Chapter 29

Don’t freak out.

Don’t freak out.

Do. Not. Freak. Out.

Luckily Stefan was more than happy to find his own way home. Bad enough feeling like my whole world was a carefully constructed piece of set design that was now collapsing all around me. I didn’t want anyone else privy to my inner devastation. Especially not him.

It was well into the evening by the time I pulled up in front of the cannery with my knuckles white on the wheel and my jaw on fire from grinding my molars together. Jacob was on the couch, going through the mail with his cheaters on, and I strode to the center of the living room and stood there like a big tangle of nerves, bursting with the urge to release my pent-up anger and frustration and not a damn place to channel it.

He slipped off the cheap glasses and crossed the room in a few strides, stopping just before me, as if an electrified force field was dancing between us and he was leery of getting zapped. “What’s wrong?”

Bad enough trying to find the words—now I was worried God-knows-who might be listening in. I turned on my heel and stomped to the kitchen, Jacob following, and grabbed a colander and a skillet out of the drying rack. I started banging them together like I was auditioning for a noise band, and the white cat with the black ear shot out from behind the fridge and blasted across the floor like he’d been rocket launched, then slipped down the basement stairs. “When was the FPMP founded?” I banged the skillet harder. “Because I just recovered a memory of someone erasing my fucking brain at least ten years before the news broke about the Ganzfeld Experiments.”

Jacob took my wrists and forced me to stop punishing our kitchenware. He set aside the pans, pressed his mouth to my ear and said, “Tell me what happened. From the beginning.”

Somehow, in whispers, I managed—even though reliving those damn memories was bad enough the first time around. “And the worst part is, the shrink visit after the hockey ghost wasn’t the first one. At that point, I already knew Kleinman. Who knows how many ghost sightings she’d wiped out by then?”

Jacob was kneading my hands in his so hard I was worried he’d rip a tendon, but I didn’t tell him to stop. At least the pain reassured me that I wasn’t crumbling, right along with all the disintegrating props I’d taken for real all this time.

“Listen,” Jacob said. “I’m not trying to minimize or negate a single word you’ve just told me, and remember that I am on your side, but what if there are aspects of the situation we don’t understand?”

“Aren’t there always?” I said bitterly.

“What if your childhood therapy was just therapy, and what if this Kleinman woman didn’t have any ulterior motive in her hypnosis? What if she saw you as a kid with an overactive imagination, a kid in distress, and was only trying to calm you down?”

And what if I’d just defaulted to the most nefarious explanation possible for my missing memories?

One thing I did know for sure…the reason my gut had been telling me Carl Hinds couldn’t have possibly had anything to do with our agents getting killed had nothing to do with anything I’d learned in homicide. It was the fact that he reminded me so much of Harold.

Jacob nearly laughed when I told him to double-check Carl’s whereabouts and start digging up his phone records, but one look at my face sobered him up soon enough. “I don’t know what his motive would be,” I said quickly, “and I hope to hell I’m wrong. But he’s always ducking out and acting cagey. I can’t vouch for his whereabouts when Agent Frank was murdered. And he seemed awfully keen on finding out what we knew about the incident at Veronica Lipton’s house.”

“Don’t worry,” he told me. “If Carl’s not our guy, that’s exactly what the evidence will prove.”

Not necessarily. After all, the evidence against Laura had been airtight. But the Carl matter was in Jacob’s hands now, and no amount of worrying on my part would do a damn bit of good.

I turned my attention back to the therapist. Had Kleinman been in cahoots with some top secret government agency, or as Jacob suggested, was she just a social worker trying to help a troubled kid? I considered each possibility as I went through the motions of my nighttime routine, eating and showering and refilling the giant bowl of kibble. Psych hadn’t been officially recognized yet, so as far as anyone knew I was either stunningly imaginative, or downright psychotic.

As I swept great drifts of scattered cat litter into the dustpan, I dredged up as many memories of Harold and Mama Brill as I could. Did I remember every moment of my life with them? No. But that didn’t seem terribly unusual, and the more I thought about them, the more detail emerged. Harold lecturing me about my grades…I was such a rotten student, even before the ghosts, his constant pressure might’ve been the only thing that kept me in school. And Mama Brill, a chunky Irish ex-hippie, pale and freckled, with a long reddish braid gone white at the temples hanging halfway down her back, gloriously weird in her thrift store muumuus. She’d drift into my room and perch on my bed as I struggled to study, and tell me to just chill and go with the flow, and everything would eventually work out. 

I was the last foster in a long line of kids who’d benefitted from Mama’s easygoing nature and Harold’s tough love. They were old enough to be my grandparents, and they occasionally talked about downsizing once I was out on my own, maybe buying an RV and seeing the country—though their dumpy brick bungalow held so many memories, I doubted they’d ever give it up.

By the time I climbed into bed with Jacob, I was heartsick and exhausted. I pulled up the covers and he curled against my back, stroking my hair. You’d think Mama would’ve been the one to do that when I was sick, sit on my bed and comfort me, but no, it was Harold. Jacob allowed me to sort and sift the memories, mostly good, in silence. But I returned to those sessions with Dr. Kleinman just as surely as I kept digging at my itchy eyes.

The hockey jersey ghost was seventh grade, and the shoe by the railroad tracks was eighth. Placing those two sightings in time felt accurate, because my disappointment in the cigarettes wasn’t the only reason I forged off on my own. I had no desire to take part in a conversation about whether or not girls would be “easy” in high school.

 I didn’t dwell on the shoe, even though I would’ve bet money that it was nothing so benign as a discarded piece of trash. I skirted around that incident. Around the session with Kleinman that helped me bury its memory, too, and I skipped ahead.

I couldn’t recall the shoe session itself, but I did remember what happened next. In the lobby where Harold should’ve been waiting for me with his unread magazine, I found a couple of beefy guys in dark suits instead. Social Services, they said.

Yeah. Right.

They put me in a dark sedan and drove me out to a place by O’Hare, a big seventies split-level on a lot and a half where I finished out the summer in a basement bedroom with vinyl wallpaper and shag carpet that smelled like mildew. New house. New family. And when the school year started, I was just another new freshman—a six-foot tall, nearly-sixteen freshman. I never saw Harold or Mama Brill again.

Jacob pressed his lips to my shoulder, then whispered, “Are you crying?”

“Allergies,” I lied.

When the gray tabby leapt onto the bed and started picking at the pillow beside my head, Jacob made to get up and shoo it away. “No, leave it,” I said. “If we shut it out in the hall, it’ll just scratch up the door.” And despite my heavy heart, eventually I drifted off to the feel of warm fur against my cheek, and the rattly sound of purring.

* * *

If I didn’t know Jacob better, I might presume that with his single-mindedness and lofty ideals, he’d encourage me to buck up and finish out my open investigations—keep the FPMP Regional Director happy, and make sure “Andy’s” coworkers didn’t end up dead. After all, it had been more than twenty years since I’d seen my beloved foster parents. What was a few more days?

He didn’t. When I woke up and told him I wasn’t doing squat until I figured out what had become of my family, he handed me a cool compress for my swollen eyes, and said, “You go do what you need to do. I’ll say you’re checking out a lead for me.”

I began my search online. Elaine Kleinman didn’t exist, big shock there—but I was really hoping to find my foster parents. Instead, I found obituaries. Some while back, Mama Brill—Brilliance Maguire Albert—died peacefully in her sleep after a long battle with cancer, at the age of seventy-eight. Harold Albert succumbed to a heart attack just over a year ago.

Losing both of them again so soon after I remembered them was bad enough. But the fact that Harold had died so recently felt like a heartbreaking near-miss. If only I’d had the backbone to face up to my past sooner.

If only.

Off the top of my head, I didn’t remember my old address, but my new phone led me to the middle school where other kids talked about girls while I kept my mouth shut about cruising teenage boys in the park. It looked smaller than I pictured it. From there, I backtracked along my school bus route. I had to retrace a few corners more than once, but in general I was surprised how minimally things had changed. The storefronts were different now, with so many cut-rate cell phone carriers between school and home that I lost count, but other than new signage and awnings, the sturdy brick buildings were the same. 

It took three passes for me to recognize my old home, but I did find it. The door had been painted a boring gray, the front lawn had a cheesy plastic swing set poking up from a hardened snow drift, and a sign in the window read, Little Wonder Daycare - Openings Available.

When I rang the doorbell, I briefly considered flashing my badge and demanding entry. That laminated card had worked well on the campus pseudocop, after all. But did I really need to cause that much fuss? I briefly considered acting like I was checking out the place for my child, but decided I was probably too old—or just too weird—to act convincingly like a guy with a preschooler.

In the end, when the frazzled-looking thirtyish Caucasian woman with the squalling kid on her hip answered the door, I told her the truth.

“So, I hope this isn’t too strange of me to ask, but I grew up in this house and was wondering if I could look around.”

She narrowed her eyes and said, “You’re from Child and Family Services, aren’t you?”

“No. Like I said, I grew up here.”

She cocked her head and invited me into the mudroom, not because she was being friendly, but because it was better than letting all the heat out. I stomped off my shoes and came inside.

The arched entryway to the living room was just like I remembered, but the space looked different with a puffy beige sectional dominating the room. Plus all the bright plastic toys. So many toys.

The woman planted herself in front of me. “You want to inspect me? Fine. Go ahead. I have nothing to hide.”

I wiped my feet on a damp doormat crusted in sidewalk salt. “I’m not with DCFS, so this isn’t an inspection. I was just hoping to take a quick look around.”

“Absolutely,” she said defensively. “Be my guest.”

Well…whatever got me into the house. I pulled out my fancy phone and keyed in absolutely nothing, and she shrank back to give me some space. The little kids ignored me. They were focused on dry cereal and cartoons.

The old formal dining room now held a second TV with another drippy kids’ show on it, and colorful vinyl playpens took up half the room’s real estate. The kitchen had been repainted a sedate yellow. Mama Brill’s hand-painted sunflower border was gone, along with her tie-dyed curtains, but the cabinets were the same. I paused in the doorway and pictured Harold sipping his coffee at the kitchen table while Mama tried to figure out where she’d left her keys, and I caught myself rubbing my eyes.

I went through, room by room, jarred by the sight of dated 90’s furniture where the dated 70’s furniture used to be. Plus all those damn toys. Three bedrooms, familiar from the hall, but strange once I got inside. Different paint, different furniture…different occupants. I was halfway down the basement stairs, with the woman yelling after me that I had no right to inspect it since it was not part of her square footage requirement, when I paused in surprise. No basement willies. None at all.

Yes, there was different junk down there, but more than any other room, it was the space that felt most like it had two and a half decades ago. The woodgrain paneling looked older and dingier than it had in my youth. But I’d loved that basement. It was my haven. Not that there were any other kids to get away from once Charles moved out, but I’d trash-picked enough furniture odds and ends to make it a rec room that was the envy of all my friends. There was the corner where I drew misshapen superhero comics on a wobbly old kitchen table. There was the spot where my beanbag chair burst into a drift of staticky white BBs. And there was the wall where an old turntable on a stack of milk crates played Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys and Ramones albums. 

I skimmed my fingertips across the paneling and felt the texture of an ancient anarchy symbol I’d carved with a dull butterfly knife. There were no spirits waiting in this house for me, just the ghost of my own past. And now that I really had a good look at it, I’d have to concede my home life was nowhere near as horrifying as I’d feared it might be.