Exiled Page 17

  I believe this. It frightens me, so I believe it. You wanted me, sixteen-year-old me. And I wanted you, twenty-nine-year-old you. But you stayed away from me. Because you wanted to fuck me so hard I would cry. You stayed away. I wish you had succeeded.

  "And then the accident happened. It was in Manhattan. I still to this day do not know why you were there, in Manhattan. What you were doing. It was late. Past midnight. Cold. Wet. A fall day, a few months after the kiss. I was good, I was being good. Staying away. Keeping you safe from me. Keeping you out of my world. I was walking. I liked to walk, back then. I would walk to get something to eat, I would walk to meet clients, I would walk just to walk, so I could think. Of you, most often. Walking out the desire to find you and take you home and keep you. I didn't wait for the light. There were no cars, and I was preoccupied, so I just crossed, as I have a million times. But a car, an older green Impala. I remember the car. The rust on the front left wheel well. A crack in the windshield, low, near the base. A rock chip that spread, most likely. I froze. The car was barreling toward me, too fast to stop. That moment, it changed everything. If I'd just moved, if I hadn't frozen . . . things would be different.

  "The driver hit the brakes, swerved to try to miss me. The back tires hydroplaned on the wet cement, and the car kept coming toward me, this time sideways. I saw him, your father. Behind the wheel. I saw his mouth moving as he swore, or yelled, or something. I saw your mother in the front seat beside him. Screaming. And I saw you. In the back. I saw you.

  "Why did it have to be you? Of all the millions of people in the fucking city, in the whole fucking world, why did it have to be you? Why you?"

  Why me, indeed?

  You seem to choke on your words, on your breath. Scuff the toe of your fine Italian leather shoe against the concrete floor. "It would have been okay. I threw myself out of the way at the last second, and your car missed me, spinning through the intersection. But a pickup truck came through the intersection right then, from the left. T-boned your car. You were sitting behind your mother, or it would have killed you. It sent the car flying, rolling. I saw it. I fucking--I watched your car go tumbling like a goddamned Matchbox toy. The truck--I don't even know what happened to the truck, or the driver. Never bothered to even find out. I threw myself out of the way, but I got clipped by the truck as it went past. The side mirror hit my head and knocked me out. When I came to, your car was upside down a hundred feet away. It wasn't even recognizable as a car anymore. There was glass everywhere, and blood. I picked myself up and went over to your car, looked in. I saw your parents in the front--" You stop. Breathe carefully. "That's the only time something I've seen has made me vomit. Everything I've done, seen, been through . . . but what happened to your mother and father in that wreck was . . . awful. There are no words. But you weren't there. You weren't there. The backseat was empty. I don't know if you crawled out, or were thrown out. Still don't. I found you a good quarter mile away. Crawling on your belly. Bloody, incoherent, but crawling with this unstoppable determination. 'Ayuda me,' you said. 'Ayudalos.' Help them. 'Mama, Papa . . . ayudalos.'" You whisper the last three words, as I may have. Desperate, broken. "I picked you up. Carried you to the hospital. There were so many other accidents that night that things got lost in the shuffle. Paperwork was accepted half finished. The ER was a nightmare on earth. People bleeding, paramedics coming and going, ambulances everywhere, nurses just trying to get people into triage. It was a fucking battlefield. They took you from me. Asked about insurance and I said I'd pay cash, no insurance. That's all they cared about. I filled out your name, address, what little information I knew. Told them I was your boyfriend."

  "So the mugger . . . ?"

  "A lie."

  "I don't understand."

  "I know." You let out a breath. "When I came back the next day, you'd been moved out of the ER, out of the ICU. I still don't entirely know what happened. Reports got mixed up, I don't know. They did the surgery on you, and you seemed to be healing. There were so many accidents that night, other stuff, shootings, a stabbing, a million different patients, a million different people and families and investigations. Yours got . . . shuffled. Lost. Missed. I don't know. The car was totaled, and your parents were unrecognizable. Their dental records weren't in the system because they were from Spain; there was no ID in the car. Lost in the wreckage, forgotten at home. Just another John and Jane Doe, dead in a car accident, with no family to ask about them, no reason to look, not when there were murder victims and whatever, mysteries to solve. And you . . . you were alone. You went under the knife. You had your head shaved, all that beautiful hair shaved off. A nine-and-a-half-hour surgery, with no promise you'd recover. I came back the day after your surgery, and you were fine. I mean, not fine, but alive. Awake. Not really coherent, but alive. I don't know if you didn't remember the accident, or if you were too scared to ask about your parents, or if you were just in a daze from the anesthesia . . . I don't know. So much I don't know. Maybe the surgery was never actually successful and the fact that you weren't really lucid was a symptom of something wrong in your brain. They made me go home, and when I came back the next day, you were gone.

  "I went nuts. They had to sedate me, and when I woke up again, they told me what had happened. That you had gone unconscious, internal bleeding, put into a coma to preserve brain function. The bleeding had been stopped, but you weren't coming out of the coma. I sat by your bedside for a week. They made me leave. Six security guards physically and literally carried me out, put me in a cab, and told him to take me somewhere else. I don't remember much after that. Days, weeks maybe, I don't know. Just . . . gone. I went on a bender, stayed drunk. I don't remember any of it.

  "When I finally dried out, I went back to the hospital. You'd been moved again. This time to a long-term care facility. No one knew anything about you there except your name. And you were just a body in a bed. There'd been so many different floors, so many different nurses and doctors, charts moved around, whatever, by the time you were moved to the hospice, no one knew how you'd even gotten hurt. Or about me. I showed up claiming to be your boyfriend, and they let me in to see you. I bribed them, honestly. A nice little stack of hundreds, a sob story about how I just want to see my girlfriend. If you believe a lie, everyone else believes it too. I really did just want to see you. That's all I cared about. They let me in, and I sat down beside you, and I cried. I came back every day after that. Every day. I filled your room with flowers. I brought in a CD player and played music for you. I read books to you. I . . ."

  Another timeless, endless, fraught pause. A pregnant silence. Your shoulders lift, and you let out a breath, as if you'd been holding it despite all the words you've spoken, more words than I've ever heard anyone speak all at once, let alone you.

  "Jakob died in that room. Jakob starved to death. Wasted away. I ignored everything. When the various men and women who helped run the various parts of my little empire came to me, concerned that I was squandering everything I'd worked so hard to build, I sold it all off. Everything. I set all my whores free, as I told you. Set them up with houses and jobs and money. Piece by piece, Jakob vanished. There was a time, then, while you were in the coma . . . it's just . . . emptiness. I was no one. You've spoken of being no one, Isabel. And I understand what that feels like. All too well. No one knew my name. No one cared. You were in a coma, and it wasn't likely you'd ever come out of it. You were the only person on the face of the earth who knew me. Everyone else was . . . gone. Not dead, but they knew Jakob. And Jakob was gone. Months . . . it was months that not one person spoke to me, not one person said my name. The staff of the hospice was efficient, but they had a thousand other patients and you were just a half-dead girl in a coma with a crazy, unresponsive boyfriend. They ignored me. I kept to myself, so they just let me come and go as I wished. I slept there, many, many nights. I slept there--Jakob slept there, and at some point Caleb woke up in his place."

  I dare to break the spell woven by your tale. "How--" M
y throat seizes around the words. "How long? How long was I in the coma?"

  The glass of the window echoes your words. Reflects them, with your image, back to me.

  "Four years, three months, and nineteen days."

  THIRTEEN

  Four years, three months, and nineteen days.

  "You told me six months!"

  "I lied."

  "You told me there was a mugger!"

  "I lied."

  "You--you told me I had no name. That no one knew who I was. You told me--"

  You whirl. "I LIED!" You scream it, spittle flying.

  Your voice echoes like thunder, reverberates.

  "Why?" I back away from you. Emotions are at a boil within me, rising up into my throat like magma welling up the chute of a volcano and bursting against my teeth like vomit. "Why?"

  You sag backward against the window, like a hot-air balloon with the furnace extinguished. "I couldn't face telling you the truth. Your parents were dead. Cremated, I believe, or buried in an unmarked grave. Everything you knew was gone. You remembered nothing. Nothing. I couldn't just leave you there, without a single memory, without even your name. No one to ever visit you. You'd just waste away there. But what could I do? If I had told you the truth about yourself, what good would it have done? Your family's apartment was long gone, everything sold off or thrown away. I had no proof of anything. You, as Isabel de la Vega, existed only in my head. What would you do with that name, that identity? Nothing. It would be useless information. Like knowing the capital of New York is Albany, it would mean nothing to you. But for me . . . you were still Isabel. The girl I . . ."

  You trail off, an admission aborted. I wonder what you were going to say? The girl I--what?

  I am feeling so many things, I cannot even parse a single thought out. Anger. Confusion. Compassion; yes, for you. I understand. In your place, what would I have done? I ask myself this but come up with no answer.

  "And at first, you were merely this . . . body, alive, awake, but . . . empty. I don't know how to even describe you, in those first days. You couldn't speak. You were weak, your muscles essentially atrophied, although the staff had done at least the bare minimum to keep you from getting bedsores and complete atrophy. You weren't even really aware of yourself or me or anything. You were just . . . there."

  You push away from the window, wipe your face with your palm. "During the four years you were in the coma, I built my empire as Caleb Indigo. I created a whole new identity. New social security, new driver's license, a credit history, work history. It will hold up to even the most stringent investigation. I paid several fortunes to make sure Caleb Indigo was a complete and real human being with a life any detective or federal investigator would believe, no matter how closely they looked. There are even actors on retainer with entire albums full of doctored photographs and memorized, scripted memories of me, should someone go looking. Jakob Kasparek is dead, and Caleb Indigo is alive. He's real. He's me. I'm him. I became him, completely. I took speech therapy classes to eradicate my accent. I took acting classes to more fully realize my new identity as Caleb, to sell him as a person even to myself. Business classes to learn how to be a legitimate businessman, not just a pimp or dealer. I built a new empire from scratch. A better one. A legal one--well, mostly legal. But that's a different story. This is about you."

  "Is it?"

  You don't hear me. "By the time you woke up, I was lifetimes more wealthy than I'd ever been as Jakob. I was in the process of building a tower, a skyscraper of my very own. When it was clear you were awake and would not be suddenly regaining your memory, but that you were physically well, I took you out of the facility. Against their wishes, and against the rather vigorous objections of the doctor. That was the last time I signed my name as Jakob Kasparek. I signed you out, and they let me. I brought you to my partially finished tower and put you in an apartment, and brought therapists to you, to help you relearn to speak, to walk, everything. About this time was when I realized I couldn't tell you who you really were. You were different. You woke up . . . different. I don't know. The girl I had known was gone. You were twenty years old and had no identity."

  You glance at me, to make sure I'm listening. "I know you want to hear me admit that I saw it as my opportunity to . . . I don't know . . . create you to be the person I wanted you to be. And I suppose on some unconscious level there was an element of that. I helped . . . sculpt your new identity, but you chose it all. I didn't force it on you. I brought you to the museum as something to do, and you didn't want to leave. I wheeled you in your wheelchair from painting to painting, exhibit to exhibit. And you made me stop at the Madame X. That was real. I didn't do that. It was you. I sent you books, brought them to you, box after box after box. I brought all kinds of books. Classics, modern fiction, histories, biographies, crime, everything. And you chose what you wanted. You read what you wanted. And for two, almost three years, all I tried to do was help you . . . find yourself, I suppose. I taught you things, yes. Manners, bearing, presence. How to intimidate people. How to read people. I did not create Madame X--not alone. That was us, Isabel. I had no reason to think you'd ever regain your memories. So while I accept as valid your anger over what you perceive as me lying to you, that isn't quite fair. But then, life is not fair, is it?"

  "How old am I?"

  You blink, roll your shoulders, as if to shrug off the mantle of the past. "How old are you? Twenty-six."

  "And my birthday?"

  You smile, a faint, lukewarm thing, as if you've forgotten how. "July second, 1989."

  "And how old are you?"

  "I was born in 1976, in Prague, what is now the Czech Republic. I am thirty-nine years old."

  "So when we first met . . . ?"

  "You were fourteen and I was twenty-seven."

  "And when you first fucked me?"

  "This?"

  I lift my chin. "Yes, Caleb. This."

  You sigh. Pass your hand through your hair. You look so much younger than thirty-nine. Thirty, at most, I would guess. "You woke up when you were twenty, nearing twenty-one. It took . . . something like two and a half years of therapy before you were fully functioning, before you had complete autonomy over your speech, over fine and broad motor control, all that. In that time you were learning, reading, becoming Madame X."

  "Caleb."

  "I waited three years, Isabel--"

  "Was I a virgin?" I ask, cutting in over you.

  You wipe your face with both hands. "Isabel--"

  "Was I a virgin?" I demand again. "You told me I wasn't. And now you're telling me I was. I don't remember, and I can't believe anything you say, clearly. How am I supposed to sort the truth from the lies?"

  "You were a virgin. That's the truth."

  "Why lie about it?"

  A shrug, almost insouciant. "I didn't want to risk bringing up . . . all of this. Answering the questions I knew you'd have if you knew you were a virgin when we first slept together."

  "Call it what it was, Caleb--you fucking me."

  You lean close, suddenly fierce. "Oh no, Isabel. That's not what it was at all. You wanted it. You wanted me. You didn't know me, not as the man you'd known before the accident, but your body knew mine. You wanted me. So don't think you can pin that on me. I'll take responsibility for the lies, but I never took from you anything you didn't want to give me, sexually. Not then, at least."

  "How old was I?" I ask. "When you--when we first had sex?"

  "You were twenty-three. The first time I touched you sexually was on your twenty-third birthday."

  "Why then?"

  "You needed time to regain full mobility," you say, with a sigh and a shrug. "And I needed to make sure you weren't going to suddenly regain your memories. I lived in constant fear of that. I always have. I've dreaded and feared this day, when I would have to lay all this out for you. Try to make you understand . . . everything. I waited. Six years, I waited. I wanted you from the first moment I saw you that day on Fifth Avenue. I craved
you after you kissed me in the alley. I thought I might go crazy with the need for you. And then you were in the coma for four years, and I watched you age, day by day, yet remain the same. And then you woke up, and you were no one. So I had to help you rebuild yourself. Or not rebuild, but . . . create a self. I couldn't touch you. I knew I couldn't. You had no way of consenting, of knowing what you would be consenting to, and that was not something I took lightly. But as the years went by it became clear to me that despite not knowing me, not remembering me, your body remembered your attraction to me. That was the same. You wanted me. You didn't seem to know what to do with it or how to act on it or what it meant, though. So I resisted it. Fought off my need for you, every single day for three years. I bathed you when you were helpless. Dressed you. Fed you. Taught you to do all those things for yourself. I was faced with the temptation of your naked body every single day, but I couldn't touch you. Couldn't have you. You wanted me, I wanted you, but I couldn't have you."

  You halt. Swallow hard. Turn away. Scrape your fingers through your hair yet again. Fist your hand at your side. Clear your throat.

  "My vow, to you and to myself, was that I would wait until your twenty-third birthday. If you were totally well, independent, and in possession of all your faculties and motor skills, and still showed evidence of desiring me, I would allow myself to explore a physical relationship with you. But not until then."