“They say the polar winter drives men mad, never seeing the light,” George said. He always knew what she was thinking. He always knew her so completely. And he loved her anyway. That was why she could never leave him.
Leave him? Why would I ever have to leave him? she wondered. The truth clawed at her mind.
“Do you remember yet?” he asked as they gazed at the dawn.
“No,” she said, though she did, and she knew that he knew it. He would be brave enough to say it for both of them. She knew that just as well.
“You’re in a hospital. There was a car crash. If you can’t keep our secrets, everyone will know about us,” he said. He took her by the shoulders. “Bad things are going to happen.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you tell the doctors about me, I’ll die.”
“George!”
“I believe in you. You can get us out of this. It won’t be easy. You’ll have to be strong.”
“I’m not strong.” She covered her face to hide her tears.
“Well, you’ll have to be brave, then. You’re going to save us.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. All we have is this. And that’s what they want…they want your thoughts, your dreams, even your nightmares, even your fears. They want to change you, Sadie. And the worst part is, if they win, you won’t even remember. You won’t even know. This will feel like a sickness. You won’t remember loving me. You won’t remember why this is important.”
Sadie shuddered. A world without George was worse than anything she could imagine.
In a world without George, she was completely alone.
“I need Occlumency. Like in Harry Potter. I have to close my mind.”
“Exactly. Use everything we’ve learned, every story we’ve ever lived, to get back to me. I can’t be there to help you this time.”
“I’m afraid,” Sadie said. They stood in the aftershock of her confession for a moment, waiting for it to feel silly and melodramatic, waiting for laughter to come. It all seemed like another story. And yet it wasn’t. Not like before.
Music began to play across the museum: a waltz. George held out his hand.
She would find a way back to him. He belonged to her. She knew every stitch of every suit he’d ever worn. His monk strap boots and brogues she’d clipped from stills of James Bond. His face, thin and angular, had washed ashore from the watercolors in her copy of The Arabian Nights. And then there were those blue, blue eyes. She could never quite place them on paper or film. But he was hers. Every bit of him, hers.
No one could take that away.
She took his hand and they danced.
“Do you remember when I taught you this?” George asked. Sadie thought. She remembered him teaching her so many times, in so many guises, that she wasn’t sure which was the first. She remembered looking it up in a book she’d brought home, with little printed shoes and lines to tell her where her feet should go. She remembered swaying alone in her room with her headphones on, lost in his arms. But their stories lived outside of time, and she could learn again and again with him. Had they ever waltzed before she’d brought home that book? She couldn’t remember.
“How is it that you taught me?” Sadie asked.
“What?”
“How could you teach me if I didn’t know it already?” George’s eyes darkened, and Sadie was captured in that tumultuous blue sea. But then the waves calmed and he was an ocean of affection again.
“After all this time, how are you surprised by what little magic we have in this world?” he asked, pulling her so close she couldn’t breathe. “After all this time, how are you still surprised by the magic of us?”
* * *
The beautiful museum faded away as the music dissolved into the whir of machinery. Celestial floors became cold linoleum beneath Sadie’s feet.
“It’s time for me to go,” George said.
“I’ll look for you around every corner.”
“I won’t be there. You have to come to me.” He lifted her chin so that she had to look up at him, hypnotized and adrift. “Come find me. You’re on your own now.”
“I thought we were running away.”
“We can’t run. This isn’t real. But I am. Not in your world, but in ours. I am real. Remember that.”
“I don’t think that’s what people mean by real.”
“But it exists for us. That’s what real is. We make this place real for the two of us.”
Sadie couldn’t argue with that. She’d never felt more real than when she was with George, after all.
“Are you going back to the Star Palace?”
“No, darling.” He collapsed onto the bed and put his head in his hands. “I can only go those places with you.”
“I thought that was where you lived. That’s what you told me.” She sat next to him, one hand on his to comfort him.
“I didn’t want you to worry. But it’s different now. I thought we had more time.”
George wrapped the cage of his arms around her.
“So where do you go when you’re not with me?”
“Where does music go when you’re not playing it? Where does a thought go when you’re not thinking it? You’ve asked yourself those questions over and over because you are afraid to ask what you want to know: what happens to me when I’m not with you?”
“Are you going to tell me?” she asked as bravely as she could, but his focus had snapped to the door, with the intensity he reserved for spy operations, life-and-death situations. Lights were coming on in the hallway, one by one.
Clunk. Clunk. Clunk. The light rushed toward them.
“We’re out of time. Just promise me, Sadie, that you’ll never let me go. You’ll never let me die alone in the dark where no one can find me.”
And then he was gone.
I wake up completely confused. My parents are here. They’re here and they’ve got luggage and…Wait, where is here?
Oh, the hospital. I look around. I look at my leg. I look at my parents.
For a split second, I think I’m free, like this was all a big mistake, and my parents have come and fixed everything like parents are supposed to, and there will be no more talking to Dr. Roberts, who will be very apologetic. And she’ll take out some giant official-looking “all better” stamp and just like that I’ll be out, STAMP STAMP STAMP, over my folder, and off I’ll go, out to the car, and it’ll be like none of this ever happened.
Of course. that’s not how this works.
My parents flew in insanely early and came straight from the airport, so they actually look worse than I do. They have all their luggage with them from their trip—they were working a car show in Germany, selling the glory of classic American cars to rich German obsessives—and they are delirious from traveling and worrying about me. They left at like two the morning I crashed. They landed, got the phone call, and came back on the next flight.
And they are, needless to say, none too pleased about my accident.
My parents always kind of look like two sides of the same coin, or two halves of a whole. They both have the kind of brown hair that you know was blond when they were babies. They have brown eyes: “Mine are hazel, your dad’s are brown,” my mom always insists, but they’re the same color. Worst of all, they are for all practical purposes telepathic. And, like one of those Japanese fighting robots that is made up of smaller robots (like in one of Henry’s anime shows), they turn into an unstoppable force when they combine.
Regrettably, that unstoppable force is not seeing things my way at all.
“We’re just so glad you’re okay,” they keep saying, but I’m still half-asleep. Too asleep to even protest the grave injustice happening right before my eyes.
Not only do my parents not insist on taking me home, they actually help
wheel me down to what might have at one time been called an asylum but is now called a “psychiatry center.” There are no bars, no crazies in straitjackets, just a bunch of way too friendly nurses.
They talk a lot with Dr. Roberts out in the hall. I pretend to busy myself with my notebook so I can eavesdrop more easily.
My dad is saying, “She’s never been in trouble, exactly, it’s just…,” and “Well, it’s hard to explain. She’s always been…,” then a bunch of stuff I can’t hear. My mom: “No, she would never…” and “What are you saying?” And finally Dr. Roberts says, “I assure you, Mr. and Mrs. Black, it’s only a few days,” and that I hear completely clearly, almost like she wants me to hear her so I know I’m completely screwed.
Traitors. Traitors. Traitors.
But I start to feel ridiculous staring at those words, because of course my parents can’t just spring me from this asylum; there’s probably some law against that anyway. So I scratch it all out again. But I’m still angry and I don’t know why.
My parents finally go home to get cleaned up, and I bury my mortification in sleep.
You know when you fall back asleep and your dreams are more intense? The second time I wake up today, I am in the middle of a dream about wizards and George. Even after my eyes are open I still have one foot in slumberland. I can’t help slipping back into my dream: the smell of soot, the long empty platform…just like in Harry Potter, the best adventures start with trains.
I’ve played this scene hundreds of times: George leaning out of the compartment, his arm outstretched to me, his white gloves stained with the blood of our enemies.
“You can make it!” he shouts over the roar of the wind. My fingers brush his hand—
“Sadie. Are you listening? I asked you if someone had been in here with you.”
I feel sick as the fingers that belong to George transfigure into a blue latex glove, and my arm that has all the scratches from the crash is not outstretched toward adventure but toward a too-cheery nurse who had been talking in my general direction since she woke me up to apply Muggle medicine over all my scrapes and bruises. Madame Pomfrey she is not.
Dr. Roberts is standing in the doorway talking in my general direction as well.
“No,” I say. “I mean, my parents. This nurse.”
“Maria,” the nurse adds without a glimmer of annoyance.
“Are you sure?” Dr. Roberts asks. “I heard you talking to someone.”
This is scary. I’ve gotten so good at talking with George inside my head that I’m pretty sure no one can tell. But the little cups of painkillers are making me stupid, transparent. Careless. I am leaking secrets everywhere because of whatever I am taking to feel none of this pain. I close the door on pain and open my fantasies to everyone.
“Yeah,” I mutter. Monosyllabic communication is usually an excellent strategy for containment. Dr. Roberts keeps at me like a Bond villain.
“Is this yours, then?” Roberts asks. She picks up a red notebook that looks a lot like mine off a chair near the door.
“No,” I say, but now she has my attention. “Mine’s green.” She flips through it, then tucks it into her briefcase.
“Have you seen a girl with hair that’s sort of red and blue and yellow? Is she in here?” Roberts is frustrated. Maria just laughs.
“Is she dangerous?” I ask. Her face softens.
“No, not at all. Maybe she’s a bit of a trickster. And very good at hiding.”
Roberts sizes me up in that clinical way doctors love to pretend makes them smarter than other people. Like they’ve got a monopoly on observation.
“Sadie, you’re very safe here,” she assures me.
“We haven’t seen her,” Maria says, and Roberts turns to leave.
“What’s her name?” I call out after her. She turns around, one eyebrow elevated by my sudden interest. She weighs her options and replies:
“She calls herself Eleanor.”
* * *
I admit, everything I know about psychiatry is from movies and books and Wikipedia, but I have been pleasantly surprised by the accuracy of my research. It just shows: knowledge is power.
When the appointed hour for cross-examination arrives, Dr. Roberts settles herself into the plastic chair by my door. She likes to sit far away and very still, and I can draw a frame around her and evaluate her all at once.
She waits a long time to say anything, but I certainly am not going to talk first.
Finally, she speaks: “Sadie, I want to continue our conversation from last time. Do you remember what we were talking about?”
“George,” I grumble.
Then she gives me one of her long wait-you-out pauses. Beware of silence. It pulls out all your secrets.
While we are waiting, I take some mental notes on her, which I will record later because obviously even though she writes her notes about me right in front of me, I can’t exactly do the same.
Dr. Roberts is incredibly pretty. She’s black, with straight hair that goes to her shoulders and really big brown eyes. She wears high heels and has a perfect manicure every single day, but her nails are short. She doesn’t sound like she’s from St. Louis. She sounds like she’s from Boston maybe. She is always scribbling and it almost looks like she’s doodling. When she is thinking hard about a problem she taps her pen on her lips, which is okay because she doesn’t wear lipstick. Her smile is crooked but genuine.
All of that is in the frame, but then there’s what’s not in the frame too. Like, you wonder: how long does that manicure take? If she’s got a Boston accent, where is her family? There’s no way she can drive in those shoes, so what shoes did she wear into the office today?
Those are the questions a detective knows to ask. Maybe they help you figure out who the killer is.
“Sadie, let’s level,” Roberts says.
I win the round of silence, but I’ve gotten so distracted that I forgot it was even a contest.
“If there’s someone out there who’s injured, I need to know about it. I’m going to have to ask your parents. Is this someone your parents would know?” she asks.
“No,” I say. This is a pin, like in chess. A loss or a loss.
“Your boyfriend, Henry—would he know who George is?” I want to die.
See, I told her about Henry in an attempt to get out of this whole George conversation, and of course it comes back to bite me. In chess it’s called an oversight. I’m terrible at chess. Henry might be the only person worse than me. Whenever George and I play, waiting up on a stakeout on one of our Moscow missions, I always lose.
Losing is the most painful part, because you have to watch it happen so slowly. You watch your pieces die on the board in slow motion, watch the death throes of your own cleverness in all its pathetic complexity. In chess you’ve usually lost the game ten moves back and didn’t see it.
Roberts vs. Black was threatening to go this way.
In my head, I recap our previous match.
She asked me straight out: “Did you try to kill yourself?”
I countered: “No, why would I kill myself what with my awesome life and awesome boyfriend named Henry who is totally real and oh also I’m a straight-A student and am in honors English and math and I am a cross-country vice captain and I am so well rounded for serious my life is great.” Breathe.
Next move, she went for check: “Did you deliberately hit that tree with your truck?”
I took flight, but I knew right then that I was just racing against checkmate: “Statistically sixteen-year-olds are terrible drivers and I was texting and driving and singing really loud and haven’t you ever done something stupid and been really embarrassed and grounded for a really long time?”
But that’s how she knows about Henry. You give a little, you get taken to the cleaners.
I try to salvage my
position: “No, Henry doesn’t know him.”
But this move is, again, beyond stupid. Him implies that there is a him to know. I truly need to get off these painkillers. But my leg hurts a lot.
“So who does know George?” she asks, having established the existence of an answer other than “No.”
“No one.”
“Sadie, we’re going to have to be a little more honest with each other—”
“Sadie, you’re awake,” my mom interrupts, shoving open the door, my dad a step behind. It wasn’t locked, of course, but I forgot entirely that it could open. We were in another world, Roberts and I. She turns, as startled as I am. She hops out of her seat.
“Mrs. Black! Mr. Black! We were just—”
“Sorry, are we interrupting?”
“Well, actually—”
“No,” I say. Roberts raises an eyebrow at me.
“We’ll continue this discussion later,” she says. And then she disappears, dissolving into nothing but the sharp click of her heels as she leaves with my unfinished story in her bag.
* * *
A shower and some breakfast have calmed my parents way down, but I know they are not happy with me. But the thing is, we don’t ever fight anymore. We just let silence and time do the work of forgetting.
My dad busies himself looking at all the TV channels, getting even more disappointed than me as he cycles through them.
“Sucks, right?” I offer.
“Seriously.” He turns it off. When I was homeschooled, my dad did most of the schooling part, because Mom was busy with car shows. He was obsessed with staying on track with all these tests, and he could be a real jerk about it because all I wanted to do was read and do literally zero math ever. But sometimes we’d be in a hotel room and Mom would be out and we’d watch hotel movie channels all day and keep it a secret.
I don’t mean to say that my parents were my only friends, exactly. I had other homeschooled friends: people I would see at these awkward game nights and book clubs and sports I had to go to so I wouldn’t turn out “under-socialized.” I had cousins, I had pen pals, I had teammates. I guess those are all friends.
The Museum of Us Page 3