Kiss Me If You Dare

12

That night I made my way to the parlor to corner Denton like I’d promised. I lingered at the threshold a moment, my book tucked under one arm, hesitant to interrupt his ritual quiet time.

The professor relaxed on the settee. Blue cotton jammy bottoms poked out beneath a fastidious white terry robe. The man seemed so content with life. There he sat, reading the evening news, sipping a cup of steaming tea, surrounded by fine possessions in a beautifully renovated home.

I sighed with envy. How could he maintain such order on a daily basis when my life was one perpetual tailspin? He looked up. “Alisha.” His voice smiled though his face remained passive. “Make yourself at home.”

“Thanks.” I took a velvet-upholstered chair across from him.

“What’s on your mind tonight?” He closed his paper, rolling it and placing it on the sofa.

“I know you said there was no changing your mind about the teams in the Revamp Program. But,” I put out a hand to keep him from interrupting me, “something has gone really wrong with Team A and I want you to be aware of it.”

At his blank look, I told him the results of our spy mission.

“… so I really think you need to reconsider the whole competition thing, or at least get some teamwork going over there.”

I thought I saw a gleam in his eye, like he was laughing at the situation.

“It’s out of my hands,” he said. “This is a senior level program. I will not hand-feed adults who have the capacity to solve their own problems. This is part of the test, Alisha. If they don’t pass here, they’ll probably fail in the real world too. Let’s hope they figure out how to put pride behind them and get to work.”

His answer was a little too coldhearted for me. I had to speak up. “I’m not sure you really understand the scope of the project or what has to go into each of these renovations. It’s hard labor and requires forethought, planning, and teamwork. Lots and lots of teamwork.” My finger pointed in emphasis.

“Look around you.” He glanced at the coved ceiling, the curved staircase, the moldings, the fireplace, the sparkling hardwood floor. “Don’t tell me I don’t know the scope of the project. I did this work myself.”

Before my eyes, the professor morphed from a spoiled only child to a contributing member of society. “Wow. I’m impressed. How long did it take?”

His eyes followed the arch of the ceiling. “I’ve been at it on and off for about thirty-five years.”

I straightened. “What about the exterior? Everything’s done but that. Maybe once we’ve finished on Rios Buena Suerta, we can come here and get that done-”

“No.”

The sharp word cut me off.

The professor leaned back and sighed. “Each aspect of this home is done as a reward for accomplishing a goal in some other area of my life. I haven’t yet succeeded in the particular facet that would allow for an exterior restoration.”

“Oh. What would you have to do for that?” I asked.

“It’s personal.” His tone put an end to the line of questioning. Denton seemed more touchy than usual tonight. I ignored his attitude. “Hmmm. I wonder why Brad never mentioned you renovated homes?”

He picked up his newspaper and snapped it straight. “I’m not sure Brad knew.”

Following his example, I flipped my legs up on my chair and opened my book. “Hope you don’t mind. I borrowed your copy of The Count of Monte Cristo.” “Not at all. Excellent story,” he said, “if you don’t mind witnessing mankind at his lowest.”

The next morning, I woke up feeling like a bag of cement had been dropped on my head. No sleep last night, just crazy dreams interspersed with tossing and turning. When I first arrived in Del Gloria, I’d had my prescription painkillers to help me rest. But now, with only the over-the-counter variety, I barely got a wink.

The alarm hadn’t gone off yet, but I got up anyway, showered, and dressed. Then I did what Dr. Vandenberg suggested: I wrote down everything I’d done since the day of the accident. I tried to be as complete as possible, challenging myself to remember all I’d experienced.

I scanned my work. Memory loss, phooey. I recalled every detail since the moment I impacted the back end of that minivan.

In the lonely stretch between Salt Lake City and Sacramento, Denton had elaborated on the stress-induced memory loss theory the doctor in Minneapolis had proposed. “Tell me about your childhood. What things do you remember?” Professor Braddock’s voice blended with the soothing hum of the tires.

I glanced at him. His comic Einstein-wear had me wondering how Brad could think so highly of him. “I had a great childhood. Right up until my mom died.”

“What great things do you remember?”

I kept it vague. “Oh, I don’t know. We’d visit my grandparents on weekends and in the summer. That was always nice.”

“Always?”

I scrunched my brows together, picking up a memory of a picnic here, a trip to the beach there. “Yeah. Pretty much.”

“What bad things do you remember?”

I gave a shrug to hide the emotion crashing over me. “I remember my mom dying. I remember her funeral.”

“Before that?”

“Nothing. It was all good.”

The professor kept his eyes on the road. “It’s never all good, Patricia.”

“It was for me.”

He cleared his throat. “Sometimes, in cases of child abuse, sexual molestation, or other traumatic situations, people lose the ability to recall specific events. If the circumstances are bad enough, people can forget entire years of their lives.” He looked at me.

“That’s awful.”

“Actually, it’s merciful.” He pointed to the front of his head. “Our memories are kept up here, in the hippocampus. During times of stress, our bodies produce a hormone called cortisol. God designed the chemical to help us deal with danger-the fight-or-flight response. But when too much cortisol is present in our brains, it damages the connection between our memories and their recall buttons. The memory is still available, we just can’t access it.”

At that point, we’d been in the car too many hours. I could barely follow his logic.

He kept talking. “Sometimes it’s good that we can’t recall something too horrible to deal with at the time. But the problem occurs when stress becomes our normal state of mind. The hormone is released inappropriately. After a while, our thinking becomes muddled. We forget the simplest things, like where we parked our car and what item we’d gone into a room to retrieve. We forget useful and happy memories along with the bad ones.”

Now, perched on the edge of the bed, I tapped my pen against the journal. Professor Braddock had gotten my attention with the muddled-thinking comment. Maybe my brain was overproducing cortisol. And that’s why I would sometimes forget stuff from day to day. Like Brad sharing his most intimate thoughts with me. Five minutes later I’d wonder if he even cared I was alive. Or when I’d make up my mind to be grateful in any circumstance. Five minutes later I’d wonder if God even cared I was alive. If living like that annoyed me so much, I could only imagine how Brad and God felt about living with me.

My pen retraced some words on the page. Denton implied that I’d been reacting to life by continually pressing some internal panic button that kept the cortisol flowing. It became my body’s defense mechanism to cope with situations my mind couldn’t handle, basically a selfinduced memory block that allowed me to get through a rough stretch without having to deal with the actual events, because in essence, I’d forgotten them. But at the same time, I’d forgotten a lot of the good stuff too.

The million-dollar question was, what was my mind protecting me from now? What happened between the time Candice pulled the trigger and the moment of impact on I-35?

Yes, I’d been shot in the arm. But was that so traumatic that I’d blocked out the next twelve hours? With the events of the previous night, when I’d been run off the road and barely escaped death at the bottom of a quarry, and later held hostage at gunpoint by some fool who thought I knew where my dad was holed up, I suppose the cortisol had been flowing at top levels. Probably no amount of mental concentration could track down those hours missing from my memory.

I’d just have to let it go and convince Professor Braddock to do the same.

I took another ten minutes to write down the discombobulated images from my dreams, then went downstairs to catch the professor at breakfast.

“Good morning, Alisha,” he said as I entered the dining room. His voice had a cold tinge to it.

“Morning.” I scooted my chair up to the table.

Ms. Rigg poured my coffee, keeping track of me out of the corner of her eye.

I took a sip. “Mmm. Delicious. Thank you.”

“Aye,” was her best shot at being cordial.

“Did your daughter make it safely back to the city?” I asked her. Now that I knew Portia wasn’t the looter responsible for taking my signature page, I wanted to explore the Jane equation.

Next to me, Professor Braddock blinked and turned to me, as if wondering what I had up my sleeve.

“Aye,” Ms. Rigg countered, offering nothing more. She took a step to go.

“Does Jane come often to visit?” I held her with my question.

Ms. Rigg looked at Denton. Then her gaze swung back in my direction. “Only when she can afford to. Poor dear struggles for her bread. And her poor mum can’t very well help.”

The woman’s comments were likely more directed at Denton than me. Fishing for a raise, I figured, remembering how Jane had focused on money the other day.

I took a sip of my coffee. “Oh. I was hoping Jane would be back soon. There was something missing from my tote the other day and I wanted to ask her about it.”

The matriarch squirmed.

Denton looked back and forth between the two of us, nibbling on his bagel like popcorn at a movie theater.

Steam collected around Ms. Rigg’s ears as she came to her daughter’s defense. “I hope you’re not calling my Jane a thief. She only opened the notebook to see who the tote belonged to.”

I suppressed an “ah ha!” So, Jane was the guilty party after all. How else would Ms. Rigg have known about the notebook? What kind of scam was Jane running now? Her schmaltzy, overzealous smile reminded me of a con man I once knew. No doubt Jane was sweet as pie to my face but would gladly hold a knife to my back. No doubt she’d written the note and knew my true identity. The question was, what would she do with that information?