Pretending to Be Erica (16 page)

“I said what?” I press.

She shakes her head. “Never mind.”

“It must’ve been important. Or funny. For you to remember it for this long.”

“We should go.” The wind teases her blonde curls. “Marie wanted us home for dinner.”

Pandas. Mr. Silverman talked about pandas in his delirium. The zoo. A memory Mrs. Silverman is reluctant to share. This has to be the code memory. What would a young girl say to her mom at a zoo after she’d spilled an ice cream? Was it something sappy?
I love you, I love Dad, I don’t want us to be apart
? It if was any of those things, she would have told me. Those were simple and easy to understand. If she’s reluctant to tell me, it’s because Erica said something deep, profound, something that had a great and terrible impact on Mrs. Silverman’s mind. We drive home in silence, but her hand shifts over and squeezes mine occasionally. She’s trying to comfort herself. To make sure I’m still here with her.

I get my phone back when we get home, my grounding up. It has one message. Taylor.

“Fakey”
—she coughs
—“sorry I missed your call. Don’t worry about it, okay? Shit happens. Shit happens to people like us a whole helluva lot.”

I laugh, and her voice stops. It comes back with an inhale.

“Just . . . promise me. Wherever you go after this, after it’s over, stay in touch, okay?”

“I will,” I say to the recording. There’s hope after all. She wants to be my friend even after I commit the crime. Even after I leave. Hope is sweet and cold and searing.

It’s not so dark in here after all.

When Millicent offers tea, I take it this time. It tastes like grass, but the heat is soothing.

“Sometimes”—I clear my throat—“I feel like I’m two people—past me and future me. I’m sure I’m not the only one to feel that way. But it’s different when people have expectations for you, you know? They expect you to be polite. They expect you to be things. I guess that’s true for everyone. I’m not anything special.”

Millicent’s eyes glitter as they always do when I say something she can dissect.

I go on. “Everyone has to figure out how to balance their opposites, you know? That’s what living among others is all about. Some people compromise a lot and can get along with lots of people. Others stay true to themselves, and they might lose some friends, but I think they’re content knowing they were honest.”

I cross my legs. “You, for example. Thirtysomething, overweight your whole life. You’ve got pretty hair, though. I bet everyone compliments you on it. You don’t have a husband. A boyfriend, though.”

Her eyelids flicker, and she writes slower.

“He’s not very honest with you. He says he likes your curves, but you think he’s lying. You know he’s lying. You’re a psychiatrist, after all.”

I wave my hands to the teas on the counter. “All these teas. You like herbal remedies. You’ve been trying them for a year now, hoping one of them’ll help you lose weight. You’re happy with your body, always have been, but he’s not, and that makes you lose confidence. Resentment festers—resentment that he’s the cause of your self-doubt. You never doubted before. You’d come to terms with yourself. But now you hate him sometimes.”

She takes my words in with a small smile, nodding. Whether it’s true, I can’t tell. But it seems close.

“The point is,” I press, “you don’t really know who you are, or what you’re capable of, until you meet the right people. The people who bring those things out in you. Some people can be go-getters, but at the end of the day we’re all reactive personalities. We just don’t know it until we meet the right catalyst. Chemistry, and all that bullshit.”

I look up at the clock, the hands moving so slowly, I can’t see the motion. What’s James doing right now? Is he thinking about me like I’m thinking about him? Is Taylor lonely? Does she, like Millicent, have resentment growing in her heart? What about Cass? Merril? Will they ever forgive me like Taylor? Or will they turn their backs when I reveal my true self?

Only the clock knows. The future knows. I breathe deep.

“Time, and all that bullshit.”

I can’t figure these numbers out.

I’ve asked Mr. Roth about portions of them, and he was eager to answer, but even with his clarifications, I feel confused. Nothing is working. It’s like the equations themselves are incomplete. Did I miss the other half of the equations on the walls? Skip over them? I stare at the Polaroids until my eyes burn in protest, scouring the pictures for more numbers that might fit.

I’m doing something wrong, and I don’t know what. I’ve tried reversing the numbers, mirroring them, making a matrix to try to break each down, but I end up with stupid decimal numbers and hexadecimals with more than two letters. I just need each of the eight equations to come to one whole number or one whole letter. Is that too much to ask?

I consider asking Sal about it in the magazine, but he wouldn’t know. He wasn’t the one who taught me—he got a brilliant dropout from MIT who’d turned to the seedy underbelly of Vegas to make it at the slots. Sal never graduated from high school, but he always wanted more for me. Wanted better for me, like a real parent.

He just wanted me to be the best to get this painting, is all.

I write the eight equations on a piece of paper and snap a picture on my phone. Send it in a text to the one number I’m afraid of, along with the message

I wait. He’s mad. Of course he’s mad. I act like an idiot on our date and then text him expecting help? The glimmer of the touch screen lights my face as I bury it in the pillow. Bury the expectation, the longing, the anger at myself. How dare I text him. How dare I even talk to him.

How dare I expect something normal.

His reply comes at eleven:

I feel like I’m swallowing my heart.

His reply is almost instant:

Oh my God
. I throw the blankets off and grab my notebook, scribbling by the dim light of my phone. He’s right. Why didn’t I think of that? Instead of eight equations, I’ve got four long ones, and they fit perfectly into each other. Now they make a little more sense. I still need to painstakingly solve all of them, apply the hexadecimal conversion where necessary, and then correlate them with each other, but for now it’s a step in any direction. And I’m grateful.

My text is probably too enthusiastic. I hover over the exclamation mark. I should delete it. I should play it cool. But I can’t. I’m happy—too happy. More happy that he texted me back than the fact the code is in my grasp.

Get ahold of your priorities, sweets.

I keep the exclamation mark.

He texts back:

And with those words shining on the screen, I fall asleep with the phone under my pillow.

For this night, for
one
night, I’m like every other teenage girl in the world.

3c2p6pm
.

The four equations equal those digits, in that exact order.
6pm
is obviously “six o’clock,” for the time Mrs. Silverman and Erica visited the zoo.
2p
could be anything—but I’m willing to bet it meant the pair of pandas in the enclosure.
3c
was trickier, but I figured it out—“three cones,” for the ice cream Mrs. Silverman spilled and Erica ate.

But there’s still one digit missing. One last digit that relates to that memory. It’s what Mrs. Silverman was reluctant to say. It relates to something little Erica said to her. It plagues me constantly, an empty space in my brain that yearns to be filled, to be known. It’s all that’s keeping me from completing this con—this
life
. The Erica in me giggles coyly when I ask her to reveal it. She’s useless. She’s enjoying watching me struggle, squirm.

Or she just wants me to stay.

Mrs. Silverman and I visit Mr. Silverman together. The second we walk in the doors, the receptionist makes a face. She doubles around the counter and smiles.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Silverman. I’m afraid you can’t visit your husband today.”

“Why not?”

“He’s not doing so well.” The receptionist pauses, as if listening. I can hear faint shouts.

“What’s going on with him?” Mrs. Silverman strides down the hall. “Brandon? Brandon, are you all right?”

“Mrs. Silverman, please—” The receptionist dashes after us.

Nurses are gathered around a room, a male nurse trying to work the door open.

“What’s going on here?” Mrs. Silverman’s voice is shrill. One of the nurses turns to her.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Silverman. He’s having some sort of breakdown—he’s jammed a chair in front of the door. We’ve called Dr. Polteski down. He’ll be here shortly to talk him through it.”

“Brandon!” Mrs. Silverman calls. “Brandon, please. It’s me! I have Erica here. We came to visit you. Please, come out.”

“No!” Mr. Silverman’s screams resound through the door. “No, go away!”

A man in a white coat strides up. “Mrs. Silverman, please wait in reception while we clear this up—”

“No! He’s obviously having a difficult time—”

“Which will be made more difficult by the presence of so many people,” Dr. Polteski interrupts. “I want everyone to leave except Nurse Rodriguez and Nurse Gray. Now, please.”

The nurses lead us to the lobby, easing us onto the couch. Mrs. Silverman buries her face in her hands, and I wrap my arms around her shoulders.

“It’s okay.” I use a comforting voice. Dad’s every shout makes her flinch like she’s being stabbed. “He’s just having a bad day. Everybody has bad days.”

The shouts grow louder. I can hear
Erica
laced through them. The doctor comes in and motions for me.

“I think it would be best if you spoke with him.”

Mrs. Silverman gets up with me, but Dr. Polteski grunts. “Alone, Erica.”

I smile at her. “I’ll get him out. Don’t worry.”

The male nurse makes way for me at the door. I lean against it, the metal cool against my forehead.

“Dad, it’s me.”

“I don’t want to go.” He sobs.

“You don’t have to go. You can stay here as long as you need to.”

“You promised,” he slurs. “You promised, Erica.”

My fists clench. “What did I promise?”

“You said you’d come back. You said it. You said if I waited, you’d come back home to us, no matter what. Home. No matter what, you’d come home.”

There’s an immense quiet. My nails bite into my palms. The metal door is damp with something. Tears. My tears. No, not mine. Not really. Erica bites them back, gnaws on her lip, and lets the words explode from her.

“I’m sorry.”

“Home!” Mr. Silverman shouts, ragged.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Home!
Home!
”

“I can’t!”

“You promised! You promised me and your mom. You promised everyone!”

“I c-can’t.” I sink down against the door, hiding my face in the metal from the onlooking nurses. I’m dead, Dad. I’m never going to come home. But I can’t tell you that. I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen. You’re the only one I tried to tell, and you refuse to understand. To hear me. Hear me:
I’m dead.
Feel it through this door that separates us:
I’m dead.
Listen to the sobs that wrack my ribs:
I’m dead.

I’m—
She’s
dead.

The ride home is silent. The house is silent. Dinner is silent.

Only when I crawl into Mrs. Silverman’s bed does she try to hug me. Touch me. Comfort me. She let me have space for once. Instead of forcing her love, letting it overflow. Now I ask for it.

I sniff, the last tears drying on the collar of her robe. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she murmurs. “There’s nothing to be sorry for. You did your best.”

Somewhere between my cold room and this warm nest of blankets, it hit me. Violet, drowned in tears that aren’t hers, puts it together. Mr. Silverman said Erica promised to come home. He could be making it up, but the man’s ramblings are based in truth—I’d seen that much with our zoo conversation. Nonsensical at first, it made sense later. It’s worth a try.

The thing Erica said to Mrs. Silverman at the zoo disturbed her. That same thing no doubt relates to the final digit of the code. What Mr. Silverman said, that Erica told him she knew she was going away, but would come home, disturbs
Violet
. If the zoo thing happened a few days before the kidnapping, then Erica’s promise would ring eerily, and coincidentally.

Violet knows there’s no such thing as coincidence.

“When I go away, I promise I’ll come home.”

The words cut through the night air. Mrs. Silverman’s hand freezes as it pets my head.

“That’s what I said at the zoo. It scared you. I scared you, because a few weeks later, I really did go away. I don’t remember it, but Dad kept shouting that at me today.”

She exhales. “I lost you in the crowd for a moment at the zoo. Near the panda enclosure. You were hiding behind a bush, playing with ladybugs. When I found you, I lost my cool. Scared you. When you stopped crying, you said you would come home. You said even if you got lost, you’d come home.”

“And like I promised, I came back. I came home . . .” I start.

Erica hasn’t come back. The Erica that Mrs. Silverman clutches is not the real Erica. The real Erica’s promise is dead—never to be fulfilled. An empty promise. I thought Erica had no tears left, but still they spill. Who’s crying? Not Violet. Violet is somber, watching from the sidelines as Erica and her mother cling to each other in a bedroom filled with the smell of roses and sorrow.

“You’re home,” she says, and hiccups. “You’re home, and it’s all right now.”

Home.

But it’s not all right, is it? You keep crying. Something is not right. You can’t put your finger on it. The other two didn’t come this close to feeling right. Third time’s the charm. You’re telling yourself it’s PTSD, Stockholm syndrome, something, anything. She’s not damaged forever. She’s not changed; you have not missed all her formative years. They made her into someone different. Change is normal. You convince yourself change is inevitable but you still shake with this fear.

You’re so afraid, afraid that tiny wrong feeling will stay forever. You sense the suppressed Violet in me. You’ll do anything to believe I’ll get better, become more like the Erica you knew before. Love. Food. Clothes. Time. No meds yet, no doctors yet. But you’d pay for it all if it meant bringing your baby home. Your real baby.