—I haven’t ever seen the man standing in my cell before—he’s handsome, with graying hair and a strong jaw. He’s wearing a suit that looks tailored. The same guard as before is with him. I sit up in bed and look at them, without moving or saying anything.
The man looks—and this is weird—nervous. He comes a little into the room and then stands, fidgeting. I’m nervous too. Everything my mom taught me about men is that this is bad, this is dangerous.
He must have turned on the light—it’s a bright fluorescent light set in the ceiling above, set in the gray board of the ceiling, and he must have turned it on and woken me and that’s how the Dreaming disappeared.
This … ah …, he says.
Oh, yeah, right, I think. Well, that explains it.
He clears his throat.
My name’s Rick Miranda, he says. Ridiculously, he hands me a card.
I look down at it.
RICK MIRANDA
FLAGSTAFF CITY ATTORNEY
Then a bunch of phone and e-mail information.
I’m the city attorney for Flagstaff, he says, confirming the details on the card, though I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it. I mean, I don’t have a phone or a computer so I’m not going to be calling him or e-mailing him. I just hold it awkwardly in my hands.
There’s a pause. He seems to be expecting me to say something, but I don’t.
I … um, he continues, I don’t know if you understand what I’m saying. The psychiatrist thought you were lucid, but you didn’t say anything, so …
Ah, I think. Not therapist, psychiatrist.
… It’s … if it were up to me, we would do this differently, continues the city attorney. I don’t know, find some kind of halfway house for you. People to talk to you. But you haven’t committed a crime, and we can’t just hold you forever.
I stare at him.
Okay …, he says. He comes closer and hunches down, bending his knees, like a father squatting to bring his kids in on some game.
I’m now officially and 100 percent freaked out. Is Mom dead or something?
The city attorney looks at me, and I see pity in his eyes.
What the—
Your mother is not your mother, he blurts out. I don’t know—we don’t know—what she told you. Your name is Angelica Watson and you disappeared from Juneau Hospital in Alaska in 1999. You were being treated for burns to your legs.
This is my mind, right now:
That’s it. Just blank. Just white, like snow.
Then: Angelica, I think.
Shaylene Cooper, we know now, posed as a nurse and took you away. She moved a whole lot—Albuquerque, right? And Phoenix? And I’m guessing she homeschooled you?
Me:
He scrubs his face with his hands, as if it’s dirty, as if he wants to pummel off his skin, and find something cleaner underneath.
Your parents never stopped believing, he says. They paid private detectives. They appeared on TV. They … ah… He turns away, and so I miss the next bit, I don’t catch it. Then he turns back to me. They’re here now, in Flagstaff. They’ve rented an apartment. We … we have to release you into their care.
I think: you can trust him to take order and replace it with chaos.
I think of my life with Mom, the routine, every day the same, apart from Fridays, and then every Friday was the same, anyway. Now a stick of dynamite has been put under all that and it has been blown into the sky.
I think:
There Will Be Two Lies and then there Will Be the Truth.
Screw you, Coyote.
And then I don’t think anything.
There’s nothing in my head, just air, but air can build to a high pressure—it’s Boyle’s Law, I learned it with Mom, or with WHOEVER MOM REALLY IS, it’s P1V1=P2V2, which means that if the volume of something contracts then the pressure goes up, and right now the volume of my mind is a tiny tiny thing because there are NO THOUGHTS IN IT, and so I guess that means the pressure is going crazy, needle pushing into red, because—