As I Wake

by Elizabeth Scott

  Once I’m away from school—away from them—I slow down, trying to think as I walk along the road Jane uses to drive me to school. It takes me through neighborhoods full of houses that look just like the one she lives in, a whole tiny universe of sameness, and although I keep expecting to see someone, I don’t see anyone.

  There’s just me.

  I take a deep breath, startled to realize I’m still shaking. Whatever happened to me just now has gotten to me, broken past the fragile shell I’ve built. More than my memory is gone. My soul has wings that beat to a heart I don’t understand and I see things, feel things that I know aren’t from here, but that are so real.

  That are more real than Jane and the life she has made for me.

  I turn onto Homeway Lane, onto Ava’s street, my street, and see two people standing by Jane’s driveway, talking.

  One of them is Clementine.

  The other is Morgan.

  31.

  I MOVE WITHOUT THOUGHT, my body dropping to the ground silently as if I’ve done it a thousand times before, and I roll into the narrow ditch that lines either side of Homeway Lane, ignoring the damp earth smell all around me.

  “What did you think I would do, throw you a welcome party?” Clementine says. “You shouldn’t be here, Morgan—there’s no you here, and I know you know that. I’ve told you what will happen if you don’t leave now. Why won’t you listen?”

  “What did you do to Ava?” Morgan says.

  Silence, and then Clementine sighs. “There was room for her here,” she says. “Jane wanted her, and there was space, so—”

  “So you just sent her here? Did you even think—?”

  “I’ve thought more than you have, that’s for certain,” Clementine says. “She fits here, Morgan. She fits, and I made sure that she’d forget before. Forget you. Do you understand me? She doesn’t know you, and you can’t be here. There’s no you here. You can’t be here, and you’ll disappear from everywhere if you stay long enough.”

  “But you won’t?”

  “I have someone here,” Clementine says. “She’s—well, she’s not who she could be, but she fits my needs.”

  “And you’ve killed her.”

  “So quick to assume the worst of me,” Clementine says, her voice thick with anger and something that sounds almost like sadness. “I wouldn’t hurt—”

  “Another you? But anyone else, well, that’s okay?”

  “Ava isn’t dead,” Clementine snaps. “She’s here, isn’t she? She’s got a new life, a good one. And look, I can’t explain everything to you—there isn’t enough time—but Morgan, if you go someplace where there is no room for you, where there isn’t a you that was or will be, what happens isn’t pretty. The universe recognizes wrongness and fixes it. You can feel it, can’t you? I know you can. You have to go back.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “There isn’t time for this,” Clementine says. “Let me send you home. We’ll forget this ever happened. I won’t even ask how you figured out how to get here or anything, I swear. And you know I should ask you that. I should tell the SAT you figured it out. Or go to the head of security for the PDM.”

  “I don’t care what you swear or what you want—I want to know why you did it.”

  “You know why,” Clementine says. “It’s my job. I take care of problems. And more than that, I would do anything—”

  “Send her back.”

  “She has a life here,” Clementine says. “She doesn’t know you.”

  “She does.”

  “No,” Clementine says, her voice weary-sounding. “She doesn’t. Go home, Morgan. Go before it’s too late.”

  I hear the sounds of someone walking away, and push myself deeper into the ditch, half expecting to see Clementine peering into it any second.

  “You can come out now,” Morgan says, and I look up.

  The smile on his face makes something deep inside me, something beyond memory, ache.

  “You knew I was here?” I say, sitting up, and he nods.

  Morgan does look strange, his skin so pale it’s almost transparent in the sunlight. But his eyes, when they meet mine, are as dark as memories I didn’t think were real until now.

  But they were. They are.

  I remember another place because that’s where I was. Where I’m from.

  I remember Morgan because I—the Ava I really am—knows him.

  “I—here, I can feel everything you do,” he says. “It’s how I found you. And I know—I know you’re in there, Ava, and I know this—” He points at Jane’s house, at the road he’s standing on. “I know this doesn’t feel right to you.”

  “No,” I say, and it comes out easily, so easily.

  So true.

  “I knew you’d remember me,” Morgan says, and reaches one hand up slowly, carefully, and cups my face, fingers rubbing gently over my jaw. “Clementine thought she’d make you forget but she doesn’t know you. You’re so strong. So—”

  “Morgan,” I say, the memories—and they are memories, moments so real I can almost feel them right now, my skin and blood singing so loudly I’m surprised it can’t be heard.

  He kisses me then and I know him. I would know him anywhere. In a thousand different worlds, as a thousand different Avas, he would always call to my heart.

  He pulls away, head tilted as if he is thinking, and without closing my eyes, without doing anything, we aren’t standing by Jane’s house anymore. We are in a dark bar and he’s looking at me the same way, watching me as I cup my hands around a drink.

  “Come away with me,” he says, his voice so soft I can barely hear it over the quiet, desperate sadness of the bar and everyone sitting in it, holding their own cups and hoping to forget the world for a little while.

  “I can’t,” I say. “If I leave my job, the city, I—they won’t kill me if they catch me. They’ll take me to the crèche and make me an example. Make me . . . I would wish for death long before it ever came.”

  “They won’t catch us.”

  “I—this is everything I’ve worked for. My whole life, this is all I ever wanted.”

  “And now?”

  I circle my hands around my cup tighter. This life was all I ever wanted until now. Until him.

  “All right,” he says, after a long moment, a moment where I haven’t said a word, where I have sat on the screaming want inside me and forced it down. Forced it silent. “I—I should go. I should stop reading books that get people like you sent to watch me. I should go and finish school and be assigned a job and meet a partner the government wants for me and never see you again. I should go and forget you but I can’t. I don’t want to.”

  He stands up, sliding on his coat. “I would rather have memories of you than anything else. You—what I feel when I look at you is the most real thing I have ever known.”

  He walks out. He does not look back. I finish my drink, and then order another one. When I’m done, when I walk outside, I start walking, then turn back around, avoiding the well-lit sidewalk and turning into an alley.

  “Hi,” Morgan says, and his voice is soft. Glad.

  “Hi,” I say, and when I reach for him, he meets me halfway.

  “Ava,” he says, and I am not outside the bar anymore. I am standing on a road, standing by Jane’s house, and Morgan is here.

  Morgan is with me and I want to go home with him. I want him.

  “Let’s—” I say, and then a fist flashes out, catching Morgan’s jaw, and it’s Ethan, Ethan is here.

  Morgan falls, crumpling into the ditch. His skin is so pale I think I can almost see the leaves in it through him.

  “Morgan?” I say, my voice rising, shaking, and Ethan puts his arms around me, says, “Ava, are you all right?”

  “I—Ethan, why are you—?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. His voice is shaking. He looks terrified. “I’ve never hit anyone before. I just—when you left school, I started feeling worried, and it got worse and worse and I en
ded up driving over here. I don’t know why. I just—I don’t know why and if I get in trouble I’ll—” He breaks off, his face going into its usual smooth appearance, and then looks into the ditch, looks at Morgan. “Is this the guy your mom is so worried about?”

  “Jane? You talked to Jane?”

  “She’s at the school,” he says, blinking a little at how I say “Jane.” “They called her right away, and when she got there and started talking I just—I don’t now. That’s when I left.”

  “But—” I say, looking at Morgan.

  “I know he’s dangerous,” Ethan says. “Your mom said so. Come on, we’ll go get her and call the police. The guy will be out for a while and they’ll come and get him and—”

  There’s a blur of movement, and Morgan springs up, gasping, and pushes past Ethan. He catches my eye as he does, pleading, and I know he wants me to push away too, to run, but for some reason I can’t move.

  And then he’s gone.

  “We should definitely go,” Ethan says, sounding nervous now, his eyes full of fear that seems to go beyond this, and leads me to a car. He helps me inside, buckling the seat belt around me, and then we are driving away.

  I look for Morgan, but don’t see him.

  Why didn’t I go with him? He wanted me to and I wanted to, I did. I felt it. I knew it.

  But I didn’t.

  “My stepfather will be proud of me,” Ethan says in the car. “I think so, anyway. Hope so. It’s easier—I mean, nicer, when he is.” He clears his throat, wipes his hands against the steering wheel, and says “Ava?” as we pull onto the road that leads to the school.

  I look at him.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” he says. “You just look—I don’t know. A little lost.”

  “Lost?”

  “Yeah,” he says, glancing at me, and I see another him now, too, one who’s sadder looking, worn looking, one who looks at Greer with sorrow in his eyes, who I can tell wishes things were different, better.

  Who looks at me the same way.

  “I want you to be safe,” he says, and I hear it again, from the other Ethan I see through and around this one.

  From a memory.

  “Be safe,” Ethan says, hunching over like always, gray sky glaring down over us, and I smile at him, say, “I’ll be fine.”

  But was I? Am I?

  32.

  JANE IS WAITING at the school, red-eyed and frightened looking, and as soon as I get out of Ethan’s car she rushes over. Her arms feel warm. Familiar, even, in a hazy way that makes me sure of one thing.

  There is something in the way Jane holds me that makes me feel loved. Not safe—I don’t trust her, not after what I’ve just heard—but the way she feels about her Ava is written all over her. Given to me so freely, so easily, and I—

  I think Jane was once my mother too.

  The police come and everyone has to take their turn talking. I hear someone say there’s no sign of Morgan. Two patrol cars went looking for him, but it’s as if he’s vanished. As if he isn’t real.

  But he is.

  When we’re finally told we can go, Jane holds my hand all the way to her car. “I know today has been hard,” she says when we get in. “And I’m not mad at you for leaving school but I just—I want to know what you were thinking. You know that boy is out there, and—”

  “I know a lot of things,” I say, and she glances at me, her face turning pale.

  “Ava,” she says, her voice going quieter, more nervous-sounding.

  “I really do remember you,” I say, and keep talking even as a smile breaks across her face. “I remember something from when I was really little. You were different. Thinner. Sadder. Broken. And then you were gone.”

  “I don’t—” she says and then pauses. “You must remember something from right after your father died. I was—it was a very hard time for me. I was working two jobs, and you probably saw me leave and were afraid I’d never come back. But I did. I mean, here I am.” She smiles at me.

  “No,” I say as we turn onto Homeway Lane. “You didn’t come back. You don’t remember what I do because you weren’t there. You want me to remember the things you do, but I don’t. I can’t. You want your Ava, the one who isn’t here. The one who isn’t me.”

  Jane stares at me, her mouth open. “I—” she says, and then pulls into the driveway and parks the car, trembling. “I don’t understand what—”

  “Yes, you do,” I say, and my voice is so tight, so sharp, that she flinches. Then her back straightens and she looks at me.

  “You are Ava,” she says. “And I’m your mother. And you do not talk to me like this.”

  “You are my mother,” I say, and she gasps in joy, eyes brightening. “Where I—where you took me from—”

  “Took you?” Jane says, all the joy draining away from her. Her eyes look haunted. “I didn’t—”

  “You did,” I say. “And where I was, my mother—you—is dead. I’m pretty sure of that, but the rest of my memories have some blanks in them. That and the weird head pain. I guess I have you and Clementine to thank for all of that, don’t I?”

  “Ava, I don’t know what—” Jane says, and then stops. Looks down at her lap for a moment, and then at me.

  “Clementine told me she could bring you back,” she says. “She said she could make everything exactly like it was.”

  I don’t know what to say. I didn’t—I didn’t expect her to say what she just has. To say that what I believe is real. That I am not the Ava who is supposed to be here.

  I didn’t expect her to tell me the truth.

  “It’s not, though,” I say. “And I—you know that too. I’ve seen how you act when Clementine is around. How you want her to go. Have you . . .” The next words are harder to say than I thought they would be, which surprises me. “Have you asked her about finding another Ava for you?”

  “You are Ava,” Jane says, voice cracking, and grabs my hands. I’m not expecting that, and don’t pull back in time, feel her fingers wrapping around mine.

  It feels real. It feels nice. It feels like something I could know. But I don’t remember it, not here, and I know the black hole where my memories are hiding or lost forever will never hold Jane where she wants to be.

  “I’m not your Ava, though,” I say, and keep my voice as gentle as possible when I see Jane’s hurt face. There’s no echo of anything through or around it. There’s nothing here but her and me and I see that she loves Ava. I see she’s sad enough that she could even love me, that she could overlook the things I’d never know, the things I’d do that her Ava never would.

  I see that she would do anything for Ava.

  I see what happened.

  “Your Ava died, didn’t she?” I say, and Jane drops my hands and pulls back into herself, arms wrapping around her body. She sits there for a moment, frozen, and then she lets out a small, choked sound. A sob.

  “Yes,” she says. “I’ve tried to remember how but I just—I just see your face, see your eyes open but not . . . not seeing anything, and know you’re gone. Clementine didn’t—she never told me I wouldn’t remember what happened to you. She said everything would go back to how it was before, but she didn’t say that everything I knew about how you died would vanish, that I would lose those memories.”

  She looks at me again. “So I know how you feel, Ava. I do. I want to keep you safe but I don’t know how. I don’t remember what I need to protect you from. I try but there’s . . . there’s nothing there. I remember everything but the moments that took you away from me.”

  “You don’t know how I feel,” I say, my voice rising. “You—you said yes when Clementine said she could bring me here. You said yes even though you knew I wouldn’t be your Ava. She was dead and you knew I wasn’t her and yet you—”

  “She said you knew me!” Jane cries. “She said out of all the other Avas in the thousands of worlds we all walk in, there were always certain people in her life, and I was one of them. That no matte
r where you were, you would know me, and I would know you.”

  “So you said yes,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. “You said yes even though she told you that I had another life. My own life.”

  “She said you needed me,” Jane says. “She said you were as alone as I was. I just—you don’t know how much I wanted you here with me.”

  “I think I have a pretty good idea, actually. I’m here after all, aren’t I? Here with a head everyone says is empty when it’s actually been wiped clean. Clementine did something to me, Jane. She put me here, but I don’t belong and I know it. I feel it every day, with every breath I take, and I won’t remember what you want me to. I can’t. I lost everything—the life that actually belongs to me—to be here, and Clementine didn’t do it for you. Don’t you see that? She wasn’t trying to help you have your Ava back, she was—”

  “Oh, God,” Jane says, her voice barely a whisper. “She wanted you here. She wanted you here, and I didn’t—I heard how eager she was, but I told myself she wanted to help. I see how she looks at you and am afraid she’s judging me but she’s not, she just—” She presses a shaking hand to her mouth.

  “Dumped me here to get rid of me,” I say. “Did she—did she tell how to get rid of me if you decided you didn’t want me anymore?”

  “Get rid of you?” Jane says, staring at me in shock. “I would never—Ava, I shouldn’t have wanted you back so badly that I’d do what I did, I know, but I—I do want you here. I want it more than anything. And we—we know each other. You even said you remember me, so—”

  “Did she tell you how to do it?” I say, leaning in toward her, letting her see the anger in my eyes. Letting her see that the world I remember in bits and pieces formed me into someone who is not the girl she thinks she knows.

  Jane stares at me.

  “No,” she says after a moment. “And even if she had, wherever you were, Clementine was there and she wanted to hurt you. I don’t ever want you hurt, I don’t want to . . .” She reaches one hand out toward me and then stops when she sees the look on my face.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t—I didn’t know being here would be like this for you. But I love you, Ava, and I really think we can be a family if—”