Chapter 8
Abigail saw that Cleo was waiting for her at the door to the study, leaning in and inspecting it like she expected the floor to be covered in snakes.
“Weird room,” she commented, “I don’t remember what it looked like before, though—your dad always had the door closed.”
Stepping past her, Abigail nodded. “He did, yeah. He kept all his client files in here and used to say that it would be a treasure trove for identity fraudsters—as much as the government wants you to pay your taxes, they also want to be sure they have every single scrap of identification possible.”
A snort of laughter that didn’t fit Cleo’s well-put-together image burst from her, making Abigail laugh as well. She had closed the cabinet after Byron left; she hadn’t wanted to think about it, if she was being honest. Picking up the hairpin she had used last time, she lowered under the desk to try and press the button.
As her knees hit the floor, a flash of yellow caught her attention—she hadn’t forgotten about the envelope that was in the side compartment, but it had slipped her mind with all Cleo’s talk of being watched. Her breath caught in her throat and she coughed to clear it.
“You okay?” Cleo asked, a flurry of footsteps followed.
“Yeah,” Abigail replied, “I just, uh, forgot about this...”
Cleo was staring at her as she emerged, holding the slightly dusty envelope.
“This?”
“There’s a smaller compartment that opened first, down the side. It had this in it.”
The pair made their way to the couch on the other side of the room and sat down. The envelope was heavy and thick. Abigail noticed as she weighed it in her hands, trying to guess the contents. It was only a little dusty, so unless that compartment was almost airtight, it hadn’t been in there long. What if it was something she really couldn’t ignore? What if it was something her dad had hidden because one of his clients was committing tax fraud... Would someone committing tax fraud tell their accountant that? Her thoughts were muddled as she tried to reason with herself. She was already failing to deal with one life-altering question; she didn’t need another.
“You’re killing me here. Please just open it.”
Turning to Cleo, Abigail could see her friend really did look tortured. Abigail chuckled and slipped the hairpin into the tiny opening at the corner of the seal, pulling it along to tear the paper open. Fine dust particles filled the air, and tiny pieces of the disintegrating yellow paper floated down to settle on her black running leggings.
“Damn,” Cleo said, “do old envelopes have asbestos in them or what?”
She smiled, “wouldn’t put it past someone to have made that, but I think it’s just old.”
As she peered into the envelope, Abigail felt herself get tongue-tied. Her stomach dropped, and she struggled to focus her eyes. Staring up at her from the weird yellow space were dozens of faces.
“What!?” Cleo exclaimed, reaching for the envelope.
Abigail tipped the contents onto the couch. A heavy black sketchbook slid out onto the couch, followed by scraps of paper, photographs, and a rain of fine confetti.
As she reached out to touch the scraps of paper, she realized that they weren’t paper—they were cut-up photographs. She picked one up and handed it to Cleo, who looked from the strip of photograph and back up to Abigail’s face a few times before sucking on her teeth, making a loud smacking sound at the end.
“You... you agree this is weird, right?”
Abigail blinked at her friend, “Uh... yeah.”
She picked up a few more strips of photographs, which were cut into irregular shapes in order to follow the outline of her body and face. She hadn’t imagined the faces she had seen inside the envelope. All of the scraps seemed to be remnants of photographs she had been in—with every other person cut out.
In her hand was a stack of six meticulously sliced photographs of her teenage self.
“Oh good,” Cleo said, “because honestly, I think I have some kind of duty of care as a nurse to get you seen if you couldn’t see how weird this is.”
Against her will, Abigail laughed at the words despite the serious tone in Cleo’s voice.
“That’s my sketchbook,” she said. “I remember it. My parents told me they didn’t see me drawing much that summer, so that was why I didn’t have an active sketchbook.”
“What!? You were always drawing!” Cleo exclaimed, “How did you believe that?”
Abigail shrugged, “Not sure, maybe it had something to do with a crash where I nearly died, losing my memories of the prior several months, moving away from the only home I’d ever known, and still trying to start college on time?”
Regretful tension seized her chest—she hadn’t meant to be so caustic—and she glanced at Cleo and braced for an accusation or hurt look.
“Hah! Well, yes, that might have skewed the odds slightly,” Cleo said with a giggle.
Abigail averted her gaze quickly; if Cleo hadn’t noticed, she might have gotten away without an awkward apology. She reflected for a second on the uncomfortable feeling of having expected to be scolded in some way and being unsure of how to act. Nope, she turned her mind away from that—she didn’t have the emotional energy to look too hard at that right now.
Tentatively, Abigail flipped open the cover of the sketchbook. Drawn in typical anime styling, a pastel scene of a beach filled the front page. Three figures sat lazing on their towels while two stood closely together, waist-deep in the water. The words Last Summer of Freedom sat below the image on the front page in bright yellow, each letter outlined in heavy black. Abigail couldn’t help but smile.
“You cartooned us?” Cleo asked, peering over the edge of the sketchbook.
Abigail laughed, suppressing the urge to hide her drawings.
“I did, yes,” she answered, “a lot of the time, I’d draw something we had done that day and turn it into a scene from an imaginary anime series—hence the subtitles.”
Cleo nodded, but she hadn’t been as into the Japanese cartoons as Abigail and Jacob had been. A memory flashed through Abigail’s mind, her and Jacob trying to convince Cleo and the others to just give it a chance—they had, but it had soon descended into Abigail and Jacob watching while the others just hung out.
“Right,” Cleo said, “well, you were pretty good—always said you should keep it up.”
She felt her face tinge red as she flipped through the sketches. That was not a conversation she wanted to have. The scenes were interspersed with pages and pages of small sketches or studies. For ten pages in a row, teenage Abigail had done nothing but draw noses.
“Oh I remember this one,” she said excitedly, pointing at a drawing of an ice cream shop seen from above where the five figures were crowded around the glass pointing at different flavors.
“Yeah?” Cleo said, “like properly or in flashes?”
“Properly,” Abigail replied, “It was the first memory that came back to me—which my specialist told me later was odd because it didn’t happen either close to the accident or soon after my most distant memory, which apparently is more common.”
The two fell silent as she flipped through the pages; she realized that there really weren’t that many days that she remembered. Then they came to a series of loose sketches, then nothing but blank pages. With a sigh, she turned back through to the last few pages of sketching.
“Do you remember these?” Cleo asked, pointing at the dates.
Cocking her head to the side, Abigail focused.
“Oh,” she said, realizing, “no... not really. I was pretty sedated during the early part of my hospital stay.”
“Sedated and drawing though,” Cleo said, “and just as good as normal—that’s actually a really good likeness of Jacob.”
She tapped the sketch of a teenage boy hunched over on a chair.
Abigail coughed as her breath caught. It suddenly felt like the air was thick with smoke.
“He... he visited me?” she whispered, “I don’t—they told me that he didn’t...”
Deliberately avoiding looking at Cleo, Abigail flicked back and forth through the pages of sketches, finding at least three more cameos of Jacob sitting in a chair at the side or end of the bed, each one dated from her week in the hospital.
“Cleo... September fifth...”
“I see it.”
Next to the last sketch was a note written in blue pen and not in Abigail’s handwriting.
“I’m sorry, please forgive me. I can’t tell you everything, I shouldn’t even be here, just know that I didn’t mean to get you hurt. We could have made it, you know? I’d have married you in a heartbeat. I’m sorry.”
Reading it out felt wrong, as if it should never have been vocalized, and her voice cracked at the last sentence.
“Oh my god...” Cleo muttered, “he... he must have written this before he...”
“Before he what?” Abigail asked sharply.
Cleo held her hands up defensively, “Come on, Abby! This definitely reads like a suicide note...”
“No, it doesn’t!” she snapped. “It’s an apology, that’s all. It’s dramatic and angsty—you know how teenagers are—but it doesn’t mean anything.”
She looked up at Cleo, desperate to see some kind of agreement or support in her friend”s face. All she saw was thinly veiled sympathy.
“At the very least, you have to admit it sounds like a goodbye...”
Abigail couldn’t bring herself to reply. It did sound like a goodbye. She bit her lip and silently turned it over in her mind.
A goodbye doesn’t have to mean suicide... right?she thought.
“Cleo... if I asked you to do something for me, would you?” Abigail hated how needy she sounded but didn’t have it in her to repeat the question.
Her friend blinked hard before rolling her eyes in an exaggerated way.
“Unless it’s super illegal or I’m likely to get hurt, obviously yes,” Cleo said.
Awkward...Abigail thought.
“Well, it might be a little illegal, I’m not sure,” she said, surprising Cleo.
“Oh, just a little?”
“Maybe... Could you have a poke around the records at the hospital? Not for like, details or anything but if there was a visitor log? Maybe if there was a... death certificate? For Jacob?”
Cleo sighed. Not like a dramatic, ladylike sigh from a costume drama but more like she needed something to give her a chance to think.
“It’s totally fine if not! Seriously, it doesn’t matter!”
“No, no, it does,” Cleo cut her off, “and I don’t think visitor logs are a thing... but death certificates are public record, sort of. Let me have a look, okay?”
Abigail swallowed down the knot in her throat, “Thank you.”
The women fell silent for a moment, both staring at the drawing.
“But I thought you didn’t think he was dead?” Cleo asked quietly.
With a shrug, Abigail tried to sound casual, “I don’t, but if I’m going to find out what happened to me that summer, I need to start with the simplest explanation first.”