“Why not?”
“What am I supposed to say to her?” he replied. “‘Hello, my name is Arie. You don’t know me, but I feel like you are my mother, even though you aren’t really. Please accept me into your life’?”
It stung to hear Arie say that he still considered Sandy to be his mother. He and I had a good relationship, and I would do anything for him, but my heart nearly burst with longing for him to see me in that way—to think of me as his mother, someone he desperately wanted in his life.
But I would never tell him that.
“Honestly?” I said, “I don’t see a problem with some form of that conversation. None of us here remember everything. I think she’d really appreciate someone who knew her before, someone who could fill in some gaps. She’s very nice, you know. I’m sure she’d be understanding.”
“That’s just it,” said Arie. “I know she has no memory of me, but part of me keeps thinking that if I just hang around her and interact with her, there would be some, you know, like a glimmer of recognition. I don’t expect her to just alla sudden remember me, but just maybe see that I’m someone more in her life than some annoying kid that always seems to show up where she is. But there’s nothing. She doesn’t know me, doesn’t care. I dunno. It’s stupid. Doesn’t matter. It’s just that—”
“It’s just that you remember.”
“Exactly,” he said with a heavy sigh, voice cracking. I thought I saw tears start in his eyes. “I remember all of our time together and our routines and all the stupid little in-jokes and I can’t make those memories go away and so from my point of view it’s like she’s just stopped caring. I just want her to, you know, like see me. Just notice me.”
“If she could remember, she would still feel the same way. You know that, don’t you? Intellectually, academically, you know that?”
“Well, yeah, sure, of course.”
“So?”
Arie scoffed and with the heel of his hand he roughly rubbed his eyes. “Maybe one day we’ll remember,” he said, a sardonic edge to his tone.
“Don’t be that way, Arie. Really things aren’t that bad.”
Sometimes I went too far in thinking that I could know what was in Arie’s mind. I felt a genuine connection with him, and I knew I could read him in a way others could not, but I often had to caution myself that I didn’t know everything about him. And sometimes I almost acknowledged that it might not be a motherly connection at all and instead was the simple result of paying him so much attention and thinking about him.
Whatever the reasons, the Arie Problem had come into sharper focus, and I saw a reason he might be so restless and petulant lately. It was his way of dealing with the crushing confusion and frustration of our lost memories and connections, our long days in limbo, resisting the Agency but not confronting it as the source of our misery. If Arie couldn’t have the relationships and connections that the Agency took away, he would pull the Agency down brick by brick. I knew this was how he felt.
And as much as I wanted to be Arie’s mother, his one and only true mother, it wounded me to see him so upset. It wasn’t enough to escape the Agency serum and to keep our memories—we had still been robbed. I wished then that Sandy could remember Arie. I wished that she too would feel that she was Arie’s mother and would regard him the way I did—with pride and love and the terrible and constant worry that is in some ways the actual foundation of parental joy. How could something like that detract from the way I felt about Arie? How could five or ten additional mothers ever do that? I didn’t own Arie, I loved him.
I wished Sandy would remember because Arie was my son and he was hurting over her, and a mother will do anything to keep her child from pain.
And with that I felt a smolder begin to awaken in me, too.
All the peas were shelled. Arie sat looking at the tree line where the laundry party had gone.
“Hey, I know it’s hard and things aren’t perfect,” I said.
Arie shot me a look of unvarnished skepticism. He was probably right to do so.
“But things are going to get better,” I went on. I wasn’t sure what else to do. “Look at us here. Out from under the Agency’s thumb. Living free, keeping our memories.”
Arie nodded in a passive, almost impatient way, as if only waiting for me to stop talking.
“Just try to be patient, Arie. We’ll figure it out.” The words felt weak and awkward even to me.
Arie gathered up his peas and the bucket of empty pods and then without answering he stood.
Just then we saw Chase hurrying toward us from the lower end of the meadow.
Life in the mountain camps agreed with Chase. He was leaner through the middle and broader in the shoulders. He wore a faded, plaid flannel work shirt, which was repaired with his own coarse mending and patched at the elbows with buckskin. The knees of his pants were similarly mended and reinforced. His face and arms were as brown as a nut, and his gray and black beard was wild and bristling. He’d let it grow out for weeks until it was impossibly thick and aggravating, then he’d chop it down to stubble like it was some troublesome hedge of brambles. And then it’d grow out again.
“Ah. There you are,” he called, half walking and half jogging up toward us. “What are you guys up to?”
“Shucking peas,” I said as he approached.
He stood over us and examined the bucket of empty pea pods. Then he looked around.
“Came all the way up here for that?” he asked, squinting.
“Chase. What’s up?” I asked.
Chase shoved his hands into the front pockets of his pants, tried to act nonchalant. He failed. “Well, I don’t want to interrupt. I mean, I love peas as much as the next guy.”
“Chase?”
“Well, I just need to talk with you for a second, Al.”
“I’ll see you later,” said Arie.
“You don’t have to go, Ars,” Chase was quick to add. “Stick around. It involves you.”
“Nah, I got some stuff to do.” He was already striding away.
I caught his arm as he passed by me and gave it a squeeze. He smiled his faint smile again as he continued toward the camp, letting the down-slope pull him along. I watched him go, shielding my eyes against the sun with my hand at my brow. When Arie had passed into the trees, I turned to Chase.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a surprise,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Can we go somewhere?”
“Okay, but I got dish duty today after lunch.”
“This won’t take long,” said Chase.
“What’s this surprise?” I asked.
“Just hold on,” said Chase. “I want the moment to be just right.”
We walked down a game trail, off the hillside, and into a shady hollow. The morning breeze gently shook the leaves of the aspens, and the shushing noise they made seemed to heighten my anticipation. We came to the old gray trunk of a fallen tree, and Chase spun me around and pulled me close to him, tucking his hands into my back pockets as I wrapped my arms around him.
“Tell me you love me,” he said as we embraced, swaying together.
I smiled. “You know I love you.”
“Come on,” he said. “Tell me.”
“Chase, I love you.”
“I love you too, bunny.”
We kissed and for a moment, all my thoughts and worries vanished as I felt the security of Chase’s arms and the warmth of his body. When we finally parted, my lips tingled.
“I’ll never get tired of that,” Chase said.
I smiled.
“But are you ready for the surprise?” Chase asked.
“Yes! I’ve been ready this whole time. You really have a surprise?”
“Yep. A big one.”
“Okay, already. What is it?”
“Guess,” he said.
I chuckled, bit my lip, and blurted, “A book.”
Chase frowned.
“What?” I said.
“You’re no f
un. You always guess everything on the first try.”
I laughed. “It really is a book?”
He frowned and nodded.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t know which one.”
Chase reached behind him and pulled the book from the waistband of his pants.
“You had it with you this whole time?” I said, still laughing.
He handed it to me.
The cover was a deep bluish-purple with a lady’s face superimposed over a view of an amusement park and a Ferris wheel. Goosebumps formed on my arms.
“It’s—”
“The Great Gatsby,” said Chase, tapping the cover with his finger. “I thought you’d like it.”
“Where’d you find it?”
“Oh, I’ve been asking around here and there since back before you can remember.”
“Arie’s notebook.”
“Yeah, it’ll help with that, too, but I know you’re just as curious to find out what happens with Daisy and Gatsby.”
I held the book close to my chest. “Oh, I am.”
Chase grinned.
“Thank you,” I said. “I can’t think of a better surprise.”
“You sure about that?”
“Well, I can’t think of many that’d be better right now.” I looked at the book again, it was worn with yellowed pages and water damage, but to me it was priceless.
I was thinking about the Arie Problem. The real surprise was still to come.
CHAPTER 3
Ruby’s big cabin tent was festooned with a crazy assortment of tools and tchotchkes and needful things. Bundles of dried herbs, little bleached mammal skulls strung together on a length of jute, a hunk of flint with a steel striker on a key chain. Tattered maps with curled edges covered the back wall like faded wallpaper. One shelf of her small bookcase was set aside for wooden animals and figurines she’d whittled—she gave them to kids who’d “done a good turn.” On the upturned, sawed-off log she used for a nightstand there lay an obsidian knife someone had knapped for her. I had once made the mistake of idly testing its edge with my thumb, and there was still a small white line through my thumbprint to remind me of how amazingly sharp it was. There was a dream catcher the size of a hubcap suspended from the roof. Woven with cream-colored deer sinew and complete with raven and eagle feathers, it turned slowly in the air over Ruby’s cot. She had a basket of woven willow branches that held scavenged magnifying lenses and reading glasses in various states of wholeness and repair.
The place reminded me of a shaman’s laboratory.
Ruby sat at a desk that served as her headquarters, her workstation. It was constructed of rough-sawn planks of knotty pine or fir, held together with rusty nails salvaged from who knows where. Along with the big central command tent and the main fire-pit, Ruby’s desk was one of the camp’s primary nerve centers.
Arie, Woolly, Chase, and I had gathered one by one in Ruby’s tent and we stood almost shoulder to shoulder just inside the front door flap. Ruby sat at the desk with a camp-fired clay mug of steaming coffee.
“All right, one ’a you lay it out for me,” said Ruby between sips of the coffee. “I never did get the whole jist of it.” She gestured in Arie’s direction with the mug. “You, kid. Go. What’s this here book ’a codes all about?”
The spiral notebook in question lay on the desk. It was now battered and water-warped and beginning to fall apart, but the skull-clock symbol scratched whitely into its red front cover was still distinct, and the page upon page of number-code were all still very legible.
“Would you believe I don’t remember?” Arie said with a diffident laugh. He ran a nervous hand through his hair. “But I have been informed by those who do remember that the notebook contains coded information that I wrote down before my last memory scrub, or maybe the year before that, and in any case, we need to find out what’s in it.”
I held my breath. Arie wasn’t exactly making a strong case. Chase tightened his hold around my waist. Woolly looked on with a sort of clinical curiosity, stroking at the now-thick fringe of whiskers that lined his jaw.
“Al? Chase?” Ruby waved the coffee mug in our direction, as though she didn’t care one way or another if any of us had a better argument to make.
“I just want to know what’s in it,” I said, with a jittery exhale.
Chase pointed a finger at me and nodded his head in assent. We weren’t making the case, either.
“Guess I shoulda started with you in the first place,” Ruby said to Woolly. She took a slurping sip of coffee and then let out a loud, “Aaah.” Then she nodded at Woolly and said, “Well? Can ya figure it out, Wool?”
Woolly picked up the paperback edition of The Great Gatsby Chase had given me. The book was also battered and appeared strangely small in Woolly’s big hands. He thumbed the frowsy pages. Then he opened the notebook and examined it as if it were the last remaining documentation of some passed-away culture. He blinked, turned the pages, blinked.
“Yes,” he said at last.
We waited for him to go on. Ruby had just lifted the mug to take a sip, but had stopped with the mug just shy of her lips, as though she couldn’t drink until Woolly continued. Woolly laid the books on the desk again. No one said anything for a while. The mug hovered at Ruby’s lips.
“That’s it?” she said after a few moments more. “Yes?” She plopped the mug down.
“Yes,” Woolly repeated. “I can figure it out. It’s a cypher. To decode the cypher, I’ll need the key. I have what is purported to be the key”—here he held up The Great Gatsby—”and I have the person who created the cypher.” Here he gestured at Arie.
“Yeah, but I don’t remember this,” said Arie, pointing at the red notebook.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Woolly. “I think I could sort it out without you. But if we look at it together and talk about it, maybe it’ll shake loose faster.”
“Well,” said Ruby, “what’re ya waiting for? Grab a pencil. Piece a’ paper. Tell us what’s in it.”
Woolly chuckled softly. Then he tented his fingers beneath his nose again and said, “No. No, it’s not that simple. It’s not like a crossword puzzle or the Daily Jumble.”
“What’s it like then?” I asked.
“Right off the bat?” His finger traced a line of the numbers in the notebook. “I’m thinking maybe these numbers represent page numbers, line numbers, and then words or letters. First number: page. Second number: line on that page, counting down from the top. Third: letter in that line counting in from the margin. Something like that. You go through the code number by number, and then consult the book page by page, and you end up with a string of letters that form words and sentences.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” said Arie.
“No,” replied Woolly, “unless I’m wrong, which I probably am. Maybe the numbers are in the reverse order of what I said. Or some other order, or maybe the entire notebook was encoded from the last page to the first. Or upside-down. Or maybe the code is something entirely different or has more layers to it. Maybe Arie translated the entire matter into Latin before he encoded it with The Great Gatsby. Arie, do you know Latin?”
Arie thought about this for a moment, looking as if he thought it would be good if he did. But then he answered, “No.”
“Point being,” Woolly continued, “there are any number of permutations, but I’ll never know which one it is without trying a few lines in a few different ways and seeing if they pencil out as words and sentences.”
“Why in tarnation would someone go to all ’at trouble, though?” Ruby asked.
“I wish we could ask him,” said Woolly, aiming an arch grin at Arie.
Chase spoke up. “I think it’s safe to say Arie had a secret, and this was his way of keeping it, preserving it through a potential memory wipe. Something he wouldn’t want just anyone to find. Like if his house was searched or if someone stole the notebook—there’s obviously a secret here, and if it was worth the trouble of all this coding,
it’s probably information that will be valuable to us.”
Woolly nodded emphatically.
“Yeah,” said Ruby, “okay, but how would he remember what he did after he had his memory scrubbed? How would he remember he even had a secret? Or a notebook fer that matter?”
I looked at Arie. He’d furrowed his brow and one of his eyebrows stood about two finger-widths higher than the other. How odd, I thought, for him to be a party to a conversation about an earlier version of himself, a person he knew but had never met, a person he was but wasn’t.
“I’m not sure,” said Woolly in answer to Ruby, “but if I had to guess, I would say he left himself clues or reminders that would lead him back to the notebook and the code after his memories were confiscated. Clues explicit enough for him to investigate, but meaningless to others.”
“That’s exactly what he did do,” I said excitedly. I turned to Chase. “Right? I’ve lost those memories, but you remember—right, Chase?”
“Yeah,” Chase confirmed. “We figured it out that night we slipped on the ice in the tunnel at the park. Things got pretty wild after that, you remember, but we figured out that the kid left symbols and quotes from the book in places that he knew he’d be drawn to. He used graffiti at Thrill Harbor, at the Ferris wheel. The book has a Ferris wheel on the cover, see? A clue, a coincidence too coincidental to be a coincidence. He kept the book at their house, knowing he’d notice that kind of thing. And who knows what else there was that we didn’t notice? Because he knew he was smart and would keep being smart even if they scrubbed him.”
Arie’s awkwardly pained expression told me that while he was impressed with this person everyone was talking about, he felt weird about admitting his own forgotten plan was impressive.
“It’s brilliant, really.” I spoke up for him. “And this was years ago, when he really was a kid.”
Arie smiled at me as his face reddened.
“Doesn’t matter, though,” said Woolly, spreading his hands and then tenting them beneath his nose again. “We have the encrypted material and the key. I think we owe it to ourselves to decode this. Doesn’t matter how it fell into our hands.”
Among These Bones (Book 3): Maybe We'll Remember Page 2
