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“I’ve never heard anything like it,” I say warily. She honestly doesn’t remember. I can think of only one person who’d benefit from her forgetting to leave her husband.
I dig around in my pocket and take out the memory charm. Give this to remember. It looks like an heirloom, something that might be passed on to a favored daughter-in-law to welcome her to the family. “My mother wanted you to have this,” I lie.
She shrinks back, and I remember that not everyone likes my mother. “Philip doesn’t like me to wear charms,” she says. “He says a worker’s wife shouldn’t look afraid.”
“You can hide it,” I say quickly, but the door’s already closing.
“Take care of yourself,” Maura says through the sliver of space that remains. “Good-bye, Cassel.”
I stand on the steps for a few moments with the charm still in my hand, trying to think. Trying to remember.
* * *
Memory is slippery. It bends to our understanding of the world, twists to accommodate our prejudices. It is unreliable. Witnesses seldom remember the same things. They identify the wrong people. They give us the details of events that never happened. Memory is slippery, but my memories suddenly feel slipperier.
* * *
After Lila’s parents divorced, she got dragged around Europe for a while, then spent several summers in New York with her father. I only knew where she was because her grandmother told my grandmother, so I was surprised to walk into the kitchen one day and see Lila there, sitting on the counter and talking to Barron like she’d never been gone.
“Hey,” she said, cracking her gum. She’d cut her hair chin length and dyed it bright pink. That and thick eyeliner made her look older than thirteen. Older than me.
“Scram,” said Barron. “We’re talking business.”
My throat felt tight, like swallowing might hurt. “Whatever.” I picked up my Heinlein book and an apple and went back to the basement.
I sat staring at the television for a while as an anime guy with a very large sword hacked up a satisfying amount of monsters. I thought about how much I didn’t care that Lila was back. After a while she came down the stairs and flopped onto the worn leather couch next to me. Her thumbs were stuck through holes in her mouse gray sweater, and I noticed a Band-Aid along the curve of her cheek.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“To see you. What do you think?” She gestured to my book. “Is that good?”
“If you like hot cloned assassins. And who doesn’t?”
“Only crazy people,” she said, and I couldn’t help smiling. She told me a little about Paris, about the diamond her father had bid on and won at Sotheby’s, which was supposed to have belonged to Rasputin and given him eternal life. About the way she’d had her breakfast on a balcony, drinking milky cups of coffee and eating bread slathered with sweet butter. She didn’t sound like she’d missed south Jersey very much, and I couldn’t blame her.
“So, what did Barron want?” I asked her.
“Nothing.” She bit her lip as she pulled all that pink hair into a sleek, tight ponytail.
“Secret worker stuff,” I said, waving my hands around to show how impressed I was. “Ooooh. Don’t tell me. I might run to the cops.”
She studied the warped yarn around her thumb. “He says it’s simple. Just a couple of hours. And he promised me eternal devotion.”
“That spends well,” I said.
Worker stuff. I still don’t know where they went or what she did, but when she got back, her hair was messed up and her lipstick was gone. We didn’t talk about that, but we did watch a lot of black-and-white caper movies in the basement, and she let me smoke some of the unfiltered Gitanes she’d picked up in Paris.
Poisonous jealousy thrummed through my veins. I wanted to kill Barron.
I guess I settled for Lila.
7
I GET BACK TO THE OLD house in time for dinner, which turns out to be goulash of some kind, thick with noodles and dotted with slivers of carrot and pearl onions. I eat three plates and wash it all down with black coffee as the cat winds around my ankles. I hand her down all the beef I can nonchalantly pick out.
“How’d the doctor’s visit go?” Grandad is drinking coffee too, and his hand shakes a little as he brings the cup to his lips. I wonder what else is in the cup.
“Fine,” I say slowly. I don’t want to tell him about the test or about Maura and her missing memories, but that leaves me with very little to say. “They hooked me up to a machine and wanted me to try and sleep.”
