He stood in the tent, taking in the scene. My red and swollen crying eyes, my matted hair.
“You sure you’re all right?” he asked.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
He didn’t have a ready answer. I wondered if Ruby had sent him. Or Woolly. Someone had brought him here. I wondered if they’d changed their minds; if they would let me back in. Was he bringing a message from them?
“Can I sit down?” he asked.
I didn’t move, but I nodded, and he perched himself awkwardly on the edge of the cot. He was sitting on one of my feet, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“Did Ruby send you?” I asked.
“Uh, no,” said Chase. “In fact, she kind of ordered me not to come here.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked again.
He pursed his lips and scratched his beard, as though he’d been asking himself the same question.
“They’re leaving,” said Chase. “Ruby’s group. They’re packing up heading east.”
I nodded. “Ruby told me,” I said.
“Yeah. Well, I don’t feel like I belong with them,” said Chase.
“You don’t?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t know them. They don’t know me. Or, I should say, they know some older version of me, someone I don’t know.” Chase was quiet then. I still didn’t understand why he was here, so I asked him a third time.
“So—what are you doing here?”
He looked at me—right into my eyes. It felt as though he really knew me, didn’t just recognize me, didn’t just consider me an acquaintance, but actually knew me. But that wasn’t possible. His memories had been wiped the same as mine and we’d barely spent any time together at the camp. There was an unspoken intensity in his looks that gave me goosebumps.
“I—can’t really explain it,” he said. “When Woolly got back, I asked him where you were and I just felt like I needed to be with you.”
“What for?”
He looked away then. “I don’t know. I mean maybe I do, but I don’t.”
His responses irked me. There was something else I wanted him to say. Something else I was longing to hear, but he hadn’t said it.
“I don’t need your help,” I said sharply.
“Of course not,” he said. “Your camp looks incredible. The tent facing south. Got your little stove in here. Looks like you have enough firewood for a year. And that firepit outside, I mean. Wow.”
“Woolly helped a lot.”
“Still. It’s really great.”
“So?”
“So, I guess what I mean is, I think maybe I need your help.”
“With what?”
“I don’t know. Just a feeling I have that I should stick by you. That with you is where I need to be. Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?” He squinted his eyes at me. “Alison, have you been crying?”
“You’re just now noticing?”
“What’s wrong?”
I stared at the floor of my tent. “I killed them.”
“Who?”
“The people from camp, when I let Ruby’s prisoner go, and the man who died when they were rescuing us.”
“You didn’t kill them,” said Chase. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Don’t tell me that. My actions led to their deaths,” I said. “It was my fault. I know it. Ruby knows it. You know it. Their lives are over.”
“So, what are you going to do about it?”
“I should turn myself over to the Agency,” I said. “I don’t deserve to be happy.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Do you not remember what it was like there? Seems like a mighty big waste—these people sacrificing their lives for you to just throw yours away. You don’t deserve that.”
“Well, what can I do? How can I make it better?”
Chase put his hand on my shoulder. “Did you ever consider that we aren’t always supposed to make things better? That maybe that’s part the experience of life?”
“No! I did this, Chase! I did it. I can’t just move on,” I cried, raising my voice. “I can’t just say it was an accident or that it doesn’t matter. I can’t forget it!”
“Then don’t,” Chase said. “Remember them; don’t forget them.”
“But I don’t remember,” I said.
“Good point. Listen, Al, you’ve been put in prison, you’ve been banished. If you ask me, you’ve paid the price. If you really think there is something you can do, then figure it out and use that to move forward.” He pulled me up and into his arms. I collapsed into the hollow of his shoulder and cried.
“When will it stop hurting?” I sobbed.
“I don’t think something like this will stop hurting,” he said. “You just gotta make room for it.”
Chase held me for a long time, until I stopped crying, and then he made us some tea on the rusty little stove. The tent got warm, and we sipped the tea, and I started feeling better. We went out to my firepit and lit a big fire. We sat side by side on the log bench Woolly had built.
“You really have an impressive stockpile of firewood,” he said. “You certainly have not been lying in bed this whole time.”
I showed him my hands and the big gray callouses that had formed on my palms. Chase took my hand and kneaded the muscles between his fingers. His hands were rough, too, but warm and gentle as well.
We laid on more wood and the flames rose up brightly, pushing back the descending gloom of late afternoon.
“I brought some food with me,” he said, nodding at the giant backpack he’d set outside the tent. “But you’re doing fine. You’re curing fish?” He gestured at my drying rack.
I nodded.
“How’s it taste?”
I shrugged.
He walked over and plucked one of the pale fillets from a bundle. He had a bite and nodded approvingly before rejoining me on the bench.
“Have more. I’ve got plenty. Canned food, too.”
He sipped his tea with a thoughtful look on his face. “So, you’d really consider going to the Agency and having your memories wiped to forget alla that?”
I nodded uncertainly.
He looked at me sadly, and with pity.
“Forgetting doesn’t change the past. It doesn’t erase it from happening. It wouldn’t change anything except you wouldn’t know it.” He sipped again. “Wouldn’t you rather know?”
“It just hurts so much,” I said, and my chin quivered as I spoke. “Out here, where it’s so quiet, and there’s no one to talk with, I just think about it all the time.”
“Like I said, you’ve paid your price. Or you’re paying it. That’s the cost of life. When we make mistakes, we have to feel them, own them. That’s what makes us human.”
His words were reaching me somehow. That maybe my punishment, my real punishment, would be to remember—to know that I’d cost lives—but maybe it could be a blessing too. It certainly made me acutely aware of the value of life.
“Besides,” said Chase with a wink and a wry grin. “Who knows what other mistakes we’ve made?” He reached over and clinked his mug against mine.
I smiled for the first time in a long time. Then I remembered what they often said in the camp.
“Well,” I said, “maybe someday we’ll remember.”
CHAPTER 50
Among the provisions Chase had brought with him there was tea. Real tea. Not the stale and doubtful leaf shreds in metal tins we’d hijacked from the Agency’s always-disappointing food rations. This was from the back before, in a brightly colored (though battered and worn) box. It was probably stale, too, but it was so flavorful and different I either couldn’t tell or didn’t care. I rationed it carefully.
Chase had not brought enough food with him to support even himself alone for the winter, but he had a rifle for hunting game and a wrist rocket to shoot smaller prey. He said if he hadn’t found me or if I didn’t want him to stay, he’d plan to stay on the move, hunting and camping and mo
ving southward to warmer climes.
But I wanted him to stay and he moved in. We settled into the harsher routine of winter living, working together, sharing chores, sharing our warmth. It was good. We read to each other and laughed and sat together staring at the fire.
Still, the thought of the people who’d had lost their lives—sixteen of them to be exact—was never far from my mind. When Chase made me laugh or when the sky turned crimson as the sun went down, I thought of those people and how they would not laugh anymore or mark the beauty of a sunset. I got accustomed to carrying them with me—whoever they were—but it got easier, especially with Chase around.
I discovered that when two people live together with no one else around—they develop a very strong bond. In the few weeks since Chase had joined me, we had grown so close. He’d come back from a full day of fishing or hunting, and just the sight of him would make me warm and happy, and I couldn’t help myself from smiling.
We knew, of course, that we had been a couple before. And so to us it seemed that we were fated to be together. It also seemed to us that we’d somehow been given our relationship all over again—it was something that had been taken and returned. It was new and fun and a sort of daily delight to learn each other’s ways, to adapt to each other. Even when we quarreled, there was a chemistry, an intensity.
“I don’t remember anything from before,” Chase said one night as he pulled me closer on the bench by the fire, “but right now it kinda feels like we’ve always been together.”
“Mm,” I said, leaning into him.
What I liked the most is that our love seemed more powerful than anything. Stronger than anything. The pandemic couldn’t kill it. The Agency could erase it. Ruby couldn’t banish it. Winter couldn’t freeze it.
And as I emerged from the cold cage of guilt that I’d built there in the woods, I realized there was another, sweeter ache I carried with me. At first I didn’t want to mention it to Chase. I didn’t want him to think I was just one big collection of complaints and hurts and wants. But as my love for Chase grew and grew, there was something missing. Someone.
Arie.
At first I just read and re-read his journals. I’d rest from our chores and find a sunny spot where it might get warm. I’d daydream about fixing bikes with him and collecting chicken eggs. I read scenes where we dodged Agency goons and searched old abandoned neighborhoods. It was strange—imagining being the person in those journals, even though I really was that person.
Soon I began talking about Arie a lot with Chase.
“How’d he seem when you left?” I asked.
“He seemed okay,” said Chase. “He was excited for the adventure, the exodus. That kid craves adventure.”
“Mm. Did he seem like he missed me at all?”
“Oh, he interrogated Woolly for a couple days after he got back from setting you up out here—how you handled it, where he’d brought you, asked about the camp.”
“What else?”
“He was sorry you couldn’t come along,” said Chase.
“He said that, or you’re just guessing?”
“He said it. Said it to me, to Woolly.”
“So, he did miss me.”
“I mean, we all did. But yeah, he missed you. He not only said so, but I could tell, too.”
It also felt strange to pine for Arie because he was as much a stranger to me as anyone else I’d met since coming out of the prison, including Chase. And Arie had decided for himself not to join me. I didn’t hesitate when it came time to accept his decision, but I was his mother. And I clung to that role, and although it felt like a chair I was saving for someone else, I was glad I was Arie’s mother.
What I didn’t do was read the coded notebook Woolly had given me along with the journals. I had grown afraid of what the strange red notebook might contain. Judging from what Woolly had said, the information in the red notebook had led me to do the things I’d done to get myself exiled in the first place. Woolly had been provocative when he pointed out the red notebook. He’d made a playful, teasing effort to tempt me into reading it, but that’d had the opposite effect. I took the white skull symbol as a warning, as a caution. I’d put the red notebook on the bottom of the pile and I had never even opened it.
And so it was a surprise when I found Chase reading it one day when I returned from checking my rabbit snares. He was boiling grouse bones for stew stock, and he sat near the fire studying a page of the strange text.
“What are you doing?” I said, dropping my captured rabbits into the snow and feeling slightly panicked. “Why are you reading that?”
“You’ve never read it?” Chase asked.
“No,” I said, “and I don’t want to.”
“Why not?” He furrowed his brow.
“Because it’s nothing but trouble.”
“Al,” Chase said, shutting the notebook, “I think we need to talk.”
CHAPTER 51
I’m not sure I would have gotten out of bed ever again if Chase hadn’t appeared, and I know I wouldn’t have read Arie’s coded notebook if Chase hadn’t read it first.
“What’s in it?” I had asked him. “What is it about this mysterious notebook?”
“Well, it’s information, Al. It’s a story.”
“Are you being purposely vague?”
“I guess I am,” Chase replied.
“Why? Why can’t you just tell me what’s in it?”
“Let me ask you a question before I answer,” said Chase. “Why haven’t you read it? You’ve been here all this time without reading it—why?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. And I meant it. Why hadn’t I read it? “I guess I thought reading it might be kind of, you know, dangerous. I thought it might nudge me into my old reckless and headstrong ways, which apparently has gotten me into more trouble than I can remember.”
“Fair enough,” Chase said thoughtfully. “So, would you like me to tell you what the notebook’s about?”
“Well, was there anything in it you found useful?” I asked, eying the notebook as though it might be a viper.
“Yes,” he said. “In fact, calling it useful would be putting it mildly.”
I folded my arms. Then unfolded them. I sat on the log bench. I stood up. Then I paced for a few moments. Then I sat down again and folded my arms. Chase sat watching me. I stood up again.
“Al, hold still for a sec.”
I stood still.
“I think you should read this.” Chase held out the notebook.
I took it.
I read it until the light failed, and then I did something I hadn’t done before: I lit a light. I had a few tallow candles from Ruby’s camp, along with a small bottle of kerosene and a lamp with a rough cotton wick, but I hadn’t used either until then. I’d been reserving them, knowing the days in winter would get shorter and darker and I’d need them then. As Chase lay dozing on the cot, I lit a candle and sat in my camp chair with a kettle of tea.
I read about Arie and the man who’d been attacked and left for dead, Eudrich. I read about the Agency’s attempts to restore memories. I read about various experiments they conducted and their failed attempts, and then about somewhat successful attempts. The language in the journal was often technical with scientific words difficult for me to follow or understand.
A lot of it had information we’d already been told—from Ruby or Woolly—and most of it was fairly dry and boring, not like the journals Arie and I had written, which I found completely engrossing and fascinating.
At one point I almost gave up reading the rest, as though it were a dull pulp novel or tedious history book. But then the story moved from medical experiments and chemical formulas and on to Eudrich’s theories about memories that were more esoteric and philosophical.
Arie had learned that a group of about six people who’d been captured and arrested on some charge of thievery or subversion. This had happened in the Zone where Arie and I had once lived together, where we wrote our journals.
The six people were imprisoned, of course, and they were, in Eudrich’s words, “closely examined.” Arie understood this to mean that they were questioned under duress. Tortured. And in the course of these close examinations, it was discovered that they had all of their memories. All of them. They remembered everything that had ever happened to them—before the serum, before the pandemic, and on back to their childhoods. The Agency records were consulted and re-consulted—these people had escaped from the Zones, after all, and should not have remembered anything but the past year of their lives. Even Agency personnel had lost their memories of the back before. And yet, the six remembered everything.
How had they gotten their memories back, Eudrich wanted to know, even after being dosed again and again?
They wouldn’t say at first. Eudrich said the examinations were “intensified,” which Arie took to mean life-threatening torture. And finally, they revealed their secret.
There was a man, said the six, who had a way to restore memories. This man, a recluse who they referred to as “the Guide.” did not use medicine. The encoded text was infuriatingly incomplete in this section of the notebook, and there were notes in the margins from Woolly explaining that transcription errors in the code had likely made these parts of the notebook untranslatable. And so there were several passages that were not decoded, and some had only fragments of decoded text, such as “when you make your secret journey,” and “walking with oneself” over some kind of “higher path.”
And there was this cryptic line: “Memory is not a matter of thinking of something that happened in the past. It is a matter of discovering oneself. To recall, you must discover.”
After studying with the Guide, after taking this so-called secret journey, the six had regained all of their memories, and the first thing they wanted to do was to return to the Zones to collect the friends and family members they now recalled with perfect clarity. But this was their downfall, because of course those they came back to rescue did not know them and did not trust them.
Tragically, they’d probably been reported by one of their own family members or friends, and this is what had led to their initial capture by the Agency.
Among These Bones (Book 3): Maybe We'll Remember Page 23
