I went through all the other objects from the bag, handling each one carefully, but nothing unusual happened. Finally only the box was left. I stared at it for a moment, looking for answers in Lincoln’s face, but he gazed inscrutably into the distance.
No more excuses, no more delays. I took a deep breath and seized the box in both hands. The pain drilled into me again, as though my head were splitting in half. It felt like the headache I had gotten before—turned up to eleven. I rocked backward onto the bed, still clutching the box, swamped by waves of nausea that barreled through me, one after the other. Somewhere beyond the pain, I could hear a rush of sound, words so indistinct I couldn’t make them out. At the edges of my vision, shadowy figures moved across a black and threatening landscape. I dropped the box and grabbed at my head with my hands, but the crushing ache did not fade.
What was happening to me? The fear overwhelmed even the pain, as I started to think again about all those scenarios that didn’t involve superpowers. Things like brain trauma. And cancer. And aneurysms.
I needed help. Wincing against the sudden, overwhelming brightness of the room, I staggered to the door. As I stepped out into the hallway, I saw a figure coming up the stairs. Tyler?
“No . . . I can’t . . .” I stumbled backward to escape the vision descending on me.
But this vision actually caught me before I hit the ground. It had strong arms and big chunky eyeglasses and smelled so good I wanted to cry.
“Nathan?”
I lost my balance, my eyes burning with tears of relief. Nathan dropped awkwardly to the rug with me half on his lap.
“Hey, hey, what’s wrong?” he asked, still cradling me.
“Thank god you’re real,” I whispered.
“Okay, let me get your parents. They’re right downstairs. They told me to come up.”
“No! Please. I’m fine.” I tried to untangle myself, but he tightened his arms around me, scrutinizing my face.
“You don’t look fine.”
“Get my painkillers. Please.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to get—”
I grabbed a handful of his shirt. “No. Just help me? Please?”
He searched my eyes for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “Where are your pills?”
“Bathroom.” I tried to pull myself up. “Prescription bottle.”
“Easy there. Sit a minute.” He unwound himself from my body and headed down the hall. Without his warmth, I began to shiver. He brought me the migraine meds the doctor had prescribed, along with a glass of water, and I managed to choke down two tablets.
“Do you need to lie down?”
I nodded, and he hooked an arm around my waist to help me up. We stumbled down the hall to my room, where I kicked off my shoes and collapsed onto the bed.
Nathan looked around, his eyes going to the old drafting table I used as a workspace for my art. I liked to mix media, combining paint and fabric and paper, and all those supplies lay scattered across the table: acrylics, watercolors, and oils; Mod Podge and colored tissue; tiny triangles of paper in a dozen colors that I hadn’t bothered to sweep away. I had tacked a few finished collages on a corkboard above the table, and Nathan’s eyes lingered on them. They looked so small and vulnerable up there, and I half expected him to say, “You think you’re some kind of artist? Who do you think you’re fooling, Brown Brown?”
“So.” I forced out a laugh that sounded more like a cough. “You made it. Thanks for coming by.”
“Listen,” he said, “I’m gonna go.”
“Wait.” The back of my head still ached, and Nathan looked blurry around the edges. He tugged nervously at the bottom of his shirt, a short-sleeved black button-down with white panels in the front. He looked like he’d spent the afternoon bowling—in 1964.
I knew I should let him leave before I did something embarrassing, like passing out or throwing up all over him, but I wasn’t sure I had the guts to ask him to meet with me again. And I needed to figure out if he was one of those people Detective Johnson was looking for . . . the ones who knew more about Tyler’s death than they were telling.
“My backpack,” I said. “It’s in Tyler’s room. Would you get it for me?” He returned with it in a matter of seconds. “The front pouch. Pull out what’s in there.”
Nathan reached into my bag and came out with the roll of money. He held it up and turned to me, wide-eyed. “Holy shit, Megan. What are you into?”
My snort of laughter left me gripping my forehead in pain. “It’s not mine. It’s Tyler’s.”
Nathan didn’t respond. He turned the money over and over in his hands, a deep crease between his eyebrows. Finally he looked back at me. “I don’t get it. What was he . . .” Sadness flickered across his face, and he blew out a deep breath to steady himself.
My heart lurched toward him in that moment, and the rest of me wanted to follow. I didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved that he had no idea where the money had come from.
He held up the roll. “That detective said drugs. Heroin. You think this is related?”
“I don’t know.”
“’Cause this doesn’t look like buying. This looks like dealing.” He sat down on the edge of my bed.
“I know.” I stared at his hand, which rested a few inches from mine. My vision clouded over again, and I could feel myself getting woozy. I wasn’t sure if it was the migraine meds or some kind of aftereffect from the pain, but I was going to pass out, and soon. Even if Nathan couldn’t explain the money, I still wanted some answers.
“How did you meet my brother?”
Nathan glanced back over at my artwork. “Oh, you know, the usual places.”
“Was it at a party? A party in DC?”
His eyes were back on me in a second, and I felt like he was sizing me up. “I should go.”
I grabbed his hand as he stood to leave. “Are you a liar?” I asked.
He froze, his hand still in mine, and he didn’t answer.
“Because you don’t seem like a liar. You seem like someone who cared about my brother. But then, I’ve been known to have really bad judgment.”
After a moment, Nathan let go of my hand and sat back down. “Yeah,” he said. “We met at a party.”
“Did he go to a lot of parties in DC?”
“A few.”
I tried to concentrate, but the thoughts kept slipping away from me. “Why didn’t he ever take me with him?”
Nathan shook his head, rubbing his hands on his thighs. “It’s a long story.”
I let my head fall back onto the pillow. “I’m not going anywhere.” But the dizziness was getting worse. My stomach turned, and I could barely keep my eyes open.
“DC has a curfew. If you’re under seventeen, you can’t be out after eleven. So a lot of the parties are underground.”
“Like in someone’s basement?”
Nathan snorted. “Not literally underground. They throw them in businesses after hours, or in closed-up buildings.”
I fought to keep talking. “So Tyler was sneaking out and driving across state lines to break the law and dance in a boarded-up building?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
I gave in to the vertigo and let my eyes drift shut. “I’m listening. Keep talking.”
Nathan took my hand in his. His thumb drifted across my knuckles, warm and comforting. And that was the last thing I remembered.
CHAPTER 5
I WOKE WITH A START, DISORIENTED, IN PITCH-DARKNESS. Through bleary eyes, I checked the clock on my nightstand. It was four a.m. Nathan was gone.
My headache had faded, but I still wore my clothes from the day before, and by the time I had peeled off my stiff, wrinkled jeans, I was wide-awake. I pulled on a robe and padded out into the hallway. My parents’ door was ajar, and I could hear the muffled sounds of late-night talk radio.
My father had always been very opposed to watching television or even reading in bed. He had a firm policy about such things:
“No shortcuts, no crutches.” Relying on coffee to wake you up in the morning or music to put you to sleep at night—those were lazy habits, he always said. And lazy habits made lazy minds.
But that was before.
Now we needed all the help we could get. Anything to ease us through the days, to shorten the endless hours. As I got closer to their door, I could hear someone crying inside their room, so softly that I couldn’t even tell which one of them it was. I leaned my back against the wall and slid down to sit on the carpet. Were they huddled together in there, comforting each other? Or was one of them crying into a pillow so the other one wouldn’t hear?
I hugged my legs tightly to my chest and tucked my face into my knees. I knew I shouldn’t keep listening, but somehow the sound kept me company, made me feel less alone. Sorrow tugged on me again, calling me down to where everything was cold and dark. I was drowning, and I dug my fingernails into the skin of my legs, trying to give myself something to hold on to. My body felt thick with exhaustion. Moving seemed impossible, but staying still was unbearable. I forced myself to my feet and back to my room, where I sat on the floor, my back leaning against the bed.
When I closed my eyes, I could see Abraham Lincoln’s face, just as it had looked on the lid of that wooden box. With one touch, it had knocked me flat. This made it official: what I’d experienced by Tyler’s locker was not a fluke, something brought on by grief and stress and migraine medication. I was really seeing images—and suffering pain—when I touched some of Tyler’s belongings. It had started that night when I trashed his room, when I collapsed and thought I saw him in the doorway. It had happened again in the hallway at school. But this box took things to a whole new level.
So why did Tyler have a Lincoln box? Our dad was the history buff in the family, not Tyler. But maybe he had it because he was so obsessed with that book about John Wilkes Booth.
The book.
Heart pounding, I dug around under my bed until I found it. I flipped to the back cover and studied David Brightman’s author bio. It described his education and two lofty-sounding awards, ending with the sentence: “Dr. Brightman works in the division of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.”
The Smithsonian? That was right across the river in DC. Maybe I could email the guy and see if he could tell me something about the box, something that might be important.
Maybe Tyler had even done the same.
I went online to find an email address for Dr. Brightman, but there was no sign of him on the staff page at the American History museum. If he had worked there when his book had been published, he didn’t seem to work there anymore. I tried a general search on his name, but all I got was review after review of his book, which had apparently been very popular. No sign of where he worked now or how to get in touch with him.
I rubbed at my eyes. I could feel an ominous headache starting to build again. I wasn’t going to be able to spend hours on the computer trying to track down one random guy who might have moved anywhere in the country by now. Who had the patience for that kind of research, or the ability?
And then it hit me: I knew who.
The next day, after the final bell, I headed to the parking lot to hunt down Eric Bowling’s car. Luckily for me, it was both brightly colored and junky and therefore stood out in the crowd of white BMWs and silver Mercedeses. I leaned against the hood, hoping he didn’t have some kind of club after school. But a few minutes later, I spotted him. These days, he sported a backpack on wheels, which made him look a bit like a flight attendant rushing for a plane. He wheeled his way through the narrow spaces between the cars.
I didn’t wait for him to speak. “Come have coffee with me.”
He just stared.
“Coffee,” I spoke slowly this time. “With me.” Maybe I wasn’t being clear enough. “I want to go someplace and talk. I need a favor.”
He held my gaze for a moment before he answered. “Can I go through my research binder with you on the way?”
I considered this for a moment. “No.”
“It was worth a try.” He reached into his pocket for his keys. “Whenever you’re ready.” As we got into the car, he set his backpack on the console between us. The bag was decorated with a scattering of little pink and purple jewels.
I eyed it. “Sparkly.”
He shrugged. “Katie strikes again.” His little sister had been in preschool the last time I’d seen her. “She got a Bedazzler for her birthday. Everything we own is now covered in them.” He pulled out the same three-ring binder I’d seen earlier and set it on top of the backpack, patting it with a smile. “In case you change your mind.” He started the car. “Where to?”
“Cemetery Starbucks?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The Cemetery Starbucks had earned its name from the little green hill in the parking lot with two faded tombstones on it. The spot had once been a family graveyard, but as the years passed, a strip mall had sprung up around it. The family wouldn’t sell the land, so Armistead Thompson and Amana Abigail Tobin—and the others whose stones had been lost or stolen long ago—shared their final resting place with three banks, two nail salons, and Lo’s Szechuan. And a Starbucks, of course.
Coffee cups in hand, Eric and I dropped our bags under a tree and walked over to the gravestones. It had never seemed like a strange place to hang out, just kitschy, a little piece of Old Virginia peeking through the new. But now, as I read the familiar inscriptions, I didn’t think about the dead but the people they had left behind.
Amana had died in 1904, when she was twenty-eight. Her stone held her name, her dates of birth and death, and a single line: The lost in sight are to memory dear. Armistead’s life had been more colorful. According to his tombstone, he had fought for the South during the Civil War, was captured at Gettysburg, and died at twenty-seven, after spending more than a year in a Union prison camp. His marker also featured a poem, which began:
Mouldering though thy body be
Yet in our dreams thy form we see.
A chill shot through me. Thy form we see.
You, too? I thought.
These stones didn’t commemorate long lives and easy good-byes. They held the grief-stricken cries of parents who longed to see their children one last time. I made my way gingerly over the grass, conscious of what lay beneath, and joined Eric, who was sitting on his research binder.
He finally asked the question I’d been waiting for. “I’m guessing this is about your brother?”
My breath hitched in my chest, and I nodded.
“I won’t say I know how you feel, but I do know this: it sucks.”
I cracked a tiny smile. As far as I was concerned, “it sucks” beat “I’m sorry” any day.
Eric took a sip of coffee before he spoke again. “I keep thinking about that time when you and I were in the sixth grade, and we were all hanging out at the club pool, and Tyler snuck into the room with the audio equipment. Do you remember?”
I shook my head.
“Come on, you have to remember. He figured out how to work the PA system, and he made it blast that old Pink song?”
The memory popped into my mind, as whole and complete as if it had happened yesterday, and I had to smile. “Oh, god. ‘Get the Party Started.’”
“And then while everyone at the pool was standing around confused, he strutted on out, climbed up the high dive, and did that awesome flip. I thought he was the coolest person ever.” Eric grinned. “But you know what I remember most? After pulling that killer stunt, he spent the rest of the day hanging out with us.”
The ache in my chest was bittersweet. Nothing will ever be that fun again, I thought. It felt incredibly selfish and petty to be sad about that, about all the fun we wouldn’t have together, but there it was.
Eric shook his head. “That’s why, when I hear the things people are saying about him—”
“What are people saying?”
Judging by the look on Eric
’s face, my tone had been harsher than I intended. He paused. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have . . . Are you sure you want me to tell you?”
I nodded.
Eric shifted on his binder. “A few people told me he got killed when a building collapsed on him. A guy in my world history class said he knew for absolute certain that Tyler was shot. I think most people are waiting for someone official to say what happened one way or the other.”
I let out the breath I’d been holding. “Aren’t you going to ask me what happened?”
“What? No, I would never presume to—”
“He overdosed. On heroin.”
Eric’s whole body froze. “No way. How is that possible?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“Whoa,” he said. “So what do you need from me?”
“I need to find this guy.” I pulled out Dr. Brightman’s book and showed Eric the bio on the back cover. “It says here he works at the Smithsonian, but I don’t think that’s true. Or at least, I couldn’t find any record of him.”
“Okay,” Eric said. “I’m sure I can do that. Do you mind if I ask why?”
I flipped through the pages, showing Eric the writing inside. “Tyler was really into his book for some reason. Plus, there was a box—a wooden box with Abraham Lincoln’s picture on it—in the bag of things the police gave us. The things that were with Tyler when he . . .” I trailed off. “I want to find out whether it’s important. And whether it’s got anything to do with what happened to him.”
My phone beeped, and I fished it out of my bag. Eric craned his neck to see the screen. “Who’s Nathan Lee?”
“A friend of my brother’s. From DC.” I shielded the phone from Eric so he couldn’t see Nathan’s text.
Hey. How are you? Better I hope.
As I was reading, a second text came in.
Didn’t get a chance to tell you, but your art is rockin it.
I smiled. I may even have blushed.
“A friend of Tyler’s who makes you smile,” Eric said. “I like him already.”
The Hidden Memory of Objects Page 6
