Dark Hope (19 page)

My words hung in the air.

“I didn’t,” he whispered gruffly, breaking the stillness.

“Didn’t what?”

“Push you from my mind. Not ever.”

I sucked my breath in, not sure what to say.

We rode the rest of the way home in silence, the only sound the occasional tick-tock of Michael’s blinker. When he’d pulled into my driveway, he put the car into park and shook his head as if to clear it.

“Understanding this other girl won’t help you remember, Hope,” Michael finally said, his voice weary. “It won’t change what happened.”

I fumbled for the right words, all my anger gone. “I know it won’t. But maybe if I can tell her story, it will help me put aside mine.”

He leaned his head back and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t like it.”

I felt a flicker of annoyance. “Why, Michael? Why? Because you have some ‘feeling’ that I am in danger? But from what, God only knows. God doesn’t even want you here to protect me, you said it
yourself. And Henri has been totally silent. You know he wouldn’t do that if I was in trouble.”

Michael scoffed at my logic. “Henri’s behavior means nothing. He’s just pouting, trying to prove a point.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” I pressed on. “And you know it. Even my father said that he feels I am meant to be here.”

“You spoke with your father?” he asked, bolting upright and looking at me in surprise.

I nodded, trying to bury the sense of unease and inevitability that my father’s admission had created in me. I ventured a smile, trying to soothe away Michael’s concerns and my own fears. “You see, it makes no sense. I have nothing to be afraid of.” I was arguing as much for my benefit as for his.

“I know,” he said, sagging back into his seat and closing his eyes. He was as still as a statue, worry etching sharp lines into his face.

Emboldened by his admission, I unbuckled my seat belt and turned to him, brushing my fingers against his. “You don’t have to protect me from my own emotions. And a research paper isn’t going to put me in any physical danger,” I cajoled. “I’m not saying I have to, but even if I go back to the Center, it’s like Fort Knox. Nothing could get me there.”

He took my hand in his and sighed. I felt a thrill. Whether it was from knowing I was winning the argument, or from the sheer pleasure of his touch, I wasn’t sure.

“Promise me you won’t go back there,” he said quietly. “At least not without me. That’s the only thing I ask.”

As the warmth of his touch spread from my fingers, I gave his hand a squeeze. “I promise.”

He opened his eyes then and looked at me. “That’s all I can ask,” he said, a sad, peculiar smile coming to his full lips. Squeezing my hand back, he released me.

My mother was waiting for me when I came through the door. She eyed the clock as she carefully wiped a dish.

“Seems you two had an awful lot to talk about,” she said with studied indifference.

I chose my words carefully as I plopped my backpack on a counter stool. “He missed a lot of school last week. I needed to catch him up.”

“Is that why he called you last night?” she asked, pointedly staring at the pile of messages still on the counter.

I swept them up and threw them in the trash, shrugging. “I guess so.”

She tried to hide her grin. “He never struck me as the studious type.”

I blushed. Why was I blushing all the time whenever the topic of Michael came up? Just asking the question made me blush even more deeply.

“It’s not like that,” I protested, the words feeling wrong on my lips, choosing that moment to dive back into my backpack.

“Like what?” flashed Mom, whom I could still see out of the corner of my eye, her grin ever widening. Then she seemed to take pity on me, changing the subject.

“You never told me how your interview went,” she opened.

I pulled out my agenda and perched myself on a stool. She continued to wipe and put away dishes, waiting for my answer.

“It went well, Mom,” I said, reaching for a pear out of the fruit bowl. “Thanks for setting it up.”

“That’s not why I’m asking, Hope, and you know it,” she said, her watchful eyes on me even while staying in perpetual motion. “How are you feeling?”

I rolled my eyes. “Not you too.” I didn’t even bother trying to hide my exasperation as I rolled the pear around in my hands.

She stopped in her tracks, arching one brow in surprise. “You told Michael?”

Oops. I clamped my mouth shut and simply shrugged.

She skewered me with her stare. “When did this happen?”

“I dunno,” I mumbled.

I could see the wheels turning in her mind as she reappraised the situation. Slowly, she nodded. “That’s what you were talking about in the driveway.” It was a statement, not a question.

I nodded dumbly. Her face was a mask as I waited for her reaction.

Slowly, she nodded. “That’s good,” she said, approvingly. She started rubbing at a dirty spot on a dish. I sighed with relief, thinking I was off the hook, but she spoke again. “You still haven’t answered my original question.”

“I’m fine,” I said tersely, choosing that moment to bite into the pear. “I’m tired of talking about it. It’s just a research paper,” I continued, my mouth full.

The pear was juicy, and I slurped just enough to annoy Mom with my bad manners. She playfully swatted at me with her dishtowel.

“Stop that,” she said, crossing her arms against my attempt at distraction. She pinned me with one of her patented hairy eyeball stares, refusing to give up the issue.

“Do your clients run away screaming in fear when you stare at them like that?” I demanded.

Frustrated, she sighed. “You’re impossible. Well, I expect you to talk with me if it raises any issues,” she commanded.

“Sheesh, between you and Michael I might as well give up on my education and lock myself away for the rest of my life,” I shot back, keeping the tone light. I took one last bite of the pear before
tossing the core into the bin. “I’m going up to study now.” I jumped off the stool and kissed her on the cheek.

She wiped the sloppy kiss off with a look of dismay and rubbed her hands on the dishtowel. “I guess I have more in common with that boy than I thought. Off with you, then. But I mean it, missy.” She shook the towel at me as she spoke. “Any flashbacks, any nightmares, anything at all, you tell me. Got it?”

“Got it,” I called over my shoulder as I climbed the stairs, relieved that she would never know the truth.

I hurried to my room and closed the door firmly behind me. I leaned against it and slid down until I was sitting huddled on the floor. Would it change anything if Michael and Mom knew about my nightmare from this morning?

I turned the question over in my mind, forcing myself to go through the nightmare I’d been avoiding thinking about all day.

The dream had been confused. But it was just a dream. I was sure of it. It was full of images from Maria’s story, some of them things I had never even seen for myself, some of them pictures I recognized from my Internet searches. Hungry children with big brown eyes crowding me on the streets of Reynosa. A hot, stifling truck, the air heavy with fear. Maria lined up to be inspected by a bunch of thugs, her sister clinging to her and then brutally torn away. Maria chained to a wall. And then me in her place.

But that had never happened, I reminded myself. And nothing in my dream—nothing—seemed like a buried memory clawing its way back to the surface.

It was just a dream, I said, looking at my shaking hands, willing them to stop. Just a dream.

I kept telling myself that in the weeks that followed, because the dream never stopped. Every night I found myself riding beside Maria on her fearsome journey from Mexico. And every night something new and insidious wove itself into the fabric of the dream, until the line between Maria and me, the difference between her story and mine, became tenuous.

As the truck pulled away from Reynosa and she leaned outside to wave goodbye to her hopeful father, I saw my father.

When her little sister turned up her face, sobbing with grief as the men pulled her away, it was my face.

As the crowd of men pressed against her, inspecting her like cattle, I recognized their eyes. I just could not place them. And then they would dissolve in a rush of wings and wind. I would feel myself flying and begin to believe that I was free, only to falter, plunging faster and faster toward the ground until I woke up in a sweat.

Night after night, I could not escape her story. My fear that something was terribly wrong, that somehow our fates were interwoven, began to mount.

I mostly escaped my mother’s vigilant eyes. She had begun traveling again, and was preoccupied with a big merger project. But I could not hide the shadows under my eyes from Michael—or from Tabitha.

“Someone’s been burning the midnight oil again,” she commented drily as I stumbled into class and sat down next to her. Our appearances were a study in contrasts. I’d barely managed to crawl out of my bed, throwing on sweats and wrapping a long scarf around my neck. My hair was lank, its ends tucked into the scarf, carefully hiding the symbol on my neck. She, on the other hand, had carefully swept her hair into a spiky fauxhawk, complete with hot pink extensions down her back, which she had matched to her
fingernails, eye shadow, and shoes. The pink stood out against her dark skin, drawing even more attention to her getup. It was ridiculously awe-inspiring.

“No time to shower,” I mumbled under the noise of the teacher’s lecture as I hunched into my chair. I could feel Michael’s stare burning into my back. I reached up and smoothed my hair against my neck, as if somehow he could see through the wall of hair to my Mark.

Tabitha wrinkled her nose. “I didn’t need to know that,” she muttered back at me.

“Ladies, something you’d like to share with us?” Mr. Bennett hovered between our desks.

“We were just discussing our research paper, sir,” Tabitha countered smoothly as the class snickered.

“I was just saying that I’d graded your interim submissions. Yours is good, but you still have some work to do,” he intoned, sliding our paper off the top of his pile.

The class laughed as Tabitha eagerly snatched the paper and then sagged with disappointment as she began to read his notes.

“You all do.” The teacher skewered the class with a withering glare. Everyone fell silent. He resumed walking the aisles, handing out papers as he went.

“You only have one week left before your final submissions. I suggest you take my feedback very seriously and focus on it during these last days. Failure to address this feedback will lower your score by a full grade.”

The class groaned and Bennett smiled with spiteful glee.

“Because I am a nice man, I will give you the rest of this period to regroup. Now go to it.”

Grumbling, the class soon broke apart, the noise of scraping chairs and conversation overwhelming the room.

I huddled over Tabitha. “What did he say?”

She held the pages out to me. “See for yourself.”

I took the paper and began reading the chicken scratches of red ink he’d left across the front page. I was vaguely aware of Michael reading over my shoulder.

“There’s a lot, but it’s doable,” I said, wondering where I’d get the energy to tackle all the additional research and revisions our teacher had suggested.

“There’s more,” Tabitha said glumly, turning the paper over. The entire back page was a sea of red. “But we can’t do any of this without talking to Maria again.”

“No way,” Michael interjected sternly.

We both turned to face him. In the days and weeks since our talk, Michael and I had commenced a careful dance. Outwardly, everything was the same. We still spent most of our classes and lunch together; he still drove me home every day after school. But our conversations were stilted, as if he was afraid to say too much; it seemed as if an invisible force field kept him from getting too close to me. And I found it easier that way, even if the distance between us was sometimes painful. For as much as I relied on Michael’s solid presence and the protection it seemed to offer, I was equally afraid of him now, and my dark, often sleepless nights had only made me more cautious. Somehow I knew that it would be best to keep the secret of my dreams from him.