Memento Nora (4 page)

Therapeutic Statement
42-03282028-11
Subject:
JAMES, NORA EMILY, 15
Facility:
HAMILTON DETENTION CENTER TFC-42

That evening Dad’s car service took the girls and me to the football game and the lacrosse team party after it. I won’t bore you with party details—those are memories I want to keep, anyway—but let’s just say I doubted Micah would have fit in very well. I told myself as the service dropped me off that I wasn’t going to see him again.

And I kept thinking that all weekend.

Then Sunday evening we had a rare occurrence in our house: we all ate dinner together. We are like one of the
Behind the Gates
families, minus the gates. Everyone is successful. Busy. Off doing their own thing. Dad, aka Ethan Trevor James III, is a partner in Soft Target Security; and he runs some sort of operations center downtown for his biggest customer, TFC. I’d never been beyond the lobby because of the restrictions, but I imagined the people inside staring at banks and banks of monitors, watching every TFC in the world for break-ins or whatever. When he’s not working, which he always is, Dad likes to play golf or have drinks with his clients. They usually live in swanky compounds or high-rise security complexes.

Mom—Sidney Woolf James—who I’ve probably made sound like a shopaholic, is a real estate attorney. She used to practice some other type of law when I was little, but now she handles the legal stuff on the sale of the pricey houses and lofts that Dad’s clients live in. I think it bores her. She rarely talks about it except to mention something about the house, like it’s a Craftsman bungalow or it used to be a shoe factory back in the day. She likes places with character and history. Places that don’t all look the same, she says. Places where you can see the lives that came before you. We always go on a celebratory shopping spree after a juicy closing.

So I naturally tuned into the conversation when Mom mentioned she had a closing tomorrow afternoon for a property in Los Palamos. It’s one of those
Behind the Gates
compounds with its own schools, malls, and even police force. You never really need to leave. And you don’t have to worry about the city curfew as long as you stay in the compound.

Mom winked at me. I knew she was thinking major shopping trip. Usually that would’ve thrilled me, but this time it made me feel queasy and hot.

“I have a lot of clients at Los Palamos,” Dad said. “Great golf course. Brand-new mall. Excellent schools.”

“Zero privacy. Twenty-four/seven surveillance,” Mom answered. “And they’re using that chip that lets them know where you are all the time.” Mom obviously didn’t think this was a good thing. “You can’t turn it off.”

“Not one car bomb since it opened,” Dad said, looking at me. “Nora, you’d like to live there, wouldn’t you?”

“It does sound nice,” I answered carefully, looking from Mom to Dad. “But I’d hate to change schools right now.” It was true. I had another two months left of my sophomore year at Homeland. And there was the prom and the yearbook.

Of course, I was also thinking a move might solve a lot of problems. Micah would be zero temptation there. Maybe the bad dreams would go away. Maybe we would be safer, but I wasn’t sure I could trust Dad anymore.

“You’ll make great friends there, the right ones,” Dad said as if it were already settled. He turned back to Mom. “There’s a house coming on the market today. The guy’s getting transferred to L.A. You’ll both love it.”

“Don’t those places have waiting lists?” I asked. One of my friends had moved to a compound last year. Her folks had put their names on the list when she first started school.

“You didn’t, did you?” Mom asked, glaring at Dad. “You put us on the damn list without asking me. Knowing how I felt. When were you planning on telling me?”

“When we got to the top of the list.” Dad grinned. “Now.”

Mom didn’t say anything.

“So we’re moving?” I asked.

“Yes, Princess, on the first,” he said. That was less than a month away.

Dad described the house. Lots of space. A pool in the backyard. A panic room in the basement. My own bathroom. And maybe next year I could even have my own car, he said, only to be driven within the compound. The insurance was so much cheaper inside the gates, he explained.

He did make it sound pretty glossy. He tried to placate Mom with the promise of a double commission. She was furious, though. And something else. That measuring, all-there look in her eyes reminded me of something I hadn’t seen in a long time. It reminded me of mornings years ago when she’d get ready for court by practicing her remarks on me as I ate my Cheerios. I’d forgotten about that woman. That woman had been fierce.

“We would’ve gotten a house there years ago if it hadn’t been for your mother’s ‘past,’” he said, his grin colder and thinner.

“Ethan,” Mom said sharply. But her tone didn’t stop him.

“And then maybe Nora would never have seen what she saw, never even come close to something like that, just to go shopping.” He spat out the last word, but he looked especially pleased with himself. And with that, the other woman, that other Mom was gone.

She stared at her plate. He cut into his meat and stabbed a chunk of it into his mouth, clearly enjoying it. The red of the nearly rare meat turned my stomach. I concentrated on my peas, not sure what to make of the situation. Or my new insight into it. How did I not notice all this tension before? Maybe I did but just didn’t take it seriously. Now I could see this tug-of-war going on between them, and it was weighted against her. And the more she lost, the more he held it against her.

For a few minutes all I heard was the sound of chewing. I closed my eyes, and all I saw was red. And the word
memento
. That’s when I decided.

“Uh, I need to stay after school tomorrow to work on a project,” I said without looking up from my plate. “Art history.”

Dad said he’d send a car to pick me up. In fact, he’d send my own driver to pick me up every day until we moved, he added. Then he hurried out the door, muttering about meeting a client for drinks.

The next morning as I picked at my oatmeal, Dad sailed down the stairs. He pecked me on the cheek and slid a brand-new Nomura Pink Ice mobile, all pearly and paper-thin, across the countertop to me.

“It’s all set up for you, Princess. ID. Allowance. Schoolwork. And just press one for the car service,” he told me. He leaned over toward Mom. She turned to avoid his kiss. He grabbed her toast and headed out the door.

After breakfast I caught her dabbing makeup on her right cheekbone, and I knew where she’d be going before her closing this afternoon.

And I knew where I’d be.

Therapeutic Statement
42-03282028-11
Subject:
JAMES, NORA EMILY, 15
Facility:
HAMILTON DETENTION CENTER TFC-42

Micah sat in the same spot near the art section, hunched over his sketch pad, a stack of books blocking what he was drawing.

“I didn’t think you were coming,” he said, peeking over the books.

“Me neither.” I wondered if they were the same books that had been there Friday.

He pulled out my chair for me again and then slid his sketch pad in front of me. My story was all there. Almost. The comic was eight boxes, or what he called “panels,” stacked in tiers on a regular sheet of paper. The first panel, the biggest one, showed a body splatting to the pavement at my feet. The next showed me waking up in a sweat. The graffiti. TFC. Him with his cast. Spitting out the pill. It was all there. The fat black pen strokes pinned the action to the crisp white page. It was in black and white, no color at all, but it seemed realer, not so cartoony that way. He hadn’t put the words in yet, but the action told the story. It was odd, like seeing myself from a distance. Not a bad odd, though. It was as if I were far enough away to see the whole story and not get hung up on a scene.

“You said someone needs to remember,” he said. “I was thinking maybe we could do it with a comic book. Okay, more like a comic strip. With our stories. And maybe other kids could tell us their memories before they get erased.”

I didn’t look up at him, although I could feel how close he was and how much he wanted to do this. I stared at the section of the comic where I was in the treatment room. Micah didn’t include Mom’s memory because I hadn’t told him what it was. In the frame, I just hid the pill under my tongue. (I spit it out in the last frame.) But something wasn’t quite right.

“Do you ever dream about getting beat up or the van hitting you?” I asked him, but I was really thinking about the comic strip.

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “My dreams aren’t as bad as they used to be. Drawing helps, I think.”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

He looked confused, and I couldn’t blame him. My brain doesn’t always follow a straight line.

“What I did.” I pointed to the treatment room panel. “It doesn’t make sense—as a story—unless you know what my mother’s memory was.”

He nodded thoughtfully. Then I told him. And I told him she was probably there at the TFC now.

Micah looked like someone had punched him in the gut. It was actually kind of sweet.

“Wow.” He let out a long breath and touched my hand.

Then he ripped off a clean sheet of paper and handed me a pencil.

“You write. I’ll draw,” he said firmly.

We sat there, quiet, our heads together, our pencils moving across paper as if we were channeling something, until my mobile buzzed to tell me the car service was outside waiting for me.

“What are we going to call this?” he asked as I helped him stuff everything into his bag. He banged his bum arm against the table in the process.

I tapped his cast and turned to leave. “
Memento
, of course,” I said over my shoulder. He wasn’t the only one who could make an exit.

I didn’t have the dream that night.

Later that week, after we had a solid first draft together, it occurred to us that we might need to disguise ourselves. I didn’t want my friends or family to figure out it was me. He was sure SWAT teams and black helicopters would drag us away if we didn’t cover our tracks.

We talked about several ways to do this. He even tried making our characters into animals. I thought it would be too cutesy until he showed me this old graphic novel about the Holocaust, where the Jews were mice and the Nazis were pigs. It definitely wasn’t cute. Micah tried using sheep and wolves for our people, but he gave up on that idea because they kept coming out too Disney. So we stuck with people. He came up with different characters. We changed the names, tweaked the story lines a little. The whole protect-the-innocent thing, especially since the innocent was us.

Then we realized something else. We didn’t know how to produce or distribute
Memento
without getting caught. I didn’t think it was a big deal. Free speech and all that. We should just upload it, I told him, and send it to everyone at school.

Micah laughed so hard when I said it that Ms. Curtis suggested it was time for us to go home.

“I know just the person who can help us,” Micah whispered as he shoved his sketch pad into his bag. “Tell your car service you need to go to the downtown library tomorrow. I’ll meet you there, and we’ll go to my friend’s place together. Okay?”

“Downtown?” I dreaded the thought of going down there again.

“Don’t worry,” Micah said. “I have your back.”

And I knew he did.