The story was moving too fast. Abby wanted to slow it down. “Where did you get the gun you used?”
“I bought it when I first moved to California. Even back then, everyone talked about crime. I was brought up in a small town in Oregon where people kept their doors unlocked. So I was scared. I never thought-never thought I would turn out to be the criminal, myself.”
“Okay,” Abby said softly. “So, once you recovered from surgery
…?”
“The psychiatrists started in on me. Trying to get me to remember. I didn’t, you see. Didn’t remember any of it. That evening was a total blank. Amnesia, the product of posttraumatic stress-that’s how they diagnosed it. Would have been simpler to say there are some things a person just can’t stand to face. Are you thirsty?”
The unexpected question caught Abby up short. “I’m okay.”
“Well, I’m thirsty. I haven’t talked so much a long time.”
She went into the kitchen, and Abby followed, waiting while Andrea poured herself a tall glass of lemonade. The kitchen was dark and windowless. There was no sunlight in this house, and Abby now knew why.
“Anyway,” Andrea said after a long swallow, “they said I’d had a psychotic break. I’d been in a fugue state. I hadn’t known what I was doing. Temporary insanity. Which was true, of course. It had to be true. No rational person would have done what I did. No one who was not insane…”
She took another gulp of lemonade. Ice clinked in the glass. Her hand was shaking.
“But I wonder, does that absolve me of guilt? If I wasn’t myself when I did it, does that mean I’m not responsible? And if I’m not, who is? Someone must be-or something. A sin of that magnitude must have a cause. And the cause must be me or something inside me, something hidden that came into the light just that one time…”
“A demon,” Abby said, understanding.
Andrea nodded, her eyes dark and sad. “We fool ourselves by thinking we’re in control of our actions. Then something like this happens, and we realize we’ve never had control. There are only urges and impulses that move us, like-like currents under the sea, like a riptide, an undertow, and they drag us where we never meant to go.”
Abby was beginning to wish she’d asked for some lemonade. Her mouth was dry. “Were you put on trial?”
Andrea answered with a shake of her head. “I was ruled incompetent. Remanded to the custody of a mental institution. I stayed there for twelve years.” She let those words settle in the air like a sentence of doom. “And they worked with me. They got me to remember. They brought back the memory of what I did that night. Thanks to them, I can relive it whenever I like. That’s what twelve years of treatment brought me. A memory I never wanted.”
“Unless you remember,” Abby said, “you can never move past it.”
Andrea’s tongue clucked. “You sound just like them. You could be a psychiatrist yourself.”
“I earned a degree in that field. Never got licensed, though.”
“Apparently you don’t believe in licenses.”
“I’m a free spirit.”
“Yes, I think you are. I sensed that about you when we met. It made me envy you. I may have been a free spirit once. I can’t recall. It was so long ago.” She looked away. “It’s a lie, anyhow-what you said.”
“What’s a lie?”
“That by remembering, I can move past it. I can never move past it. Remembering only etches the pain deeper. It doesn’t resolve anything. It doesn’t bring closure.” Her tone was hollow. “There can never be closure.”
“How about forgiveness?”
“Never that, either.”
Abby touched Andrea’s arm, a light touch, the outreach of one human being to another. “People do things in a state of psychosis that have nothing to do with their moral values or their character.”
Andrea didn’t withdraw from the touch, but neither did she seem comforted by it. “So I shouldn’t blame myself? But I took out the gun. I loaded it. I pulled the trigger. So who gets the blame? The demon who possessed me-that’s what I’d like to think. But that demon was part of me, was in me.” Now she pulled free of Abby’s hand. “And somewhere it still is.”
“The doctors must have felt otherwise, or they wouldn’t have released you.”
Her shoulders lifted listlessly. “They said I was no longer a danger to myself or others. They let me go. I spent six months in a halfway house. Then I was on my own. I didn’t want to be anywhere near California. So I moved to Florida. It was about as far away as I could get. I rented a cheap place, and did some entry-level jobs. It was all right. I was almost happy at times. I would walk on the beach in the evening and feel… almost whole.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t stay there.”
Andrea looked at her. “So am I, really. I don’t understand it, myself. But last year I started to feel… started to feel I had to come back. Had to be in California again. I don’t know why. There’s nothing for me here. Nothing but memories… bad memories…”
“So here you are.”
“Yes. Here I am. My parents died years ago. They left enough money for me to buy this house and pay my bills without working anymore, as long as I didn’t indulge in any extravagances. Of course, I had no desire to indulge myself. I only wanted to be left alone. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“And have you been? Left alone, I mean.”
“Not at first. When I was in the halfway house, they would still come after me-the newspaper people, the magazine people, the TV people. They wouldn’t let me be. Most of the public had forgotten by then, but those people would never forget. To them I was an open sore, and all they could do was scratch and make me bleed.”
“That’s why you changed your name.”
Andrea smiled a little, in acknowledgment of this small victory, this successful deception. “Yes. I found a way. It was illegal, but
… well, I suppose you know all about that kind of thing. The name you gave me was an alias. You probably have documents to back it up, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So do I. By the time I moved to Florida, I was Andrea Lowry. No one tracked me down. No one recognized me. It was… wonderful.”
“One more reason to stay in the Sunshine State.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But something drew me back. Still, I've kept a low profile. No one has intruded on me or questioned my past. I did worry that the absence of any credit history would prevent me from buying this house, but I was paying cash out of the inheritance, so the seller didn't care.”
“They wouldn't have cared, anyway,” Abby said. “A blank credit history simply means you have no record of defaults. There are no red flags. That's all they ever look for.”
“I knew you'd be an expert on it. How many identities do you have?”
Abby had actually lost count. “I’ve used a few,” she answered vaguely.
“Do you enjoy it?”
“Excuse me?”
“Changing your identity. Becoming someone else.”
“I guess I do.” Oddly, she’d never thought about it before.
Andrea seemed unsurprised. “I thought I would enjoy it. I thought-this is how naive I was-I thought it would make me free. Of course it didn't.”
“But the reporters couldn't find you.”
“True, I was free of them. But that wasn’t freedom. I was still the same person, only with a different name. I had the same memories, the same bad dreams-and the same good dreams, which were worse than nightmares, because they would never last, and I would wake up, and the children wouldn’t be there after all, and it wasn’t their hair I was smelling, only my pillow…”
Abby almost reached out again, but stopped herself, knowing the gesture would be rejected. “You may not believe me,” she said, “but I think you’ve suffered enough. There’s a statute of limitations on any kind of pain, any
