Escape From Memory Read online

  And I suddenly wasn’t sure I wanted Lynne to know the latest developments. Mom was weird, all right, but it was the kind of weird you could live with and not have to pay too much attention to. Ever since I’d been hypnotized, the weirdness had spread. Lynne was beginning to treat me like a particularly perplexing math problem, not a friend. I wasn’t going to encourage that.

  I did the rest of my homework with unusual attention to detail. I even did an English assignment that wasn’t due until Friday. When I finished, it was practically six o’clock, and Mom still wasn’t home.

  I stood up, stretched, walked around the table. I really wished we had a TV. All my friends always had something to do, a way to kill time whenever they wanted. Turn on the tube, flip through all the channels a time or two, and, zap, there went that half hour you didn’t know what to do with. There went those thoughts you didn’t want to think, replaced by clever talking frogs, housewives delighted with their clean laundry, rock stars revealing their love lives, Oprah frowning empathetically over some sad tale.

  I picked up a book—Mom’s favored replacement for TV—but I couldn’t concentrate. I considered fixing dinner, because I was getting hungry. But I didn’t want Mom to think I was rewarding her for being away. No, let her fix dinner, for her and me both, as soon as she got back. Let her pay for scaring me.

  Just to do something, I settled for vacuuming, because I was getting sick of stepping on crumbs every time I walked around the table. I hauled out the sweeper and swiped it across the floor under and around the table. Bored, I pressed on, over by the wall, over toward the door. Something jammed in the bottom and rattled, vibrating against all that suction. Irritated, I kept going, but the rattling continued.

  “Okay, okay,” I muttered, and switched off the vacuum.

  It was a small scrap of paper stuck against the turning belt. I yanked it out. I don’t know what made me bother looking at it. But once I looked, I stared.

  On the paper, in such a messy scrawl that I barely recognized it as Mom’s writing, were the words, Take the car. Go to Lynne’s.

  Eight

  I DIDN’T DO IT. I DISOBEYED.

  I mean, really. I’m only fifteen. I don’t have a license. I’m not sure I’ve ever even touched a steering wheel. And Lynne lives way over on the other side of town, practically out in the country.

  Besides, after a decade, who’s to say the car would even start?

  I could have called Lynne and asked her parents to pick me up. They would have come immediately.

  But this was too weird. If Mom wanted me to go to Lynne’s, why hadn’t she told me in person? Why hadn’t she left a clear note where I was sure to see it? Why hadn’t she told me she was taking a leave of absence from work? Why hadn’t she explained my memory to me? Why wasn’t she here?

  I brooded. At seven o’clock I finally got up and made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, because I was going light-headed with hunger. (I wanted to blame hunger.)

  By seven thirty I was staring out the window at the dusk … and then the darkness. My brain didn’t seem to be working very well. I’d think, I should call someone, but I wouldn’t move. It was too hard figuring out whom to call, what to say. I was fifteen, not some little kid. I didn’t need my mother waiting for me every day after school. Let’s say I called the cops and reported my mom as a missing person. They’d laugh me off the phone. She’s only been gone a couple hours? they’d say. And you’re worried? Are you sure she didn’t tell you she was going someplace, and you just weren’t paying attention? (Had she told me she was going someplace, and I just hadn’t paid attention?)

  My mother never went anywhere.

  My mother also never took leaves of absence from work. She barely even took vacations.

  Something was really, really wrong. And I couldn’t begin to figure out what, based on the scanty clues I had: the note, the key, the overturned chair. (Had it been overturned before I walked in?)

  The phone rang, and I jumped three inches, panic coursing throughout my body. I grabbed the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, Kira. Are the science fair entry forms due this Friday or next Friday?”

  It was Lynne.

  “Um, I don’t know. I left that folder at school,” I managed to say.

  “You okay?” Lynne asked. “You sound kind of strange.”

  That was my opening, my chance. I could spill all to Lynne, and she—or her parents—could reassure me, comfort me. Find my mom.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  Suddenly I remembered reading about how little kids trapped in house fires tend to do everything wrong: Rather than rushing to a door or a window, their natural instincts tell them to hide in the closet or under the bed. Hide where you can’t see the fire, and maybe it won’t be there.

  I was doing the same thing. As long as I didn’t tell Lynne that something was really, really wrong, it was all in my head. Paranoia.

  “… get my dad to drive me over to the library, then,” Lynne was saying. “Want to meet me there?”

  “Huh?” I struggled to make sense of Lynne’s words. It was like my brain wasn’t capable of understanding. “No, thanks. Not tonight,” I finally said.

  I hung up the phone and just stood there staring at it for a long time. When I turned around, a strange woman was standing in the doorway of the kitchen.

  “Who are you? What are you doing here? Where’s my mother?” I asked, my questions tumbling out rapid-fire. I wasn’t scared—that is, no more scared than I’d been for the past few hours.

  The woman regarded me silently for a few seconds. She chose to answer only one of my questions.

  “I,” she said, “am your Aunt Memory.”

  Nine

  THE WOMAN SPOKE THOSE WORDS—“I AM YOUR AUNT MEMORY”—the way someone might say, I am the president of the United States or I am the queen of England. She clearly expected me to understand immediately maybe even to curtsy or bow.

  When I did none of those, only stared blankly the woman gasped.

  “She didn’t explain?” the woman asked incredulously. “She never told you?”

  “Who? Told me what?” I asked. Some calm, reasonable part of my mind was thinking, Pick up the phone again and call the police! Now you have a reason! But I hesitated, studying the woman. She had dark hair, pulled back from her face. She wore a long, flowing dark coat, of some sort of wool, too heavy for April. I judged her to be in her thirties or forties. About my mom’s age, maybe older. She didn’t seem to be a threat. She wasn’t aiming a gun or a knife at me.

  She seemed more like a clue. A better one than a key or a scrap of paper.

  “You mean my mom,” I said. “You mean my mom never explained.”

  “I mean Sophia,” the woman said. And in her pronunciation of my mom’s name I heard the same, faint accent my mom had. An accent I’d been hearing my whole life without knowing it.

  “Then you explain,” I said, and was instantly amazed by my own boldness.

  “There is no time now,” the woman said, glancing impatiently over her shoulder. “You must come with me.”

  This had gone too far. I placed my hand back on the phone, ready to knock the receiver off the hook. I could punch in 9-1-1 without looking, behind my back. I would, if the woman so much as took one step in my direction.

  But what if the police came before I got any answers?

  “I can’t go anywhere right now,” I said cautiously. “I’m waiting for my mom to come home.”

  The woman gave me the kind of pitying look our teachers give the stupidest kids at school. Part I don’t have time for this right now, part I can’t believe how dumb you are, and part I feel really, really sorry for you, not being able to do any better than that. What will ever become of you? It made me feel about three years old and dumber than a dog.

  “Sophia,” the woman said, “is not your mother!”

  I could see her mouth moving, but I’m not sure I heard her words. Rather, I felt t
hem, deep in my heart, deep in my brain.

  I waited for the jolt of shock. It didn’t come. Somehow I had known this—for how long? Since my hypnotized memory of escaping with “Mama,” at least. But probably longer than that. I called my mother “Mom.” I put her name down on all those forms we had to fill out for school. I’d given her a Mother’s Day card every year. I loved her, I guess. But there had always been something at the back of my mind, I thought now, some inkling that went beyond wanting my mother to be more like my friends’ mothers.

  “Why did she say she was?” I asked weakly. My grip on the phone slipped. It didn’t matter.

  The woman shrugged. She was watching me carefully.

  “She kidnapped you,” the woman said. Her accent seemed even more pronounced suddenly. “Do not judge her too harshly. I believe she thought she was protecting you. Crythe then was … dangerous.”

  “Crythe?” I asked numbly.

  The woman no longer seemed surprised by my ignorance.

  “Crythe,” she repeated. “Your home. Where Sophia is imprisoned now. She has been kidnapped now too. You must come and save her!”

  Ten

  LATER I WOULD WONDER WHY I BELIEVED HER SO QUICKLY. I WASN’T stupid. I wasn’t naive. I’d heard the same “stranger danger” lectures everyone gets, from preschool on up. I wasn’t sure I trusted this woman. But she claimed to be my Aunt Memory, whatever that meant, and memory was exactly what I was starved for.

  Plus, she seemed so sure that I would believe.

  “Quickly now,” she said. “Pack a suitcase.”

  “I don’t have one,” I said. Apart from overnights at my friends’ houses, I’d never gone anywhere that required packing.

  “Ah,” the woman said, almost approvingly. “Some other container?”

  “I’ll use my mom’s,” I said. “Sophia’s.”

  I dragged out the big, black suitcase that had sat in the hall closet as long as we’d lived there. I’d searched it only the day before.

  While the woman watched, I carried it into my room and lay it down on my bed. I went to get my toothbrush and toothpaste. It seemed surreal to care about dental hygiene at a time like this. But I was grateful to have insignificant details to focus on.

  “Is it cold there?” I asked as I walked back into my room. “And how many days should I plan on?”

  “These should be enough” the woman said, holding up a stack of jeans, sweatshirts, and underwear.

  She’d gotten into my drawers. While I was in the bathroom, she’d gone through my clothes, made her own selections.

  “Um, thanks for helping, but I like to keep my possessions private,” I said, taking the clothes out of her hands.

  The woman blinked. Her eyes were the color of rainwater, clear and undecipherable.

  “But I’m your aunt,” she said. “Your Aunt Memory. I am supposed to know everything about you.”

  “Oh,” I said. I stuffed the clothes in the case. Alarm bells were going off in my head. “Things must be really different in Crythe than they are here, because …” I looked at the woman again. She had her head tilted to the side, studying me as carefully as if she were about to face a test. About Kira Landon: Which of her top front teeth sticks out, ever so slightly? Which side does she part her hair on? Which eyebrow is thicker?

  The woman was giving me the heebie-jeebies. I didn’t finish my sentence.

  “Well, let’s go,” I said in a too-loud voice. I was suddenly eager to leave, before I chickened out. Before I came to my senses.

  “Do I make you uncomfortable?” the woman asked. “I forget you have not been raised in Crythe.”

  “A little information about the place would help,” I grumbled, zipping the suitcase. The woman picked it up.

  “I’ll tell you in the car,” she said.

  That was the incentive I needed. I turned off the lights in my room and then in the rest of the apartment. I grabbed my jacket, locked the door, and put the key in my jacket pocket.

  Three keys, I thought strangely. I have three keys now.

  My heart pounded unnaturally as I followed the woman down the dark stairs. There was still time to turn around, to run away, to find someone else to listen to the woman’s story. Someone who wouldn’t be blinded by hope and fear, as I was.

  I stopped at the bottom of the stairs. I had a sudden flash of memory: I had waited in this very spot, my first day of kindergarten. And then Mom had come down the stairs and walked with me to school.

  “You’re not scared, are you, Kira?” Mr. Miller had asked as we passed his drugstore that August morning, so long ago.

  “No,” I had said confidently. Then I leaned in to whisper, “But I think my mom is.”

  Mr. Miller had gotten a big chuckle out of that, treated the whole thing like a joke. I’d heard him afterward, repeating my words to other customers. Otherwise, I would have forgotten. But now I could remember the white, stretched look of Mom’s face on my very first day of school. She had been scared. She’d been terrified, and not just because her little girl was growing up.

  “Is my mom—Is Sophia—,” I said now. “Is she in great danger?”

  “I will not lie to you,” the woman said. “Yes. She is. But it is not too late. You can save her.”

  How could I refuse?

  But I remembered Mom wasn’t really my mother. I remembered she had kidnapped me. I didn’t move.

  The woman kept walking until she reached a strange car parked in the driveway by the bushes. She opened the trunk and shoved my suitcase inside. Then she turned around and noticed I was hanging back.

  “Kira?” she said. “Come on. We’ve got to hurry.”

  “Um,” I said indecisively. This was all too strange. I didn’t know what to do.

  “Kira?” the woman repeated. She left the trunk open and walked back toward me. I saw the shadowy bushes beside the car moving in the breeze. I stared at them, wanting the shadows to give me a sign: Go or stay.

  “I see what is needed,” the woman said as she reached my side. She put her arm around my shoulder—to comfort me, I thought.

  Then I inhaled a sharp, sweet scent, and I forgot everything.

  Eleven

  AN ENGINE HUMMED. I WAS ALMOST WAKING UP, ALMOST WINNING the fight against sleep that kept trying to pull me back in. My head throbbed in time with the noise. With my eyes still shut, I tried to remember where I was. That humming engine, all the vibrations … Was I on the bus, riding to school? How could I have fallen asleep on a ten-block bus ride? My brain wasn’t alert enough for logic.

  I let myself slip back into sleep, into a dream. I was on a bus. In my mind I could see the dream bus, empty except for the driver and me. I stared at the back of the driver’s head, many seats ahead, and it seemed like the driver must be my mom. I thought I should recognize her. But how many times had I looked that closely at the back of my mother’s head? Then the driver turned her head and looked back at me, and it wasn’t Mom at all. It was that strange woman, Aunt Memory.

  Then I was truly awake. Groggily, I opened my eyes and looked out the window my forehead was pressed against. Instead of the familiar streets of Willistown, I saw only clouds, dark and far below me.

  I wasn’t on the bus at all. I wasn’t even in a car. I was on a plane.

  I jerked back from the window so quickly, I hit my head on the back of the seat.

  “Wha—Where—” I couldn’t form a complete thought, let alone express one.

  Aunt Memory turned around in the seat in front of me.

  “You’re awake now,” she said calmly. “How do you feel? Are you hungry? Thirsty?”

  I stared at her. How could she ask such normal questions when we were who-knew-where and I had no memory of getting there?

  I ignored her questions and looked around, wildly. The plane was a small one. Aunt Memory sat in the front beside a man I assumed was the pilot. It was too dark to see him clearly, but he looked old, wizened, and nearly bald beneath his headphones. The instru
ment panel glowed in front of him.

  My seat, behind them, was smaller and less padded than theirs. My suitcase was wedged in beside me. I put my hand on it, as if the feel of a familiar object could reassure me.

  I noticed that Aunt Memory and the pilot had no luggage.

  “You said you’d explain everything in the car,” I accused Aunt Memory. “You didn’t say anything about a plane!”

  I saw Aunt Memory’s shoulders rise and fall, carelessly.

  “You were hesitant enough as it was,” she said. Somehow her accent seemed more pronounced than ever. I could barely understand her. “I saw no reason to frighten you.”

  “Frighten me?” I fumed. “You don’t think it’s frightening to be knocked out and then to wake up in an airplane going to—Where are we going?”

  “Crythe, of course,” Aunt Memory said impatiently. “Just like I told you. Crythe is far away and our arrival there is urgently awaited. You didn’t think we had time to drive, did you?”

  “I didn’t have time to think,” I grumbled. “I was too busy being”—the right word came to me all at once—“kidnapped. You kidnapped me!”

  I glanced at the pilot, wondering if he’d heard me. Weren’t pilots bound by some sort of international law by which they were required to report crimes? Unless, of course, Aunt Memory had a gun shoved in his side and was hijacking him, as well as kidnapping me. Or unless he was her accomplice, as committed to the kidnapping as she was.

  All of this suddenly seemed too silly to be believed. I wasn’t the sort of person who got kidnapped. I didn’t think I knew anyone who was the sort to get kidnapped. And yet, if Aunt Memory’s story was true, I’d now been kidnapped twice, and Mom kidnapped once. Ridiculous. We weren’t celebrities or millionaires or princesses of endangered countries….

  Were we?

  Aunt Memory had turned around completely now, and she was looking me directly in the eye. Even in the near darkness, I could make out sympathy in her gaze. I couldn’t think of her as a kidnapper.