Everyone We've Been (32 page)

“I need your help please I need your help.” I mumble a run-on sentence once I reach the counter where the receptionist is. It's Heidi again, and the man who was training is nowhere in sight. I drove to Overton right after losing it in the car, and I was expecting to have to plead or grovel my way into the clinic since I didn't make an appointment, but apparently Dr. Overton has granted me temporary emergency access because of my “symptoms,” the unexpected side effects I've been experiencing.

“Please,” I say again. I must be loud, because while Heidi is trying to calm me down and the other patients are staring, the nurse with the purple stripe in her hair hurries in with Dr. Overton, who's holding a half-eaten chocolate granola bar, his eyes wide with surprise.

“Addison!” he says. “What are you doing here?”

“I need you to help me.”

He and the nurse exchange a glance, and I determine definitively that, yes, she does know me. Then I follow Dr. Overton to his office and sit across the desk from him for the third time in a week.

“What's wrong?” he asks, looking genuinely concerned.

“The boy I was seeing? The memory?” Dr. Overton nods. “He's gone. I can't get him to come back.”

I see some of the tension release from his shoulders.

“Well, that's good! Right?” He watches me carefully.

I shake my head. “No, that's not
good.
He's all I have.”

Of the first time I fell in love. Of the two people who were erased from my mind.

Dr. Overton's forehead furrows and he seems unsure what to say for a second. Finally he chuckles. “He's not
all
you have, Addie. You have two parents who would do anything for you and—”

“You don't understand,” I say, speaking over him. “I feel like there's a giant hole.” I hear my voice catch as I continue. “And I don't know how to fill it. How to go back to being normal and happy. How to look at my family again.”

To know that they're not who I thought. That I'm not who I thought.

The crease remains in the middle of Dr. Overton's forehead.

“I want
you
to fill it,” I say slowly. “I want you to give me my memories back.”

He is silent for a long moment before he exhales through his nose. He gives me a sad smile then, like he actually understands, genuinely feels for me.

“Addie, I wish I could, but I'm afraid I'm not in a position to do that,” he says.

“That's not good enough,” I say, my voice rising. “All I hear about is how easy memory splicing is, how easy it is to take away the past. So it must be just as easy to bring it back. Saying you can't do that is not good enough.”

I know I've crossed the line into disrespectful, but when I finish speaking, he looks shaken, not angry. His eyes are full of something like empathy, like conflicted feelings.

“Addison, I know you've been through a tough few days. I know you're upset—and you are well within your rights to be. If I were in your shoes, well…” His voice fades out. “Do you know what I love about this job? What I love about our minds?”

Thankfully, he doesn't wait for me to respond.

“I love the idea of us carrying around fragments of places and people and things we've experienced. It's so unlikely and almost miraculous, when you think about it. All the things that matter stay with us. They take up space inside us. Sometimes
outside
us, too, I suppose.” He smiles at me then, and I know he's talking about Memory Zach. The apparition I was seeing.

He runs his hands over his eyes, and I can see that this is something he has thought about a lot. “Every now and then,
often
in fact, I'm reminded that I'm not playing with neurons or electrodes or even memories. I'm playing with fragments of people's lives, people's hearts. And I don't take that lightly. I really don't.”

There's a long silence between us then, and I take the opportunity to say, “So help me? Please?”

“I wish I could. I really, truly do. But we've never done a successful retrieval procedure. My father is working on it, but it's years away. There's nothing I can do.”

I bury my face in my hands.

Memory Zach is really gone. My brother is really gone.

And what was the point? What was the point of the last few weeks? Only to make me more aware of what I was missing, what I'll never have?

How will I ever feel anything now that's not incomplete or hollow or a shadow of what's real?

How do I go back to dreaming of New York, making plans for college and the rest of my life, when massive chunks of it—of who I am—are gone forever?

How do I move forward?

All I have in place of my past is brokenness. This sadness that nothing can lift, a fog I can't see through. This knowledge that my family lied to me for years and years, that I lied to myself. That I'm the reason my family crumbled. That if I had done something different, my little brother might still be alive.

I can't take it.

It's too much.

How do I move forward? That's what I want. To
move on
—it's, in a way, what I've always wanted. After Rory died. After Zach broke my heart.

It's why I've been itching to leave Lyndale my whole life.

I want what's next.

“Addie, I'm so very sorry,” Dr. Overton says, sounding like he means it.

I can't stop shivering, but then a thought hits me.

I pull my fingers away from my face and look at him.

If there's no way to bring back my memories, to fill this new and ugly void in my life, maybe there's something else I can do.

“If you can't bring them back,” I whisper, “can you take them away? For good?”

Now it's not just my hands shaking; my voice is, too.

“What do you mean by ‘them?' ” The line of concern down his forehead is even more etched now.

“Everything I've figured out. Everything starting from when the boy got on the bus—no,
before
that. I don't want the Bach suite—the concert, either.”

Dr. Overton looks confused, but he lets me go on.

“I don't want to know about Rory or about Zach. I don't want to know that I erased him or to remember meeting him today. I want everything from the last three weeks gone.”

He's shaking his head. “That's three procedures. We're still monitoring for the effects of the accident. I don't think we can do that.”

“It's not dangerous. All the pamphlets and stuff say that. And you said my CT was clear. It's what I want. Please.” I'm practically hysterical at this point.

“But, Addison,” he says now. “You do realize that you won't get them back? That these memories will be gone for good if we go through with what you're asking for?”

The thing I want most is to move on. And the procedure helped me do that before, didn't it? Maybe not completely, but mostly. That's why I came back for the second one. Why I'll do it again now.

“I know,” I say, still shaking.

“Okay,” Dr. Overton says. “Okay.”

The waiting-room music is slipping in under the door, and I dig my nails into my palms. I don't want to think about anything right now.

“One problem,” Dr. Overton says. “You're still only seventeen. There's absolutely no way we can proceed without a parent's permission. And given the circumstances surrounding your last…Well, one of them has to be with you for the procedure.”

Bruce, Mom's boyfriend, is the first person to see me when I enter the Channel Se7en building. “Hey, little miss!” he exclaims when I hurtle into the office area, full of cubicles, where he's standing reading a sheet of paper. He's wearing a checkered sweater vest, gray dress pants, and black oxfords. No socks, as usual. “Everything okay? Where are we going in such a hurry?”

“I need to talk to my mom,” I say. “Do you know where she is?”

He frowns at me, concerned, then glances down at his watch. “She's probably in a meeting. It's in the boardroom, but I can run over and stick my head in for you and we'll tell her you're looking for her, okay?”

“Thanks,” I say as he starts down the hall to get her.

Bruce is fond of the royal “we.” If, God forbid, he impregnated my mother, he'd be one of those men going around announcing, “We're pregnant.”

But he's always been nice to me and Caleb.

I pace around now as I wait for him to return. It's past four. Less than an hour till Overton closes. And what if Dr. Overton changes his mind about attempting the procedure?

Mom's clicking heels announce her presence before she rounds the corner. “What's wrong? What is it?” she asks, hurrying toward me. “Bruce said you looked like something was wrong.”

“I want to forget all this. The past few weeks. Finding out about Rory,” I tell her once she's stopped in front of me. She glances around and then leads me into her office. She shuts the door after us. “Dr. Overton is willing to do the procedure as long as you'll sign for it and be there.”

“Addison,” Mom says. She looks stunned. “But you were so adamant that it was the wrong thing, that we should never have done it to erase…your brother.”

Even now it's hard for her to say his name to me.

Rory, Rory, Rory.

I do it for her while I still can.

I do it for him, too, before I betray him a second time. A third time.

He's dead because of me.

I wasn't even strong enough to remember him.

In the cemetery, I promised him I'd remember him from now on, but Zach was right.

I'm a coward.

“Well, I guess you were right the first time. I'm not strong enough for the truth.” I burst into tears now, and she wraps her arms around me. Smooths my hair from my face.

“Oh, honey,” she says. “Oh, Addie.”

She's quiet for a second, tracing circles over my back, and then she says, “You know, you were different after the first procedure.”

I remember that feeling of things vanishing, the feeling of wanting more than I had. Did my mother feel guilty because of what she'd taken away from me or because she was finally sleeping for the first time in months, knowing that I was, too?

“I remember,” I say.

“You know your father won't support this. You know how he feels about Overton.”

“Well, he's not here, is he?”

“And what about the side effects from when you erased the boy? That had never happened to a patient before. What if it's not safe? What if your side effects are even worse this time around?”

“Mom, please,” I say. My mother has always tried to protect me because, I realize now, her biggest fear is that she can't. So I appeal to the part of her that hopes something else will help me, even if it's not her. “
This
is the worst thing. Having some of the pieces but not all. Knowing the worst parts and not the best. I don't want it anymore.
Any
of it. I just…I want to be able to move on. I want to forget.”