“Mom?” I ask. I hesitate before I open the door, like I always do. Because I’m afraid of what I might see on the other side. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, fine, just fine,” she answers as the faucet turns on. I let go of a breath I didn’t know I was holding and push open the door.
Her wild hair is standing on end, black against the paleness of her skin. Under her T-shirt and shorts, I can see the bones sticking out at her joints in all the wrong places, and when her eyes meet mine in the mirror, I’m struck with the image of her I remembered when I was dying—and how it should be some sort of crime for God to let a woman like that turn into someone like this.
“Janelle?” she asks, fumbling with a foil packet of Advil. All the medication in our house now comes in single-serving packets. “Are you feeling better? Your father said you were sick.”
I nod. “I’m fine.” It’s possible he told her what happened with the truck and she forgot, or it’s possible he didn’t tell her at all. I’m not sure which is worse, but it doesn’t matter because the result is the same.
A quick glance at the broken glass in the sink—not on the floor and no blood—tells me she’s fine. The thin layer of dust covering the whole bathroom tells me I need to stop avoiding this room and get in here to clean this weekend.
“My head just hurts so much.” She throws a hand over her eyes to shield them from the light.
“Here, let me help you.” I’ve barely torn open the packet when she snatches the pills from my hand and swallows them dry. “Have you eaten anything today? Struz is bringing over Chinese food.”
“Great, the whole house will smell awful,” she says with a snort. “It’s like your father does this to me on purpose. He knows how terrible my headaches are and he knows how much strong smells bother me. And loud noises. I just need peace and quiet. I need to rest.”
I flick off the bathroom light and help her back to bed.
“I just need to rest,” she repeats as she gets under the covers. She looks small and fragile, like a sick child instead of my mother. “Can you get me a cold compress?”
Part of me wants to say,
Get your own compress
, but instead I nod.
Just because I died and had a moment of reflection doesn’t mean anything’s going to change around here.
It’ll take a lot more to wake this hollow heart.
“W
hoa, whoa, whoa!” Struz says, his six-foot-seven-inch wingspan flailing around the dining room table, almost knocking into both me and Jared.
I make eye contact with Alex, who’s been eating his second dinner with us every night since he was old enough to think up a good excuse to walk over to our house by himself—his mom cooks only organic, vegan, and gluten-free meals. He grins at me as he goes to take a sip of his Coke, but thinks better of it. Probably because he knows what’s coming. Struz has made us laugh until soda comes out of our noses many times.
Struz continues, “Jim! You gotta be kidding me. You mean you haven’t done a background check or a fingerprint analysis or anything on this
Nick
character?”
Jared laughs so hard he spits some of his Chinese food back onto his plate. Alex throws his napkin at Struz’s face. Dad and I shush them.
Struz dramatically wipes a hand through his hair and turns back to his captive audience. “That’s just not okay. I mean, seriously!” he continues, his voice quieter now, as he gestures to the flowers Nick brought earlier. “Jared! This guy brought J-baby roses!
Pink ones!
And we don’t even know who he is. What is wrong with your father?”
“Nick could be a terrorist,” Alex says. He finds that way too funny.
“He could be an
alien!
” Jared laughs.
I roll my eyes.
“No, seriously,” Dad says. “Let’s hear something about this guy. How did he win you over?”
Batting his eyes like a cartoon character, Alex says, “He’s dreamy,” with a dramatic sigh.
“That better not be an imitation of me,” I say.
Alex just laughs.
I look at Struz, who does his “give it to me” hand gesture, and then Dad, who also appears to be waiting for some kind of response. “Nick’s smart; he works hard.”
“At sports,” Alex coughs.
“Don’t be such an intellectual snob.”
“Seriously, Alex,” Struz says. “Professional athletes get a lot of play.”
I ignore that comment, since Dad and I haven’t really ever had the “who are you dating” conversation, and I’d prefer not to have it right now. And I’d
really
prefer not to talk about any of the guys in my life and how much “play” they are or aren’t getting. Struz included. “Nick wants to play football at USC next year,” I add, because something needs to be said.
“I suppose if he goes to USC, he’s good enough for me,” Struz says—not surprising, since that’s where he went to college. “But if he goes to UCLA, you have to break up.”
Jared laughs and announces that his lifelong dream is to go to UCLA, and I break open a fortune cookie. Stuffing the cookie into my mouth, I unroll the fortune and can’t help snorting a laugh.
Everyone pauses. “What’s it say?” Jared asks, reaching across the table.
Instead of answering, I flick the fortune to Alex before getting up. I grab my plate and a couple of empty cartons and head into the kitchen. Just before I turn the water on, I hear Alex’s voice reading my fortune. “Soon life will become more interesting.”
Jared’s unrestrained laughter drowns out what anyone else might be saying, and I’m glad.
I see those images of myself playing out again, watching my life pass me by. As if dying and then being resurrected weren’t enough—as if anything could
become
more interesting than that.
“Just not sure if interesting will be a good or a bad thing, huh?” Alex asks when he comes through the kitchen. He hands me the dirty dishes and opens the cabinet to grab some Tupperware. Struz did order the left side of the menu, and we’ll be eating Chinese for the next few days.
“I was
dead
, Alex,” I repeat, because we’ve had this conversation already. At least six times. In the hospital. Whenever Alex made it into my room without Jared or Nick.
“J,” Alex whispers, his hand falling on my arm, “I can’t imagine all the shit you’re feeling, but come on—you got hit by a truck, you lost consciousness, and you had seizures in the hospital.”
“One seizure.”
He pulls his hand back. “It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for your mind to make something up. Besides, when’s the last time Ben Michaels and Elijah Palma even came to the beach?”
I can’t argue with that. I’m at the beach almost every day, and I can’t remember ever seeing them. Not that I would have been looking, though.
Logically, I know he’s right. I’ve heard the Near-Death Experience stories. People seeing angels, tunnels of light, balls of energy, even God. I don’t believe in that. I believe the mind is a powerful thing, and I believe people see what they want to see.
But why did
I
see Ben Michaels?
“J, did you hear what I said?”
“Hmm?”
Alex glances at the door to the dining room and lowers his voice as he sits on top of the counter and leans over my shoulder. “We should be asking about John Doe, his truck, and where the hell it came from.”
I found out some of the details at the hospital. After hitting me—if it even did—the truck crashed into an embankment and the driver—still unidentified, since the license in his wallet was a fake—died on impact.
Based on the skid marks and the collision, they’re betting he was flying down the hill at more than eighty miles an hour. It’s no wonder I didn’t see the truck coming.
But I still feel like an imposter—alive, when he’s not.
“Are you listening to me?”
“What? Sorry.” I turn off the water and dry my hands, making an attempt to give Alex my full attention.
“I was
saying
…” He draws it out, and I wave my hand to hurry him along. “I found out the truck that hit you, there’s no record of it. They couldn’t pull up the plates or the guy’s registration in the system—no record of any of them.”
“Wait, what was the fake name?”
Alex balks. “Does it matter?”
I don’t have a reason that I can explain. But it does matter.
“Don’t obsess over the unimportant stuff,” Alex says, and I nod because the last thing I want to do is get into an argument about my tendency to overanalyze and the way it drives Alex crazy. “Nothing he had on him matched anything in the DMV database.”
“What, so they’re all fake?”
Alex shrugs. “I don’t know. I only half heard the conversation your dad was having with the cops afterward, but when they ran the VIN and even the parts for the truck, nada.”
“That’s impossible. Even if somebody made fake plates and IDs—even if they stole parts from several trucks, the model numbers would still register. They’d just register to different vehicles.” I shake my head. “Who would go to the trouble for an old Toyota?”
“That’s the kicker,” Alex says, folding his arms across his chest and leaning against the kitchen counter. When he does that, he looks weirdly like my dad. “It’s not a Toyota.”
“Please, are we really going to have an argument about cars again? I thought we agreed you’d stick to calc and physics and leave practical knowledge to me.”
He smiles but doesn’t say anything. He knows something I don’t. And he’s dying to share. I wave for him to continue.
“The frame of the truck is the same design as a ’79 Toyota, but the engine and the vehicle paperwork, even the logo are all really different. It’s actually a 1997 Velociadad.”
“A what?” I turn back to the dishwasher. “I’ve never even heard of a car company anywhere in the world by that name.”
“Which is probably why I heard your dad ask if the truck appeared out of thin air,” Alex says.
I’m not even sure what I can say about that—what can anyone?
Alex is right, of course. This
is
more important than whether Ben Michaels resurrected me or I hallucinated it. This is real, and my dad is investigating it. That automatically gives it more urgency. It’s something I can handle now.
“Could someone be running a chop shop?” Alex asks. “Stealing vehicles, repackaging and reselling them as something else?”
“It’s possible, but why bother with all the hassle?”
Alex just shrugs and doesn’t say anything else, which means we’ve both reached our limit. Because I’m still pissed that he doesn’t believe that I died, I add, “No theories? C’mon, they don’t let just anyone into West Point.”
“Don’t say that out loud.” Alex looks around shiftily.
I roll my eyes. “Your mother hasn’t bugged my house as far as I know.”
“Your dad thinks I’ll be able to get in.” Of course Alex will get in. He has a 4.6 GPA and he’s bilingual. And my dad will write him a recommendation, since he went to West Point and graduated at the top of his class. Which is one of the reasons Alex wants to go.
Alex has gone silent, staring into space with his jaw set. I feel bad now for making him think about all the drama he’ll have to deal with when he finally admits to his mother he’s not going to graduate early and go to Stanford, thereby deviating from the life plan she’s been outlining for him since he was conceived.
“So which one of the boxes do you think has stuff about the truck in it?” I ask, because getting back to the investigation will be the only way to make him feel better—and because I know my dad has info about the truck. It doesn’t matter that the FBI doesn’t allow you to investigate anything that happens to you or your family or even people you know. My dad wouldn’t let a truck just appear out of thin air and hit me without investigating it.
“When I helped Jared bring them into the office, I set the lightest box in the back corner, farthest from his desk.” He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t need to. We’ve been spying on my dad and comparing notes about his cases practically forever. We’re nerds like that.
W
hen my cell phone beeps in the middle of the night, I almost say
Whatever
and go back to sleep. A stolen Toyota—or whatever it is—is hardly worth waking up to check out.
Except for the fact that the driver is dead, when it should have been me.
I roll out of bed and fumble into the hallway. We’ve lived here my whole life, and I’ve done the get-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night stunt enough that I don’t need to turn on the lights. But I curse silently as I head down the stairs and see the sliver of light coming from my dad’s study. Either he and poor Struz are still working, or he’s fallen asleep at his desk.
I imagine it’s this way for all law-enforcement agents—long hours, sleepless nights, obsessive attention to detail, poring over case files. Every FBI agent I know has at least two cases they’ll never forget and never stop thinking about, investigations they’ll carry with them in the back of their minds always, for their entire lives. The one that went right. And the one that went wrong.
For my dad, the case that went right was the one that made his career.
It was more than ten years ago. It was his first case with Struz, who was a junior analyst at the time. I was too young to remember any of the details now, except the ones I heard repeated whenever he relived the story.
Ten Russian spies were discovered and arrested in Temecula, of all places. One was a Fox News reporter, popular with the public and, of course, beautiful. She ended up getting caught in a trap an undercover FBI agent set for her, and as a result all ten of them—and some guy bankrolling them in Budapest—went down. The undercover agent? My dad.
But the case that went wrong—the one still unsolved—is even older. It happened one of his first years on the job, before he got involved in counterintelligence. When my mom was pregnant with me—just after she’d found out I was a girl.
A seventeen-year-old girl—captain of the swim team, with an academic scholarship to USC, a boyfriend, friends, the perfect family, with a dog and white picket fence—went missing from her bedroom. All her possessions were untouched and in their rightful place. No forced entry, no signs of a break-in, no one heard or saw anything unusual—it was like she just … disappeared into thin air.