She reaches for me and I step away. I want to run again, I want to run forever, but this is the safest place for me, I think.
Safe, with a woman who wants a me that is gone. With a woman who made a deal with Clementine to get me here.
I laugh and it comes out like a sob.
“Something happened to you,” Jane says, her smile fading. “Did—” She takes a deep breath. “Clementine came by after you left. Wanted to know where you were. I didn’t know—I went looking for you, I went to all the places Ava goes, but you weren’t—”
“I wasn’t there,” I say.
“No,” Jane says. “You weren’t. She found you though, didn’t she? Did she—did she hurt you? I know she’s—I know she can do things, but if she hurt you I swear I’ll—”
“She didn’t touch me,” I say, because she didn’t. I am whole, I am here. Clementine broke no bones. She just shattered my heart. Broke most of the memories I have. “She . . . she let me in on a few things I’d forgotten. No, that’s not it.” I laugh that broken sob again. “She told me things I never knew.”
“Ava,” Jane says, “oh, Ava, honey,” and starts to cry.
“You shouldn’t be crying,” I say, staring at her wet face. “You’ve got what you wanted. I’m here and I—I’ve got no choice but to be your Ava.”
“There is no ‘my Ava,’” she says. “Don’t you see that? You are Ava.”
“I have one memory of you,” I say. “One moment that you—you, standing right here—weren’t even there for. That you won’t ever remember.”
“But it’s a memory,” she says. “It’s your memory of you and me and if I—if I wasn’t there like I am now, I was still—I’m always with you, Ava. You will always—and I am talking to you, Ava, the you that is here now—you are and will always be my daughter. My heart would know you anywhere.”
“No, it can’t,” I say. “It’s—it’s the kind of thing you want to say, that you want to believe, but it isn’t—I know it isn’t true. I thought my heart knew things, but what I thought was real turned out to be a lie, and now I don’t—”
Jane touches my hand. “I know you’re upset,” she says. “I know you’re hurting.”
“You think?” I say, my voice bitter, and then she surprises me. She wraps her arms around me. She hugs me.
I fight her at first. I don’t want to be touched by her, by anyone, not again, not ever. I believed in Morgan and the memories I had but they led me here, they’ve trapped me here, but Jane won’t let go. She just holds on, one hand rubbing small circles on my back, a gentle touch, a mother’s touch, and I don’t remember ever being held like this. Feeling safe like this. I remember feeling loved but Morgan’s love led me here, led to Clementine telling me what he hadn’t wanted me to see, and before I know it I am crying, strange, harsh sobbing sounds.
Jane says, “It’s okay, it’s okay” over and over again and even though I don’t believe her, I want to. And after a while, I hold her back.
She is smaller than I thought, and when my arms wrap around her, I still don’t know her—don’t remember her—but yet, somehow, in a way beyond memory, I do. Something in me, in my bruised heart, wakes up, and even though I’m terrified, I don’t push the feeling away.
I am so tired of feeling bad. Of feeling lost. Of being alone.
When I’m done crying, my head hurts. Jane walks me to Ava’s room, tucks me into Ava’s bed. Sits beside me, smoothing my hair.
“You’re going to be all right, you’re going to be safe,” she says as my eyes get heavy, and before they close I realize I want to believe her.
35.
WAKE U P.
I’m in a large gray room with gray walls. Gray light floats in through a grimy window and I scramble out of bed, my breath casting small white clouds that float around me, float away. My feet are so small and my hands, struggling to make up my bed, are small too.
When the bed is done I stand in front of it, stand as straight and tall as I can. While we wait, I stare at the forehead of the girl across from me. I don’t know her name. She came in and took over the bed of the last one who died. I remember her because she said she didn’t feel well right before she disappeared.
When I feel sick, I never say a word to anyone.
Blink, and I am taller, older, and I am making my narrow gray bed for the last time, ignoring the voices behind and around me as they whisper, “Are you really leaving? Really? How did you do it?”
I did it because I wanted to live. I did it because I wanted out.
I did it because I didn’t want to die.
I did it because I want to do something with my life.
I did it because I want to breathe and know that I’m going to live.
That’s how I’m leaving the crèche, how I found a way to leave these gray walls behind.
I’ve been chosen to go to training—it’s all I’ve been told. I didn’t ask anything else. I didn’t dare. Maybe it was the tests we had to take recently, pages and pages of questions given by a man who looked through us like we weren’t there even as he explained what we were supposed to do.
It doesn’t matter how I’m leaving. It matters that I am and I will never, ever come back here. I will make that happen, I will make everyone forget where I am from, that I was branded an enemy of the government from the time I was born.
I will be safe.
Blink, and I am sitting on a cold metal chair in a darkened room, a row of faces I can’t see in front of me, watching me.
“You’re doing very well with your training,” one of them says. “Almost done soon, aren’t you?”
I nod.
“You never ask about your family,” another voice says. “Never asked to see the records of your mother.”
“I don’t remember her,” I say, and force my hands to stay where they are, force myself to stay relaxed, to keep my eyes wide open. Blinking and fidgeting means lying. I know that now.
I am strong.
I will do this. I will become someone.
“You can go, then,” the voice says and then I am standing in an empty field, nothing but brown, dead grass as far as the eye can see. No one else is here. No one wants to even walk by this place. See where the dead that don’t exist lie.
I lean down and touch the ground. It is cold and the grass is brittle, shredding into nothing under my hand. I pretend there is a breathing heart underneath, that the people who died and were brought here breathe as one, live in some way. That I can sense my mother here.
“Ava,” I hear, and look behind me, see Morgan standing at the edge of the field, a white flower, for memory, in his hands.
I am not surprised to see him, but my heart thumps hard and fast all the same, me and Morgan now and forever what I didn’t know I even wanted until I first saw him.
I get up and walk toward him and then he is holding me, his arms around me, our fingers wrapped together, holding the flower as one.
“The lost souls are supposed to be here,” he says, looking down at the ground. “I never thought about them before. I should have. Ava, I don’t care what the government says, I don’t care about any of it. I know who you are. I know and I lo—”
I touch my fingers to his mouth, to silence him, because he can’t feel like that about me, no one has ever felt like that about me. It feels familiar, but only with him.
Only with Morgan.
I bend down and put the flower on the ground, put it where the dry grass will break it into pieces, and he bends down next to me too, puts his hands on mine like we are one.
We are one.
He is here, he sees me, and loves—
Wake up.
36.
I SIT UP
, startled and gasping, and I am not in that field anymore. I am in bed, Ava’s bed, Ava’s covers wrapped around me, I was dreaming—remembering—and Morgan—
Morgan is here. I can see him outlined in the dark of Ava’s room. He is kneeling by Ava’s bed, head bowed, the edge of his hand barely brushing against mine, the most tentative of touches.
I shove him, pushing him away and springing to my feet, crossing to the window, which is open, a breeze blowing the curtains back to show the night sky.
“Ava,” he says, his voice scared-sounding, and I hit him as hard as I can, closed fist to the side of his face, furious with him. With myself, for being glad to hear his voice.
For being glad to see him.
“Get out,” I say. “Get out and go to Clementine. Go to your family.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, and he sounds like he means it, his eyes are so sincere in the moonlight, in the faraway glow of starlight, and I think of the dreams—memories—that just came to me, of his hand in mine.
“I should have told you,” he says. “But at first, I figured you knew—you were trained, you were a listener, I was your job and I thought—I thought maybe Clementine had sent you and the others as a warning. But when I got to know you, when I—when I wanted to be with you, I knew you didn’t know her. And then I found out you were from the crèche, and you told me about your mother, I . . . I was afraid of what you’d think of me if you knew about her.”
“You didn’t trust me.”
He’s silent for a long moment.
“I—I was afraid,” he finally says. “I was afraid you’d see me as someone who’d hurt you. I was afraid you’d decide to forget all about me.”
“And that was supposed to happen, wasn’t it?” I say. “Thanks to you and your grandmother, I’m here, where you aren’t supposed to be at all. Where you’re supposed to be nothing to me. Where I’m supposed to be another me altogether.”
“You don’t know—you don’t know how much I wish I’d told you,” he says. “I just—she and I hadn’t spoke in so long that I thought Clementine had written me off. Maybe even wanted me gone, when you first showed up. When my parents died, she sent me away to school, and never came to see me, never called me. I never even saw her again until here. But you—Ava, I remember you. I remember you in my soul. Don’t you remember me?”
“Yes,” I say, my voice soft and when he smiles I say, “So that makes it okay to lie?”
“No. I’m not—I’m telling you why I did what I did, Ava. I can’t—do you really think I don’t see how wrong I was? That I don’t hate what happened? That I have to live with knowing I did this, that I—that she put you here because of me? I would do anything to fix that. Anything.”
“So you came here.”
He nods, and I look at him. Moonlight shines through him like he isn’t even here, casts its light on Ava’s carpet.
“You don’t have a shadow,” I say.
“Not here,” he says.
“Why?”
“I—it doesn’t matter now.”
“Why?” I say again.
“Because there’s no me here. Never has been. I came here to find you because I’m sorry, and because I miss you, because I lo—”
“Don’t,” I say, my voice shaking. I don’t want him to say it and I want him to say it. I want to believe it, and I’m afraid . . .
I’m afraid I will. That I do.
That, in spite of everything, I feel the same way.
He shifts his weight, but the moonlight still cuts through him and no shadow falls where he stands.
“I came here for you,” he says after a moment, his voice soft. “I would do anything for you.”
“There—there isn’t anything you can do,” I say. “I remember you, I remember—I remember us—but I also know you lied to me. That . . . all I have left now is what I know. It’s all I can trust.”
He nods, face somber. “I—you’ll never come back with me, will you?”
“No.”
He closes his eyes, briefly, and then turns, moves toward the window.
“What, no throwing yourself at me and saying you don’t want to live without me?” I say, trying to keep my voice light, but my heart is pounding, pounding.
He stills, and then looks at me. “You might not remember it,” he says, “but you already know it’s true.”
And then he goes.
I look out into the night, into the dark, until he is a part of it. Until I can’t see him anymore.
Then I sit on the floor, in front of the open window, and watch the sky. I watch the sun rise, I watch the stars disappear into the light.
37.
IN THE MORNING
Jane tells me I can take a few days off school.
“I think you need a little break,” she says as she offers me thick slices of buttered toast, and I nod, thinking of Morgan standing in Ava’s room last night saying he was sorry. That he came here for me.