Wes and I walk up the wide steps. There’s no hotel staff outside, and I take a long, shallow breath. What if my grandfather was wrong, and it was just a Dean look-alike? What if it was him, but he’s quit since then, lost somewhere in this huge city, in this unfamiliar time?
The closer we get to the elaborately decorated double doors, the more ridiculous it seems: my great-grandfather from the forties was sent through a faulty time machine and ended up stranded in 1989, working as a doorman? I almost grab Wes’s arm, asking him to turn around, but we’ve come so far. I have to at least see what pushed my grandfather over the edge of sanity. I have to know if this person is really Dean.
We open the glass doors ourselves and enter a blue-and-gold lobby. A man is crossing the wide marble floor, coming right for us. He’s dressed in a blue uniform, with a small cap on his head. As soon as I see his face, I do grab Wes’s arm, but this time to steady myself. My grandfather wasn’t crazy. This man is Dean Bentley.
“Can I help you?” Dean asks in his familiar voice. He’s smiling broadly. He looks the same as he did in 1944, with heavy brows and military-short dark hair. “Sorry I wasn’t at my post, but let me get your luggage while you check in to the hotel.”
He gets a good look at our faces, and his smile fades. He recognizes us. “If you pardon me asking, you seem a little young to be checking in to a room by yourself. Are you staying with your parents today?”
“Dean.” I choke on the word. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m sorry?” He looks confused; his brows furrow, causing sharp lines to appear on his forehead.
“It’s me. Lydia.” I feel tears gather in my eyes and I blink as Dean’s features blur. I never thought I’d see him again. I thought I was responsible for killing him. And here he is, standing right in front of me. “I can’t believe it’s you.”
“Lydia?”
I nod, and reach out my hands. “It’s me. I came here to . . . well, it’s a long story.”
“I don’t think I follow.”
I look into his face and see that he’s still confused. Is he just surprised that I’m in this time period? Is he afraid that the Project might be watching? I glance around the room and then lean in closer to him.
“It’s me. Lydia,” I whisper. “Your great-granddaughter.”
The man looks shocked, and then begins to laugh. The sound hits me right in the chest. Dean’s voice. His laugh. I never thought I’d hear it again. It makes me think of Mary, Lucas, and the Bentleys. I miss them so much, and I’ll most likely never see any of them again.
But here’s Dean. One small piece of that life I haven’t lost.
His voice cuts through my thoughts. “Do I look old enough to have a great-granddaughter?”
He doesn’t. It’s as though no time has passed, and he was never betrayed by the very Project he helped to build. As though Dr. Faust never threw him, broken and bleeding, into the time machine. I want to fling my arms around him, but his words begin to chip away at the joy that has been bubbling inside of me.
“It’s me. Lydia.”
He shakes his head. “Sorry, I’ve never met a Lydia before.”
I look around the lobby again. Is it not safe? Are there people watching us even now? “Dean, I realize this might not be the best place to talk. We need to go somewhere private. I need to know how you survived the TM and how long you’ve been in this time period.”
His gaze becomes wary. “What’s a TM? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m sorry, but this conversation is starting to make me uncomfortable. I think you’ve confused me with someone else.”
“Lydia.” Wes is watching the people nearby. The lobby isn’t packed, but there are several guests standing next to the check-in counters, and a few of them are watching us. “We shouldn’t do this here.”
“Do you know someplace safe where we can talk?” I ask Dean, keeping my voice low.
“I don’t think that’s necessary.” His gaze shifts to somewhere over my shoulder, as though he’s looking for an escape. “If you’ll excuse me.”
He steps to the side, trying to skirt us. But I step with him. “What is going on?” I whisper. “Can you not talk here? Is it not secure?”
“I really don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m sorry.” He sounds so serious. I scan his face, trying to read behind his words.
“What’s going on?” I repeat.
He frowns. There are thick lines bracketing his mouth that I never noticed before. “I’d like to know that too.”
I stare up at him. His green eyes—so much like my own, so much like my grandfather’s—are cold, and . . . indifferent. There’s not even a hint of recognition. After Wes, I’ve become somewhat of an expert on people who hide their emotions, but this is different. He’s not hiding anything, because there’s nothing left to hide.
Unless Dean is the world’s best actor—which I know he isn’t—then he honestly has no idea who I am.
“Oh my god. You look like Dean, you sound like him, but you’re not him, are you? You don’t remember anything.”
“What?” Both Dean and Wes look confused.
I clench my fists and try one more time. “Dean Bentley. That’s your name. You’re the son of Harriet and Jacob. Married to Elizabeth. Doesn’t any of this sound familiar? Try to remember,” I plead.
His frown deepens. “I am married. But my wife’s name is Theresa. Not Elizabeth.”
“What?” I press my hand to my chest. I feel the hard metal of Wes’s watch shift under my fingertips. “You’re married to someone here? In this time period? Did they make you marry her? Did they make you forget your old life?”
He bristles. “I’ve been a happily married man for two years, and no one makes me do anything. Except maybe my wife. Now if you’ll excuse me.”
“Wait. Please. I don’t understand. How can you not remember any of it? Not the Project? Not Eliza?” I feel tears form again, and I dig my fingernails into my palms, trying to use the pain of it to distract me.
“Lydia.” Wes touches my shoulder, but I ignore him, concentrating on Dean.
“What did they do to you? Please, you have to remember.”
I don’t even notice as an older man in a plain brown suit approaches. He extends his hand toward Wes, who takes it reluctantly. “Mr. Turner, general manager of the hotel. Is there a problem here?”
“No, sir.” Dean smiles pleasantly at the older man. “These two thought I was someone else. They’ve realized their mistake, and they’re leaving now.”
Mr. Turner looks Wes and me over. “Not the first time this has happened to you, is it, Frank? You must have a twin out there.”
I wipe at the tears on my cheeks, trying to hide how upset I am. “Was someone else here looking for Dean?”
“Dean?” Mr. Turner laughs. It’s a booming sound, and more of the people in the lobby turn to stare at us. “There was an older man who came around a few months back. We had to have security throw him out. Kept coming back and just sitting across the street, accosting Frank whenever his shift was over. People like that shouldn’t be allowed to roam the streets. They’re like wild dogs.” He smiles at us. “Strange coincidence, you two showing up and asking the same questions. I don’t need to call security again, now do I?”
“No.” Wes gently takes my arm. “We’re going.”
I let Wes lead me forward. We’re almost to the door when I stop. I can’t leave it like this. I can’t.
I yank away from Wes’s hold and spin around. Dean and Mr. Turner are still standing in the middle of the lobby watching us go. “What about your son?” I yell. “What about Peter? How could you forget Peter?”
Something flickers in Dean’s long, thin face, and I freeze. He remembers. But then whatever it is disappears, and he just stares at me, as blank as an empty canvas.
“You’re mistaken,” he says calmly. “I have no son.”
Wes and I leave the hotel. The tears are streaming down my face now, but I le
t them fall, making no move to wipe them away. Wes links his arm through mine, as though he’s some old-fashioned suitor, and leads me down the street. We walk in the opposite direction of the subway, toward a narrow, steep stretch of green grass. As we get closer, I realize that it’s a park built into the side of a hill. A jogger passes us and sees my face. He averts his eyes and keeps running, head down. A city person, used to ignoring something that makes them uncomfortable.
We sit down on a bench next to a cement pathway that winds through the park. Below us, a highway runs alongside the grass. I hear cars passing, a steady rushing noise that ebbs and flows like the waves of an ocean. It reminds me of Montauk, of home, and the thought of it causes a sharp pain to settle in the center of my chest.
“It’s like he’s a different person,” I say to Wes after a minute. My voice sounds high and nasal and I sniff loudly. The tears have finally stopped, but my nose is stuffed and I have that tender, sore feeling you get after crying. “Like they erased his mind.”
Wes reaches into the pocket of his slacks and pulls out a tissue. “Here.” He hands it to me.
It’s wadded up and torn, but I take it anyway and blow my nose. “Do you think that’s even possible?”
He leans forward, his elbows resting on his spread-apart knees. The pose somehow makes his body look longer, even though he’s bent almost in half. “I think anything’s possible when it comes to the Project.”
“He has amnesia or something. Maybe from the machine. Maybe they did it to him. But I looked into his eyes, Wes. He was gone. There was an emptiness I’ve never seen before.”
Wes is silent. I feel curiously empty too, hollowed out and no longer whole. “I wonder if Dean is still in there somewhere,” I say.
“If it was because of the Project, then probably not.”
I see Wes’s shadow spread out across the pavement in front of us. The way he’s sitting makes the dark pattern on the ground look like some kind of beast with long arms and no head. Mine just looks like a girl with her head tilted down. I move a little, scooting closer to Wes. We’re not touching, but our shadows merge together in a distorted blob until we’re one giant monster.
“It would make sense for them to experiment with erasing memories,” I say, thinking out loud. “If people can’t remember something, then they can’t talk about it.”
Wes frowns. “I doubt he got amnesia from the machine. They wouldn’t have let him reenter society if that was the case. They would have just killed him.”
“Couldn’t he be lying to us about his memories? Maybe he escaped and now he’s working here, trying to hide from the Project. He could have been worried that we’d blow his cover.” I can’t keep the hope out of my voice even though I know it’s a long shot—I saw Dean standing in that lobby. He was like a marionette or something. Dead-eyed but still putting on a show. And it’s not hard to imagine who’s holding the strings.
“I don’t think so,” Wes answers. “I’ve gotten pretty good at knowing if someone’s lying. He wasn’t. Somehow he’s forgotten his entire life in nineteen forty-four.”
I grit my teeth together at the thought of what Dean probably endured. “I bet he’s their guinea pig. Erase his mind, reenter him into society, and see what happens. Do you think he’s even really married? Does his ‘wife’ know he really loves Eliza? And his son?”
Wes is silent.
“I have to get him out of there.” I push my bangs away from my forehead impatiently. “I have to rescue him from this.”
Wes still doesn’t speak, but I feel the tension coming off him. “What?” I turn on my hip until I’m facing him on the bench. “You don’t agree?”
He hesitates.
“Just spit it out, Wes.”
“I think . . . that you should be cautious. He might not want to be rescued.”
“He doesn’t know he wants to be rescued.”
“Lydia.” Wes sits back and studies me. “If we’re right, then he doesn’t remember anything. And he never will again. Those memories have been wiped clean. It’s not like they’re saved in some container or something.” He doesn’t touch my knee again, but his hand hovers over it, and I can feel the heat from his skin even through the fabric of my dress. “We can’t go barreling in there to save a man who doesn’t care if he’s saved or not. We’d be destroying whatever life he has left.”
I want to scream at him, to beat the metal bench with my fists, but I force myself to consider his words. Dean is not the person I remember. Maybe he’s even happy now, with this Theresa woman. Do I have the right to take that away from him? To uproot his new life, put him into a dangerous situation he might not survive in order to send him back to a world he doesn’t even remember? What’s the point?
I think of the last time I tried to save Dean, and what the consequences were. I changed time, and destroyed three—or more—lives in the process. I have to stop trying to play God in these situations, thinking I know more than everyone else. Thinking that my own pursuit of the truth is just as important to other people as it is to me. Dean doesn’t care about the truth. At least not anymore.
“I can’t believe this is how it ends for him. A doorman in a hotel in nineteen eighty-nine. His family never knowing what happened to him.”
Wes touches my knee lightly, just for a second. “You’ll know the truth. That’s important to you—solving the mystery, even if you don’t like what you find.”
I smile, even though I’m struggling not to cry again. “You think you know me so well, don’t you?”
He gives me a sort of smirking smile. “I think I know you a little bit.”
I close my eyes and feel the afternoon sun burn against the delicate skin of my eyelids.
For the second time in six weeks, I am forced to leave Dean to his fate.
CHAPTER 14
The sky is turning twilight gray. We’ve been sitting on this bench for hours, just listening to the cars below and watching the Hudson River, which spreads out beyond the highway—the slow-moving boats, the bridges that spark silver in the sunlight, and the green cliffs that make up the shoreline of New Jersey.
I haven’t wanted to move, because I know that the minute I do everything becomes real again and I have to accept the choice that I’ve made. Wes seems to sense this, and he sits quietly next to me. Not talking, but just . . . there.
“We should go back to the squat,” I finally say. From somewhere in the park I hear the sound of a child shrieking. I can’t tell if it’s laughter or fear. “I need to open that disk. It’s the only lead I have left for discovering why my grandfather disappears. Dean is certainly a dead end.”
Wes doesn’t say anything. He appears to be thinking about something hard, though I’m not sure what it is.
“Are you ready to go?” I ask.
“I have a better idea.” He abruptly takes my hand and pulls me up from the bench. He moves quickly down the concrete path of the park, and I struggle to keep up with him.
“Wes, what—”
Up ahead, I see a playground tucked into the trees. It has a large jungle gym, a set of rusted swings, and a fountain in the middle. Even though it’s late and the park is empty, the sprinklers are still on. The water sprays everywhere, shooting high up into the air and bouncing off of the concrete ground.
Wes tugs me forward, leading us into the gated area. “The disk!” I shout, and I have just a second to toss it onto a bench before Wes picks me up by the waist and spins us both into the falling water.
I shriek as it soaks through the fabric of my dress. It is freezing cold, but the city air is hot and stale, and so I raise my hands up high, feeling the water glide down my skin.
Wes sets me on the ground. His hair is plastered to his forehead, and I smile up at him through the drops of water that cling to my eyelashes. He smiles back and reaches for me, but I turn on my heel and run toward the jungle gym. I can hear him chasing me as I leave the fountain behind. I am almost to the tall wooden structure when he catches me,
sliding his arm around my waist again and spinning me in a circle.
We are both laughing when he finally lets go of me. I pull my dress away from my body. It is soaked through.
Wes moves to stand in front of me. “Better?” he whispers, pushing my wet, tangled hair away from my cheeks.
“Lots,” I reply. He grins at me. The energy coming from him is so strong that he seems to be vibrating with it. He flings back his hair and uses both hands to push it away from his face, and I look at him more closely. There is something . . . off about his features. His mouth is too wide; his eyes are too bright. My smile fades, but he doesn’t notice.
“Wes,” I say slowly. “Are you feeling okay?”
“I feel great. Alive.” He looks down at me. His movements are jerky, so different from his usual grace. “Want to stay here for a while?”
I push away the feeling of dread that’s growing inside of me. “Yeah. I do.” Maybe this is just Wes’s way of learning how to open himself up to another person. There’s bound to be a little awkwardness in the beginning. I’m probably worrying for nothing. But the image of his shaking against the chipped sink flashes through my head.
“Come on,” Wes says. He leads me back toward the water. It feels colder this time, on the bare skin of my arms, and I shiver under the falling stream.
When we get back to the squat, my dress is still damp, clinging to my body. I’m hoping that Nikki has something I can borrow, but we find the apartment empty and dark. I turn on one of the floor lamps, and a glow spreads through the open space.
Wes walks across the room to the window. I think about him standing in the falling water, his light-colored shirt molded to the outline of his chest.
He turns his head to catch me looking at him and we both freeze.
“We should open up that disk.” My voice is a whisper.
He nods, but his gaze drops to the pale column of my neck. To my collarbone. To his pocket watch, against my chest.
I swallow hard.
“Ahem.” The noise is quiet, but we both hear it. Wes looks up, staring at something past my head. I spin around. LJ is standing in his bedroom doorway, his face on fire.
This Strange and Familiar Place Page 13
