by Amber Stuart
Christ, what was happening? The room was spinning, my stomach was rolling again. I knew these sensations. Because I couldn’t cry.
“Lottie,” I whispered, but what could I tell her?
I loved Lottie. More than anything. More than everything. She would always be my life. My world. I had died without her. I had descended into this afterlife that was so often more painful and agonizing than any Hell conjured up by theologians. I could teach them a thing or two about deprivation and misery. She wasn’t the same, but she was so close. And she made me feel again; I was even happy again at times, so surely that counted for something?
But that’s not what worried her now; that’s not why her heart was breaking as I sat in that dark hotel room in Baton Rouge, exhausted but sick, Lottie’s cries on the other end digging into my chest, blades of thin, hot metal that seared deep into my heart. Kyrieana knew that I could never love her. And she was in love with me.
“It’s ok, Dietrich,” she whispered between her hiccups and sobs. “I always knew you could never love me. But I couldn’t help it. We’re just… she’s me and I’m her, and she loved you so much, and I’ll always love you too.”
And just like that – she disconnected.
I looked numbly at the phone in my hand for a few seconds, willing it to make sense of this vortex of emotional mania that my life had become. My stomach rolled again, and I rushed to the bathroom to throw up.
Chapter 8
Jackson had brought a surprise with him. A younger man, one Lottie and Lydia had never met either because he was introduced to all of us as David. While we all sat around the living area with Jackson, David kept his distance, sitting at the table where Lottie and I had finished off most of a bottle of pinot noir… only four nights ago? It seemed like I had been here for weeks.
David must have been about Eric’s age – early thirties – and had the look of someone who spent a lot of time in the gym working on bodybuilding and strength training. Was he Jackson’s bodyguard? Even Lottie didn’t know exactly what Eric or I did, and Lydia certainly wouldn’t have known. So why was he here? What was Jackson worried about?
I immediately didn’t like either man, and when I looked over at Eric, who had sat on the floor in front of the TV, I noticed he didn’t seem comfortable with their sudden presence in Baton Rouge either. I also noticed Lydia had chosen to sit on the floor next to him. A little too closely.
Jackson was eager to start questioning Lottie, and started with her earliest memories from when she had awakened in that bedroom in Waco. He was a tall, thin man, probably in his mid-fifties, with thinning hair and gray sideburns. Every now and then, he would pause, look thoughtfully between Lottie and me, recross his legs or adjust his black rimmed glasses, then ask another question.
He had started with simple facts, asking her if she had known English when she woke up, for example, and Lottie had said yes. She had pretended not to because she knew she shouldn’t know how and it had scared her. He asked her about her memories growing up – or Lottie’s memories growing up – and she confirmed she’d had them all with her from the beginning.
“And him?” he asked. He had just recrossed his legs again and had cocked his head toward me like he was examining one of his patients.
“Yes, I remembered him,” Lottie said softly, looking down now at her fingernails, pushing at a cuticle that was creeping up toward the Persian green color she had recently chosen.
“But was it just a memory,” he asked, more as a confirmation than an actual question.
“Well, not exactly.” Lottie was still picking at that cuticle. I was starting to worry it may never grow back if she didn’t leave it alone.
But Jackson was getting impatient. “Lottie, look at me. What do you mean ‘not exactly.’”
I didn’t like the tone of his voice.
Lottie complied and looked up at him. Her hands were trembling, and she was chewing on her lower lip again. If he spoke to her like that again, I was going to throw him out. Maybe even over the railing and off the walkway. It probably wouldn’t kill him. Unfortunately.
I put my hand over hers and she quickly wrapped her fingers around mine. “I mean I remembered things, but I felt them, too. Like I was actually Charlotte Theriot. But I still remembered my life and felt my emotions as well, so when I woke up, I was scared and alone but excited because it had worked and we were here and alive but then it all hit me – this life I would never get to have, this man who would never be my husband, and oh, God, I loved him so much, it hurt so badly to think about never seeing him again or hearing his voice and I missed him so much that I wanted to die. I just lay there both ecstatic to be alive and praying for death.”
Oh, Lottie. I would die a hundred times over for you. If there is a God, please don’t let anything like that ever happen to her again. Please.
Jackson adjusted his glasses, and just said, “Hm.” He studied his own nails for a minute before speaking again, while I pulled Lottie closer to me, resting her head against my shoulder, kissing the top of her head and that soft brown hair. Even now, I could smell the pears and honey.
“Ich sterben würde diese Todesfälle für du,” I whispered. Jackson glared at me, apparently not appreciating my insensitivity to his human monolingualism.
“Aren’t you at all concerned,” he asked me, “that you’re being conned?”
“What?” Lottie shot up, whatever fear Kyrieana had of this man was quickly replaced by Lottie’s indignation.
“Everything Lydia already told me, everything you’re telling me now, none of this is possible. The brain is just another organ. Once it’s dead, everything that made that person unique is gone. Irretrievable. Our own emotions, personalities, memories replace what was lost. You can’t be Charlotte Theriot because Charlotte Theriot was most certainly dead. She had been dead for nearly three days. Do you remember reviving her body?”
Lottie, pale and hopelessly confused, shook her head.
“That’s not uncommon; it is pretty traumatic,” Jackson continued, “so it’s probably for the best. Modern funeral practices are… well, they’ve made what we do a lot more difficult. Facial features are set, often with wire, to create a peaceful expression on the deceased’s face, the body is filled with embalming chemicals and the…”
“Ok, I get it, it’s not pretty,” Lottie snapped, “but we do it all the time, and the bodies start working again, so why is it so impossible to believe this body is still her? And now, me, too?”
Jackson sighed impatiently and looked over to David. Muscle-Man still hadn’t moved. He didn’t even look overly interested in our conversation.
“Fine, Lottie, I will look into this,” Jackson sighed again, a patronizing sigh that was intended to convey he was just placating her, but we should all remember that he thought Lottie was a remarkable con artist and that I was remarkably stupid.
“I am not lying.” Lottie clenched her jaw. She was furious now.
“Well,” Jackson held his hands up in a gesture of reconciliation, but I doubted its sincerity, “we will see what I can find out. I will have to talk to some experts first.”
“Why the hell didn’t they send the experts in the first place then,” I muttered.
Jackson glared at me again. Perhaps I would throw him off the roof.
“Ok, Lottie, I believe that you believe this is all happening to you. But don’t you think it’s possible that you saw this man at the funeral, at the cemetery, and just wanted Charlotte’s life? So you’ve created this,” he paused again, waving his hands around him, then toward us without ever taking his eyes off of her, “fantasy?”
Lottie shook her head, but less vigorously this time. “No,” she said, quieter, but confusion was etched in her voice now. He was getting to her. He was making her doubt herself.
“But Lottie knows things she wouldn’t know otherwise. Hell, she knows things I didn’t know,” I countered.
Jackson’s glare fell o
n me again. Maybe I would throw him off an airplane. Without a parachute. The way Lydia had talked about this doctor, she had made him seem so kind, so compassionate. Where was that man now?
“Explain,” he demanded.
I arched an eyebrow at him. Did he really think he could order me to do anything? But Eric spoke before I could respond – preferably by breaking his thin, wiry neck.
“I tried to kiss her once. A long time ago. She asked me not to tell Dietrich so I never did, and based on Dietrich’s reaction when I had Lottie tell him what happened, she had never told him before either. Only Lottie could have known all of that. And that was definitely Lottie there. Telling that story, I mean. It was just like Lottie was still alive.”
Jackson never looked away from me. “I see. Well, I’ll make sure all of this gets relayed.”
He stood up. For the first time since coming in the apartment, David finally moved. He stood up as well and walked to the door, his hand on the doorknob, waiting.
“We’ll be in touch, Lottie. I’ll give you a call when I know something. Lydia, it was so nice seeing you again,” his smile turned genuine, more affectionate and fatherly. Christ, I hated this guy.
“Nice meeting you, David,” I piped in, partly just to be an asshole and partly because I just wanted to see what he’d do.
David nodded at me and mumbled something that sounded like, “You too,” but I think he meant it as much as I had. We watched them leave and I waited until I could no longer hear their footsteps outside on the walkway before turning to Eric and slipping into Russian.
“Follow them.” Eric just nodded in agreement and offered a quick excuse for leaving; I handed him my keys as he tried to convince Lydia, again, that he really had to leave.
Lottie was silent, still sitting on the sofa, watching Eric and me with an intense curiosity mingled with apprehension and fear. Nothing this morning had gone the way she had expected; her former – or current? – boyfriend speaking a language she didn’t recognize, Eric’s sudden departure, why should any of this play out any better?
Lydia was unfazed though, cheerful as ever and even comfortable around me. Perhaps, somehow, I had slain the Jabberwocky. She chatted happily as she picked up water glasses, wiping away the wet circles they had left behind, then, perhaps sensing Lottie and I didn’t share her enthusiasm, she announced she really should start getting ready for work. Her shift didn’t start for another two hours.
As soon as Lydia’s bedroom door closed, Lottie turned to me. “What was that all about?”
I assumed she meant with Eric, but I had no intention of telling her what that was all about. So I played dumb.
“I don’t have a clue. That guy’s a real prick, though.”
“Dietrich,” she sighed, rolling her eyes at the same time in that how-can-anyone-try-my-patience-and-still-be-loved-as-much-as-you way of hers.
“Hey, don’t blame me. He’s one of yours.”
“What did you tell Eric?”
“When?” I was being obnoxious. If she kicked me out, I was going to have to walk back to the hotel.
Lottie played absentmindedly with her fingers, and I watched them gliding over each other: thin, delicate, soft. I could so vividly remember the way those fingers felt on me, the way they stroked my face or curled through my hair or clenched into my back as we were making love, how they traced lightly across my arm as she lay nestled against me on the sofa watching television. Those fingers were the only woman’s fingers that had ever touched me. I had never even kissed a girl before Lottie.
We were both virgins when we met, but she was far less naïve than me, and I knew that, which made me even more self-conscious with every touch, every kiss, so that I often found myself in the unusual position of being the one to pull away, to step back from the threshold of exploration. By then, Lottie knew about my past, she knew the demons that had followed me across the Atlantic, and she would sit back from me on my bed in my dorm room, giving me my space to feel so completely mixed up, impossibly horny and eager but uncertain and awkward. God, I had loved her so much even then.
I think I had loved her since the night I met her at that party I most certainly did not want to be at, but had somehow gotten talked into by my roommate, mostly because he had needed a designated driver, and I had finally conceded because even though I didn’t particularly like him, I didn’t want him dead. I spotted her immediately, my entire body suddenly burning with a fire that was so intense, so physical, so real, that I was glad the lights were subdued. I was positive that I was blushing. Fucking German complexion.
She was talking to someone, a friend, a girl who blended into the other faces and bodies packed into the small room, and she caught me staring at her. I should have looked away – Jesus, I must have seemed like such a pervert – but I couldn’t. I probably just blushed a deeper shade of crimson and she smiled at me but never stopped her conversation with her friend.
She laughed. That little bell laugh – hadn’t Edgar Allen Poe coined a term for that sound? Tintinnabulation? Such an ugly word for something so beautiful – and I smiled. She peeked over at me again, saw that I was still watching her and was smiling now, and I thought, “Dietrich, for God’s sake, look away, get out of here, fake a seizure, just do something!” But I couldn’t. I was transfixed, and I didn’t know what I could do anyway; I hadn’t been raised with the social skills to navigate normal interpersonal exchanges, let alone this, whatever this was.
I was saved though. Lottie leaned over to her friend, whispered something in her ear, then crossed the room to me. Lottie had come to me. She saved me that night: from that horribly embarrassing moment, from being stuck at a party I hadn’t wanted to go to, from a life of being alone, unloved and not loving, from a life not being lived.
I reached out now and took her left hand, turning it over so that I could trace the Bermuda triangle across the back of her hand. I heard her swallow as she watched my face, those goosebumps breaking out across her arms even though it was warm in her apartment.
“Where’s your ring?” I asked, lifting her fingers so they extended, so slender, so elegant in the way they could move while she was cooking or reading or building sandcastles on the beach; how could anyone look so fragile and yet be so strong?
“It’s here. I still have it,” she whispered, and I lifted my eyes to meet hers.
There were a thousand words that passed between us in that look: this longing and desire, the aching pain of permanent loss, the pervasive sense of otherness that kept this physical distance between us.
“Do you really not hate me, Dietrich, not even a little?” she asked, her voice still barely above a whisper.
“No,” I didn’t need to think about it. “I hate what’s happened to you, but I could never hate you.”
“Is there much of a difference?” she teased, throwing my exact words from a few days ago back at me.
“Yes,” I answered, “a huge difference.” And I kissed her.
Her lips, Lottie’s lips, were surprised and she gasped as my mouth gently pushed hers open, my tongue probing for hers, but then she was kissing me, too, her hand reaching around the back of my neck to pull me closer to her, so close, the scent of pears and honey strong and sweet, intoxicating. I wrapped a hand around the back of her head, tangling my fingers in that long, wavy hair that stubbornly refused to ever stay neatly in a bun or ponytail, and as my other hand lightly grazed the skin of her back under the hem of her shirt, she shivered: pleasure, nervousness, excitement, hesitancy.
Her other hand had found the edge of my shirt and pushed it up, slipping underneath, her fingers teasing the small of my back, and I responded, pushing her shirt higher so I could access more of her skin as that kiss, oh God, how I missed kissing her, spoke of the lust we’d both been containing. Her hand slipped, hesitated, and she faltered with recognition.
This was Lottie and not-Lottie, after all, and she finally broke the kiss, panting, breathless, still
holding onto me tightly but no longer sure of herself.
“Dietrich,” she exhaled, “I’ve never…”
She stopped, closed her mouth tightly and chewed on her lower lip again. Part of her knew how it must sound, especially to me, this almost-declaration that human intimacy was something completely foreign to her, because she also knew how familiar it was, how familiar I was. Those dual lives, always competing, always bewildering to her.
I stroked the side of her face and smiled at her. “It’s all right, Lottie,” I assured her. “I understand.”
That wasn’t entirely true. How could anyone possibly understand? But I wanted to, and more importantly, I wanted her to be happy, to feel safe and loved and at peace again. She was going to protest; Lottie – and even Kyrieana – would tell me how unfair this was to me, which I was ready to argue about, but the sound of footsteps outside on the walkway forced us to pull away from each other, snapping us out of whatever memories and sexual tension we had fallen into. Eric had returned.
I got up to let him in, immediately falling back into Russian as soon as he stepped inside.
“They’re at the Holiday Inn on Siegen,” Eric told me, also in Russian, “we need them out of the room though. We both need to get out there, wait for them to go somewhere. They’ll have to leave for lunch.”
I nodded in agreement.
“Did you request a track on their cell phones?” I asked.
“Yeah, but I don’t know. Do you think this ‘expert’ can be reached on a cell phone?”
“No,” I agreed, “but we can’t trace those kinds of calls. We’re kind of limited by our shitty human technology.”
Lydia had come out of her bedroom, her sandy blonde hair swept up into a neat French twist, and her face lit up when she saw Eric had returned. My life had turned into a fucking sci-fi soap opera.
“Eric!” she beamed. Even Lottie noticed the difference in her friend this time.
