.

‘What?’ I ask, affronted.

‘That’s the first memory you’ve had!?’ He laughs harder.

I don’t understand why this is humorous. And I don’t appreciate his amusement either. ‘Yes. Why are you laughing?’

He wipes his eyes. ‘Sorry. I just find it totally messed up that you can’t remember what the Internet is but you know the words to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116.’

My eyes widen in surprise. ‘Shakespeare’s what?’

‘It’s a famous poem.’

I feel somewhat disappointed. A
poem.
Why would I remember a poem? Of all things? ‘Well, what does it mean?’ I ask impatiently.

Cody rolls his eyes. ‘It’s some sappy crap about eternal love or something.’ He sticks his finger in his mouth and makes a gagging sound with his throat.

Eternal love?

I think of the locket sitting in the top drawer of my dresser. Two hearts, intersecting at their cores.

‘How do you know it?’ I ask.

‘We studied Shakespeare in school last year.’

‘So it’s possible that’s where I learned it too?’ I ask, my hopes instantly rising. ‘In school?’

Not in some sinister lab.

Just a regular, everyday school.

He shrugs. ‘Probably. Girls totally dig that mushy stuff. So I guess I’m not surprised you remember it.’ He contemplates for a second. ‘Or you could have been a serious
history buff or something.’

This piques my interest. ‘History?’

‘Yeah,’ Cody says, as though it was obvious. ‘That poem was written like four hundred years ago.’

My blood starts to pump faster as my mind automatically does the math. ‘Four hundred years ago,’ I repeat. ‘In what year?’

He shrugs again. ‘I don’t know. Sixteen something.’

‘Sixteen
what
?’ I demand, surprised by the intensity in my own voice.

Cody shoots me a look of contempt. ‘Chill out. I don’t know.’

Exasperated, I gesture towards the computer. ‘Well, can you look it up?’

He throws his hands in the air. ‘Fine, fine. Calm down.’

As he starts typing, my leg bounces nervously. Cody shoots me another strange look.

The screen morphs into a page of text. An illustration of a man with puffy black hair and a white collared shirt appears under the name ‘William Shakespeare’.

‘OK, let’s see.’ Cody leans in. ‘Sonnet 116. It says here, first published in –’ his eyes quickly scan the page – ‘1609.’

Heather says Scott wants us to meet him in town for dinner.
We’re going to go to something called a restaurant. Cody explains from the back seat of the
car that it’s what people do when they don’t want to cook at home. Or when they want better food than what their mother can make.

Heather gives him a bitter look in the rear-view mirror. ‘Just be grateful we’re bringing you at all, Cody.’

He crosses his arms and makes a
pff
sound with his lips.

‘Your father and I are still extremely disappointed in you.’

‘Whatever,’ is his reply.

At the restaurant, Heather shows me how to order from a menu and recommends a few items she thinks I would like. I finally decide on something called baked ziti because Heather says it shares an
ingredient with the delicious sandwich she made for me a few days ago.

And although the dish is very good – unbelievably good – I can’t fully enjoy it. My mind is distracted. The events of the day are replaying on an endless loop.

‘Did you have fun shopping today?’ Scott asks me after he sucks a long noodle into his mouth.

‘Yes,’ I lie.

I seem to be doing a lot of that lately. I wonder if it’s somehow indicative of who I used to be.

‘We got some really adorable stuff,’ Heather adds. ‘It was so much fun to be able to shop for a girl for a change.’

Across the table, I see Cody roll his eyes. He’s fully engaged with something on his phone.

I’m not very talkative and soon the conversation shifts to the topic of Scott’s work. I’m grateful to have the time to myself to think.

Why am I reciting poetry from the year 1609?

Why do I have a locket with that very year engraved on the back?

Why is it the first thing I said when they pulled me from the ocean?

And why is that boy –
Zen
– the only one who seems to know anything about any of it?

I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know who to trust. I can’t even trust my own mind. I want to crawl under this table and never resurface. I want to swim into the sea and
never turn around. I just want to escape.

After dinner, we step out into the warm summer-night air. It feels fresh and rejuvenating on my skin. The sun has already set and I can smell the faint traces of the ocean a few miles away.
Scott takes Cody in his car, saying something about making a quick stop at the drugstore, and I go with Heather.

She navigates the twisty dark road that leads to the house, the headlights illuminating only a few feet of the way ahead of us. As we near the driveway, I notice a man walking up the hill from
the other direction. Heather spots him a good five seconds later and slows the car.

I find it odd for someone to be walking alone in the dark but it doesn’t seem to bother her. She simply smiles and waves. The same way she always does when she passes pedestrians. On the
way to the supermarket the other day she explained that it’s something people do in small towns: they wave to each other.

But the man doesn’t wave back.

As the car comes closer, his eyes lock on me and my heart leaps into my throat.

I recognize him.

He’s tall, with bright auburn hair and a matching beard.

I saw him yesterday. He was on the bus Cody and I rode from the airport to the bus station.

In
Los Angeles.

Nearly two hundred miles away.

So what is he doing
here
? In
this
town? On
this
street?

Heather seems completely oblivious to my reaction and the strangeness of the situation. Meanwhile my brain is scrambling for an explanation. When I saw him staring at me on the bus, I assumed he
recognized me from the news. So I lowered my baseball cap and turned around.

But I can’t do that now.

I can’t just turn away and ignore him.

I observe him carefully until we pass and then I whip my head around and continue to study him through the back window. He’s stopped walking. He stands in the middle of the road, watching
Heather’s car as it turns into the driveway.

I fumble with the ramifications. Whoever this man is now knows where the Carlsons live. Where
I
live.

Chances are, he’s just another one of those media-hungry people that Kiyana warned me about in the hospital. Chances are, he just wants a photograph of the girl who fell from the sky and
lived to tell the tale.

But it’s not
these
options that cause my stomach to tie in knots.

It’s those
other
options. The ones I don’t know about. The ones my imagination creates.

‘There are people looking for you, and trust me when I say, you do
not
want them to find you.’

A strange sensation floods through my body. My muscles are tingling. Almost as though they’re warming up for something.
Anticipating
. My arms and legs vibrate. My head feels light.
Almost dizzy. My fingers twitch.

I eye the car door, feeling a sudden urge to shove it open, leap from the moving vehicle and run. Run until I’m far away from here.

I grow antsy. Jittery. My legs burn. Like there’s a fire lashing inside them. I can’t make sense of what I’m feeling. I can’t think. All I know is I have to get out of
here. I have to get out of this car.
Now!

My breathing has become ragged and fast. But Heather doesn’t seem to notice. She continues to steer the car down the long driveway towards the house. We’re almost there. Only a few
more seconds. My whole body is trembling now. I rest my shaking hand on the door.

When the car finally pulls to a stop, I yank swiftly on the handle and kick open the door, readying myself to run. But I’m stopped by a startling noise. A horrible crunching, grating
sound. Like metal ripping and glass shattering.

Heather gasps and drops the box of leftovers she brought home from the restaurant, splattering red pasta sauce everywhere.

I glance down. The entire car door is lying on the asphalt driveway.

Night has long since fallen but the house is still awake.

Cody is in his room. I hear the soft patter of his fingertips. I believe he’s playing another game on his cellphone. Heather and Scott are having a heated conversation in their bedroom one
floor below.

And I lie on my bed . . . listening.

I can tell by their hushed whispers that they don’t want anyone to overhear their discussion. But I don’t seem to have a problem. I hear it as easily as if they were standing at the
foot of my bed.

Heather is really upset about the car-door incident. She hasn’t said as much to me but I can tell. She acts differently around me now. Almost skittish. And as soon as Scott returned home
from the drugstore, she ushered him into their bedroom and closed the door. I haven’t seen either of them since.

Even if I couldn’t hear them right now, it wouldn’t be difficult to surmise that they’re talking about me.

But fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately) I can.

‘You should have seen it, Scott,’ Heather is saying. ‘One minute the door was there. The next it was lying on the ground. She kicked the whole thing off like it was made of
tinfoil. Don’t you find that just a little bit odd?’

‘I think you’re blowing this whole thing out of proportion,’ Scott tells her. ‘There’s obviously an explanation for it. Did you ever stop to think that maybe the
door was already loose? That something was wrong with the hinge and it just happened to fall off at the same time that she opened it.’