Dad’s car is in front of our house. Mom’s and Caleb’s cars are there, too, which means they are all waiting for me.
I enter as quietly as I can, hoping, somehow, I’ll be able to slip upstairs without anyone noticing.
I almost make it. Dad has his back to me. He’s talking to my mother, his voice tired and gravelly, an indication that he hasn’t slept since arriving from work. Mom, her face in her hands, is on the couch farthest away from him.
It’s odd to see my parents in our living room, like we are five years in the past. What is different now is that the secret they’ve been keeping, the weight that has quietly torn our family apart, now sits exposed and obvious in the center of the room.
In this light, I wonder how I missed it. All the weird looks my family got over the years. I thought then that it was because of my mother’s mild celebrity or my parents’ breakup. Obviously, it was because people still remembered our tragedy. Most of them were too polite to say anything. Maybe they mentioned Rory at first and the name meant nothing to me. Or they said other things in a way I didn’t understand.
Let us know if you need anything and how are your parents doingcould mean anything. I’d wonder self-consciously,How do they know my dad hasn’t been home in three weekends?
Now my question is this: How did I never figure it out?
The answer, of course, slaps me right in the face, as it has been doing all day.
My parents quite literally hid it, wiped it clean from my mind.
And then I did it again to myself.
“Addie, how could you!” my mother exclaims, asking the very question that is haunting me, before I have a chance to get upstairs unnoticed. “You went to Overton on your own? Youliedto get your memory erased? Do you know how dangerous it is to have a procedure on yourmindwithout your full medical history? Do you know all the things that could easily have gone wrong and we wouldn’t have evenknownabout it? For a whole year?” Her voice is breaking. My mother has cried more in two days than she has in years.
I want to point out that the procedure seemed perfectly safe—convenient, even—whentheyhad it done on me, but I bite back my words. “Katy told you?”
She must have called and told them everything right after she left my car at school.
“Katy called me,” Mom says. “But when your father landed, he already had several missed calls from Overton. Apparently, some of the staff recognized you when you went in yesterday. After you left, they put together that you’d been there both as Addison and under that other name. They realized that if you were only seventeen now, you had to have been underage for the procedure last year. That the information they had for you under the other name didn’t add up. When they figured this all out, they only had your father’s cell phone number and the disconnected number from before we moved.”
“I came over as soon as I got into town,” Dad says now.
Which staff members recognized me?I wonder.The receptionist? The nurse with the streak?
“They can’t believe you’ve had two procedures,” Caleb says. “It’s really rare.”
“And now you’re hallucinating? Why didn’t you mention what was happening right away? Why would you do something like this?” Mom asks.
Dad looks at the wall behind me. Even now, with everything out in the open, he can’t force himself to look at me. It makes my chest hurt. It infuriates me.
“Why wouldyou?” I shoot back, since I can’t answer her question.I don’t know why I would.
Maybe it’s true that they succeeded in protecting me—I don’t remember my brother’s death—but they’ve also taken away the most valuable thing I had: the ability to know myself.
Dad surprises me by speaking then, instead of leaving it to Mom, as usual.
“Addie, there’s more to the story than you realize. But we can get to that later. Dr. Overton wants you to come in right away for a scan. When I called the clinic back, he said when you saw him, you didn’t tell him anything about the boy you were seeing.”
The boy.
Zach.
Zach, Zach, Zach.
I suddenly wish I was with him right now, my apparition. That I could tell him what his name is so he’d have a little bit more of himself.
Then a pang of something I can’t name slams into my chest. My parents know him, too—Katy told me that.
Zach.
He is my memory, and yet I’m the only one who doesn’t remember what happened. Who he is.
