Remember (16 page)

chapter twenty-eight

T
here was no sign of my mom, or at least the woman I’d thought of as my mom, when I got home. I’d expected her to jump on me for missing dinner, but the house was quiet. I wondered if my dad had asked her to leave. The house was perfectly clean, everything put away, tidied up. It could have been cut out of a Pottery Barn catalog. There wasn’t anything that made it ours. Even the framed family photos on the mantel looked staged, like the pictures that came with the frame when you bought it.

I grabbed a bottle of water out of the fridge. I wasn’t thirsty, but I thought it would be good to have something to keep my hands busy. I stood outside his closed office door. My dad was a master at negotiation and getting people to do what he wanted. He always said he wished he could focus on the sci
ence of Neurotech and ignore the business side, but the truth was he liked it. “Business is war” and all that. It gave him a chance to feel like he was living out one of his strategy games. He could be a five-star boardroom general. I noticed that he’d shut his office door, which was a power play. It meant I would knock, letting him be the one to give me permission to enter.

I lowered my hand. Screw it. Neil said he thought I was brave. It was time for me to live up to that. I opened the door without knocking. My dad looked up, surprised. Point one of the game went to me. He glanced up at the clock on the shelf.

“You’re early.”

“Not a lot of traffic.”

I could tell he wanted to ask me where I’d been, but didn’t want to waste a question on something that didn’t matter. He motioned for me to sit across from him. As soon as I sat, I realized that my chair was lower than his. Point to Dad.

He sat silently, waiting for me to talk. I knew this was a power play too. I tried to hold out, but the silence was stretching my last nerve. “Have you been checking on me?” I finally asked.

“What do you mean, checking on you?”

He wasn’t going to make any of this easy. “I mean, have you been having me followed, making notes of who I see and what I do? It’s Josh, isn’t it?” I put into words what I knew had to be true. “You have him running and reporting to you like some
kind of spy. He tells you all about every detail of my life.”

“He’s concerned about you.” Dad leaned back, lacing his hands together over his belly.

My heart sank. I’d known it, but it was still hard to hear. “He wants to make you happy,” I spit out. “It’s not about me. It’s about his desire to make you proud of him.” How long had Josh continued to date me because he was really in love with my dad? With the idea that someday he could be just like him? He’d asked me questions, acted interested in my life, and then told my dad everything. It made me sick.

Dad sighed as if the entire conversation tired him. “I think your anger at Josh is misplaced.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not saving all my anger for Josh. You have no business trying to scare off my friends. Threatening them. Telling them to stay away from me.”

“You consider this Neil fellow to be a friend?” His face gave away nothing.

He admitted he knew about Neil. A mix of feelings flooded in, relief that he’d told the truth and disappointment that he’d done it. I hadn’t wanted to believe he was capable of it, but now there was no running from it. “Yes. Neil is one of the few friends I have left.”

He sighed. “You’re not going to believe me, but he’s not.”

“You’re right; I don’t believe you.” I made myself meet his eyes. “I know about my mom. My real mom.”

Dad let out a long breath through his pursed lips.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” I asked, trying to keep my voice under control. My entire body shook, like an electrical current was running through every nerve.

“First off, I don’t think it’s fair to imply Louise isn’t your ‘real’ mom. She’s been there for you day in and day out since you were nine.” He brushed me off before I could cut him off. “I’m aware I owe you an explanation, but I’m going to request that you not interrupt until I’ve shared the entire story.”

I realized I was squeezing the water bottle too tightly and relaxed my grip before it exploded. “Fine.”

“I’ll admit mistakes were made. However, I won’t apologize for doing what I thought was best.”

“Erasing my childhood was the best?”

He tapped the desk with his Waterman pen. “I thought we agreed you were going to be quiet until I had a chance to finish.”

I clenched my jaw and nodded.

“You and your mom, Robyn, were close. She called you Shadow. As a toddler you’d cling to her legs. If she got up, you got up. She went into the kitchen; you were a step behind her. You had a connection, I guess you’d call it. I suppose lots of moms and daughters do, but it seemed even more than that. You were two peas in a pod. She rode horses too.”

I wondered if he knew I’d already found that out. Mentioning Harry was on the tip of my tongue, but I managed to choke it down.

“You know she died.” He waited for me to nod. “It was
a horrible accident. Stupid. Just a missed step and she fell. It shouldn’t have happened, but it did. Losing a mother at a young age isn’t easy for anyone. It was more than that for you. You were devastated. Your mom was your bedrock; when she had the accident, it was as if your world bottomed out. You stopped talking. You were hardly eating. You started sleepwalking. One night you let yourself out of the house. You were walking down the center of the road at two in the morning in bare feet. I had to bungee-cord the door shut to keep you from getting out. I used a bell so I could hear you and wake up before you got too far.

“I took you to counselors. God, all sorts of counselors: someone who did play therapy, and another who did art therapy, and another guy who was all about pets; he’d have you playing with bunnies and dogs.” Dad snorted. “At least you seemed to sort of enjoy that, but it wasn’t making any difference. You weren’t any better. I wasn’t sure what to do. Everyone kept saying to give you time, but you kept wandering off in the night. Or I wouldn’t be able to find you and it would turn out you’d crawled into the closet and cried yourself to sleep. It was like the grief was going to kill you.” He looked at me. “Do you remember any of this?”

Nothing. My brain wasn’t even giving me a hint. I had a sense what he was telling me was at least partly the truth. There was a nagging feeling that what he was saying was on the border of what I could remember. “No.”

“I thought I might lose you.” Dad’s voice cracked, and he stopped to pull himself together. “I’d lost my wife, and I didn’t
know what I would do if I lost you, too. All those fancy doctors? They didn’t know what to do either. What if one night I didn’t catch you? What if you got hit by a car and died? What if you wandered off on a cold night and fell asleep in the woods and never woke up?”

I stared at him. I couldn’t escape the feeling that he wasn’t telling me everything. That there was more, but I wasn’t able to find it in the haze of my mind.

“Your mom was the one who had the original idea for Memtex. We were through with the clinical trials around the time she died. We had a green light to move forward. Investors were lining up to give us money. I’ll admit I was excited. I knew it was going to be big. It was going to change our lives. But your mom wasn’t as excited about the business aspects. She would have been happy signing over the idea and staying in the lab; what made her happy was that the procedure was going to make a difference for other people. People were going to get their lives back. When she was gone, and when I thought I was going to lose you, too, I thought, ‘There’s nothing she’d want more than to save her own daughter.’ Her accident didn’t have to end your life too.”

A band of tension around my chest loosened. No matter how bad this was, at least he hadn’t killed her. It might have been irrational, but I believed him. It had been an accident.

“Why did you take all of her away from me?” I’d planned for the words to come out as a firm question, but my voice made it pleading. “You could have softened things, but instead
you wiped them altogether.”

Dad rubbed his eyes. “I tried. I took you into the lab and gave you the procedure, but it didn’t seem to stick. You have to realize that the procedure wasn’t anywhere near approved for use with kids, and certainly not kids as young as you were. The brain at that age is growing and changing, making new neural connections almost fast enough to see. I softened the memories, but as soon as I did, your brain would find another route.”

“So you just wiped it out all together. Wiped her.”

He nodded. “If I’d thought there was another way, I swear to God, I would have done it. I’m not making excuses, but you have to understand I wasn’t in the best place. I’d lost my wife. I was working these crazy hours trying to get the company off the ground, not sleeping well. I didn’t have a lot of support; both your mom’s family and mine were gone. I wanted to make things better, and at the time it seemed like the only solution.”

“Did you love her?”

He looked up shocked. “Your mom? Robyn was . . . everything.”

“Then how did you move on so quickly? I get that you needed me to forget, but it’s like you forgot too,” I said.

Dad pulled his lower desk drawer out and rummaged through, pulling out all the folders. Then he pressed on the bottom of the drawer, and it popped up, showing a shallow hiding space below. Clearly, I should have spent more time when I broke into his office. He pulled out a file and passed it over
to me. It was a folder stuffed with photos. I picked through them: a wedding picture showing my dad and real mom looking impossibly young. My breath caught in my throat. There was a picture of my parents holding me as a toddler, all three of us in front of a straggly Christmas tree. Our faces had huge, matching smiles.

“I never forgot, but I did make a decision to move forward. I knew staying in our home was a bad idea. There were too many things to remind you of the past in the house. I didn’t want to take the chance of your memory flooding back. It made sense to live closer to Seattle for Neurotech’s start-up, so I decided we’d start over. It wasn’t that I wanted to erase Robyn, but it was easier to make a clean break. I told myself I was doing it for you, but I can admit now it was for me, too.” He stared down at his hands. “It might have been a poor decision, but I made it for the right reasons.”

He tried to smile, but it was brittle. “I’ve never been good with emotions and feelings. I’ve always had an engineering brain. So I handled this the same way. I couldn’t deal with my grief, so I boxed it up and refused to think about it. Louise worked with your mom and me. She’d stepped up after your mom died. She offered to come with me to help. You liked her. You always had. She moved into the house as sort of a nanny and assistant.”

I couldn’t meet his eyes. It seemed slimy and wrong no matter how he tried to package it.

He shrugged. “You already saw her as sort of a mother fig
ure. She was the first woman you saw after the procedure. She was around and took care of you. It seemed easiest to let her take that role for real.” He cleared his throat. “I came to care for Louise. I don’t want to make it sound like some kind of business relationship. It evolved into love.”

“Did you think I’d never find out?”

“I hoped so. Later, I wondered if I’d made a mistake, but the decision was done. There was no way to go back. I wanted to make the best of things so you could have a good life.” He reached for my hand across the desk and squeezed it. “You have had a good life, haven’t you? You’ve been happy.”

“Yes, but it hasn’t been real,” I protested.

“What’s real? Life is about experiences and what we remember. I took away a horrific moment in your life and gave you a foundation to build on that led you to this point. What might have happened to you if I’d left things? What if you’d stayed depressed? Would you have done as well in school? Made friends? I don’t know, but I wasn’t willing to risk it when I had a way to make it better. Am I sorry I lied to you? Yes. Would I do it the same way again? I think so.”

I sat silently in the chair. I’d had thousands of questions, but now they’d dried up and blown away. “When you realized I was remembering, you could have told me. You left me twisting, not knowing what to believe.”

He fussed with the papers on the desk. “I should have. My only excuse is that I thought it might go away. Or I hoped it would go
away. That was why I wanted you to come in for an appointment. I thought I’d be able to tell how far things had gone. I shouldn’t have let you find out all of this from that fellow.”

I didn’t like how he referred to Neil. “It’s not his fault. I asked him to help me.”

Dad sniffed dismissively. “I’m sure he’s been a great help.”

“You can’t be mad at him because he told me the truth.”

“He’s not telling you the whole truth. He hates Neurotech. He wants to use you to take down the company. He’s acting as if he’s your friend, like he cares about you, but this is all about his misguided desire for revenge.” With every word his finger stabbed down on his desk, as if he were pinning the words into place.

“I know about his brother,” I said. “He told me the very first time we met. He hasn’t been hiding it.”

He leaned back in his seat and crossed his hands over his belly. “Did he tell you about his sister?”

I took a slow breath in. It seemed that suddenly I’d turned around and discovered that I was on the very edge of a cliff. That I’d danced right up to it without having any idea how close I was to falling. He knew something. Something that I wasn’t going to want to hear.

“She’s that reporter,” Dad spit out. “The one who’s been hounding the company, calling for investigations and trying to sniff out trouble. The one who showed up at your school.”

“That’s not his sister.” Even as I said it, I knew I was wrong.
My dad wouldn’t be mistaken about something like this. He’d done his homework and was about to make me regret not having done my own.

He tossed a sheet of paper across the desktop. It drifted to a stop in front of me. It was some type of report from a private investigation company. “It’s all there. Gambel is her married name.”