The Leaving (14 page)

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300,009,099

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85,968

85,969

“No way to know for sure, but think about it this way. The majority of people walking around probably have no exact memory of their eighth birthday or tenth birthday or of their ninth Christmas or any of that.”

Normal people don’t remember everything
.

Normal people forget
.

Do normal people ever have just one memory that is so
. . .

very
. . .

unrelenting/unavoidable/unfathomable?

“The hot air balloon and carousel and all,” she said. “Do you think those things even happened?”

She’d spent her time in the waiting room searching for hot air balloon companies and carousels in the area on her phone.

Horse stables, too.

It was useless.

So far, Lucas’s plea to the world to help them had turned up nothing, and she had zero expectation that it would.

“As I told Lucas and Kristen,” Sashor said, “it’s a lot easier to implant a fake memory than it is to erase a real one—though it’s true that people are having success in treating trauma victims with post-traumatic stress by just recasting the trauma—like if they witnessed a car accident or something awful. But the reverse is much easier. So it’s possible that the hot air balloon memory was implanted in you, though to what end? It would be one thing if you remembered that your captor was a
man, say, with a scar on his forehead. Because if that were a fake fact, an implanted memory, it would throw the police off the trail. A hot air balloon? What’s the point?”

/
  /
         /

He went on to say that the problem now was that “source errors” could creep into their minds. That, at least in terms of helping to locate Max, Scarlett and the others were becoming less reliable with each passing second.

“You’ll think you’re recovering your own memory,” he explained, “when it’s actually something you pulled out of a news report or movie or article.”

/
  /

Great
.

She asked, “Do you think hypnosis could really help?”

Then tried to imagine it.

You are getting sleepy.

Very

very

sleepy.
^{z
z
z z
z
z
z
z
z
z}

Was that how it really worked?

“I have my doubts,” Sashor said. “The person Kristen is working with has been at the center of an ongoing controversy for years now. She’s been involved in a few prominent abuse trials, and there’s concern about false recovered memories.”

“She said she remembers not liking me,” Scarlett said. “How does that work? Like memories of emotions?”

It was a nice, roundabout way of asking about her longing for Lucas.

She’d answered “yes” to the question about being in love.

She couldn’t recall a single incident of kissing, but had visceral memory of what it would feel like.

Had felt like.

With him.

Last night, at Opus 6, it was all coming together.

So many rocks and w i n d i n g,  l o o p i n g  paths.

She liked it there. S h e  f e l t  t h a t  w a y,  t o o.

Maybe when they got together later—just the two of them, like they’d planned—they’d
know
.

Know what, though?

Something.

Anything.

Sashor said, “That aspect of memory is still one of the most mysterious.”

“Do you think it’s weird that I’m not sure I
want
to remember where we were?” she asked then.

He shrugged. “What
do
you want?”

She considered saying “To be with Lucas” or “To be with Lucas again.”

What she said instead was another truth. “I want Tammy—that’s my mother—to accept that aliens weren’t involved.”

He laughed.

“No,” she said. “For real.”

“Oh.” He cleared his throat. “Well, that’s unfortunate.”

Scarlett liked this guy.

“I did a study once of people who claimed they were abducted by aliens,” he said, surprising her. “I wanted to try to see if they were prone to false memories in other facets of life.”

“What did you find out?”

“That people who think they were abducted by aliens
really
want to believe they were abducted by aliens.” He smiled and picked up a tiny horseshoe from a game on his desk, tossed it at a small sand box, missed the pole. “And that they get mad at you if you suggest that maybe they experienced an episode of sleep paralysis and it was scary and now this is how their brain has constructed a script around it. It gives their life meaning.”

“That sounds like her, all right. She keeps saying how we were chosen. For this special thing.”

“Well, you were,” he said, and he wrote down the word “chosen,” underlined it. “But probably not by aliens. Just don’t tell her I said that.”

“So I’m pretty much doomed,” she said.

“You’ll be okay,” he said. “You’re strong. All of you. And you seem like, I don’t know, good kids. So whoever raised you seems to have done a decent job, if you discount the fact that it wasn’t his or her or their right to do it in the first place. Either that, or you all formed a support system for each other.”

“Can I try?” She nodded at the game, and he pushed it toward her.

“Actually I have one more question for you,” he said. “It’s really just for my own research purposes.”

She took the tiny horseshoe in her hand and aimed. “What’s that?” she asked.

“I know you were only five, but do you remember anything that was happening
in the world
before you disappeared?”

“Such as?”

“Anything. Like a presidential election or space shuttle launch. I’m interested in when a shift occurs and memory starts to include not just small personal memories but has more context in the world.”

Scarlett’s kneejerk feeling was to just say no, but she took a minute.

The world?

The news?

Her mother’s clippings came to mind.

“Oh, like that school shooting?” she said, adjusting her grip on the toy.

“You remember hearing about that?” Sashor sat up straighter.

Well . . .

     /
/  /
         /        /
     /
   /
         /
      /
   /
          /

“No,” she said. “I saw it mentioned in some articles about The Leaving.” She tossed and her horseshoe clinked around the pole. “I imagine that would be the kind of thing my mother would have gone out of her way to make sure I didn’t hear about, right? Since I was going to be going to the school.”

“Probably, yeah,” he said. “Makes sense.” He held up another tiny horseshoe. “My turn.”

Lucas

Ryan wasn’t home for Lucas to ask questions about the book, so he started reading it.

The Leaving
, by Daniel Orlean—copyright 1968—was a slim 150 pages.

The author bio said only that Orlean lived in Florida and this was his first novel.

In it, Frank Mamet has decided that he doesn’t want his son, Joseph, to go away to the newly enforced government Leaving period. “They think they can raise my kids better than I can?” he says at one point. “They’re wrong. Because sure, children should be protected from society’s evils—but by
their parents
—and they simply can’t be raised without an awareness of the realities of the world around them. A whole generation oblivious to the truth of the human condition is a recipe for the collapse of society.”

On the eve of Joseph’s Leaving, Frank takes Joseph on the run. And while they’re being chased down by Leaving police, he tries to teach Joseph what life was like before the new government was formed and The Leaving started—telling him stories prompted by a small collection of old family photos. All the while, they are searching for a mysterious
man who supposedly grants exceptions to families who are willing to go to work for a burgeoning shadow government.

His wife
wants
her children to go away like all the other kids. She wants them to be protected from the horrors of childhood; she is newly diagnosed with cancer and wants her children to not witness her decline and death. She wants them to
leave
and come back like the others have, with memories of having had a happy young life.

Frank has taken their son against her wishes.

Eventually Frank finds a community of people who are off the grid, living the old-fashioned way. Raising families together in an underground city cut off from society. He very much wants to stay, but he has left behind a dying wife and a daughter. So he leaves his son there and goes out to try to bring them back.

Turns out, his wife has died and his daughter is being cared for by a very pro-Leaving neighbor. He has to kill the woman—a childless widow—to claim his daughter and bring her with him. Alas, forces align against them and they are caught. He’s sent to prison. His daughter is sent to The Leaving. His only hope is that his son will one day rise up and fight back. His son, the keeper of those family photos, the keeper of all that is real about life and loss, may one day become a hero.

By the time he was done reading, Lucas was starving. The pickings were slim, so he grabbed a slice of cold pizza and wondered whether he knew how to cook. If he didn’t, it was time to learn.

What was taking Scarlett so long?

Why hadn’t she texted yet?

The keeper of photos.

The camera tattoo.

He went back to his room and lay down on the sagging mattress, watching dust dance.

His brain sought connections but found none.

Then, soon, noises.

Ryan.

Miranda.

The TV.

The news:

“
Meanwhile, the victims of The Leaving are starting to be met with increasing skepticism about their story that they don’t remember anything about the past eleven years, or about Max Godard, whose fate remains unknown
.”

Lucas got up and joined them just in time to see the clip of Avery playing again:

“
They must know something
.”

He shouldn’t have rushed her out of the RV like that.

Shouldn’t have told her that, no, she could not come talk to Ryan with him.

They’d exchanged phone numbers before she left, and he’d promised her updates, but she was a distraction.

“Have you ever seen this book?” Lucas held it out to Ryan. Miranda went to his side to also look.

“No.” Ryan took it from him and thumbed the pages, and the air suddenly smelled old, borderline vomit-y. Then he turned to the cover, to study the illustration of small children in pods beneath the title:
The Leaving
. “Was it out there?”

“Out where?” Miranda asked.

“Yes.” Lucas ignored her. “You’ve really never seen it?”

“No.” Ryan turned it over.

Miranda stood at his shoulder also reading the back cover. “That is messed up,” she said, almost too quickly.

“There’ve been a few books,” Ryan said.

“This was written in 1968.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Ryan said. “This is ringing a bell now. Dad was writing to some author’s son or something. It was a few years ago. I’d stopped paying attention and he’d stopped telling me what he was doing anyway.”

“Where’s his computer?”

“Bedroom.”

They went down the hall together, and Miranda followed. Ryan powered up the laptop on the desk in the corner, and they waited.

Lucas hadn’t been in there yet, hadn’t seen how his father had been living—in a small brown room that barely fit the queen bed and desk. Lucas was sure there had once been curtains with flowers on them, perfume bottles on a silver tray reflecting sunlight. But she was long gone and all that was, too.

Miranda had the book now. “If you don’t mind my saying it, this is a stretch.”

Lucas said, “Scarlett told her mother she was
going to the leaving
.”

“All right, all right,” Miranda said. “So you think it’s the author? Or his son?”

“Maybe,” Lucas said. “I don’t know.”

But it had to mean something.

When the monitor lit, Ryan clicked to an e-mail bookmark, and the mail loaded. Lucas went to sit at the desk.

There was a lot of recent spam and more than thirty-five thousand e-mails in the account, so Lucas searched for the name Orlean and found a correspondence with the author’s son, Paul, from several years ago.

Thank you for your letter
, Paul had written.
I handle all my father’s correspondence now that he has gotten on in years
.