by Tara Brown
“Jane!”
My heart clogs my throat and my stomach is quivering and threatening to come back up. I turn, as the tears I am desperately trying to rein in slip from my eyes. “You know the funny part? I brought my cat to your house because I was admitting defeat. I was wrong to go into Rory’s mind. I was wrong not to respect you telling me it wasn’t safe. And I knew it. I knew I was wrong and I missed you, so I was coming to beg you for forgiveness. That’s why I came to the castle you call a house.” I laugh at the irony and turn and walk away.
It’s about the saddest moment in my life.
Not the death of my pretend sister. Or the painful loss of my fake parents. Not the pretend worlds I thought I lived in. Or the real minds I ran through.
No.
The saddest moment is walking away from that man. And my gun.
I catch a cab, wishing I still had a car or even my helicopter, to the military base no one knows is a base. I flash my credentials at the kiosk and am buzzed through.
A man greets me at the front door. “How can we be of service, Master Sergeant?” he asks with a salute.
I salute him back, and nod. “You have a prisoner here I wish to speak to.”
“Prisoner?” He sounds confused. If the world knew some of the worst military criminals were kept in downtown DC, they would flip out. I nod my head at the wall that I know contains an elevator into the ground where the cells and extreme military guards are.
“Rory Guthrie. I need to see him.”
His eyes widen. “We do not have—”
I sigh and pull out my phone, pressing a number in my recent calls.
“This better be good, I am a busy man for God’s sake. Spears?”
“Sorry, sir. Can you just tell the officer in charge at the DC brig that I am allowed to see Rory?”
“I can, but why the fuck do you want me to do that?” The president’s military years come back to him quickly in a decent amount of sailor talk. “Are you fucking kidding me, Spears? What is going on?”
“I need to ask him some questions for my own peace of mind. I’m sure you understand. You can record it for your records if you like. Something might come of it.”
“Fine,” he barks, and I hand the phone over to the officer in charge. He takes it hesitantly, his eyes widening and his mouth dropping. “Yes—yes, sir. Of course, sir. Yes. Thank—”
I take the phone back from the baffled man. “He hangs up on me all the time too.”
He gives me a look. “Who the hell are you?”
I shrug. “That is the question of the day.”
I turn and walk to the wall where the door is. It takes an eye scan to open it. I lean forward. I have been here before.
The light turns green and the wall slides away, sounding heavy and thick. I step into the elevator, again allowing a scan of my eyes. The man stares at me in disbelief. “Floor seven,” he says as the doors close. I press the seven and we descend into the earth. The elevator dings after a second. I step out where two men with assault rifles stare at me with their guns pointed. I lean forward and scan my eyes again before they lower their weapons. They then salute.
I nod, saluting back. “Rory Guthrie, please.”
They look puzzled, but one turns and walks to a door on the right. He scans his fingerprints and then his eyes. The door slides open, again sounding heavy. I walk to it, instantly shuddering when I see him.
Rory’s behind Plexiglas in a bright-orange jumpsuit. He lifts his face, smiling wide. “I knew you’d be back.” He looks sickly, as anyone would after weeks in a drug-induced coma. His eyes are shifty and his face is slack, as if he is drugged even now. Mind running has made a mess of us both.
I sit in the chair as the two men stand guard, listening to our conversation. The male and female prisoners in the cells are trained to the highest level; there is a reason they are kept under such strict guard. I lean back and sigh. “You set me up.”
“Aye.” He nods, sitting and leaning forward on his bed. He sighs and swallows funny, like his throat has thickened. “I did. I am sorry for that, Jane. I wish I had been there the moment ya realized ya were nothing but an urchin like me.”
“You think I care about being an urchin?” I pause and then just ask the thing I want to know. “Why do you hate me, Rory?”
“Are ya kidding me?” His dark-blue eyes are hazy. I can tell they’ve been drugging him for a while. Honestly, if I were the guards, I would drug him too. “I don’t hate ya, Jane. I love ya. I have always loved ya. I hated what they did to ya. When Angie told me what Dash had done, I was furious.”
“You tormented me.”
“Ya like it rough. I know ya do.” He laughs and taps his temple. “I’ve seen what’s in there, ya do remember that.”
“I want to know what you saw in there.”
He shrugs. “I didn’t see nothing ya don’t remember already.”
I close my eyes and sigh. “What did you see?”
“What’s it worth?”
“Nothing to me. But for you, it’s a moment to redeem yourself for the horrible things you’ve done.”
His eyes dart to the right and left. “I got nothing to feel bad about. I lived the life I was meant to with the cards I was dealt. I didn’t have it all erased like a little bitch. I suffered through. On my own. Persevered.”
His words don’t hurt me. I didn’t run from my past. It was taken from me on purpose. “I feel sorry for you, Rory. Sorry that you won’t ever love anyone and no will ever love you.”
He winks, but I can see the words have hit him. “Ya loved me for a minute, Jane.”
“I didn’t know you.”
He laughs again and I can see he’s crazy. He’s gone. I get up, but he jumps to his feet giving me a desperate look. “They made me think Dash has a nano with your old memories. He had to collect them with something, didn’t he, then? But I think he covered them up, and they still exist. Ya just need triggers to find them again.”
“If he took them, then you really didn’t see anything in my past.”
“No. I might have lied a bit on that one.” He shrugs, but I think he’s having a second of clarity. “Blank slate in yer head. But I did see him in the rehab center, rebuilding ya. Some mushy shite in there. But you bitches always fall for the mushy shite. There’s layers in yer head, Jane. They’re trying to hide something from ya.”
I lift my middle finger and then look down at it like I’m surprised it’s there. He laughs and I walk out. I will do my best to never see him again.
16. CRASH INTO ME
Mrs. Starling hands me a spade and nods her head at the flower bed. “Now we turn the soil as deep as we can.”
I dig it in and push with my foot, lifting and turning the dirt. She kneels and plants as I till and turn. It’s the best-case scenario for her, and me. I get to work out my frustrations in life and she gets to plant a flower bed without the hard part.
“I sure do miss that Dash. He was a sweet boy. You can always tell by how someone acts when they don’t know you’re looking.” She looks up at me and smiles. “Caught him talking to Binx once. He was going on about you. Told Binx he was going to work hard to deserve you.”
I snap. “He’s an ass and we’re done. You need to get past this. It’s been months. He’s over it too, I’m sure.”
She flinches, but the saucy old lady she is rebounds. “He was a nice boy, Jane, and you shouldn’t call him an ass. Whatever he did, he’s sorry. I know that. I see him all the time, walking by with that dog that’s slowly turning into a horse. He’s not over it.”
“He walks by?”
Her eyes light up. “Oh, he does. All the time. Back and forth, talking to himself, and then off he goes again. Then I see him a few days later and it’s the same thing. Twice every week for months now.”
I gulp. “Let’s just stick to t
he gardening.” It doesn’t dawn on me that she means to set me up so that he walks by as I am digging an old root from last summer.
“Dash, how are you? That dog is something,” she says. “Hello, Sirius. Such a fancy name for such a goofy dog.”
I freeze, hearing his voice. “Thanks, Mrs. Starling. He’s a good dog.” I stand and turn just as he says my name. “Hello, Jane.”
“Dash.” I lift a dirty hand. Sirius, who has indeed become a horse, jumps at me. Dash can barely contain him as he hurries over to sniff and rub against me. “Hey, boy!” I pet him, scratching his ears. I can’t fight my gaze lifting to Dash. He smiles at me, but it’s his hand I catch. He’s got a wedding ring on.
My insides ache the moment my eyes lock on the silver-looking ring. Though I’m sure it’s not silver, but instead made of some kind of titanium or platinum—another metal that is expensive and hoity-toity.
I can’t help but wonder if it’s the one that he matched to the rings he got me? The ring is on the correct finger, but then I realize it’s the wrong hand.
Oh my God.
He is wearing the ring we should have been married in.
My chest tightens and aches, but I focus on petting Sirius and brushing off the dirt I’ve wiped on him. “Can we talk?” I ask, hating that Mrs. Starling is grinning from ear to ear about it, but the ring has me thinking.
He nods, and his eyes get a bit hopeful. He holds an arm out for me. I don’t take it, but I can’t stop myself from wanting to.
Four months has killed off all the hate. My heart has spent all this whispering that what he did was for the best. He took away the things I didn’t want anyway. But the common-sense part of my brain shouts that he lied to me for years. Years more than I am allowed to remember. I am thirty-four and I have known him for seventeen years.
Walking beside him, I can’t help but still love him. I love his smell, the one I assign to all good men in my brain. They always smell like Dash. My father, kindly men, and cops I meet. It’s all the same.
The memory of him on top of me and inside me haunts me, making me crave him in the dark of night. It’s worst first thing in the morning when I swear I can feel him next to me. Sometimes my feet seek him out and I end up sleeping sideways on the bed.
It’s fairly awful.
Seeing the ring on his right hand on the wedding finger makes me sick. I don’t want to let him go and I don’t want someone else finding his feet in the night.
“How have you been?” he asks, almost like we are going to go for the weather next.
“Fine.” I don’t want to know how he’s been. I haven’t been fine.
“I’m fine also.” He laughs and looks at me. “I miss you. I miss everything about you.”
“You miss me?” I glare. I can’t even stop myself. “What exactly? All the things you put in there? I was essentially the perfect woman for a while. I was whatever you rebooted me to be.”
He looks injured and I’m angry. Maybe we haven’t changed in four months. We haven’t even traded places. He looks exhausted still, if I stare and really try to see past the golden tan he’s sporting. He’s clearly been somewhere warm. Maybe out boating a lot. I always did hate boating.
“Can we start over?”
“No.” It’s a lie, but I will not yield. “I just needed an answer from you.”
“I dropped your gun off months ago. It’s back in the closet. I left my key with Mrs. Starling.”
“You went in my house when I wasn’t there? Or was I sleeping? Did you watch me sleep?”
“No.” He steps back. “Please, stop. I’m not a freak, Jane.”
“I think you are. I think you liked that I didn’t know everything and you did.” I don’t believe my words. I just want to hurt him. And not because he hurt me, but because I am hurting and petty.
“You’re wrong!” Rage fills his eyes. “If I could have forgotten too, I would have. You don’t even know the things I have done.”
“I can imagine.”
He reaches for me, grabbing my arms, not violently, but assertively. “I didn’t have a goddamned clue what you did for the ten years we were apart! I kept track of you—as in, I knew you were in Beirut or wherever you went on mission—but I didn’t know what you were doing! I knew once upon a time you were a scared little girl who had been brutalized! Jesus! Do you want to know it all?” He runs his hands through his hair, grabbing it and tugging a bit. He leaves it sticking out all over. “Fine! Fine, goddammit. Fine! You probably were raped and then stabbed. Is that what you want to hear? Those scars on your stomach are not from a car accident. They’re from a teenaged girl being gutted like a fish to remove the baby she had been carrying.”
I gasp and he calms down a little and speaks with the deepest regret I have ever heard. “The police found you in an alley in the winter, bleeding out from head wounds and practically disemboweled. The cold saved your life—your heart slowed down, so you didn’t bleed to death. No one knows who you were but me. I happened to be working that night, an intern at the hospital. There are police reports if you don’t believe me, but it’s all about a Jane Doe. You can Google the whole story. It was in ’98 and you were found in New York. The Lower East Side. A teenaged homeless girl was attacked and her fetus cut from her. There’s a reason you hate Manhattan.”
I shake, trying to wrap my head around it all, but I can’t.
He looks distraught. “You stayed in a coma for a winter. When you were stable, they transferred you to the brain-injury facility and I went with you. I had us both put there because of the remarkable things they were doing. I thought I could help you come back.”
“No.” I twitch and tremble.
“I stayed with you until you woke up, and my face was the first thing you saw. I have always been the safe person for you. Which was why I was always the bad guy in your scenarios, as you said. I feared it was some part of you realizing who I was. Which was why I agreed to let Rory be the bad guy in that one scenario with Ashley Potter and the girls in the cells. That played rather well for him unbeknownst to me.”
He’s rambling and I’m still stuck on pregnant teenager.
“I have spent my entire adult life protecting you from this,” he continues. “When you signed up to be a mind runner, I tried to convince them not to use you, but they knew you were already susceptible to the process. And being military, you had the training to go with it. They convinced me that you would attribute most of the bad things to the minds you were in and not see them as your memories at all. And to be honest, they didn’t give a shit about you either way.”
He pauses, releasing me, though his hand still grips me. I have a terrible feeling he’s going to cry. “I won’t ever forgive myself for what I did, but I could not bear that you might wake and remember you had been pregnant. That you had been growing a life and someone took it. Or that you had had that terrible existence. Every day I walked into your room to assess you, and every day I was stunned by how perfect you were. I didn’t understand how you had come to the fate you had.”
My eyes fill with tears as I step back. Sirius whines and rubs against me. I part my lips as if to speak but I can’t. I’m in shock. Absolute shock.
I don’t have words. But I don’t need them. He steps in, wrapping himself around me completely. He holds me, shielding me from it all, and whispers, “You are not that girl. We buried that girl. We let her die and let it end for that poor, sad soul. We created your past, for you. You are strong and capable and a better person than anyone I know. You were an amazing spy and agent for the CIA and FBI. You have always been brilliant as a Master Sergeant and soldier. You are strong and capable.”
I don’t feel that way. I shove him back and turn, running away from it all. I push everything away, but he catches me, again gripping me. “Jane. What’s the difference now? Your childhood was shit either way.”
“I ha
d a baby cut from my stomach, Dash!” I snap.
“Right. You were a drug addict on the streets. High as fuck. You got pregnant, likely sold it and then backed out of the deal, so the broker took the baby and left you for dead.”
“The baby? Did anyone find the baby?”
“No. The investigators attributed it to black-market baby brokers. They believe it was either a pimp or a broker, but the baby would have been sold if it had lived.”
“Did anyone ever come for me? Try to claim me?” None of this feels real, but I fear it is the real world.
“No.”
“I’m Jane Doe? I don’t have a name?”
He steps to me, huffing his breath. “Jane, let me give you one,” he says and kisses my cheek, brushing his face against mine. I love his breath on the side of my face. “Let me make you part of my family.”
I nod. I don’t have another answer or the capability to speak. I lean into him, letting him surround me until he feels too big, like all the words he has spoken are falling in on me, smothering me. I push him back. “This isn’t true.”
“I am so sorry, but it is. I have all the proof you need. I can show you video footage of you as a pregnant junkie, Jane. I just didn’t want to. I wanted to keep you safe from this.”
He steps back in and lowers his face, pressing his lips to mine. He kisses gently.
I need it. I need to feel something other than this desperate pain.
I grab his hand and we turn back to the house. We haven’t made it far, so we just walk back. Mrs. Starling jumps up and grabs the leash from Dash’s hands. “Let me take him for a walk. He’s such a good boy.” She turns and leaves the gardening, taking the happy horse with her.
I ignore her and the dog and drag him up the stoop.
We crash into the foyer, kissing and tugging. I hear Binx running for me, but I am lost in the warmth of the kisses and clothing being pulled away. Dash slams the door and lifts me into his arms. He carries me to the bed, laying me back and tugging my dirty jeans off. He stops and kisses a scar along my thigh before moving up and kissing the scars along my belly. The ones that took something I never knew I had. Something I can’t even feel because I have not even dealt with that yet.
