As I Wake

by Elizabeth Scott

  I will be safe.

  Blink, and I am sitting on a cold metal chair in a darkened room, a row of faces I can’t see in front of me, watching me.

  “You’re doing very well with your training,” one of them says. “Almost done soon, aren’t you?”

  I nod.

  “You never ask about your family,” another voice says. “Never asked to see the records of your mother.”

  “I don’t remember her,” I say, and force my hands to stay where they are, force myself to stay relaxed, to keep my eyes wide open. Blinking and fidgeting means lying. I know that now.

  I am strong.

  I will do this. I will become someone.

  “You can go, then,” the voice says and then I am standing in an empty field, nothing but brown, dead grass as far as the eye can see. No one else is here. No one wants to even walk by this place. See where the dead that don’t exist lie.

  I lean down and touch the ground. It is cold and the grass is brittle, shredding into nothing under my hand. I pretend there is a breathing heart underneath, that the people who died and were brought here breathe as one, live in some way. That I can sense my mother here.

  “Ava,” I hear, and look behind me, see Morgan standing at the edge of the field, a white flower, for memory, in his hands.

  I am not surprised to see him, but my heart thumps hard and fast all the same, me and Morgan now and forever what I didn’t know I even wanted until I first saw him.

  I get up and walk toward him and then he is holding me, his arms around me, our fingers wrapped together, holding the flower as one.

  “The lost souls are supposed to be here,” he says, looking down at the ground. “I never thought about them before. I should have. Ava, I don’t care what the government says, I don’t care about any of it. I know who you are. I know and I lo—”

  I touch my fingers to his mouth, to silence him, because he can’t feel like that about me, no one has ever felt like that about me. It feels familiar, but only with him.

  Only with Morgan.

  I bend down and put the flower on the ground, put it where the dry grass will break it into pieces, and he bends down next to me too, puts his hands on mine like we are one.

  We are one.

  He is here, he sees me, and loves—

  Wake up.

  36.

  I SIT UP, startled and gasping, and I am not in that field anymore. I am in bed, Ava’s bed, Ava’s covers wrapped around me, I was dreaming—remembering—and Morgan—

  Morgan is here. I can see him outlined in the dark of Ava’s room. He is kneeling by Ava’s bed, head bowed, the edge of his hand barely brushing against mine, the most tentative of touches.

  I shove him, pushing him away and springing to my feet, crossing to the window, which is open, a breeze blowing the curtains back to show the night sky.

  “Ava,” he says, his voice scared-sounding, and I hit him as hard as I can, closed fist to the side of his face, furious with him. With myself, for being glad to hear his voice.

  For being glad to see him.

  “Get out,” I say. “Get out and go to Clementine. Go to your family.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, and he sounds like he means it, his eyes are so sincere in the moonlight, in the faraway glow of starlight, and I think of the dreams—memories—that just came to me, of his hand in mine.

  “I should have told you,” he says. “But at first, I figured you knew—you were trained, you were a listener, I was your job and I thought—I thought maybe Clementine had sent you and the others as a warning. But when I got to know you, when I—when I wanted to be with you, I knew you didn’t know her. And then I found out you were from the crèche, and you told me about your mother, I . . . I was afraid of what you’d think of me if you knew about her.”

  “You didn’t trust me.”

  He’s silent for a long moment.

  “I—I was afraid,” he finally says. “I was afraid you’d see me as someone who’d hurt you. I was afraid you’d decide to forget all about me.”

  “And that was supposed to happen, wasn’t it?” I say. “Thanks to you and your grandmother, I’m here, where you aren’t supposed to be at all. Where you’re supposed to be nothing to me. Where I’m supposed to be another me altogether.”

  “You don’t know—you don’t know how much I wish I’d told you,” he says. “I just—she and I hadn’t spoke in so long that I thought Clementine had written me off. Maybe even wanted me gone, when you first showed up. When my parents died, she sent me away to school, and never came to see me, never called me. I never even saw her again until here. But you—Ava, I remember you. I remember you in my soul. Don’t you remember me?”

  “Yes,” I say, my voice soft and when he smiles I say, “So that makes it okay to lie?”

  “No. I’m not—I’m telling you why I did what I did, Ava. I can’t—do you really think I don’t see how wrong I was? That I don’t hate what happened? That I have to live with knowing I did this, that I—that she put you here because of me? I would do anything to fix that. Anything.”

  “So you came here.”

  He nods, and I look at him. Moonlight shines through him like he isn’t even here, casts its light on Ava’s carpet.

  “You don’t have a shadow,” I say.

  “Not here,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “I—it doesn’t matter now.”

  “Why?” I say again.

  “Because there’s no me here. Never has been. I came here to find you because I’m sorry, and because I miss you, because I lo—”

  “Don’t,” I say, my voice shaking. I don’t want him to say it and I want him to say it. I want to believe it, and I’m afraid . . .

  I’m afraid I will. That I do.

  That, in spite of everything, I feel the same way.

  He shifts his weight, but the moonlight still cuts through him and no shadow falls where he stands.

  “I came here for you,” he says after a moment, his voice soft. “I would do anything for you.”

  “There—there isn’t anything you can do,” I say. “I remember you, I remember—I remember us—but I also know you lied to me. That . . . all I have left now is what I know. It’s all I can trust.”

  He nods, face somber. “I—you’ll never come back with me, will you?”

  “No.”

  He closes his eyes, briefly, and then turns, moves toward the window.

  “What, no throwing yourself at me and saying you don’t want to live without me?” I say, trying to keep my voice light, but my heart is pounding, pounding.

  He stills, and then looks at me. “You might not remember it,” he says, “but you already know it’s true.”

  And then he goes.

  I look out into the night, into the dark, until he is a part of it. Until I can’t see him anymore.

  Then I sit on the floor, in front of the open window, and watch the sky. I watch the sun rise, I watch the stars disappear into the light.

  37.

  IN THE MORNING Jane tells me I can take a few days off school.

  “I think you need a little break,” she says as she offers me thick slices of buttered toast, and I nod, thinking of Morgan standing in Ava’s room last night saying he was sorry. That he came here for me.

  That I was sent here because of him.

  I nod because I don’t want to face Ava’s world—my new world—right now. I want to hide from what I know, what I remember, and what I’ve learned.

  I’m here now, and I have to find a way to live with that. To live here.

  So I don’t go to school, and spend my days with Jane. She calls in sick to work—“I’ve always wanted to do that,” she says when she gets off the phone after coughing and talking, whispery-raspy about how bad she feels—and we make chocolate chip cookies, which come out burnt; cake, which comes out lopsided; and brownies, which shrivel around the edges but stay liquid and lumpy in the middle.

  And it’s fun. We puzzl
e over the recipes—Jane says she doesn’t cook much, and I tell her I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a recipe before—and try to figure out things like what the difference between baking powder and baking soda is, and how and why we’re supposed to do thing like “sift flour.”

  “It’s like another language,” Jane says as we’re eating ice cream for dinner and watching a show about famous people talking about how famous they are. “A recipe can’t tell you to mix flour and sugar together. It has to say you need to fold them in.”

  “And then mix, but don’t overmix.”

  “Exactly,” she says. “How can you overmix something? And what happens if you do? I didn’t see anything about that. Did you?”

  I glance at the kitchen, and then at her. She smiles at me.

  I smile back.

  It’s nice, being with her. The littlest things make her happy—me asking her what she wanted to be when she was my age (television star, squashed when she got a summer job at a television station and spent three months getting coffee for people), her taking me shopping and me saying, “Why are you standing out there?” when she starts to wait outside a store when I go in.

  It’s nice, but at night, every night, I sleep in strange fits and starts, pulled in and out of dreams that aren’t dreams at all. The me that was is still there and remembers more all the time.

  I remember: waiting in line for food with Olivia and Greer, Sophy coming up to us and asking to wait with us, the three of us nodding and smiling. Not relaxing until we were done and she’d said good-bye.

  I remember: sitting with Greer in the park, watching her get up and walk over to Olivia when she comes in, smiling. See her sitting, hands clenched, as Sophy sits across from us in a cafeteria and asks how we are. I remember Ethan, shoulders hunched as he walks into training wearing the kind of quilted winter coat that most people have to wait years to get, how he blushes when Sophy whispers something in his ear, turns a painful, shamed red.

  I remember Morgan.

  I remember so much, a million moments; attic, shadowy bar, field of brittle dying grass. His apartment, all windows and light. My own, small and dark, and how I felt seeing him there, in my rooms, my space. How he touched my face lightly, as if I was something delicate. How he touched me, as if I held something he wanted to know. As if I mattered to him.

  As if I was—am—will always be—everything to him.

  Three days after Morgan came to me at night, three days after I found out he and Clementine are bound by blood, I am back at the hospital again, having my own blood drawn for some follow-up tests. There is still confusion as to exactly how I lost my memory.

  I don’t say that I know why, and neither does Jane. We just head for the fourth floor, for the lab, where we sit in a small room filled with old magazines and wait for a long time before I am beckoned back to sit and have blood drawn out of me, drained into three small tubes.

  Afterward, Jane acts as if I am sick, wrapping an arm around me as we leave, asking me if I want anything once, twice.

  “I’m fine,” I say and she says, “Ava, the last time you had to give blood you almost passed out. Remember how you had to drink apple juice?”

  I don’t, of course, and as soon as she says it I see she knows that too. I see her bite her lip and blink once, hard. I see her think of her Ava.

  “I wouldn’t mind some water,” I say, and she smiles at me, and leads me to a drinking fountain like I am made of glass.

  In some ways, what she wants from me is enormous and impossible, is about finding someone in me who isn’t there and never will be. But in other ways, her want is so small, so easy to please. And simple enough—pleasant enough—for me to do. It is no hardship to have her looking out for me. To want me to be safe, to be happy.

  I only ever remember Morgan wanting me to be happy. Morgan—

  I push the thought away, push him away, and drink some water, then swear to Jane I will wait right where I am standing while she goes and gets the car.

  “You really will wait right here, won’t you?” she says, sounding surprised.

  “Why wouldn’t I? You asked me to.”

  “I—thank you,” she says, and touches my hair hesitantly, gently, before she goes.

  I close my eyes when she does, wondering if she ever had a chance to touch my hair like that in another place. A different here.

  Nothing comes, no swimming memory that swallows me whole.

  And when I open my eyes, I see Clementine standing next to the drinking fountain.

  “I need to talk to you,” she says. “I—I need your help.”

  I stare at her, startled. “What?”

  “You heard me,” she says. “I—look, Ava, Morgan has come to see you, hasn’t he?”

  “What, you don’t know? I thought you knew everything.”

  “Not here,” she says, brittle-voiced. “Has he been to see you or not? I don’t—I don’t know where he is.”

  “I don’t either.”

  She pales. “He didn’t tell you—of course he didn’t, he’s so intent on you that he’s not thinking,” she says, almost muttering to herself, and then looks at me, fierce-eyed.

  “Morgan has to go back,” she says. “If he doesn’t, he’ll vanish. And not just here. He’ll—he’ll be gone everywhere. If you’ve seen him, you’ll—you’ll know what I mean. He’s—”

  “Disappearing,” I say, thinking of how the moonlight cut through him when he stood in Ava’s room. How he said It doesn’t matter when I asked him about it.

  But it did. It does.

  “You have seen him,” she says, and for a moment, just a moment, relief is visible on her face.

  It terrifies me. Not just because it shows me that Clementine is capable of feeling, but because the thought of Morgan being gone, forever gone—

  I don’t want to picture it. I don’ t even want to think about it.

  “You don’t want him gone either, do you?” she says. “I see it on your face. Good.”

  “Stop it,” I say, angry that she can read me so easily. That all my attempts to forget Morgan have failed. That I don’t want to forget him. “You—you sent me here, you got yourself here, you send him back. I don’t know why you—” I break off, staring at her.

  “You can’t,” I say slowly. “You didn’t bring him here, and you can’t send him back, can you?”

  She stares right back at me, and then looks away, stares at the water fountain.

  “No,” she finally says. “I can’t send him back. I’ve tried but it—it doesn’t work. But you—if you would—”

  “What, go back with him and then have you send me right back here? Or kill me to make sure this doesn’t all happen again?”

  “No,” she says once more. “No, I wouldn’t—”

  I laugh, bitter and sharp, and she leans in toward me, her face pinched with anger. I don’t have to remember that no one laughs at Clementine. I can tell.

  “I don’t lie about what I’ll do and what I won’t do,” she says. “If you went back and I sent you here again, he’d just follow you like he has now. And as for you dying—I didn’t kill you because I saw you cared about him and now—well, now I wish I had, but if I did, he’d never—he would only try something even more dangerous, try and mess with time . . .”

  She shudders. “So, no, I won’t hurt you. All you have to do is tell him you won’t come back with him. Just . . . just tell him to go. You do that and I’ll find a way to make it so this place is the only one you know.”

  “I don’t want anything from you,” I say, my voice shaking with fear and anger. She could—and has—crushed my life so easily. “And I told Morgan I wasn’t gong to leave with him.”

  “You have to mean it.”

  “I meant—”

  “No,” she says. “You didn’t. He—to get here, he had to find you, and he’s bound to you in a way I can’t unravel, that goes all over, across everything. You think about him still, I can see it, and I know he does the same. That
he hopes because of it, and waits. He waits, dying, for you. Do you want that for him? Do you want him to die?”

  Dying? I’d seen that he was fading, knew he didn’t fit here, and she said he was vanishing, that he’d disappear, but I didn’t—I didn’t want to believe it was so final. So forever. “He wouldn’t—”

  “Of course he would,” Clementine snaps. “He was ready to throw his life away for you. I tried to stop it, but I only made things worse. To get here and stay, he’s destroying himself. He . . . he loves you, and I can’t break that. But you—if you find him, tell him he has to go, and mean it, you can. Once he can’t feel what brought him here, once you break that link between you that I—how it goes so far I don’t know. I wish I’d studied it, but I didn’t know about it. But just do this and he’ll go back. He won’t be able to fight it.”

  “And he’ll live.”

  “Yes,” she says, and I stare at her. He’ll live, but I’ll never see him again. I’ll be here and—

  “Look,” Clementine says, and points behind me. I don’t turn and she half smiles, winter cold, at me.

  “Jane’s coming,” she says. “If Morgan stays, he dies, and if you go back with him, you know I won’t rest until he’s safe, and he’ll never be safe with you as far as I’m concerned. But here—if you’re here, just you, you can have a life you’d never have, not even with Morgan. You’ll have a real home. You can go to school, to college, have a job you want. You can do—and be—anything here, Ava. Think about that.”

  38.

  I DO.

  Clementine watches Jane and I leave, smiling at Jane’s bristled, “Are you all right?” to me, at her angry stare that Clementine absorbs like it means nothing to her.

  On our way to lunch, Jane asks me if I’m all right at least four times. I say, “I’m fine,” each time and think—just for a second—about telling her about Clementine. About everything.

  I don’t, but there are those moments—those seconds—where I think about it. When I think of Jane as someone the Ava I am can talk to.