After I returned to
the living room, they waited. Six people standing there, wondering what I’d do. Encircling me.
I felt a hand on my back. Lester Andrew Wyatt’s hand. I whirled around and saw a tear rolling down his cheek.
“That’s the first time I saw any of that,” he said, his voice choked with some sort of emotion, though I wasn’t sure what. He leaned closer to my ear. “This is what I wanted. This is the moment I wanted us to share. Just a moment for you, me, and Cyra.”
I couldn’t believe he
was crying and I wasn’t. I had an overwhelming impulse to bat his hand away. I still wasn’t sure what he was to me—not sure what was real or what I imagined or what I remembered.
I turned to my mother. “Why did you hide these from me?” I asked.
She brushed a crumpled tissue over her quivering lips. “I hide them from myself, too,” she said. “I only take them out twice a year, on her birthday and on the anniv—I’ve never even put them on the computer before. I only kept prints, and I kept them hidden in my closet. But Todd found them. He made this slideshow for me and gave it to me on her birthday. I think he was hoping the music would do for me what it did for Cyra. September is always so hard.”
The fall semester stress.
Todd didn’t say a word. What could he say? He’d broken my trust in a way that could never be mended. He’d gone all these years keeping my mother’s secret.
I didn’t feel shaky. I didn’t even feel angry anymore. I mostly felt pity.
“Those pictures should have been in frames,” I said to my mother. “They should have been in frames my whole life. I should have passed them in the hall every day. We should have looked at them together on every one of her birthdays.”
“I know that now,” Mom said, hiding her face behind the tissue.
“You erased her.”
“No.” She shook her head, knowing that was exactly what she had done.
“You did. You just . . . crossed her out.”
“It was the only way I could function. It was a mistake.”
I blinked slowly, still without a hint of tears. “Forgetting your umbrella at the restaurant is a mistake. Forgetting to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ is a mistake. But forgetting . . .” It got harder to find the words I wanted, but at least I found the words I needed. “You made me forget my sister. I see her in these pictures, but I don’t remember her at all. I don’t remember a thing about her.”
“I don’t think that’s entirely true.”
Ah, that weaselly voice could belong to only one man: Dr. Silver. It was perfect that he’d chosen that moment to finally chime in. “I think you may have recently begun to remember her, but you’re having difficulty processing the trauma.”
I glanced at my mom, at Todd, at Max, at Lou. All of them kept their eyes on Dr. Silver. “What trauma?”
Dr. Silver’s eyes were on me. “Theo, do you have any memories of the fire?”
I frowned. Funny, I’d never seen him in anything but a striped dress shirt and khakis. Now he was wearing jeans and a red zip-up fleece. Nothing but the closely trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and glasses to prove he was the shrink in the room. He appeared to be waiting patiently. He’d have to wait until the end of time, because I had no memory of any fire.
On the other hand, I did remember something Andy had said to me. (Imaginary Andy, that is.) He said sometimes we don’t even know what we’ve forgotten until people ask specific questions. Doctor Silver had asked a specific question. Maybe that was why I could feel the heat burning the lining of my stomach, making my face sweaty and flushed, making my (nonexistent) scar burn.
Andy had lost Cyra in a fire on September 1, 2003—that much I knew. But now I understood the missing piece.
I’d been there, too.
I dashed back into my mother’s room, back to the laptop. Nobody said a word as I Googled Lester Andrew Wyatt again. I’d been such a harried basket case the first time. I’d been running barefoot through the streets, reeling from the discovery of two Andys, not even sure of the year. Tears had blurred the microscopic text on my iPhone screen, and Wyatt had been so close on my tail, I’d let a photo of the fire tell me the whole story. But now, I could actually read the text of the
Times
article.
Now I understood what made Lester Andrew Wyatt such a hero.
It was just four
paragraphs. Four paragraphs that could have saved me from the past four days. Four paragraphs in the classic
Times
font that told the story of Sunday, September 1, 2003. The story of two eighteen-year-old do-gooders who were deeply in love.
Andy and Cyrano had just graduated from Exeter and had spent the summer helping to build a women’s shelter on Parker Street called “Keeping Our Promise.” It was a passion project funded by George Wyatt, Andrew’s father.
Cyrano had simply wanted to give her five-year-old sister a tour on a beautiful Sunday morning. But the electrical work hadn’t been fully completed, and a fire broke out in one of the rooms (I didn’t have to guess which room). The three of them were trapped.
Wyatt spoke from behind my shoulder as I read the article. “Do you remember now?”
The answer was no. I knew this was the part where I was supposed to surrender to suggestion.
Yes, I remember now
. But I wouldn’t. The fire was only part of what I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten my own sister. And some of the people hovering around me now were responsible for that.
“There was so much smoke,” Wyatt said. “Everything was crumbling down. The walls, the ceiling . . . There was no way I could have gotten to both of you in time. ”
I realized what he was trying to say and shut my eyes.
“Cyra knew,” he said. “She knew it had to be you, Theo. She wouldn’t even let me try another way—all she cared about was getting you out. By the time I went back for her, it was too late. The fire department was there by then. They tried to go back for her, but . . .”
I forced my eyes back open.
“Half the building was gone by the time they put it out,” he said. “We kept what we could, but it took us two years to rebuild.”
If half the building had burned to cinders, I couldn’t imagine what had happened to my sister’s body, and I didn’t want to ask.
“Theo, we’ve all had a talk this morning,” Dr. Silver said quietly. “Your mother and Andrew and Max and Louise and I. And I think I’ve pieced together what happened here.”
Have at it, Dr. Silver. God knows I’m in the dark.
“You were only five,” he said. “When a child that young endures something so traumatic, sometimes her only way to cope is to repress the memory—maybe even to repress all of her memories before that age. That surely could have been addressed in counseling. Someone could have helped you process those feelings, allowed you to grieve, but your mother . . .” He turned to Mom. “I’m sorry, Margaret, but I can’t overstate this. You made a deeply misguided decision. Never to speak of Cyrano again, to remove all her pictures, to move away from your home, to cut all ties with Andrew, and with Cyrano’s father.”
I could see the real story taking shape. She’d cut ties with
my father
, too. No doubt because he refused to go along with her “reset” approach. I bet he’d tried to contact me a bunch of times, but she’d shut him out at every turn. He must have given up at some point and just let her build our fictional little world without him in it. Maybe that’s why she was always so afraid when the doorbell rang? Afraid my father would come back to wreck her fake, Cyra-less life with the truth.
Mom, of course, refused to look at me as Dr. Silver spoke. She couldn’t look at anyone now.
“Cyra went off to boarding school when you were only a year old,” he said. “You only saw her for summers and holidays, which I think made it that much easier for you to forget. But repressed memories tend to reemerge at some point. Usually there’s some kind of trigger. It could have been as simple as a scent on the street, or a significant location, or a song.”
“The slideshow,” Mom said, nearly under her breath. “I played the slideshow the night of Cyra’s birthday. That was the night Todd gave me the disc. I didn’t even know what it was. I played it with the volume all the way up, but when it was over, I heard Theo screaming from her room.” Now she finally looked at me. “I ran to your bedroom and found you writhing in your sleep. It was the worst nightmare I’d ever seen you have. You were thrashing around so violently that you fell out of bed before I could get to you. You rolled off the bed and knocked your face into that damn coffee table. You woke up for a second after the fall, and I asked you if you were all right, but you shooed me away and fell right back to sleep.”
“Which night?” I asked. “Which night was that?”
“Cyra’s birthday,” Mom said. “June seventeenth.”
June seventeenth. The Night in Question. I couldn’t remember where I’d gone because I hadn’t gone anywhere. I couldn’t remember what had happened to me because nothing had really happened. Just a very bad dream that had shaken me out of bed and knocked me on my ass, leaving me sore as hell.
“I bought headphones to make sure you’d never hear the songs again,” Mom said. “I swore to myself I’d never even look at the pictures again, but then I found your dress covered in sick that night, and I thought I’d lost you, too. I was sure of it—”
“Why didn’t you
tell
me, Mom? Why didn’t you talk about my dream the next day?”
“I was afraid. I didn’t know if you’d wake up remembering the songs, remembering her. I was afraid we were about to have the conversation. I was waiting for you to say something. I saw that tiny nick on your face from when you hit the table. I thought for sure you’d ask about it, but you didn’t say a word.” Mom shook her head. “If you thought something terrible had happened to you, why didn’t you tell me?”
Yeah, right. Like I was about to tell Meg Lane that all her years of overprotective insanity were justified. But at least I knew where the Ice Queen had come from. It was why neither one of us had said a word that morning. Because that was us. A few polite, disinterested questions at breakfast.
“For the record, it’s not a tiny nick,” I said. “It’s huge. It’s disgusting. Why am I seeing it if it’s not there?”
Dr. Silver stepped toward me. “I found at least part of the answer in your bathroom.” He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a prescription bottle. My bottle of Lexapro. “Theo, there’s not even a quarter of the pills that should be in this bottle. Have you been taking more than I prescribed? Even more than twice as much?”
“I’ve been doubling up,” I said defensively, ignoring the sudden attention from Max and Lou. “And I took some extras when I was anxious. To help calm me down.”
He let out a sigh. “Theo, I made it clear that you had to take this medication strictly as prescribed. That much Lexapro wouldn’t calm you down—if anything, it would do the opposite. Have you been feeling speedy? Agitated? Snapping all the time?”
Faster and meaner.
I stole a glance at Max and Lou. Their accusatory glares softened.
“Yeah,” I admitted.
“Do you remember me telling you that one potential serious side effect of Lexapro is hallucinations? Both visual and auditory?”
I almost snapped,
I remember a list of potential side effects that pretty much amounted to everything.
But snapping didn’t seem like the best move right now.
“Your friends also told me you’d stopped taking your Ambien,” he continued, “which I had given you specifically to counteract the insomnia from the Lexapro. Theo, sleep deprivation alone could cause hallucinations.”
I hung my head. It was ironic: after his lecture, all I wanted to do was take a nap. If sleep was the cure, bring it on.
“It’ll be okay,” Lester Wyatt chimed in. “You’re sick, but you’ll get better.” He looked to Dr. Silver. “She just needs some psychiatric care, Doctor. And she’ll get better, right? She’ll come back to reality, and we can put this all behind us?”
Dr. Silver nodded. “Yes. It’ll take some time. Now that we have a clear picture, we can begin some targeted therapy. First, we need to decrease the medication and wait for the side effects to subside. I think that would be best done in a hospital environment.”
Fear gripped me. “You’re locking me up?”
“No,” he reassured me. “I don’t think you’re a danger to yourself or others. I just need you safely monitored while we lower the dose. I’m checking you into the medical wing.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but couldn’t. I’d made myself sick, and I needed help. Lester Wyatt was right. Everything he’d said to me was right. I couldn’t separate reality from fantasy. It was just like my mother said, just like I’d told my imaginary friend Andy Reese: if there was one thing I was good at, it was making up stories.
Chapter Nineteen
Every hospital room looks the same. Ugly white walls, a bed with bars on either side, fluorescent lights that make everyone look like shit, and a TV on the wall that is inexplicably twenty years too old. Every hospital room feels the same. Depressing as hell.
I had a laundry list of things to be depressed about. Where to begin? The sister I’d lost and still couldn’t remember? The scar I’d been hallucinating for months? The boy I’d been hallucinating for a week? The mother who’d purposely robbed me of the chance to grieve, robbed me of the chance to be totally sane for the last twelve years? I was just beginning to understand the extent to which that fire and the loss of my sister defined me.
Maybe the most depressing thing was the company. Not Lou and Max, of course, but my mom, always in the chair at my side, never leaving. I was so sick of her guilty expressions, her attempts to apologize a hundred different ways. Now that the secret was out, she couldn’t seem to shut up.
She said she’d never wanted Cyra to date Andy in the first place (big surprise!). She said she never liked him, that she blamed him for taking us to K.O.P. that morning. She’d been secretly happy that high school was over, and that Cyra and Andy would finally have to break up.
I could have endured it, though, except for one problem. There was still a physical remnant, a nagging sensation.
Not a blaring siren, not even a buzzing, more of a steady quiet blaze. It was still there, burning a tiny part of me from the inside. How long would it take to come down from my Lexapro trip? How long until it stopped? Maybe it was embarrassment. I’d spent a week of my life falling for a hallucination. I’d launched us into that pathetic “investigation.” Why couldn’t I just
remember
Cyra and Andy like a normal person? How could I have forgotten that Andy rescued me from that fire? Why did my unconscious have to torture me with all the psychodrama? All the madness with Unhinged Andy the Arsonist, and the “claw marks” under the rug. I was clinically compelled to make up stories.
At the very least, that provided an answer for some of the insanity. A depressing answer, yes, but at least I’d hit my depressive rock bottom. Or so I thought until day three, when the nurse told me I had a visitor.
I was certain it would be Andy Wyatt. I wasn’t ready for that visit yet, but when I saw her walk through the door, I wished it had been him. That would have been easier.
I’d been so busy reeling from epiphanies, I’d nearly forgotten about her. I’d nearly forgotten the one person in this godforsaken mess that I’d actually tortured more than I’d tortured myself.
“Hi, I’m Emma,” she said quietly, shaking Lou’s hand. She shook Max’s hand and then my mother’s. “You might not remember me, Ms. Lane. Emma Renaux. Cyra and I were—”
“Yes, of course, I remember you.” Mom’s voice hitched. “Emma. Cyra adored you.”
Emma’s eyes began to tear up, but she kept her polite smile intact. “Well, I adored her, too.”
There was a painful silence before she finally turned to me. “Hello, Theo.”
I hadn’t been expecting a smile. I couldn’t help but smile back. I began to tear up, too. I’d ruined her wedding—the most important day of her life—and here she was in this awful place, forgiving me. Her hair was combed more simply than I’d ever seen it. I’d only seen her dolled up for wedding events. Now there was just a small diamond barrette holding back her bangs. Her outfit was simpler, too. A cropped black jacket, designer jeans, and flats. The only complicated thing was that smile. It was a muddy mix of sadness, longing, good manners, and a whiff of sincere happiness. Then, of course, there was the fear. She was a little afraid of me. How could she not be, after that all-out assault I’d launched at Delmonico’s Steakhouse?
“Hi,” I managed, trying to sound as un-scary as possible.
Lou scooted toward the door. “Maybe you guys want a minute,” she said. Before I could argue, she led Max and Mom out of the room, leaving me alone with Emma for the first time since our encounter on the terrace of the Ritz-Carlton.
Silence stretched between us. My smile gradually faded.
Emma spoke first. “Theo, I want . . .” she began. “No, I
need
you to forgive me.”
I stared at her, unsure how to respond. “You want . . . me . . . to forgive
you
?”
“If you can,” she said quickly. “I know it can’t happen overnight.”
“No, it’s not that, it’s . . . Why are you apologizing? I should be the one apologizing. I ruined your wedding.”
“No.” She pulled a chair up next to my bed. “That was just an event. It’s just a symbol. It doesn’t mean anything. What happened between us is real. It is so much more important. I’m so ashamed of myself.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know where to begin,” she said. She leaned closer. “Theo, do you believe in ghosts?”
I nodded. “I do.”
“I do, too. Andy made fun of me about it for years, but Cyra and I always believed. The thing is, when I saw you on the terrace at the Ritz, I thought . . . Well, I thought you were a ghost. I thought you were Cyra. You’re almost the same age she was when we lost her. You’re so much alike . . .”
I struggled to sit up in bed. In all my Mom’s wailing and self-flagellation, she’d never once told me what Cyra was really like. “You think I look like her?”
“That’s part of it. But it was eerie. It was hard to look at you. The truth is, I’d been waiting for her. From the second Andy proposed to me, I’d been waiting. I thought she would hate me so much for taking him away that she’d come back, just to remind me that he was hers and hers alone—that he belonged to her. Because he did belong to her, Theo. I may have loved him first, but Cyra beat me to it. And he loved her
so
much more than he could ever love me. More than he loves me now, I know that. Who wouldn’t love her more? She was Cyra.”
I tried to swallow, but my throat was clogged. I nodded as if I understood, but how could I really? I didn’t know her.
“I tried to convince myself that twelve years was long enough,” Emma went on. “We even decided to get married on the K.O.P. anniversary in her honor. So when I saw you that night, I wasn’t myself. I thought she had come back to punish me. That’s why I told her—I mean, told
you
—not to blame Andy, that it wasn’t his fault. I was the one who’d pushed for the wedding.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be. I went right to Andy that night and told him the wedding was off, that I’d seen Cyra’s ghost and we had to call it quits. He said I was being crazy. He convinced me it wasn’t a ghost, but then we couldn’t figure out who it was. Who could look and sound so much like her? Then Helena told us about the girl she’d met at the party. A girl named Theo. How many girls are named Theo? I can’t tell you the
joy
I felt. The closest thing to Cyra on earth. Here you were walking back into our lives after twelve years of nothing—”
“That wasn’t my fault!” I protested, tossing my blanket aside. I almost leapt off the hospital bed to grab her hands.
“I know, I know. Andy told me the whole story. But when you stomped into the rehearsal dinner, you were so angry. Everything you said about Cyra, about how I knew what had happened to her, how I was trying to sweep her under the rug and forget her, how you could never forget her . . . it wasn’t wrong. It was like you knew all my greatest fears, all the guilt, this huge weight I carried. I should have just talked
to you then and there. I should have put my arms around you. But I panicked. I hid. I told my brother to ask you to leave.”
I almost laughed. “He took you pretty seriously,” I mumbled, lying back against the pillows. “He did a little more than ask.”
Emma crossed her arms. “Oh, God, what did Tyler do? He can be a bit of a bully sometimes. His friends are idiots. Was he rude to you?”
I thought about what Tyler had said.
“Whatever happened, happened. What’s done is done. Let it go.”
He was talking about my sister’s death. He knew more about my sister than I did. He just happened to be an utter asshole.
“Never mind,” I said. “We just had a misunderstanding.”
Emma leaned close in her chair. “Can you forgive me, Theo?”
“Why do I have to forgive you?” I pressed. “I mean, I’ll forgive you, sure, of course, but I should be asking you to forgive me, right?”
She shook her head. “Andy explained it all. About how your mother hid Cyra from you. Whatever you were going through, I made it worse. I wasted all of our precious time thinking your only mission in life was to destroy my wedding.”
I reached for her hand. “But I did,” I said. “I did destroy your wedding.”
“You did nothing of the sort.” She smiled, sniffling, and clasped her hand over mine. “We went to the courthouse this morning and did the deed. I mean, not
the
deed; we haven’t done
that
yet.” She laughed and wiped a tear away. Her face turned bright pink. “Okay,
that
was an overshare!”
I laughed along to ease her embarrassment, but I couldn’t help wondering if she was even more of a traditional Southern belle than I’d thought. Saving herself for marriage, no matter how many years it took? Could I wait that long? I could barely wait for a fully toasted Pop-Tart.
But then I thought about what Tyler had said to me in that bathroom stall.
“My sister has waited her entire life for this wedding.”
It was so true. Emma had only ever loved one man. She’d been saving herself for him ever since she saw him across that crowded room at the freshman Winter Formal. Because she knew before she’d even asked him to dance. She knew she was going to marry him.
The nurse stepped back into my room. “Ladies, I’m afraid visiting hours are over. I’m going to have to ask you to say your goodbyes.”
“No,” I said. I squeezed Emma’s hand tightly. “Don’t go.”
“Oh, honey.” She grew misty again and squeezed back. “I’ve got to go. We’re doing a little makeup wedding night with the family at the hotel. But I’m going to come back and visit you every single day, I promise.”
“Sorry, ladies,” the nurse insisted. “Rules are rules.”
“You don’t have to listen to her,” I said. I didn’t know why I was so desperate to keep her. Maybe because I had finally made my first real connection to Cyra. I didn’t want to let it go.
“Theo, I know,” Emma whispered, extricating herself. She drifted toward the door. “I feel the same, but I promise I’m not going anywhere. We’re going to be friends, you and I. There is so much I can tell you about her, about how much she
adored
you. Tomorrow, okay?”
She blew me a kiss as the nurse escorted her out, and I realized what a mess I truly was. I barely knew Emma Renaux, but as she walked out that door, I felt like I was losing Cyra all over again.
I must have dozed
off, because the next thing I knew Max and Lou were at my side, shaking me awake.
“
Jesus
,
come on, Thee,” Max was saying. “Did you see it? You saw it, right?”
I yawned and rubbed my eyes. “Saw what?”
“The
ring.
” Lou tried her best to whisper, but she was too revved up. She glanced back at the closed door. We were alone. I wondered if Mom had gone home.
“What ring?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
“
The
ring,” Lou said. “Your dream ring. The wedding ring you’ve sketched a zillion times? The one you supposedly dreamed up in your imagination? It was on Emma’s finger.”
Now I was awake. I sat up straight. “What? No, it wasn’t.”
“Yeah, it was,” Max said.
Lou gripped my wrist. “Six little diamond daisy petals with a gold center? Who else has a wedding ring that looks like a daisy? Who else would dream of a wedding ring that looks like a daisy? Thee, it was your ring.”
Not only was I awake; I was afraid. Three days, and I was still so far gone that I’d missed the ring on Emma’s finger. I
had missed the
wedding ring
. Apparently, I was in no condition to notice anything at this point. “Wait, slow down. When did you see it?”
“Five minutes ago,” Max said breathlessly. “Not even. When she left. She hugged us all goodbye. It practically dug a hole in my back.”
Lou dragged a chair over as Max sat down next to me on the bed. “Listen, Thee, it’s not just the ring,” Lou added. “I’ve been thinking about this all night. I just didn’t want to mess with your head any more than it’s been messed with.”
“I don’t even think that’s possible,” I said.
“Well, then, here’s the thing.” Lou leaned in. “All anyone talks about is the stuff you made up. But no one’s talking about the stuff that might have been real. Like that ring. If you didn’t make it up, then it’s something you’ve seen before, something you remember, something from your past. What if there’s more like that?”
“Like what?”
“That’s what we’re asking you,” Max said. “I mean, Dr. Silver’s smart, and yes, he’s got the beard on me, but what about
us
? I’ve been in sessions with you for over three years. I think I’m pretty freaking qualified to assess your overall sanity, and my verdict is: Not Crazy. I mean, yes, you’re crazy, but you’re not
crazy
.”
Really? Then why do I feel crazier than ever right now?
“Thee, I was wrong,” Lou said. “I was wrong about your iDoc.”
Forget crazy; now I was frightened again. My eyes darted between the two of them. “What the hell are you guys talking about?”
“Remember we were talking about Schaffler?” Lou said. “About how you were breaking the rules? About how you were ‘tainting the narrative’ by putting yourself in Andy’s story?”
“Yeah.”
“Right, but Thee, you
are
Andy.”
“I’m Andy?”
Lou exchanged a glance with Max. She rested a hand on my shoulder. “I mean, not the real Andy, but you’re Andy Reese. You’ve been Andy Reese this whole time. You’ve been writing all his lines. Every time Andy remembered something, it was really you
remembering, and every time he couldn’t remember something, it was because you couldn’t remember it. I think Dr. Silver is right. Something triggered your memories of Cyra, but I think the only way you could deal with the memories was to turn them into a movie, to turn them into your new iDoc. Thee, you never broke the rules, because you never put yourself into Andy’s story. It has always been your
story. You’ve been trying to tell your own story.”