I make a quick check of the hotel room as Charlie and Landon file out. I grab the empty trash sack out of the small can under the desk and shove all of our notes into it. When I’m certain I have everything, I follow Charlie and Landon outside.
Charlie is still smiling when we reach the car. She honestly thinks this is a dream, and I don’t have the heart to tell her it isn’t. It’s not a dream. It’s actually a nightmare and we’ve been living it for more than a week now.
Landon climbs inside the car, but Charlie waits for me by the back door. “You want to ride in the front with your brother?” she asks, forming air quotes with her fingers.
I shake my head and reach around her to open the door. “No, you can ride in the front.” She begins to turn when I grab her arm. I lean down to her ear and whisper. “You aren’t dreaming, Charlie. This is real. Something is happening to us and you need to take it seriously so we can figure it out, okay?”
When I pull back, her eyes are wide. The smile is gone from her face and she doesn’t nod. She just gets in the car and closes the door.
I claim my spot in the back seat and pull my phone out of my pocket. There’s a reminder set on it, so I open it.
Go to the police station first. Get the backpack and read every note and journal entry you can…as fast as you can.
I close out the reminder, knowing I’ll get about five more reminders in the next two hours. I know this…because I remember setting every single one of them last night.
I remember writing all the notes in this small hotel trash bag that I have clutched tightly in my hand.
I remember grabbing hold of Charlie’s face right before the clock struck 11:00a.m.
I remember whispering never never to her, right before I kissed her.
And I remember ten seconds after our lips touched…she pulled back and had no idea who I was. She had no memory of the last forty-eight hours.
Yet…I remembered every single minute of the last two days.
I just couldn’t tell her the truth. I didn’t want to scare her, and making her believe I was in the same situation as her seemed to be the more comforting option.
I don’t know why I didn’t forget this time, or why she did. I should be relieved that whatever the hell has been going on with us seems to be over for me, but I’m not relieved at all. I’m disappointed. I would rather have lost my memory again with her than to have her be alone in this. At least when we were in it together, we knew it was something we could work out together.
What seemed to be a pattern has now been broken, and I feel like this just makes it even more difficult to figure out. Why was I spared this time? Why was she not? Why do I feel like I can’t be honest with her? Have I always shouldered this much guilt?
I still don’t know who I am, or who I used to be. I only have the last forty-eight hours to go by, which isn’t much. But it’s still better than the half hour of memories Charlie has.
I should just be honest with her, but I can’t. I don’t want this to scare her, and I feel like the only comfort she has right now is knowing she’s not alone in this.
Landon keeps glancing back at me, and then looking at her. I know he thinks we’ve lost our minds. We sort of did lose our minds, but not in the way he’s thinking.
I like him. I wasn’t sure if he’d show up this morning like I asked him to, since he’s still doubtful. I like that he doubts us, but his loyalty to me trumps his reasoning. I’m sure very few people have that quality.
We’re mostly quiet on the way to the police station, until Charlie turns to Landon and glares at him.
“How do you know we aren’t lying to you?” she asks him. “Why would you even humor us unless you have something to do with what’s happened to us?” She’s more suspicious of him than she is of me.
Landon grips the steering wheel and glances at me in the rearview mirror. “I don’t know that you both aren’t lying. For all I know, you’re getting a kick out of this. Ninety percent of me thinks you two are full of shit and have nothing better to do. Five percent of me thinks maybe you’re telling the truth.”
“That’s only ninety-five percent,” I pipe in from the backseat.
“That’s because the other five percent of me thinks I’m the one who has gone crazy,” he says.
Charlie laughs at that.
We pull in to the police station and Landon finds a parking spot. Before he turns off the car, Charlie says, “Just to be clear, what do I need to say? That I’m here for my backpack?”
“I’ll go in with you,” I tell her. “The note said everyone thought you were missing and that I was suspected in your disappearance. If we go in together, they’ll have no reason to pursue anything further.”
She gets out of the car, and as we’re walking into the police station, she says, “Why don’t we just tell them what’s going on? That we can’t remember anything?”
I pause with my hand on the door. “Because, Charlie. We specifically warned ourselves in the notes not to do that. I’d rather trust the versions of ourselves we don’t remember than trust people who don’t know us at all.”
She nods. “Good point, ” she says. She pauses and cocks her head to the side. “I wonder if you’re smart.”
Her comment makes me chuckle.
There’s no one in the lobby area when we walk in. I approach a glass window. There’s no one behind the desk, but there’s a speaker, so I press the button next to it, hearing it crackle to life.
“Hello?” I ask. “Anyone here?”
“Coming!” I hear a woman yell. A few seconds later, she appears behind the desk. Her eyes grow alarmed when she sees Charlie and me.
“Charlie?” she asks.
Charlie nods, wringing her hands together nervously. “Yeah,” she says. “I’m here for my stuff. A backpack?”
The woman stares at Charlie for a few seconds and her eyes drop to Charlie’s hands. The way Charlie is standing makes her look nervous…like she’s hiding something. The woman tells us she’ll go see what she can do, and she disappears around the desk again.
“Try to relax,” I whisper to Charlie. “Don’t make it look like I forced you to do this. They’re already suspicious of me.”
Charlie folds her hands over her chest, nods, and then brings her thumb to her mouth. She begins to bite the pad of it. “I don’t know how to look relaxed,” she says. “I’m not relaxed. I’m confused as hell.”
The woman doesn’t return, but a door to our left opens and a uniformed officer appears in the doorway. He looks over at Charlie and then me. He motions for us to follow him.
He walks into an office and proceeds to sit behind his desk. He nods at the two chairs opposite him, so we both take a seat. He doesn’t look at all pleased when he leans forward and clears his throat.
“Do you realize how many people we have looking for you right now, young lady?”
Charlie stiffens. I can feel the confusion roll off of her. I know she’s still trying to grasp what’s happened in the last hour, so I answer for her.
“We’re really sorry,” I say to him. His eyes remain on Charlie for a few seconds, and then slide to me. “We got in a fight. She decided to disappear for a few days to process everything. She didn’t know anyone would be looking for her, or that she would be reported missing.”
The officer looks bored with me. “I appreciate your ability to answer for your girlfriend, but I’d really like to hear what Ms. Wynwood has to say.” He stands, towering over us, and motions toward the door. “Wait outside, Mr. Nash. I’d like to speak to her alone.”
Shit.
I don’t want to leave her alone with him. I hesitate, but Charlie places a reassuring hand on my arm. “It’s fine. Wait outside,” she says. I look at her closely, but she seems confident. I stand up a little too forcefully and the chair makes an awful screeching sound as it scoots backward. I don’t look at the officer again. I walk out, close his door behind me, and begin pacing the empty lobby.
Charlie emerges a few minutes later with a backpack slung over her shoulder and a smug grin on her face. I smile back at her, knowing I never should have doubted that her nerves would get the best of her. This is the fourth time she’s started from scratch, and she seems to have made it through the first few times okay. This time shouldn’t be any different.
She doesn’t sit in the front seat this time. When we approach the car, she says, “Let’s both sit in the back so we can go through all this stuff.”
Landon is already annoyed that he thinks we’ve carried out what he thinks is a prank for so long, and now we’re forcing him to chauffer us around.
“Where to now?” Landon asks.
“Just drive us around until we figure out where we want to go next,” I say.
Charlie unzips the backpack and begins rifling through it. “I think we should go to the prison,” she says. “My father might have some sort of explanation.”
“Again?” Landon asks. “Silas and I tried that yesterday. They wouldn’t let us speak to him.”
“But I’m his daughter,” she says. She glances over at me as if she’s silently asking for my approval.
“I agree with Charlie,” I say. “Let’s go see her father.”
Landon sighs heavily. “I can’t wait until this is over,” he says, making a sharp right out of the driveway of the police station. “Ridiculous,” he mutters. He reaches for the radio and turns up the volume, drowning us out.
We begin pulling items out of the backpack. There are two separate stacks I remember making a couple of days ago when I first began going through these items. One of them is useful to us, one is not. I hand Charlie the journals and I begin sorting through letters, hoping she doesn’t notice I’m skipping some of the ones I know I’ve already read.
“All these journals are full,” she says, flipping through them. “If I wrote this much and this often, wouldn’t I have one that’s current? I can’t find one from this year.”
She makes a good point. When I was in her attic taking all of this stuff, I didn’t notice anything that looked like she was actively using it. I shrug. “Maybe we missed it when we grabbed all of these.”
She leans forward and talks over the music. “I want to go to my house,” she says to Landon. She falls back against the seat, clutching the backpack to her chest. She doesn’t continue going through the letters or journals. She just quietly stares out the window while we approach her neighborhood.
When we arrive at her house, she hesitates before opening the car door. “This is where I live?” she asks.
I’m sure she wasn’t expecting this, yet I can’t reassure her or warn her about what she’ll find inside because she still believes I lost my memories, too.
“Do you want me to go inside with you?”
She shakes her head. “That’s probably not a good idea. Our notes said you should stay away from my mother.”
“True,” I say. “Well, the notes said we found all this stuff in your attic. Maybe check your bedroom this time. If you had a journal you actively wrote in, it’s probably near where you sleep.”
She nods and then exits the car and begins walking toward her house. I watch until she disappears inside.
I can see Landon watching me suspiciously in the rearview mirror. I avoid eye contact with him. I know he already doesn’t believe us, but if he finds out I have any memory of the last forty-eight hours, he’ll definitely think I’m lying. And then he’ll stop helping us.
I find a letter I haven’t read yet and begin to open it when the back door opens. Charlie tosses a box inside the car and I’m relieved to see she found more stuff, including another journal. She slides into the car when the front door opens. I glance in the front seat to see Janette joining the party.
Charlie leans over until our shoulders are touching. “I think she’s my sister,” she whispers. “She doesn’t seem to like me very much.”
Janette’s car door slams shut and she immediately turns around in her seat and glares at me. “Thanks for letting me know my sister is alive, asshole.” She faces the front again and I catch Charlie suppressing a laugh.
“Are you serious?” Landon says, staring across the front seat at Janette. He doesn’t seem at all pleased that Janette is tagging along.
She rolls her head and groans. “Oh, come on,” she says to Landon. “It’s been a year since we broke up. It’s not going to kill you to sit in the same car with me. Besides, I’m not staying home all day with Loco Laura.”
“Holy shit,” Charlie mutters. She leans forward. “You two used to date?”
Landon nods. “Yeah. But it was a loooong time ago. And it lasted like a week.” He throws the car in reverse and begins backing out.
“Two weeks,” Janette specifies.
Charlie looks at me and raises an eyebrow. “And the plot thickens…” she says.
I personally think Janette’s presence will be more intrusive than helpful. At least Landon knows what’s going on with us. Janette doesn’t seem like she would take something like this very well.
She pulls a tube of lip-gloss out of her purse and begins applying it in the passenger mirror. “So where are we going?”
“To see Brett,” Charlie replies nonchalantly as she rifles through the box in the backseat.
Janette spins around in her seat. “Brett? As in Dad? We’re going to see Dad?”
Charlie nods as she pulls out her journal. “Yes,” she says. She looks up at Janette. “If you have a problem with that, we can take you back home.”
Janette clamps her mouth shut and slowly turns back around. “I don’t have a problem with it,” she says. “But I’m not getting out of the car. I don’t want to see him.”
Charlie raises an eyebrow at me and then settles back in her seat, opening the journal. A folded letter falls out and she begins to open that one first. She inhales a breath and then looks at me and says, “Well. Here we go, Silas Baby. Let’s get to know each other.” She opens the letter and begins to read.
I open a letter I’ve yet to read and settle into my seat as well. “Here we go, Charlie Baby.”