Stay With Me: A Brenna Spector Novel of Suspense Read online

  “I . . . I just want to talk to somebody.”

  Maya hadn’t gone into any more detail than that, and Brenna hadn’t pushed. Brenna had never said, You can talk to me, because even if she hadn’t remembered her own adolescence as acutely as she did, Brenna knew the situation well enough to understand that as far as this particular topic was concerned, the idea of confiding in Mom was about as appealing to Maya as anesthesia-free liver surgery with a side of Brussels sprouts.

  Two weeks earlier, in Brenna’s apartment, Maya had been held at knifepoint by a crazy person. She’d pretended it hadn’t affected her, but really, who wouldn’t want to see a shrink after that? Who wouldn’t have nightmares? And who the hell would want to talk to her mother about it, when, if it hadn’t been for her mother’s aforementioned revelation/danger streak, there wouldn’t have been a crazy, knife-wielding person in the apartment to begin with?

  So Brenna hadn’t asked questions. The following day, after Maya had left for school, she’d picked up the phone and tapped in the same number she’d last dialed on her mother’s robin’s egg blue rotary on May 4, 1988. I’m a former patient of Dr. Lieberman’s, she had said to the unfamiliar-sounding receptionist over the phone. And my daughter needs help.

  Maya had been in with Dr. Lieberman for forty-five minutes. And at the risk of sounding like Brenna’s own mother, who unreasonably expected her daughter to have developed a newfound “appreciation and acceptance” of her perfect memory every time she walked out of a session, Brenna hoped Maya was cured. She hoped, during those forty-five minutes, that Lieberman had said something—anything—to bring her back to her old self, that reasonably well-adjusted kid she was before the night of December 21, the kid whose deepest, darkest secret was the worn childhood copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar she’d stolen out of a to-be-donated-to-the-library box and kept hidden in the back of her bookshelf.

  I’m sorry, Maya, Brenna thought. I’m so sorry . . .

  She’d had no idea crazy DeeDee Walsh would show up at her apartment when Maya was there alone. If Brenna had known that, she would have dropped the entire case, forgotten all about it, no matter how much it had to do with finding her sister. Nothing—not even Brenna’s twenty-eight-years-missing sister—was worth rushing back to her apartment at 8 P.M. on December 21 after receiving crazy DeeDee’s text. Nothing was worth the feeling of unlocking her own door with that texted picture in her mind—DeeDee’s knife at Maya’s throat, Brenna’s hand shaking as she slips the key in, her heart pounding up into her neck, sweat trickling down her back . . .

  Stop. Stay here. Brenna reached into her bag again and touched the journal. She pulled it out and opened it, slowly turning the pages, not reading them so much as looking at the letters, the soft indent where the pen had moved against the thin paper, the swirls at the ends of the Ys and Js. She imagined her sister’s hand, Clea’s hand, holding the pen, and that kept her here.

  Ironic, wasn’t it? Clea, whose disappearance had been the traumatic event to trigger Brenna’s hyperthymesia in the first place. Clea—well, an artifact of Clea, anyway—keeping Brenna in the present.

  The journal had turned up in Brenna’s mailbox four days ago, in a padded brown envelope with no note, no return address, and a Los Angeles postmark. She’d known who it was from and what was inside. She’d even seen Xeroxed versions of the handwritten pages. But still, when she’d opened it, Brenna had gasped. Her journal. The journal Clea had kept for years, before and after Brenna had watched her get into that blue car at dawn, a man she couldn’t see behind the wheel but whose voice she could hear, deep and resonant.

  You look so pretty, Clee-bee.

  A man whose name was Bill. Brenna had learned this from the journal, which began when Clea was thirteen years old and ended one month after her disappearance at seventeen. So strange that he would have such a prosaic name, this shadow that haunted Brenna’s dreams, her life. Over the years, Brenna had called him so many names in her mind—The Big Bad Wolf, He Who Shall Not Be Named, Voldemort—never Bill.

  Clea hadn’t revealed his last name in the journal, or why, two weeks after running off with this man she’d more than once referred to as My Great Love, she’d hit the road and started hitchhiking on her own. I’m free now, was all she had written on the topic. Free and alive and hopeful, at last.

  Brenna still couldn’t bring herself to read parts of the journal. (When you remember everything you read word for word, you need to be careful.) But the pages Brenna was able to read consistently surprised her.

  Clea had loved so many boys—loved them deeply and thoroughly and with every inch of her heart and soul—yet when the journal was being written, Brenna hadn’t known about any of them. There was her sister in her pink room with the pink shag carpet, Clea with her Elvis Costello records blasting and her Adam Ant poster on the wall. There was Clea, repeatedly telling Brenna to “stop snooping on me, weirdo.” And there was Brenna, always snooping, always spying, thinking, I know her better than anyone. Whether she likes it or not, I do.

  It had taken Brenna twenty-eight years and the strange emergence of this journal to finally realize that she hadn’t known her sister better than anyone.

  She hadn’t known her sister at all.

  Was Clea with one of those boys now? Was she alive and well, or had she perished twenty-eight years ago, one month after her disappearance, her life ending with this journal? Brenna was beginning to doubt she’d ever be able to answer that question. As close as she’d come to finally finding her sister, she still knew nothing about Clea—not from an investigative standpoint anyway. In her journal, Clea never mentioned last names. And on top of that, Clea was so given to bouts of fantasy, Brenna never could be sure which entries were real and which were 1980s-style fan fiction . . .

  But Brenna did have this journal, which for whatever reason was enough to yank her out of her memories. She didn’t need any of the things she used to rely on—rubber bands snapping against her wrists, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or the Lord’s Prayer, digging her fingernails into her palms or squeezing her eyes shut like someone in the throes of seizure. All Brenna needed now to stay anchored in the present was the weight of this journal in her hands, the blue faux leather cover, gold-embossed with “My Diary.” All she needed was her sister’s handwriting, the loops and swirls of it, the bright blue and purple and red ink and all those capital letters and exclamation points, all that barely contained teenage excitement, running up and down the pages. Proof of life, Clea’s life.

  Maybe that was enough.

  The waiting room door pushed open. Brenna closed the journal and dropped it back into her bag and looked up at Maya, Dr. Lieberman standing behind her, a benign smile taped to his face.

  “All better?” Brenna winced. “Did I really just say that?”

  Maya said, “Yes. Out loud. Unfortunately.”

  Lieberman smiled. “Your daughter takes after you.”

  “Don’t tell her that. She’ll cry.”

  Maya said nothing. Brenna watched her face. Ever since Maya had asked to see a shrink, Brenna had found herself doing that—staring at her daughter the way you’d stare at a kaleidoscope, looking for the slightest shift in the clear blue eyes.

  Lieberman patted Maya on the shoulder. “She has your dry sense of humor, Brenna—that’s what I meant,” he said. “Maybe next week, we’ll get past the jokes and start talking.”

  Like his waiting room, the doctor had changed very little in the past twenty years. He still had the pinkish cheeks, the toothy smile, the kind, easy voice. Lieberman had always reminded Brenna of an oversized rabbit come to life, and that was even more pronounced now, with his hair gone mostly white.

  Brenna looked at Lieberman’s tie. Mustard yellow, with little hot dogs and hamburgers all over it. Yep, the fashion sense hadn’t changed, either.

  “That okay with you?” she asked Maya.

  M
aya cracked a smile. A hopeful little smile, nothing sarcastic about it, and for a moment, Brenna was dropping her off for her first day of kindergarten—Maya in her pink corduroy jeans and her purple and pink plaid T-shirt, her pink sneakers from Old Navy and her furry orange coat—an outfit she’d chosen herself. Maya hugging Brenna good-bye on the steps of PS 102, Maya smelling of strawberry shampoo, soft yellow hair at Brenna’s cheek, the glass doors looming so big behind her . . .

  “Chamomile,” Dr. Lieberman was saying to Maya, his voice yanking Brenna back from that morning, that sweet, pink morning. It had been September 4, 2001—exactly one week before the attacks—but at the time, it was just another date for Brenna to remember, one among thousands jammed into her head and significant only as a start. A good start.

  My daughter, growing up . . .

  “Yeah,” Maya said. “I like all kinds of tea.”

  Brenna turned to find Maya watching her.

  “Try a cup of chamomile before you go to sleep, with a teaspoon of honey and some milk,” Dr. Lieberman said.

  Brenna cleared her throat. “Why?”

  “Maya’s been having a little insomnia,” he said. “Nothing to worry about.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Brenna said to Maya.

  Her gaze dropped to the floor.

  “See you next week,” Lieberman said. “Same Bat Time, same Bat Channel.”

  “Huh?”

  Brenna said, “That line wasn’t even timely when he said it to me.”

  “When did I say it to you?”

  “December 8, 1982; February 21, March 9, and September 16, 1983; February—”

  “Okay, okay.” Lieberman sighed. “I am officially retiring the line.”

  “You’ve said that before, too.”

  Lieberman smiled, shook his head. “Some things never change.”

  “Most things,” Brenna said.

  “That right?”

  She gave the waiting room a pointed once-over. “Yep.”

  Lieberman shrugged. “I’ll have to take your word for that.”

  “You can’t sleep?” Brenna said, once she and Maya were in the elevator and heading down. It had been the first thing she’d said to her since leaving Lieberman’s office, Brenna trying dozens of different ways to make a phrase out of what she’d been thinking.

  Maya shrugged. “No big deal.” She gazed up at the blinking numbers and, for some reason, smiled. “It’s only been a couple of nights.”

  For several seconds, Brenna watched her daughter, a lump forming in her throat. “Maya?”

  She looked at her.

  Just say it. “You can tell Dad.”

  “Huh?”

  Brenna cleared her throat. “You can tell him about what happened . . . on December 21.”

  “December . . .”

  Brenna closed her eyes. “It was wrong of me to tell you to keep that from him,” she said. “You can’t keep things from your father, even if those things make me look irresponsible.”

  “Mom.”

  “I shouldn’t have left you alone that night. That never should have happened to you. You were in my care and I let you down.”

  “Mom.”

  “Your father should know that.”

  “Mom,” Maya said. “First of all, you saved my life.”

  “But I never would’ve had to if—”

  “Secondly, that freak is in jail right now. No one’s going to hurt me anymore.”

  “Maya . . .”

  “Thirdly, I’m not telling Dad.”

  The doors opened, the last word, “Dad,” echoing in the quiet lobby. It was a cold winter Saturday and gray light pressed through the windows, the whole city still tired from the holidays, everything sad and hungover, the year still too new to matter. Brenna had always hated January, for these reasons and more. “Why not?” she asked.

  “Faith’s a reporter, and she got the same story everybody else did. I was at a friend’s, I came home to find you and DeeDee fighting with each other, Trent called the police and they saved the day. That’s a good story. Why needlessly freak them out with extra details?”

  “It’s not extra details, honey. It’s the truth.”

  “It’s my truth,” she said. “I can tell who I want.”

  As they headed for the door, Maya placed a hand on Brenna’s arm. Brenna turned to her. “Maya, your father deserves to know . . .” she started to say. But Maya’s expression stopped her. “It’s our truth, Mom,” Maya said, very quietly. “And it’s not why I wanted to see Dr. Lieberman.”

  Brenna never found out why Maya had wanted to see Lieberman because Maya didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Whatever I say is going to sound stupid,” Maya explained to her on the subway. “And then you’ll remember it forever.”

  “Hey,” Brenna tried. “I remember, but I don’t judge.”

  Maya rolled her eyes, which wasn’t fair.

  “I don’t,” Brenna said.

  But really, Maya didn’t have to be fair about this, and Brenna didn’t want to press her. Even if she did manage to yank a reason out of her, Brenna deep-down knew it that it all boiled down to the knife attack—how could it not? And if Brenna’s thirteen-year-old daughter wanted to protect her from the truth, then there wasn’t much Brenna could do about that, was there, other than to let Maya believe she was protecting her?

  The subway jerked to a stop at Christopher Street, and Brenna and Maya sauntered off—no hurry, really. The subway was a pleasure on weekends—always a place to sit, no pushing . . . “So,” Brenna said. “Devil’s food?”

  They were on their way to Magnolia Bakery, where the handoff was scheduled to take place. It was Jim and Faith’s day to take Maya, and because Maya had been getting increasingly annoyed at Brenna’s insistence on accompanying her for every handoff (Mom. It’s daytime and I’m a teenager! I can walk to Faith and Jim’s apartment by myself!) Brenna had been suggesting the most bribe-worthy of meeting places. Last week, the handoff had happened at Urban Outfitters, and it had come with a very cute sweater that Maya claimed she would “wear forever.” Before that, it had been at the Apple Store.

  “I might try something different,” said Maya, who hadn’t tried a different cupcake flavor at the Magnolia Bakery since June 21, 2008 (Coconut cream. She’d hated it.).

  Brenna turned and looked at Maya and caught her in the middle of yet another inexplicable smile. “Maya?”

  The smile melted away fast, Brenna thinking maybe she’d imagined it, maybe she’d just been reading in . . .

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why don’t you ever want to talk to Dad?”

  “Jeez,” she said. “I thought we were talking about cupcake flavors.”

  Maya stared straight ahead. “It’s a legitimate question. I’m not saying you guys have to . . . like . . . go bowling together. But why can’t you be in the same room?”

  Brenna swallowed. “I hate bowling.”

  “Not funny.” Maya tended to walk fast when she got agitated, and now she was speeding up Bleecker Street at what felt like thirty miles an hour, Brenna rushing to keep up with her.

  “We’re not late,” Brenna said, “and even if we were, Faith would wait. There’s no need to run a three-minute mile.”

  “Mom.”

  “What?”

  “I asked you a question.”

  “Can we walk a little slower please?”

  Maya stopped abruptly.

  Brenna sighed. “It’s my condition, Maya,” she said. “Your father . . . he’s a good guy. But being in the same room with him triggers too many memories.”

  “Are you always going to use that as an excuse?”

  “It’s not an excuse,” Brenna said. “It’s a fact. A pathetic fact, yes, but your dad . . .” Brenna’s phone vibr
ated SOS in Morse code—a text. Brenna plucked it out of her pocket and glanced at the screen. Where are you?

  It was from Nick Morasco. She hadn’t spoken to him in two days, hadn’t answered his texts or returned his calls. And the last thing she’d said to him was “Can you please leave?”

  It hadn’t been his fault, either. Well, not really.

  Brenna closed her eyes. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” she said to Maya, “to have your father in your life.”

  “Unlike your own dad, right?”

  “Right,” said Brenna, who still couldn’t open her eyes.

  “So why can’t you talk to Dad? You have way crappier memories of other people, but you don’t refuse to look at them. ”

  Another text. Brenna took a look at her phone:

  Are you okay?

  “It isn’t the crappy memories that are hard, honey,” she said. “It’s the good ones.”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  “I mean it, Maya. Maybe when you’re older, you’ll understand.”

  “No,” she said. “I meant, okay, Mom, there it is.” Maya pointed at the bakery, which loomed just across the street, an unruly line forming in the front. “I can take it from here.”

  “I’m not going with you? I was sort of looking forward to seeing Faith. It’s been a while.”

  Maya said something, too quiet for Brenna to hear.

  “What?” Brenna said, but then she looked closer at her daughter, followed her line of vision.

  Maya repeated, “Faith couldn’t make it today,” just as Brenna saw him, toward the end of the line. Jim. Maya said, “I . . . uh . . . She called my cell and explained. Some interview got postponed or pushed back to today or something . . .”

  Jim was wearing a deep green jacket she’d never seen, but it was the same color as the T-shirt he’d worn on July 9, 1997, pushing the stroller through Central Park, the air thick and sticky and almost solid, smelling of hot dogs and wet sidewalk and sweat . . .

  Jim slips his arm around Brenna’s waist and pulls her close to him. “She’s out,” he whispers in Brenna’s ear, his breath soft at her neck as she looks down at their daughter, their sleeping, quiet daughter, her hands thrown up on either side of her head, surrendering to sleep . . .