The Forgotten Girl Read online

  “Just don’t eat it,” Dad said.

  “Is this even legal?”

  “Self-defense is one of our constitutional rights.”

  “We’re making bombs,” I said. “I’m pretty sure that’s not legal.”

  “Think of them as explosives,” Dad said. “There’s a subtle difference.”

  I’d spent most of the day with the spider, bringing him to life through archived articles and bios. As out of my element as I was, it was a relief to be doing something else—with somebody else.

  “How do you defend yourself with these anyway?” I asked. “It’s just a puff of smoke, right?”

  “It’s a lot of smoke,” Dad said. “We’re not making party snappers here, son. These are the real deal.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “They create a diversion, giving you time to arm yourself or run. They also make one hell of a bang, which sets your adversary on the back foot.”

  “Cool,” I said.

  “I threw one at a bear once.”

  I smiled, put on the B side of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s greatest hits, and glugged a little more wine into my glass. During this time—maybe three minutes—I didn’t think of the spider at all. Then “Fortunate Son” crackled from the speakers with its line “Some folks are born made to wave the flag,” and there he was, President Lang, mind-melting Congress and the nation.

  “So,” Dad said. “You’ve had a couple of days to get your head together. Are you any closer to finding what you’re looking for?”

  “I’m more informed,” I said. “I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.”

  “Information is power.”

  I shrugged; he’d paraphrased Sun Tzu. My theory—my art of war: Power is useless if you can’t do anything with it.

  My mind had been cranking, though, thinking up ways I could expose Lang as the dangerous son of a bitch I knew him to be. I wondered if I could present my notes to some visionary muckraker, who would sling enough shit at Lang to hobble any political revival. Trouble was, Lang wasn’t news, and hadn’t been since 2006. Also, the moment I mentioned telepathy or mind control, any journalist—muckraker or not—worth their salt would boot my bony ass out the door. I even entertained (it was more a guilty fantasy) the idea of hiring a hit man. Not that I knew where to find a hit man, even in Jersey. I could have asked my landlord, I suppose, who might know a man who knows a man. I didn’t think this was a job for some paisano from South Trenton, though, but rather an elite assassin with a high-tech sniper rifle, who could take out his target from a distance while factoring in wind resistance and the Coriolis effect. Moreover, my peace-loving Mom would spin in her grave if I used my inheritance to put a hit on a sixty-two-year-old man.

  I had to get real: Bringing down a future tyrant was not a job for a vegetarian street performer. What I needed was to find my girlfriend. To support and protect her. That was my part in this. For as long as Sally was safe, the spider would be defanged.

  I sighed, measuring exact amounts of silver fulminate into little piles, which wasn’t easy with trembling hands.

  “So,” Dad began, looking at me across the table. “Are you ready to tell me what’s going on?”

  I met his gaze for a second, then glanced away. Over the last couple of days—and certainly while reading about the spider—I had toyed with the idea of telling Dad everything. He would believe me. He might even take some of the weight from my shoulders. Ultimately, I decided not to; Dominic Lang was a dangerous motherfucker, and his supernatural ability made it impossible to keep anything from him. The less Dad knew, the safer he’d be.

  “It’s better you don’t know,” I said.

  “Bullshit.” Dad’s eye whirled angrily. “I don’t like being kept in the dark, Harvey. The goddamn government does enough of that. I sure as hell don’t need it in my own house.”

  “I can leave if you want,” I retorted, and now there was an edge to my voice. “I’ll go right now.”

  “I don’t want that.” Dad glugged his wine and some spilled onto his chin. “You’re my son, dammit. If you’re in trouble, I want to protect you. Can’t you understand that?”

  I could; it was exactly my reason for wanting to find Sally.

  “This isn’t your fight,” I said.

  “Yeah, it is.” Dad wiped his chin and sat back in his seat. “Anything happens to you, I bleed, too.”

  “That goes both ways.”

  He sighed, knowing he wouldn’t get me to change my mind, but not knowing how conflicted I was. My lips trembled and I pushed down a rising tide of emotion. I was grateful when the record needed changing. It gave me an opportunity to leave the table. I selected something with enough flower power to diffuse the tension. It didn’t really work.

  “You’re a hardheaded little bastard, you know that?” Dad shook his head and handled volatile materials recklessly. I kept a safe distance, fearing disaster, but curious to see how a dozen sleeping cats would react to the kitchen table suddenly exploding.

  “I’m doing what I have to do,” I said.

  “At what cost?”

  “Doing nothing will cost more.”

  “Time will tell.” He sighed again, shrugged, then refilled his glass. “Until then, I can take comfort in knowing that you’re tougher than you give yourself credit for and that whatever the hell you’re up to, you’ll do well not to underestimate yourself.”

  I wanted to hug him, and would have—explosions, be damned—had Michael Jackson not leapt onto the kitchen table and stepped dangerously close to the silver fulminate. I grabbed him quickly and hugged him instead.

  Dad nodded, acknowledging the save. Our gazes locked and I saw in his eye, beyond the frustration and fear, maybe not the smartest man or the strongest, but a good man, and one to whom I was the most important thing in life.

  “I appreciate you looking out for me,” I said.

  “I’m trying,” he said.

  * * *

  We cleared the bomb-making detritus away without incident and took our wine into the living room. Dad ditched the psychedelic rock and brought us all the way into the eighties with Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Stupidly, I looked at the cat to see what he would do.

  He slept.

  I was tired, too. It was late, almost midnight, but there was still tension between me and Dad and I wanted to fix that before hitting the hay.

  “I read some of your book,” I said hopefully. “Reptilians Among Us. It’s … interesting. In places.”

  “Yeah, well, I couldn’t get it published.” Dad flapped a hand. “I had to go the vanity route.”

  “There’s no shame in that.”

  “It took me five years to write that goddamn book,” Dad growled. “I wanted to get paid.”

  “So write another book,” I said. “Write about home defense. Or your experiences in ’Nam. Put the Stars and Stripes on the cover and call it Patriot. We’re Americans. We eat that shit up.”

  “I think I’m done with writing,” Dad said, shaking his head. “I need someone to keep me from straying. I’m nothing without my editor.”

  “You mean Mom?” I said. “Jesus, Dad, she wasn’t your editor, she was your wife.”

  “She was everything.”

  My effort at easing the tension had resulted in Dad staring glumly into his wine. It reminded me of an unfortunate truth—that Dad and I would always take one step forward, and two steps back. This visit had gone a long way toward bringing us closer, but there were still cracks.

  “I miss her,” Dad said.

  “I know.”

  Of course he missed her; Mom understood Dad in a way that no one else did or ever would. Including me. I once asked her—whiny little dick that I was—what she saw in him, why she put up with his violent war stories, his insecurities and anger. Mom patiently explained that so much of Dad’s behavior was a show, a coping mechanism, which was a good thing, because too many soldiers came back from Vietnam, from the Gulf, from Afghanistan, without one.
It allows him to be a husband and a father, she’d said. Believe me, Harvey, there are worse men out there.

  “I miss her so much.”

  The teenager in me wanted to slip out of the room. The man I had become went to his side, took his hand.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” I said. “It’s all good.”

  He nodded and a tear dripped onto his cheek, and we sat there for a moment, hand in hand, while Michael Jackson sang “Beat It,” which was kind of odd, but also kind of cool.

  “You were at her grave,” I said a moment later. “On the anniversary. I must have just missed you.”

  “I go as often as I can,” Dad said. “It may be my favorite place in the world. Does that sound weird?”

  “No,” I said, and smiled. “Those notes you leave for her … so sweet.”

  “They help me remember the little things.”

  “Memories are important,” I said, and nearly added, I know that better than anyone, but instead a long, musical yawn escaped me.

  “You’re tired,” Dad said. “Go to bed.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Bed sounds good.”

  It really did, and I should have gone. I even stood up and took a couple of drowsy steps toward the stairs. And then a question popped into my head—a lame-ass, unnecessary question—that I asked really without thinking about it, and in so doing instigated another sleepless night, yet more reading, and a chain of chaotic events.

  “So…” I looked at Dad over my shoulder. “What’s the deal with the second person?”

  “What second person?” he asked.

  “You know, the narrative you use when you write those little notes for Mom.” I struggled for a succinct way to explain it. “Using the pronoun ‘you’ instead of ‘I’ … like in a Choose Your Own Adventure.”

  “Oh, right,” Dad said. “I like that style.”

  “It’s unusual,” I said.

  “It helps me focus on the memory. Not the emotion.”

  “Right,” I said, and nodded. “That makes total sense.”

  “It should,” Dad said. “I got the idea from you.”

  “From me?”

  “From your journal.”

  “My journal?” The sleepy voice telling me to go to bed was enveloped by another voice insisting I stick around awhile. “I have a journal?”

  “The one you started after Mom died,” Dad said. He downed his wine and his single eye whirled. “You called it your Book of Moments, remember? You left it here … shit, I don’t know, three, four years ago. I didn’t think you’d mind if I read it.”

  “Four years ago…?” I stepped toward him.

  “You’d had a fight with Sally,” Dad replied. “Nothing serious, you said, but you stayed with me until the dust settled.”

  I felt my head clearing, as if a small hole had been drilled into the back of my skull and the sleepiness was flowing out like sand.

  “Do you still have it?” I asked.

  “The journal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sure,” Dad said. “It’s in the bunker.”

  I frowned, then recalled Dad packing some of his albums into a box marked BUNKER, thinking it peculiar, but being too distracted to ask him about it.

  “Okay, let’s pretend we’ve had a conversation about the bunker,” I said. “I know all about it. I’m impressed by your forward thinking and preparedness. Now I just want to take a look for myself.”

  “It’s not quite ready,” Dad said. “I’m in the process of stockpiling it. Blankets. Batteries. Canned food…”

  “Let’s go, Dad.”

  “Medical supplies. RAD monitor. Chemicals for the toilet. I packed a box of your old stuff, too, in case you wanted to join me in the apocalypse.”

  “I can think of nothing better,” I said. “Let’s go check it out.”

  “What … now?”

  I grabbed his hands and pulled him out of the chair.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Right now.”

  * * *

  He’d buried a storage container in the garden like a giant coffin, painted it inside and out with a waterproof sealant, lined it with timber and drywall. Three vents led to the surface, these concealed on the outside by rocks and bushes. The door was reinforced steel, with several narrow steps leading to it, concealed by a trapdoor that blended with the environment. It was strewn with shelving, boxes, radio equipment, bottles of water, two cots—one of them, I supposed, for me: his apocalypse amigo.

  “Still work to do,” Dad said, turning on a lamp he’d wired to three car batteries. “More supplies, for a start. And I’m going to rig the power to the house with a genny for backup. When that runs dry, we’re on to batteries and candles. Even so, I figure two of us can survive down here for at least twelve weeks. Long enough for any threat to pass.”

  “Sounds good,” I said, looking around. The walls were brilliant white in the lamp’s glare. He’d painted the floor white, too. It was like being inside a large refrigerator.

  “These things aren’t designed to be underground,” Dad said, flicking his finger at all four walls. “I’ve reinforced it to withstand the pressure. The vents are filtered, too, so we won’t die from radioactive fallout. Also, I want to finesse the trapdoor, get it to blend better so it won’t be spotted by Russian drones.”

  “Good thinking,” I said, not adding that the reinforced walls and air filtration system would do nothing to prevent us from killing each other—doubtless a more realistic threat. My attention had been diverted to a box beside one of the cots. It had my name on it.

  I’m not sure my feet touched the ground. I flew around the cot and opened the box. The first thing I saw was a photograph of Sally (I recognized her face from the employee-of-the-month photo that Jackhammer had shown me). She wore a green bandanna in her hair and looked, I thought, quite lovely. I must have thought so at the time, because I was in the picture too, smiling broadly, my arm thrown around her. Judging by the length of my dreads, I guessed the picture was about two years old.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered, studying the photo, everything from the baby-blue Schwinn leaning against the wall behind us to Sally’s faded Led Zeppelin T-shirt.

  No memories stirred.

  I continued through the box and found a photo of toothless baby me snuggled in Mom’s arms, another of Mom on her own, another of me and Dad at the shore (I’m doing bunny ears behind his head and grinning as if I’m the first person in the world to have thought of it). There were a couple of mix tapes I’d made in my teens, my high school diploma, an unfinished screenplay I’d written when I was twelve. There were also new editions of three of my favorite novels: Lord of the Flies, The Grapes of Wrath, and A Prayer for Owen Meany. It was a little frustrating that Dad hadn’t mentioned this stash while I’d been hunting for something to read, but I was more touched by the fact that he’d added them to the box—that he knew my favorites. Dude had been paying attention after all. I held up the Steinbeck and gave the old man a smile. He waved it off, curled up on the cot, and fell asleep moments later.

  It was a box of words, keepsakes, and memories—things to cherish if the missiles flew, the Martians invaded, or if President Lang ever turned himself into a flame. At the bottom was a three-hundred-page notepad with a frayed cover. It was dog-eared, distended with the ink from a thousand pens. Nearly every page was busy with writing—my writing. I had no memory of it at all.

  It was not a journal. Dad was wrong about that. There were no dates. No chronology or pattern. It was—just as I’d calligraphed on the front cover—a book of moments, written as they’d occurred to me. Some were very short. Others continued for pages.

  All were written in the second person.

  This was me putting memory before emotion, because I understood, even at sixteen, that emotions bend and flex, but memories are brittle. I turned to page one. LIVIN’ ON A PRAYER was written on the top line in tight uppercase. Beneath this, several overwrought paragraphs about how Dad got into a high-speed car chase wit
h Jon Bon Jovi after Jovi flipped him off at an all-way. I skipped a dozen or so pages and relived the moment I found a dead rattlesnake beneath the kitchen sink of my old apartment. Halfway in: the moment Eloise Dance, my ex-girlfriend, woke me up by tapping the barrel of a loaded .357 against my forehead. Your balls shrivel to the size of pinheads, I had written. This isn’t what you meant by starting the day with a bang.

  These and more. The memories either bubbled to the surface or they had never gone away, but in every case the connection was made. I was there again. This was my life. The second person added a layer of distance that I found more evocative. It was like being apprised by a wiser, more sensitive version of myself.

  Until I got to the second half. The Sally years. I read these entries from inside a void. There were no connections. No cascades. I was a stranger inside my own head.

  For the first time, I got a sense of Sally’s power.

  Terrifying.

  I cracked a bottle of water and read through the night. I learned more about Sally—about us—than I could have hoped. Small things: how we met; how often we made love; which movies made her cry.

  But also, crucially, I had a pretty good idea where she was hiding.

  Twelve

  I hit the road in Dad’s old truck, which groaned and coughed and wouldn’t go a tick over sixty. The cassette player worked, at least, so I could listen to the mix tapes I’d rescued from the bunker. I also rescued my Book of Moments and the photograph of me and Sally. My backpack was on the seat beside me, stuffed with freshly laundered clothes, and I tried not to think about what was in the glove compartment: a dozen smoke bombs nestled in an egg carton, and a loaded .38 Special.

  * * *

  Sally slides from you and lays gasping within the tangled sheets and pillows. Her hair is loose, spilling everywhere, and her rapid breathing pulls her stomach inward, deep as a cupped palm.

  “Damn you,” she says.

  You roll onto your side and look at her. Run one finger from her cheekbone to her right breast, where a small black hair, fine as an eyelash, grows just above the areola. Sometimes she plucks this hair and sometimes she leaves it. You don’t mind either way.