Proof of Life

by Sheila Lowe

  “Who’s that?” Jenna asked.

  “Abby Starkey’s mom,” said Zach angrily. “Why the hell would you tell her?”

  The unfair accusation bruised Jessica more than it should have. She flared back at him. “I didn’t tell her. Elaine came over last night while I was at Abby’s house—because you asked me to be there—remember? Abby let it slip. Dammit, I knew Elaine was going to drag it out of her the minute I left. But why would she blab it to the media?”

  “Probably thinks her daughter is going to hell because of what you’re doing. And she’d probably be right.”

  Zach shot Jenna a dirty look. “Knock it off, Jen.”

  For a half-second, Jenna’s face collapsed with fatigue and the strain of uncertainty. The breezy mask fell back in place, but not before Jessica saw what her twin was hiding: genuine worry.

  “You came all the way over here so you could tell me I’m trending?”

  “We came because we couldn’t get hold of you and I have a key to your house in case of emergency. And now, I’m leaving. I don’t see any emergency here.”

  Jenna pointed an accusing finger at Zach. “Next time you can’t reach her, don’t call me.” She sashayed to the door, turning back with a beauty pageant wave. “B’bye, Sage.”

  They watched her go in silence.

  “Have you found anything new since the food wrapper?” Jessica asked, as the door closed behind her with a sharp snap.

  Zach’s face was pasty grey with exhaustion. Dark circles smudged the skin beneath his eyes, the thick, black hair greasy and uncombed. The signs of working all night at Ballona marsh with his team. He glowered down at her. “I’m no longer allowed to discuss the case with you. If you want to know anything, ask your brother-in-law. Or turn on the news.”

  “You’re acting like it’s my fault that you asked me to connect with Ethan.” She heard the peevishness in her tone and wished Sage did not have to witness the childish exchange.

  Zach heaved an injured sigh. “No, Jess, it’s not your fault I asked for your help. But you and I get to bear the consequences of my mistake. I’m not allowed to ask for your help again, and can’t share any information. Roland is doing damage control right now, seeing if he can save my fucking job. He’s telling the media—with her permission—that it was Abby who called you in. But they’ve got your name and who you and Jenna are. They know you were the one with amnesia and she was the kidnap victim who got the brain implant. I advise you to keep a low profile. You can expect it to get insane once the newsies figure out where you live. Your services are no longer needed. Don’t call me and I won’t call you.”

  With a curt nod to Sage, Zach walked out, shutting the door behind him harder than he needed to.

  “I’m sorry,” said Jessica.

  Sage pulled her into his arms. “There’s nothing for you to be sorry for. Maybe I shouldn’t say it, but is your sister always such a bitch?”

  That made her laugh. “Not always, but lately, way too often.”

  “It’s incredible how alike you two look.”

  “I intended to tell you about the twin thing, but it’s been kinda busy.” Jessica sighed, feeling as bruised as if her twin had used her as a punching bag.

  Sage released her. “I know about your amnesia, of course, but—Jenna had a brain implant?”

  “Not right now, okay?”

  “No need to say a word until you’re ready.”

  “Thank you. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that.”

  “Sure. But what’s with this Zach guy? He has a thing for you.” He released her and took a step back.

  In a flash, her shields went up, her shoulders stiffening out of habit, ready to defend herself from a verbal assault.

  He’s not Greg.

  Thank God.

  Drop the shoulders. Release the breath. “He had a thing for me. We were together for a while several years ago. We’re just friends now.”

  Sage gave her a small smile. “The way he looked at you, it’s not over by a long shot. Not for him.”

  “I don’t want to think about Zach. Or Ethan. If I’m not allowed to help on the case, I need to get him out of my mind.”

  Jessica reached up, stretching on tiptoes, and took Sage’s face in her hands. She pulled him down and kissed him, sweetly at first, then with growing intensity. She should not be wanting him again already, but an urge to make up for lost time melded with the urge to strip off their clothes and start all over again. The way his body responded told her that he felt the same.

  Much later, she wiped away beads of sweat gathered on her skin, congratulating herself on finding such an effective way to rid her mind of the painful scene with Zach and Jenna. Sage was flat on his back underneath her, panting.

  “You’re gonna wear me out,” he said. “Not that I’m complaining.” He caught one of her long curls and wound it around his index finger, drawing her down to him until their noses were close. “I love your hair,” he murmured, “It’s so wild.”

  “Untamable,” she agreed.

  A slow smile spread across his face. “Mmm, kinda like you, I bet.”

  She nodded. “Like me.”

  He didn’t know yet that being untamable was a source of pride for Jessica, and had been as far back as her memory would take her. The first time she had defied their mother’s order to put on the same dress as her twin, they were three years old—the same as Emma and Sophie now.

  Lorraine had planned to show off her identical little dolls to the garden club ladies. Jessica’s obstinate refusal to wear the pink ruffled dress with its big flouncy bow had set off one of her “spells.” It turned out that locking herself in her room with a fifth of vodka and lime slices in a bowl of ice was not the punishment Lorraine intended. The twins had taken it as an invitation to watch as much TV as they wanted.

  “Hey, where’d you go?”

  She rolled off him and lay beside him, feeling his skin, still damp. “A quick trip down memory lane.”

  “What did you find there?”

  “An alcoholic mother who parented at her convenience. The good news is, she wasn’t our birth mother.”

  Sage turned on his side, resting on his elbow. “You’re adopted, too?”

  “From six months old. We don’t know anything about our birth mother or why she gave us up. Have you ever looked for yours?”

  A shutter came down over his face, giving him a harsh look that startled her. Remembering what Jay the bicycle man had told her about his youth, she tried to take back the question with a kiss. Not a kiss of passion, but the kind she would have given Justin for a scraped knee.

  “I’m sorry if that’s off-limits.”

  Sage shook his head, letting her off the hook. “We both have our baggage and we’ll talk about it all sometime. Regina was my real mother. That other woman was just an incubator, a means for me to get here. And, I didn’t have to look for her. Regina told me about her as soon as I was old enough to understand. I’ve met her.”

  “You have? How was it?”

  Growing up, Jessica and Jenna had countless discussions about their birth mother and who she might be. On their eleventh birthday they’d made a pact never to question their parents, never to search for their birth mother, fearing what they might find. That way, the loving fantasy woman of their own construction—the tragic mother, forced to give up her babies through some terrible circumstance, would always be theirs.

  Sage lay back and stared up at the ceiling. “I didn’t have any feelings for her. It wasn’t like, oh, Mommy, I love you, or anything close. I went to see her for one reason: I wanted her to tell me what happened to my siblings. She refused to see me at first, but I hounded her until she told me how to find them.”

  The conversation had brought the woman he did not love into the cottage with them, draining some of the warmth from his voice. “My sister died young. Drugs. My brother was the middle kid. He’s doing great. We were separated too young for him to remember me very well. I got in to
uch with him through his Facebook page. He was totally psyched to hear from me. He got married last year and became a dad.”

  Jessica grinned. “Which makes you Uncle Sage.”

  “Yeah, it does. One of these days soon, I’ll take you to see the baby. They live in Silicon Valley.” He leaned over and touched a fingertip to Jessica’s lips. “Now, let’s get some shuteye and when we wake up and I see your beautiful face, everything will be perfect again.”

  She kissed the fingertip. “It’s perfect now.”

  Her curiosity about his childhood itched like a healing scab that she wanted to pick at, to understand what Sage had been through to make him the beautiful man he was today. His friend, Jay, had said he was adopted at four and didn’t speak for a year. What had that child witnessed that was so terrible he couldn’t speak about it, drawing violent pictures years later? Four years old.

  Ethan’s age.

  The wintery mid-afternoon light dribbled in through the kitchen windows, the intermittent rain a mild drumbeat on the roof. In a matter of seconds Sage’s breathing had slowed to a light snore. Curled next to him, Jessica rested a hand on his chest, preoccupied with the remarkable strangeness of knowing that she was already precious to him.

  The dream started soon after his soft respirations lulled her to sleep, too.

  Consciousness faded and she was Ethan, running on skinny little legs in the cold black night, choking on a suffocating terror the likes of which she had never known. Then, just as abruptly, she was no longer Ethan.

  She was nothing. Alone in an abyss so complete, it had no end. She was nothing. Had never existed. The world she remembered was nothing more than a dream.

  Reaching out through the roiling black brume, her hands touched nothing, her eyes saw nothing. Her body was tormented by unendurable pain, and fear that terrible punishment must come as a result of diabolical deeds, although she did not know what they were.

  For eons, she floated in cold darkness, deprived of sensory stimuli, until at last, the maw of hell opened below her, releasing the silhouettes of other humans. She and they were faceless zombies, their humanity wiped away, walking the streets of a ghost town.

  Whether or not the others saw her, too, so consumed were they by their own misery that they had nothing left for the suffering of anyone else. She reached out to touch one but her hand passed straight through its body. No communication, no connection.

  What am I doing here? What have I done to deserve this?

  “You know.” The voice echoed through her, reverberating with the beat of a kettle drum, penetrating every cell. Other voices called out. “Come with us, we’ve been waiting for you.”

  A group of shadowy figures gathered around a door that had materialized in the distance.

  “Come on in,” they called, beckoning her to enter through a blinding light that seemed to surround the door. “Come with us.”

  Anything must be better than the ghost town. Floating over, she passed through the doorway and emerged into a long, dark tunnel. The light that had attracted her was extinguished as she entered, leaving a charcoal fog.

  Unable to see, she tried to pull back, crying out in revolt. I don’t belong here.

  The figures encircled her, ignoring her protests, pushing and shoving, dragging thorny nails as rough and sharp as broken glass against her skin.

  “You are nothing,” they taunted. “You have nothing to look forward to.”

  A miasma of pure evil enveloped her. “You are nothing,” whispered a rasping breath, unleashing a smell so foul there were no words to describe it. “You must come with us.”

  Somehow, she knew that the only hope was to cling tight to the last vestiges of her soul. Her mouth opened wide, sending commands to vocal cords that paid no attention. In her mind she screamed, “Let me go! I want to go back.”

  With harsh cries, snarling and gnashing their razor-sharp teeth, the creatures released her and slithered back into the void.

  Out of the darkness, a hand reached out and took hers.

  “Come, Jessica,” a voice sang out with the sweetness of healing water poured onto parched land. “You do not belong there. Come.”

  Without waiting for a second invitation, desperate to put as much distance as possible between herself and the stark horror of that place, she flew back the way she had come, toward the light.

  Jessica awoke naked and confused near her worktable. Her arms burned like fire. She grabbed the back of her work stool as the room tilted, and waited for the floor to settle under her feet.

  How did I get to hell, then back here?

  The same way you went from the worktable to the patio. Call it what it is, dumbshit—a fugue.

  That damned snarky voice, always barking an answer she would rather not hear. The voice had no name, but she had accepted it long ago as a particularly obnoxious part of herself that always insisted on being right.

  A fugue. She might never have known what a fugue state was if it weren’t for the retrograde amnesia that temporarily robbed her of memories of life before the accident.

  “Fugue,” Google had instructed her, was a rare psychiatric disorder characterized by reversible dissociative states that may last from hours to months.

  As usual, Snarky was right. The recent episodes were more and more like fugue states—longer and deeper than earlier ones. But never had she gone as far as Hell.

  An abrupt surge of longing for her twin made her hurt all over. They used to share everything. Even when they disagreed on a subject, the argument was good-natured bickering. Jenna had always been the conservative one, but becoming Roland’s wife and mother to her twin girls had turned her into someone Jessica felt she no longer knew.

  She glanced at Sage asleep on the futon, with a pang of envy. His chest rose and fell evenly beneath the covers, one foot carelessly sticking out from the comforter. She would give a lot to be able to sleep that soundly. It was hard to remember a time when she had not gone to bed afraid that she might awaken in some strange place, having done things she was unaware of, but which might alter her future.

  The dream had felt so real, her stomach churned. The empty wine bottle that stood by the bed was nowhere near enough alcohol to account for the sick ache in her gut, nor the way her head was hammering, as if roofing nails were being pounded into it.

  Jessica stumbled to the bathroom for the bottle of ibuprofen in the medicine cabinet. She turned on the light and held her arms in front of her, nearly puking at what she saw. Deep scratches ran from elbow to wrist, leaking pinpricks of blood. Across each palm was a thick black X. Gulping back bile, she turned on the cold faucet and washed her arms clean.

  Had she gouged those lacerations into her own flesh? Or had she really experienced a run-in with demons from hell? Why me? Why now? Why? Why? Why?

  She pumped eucalyptus-scented soap onto her palms and scrubbed at the Xs until her hands were raw. The medicine cabinet held a tube of aloe vera gel. She squirted it onto her palms and arms, breathing a sigh of relief as the sting began to subside. What would Jenna say about those Xs?

  “You have the mark of the Devil.”

  And she would be right, wouldn’t she? What else could it be?

  Jessica took four Advil with water from the faucet, spilling more down her chin than she swallowed. How was she going to tell Sage she had gone to all the way to hell and back? In their short acquaintance he had been nothing but kind and compassionate, far more than she could have expected or asked for. But even he must have his limits. What better way to kill a budding relationship than to tell him what she had experienced? Yet, there was no way to keep it from him. Her teeth were chattering, her skin, clammy with fear, alternating hot and cold.

  She did her best not to disturb him as she slipped under the comforter, but Sage rolled over and slipped an arm underneath her. “Whoa, you’re an icicle. What’s wrong?”

  The terror would not let go. “I—I—”

  Sage gathered her close, rocking her like a child. “
Shhhh, baby, baby, it’s okay, you’re safe. You’re not alone, Jess, I’m here with you.”

  She had become so accustomed to being alone since Jenna got married that it took more than a moment for the words to sink in. He went on murmuring, reassuring her in a voice so low and calm, that soon, she relaxed into him. Sage rested his chin lightly on her head. He rubbed her exposed shoulder and arm, continuing along the length of her body until the gooseflesh smoothed, her pulse slowed to normal again. With a shuddering breath, the shivering stilled and the words started pouring out.

  “I went to hell. It wasn’t a dream, it was real. I went to sleep here, with you, but I woke up over there, at my worktable. Look—” She showed him her damaged arms, the Xs on her hands, told him everything.

  His hands closed around hers, tenderly hiding the reminders of the dream. “Do you have any idea what it means?”

  “Remember I told you how I became Hailey Martin who was murdered, and Finley Hunter, the cult victim? It was like that, only quadrupled. But what’s weird—among all the other weirdness—at first, I was Ethan, I was seeing through his eyes. Then it…well, it…was different.”

  “Different how?”

  “I wasn’t him anymore. I was—” Jessica sat up so fast it made her head spin. The dawning truth made her drop her voice to a near-whisper. “In hell, I was Trey Starkey.”

  TWENTY

  “Are you sure?” Sage asked.

  Jessica huffed a humorless laugh. “Sure? I’m not sure of anything anymore. Maybe it was all a horrible nightmare.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “No, I don’t think so. It was absolutely real.” She touched the scratches on her arms. “If that’s hell, I will vow right this minute never to sin again.”

  “We make our own heaven or hell when we die,” said Sage with confidence. “That’s what I believe, and what Bella’s spirit guides have told her. If Trey Starkey is in hell, then obviously, he’s dead. And if he believes he deserves the kind of hell you described, he’s created it with his mind. You don’t have to make it your reality.”

  “If he created what was in my dream, he’s in a very bad place.” The further she was able to separate herself from the infernal force that had taken hold of her, the more the fog started to clear from her mind.