“We don’t get to choose happy,” James says, and I know now that he isn’t lying. That he’s talking to me in a way he won’t talk to anyone else, not ever. Because James and I speak the same language. He has lived a lie with every move and every choice and even every thought and emotion for years now. “You and me. I wish we could choose happy. I wish I could let you go. But I need you. Please don’t walk away.”
I look down at my hand, remember the way it looked in Adam’s. Think about the other life I could have. Think about how I don’t feel anything now, right or wrong, right or wrong, I could go either direction and neither is right or wrong. “Bring Annie with you. Tomorrow. Underneath the arch at noon.”
I hear a soft exhalation on his end. I picture his face. I think he is relieved and a little sad at the same time. “You’re still with me. Thank you.”
“Just bring Annie.” I hang up.
Tomorrow I will be free. Really free. Forever.
FIA
Six Months Ago
IT’S BEEN ALMOST A YEAR.
I have taken laptops, sneaked into offices, cracked safes, and gotten James into places he shouldn’t have been. I have been his “date” at political functions, at luncheons with other rich worthless people,
at club after club. I have danced and sabotaged and stolen my way across Europe, and I have no idea what any of it was for. I follow instructions and turn off the part of my brain that works for myself. Off, off, off. It’s easy, really.
I am happiest and most miserable with James. Sometimes I think I love him. And sometimes I think I hate him more than anyone else in the whole entire world, because he brought me back from the darkness where I tried to end myself, but I do not know this me that has taken my place. He is kind and he is funny and he is angry and he lies with everything he is.
Nearly a year without Annie. Annie, who I was never apart from our entire lives.
She writes me, but her letters are all false cheer. In one she “decided” not to go to college because she couldn’t find a program she liked, and the Keane Foundation was “kind” enough to let her stay on. At the end of every letter she tells me she’s still planning not to plan and can’t wait not to plan with me again.
Today’s letter leaves me feeling hollow. I read it again and again, but it only makes it worse.
“Hey,” James says, leaning his head into my room. This Paris hotel is old in the way that it’s good to be old, apparently, and smells like money and dust. My bed is massive (I drown in it, and it doesn’t matter how big the bed is, my nightmares more than fill it) and four-postered and cold. I’m sitting in the middle of it, reading the words.
“I knocked,” he says. Then he walks in and sits next to me. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t remember this. At all. I don’t even know the girl she’s talking about.”
He takes the letter from my hands, reads it. It tells a story about Annie and Fia when they were little. Fia’s seventh birthday. Their parents taking them on a hike in a canyon near their home in the Colorado mountains (I remember the mountains, I do, they made me feel safe, I want the mountains back), where they had put together a treasure hunt, but their mom had unknowingly hidden half the clues in poison oak and within minutes they were all covered in bumpy itchy horrible rashes.
So they drove home, the mother crying and the dad laughing because he said it was the only thing he could do, and then the mom laughing so much she was still crying. According to Annie, Fia wasn’t sad, she was angry, so angry as she said, over and over, “I told you those bushes were wrong. I told you not to touch them. Now Annie’s hurt. I TOLD YOU.”
The letter said Fia knew even then what was wrong and right.
I am so filled with wrong I don’t remember what right is. I am not that little girl. I don’t want to be that little girl.
“You were young,” James says. “It makes sense that you wouldn’t remember it.”
“I don’t remember them. My parents, those people. When we had to move in with our aunt and she sold our house, it was like losing them all over again, and then when we came to the school and my whole brain, my whole soul, my whole everything was overwhelmed with this constant flood of wrong, how could I hold on to them? I don’t remember them. My parents are dead and I don’t remember them. And I’m trying to lose Annie, too.”
“Fia, come on, you—”
“If that story is true, then it’s my fault. If I could tell even then when something was wrong, then Annie isn’t the one who should have stopped them from getting in the car that day. I am. But I don’t remember—I don’t remember—if I could feel anything or not. Everything is my fault.”
I don’t realize I’m crying until James wipes a tear from my face. He pulls me close, my head against his chest and his heart is steady, steady, steady. He can’t lie with his heartbeat.
“It’s not your fault.”
“It is.”
“Did I ever tell you about my mom?”
“She shot herself.”