Hopefuls (Book 1): The Private Life of Jane Maxwell

by Jenn Gott

  Was it possible that she knew something Jane didn’t?

  It didn’t matter. There was no time to ponder their circumstances. Mindsight grabbed Jane’s hand, hauling her to her feet, and together they burst back out into the open. Lightning bit the air, so close that Jane felt it in her teeth, as they dodged around a car, and then a van, and then around the corner of a café. Jane heard screams from somewhere inside, and faces pressed quickly against the glass. The flash of a camera, several phones held in their direction. Jane was grateful for the anonymity of their uniforms—until she realized that this might get played up as a promotional stunt tomorrow, hyping the Spectral Wars storyline. Irritation clawed over Jane’s skin. Of all the things to concern herself with, and yet . . .

  They kept running. Kept dodging. Really, UltraViolet was a terrible shot. Unless she wanted them to escape, but that would be ridiculous—right?

  No time for that, either. Jane’s legs burned, her chest heaving as Mindsight led the way through the back alleys of Grand City. Jane did not question where they were going. They ran and ran, for what felt like forever. Once, it seemed as if they might have lost UltraViolet—but then she reappeared, directly in front of them, and they slid to an ungraceful halt and veered to the side.

  They ran all the way to the bay.

  At the park that ringed the water, Jane’s feet slipped over damp grass. The paths were abandoned by this time of night, the benches empty. They ran, their backs exposed in the moonlight, straight to the water’s edge.

  There was nowhere else for them to go. Jane stood in front of the railing that edged the water, heaving, gulping in lungfuls of salt air. She leaned forward, resting her hands on her knees. Mindsight slid the journal out of her grasp, and Jane was too winded to care.

  “Be ready,” Mindsight whispered.

  Ready for what? Jane wanted to ask, but all she could manage was a nod.

  “Well!” a voice puffed out behind them. Jane whirled. She tried to summon a flash of light, but even her powers were spent. Her hands flickered only briefly, a lighter going out.

  UltraViolet stood by a park bench, twenty-some-odd feet away.

  “Not that I don’t enjoy a good chase,” she called out, “but really, Mindsight. What are you hoping to accomplish with this?”

  Mindsight squared her shoulders. “You want the journal.”

  “That much, I believe we’ve already established.”

  “I know,” Mindsight said. She clutched the journal to her chest. “But before we return to our own reality, I just wanted to make sure that you saw. So there would be no question in your mind, no reason to come after us.”

  A sick feeling settled fast in the pit of Jane’s stomach. For a brief instant—just a flicker—it was like Jane had seen a frame of UltraViolet’s face, her expression perfectly matching Jane’s emotions, like they both realized what was happening all at once.

  “Amy . . . ,” Jane said, but too late.

  Mindsight spun around, hurtling the journal out over the bay.

  A narrow panel: the journal, midair, its pages fanned open. Glimpses of Clair’s handwriting, the odd doodle here and there. Beside this panel is another slice, and then another, and then another, stacked up like frames of a movie as the last few months of Clair’s life tumble through the night.

  Beneath them, a wide shot of the bay. The journal lands, barely making a splash against the larger scope of the boats and the waves and the city lying beyond.

  Time freezes, just for a moment. A panel of black as Jane shut down, unable to process what’s happening around her.

  Then the real world came roaring back to life, quite literally, as UltraViolet’s scream of rage belted through the park. Jane just kept staring at the water, the way it lapped at the pages as the journal sank beneath the surface. It was Mindsight that threw her arm out, grabbing the wrist cuff on Jane as she activated her own. I’m sorry. The words floated, disconnected, and Jane didn’t know if Mindsight had said them, or if she did, or if somehow they had come from Clair, like an echo on the wind. Jane’s world shifted, lurching out from underneath her, as a crackle raised the hairs all over Jane’s body.

  She hit the ground, tumbling forward onto her hands and knees. Sunshine lit up the sidewalk, spitting back at her from the clutter of waves splashing madly in the bay. Jane raised her head. Across the water, she could see the hole Woolfolk Tower had left behind, a cigarette burn on a comic page.

  A surge of anger pushed her back to her feet. “You shouldn’t have done that!” She whirled toward Mindsight, ready to fight, but—

  Mindsight was sprawled on the sidewalk. A scorch mark marred the back of her trench coat like a letter sealed with a lipstick kiss.

  Nobody questioned Jane on how she knew the layout of the hospital so well. Instead they followed her, their own personal ambassador through the lands of fear and grief. Jane led the rest of the Heroes down the halls—a left, two rights, another left. Around the edges of a crowded ER, to a tiny corner with just enough chairs for them to wait. She did not stop to ask for directions. She consulted no maps.

  A year and a half later and an entire world away, and the hospital hadn’t changed at all. The smells: alternating between a harsh disinfectant, cheap coffee, and the sweat of fear. The sounds: the squeak of nurses’ shoes, the conflicting beeps and shrieks of the monitors, the whispered conversations. The ER was still too warm, too dry, the floor of the lounge was still so polished that Jane could almost see her reflection in the faux-marble white tiles. There was still a smudge on the wall, a black mark at roughly elbow level. A TV mounted in the corner blared the same talking heads, the same worn-out problems of gun violence, bigoted legislation, and hopeless elections, as if somehow these three things were not all heads of the same demonic creature. Jane sat in what she had come to think of as her chair. Its cushion felt the same underneath her ass, the wooden armrests had the same notches and grooves worn into it like veins. Time may as well have not progressed at all. Jane even spotted several of the doctors and nurses that she used to know, their tired faces passing over her without the slightest flicker of recognition.

  This was the last place that Jane had wanted to come, but what other choice did she have? There wasn’t time to bring Amy back to headquarters. The Heroes had begun talking in her ear almost immediately, having picked up the tracking signals of her and Mindsight’s uniforms, and Jane could barely bring herself to answer them. “Help” was about the only word that had slipped out—over and over again, a frantic, frenzied prayer.

  Now there was nothing to do but wait. Cal and Marie and Tony and Keisha and Devin were less versed in the art—they paced the visitors lounge like it was a cage, or gazed longingly out the windows, or stared at the clock with contempt, or blankly watched the talking heads on TV. Once, Cal and Devin got into a whispered argument in the corner. “Dude, I’m telling you, I talked to her! It’s definitely Juanita!” Cal said, but Devin just shook his head. “What’s it going to take, man? She lied to you.”

  “But—!”

  “Look, sometimes people lie, okay? Even people we trust.”

  Cal’s face twitched. He took a breath to argue, but Jane turned away with a sigh, trying to ignore them. She sat in her chair, so chosen because it faced nothing but a potted plant and a stretch of empty wall. Unlike the others, she did not try to distract herself to pass the time. She had learned through experience that it did not help. She did nothing. She said nothing. She thought nothing.

  She did not, however, attempt to feel nothing. That, like pacing, like flipping through glossy magazines, like pointless arguments, would not work, not in Jane’s experience anyway. In hospitals, dark moods clung to the shadows, growing until they blotted out the room around you. Jane sat in her chair, isolated from the rest of her group, and she cried in silence.

  At five o’clock, her phone chirped. Jane pulled it out, swiped off the alarm with mechanical indifference. It wasn’t until it had rung that she realized she’d set it on he
r way in, a habit from the last time she’d spent so much time in the hospital. It was something that her mother had drilled into her: food every five hours. Seven and noon and five and ten. Then bed, whether she wanted it or not. Up again at six, to repeat the cycle.

  Jane got up. She wiped at her eyes beneath her glasses, turned to her companions. “I’m going to the vending machine.”

  She did not offer to get them anything, though she assumed they knew the offer was open. They said nothing. Cal grunted an acknowledgment, and Marie waved her fingers as she flipped a page in a magazine, and Tony looked at her, his expression blank. It had been more than three hours since they’d arrived, and they were starting to lose their earlier optimism.

  Whatever. Jane turned away, shuffling down the hall to where she knew she would find a small alcove. Three vending machines—snacks, soft drinks, and coffee—sat next to a counter with a mini fridge and a trashcan tucked underneath, and a cheap microwave and tiny sink on top. Jane stared through the glass of the snack machine. The same labels, all unappealing: low-fat microwave popcorn, packets of cup-o-soup, potato sticks, honey roasted peanuts, Snickers bars, stale cinnamon buns. Jane’s reflection hovered like a ghost as she listened to the ching-jangle of change going in, the click of buttons being punched. She did not even look at the keypad as she dialed in 1-3-4, already knowing that a Snickers bar was going to be trundling forward on the spiral. It clunked to the base a moment later, though it took Jane another moment before she ducked to retrieve it.

  Coffee next. Jane munched on her candy bar, chewing without tasting, as she waited for the coffee machine to thunk and hiss its way through pissing out coffee that would be both too weak and too hot at the same time. She rested her half-eaten Snickers on its wrapper as she poured in creamers and packets of sugar, thwacking them against her palm three times before tearing off the top. A coffee stirrer was clenched between her teeth. She was just pouring in the last of her creamers when a set of footsteps began clacking down the hall toward her, and a familiar voice cried out, “There you are!”

  Jane jerked at the sound of her mother. Unfortunately, she had already curled her grip around the paper coffee cup, and now it went flying off the counter, landing on her shoes. “Shit!” Jane shouted, as searing hot coffee soaked through her toes and the hem of her pants.

  She ignored her mother—who wasn’t even really her mother anyway, and dammit Jane was tired of playing this game—as she grabbed a pile of napkins from the counter and crouched to try to mop up her mess. Mrs. Maxwell swept over, uttering apologies: didn’t mean to startle her, blah blah, she came as soon as she heard, blah blah, wanted to be with you, blah blah. It was probably sweet, but it meant nothing to Jane. The comfort was as useless as the napkins, flimsy and falling apart as soon as they tried to be helpful.

  “Oh, sweetie, here, let someone else take care of that,” Mrs. Maxwell said. She placed her hands gently on Jane’s shoulders, as if to guide her to her feet.

  Jane jerked out from underneath her grip. “Leave me alone.” She dabbed even more angrily at the spilled coffee, the sopping pile of napkins falling to pieces in her hands.

  Mrs. Maxwell sighed. “Jane—”

  “I don’t want your help.” Jane jabbed her glasses up her nose with the back of her knuckle. “I’m capable of cleaning this up on my own, thank you.”

  Unfortunately, Mrs. Maxwell—either version of her—was not one to be so easily dismissed. Jane kept her back turned, the level of her shoulders sharp and unwelcome. But a moment later Mrs. Maxwell was crouched right there beside Jane, a fresh pile of napkins pinched in her manicured fingers.

  “Here,” she said, holding them out to Jane.

  Briefly, Jane did consider ignoring them—but that would just be petty, at this point. She took them without a word, sopping up the last of the coffee.

  “You know,” Mrs. Maxwell said, “I understand that this is hard for you, Janie. Really, I do. But you can’t let your guilt make you drive everyone away. I let you push me away last time. I’m giving you fair warning: I won’t be so easily dissuaded now. I’m your mother, and I love you, no matter what.”

  Jane frowned as she scooped up the mess of soggy napkins and stuffed them into the now-empty coffee cup. “Last time?” she asked as she stood up.

  If she wasn’t so consumed with worry and grief, Jane probably would have had the good sense to be a little more discreet with her question. The sharp line of Mrs. Maxwell’s mouth was enough to let Jane know that she should have played things better, but as Jane threw her garbage away and stepped around Mrs. Maxwell to get to the tiny sink, she was suddenly overwhelmed with exhaustion. She simply did not care anymore, if she was playing this world’s Jane correctly. She had far more important things to concern herself with.

  Mrs. Maxwell straightened up. She smoothed out the pencil skirt of her neat little dove-gray suit. Randomly, it struck Jane that if this version of Mrs. Maxwell had been alive in the forties, she would have been the kind of woman whose stocking lines were always perfect.

  Jane shook the idea out of her head. She washed her hands, using extra soap.

  Mrs. Maxwell lowered her voice. “Look, I know you’ve been trying to pretend the whole thing never happened, and if that’s how you need to deal with it, then . . . then fine. I’m done trying to change your mind on this, and I can only imagine how hard it must have been for you, watching her die.”

  Jane said nothing. She shook her hands off, patting them dry against her jeans.

  “But listen,” Mrs. Maxwell said—and here she actually took hold of Jane’s elbow. “Listen: that wasn’t Amy, all right? Amy is going to be fine.”

  A chill swept over Jane. She was still standing in front of the sink, still facing the little sign over the counter that instructed people how long you needed to wash your hands in order to properly kill all the germs. The cheerful blue-and-white letters seemed to swim in front of her, blurring as she lost herself in what Mrs. Maxwell had said. That wasn’t Amy . . . How hard it must have been for you, watching her die . . .

  Maybe it was nothing. Maybe . . . maybe this world’s Jane had merely witnessed something horrific, and it had traumatized her with the possibility that it could have been Amy, if circumstances were different. She tried to ignore the creeping sensation working its way up her back, onto her shoulder, where it whispered in her ear like a little cartoon devil. That wasn’t Amy.

  Instinctively, Jane rubbed at the spot where her wedding ring was supposed to sit, as she turned toward Mrs. Maxwell. She didn’t even realize that she was doing it, years of habit driving her thumb’s actions, until she saw Mrs. Maxwell glance down.

  Then they both went very, very still. Jane, out of fear that she’d done the wrong thing, that she’d finally been caught out in her lie—though how Mrs. Maxwell could have known, Jane couldn’t even begin to imagine. But Mrs. Maxwell . . .

  Mrs. Maxwell raised her eyes. Her gaze locked with Jane’s, snaring Jane before she could react. Jane stood stock-still, terrified, barely breathing, as the piercing look of her mother seemed to pour down into Jane’s soul, stripping back all her secrets. Her mother’s voice filled her head, words repeated a thousand times during Jane’s childhood: I can always tell what you’re thinking, Jane. With the notable exception of the one truth she hadn’t wanted to see, Jane’s mother was always right. Mrs. Maxwell’s eyes, gray like the first hints of weather on a summer day, narrowed as they studied Jane. They lacked the wrinkles that Jane’s real mother sported, no doubt buffed and polished away by a careful plastic surgeon. In the hospital where Clair had died, Mrs. Maxwell’s eyes looked more like the eyes that used to peer down at Jane when she was six, twelve, twenty.

  Jane was never able to keep a secret from them, not forever. Not those eyes.

  They widened. Abruptly, the grip on Jane’s elbow released. “Oh my god,” Mrs. Maxwell whispered, as she pressed one hand to her mouth, the other over her heart.

  Mrs. Maxwell turned away. Jane watched, st
epping out of the alcove, as Mrs. Maxwell marched straight down the hall, all the way to the end. A large window overlooked the parking lot, and Mrs. Maxwell stopped directly in front of it. Rose-gold sunbeams spilled across her head like a celestial spotlight.

  She just . . . stood there. Jane could see Mrs. Maxwell’s arms, wrapped around herself in a hug. The harsh plane of her shoulders, mimicking what Jane had tried to signal just a few minutes earlier: leave me alone.

  Jane left her alone. She turned away, collecting the remains of her Snickers bar as she made her way back to the visitors lounge. Her heart thundered in her ears, louder than her footsteps, as she tried to make sense of what had just happened.

  That wasn’t Amy.

  * * *

  A fragment of a memory. It might have been a dream. So much of Jane’s time at the hospital with Clair was blurred around the edges, shifting from one day to the next, shifting from awake to asleep to awake. Jane had forgotten about it, or she’d tried to, but it still clung to the edge of her memories like a dead leaf.

  Sitting in the hospital chair, leaning forward so that her head rested on Clair’s bed. Clair’s unresponsive legs beneath her like a bony pillow. The bumpy pattern of the hospital blanket pressing into her cheek. Jane looked up, her attention drawn by the squeak of a shoe—was it a doctor, come to deliver news?, a nurse, checking Clair’s vitals?, her mother, stopping by after work? No, the person in the doorway was already turning away, probably wasn’t even supposed to be there in the first place, probably had the wrong room. She was wearing a short black jacket, a black baseball cap. Her eyes were obscured by black sunglasses, but there was something about her, when she started to turn back before catching herself. It felt like Jane was studying her own profile, like she’d somehow stepped outside of herself in her grief. Jane started to open her mouth, to call out, but a flare of light made Jane flinch, and by the time she looked back, the person was gone.