Another Little Piece (2 page)

“Normal,” he repeated.

I nodded miserably. “Yeah, I mean, kind of normal.”

PASSED

He left without another word.

I didn’t sleep that night.

Wondering if I had passed his test.

Wondering if he was right about me being a monster.

Wondering exactly how he expected a monster to feel.

How he expected me to feel.

I still felt normal.

Whatever normal was.

It wasn’t until the seven a.m. nurse-shift change, when the night nurse said good-bye and good luck, that I realized I was leaving. Going home. Whatever and wherever that was.

All of the many doctors I’d seen during my four days at the hospital made a point of coming by my room and wishing me well; some even told me to keep in touch. Only Grimace and Gloom stayed away. I guess we’d already said our good-byes.

HOMECOMING

HI, MOM

Hi, Mom.

Hi, Dad.

I know you love me lots.

Of course, I love you lots too.

What else can I say?

School’s fine. I’m fine.

Yeah, the weather’s gray.

I know whatever I need, you’re there.

Of course, I’ll always come to you.

What else can I say?

Bye, Mom.

Bye, Dad.

I know you trust me.

Of course, I’ll be good.

I’ll be good.

That’s what I told ’em.

What else could I say?

—ARG

FAMILY ROAD TRIPS

They found me in Oklahoma, which was strange, because Annaliese Rose Gordon’s home was in the northeastern part of the country. Western New York to be more specific. Buffalo, if you were looking to stick a pin in a map. According to the GPS stats, that was a distance of almost thirteen hundred miles. From the way everyone kept shaking their heads and saying “Oklahoma” in the same way they might have said “Mars,” I guessed this was far beyond the range where anyone had ever considered looking for Annaliese.

Here’s another GPS-derived fact. Those thirteen hundred miles can be traveled by car in about twenty-one hours. A little less than a day to get from one part of the country to another seems reasonable, but that doesn’t include stops. When you account for stopping early and often, those thirteen hundred miles start to stretch across several days . . . and they begin to feel like forever.

My parental guardians explained their reasons for this mode of transportation very earnestly. Well,
she
e
xplained. The mom. She is the talker. And the crier. And the hugger. And the everything else. The dad is there for one thing and one thing only. Backup. He stands behind her. Sometimes holding her up. Sometimes bracing her. Sometimes just there. Waiting. Waiting in case she sticks her hand out, and then he will be there, ready to take it in his own.

They are a good team.

The explanation for the drive went like this:

Air travel would be too traumatic after everything I had gone through.

Traveling by car would give me time to adjust.

We’ve always loved family road trips.

After three hours I added another possible reason: to quiz me endlessly.

The mom insisted on calling my memory loss amnesia. As if I were a character in a soap opera. She thought I just needed the right trigger to snap me out of it. It started with a picture quiz. I correctly identified the Gerber baby, but couldn’t place my own baby picture.

It got worse from there.

Ronald McDonald—yes. The clown from my fourth birthday party—no. I easily named every character from
Friends
. My own best friend—“Gwen is such a nice girl,” the mom told me, as if this detail might jog my memory—no recognition at all. In the animal-kingdom category I got Kermit the Frog, Lassie, and Dumbo all correct. But Snowball didn’t come close to Here Kitty Kitty, the rather cumbersome name that I apparently gave my own dear cat at the age of five.

The game officially ended when I incorrectly identified a woman with iron-gray curls and a closed-lip smile as Queen Elizabeth. Turns out that one was my nana.

Next we played something called, “What’s Your Favorite . . . ?”

The first topic was food.

I was trying, even though my palms were sweaty and a headache had formed behind my left eye. It would’ve been easy to tell the mom where to shove her questions. Except the mom was a really nice lady. And she was trying to be upbeat, chirpy even. But with every wrong answer, she’d deflate a little bit. She tried to cover it. She’d pat my hand and tell me it was okay. She was always touching me—patting, rubbing, squeezing my hand, arm, or leg. And that’s when she wasn’t hugging me. That was okay, too, though. She was a good hugger. As soon as her arms wrapped around me, there was this sensation like everything was going to be okay. So far this was the one thing that we had most in common—we both really wanted everything to be okay.

So favorite foods. I knew she picked this topic first because I was so skinny. I knew she thought I was so skinny because she said it every time she looked at me. And she’d shown me Annaliese’s school picture from the previous year. It had been taken only a few days before she’d disappeared, just a few weeks away from her seventeenth birthday. There was a roundness to her cheeks, not fat, just a sort of youthful glow. But now, as the mom made sure to remind me, it was almost exactly a year later, I was once again only weeks away from a birthday, but the glow and roundness had been replaced by hollows and eyes too big for my face.

“Well, I don’t really know about favorite,” I said at last, wanting to play along. “The hospital food was pretty bad.”

The mom jumped on this. “It was terrible! Wasn’t it terrible, John?”

That was the dad’s cue. He knew his part too. “Awful.”

For a moment we were a family, united by our shared disgust for hospital food. Buoyed by my success, I added, “It was so bland—that was the problem.”

Another hit. “Yes! It’s like they have a flavor extractor back there in the kitchen.”

“Must take out color too, ’cause my green beans last night were gray,” the dad added, backing the mom up in her comedy attempts.

We were all smiling at one another. It felt good. No, great. It felt great. If I could take that moment and plant it in the ground, I would wait for a tree to grow from it, and then I would build a fort in that tree where I would live forever. That was how good it felt.

“I need something to wake my taste buds up again,” I said.

“Ooh, yeah,” the mom agreed excitedly. “How about Mexican for lunch?”

“Or better yet,” I said, “curry. That would really hit the spot.”

The smiles dimmed. “Curry?”

I’d said something wrong. “Yeah, like Indian?”

“Indian?”

“Uh-huh?”

Every one of our words had question marks attached, as if we would recant them in an instant if asked.

“You never liked foreign food. That’s what you always said?” This was the mom again.

The dad stepped in. “Your favorites were spaghetti and tacos, which we always thought was funny because they are foreign foods.” This was a statement. At last. He would not rewrite history for me, just because I couldn’t remember it.

I said nothing, feeling like I’d been caught playing a part. The monster trying to disguise herself as someone’s daughter.

The mom suddenly gasped. “Annaliese, do you remember where you had those Indian foods? Do you think it’s possible that a—what’s a person from India called, John?”

“An Indian.”

“Of course, of course. Indian. I always think cowboys and Indians, but they’re Native Americans now. Except they live on Indian reservations, don’t they? I mean, we don’t call them Native American reservations. Or should we?”

“Sweetheart.” The dad’s voice was soft, a reminder that she had gone off track.

“Oh, right. Do you think it was maybe an . . . an Indian that took Annaliese? Annaliese, what do you remember?”

“Nothing,” I said immediately. Except there was something. Pointing to the word
vindaloo
on a menu. And the taste. I kept a tissue clutched in my hand to dab at my nose, running from the heat, but I didn’t stop eating. Using pieces of naan, I sopped up every last bit of sauce until the bowl was clean.

“Chocolate,” the mom abruptly broke in. “You love chocolate. We love chocolate. Do you re—?”

She stopped herself from asking if I remembered, not wanting to hear that I didn’t. Pulling one of her overflowing bags from the backseat, she rooted around in it until she found a package wrapped in brown paper. Carefully, as if it held precious contents, she unraveled the paper until at last she revealed four bars of chocolate.

“I bought these before you . . . well, I’ve been holding on to them. It was—it
is
—our thing. Monthly chocolate taste tests. We’d find different places on the internet to buy from, all over the country, little specialty places and—” Her voice cracked as she stared down at those chocolate bars. Her hair fell forward, hiding her face, but I could tell she was struggling against tears. There was a charged feeling in the car, like the way the air feels before a thunderstorm.

Wanting to make it better, wanting to bring her daughter back, I snagged one of the bars off the pile, peeled away the paper and foil, and took a huge bite. The chocolate was hard and at first tasteless, and as it melted between my teeth and found its way onto my tongue, it wasn’t sweet, but instead bitter and salty.

It felt like chewing on my own tongue, like my mouth was filling with blood. I tried to swallow but my throat had closed up. No, it wasn’t closed, but merely already occupied with my last hospital meal of orange juice and Cheerios coming up. My hand flew to my mouth, but it was too late. My insides erupted. Even after everything was out—spattering the backs of the car seats, the floor, my clothes and shoes—I couldn’t stop gagging. Finally in desperation I sucked on the fabric of my own shirtsleeve until it absorbed most of the terrible chocolate blood taste from my mouth.

The dad had pulled onto the side of the road by then, and they’d both gotten out of the car, throwing all the doors open. Together they stared at me like I was some kind of wild animal that had wandered into their car, and they were waiting for me to realize I didn’t belong here and go back to wherever I had come from. I simply sat there, staring at my puke-spattered sneakers.

Finally, the mom handed me a tissue. Only then did I notice my runny nose and the tears leaking down the side of my face.

“I think I must have gotten carsick,” I said feebly.

“Annaliese was never carsick.”

The mom didn’t seem to notice that she had referred to Annaliese as if she was a different person from me, a person who now existed only in the past tense.

BY THE NUMBERS

Thirty-four. “She’s our daughter.” The whispered words came from the dad when he thought I was asleep, in one of the two queen beds that filled our tiny motel room. At first I thought he was talking to the mom, but then he said it again, again, and again. Repeating that phrase. To keep myself still, I began to count each set.

It wasn’t simply a statement, but a mantra. He was trying to convince himself. Eventually the flow of words became a trickle before stopping entirely, replaced by the sound of his steady breathing.

I didn’t sleep again for the rest of the night.

One interview on the
Today
show. Three with each of the local news stations. It was necessary to remove the reporters camped out on the front lawn. Annaliese’s disappearance had been a major news story, but my reappearance was more than that. Annaliese Rose Gordon. The name was at the top of internet search phrases, and that meant that people were talking about me, and they wanted to know more. The reporters were there to feed that appetite. The mom and the dad did most of the talking, and at the end I delivered my one line: “I’m happy to be home, and just want to get back to normal.”

Sixteen. That was the number of counseling sessions I attended. Some alone, some with the mom and the dad. The mom was behind it. On the ride back to New York she’d read some book about families in crisis—apparently unable to find one specifically about having one’s amnesiac daughter returned after disappearing for almost a year—and this book stressed the importance of finding the right counselor for YOU. The emphasis was theirs.

Two. The number of hours I spent touring Annaliese’s old school. She was only a few months into her junior year when she’d disappeared, and I would be picking up where she had left off. The parents trailed behind the principal, and I trailed behind them as he gave us a guided tour, helpfully pointing out the classrooms I would go to on Monday morning. It felt like another test. One I failed again and again as they asked, “Remember this?” And then they reached my old locker—preserved exactly as it had been at the mom’s insistence that I might return any day.

“Go ahead,” they said. “Give the lock a few spins, maybe the muscle memory will remember what you don’t.”

So, I tried. But my muscles didn’t remember any more than the rest of me did.

Forty-five to zero. That was the score at the end of the Homecoming football game. At the school we’d seen the signs advertising Saturday’s game and the dance that would follow. Annaliese’s disappearance came a month before last year’s Homecoming, but according to the mom, the dress for the dance was hanging in the closet—the tags still on and waiting. When we returned home I checked, and there it was. Perfectly preserved inside a clear plastic bag, a pink dress with spaghetti straps and matching pale-pink crystals, hanging at the back of the closet. Of course, I couldn’t go to the dance this year. As the dad quickly pointed out, quelling the gleam in the mom’s eyes, it was too soon. After a moment to swallow her disappointment the mom agreed, adding that with all the weight I’d lost, the dress would’ve hung on me anyway.

The game was another matter. It was the perfect opportunity for me to get my feet wet, while still having the mom and the dad at my side.

Five seconds. That was how much time remained on the game clock when I decided to stop counting, and begin my new life as Annaliese Rose Gordon for real. It wasn’t that I started feeling like Annaliese, but more like it shook me awake. For the first time I knew for sure that the worst wasn’t behind me.

No, the worst was straight ahead, and I was headed right at it.

GAME CHANGER

There were only seconds left on the clock, and the other team, losing and desperate to put some kind of number on the board, launched a Hail Mary pass. It wasn’t a game changer, but you could feel how badly the other side wanted it, needed it, to ease that long ride home. And as if God himself were behind that ball, it was the first the quarterback threw that didn’t jelly-roll through the air but flew straight and true, landing right in the outstretched hands of . . . one of our guys.

Number sixteen, the name
RICE
written across his back, tore down half the field and danced into the end zone to score the final touchdown of the game. Rice Sixteen ripped his helmet off and, shaking his head, sent long, shaggy hair flying. The setting sun flared, gilding him.

And that’s when I felt the first hunger pang. Even from my spot halfway up the bleachers, I could see the beads of sweat on his golden-brown skin. Except it didn’t resemble sweat so much as the juices dripping from the crisped and crackling skin of a roasted chicken. I wanted to sink my teeth into him. My stomach growled with hunger at the thought. Saliva collected in my mouth. I swallowed loudly.