Cruel Abandon

by S. Massery

  “Do places hold memory?” I ask his back. “Are you…?”

  He grunts. “Am I okay? I guess we’ll find out.”

  Do places hold memory? Do I want them to? It happens often enough in books: a room will transport the characters back to a time when things were different. But standing on the threshold of a brightly lit room is one thing. Peering off the edge of a cliff is quite another.

  “Your mom preferred us apart,” he says quietly. He moves away from me, allowing my view to open up. “She said it was better that way.”

  “I…”

  “The first week you were back, you had awful nightmares. Like, you’d be screaming bloody murder, eyes wide open, but you were still asleep. The doctors didn’t know what to do. Your parents didn’t.” He turns back and finally meets my gaze.

  More pain pours out of him—I wonder if it relieves the pressure building inside him or if he’s losing pieces of himself.

  Maybe both.

  “Where are we?” I rotate, but the clearing is different from my teenage memory. Strange enough that we could be in a new state entirely. “What does this have to do with you?”

  His gaze falls to the trail we stand on, and slowly, carefully, he removes something from his pocket.

  Yellow plastic, extremely faded. Thin.

  I take it and flatten it.

  DO NOT printed in block lettering.

  “Crime scene tape,” I say. “I… I knew that. I found this. You kept it?”

  “I didn’t follow you out here. I had lied about that.” He paces out to the center of the small clearing, then back toward me.

  I’ve never seen him like this.

  “Hey,” I say, unsticking my feet and grabbing his hands. “It’s okay. I don’t blame you for lying, but… what made you come out here if you weren’t following me?”

  “I was out here trying to figure out what the fuck happened.” He stares at me. “I just… I don’t know.”

  Impulsively, I throw my arms around his neck. He is frozen for a moment, then slowly returns the hug.

  I stroke his hair. “I understand you,” I whisper in his ear. “Why do you think I came out here? To try and make sense of everything, too. Everything is scrambled.”

  He grips me tighter, lifting me until he’s standing straight. My feet come off the ground.

  “I’m scared,” I admit.

  “I won’t let anything bad happen.”

  I wiggle loose, regaining my footing. “I’m not afraid of what might happen… I’m afraid of what already did happen. How bad could it have been to make my brain shut off those memories and give me lasting post-traumatic stress from it? I’m not normal, Liam. I have trouble processing. I haven’t even begun to think about Whitney being gone. When my mind goes in that direction, I just go numb.” Tears prick the backs of my eyes. “I don’t want to be numb.”

  “If you are, just say the word,” he responds. “I’ll chase you to the deepest corners of your mind to bring you back.”

  I dig my fingers into the sleeves of his jacket. “You might just have to.”

  When did this thing between us shift so drastically? I’m weightless and heavy at the same time, pushed along by a current I don’t understand.

  “You came here, and I was afraid of what might happen if you were left too long on your own—so I interrupted,” Liam confesses. “I was here, I was trying… and then I saw you, and I forgot about everything except what your mother told me.”

  I tip my head back. “And what, exactly, did she tell you? That she couldn’t stand the nightmares? That I was better off with the post-traumatic amnesia?”

  “Yes.” He closes his eyes. “She… You didn’t just scream, Sky. You yelled until your voice was gone, and even then you carried on. And it was my name on your lips when you woke up. I didn’t get it then, I don’t—”

  White spots bloom on the periphery of my vision.

  “I screamed for you?”

  He nods. His eyes are still closed. I still hold his forearms, and his fingers are light on my elbows. This moment is surreal, impossible…

  My chest aches.

  It’s been aching all day, but this is different. This is the sort of ache that comes not with drowning but with breathing.

  I tear away from him and run into the meadow. My shoulder hits a tree, and I stumble. My knees hit the ground, and I sit back on my heels. My head falls back.

  The evening sky is twilight-blue, almost gray. There are faint traces of gold and orange streaked across it, catching wisps of clouds.

  Run.

  “Oh god,” I choke out. I cover my mouth with both hands.

  He stops at my side and peers over me, his face barely making it into my narrowed vision.

  His face… now and then. Present and past. My vision flickers again, this time more intrusively. I’m sweating, ice-cold, and my body has officially turned on me.

  “You’re hyperventilating,” he says to me. “Please, Sky—”

  “You found me here,” I whisper. “You. You found me. I should’ve remembered that. It’s always been you, hasn’t it?”

  My fingers tingle, I tremble, and then, as if a candle is extinguished, I slip into the black hole yawning open in the back of my mind.

  Part III

  The Deception

  32

  Sky

  I’m lost.

  My voice is gone.

  My clothes are in tatters.

  There’s something in my hair, on my skin. It was sticky, but now it flakes off. I’d scratch at it, but rope digs into my wrists.

  Not my ankles, though.

  I hoist myself up and force my legs to move. To carry me away from this godforsaken place. Rocks and branches tear at my bare legs, and I bounce off trees. I barely feel the sting of impact.

  “Sky,” someone calls. “Skylar. Can you hear me?”

  The voice echoes around me. We’re in a fun house of mirrors, and I don’t know where the exit is.

  “Easy,” the voice says.

  Hands guide me down to the forest floor, and I stare at the sky. I won’t shift my gaze away from the bare branches swaying above us for fear of what I might see.

  So much blood.

  “She’s here!” he yells. “I found her!”

  He repeats it over and over again, until his voice grows hoarse.

  His fingers tug uselessly at the rope. “Stay with me, Sky.”

  I can’t. I won’t.

  I drift away.

  “Can you tell me why you’re here today, Skylar?” Dr. Penn asks.

  Silence.

  I can’t get the words out. My throat is incredibly dry. I rub my thumb over the tip of my index finger. It’s wrapped in bandages to protect them, but the pain is still bright and sharp. It’s a moment of grounding. “I don’t know. I, um, was in the hospital.”

  “Yes, you were. You seem uncomfortable.”

  “They said I was gone. And now I have to talk to you.” Pause. An eternity can live in a moment of quiet, and this one stretches, both near and far. I almost reach for it, but fear holds me back. I force my mouth open, to talk. To tell the truth. “I am uncomfortable.”

  “What makes you feel that way?”

  Another pause, and crackling silence.

  I hate this, I think, over and over. “My skin.”

  The first time I see my face on the news, I don’t recognize myself. I only recognize my name scrolling across the bottom of the screen, along with other words that don’t make sense: breaking news and found alive and survivor.

  I don’t feel like a survivor. I’ve been shipped to Hell, forced to repeat monstrous things. My fingernails have grown back, painstakingly slow. The cuts and bruises are still fresh, barely scabbed over. My ribs protest loudly when I breathe too deeply.

  It’s the oddest thing, relearning your body. Trying to piece together what happened based on the roadmap of new scars and injuries scattered across you.

  Me.

  Anyway, the news.
I stare and I stare, and it takes me a minute, maybe more, to realize the girl on the screen is me. The words coming out of the broadcaster’s mouth don’t compute. He’s talking from underwater, and I’d have a better chance of understanding him if he was speaking a foreign language.

  My mother finds me poised on the edge of my seat in the living room, the remote dangling from my fingers. It is dark, late, I am loathing the idea of sleeping, and so here I sit.

  Transfixed and horrified.

  Something bad happened, and I fear it’s changed me for good. Changed my essence right down to the bone—deeper, even. My soul is scarred.

  Imagine having to live with that, but not knowing what. Fearing the worst and knowing… maybe that isn’t even the tip of the iceberg of what happened. My head pounds, right behind my eyes.

  “Mom—”

  She turns off the television, pulls the remote control from my hand, and sets it on the coffee table. “I don’t think you should watch that.” Her voice is careful, even.

  “Why do they have a video of me—”

  I looked awful in that short, silent clip. In a dragged-through-the-mud kind of way. My scalp is still tender, and sprouts of broken baby hair stick straight out. Maybe I did get dragged…

  “Honey, it’s just going to upset you, and it’s time for bed.”

  I am calm, I almost say. It’s a lie—my heart threatens to beat right out of my chest.

  I let her guide me to bed, then I contemplate what happened. The possibilities.

  The woods, the voice, my injuries.

  And then the nightmares started.

  Fourteen years old and stuck in a vicious cycle.

  I twist, shrieking. Something’s wrapped around my legs, holding me captive. I can’t escape, I can’t—

  “Wake up,” someone says, shaking my shoulders.

  My head snaps forward and back. I’m already awake, trapped in this hellhole. Every muscle aches. My eyes are open, but I can’t see anything. There’s just a thick black smog around me.

  A light flickers on, and Liam suddenly appears before me, cupping my cheeks.

  “Hush,” he whispers. “A dream. A bad dream. You’re at home, in your bed.”

  I grip his wrists. “I don’t remember a dream. Why am I screaming if I have amnesia? Why can’t I just forget it entirely?”

  “I don’t know,” he says evenly. “Lie down. It’s okay.”

  He has a blanket and pillow on the floor. He’s been here every night this week, stopping the nightmares in their tracks. Senseless dreams, whispers of pain. It’s been two months of therapy, of healing, of trying to slip back into a regular routine. Wounds keep splitting open, and I don’t get it. I don’t understand why Liam seems to be the only person capable of calming me down.

  “Thank you,” I whisper.

  He turns off the light and lies down, too.

  I reach my hand out and exhale when his fingers find mine.

  33

  Liam

  Trust is an odd concept—one I should’ve paid more attention to learning in school. It’s fragile and ironclad at the same time. What I once thought might shatter it only proved its endurance.

  And now this.

  This could be it. Sky could remember, realize what happened, and turn her back on me forever. Because it’s me. I’m the one who urged her into the woods to explore. The girl I barely knew.

  And it was out of the woods that we dragged ourselves, although it may as well have been Hell.

  I carry Sky back to my house. Her head lolls against my shoulder, and I suppress the urge to shake her awake. There’s another part of me that wants to brush the hair away from her face, then keep her hidden from the world. From her overprotective mother and my hovering parents.

  She’s light as a bird, as if her bones are hollow. How delicate, how fragile does that make her? Why hasn’t she shattered under my pressure already?

  Why did I think pushing her to remember was a good fucking idea?

  I slip in through the back door and down to the basement. It was converted into a game room for me and Jake a few years back. We secretly agreed that our parents created it because it was somewhere easy to put us when Mom had reached her limit.

  It’s changed slightly in the years that Jake and I have been out of the house, and I consider that to be a good thing. My parents aren’t holding on to the past or wishing their sons would return to the nest. This is the sort of progress the television show therapists talk about. Moving forward, plowing ahead.

  There’s a corner with Mom’s exercise equipment, a treadmill and inflated ball, some weights, and a large mat. The TV, which we used to play videogames on, is now slightly angled toward the treadmill.

  The couch has been pushed against the wall, and a desk in the corner with a computer—and three monitors—belies Dad’s work ethic. I wonder how often they sneak down here to work, alone or together.

  I carefully set Sky on the couch, pulling the blanket from the back of it over her. She doesn’t so much as stir, so I sit back on my heels. She still has a pulse. She’s still breathing.

  But a scowl is set between her brows now.

  She’s fighting something in her head.

  “Honey?”

  I twist toward the stairs, where Mom hovers.

  “Is she okay?”

  “I…” I glance back at Sky’s face. Was she happy before I brought her here? Before her roommate went missing, and the girl before that turned up dead? “I think I broke her.”

  “Oh, darling,” Mom whispers, coming closer.

  The top of my head barely reaches her collarbone in this position, but she bends down and hugs me like she used to when I was a kid.

  A lump forms in my throat.

  I sit perfectly still, not wanting to dislodge it. But… it feels nice.

  I close my eyes.

  “I’m proud of who you’re becoming,” she says in my ear. “A fine young man. You’ll find your place in the world, and so will Skylar.”

  “Perhaps,” I mutter.

  “No, Liam, you will. Things will fall into place like they always do. So the sports didn’t work out—you’re a fighter.” She cracks a smile. “Literally and figuratively. You’ve never let go of what you wanted, so now you just need to figure out what you want. And go get it.”

  My gaze automatically flips to Sky.

  “Did you agree with her mom asking me to stay away?”

  She sighs, then goes and drags the computer chair over to us. She sits, contemplating Sky, then me. “I can’t pretend I did. I hated that decision. I hated the look on your face every time Skylar’s name was mentioned, or when you came downstairs and she was in our kitchen before school.”

  “Why didn’t you—”

  “Do something?” She smiles sadly. “Say something? Her daughter had just faced unimaginable suffering. I wasn’t going to get in the way of that healing, even if they went about it the wrong way.”

  In high school, it wasn’t just shame that kept me away from Sky. Her mother put the fear of God into me that I would be the reason for Sky’s relapse into pain. Memories. Trauma. I stayed as far away from her as I could… until I couldn’t.

  We traded barbs at the parties we both went to, I lost myself in as many girls as I could to forget about her, I thought if I hated her, it would be easier. It didn’t work. I found myself scaring away any guy who thought he might have a chance with her. The girls I had sex with ultimately didn’t mean anything. I was deemed a player, but it still didn’t stop me.

  No one but my friends recognized my path to destruction.

  I was going to run myself into the ground—but they stopped me. They helped me.

  “I’m sorry.” I don’t know who I’m apologizing to: Sky or my mother. Maybe both. “I’m sorry.”

  Mom takes my hand and kisses my knuckles. “Focus on the present. You and her are together now.”

  I tilt my head. “I can’t focus on the present, Mom. Not when Sky’s still battli
ng the past.”

  She stares at me, then nods. But she must be out of advice, because she leaves us. Climbs the stairs like it’s a mountain, wearier than I’ve ever seen her.

  What sort of demons must Mom be carrying?

  “Liam,” Sky whimpers. She reaches out blindly, her eyes squeezed tightly shut.

  I take her hand in both of mine. Like Mom just did to me, I put my lips on her knuckles and wait. If I was the sort to pray, I might consider that now.

  There are a lot of things I would do for her.

  She jackknifes upright, mouth wide open. Silent screams.

  Pain splits through my chest, cracking me wide open. I pull her into me, wrapping my arms around her.

  “Wake up, wake up,” I chant. I cup the back of her head.

  I know the moment she comes back. Her body stiffens, then relaxes. She sags against me, her fingers digging into my shirt.

  “I’m here,” I say.

  She shivers. “I’m not.”

  I lean back and touch her cheek. She’s right: she’s not here. Her eyes are glassy, her expression… wrong. Maybe she’s not awake—maybe she’s stuck somewhere between.

  “Where are you, Sky?”

  Tears fill her eyes. “In the woods. Will you come find me?”

  My heart lurches. “Yes. Always.”

  A small smile flits across her lips, and then her eyes flutter closed again. I lower her down, unwilling to release her just yet. I can’t, I won’t.

  Even when my phone chimes. Even when Dad comes downstairs and locks eyes with me.

  “You know a Detective Masters?” he asks.

  “I do.”

  He doesn’t ask me how I might be familiar with the name. He doesn’t say anything, really. He just sighs and watches. Then, finally, “He wants to talk to her.”

  “He can’t.”

  “You, then.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut. “Fine. Give me… give me a minute.”