Walking around the house I grew up in makes sickness stir.
Max brought me back here to get clean clothes from my suitcase and offered to take me to his mother’s while he cooks us something to eat in there, but I refused.
I didn’t like her old, knowing eyes boring into me.
Scooping my hair up into a messy bun, I look around at the dust and debate asking Max to take me to the store for some cleaning products.
I already know I don’t want to stay here though, and cleaning up old mess created by people I should never have wanted to remember has lost its appeal.
Walking back to the room where the beds and dried blood was, I force myself to open the door to shock myself into remembering something. Anything.
Thud…
What the hell?
The room is empty. No beds, no carpet, no blood. Stepping inside the room, I spin in the empty space, convincing myself that it’s my mind spinning and not the room. There’s nothing here.
Where did it go?
Old curtains hang at the windows, ratty and torn in diluted shades of blue, but that’s the only thing in the room.
Bare floorboards covered in a light littering of dirt stare up at me, the particles lifting into the air from my disturbance of their resting place.
Pushing my feet to move back into the corridor, my chest tightens and the ribcage cracks, crushing the organs beneath.
I look around the house, combing through every inch, marching towards the living space.
Nothing.
No furniture, just my suitcase sitting alone in the center of the room.
Old wallpaper rotting and peeling hangs on the walls and a mirror caked in a century worth of grime takes center position over the fireplace.
What the hell is going on?
Trepidation filters into my bloodstream, the unhealthy tremble bites into my fingertips with the need to itch the rushing of my own blood pumping manically through my system.
I’m losing my mind. Swiping my hand over the mirror, a reflection looks back at me, but it’s not one I recognize and it’s not until I lift my hand to clear more dirt that it confirms it’s me.
Tapping at the back door gains my attention and Max beams at me through the glass at me, holding up two plates.
Waltzing towards him, I open the door and take one of the plates.
“Where has all the stuff gone?” I ask, almost panicked.
His brow quirks and he looks over my head into the space behind me.
“What stuff? Your suitcase?”
He pushes past me into the house and then stops in the living room when he notices my suitcase is right where we left it.
“It’s there.” He points.
Well done, detective.
“The furniture, Max!” I snap, waving my arms around. “It’s gone.”
I grab his arm and frog march him to the room where—when I arrived—had dead flies and dried blood-covered mattresses.
Kicking open the door, I open my hand to gesture inside.
“What?” he asks, small lines creasing his forehead.
“Where’s all the mess?”
“Evi, you’re not making any sense. What the hell are you talking about?”
“This place was a mess. There was furniture and…”
“It’s been empty for years. It was a crime scene. They used a crime scene clean up. All furniture contaminated with blood or other fluids got destroyed and anything left was kept in the basement.”
Thud…
“Evi?”
“Where did it happen?”
He stiffens. “Why would you think I’d know that?”
I don’t.
God, what the hell is happening to me?
“How did you find out about this place if you lost your memories?” he suddenly asks me.
Exhaling hard, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
There is something building inside me like a surging sea and it is becoming too powerful to contain.
“I got a box from my mother to open on my twenty-first birthday.”
My back hits the wall behind me and I slide down until my ass hits the floor.
“She was released from prison and wanted me to have the house.”
“You know why she was released and when, right?” he asks me, drawing his bottom lip into his mouth.
My head tilts up to him. The plate of food I was holding is discarded on the floor.
“No. Time served?” I shrug.
Breathing through his nose, he drops down, placing his plate next to mine.
His fingers stroke out and tug a stray strand of hair behind my ear.
“She had cancer, Evi.”
Had. Past tense.
“Had?”
Tilting his head, he drops to his ass and takes my hand in his.
“She got compassionate leave because she was dying.”
She’s dying.
“That was three years ago.”
My eyes snap up to his. “What?”
He nods, confirming what I thought he said. “It was in the papers.”
“No.” That’s not right. A wicked ache ebbs in the very pit of my stomach.
Images attack my mind, firing like bullets, obliterating everything I know to be truth.
My gaze drops to a scattering of small scars in half moon dents around my wrist. From her.
“You don’t have to do this, Evi. She had no right to ask this of you.”
“It’s fine, Mom.” I look into the eyes of the woman who has raised me for the last nine years, patting down her arms and reassuring her to let me do this. The fabric of her cashmere sweater is smooth over my skin.
The voices haunt me inside my mind, whispering to me about her.
I need to do this, to give myself the closure.
Her brown hair with specks of grey wisp from the bun she has neatly constructed on the top of her head. Worry lines crease around her mouth, making her look older than she is.
Fragile hands stroke over my face.
“You’re a good girl, Evi. She didn’t deserve you.”
Feeling a twinge of guilt for putting my adoptive mother through this turmoil bites at my conscience but it doesn’t outweigh the intrigue, the overwhelming need to see my real mother, to ask her why.
Turning back to the nurse, I signal that I’m ready with a tilt of my head. She nods her head in return and leads me down a corridor.
Medical staff buzz around like bees from room to room, and from open doors, soft cries and beeping machines of other patients not quite as far gone as my birth mother leak out.
I didn’t like hospitals. They stole my identity and left me empty.
Blue sterile walls, endless and cold, lead all the way down to a room at the bottom of the corridor. All on its own away from everyone else.
The place they take you to die is no more than a cupboard.
Pushing open the door, the nurse rests her hand on my arm. “Are you sure you want to go in alone?”
I’m always alone.
“Yes.”
They had assured my adoptive parents that my birth mother was too weak to move, let alone do anything to hurt me.
They didn’t account for loose lips though, and just the very sight of her cuts me just as deep as glass could.
There are no windows inside; the heat hangs in the air, concentrated and smothering, compressing down on me.
The walls look dirty in the dimmed lights. Grey rather than the white they actually are.
Machines beep and an accordion-looking machine pumps up and down, emitting a breathy whisper as it does.
The woman lying in the bed with tubes going into her hands and up her nose doesn’t look familiar to me at all.
It almost makes me feel more lost in my own skin.
There’s nothing I can relate to in her features.
She has a pale complexion, her skin thin like paper, the veins beneath green and on show, threading all through the film covering her bones. She doesn’t have hair anywhere. No eyelashes or eyebrows.
Cracked lips whisper incoherent words.
Dazed eyes flicker open and shut.
There are tears building and leaking from the corners of her eyes, light brown eyes, the outline round to my almond shape.
“Evi,” she croaks.
The room begins to dim and a coolness breezes over me despite the heat moments before.
Death has entered the room to take her away for her sins.
Closing the gap between the bed and me, I look down on her, waiting for her to evoke some emotion inside me, but there’s nothing.
She’s dying, but it’s like a stranger dying. I can’t find the right response inside me to care. It’s simply missing.
I don’t know her. I owe her nothing.
She doesn’t know me.
I don’t know me.
She whispers my name again and movement draws me to her hand turning over, her fingers wiggling.
Does she want to hold my hand?
I can do that, feel her hold on me, let her stroke over the steady thump of my pulse, the pulse she tried to snuff out.
Slipping my hand down towards hers, my body stiffens when her fingers, much stronger than anticipated, clutch hold of me in a death grip.
Her strength pulls me towards her, brittle nails digging into my supple flesh, breaking off and tearing the skin.
She’s whispering something, her face void of any love. Any guilt.
Her fingertips are going to fuse with my bones if she tightens her hold any more.
I want to push her off me but her words send me spiraling into despair, her hushed tone-spilling lie after lie.
She’s lying.
She’s lying.
“Stop. You’re making yourself bleed.”
Max’s voice penetrates the memory. Looking down at my arm, I’ve scratched at the tiny moon-shaped scars there and blood sits under my nails.
“I’m losing my mind.” I shudder.
“No, you’re not.”
Nothing makes sense. I want to go back to the memory and focus on what she said to me. If that was even real.
If you stare so far into the darkness, maybe the darkness starts staring back at you.
“I need to talk to Garret,” I tell him, scrambling to my feet.
His posture is rigid and he hasn’t moved from the floor.
“Max, please. Take me back to your house so I can get my cell phone.”
The ride back is like being sucked into a vacuum.
Neither of us are speaking.
My gaze keeps drifting to where he’s sitting, thinking of last night when I was riding him like a rodeo bull right there.
The tension is palpable inside the small confines.
I roll the window down to let some air in and to have some sound other than my own pulse drumming in my ears.
What must he think of me knowing I have Garret?
Slut. Dirty Evi.
“I don’t regret last night.” I word vomit into the heated space between us, wishing my words got sucked out the open window before reaching his ears.
I don’t regret it, but what if he does?
His sigh is weighted and troubled. Little pinpricks stab at my heart, waiting for him to say something.
One, two, three, four.
“Being with you could never be a regret. I wish it had been somewhere else and under different circumstances. You’re not single, Evi, and your heart may be here, but your head is out at sea. I want to be the lighthouse for you so badly.”
“I feel a but is coming?” I whisper.
His head swivels to look over at me. “But you have a boyfriend and I don’t know where that leaves me in your life.”
“I want you in my life.”
That’s all I know right now. The thought of leaving here and going back to my life where he doesn’t exist physically causes pain.
“Then I’ll be in your life,” he promises, flittering his gaze between me and the road ahead.
And then we drift back into silence until he’s pulling to a stop.
He gestures to the shop.
“I’m going to call the energy company to get the power on at your house and I’ll bring some bulbs and things for when we go back.”
Handing me a key to his apartment, he smiles tightly and nods for me to go ahead.
Opening the door, I locate my cell phone and Facetime Garret.
The music sounds, signaling it’s ringing, and then his face appears after I contemplate hanging up.
“I’m so glad you got in contact,” he tells me, like he’s talking to someone he met on a business trip.
“We’ve been worried, Evi.”
Moving to the couch, I sit to relieve some pressure from my feet, the cuts on the soles sore and oozing.
“Who is we?” I ask, confusion like static in my head.
“I spoke with Dr. Holst,” he announces, and the old clutches of shame drench me.
“What did he say?”
The corners of Garret lip curl back, showing off his perfect-shaped white Hollywood smile. He paid for that smile, there’s no doubt.
“Just that you took off.”
He’s being careful with his tone. I know him well enough to know something is bothering him.
Did Edward tell him about what happened at the lake house?
“Did you go there?” I ask.
“I went and retrieved the box you left there.”
The box that revealed who I was, only the memories of me seeing my mother years before are so real. Too real to be fake.
“Did my mother die?” I ask, my arm beginning to tire from holding the cell phone outstretched in front of me.
I prop up my cell on the coffee table and fold my arms over my chest.
“Evi, what are those marks?” he says, with the authority of a white coat telling me to take my medicine.
The red welts around my wrist appear angry. “That doesn’t matter.”
“If you’ve hurt yourself, it matters.”
“It was nothing. Stop avoiding my question, Garret.”
“What question was that, Evi?” he asks in such a calm, cool tone that it annoys me.
People pass behind him and the phone keeps jerking in his grip.
“Where are you?” I ask, changing the subject.
“Where are you?” he repeats, and I shift on the seat.
The front door opens and Max comes inside, placing a bag on the dining table.
“It’s going to take a couple of days before they can get anyone out to reconnect the power,” Max says.
“Who is that?” Garret asks, and the air stills along with Max’s entire body.
“It’s Max. He’s the boy that used to live next door to me.” And so much more than that.
“Why is he with you?” Garret’s brow drops and he checks his watch and then nods to someone out of sight behind the phone.
“I’m with him, Garret. He’s helping me.”
Static breaks up my voice and distorts the screen and then all that’s there is Garret, frozen on the screen with no sound coming from it.
We lost signal.
Dammit. Reaching forward, I grab the phone and slam it face down.
“I didn’t realize you were on a call.” Max’s voice carries to me and I sigh, throwing myself back against the cushions.
“It doesn’t matter.”
He’s just standing there like a spare part and guilt of making him uncomfortable in his own home itches away at my skin.
“I want to swim so bad.”
“The school has a pool,” he pipes up with a sparkle in his eyes. I must have spoken my desire aloud.
Excitement bubbles in my veins at the possibility.
“Accessible?”
Lifting a shoulder, he smirks. Going to the cupboard beneath his sink, he rummages through it and comes back holding some bolt cutters.
“Define accessible.”
“Let’s go.” I jump up and let him lead the way.