HE LOOKS UP.
There: the mazelike grid of cracks in the white plaster ceiling. Dull thrum of an old air conditioner. All that white noise, kicking on.
Cheerless light seeps down from the translucent windows, still no wall decorations, just the bed, containing Jay, the stainless-steel sideboard, and the one metal chair.
He remembers this part all too well; it’s one of those glib pulp endings where the story circles back where it began and, for a moment, you wonder if the whole thing was a dream.
“How’re you feeling?” Jane Doe is bedside. She’s got her “HELLO My Name Is” sticker plastered to the lapel of her jacket but she’s left the fill-in space blank. Jay turns his head in slow motion and the world crawls reluctantly with him.
Doe even says Public’s line: “Sometimes that tranquilizer really kicks your ass,” and waits, deadpan.
Jay smiles, languid in the anesthetic’s wake, and lets his eyes stray back to the map of cracks in the ceiling. Déjà vu. Okay. Sure. Maybe he imagined the whole thing.
“Gee, where am I, I wonder?” he says drily.
“Witness protection. You’re in witness protection, Jay.” She sits down. She’s flushed with color, like someone who’s just come from running a 5K: playful, jacked with endorphins, oddly upbeat, after all that’s happened.
“I remember,” he says.
“What a shitstorm, huh? Empty out one can of worms,” Doe quips, “and open up another.”
“I’m in the program,” Jay offers.
“Back. You’re back in the program, yes.”
“Vaughn?”
“Safe.”
“Safe. Everybody’s safe. That’s how you roll.”
Doe shrugs. “Don’t give me shit about it, either.”
Jay’s wrist lifts away from the bedrail. At least he’s not handcuffed, this time. But there’s an IV shunt stuck in the vein in his arm, tubes snaking up to a clear bag on a tall stand. They have what they needed from him. He’s not a captive. Just . . . what?
Doe hesitates, frowns. “Question? Something you want to ask me?”
“Dunn?”
“The man was not in a good place, morally or ethically.”
“Undercover?”
Doe shakes her head. This is not something Jay should waste much time thinking through, she tells him. “It’s not a black-and-white world,” she adds. “We do bad things to get good results, we do good things that go horribly wrong. We’re human, you know? Not perfect. We do the best we can.”
“Why did you bring me back here?”
Doe doesn’t answer right away. The skinny jeans and faded black Chuck Taylors make her look like somebody’s Melrose Avenue hipster mom. Jay wonders if she’s older than he thinks. “Dunn wasn’t the shooter,” she says.
“I know,” Jay says. “But he was buying the list.”
“Buying, trading, brokering. He was a middleman.”
“And the end buyer?”
Doe smiles sardonically, says nothing. Still out there, is the unspoken answer.
“So you pretended to believe me, and I became the bait?”
Doe won’t confirm or deny it.
“And the one guy who can isn’t talking.”
“Ever,” Doe agrees. “RIP John Q. It’s not optimal, but what can you do?” She tugs at the ends of her hair. Her nails are ragged again from where she’s been biting them. Polish chipping off.
Jay has to ask, “Are you protecting me, or protecting yourselves from me?”
Doe looks at him candidly and tells him that he’s free to leave, whenever he wants. It’s not a bluff.
This is what he remembers:
A small girl he unlocked.
A duplicitous woman who unlocked him.
An invented island life.
Weight lifting from his heart.
“I need to use the bathroom.” He doesn’t, but has to say it.
Doe gives no knowing reaction, though; she’s playing this awfully straight. She takes up and triggers the remote, and the whole bed changes shape, lifting him to another level of muzziness and pain. He discovers that his other arm is taped and strapped to his chest, immobilizing that side of him. And just as well: it feels like somebody has pounded a spike through his shoulder, impaling him on the mattress.
“You could, you know . . . bedpan.”
“No,” Jay says. He wants to ask about Ginger and Helen, but he’s afraid of the answer.
“Okay. I’ll send someone in to help you,” Doe says. She stands and starts to walk out. Her shoes scuff tile, “Oh—” she adds, slowing, but not completely turning around, “you’re gonna need to let us know if you want your family with you.” And then she’s gone.
Jay thinks, aloud, “Family?”
“Okay, well, I was watching?” Mouse squeak of sneakers and the rustle of a cotton jumper, and a small voice, coming from under the bed. “And they were filling you with all that intervenious water and stuff? And I thought maybe you’d puff up like a water balloon and pop . . .”
Jay shifts his body in stages, the stabbing pain coursing along his side from his neck to his hip; leans over the bedrail and looks down to where Helen is on her back, on the floor, just her head exposed, peeking up at him with the gravity of all her eight years.
“. . . so I crawled under here, in case. Hello.” She wriggles out. “And fell asleep.” Helen stands up and looks at Jay soberly. And as his eyes rise to meet hers, he sees, behind her, in the open doorway to his empty hospital room, Ginger, hair in rebellion and still mascara-challenged, approximating the awkward posture of an eighth-grade girl at her first all-school dance.
“Well, not exactly asleep, though,” Helen is saying. “Just sort of like with my eyes closed and resting?” She thinks about it. “But there were some dreams.”
Ginger crosses from the doorway to the bed, all business, avoiding Jay’s gaze. She lowers the bedrail for him to hold on to as he sits up and slides his legs off the edge.
“Marshal Doe said you needed some help.”
“Helen was on the list,” Jay says.
Ginger tugs at Helen’s jumper, straightening it, as if she isn’t listening.
“I’m talking about the list of names your husband was going to sell to Dunn.”
Now she looks at him. Her eyes asking: Where does this go? And it’s funny, because Jay is wondering the same thing. Helen is up on her feet, arms out, spinning. “Mommy said her old husband went away with a mermaid. She cried a lot.”
Ginger allows that she did, but adds, pointedly, to Jay, “For the mermaid.”
Jay reaches out, but Ginger leans away. Nothing is certain yet. Needing more from him.
Helen puts her hands over her face. “Go ahead. I’m not watching.”
Common knowledge among behavioral biology fanboys like Vaughn, according to Vaughn: in a wide range of mammals, including monkeys, bears, cats, dogs, and, yes, mice, mothers are incredibly protective when their offspring are young and vulnerable. As part of this behavior, female mice will attack any threat against their offspring in what is variously called maternal aggression or maternal defense, depending on the researcher and the experiment.
Jay says, “It was you.”
A mother mouse will even kill the intruder to her nest if she thinks her pups are in danger.
Ginger says nothing. Her eyes search his.
“They wanted me to remember you,” he says.
Almost imperceptibly, Ginger nods. “Did you?”
Jay takes a moment before answering, mostly for show. The weight is gone. He remembers all that matters: his sister’s viral giggles, his brother’s sly wit, his father’s sure hands, his mother’s grace.
And the rest?
“I’ve never seen you before in my life,” Jay says.