Dead of Winter

Chapter 7

After Mia bundled Charlie off to bed, I retrieved my New Horizons "homework" from the tote, hoping to divert my thoughts from the night's unpleasantness. Ten minutes later, I still hadn't found the section where Carville described reconsolidation in concise detail.

Memory refuses to lie quietly within the storehouse of the mind...

Carville's words ringing in my head, I scanned the procedural packet's glossy pages. Although I hadn't believed a word he’d said, thinking he'd been trying to intimidate me, he'd been right. Memory wasn't something stored in a particular place, but in various places throughout the brain. Sensory experiences, shaping and reshaping themselves over time, actually did trigger changes in the brain's neuronal molecules, especially the way these connected to one another.

It is a dangerous, slippery, malleable thing...

Cells and synapses, possessing some innate ability to tell time, affected an individual's learning capacity based on the strength of their connections. Nor was memory limited to a single event. Each fragment of experience was like a miniature timeline. While those timelines could (and often did) nest within each other, they weren't compartmentalized, and were never idle.

To imagine that, I tried picturing a set of babushka dolls—what would happen if they underwent a constant mutation. Painted faces melting, expressions melding, they ended up resembling watercolor paintings someone left out in the rain. How would Nisha's recollections seep into that shifting, experiential catalogue to alter my brain and its chemistry?

If her memories were viable, would they be recognizable images, or just a series of abstract impressions? Picturing the worst-case scenario, I imagined a host of unrelated fragments blending in interesting yet accidental patterns, like swirls of color on marbleized paper. Evocative but uninformative; beautiful but unusable.

I just hoped Nisha's memories were still viable, still intact. It was the only way to know what had happened to her. But with discovery and eventual justice for my innocent sister, I knew a maybe-unwanted compartmentalization of her past would have to follow. Closure was never a neat and tidy thing, just as the muffled thud of her pink coffin lid after her wake was not an ending. To reveal the past, the secrets sealed within its stir of echoes, meant reopening old wounds, tearing time's scabs away to let them bleed afresh.

More than just reopening, I thought, recalling another of Carville's admonitions. Once Nisha's past attached itself to my unconscious, her thoughts, feelings, and experiences would become mine. Her memories would be my memories.

Was he right? Would taking part of her into my consciousness—knowing—change me that much? So much, that when it was over, as he'd inferred, looking in a mirror, I might no longer recognize myself? In the end, would it ever be enough? Would I be smart enough, strong enough?

Words blurred on the page. I let them, allowing a profusion of thoughts to collect upon me like invisible snow drifts. Drifts that now made my neck and shoulders ache. It'd been snowing back then, too. The day Nisha disappeared forever.

Casting my mind back, I now revisited our last conversation. It'd been a Friday in February of our Senior year. I'd come home early and caught her packing a bag.

"What are you doing here, Amara? Don't you have Art this period?"

Although the irritation in her voice was palpable, something in her eyes raised alarm bells in my head. "They canceled classes after lunch because of the storm."

She didn't stop packing and didn't look out the window. "It's not snowing that much."

I threw myself across the bed. "Are we going somewhere, Nisha? Please tell me it's not another college tour!" We'd been visiting colleges every weekend since October, but I thought our visit to SUNY Plattsburgh wasn't until the next weekend.

"He called me last night," she said, her tone frothy with portent.

I didn't have to ask who he was. The dreamy, faraway stare that always fell across her eyes like a veil was a dead giveaway. She always got like that whenever she mentioned him. Her nameless, faceless mystery man.

"Things between us are getting serious." With a dramatic sigh and shiver, she crammed the last of her toiletries into the pack and zipped it shut. "We're going to spend the weekend together!"

Not willing to believe what I'd just heard, I sat bolt upright. "By serious, you mean...?"

"I don't expect you to understand," she said with a sniff, "but we need privacy, and what Dad doesn't know, won't hurt him." Nisha plucked a keyring with a brass tag from the quilt and jangled the keys at me. "What could be more private than the cabin?"

"Loon Lake? Are you out of your mind? If Father finds out—"

"To hell with him and his rules and his stupid stories!" She wheeled about, arms akimbo. "In all the years he's been telling us how dangerous Loon Lake is in winter, has he ever defined that so-called danger? Sure, it's in the middle of nowhere and it's cold; other than that, there's nothing there in winter that's not there in summer. He's out of his freaking mind!"

"How well do you really know this guy, Nisha?" I began picking at the quilt. The gold topstitching had worn thin in more than a few places. Discolored batting poked through its frayed pink and green squares. "Where'd you meet? Where does he go to school? What's his name?" I inched closer to her. "Could you at least tell me his name?"

"There's no time for that." Finished with the pack, she began rummaging through our shared dresser for a thick sweater. "I need to leave before he gets here. You know, he always leaves work early on Fridays. If he asks, just tell him I've gone skiing with a friend."

"Which friend? Because he's going to ask, Nisha!"

"Make up a name, any name. It's not like he'll know—or care. He's been so preoccupied with his research; I doubt he'd notice if one of us dropped dead at his feet." She pulled a skin-tight black turtleneck over her head, flipped her long, raven locks over one shoulder, then plopped beside me on the bed. "This weekend is important to me, Amara."

"Yeah, I get that, but—"

"Just promise you won't tell Dad."

The last words she'd ever said to me.

Ten years later, I still regretted making that promise.

Booklet still in hand, I changed position with a grunt, uncurling from a side-lying position and inching my way to a firmer seat with my back against the couch arm. Pillows plumped in all the right places, I curled up, intending to settle back into reading, when a noise from outside startled me.

For a moment, I sat frozen in fear, fingers frigid and tingling, heart quickening to a roar I could feel in my ears. More scratching? I leaned forward, listening.

No, this sound, more prolonged, was harder, heavier. More of a scraping or grating…

Prying?

I sat bolt upright, held my breath, and listened.

When it came again, accompanied by a low rumble, curiosity overtook fear. I bounded to the living room's wide curved window. Lights splashed across the drive, illuminating the unrelenting snowfall in long horizontal shafts.

A snowplow.

Though embarrassed, I breathed a sigh of relief. God, how stupid, letting the damned snowplow unsettle me! What was I expecting, Taryn's assailant returning with a crowbar to break in and bludgeon the rest of us? With revolvers in both nightstands, he wouldn't get far. Not if I could help it.

I flopped back on the couch to resume reading, bypassing sections about selective memory's applications in various trauma therapies. Although they looked interesting, those procedures didn't address my immediate concerns.

Nearing the section's end, my gaze fell on the subheading, Special Considerations. Its paragraphs, advising prospective patients against person-to-person reconsolidation, presented a laundry list of harmful side effects. Hallucinations, psychosis, homicidal aggression: the author of the booklet had left no stone unturned. Below this, another section described the procedure in all its gory details.

Gory to me, at any rate; I hated needles. How Rory could handle them on the job, I'd never know. The sight of one, slim surgical steel in its protective plastic sleeve, made my skin crawl.

A few sentences later found me shuddering. Just my luck, the needle used for reconsolidation wasn't a simple hypodermic, but its larger, much more Machiavellian cousin.

An inducer.

Ooh, lucky me!

After cross matching, the patient would receive, along with a small transfusion, an instillation of donor cerebrospinal fluid (or CSF, according to the booklet). An essential transport medium, CSF, which collected in "cisterns," subarachnoid wells within the brain, contained the most viable memory deposits. Used as a secondary, though less-preferred medium—and again, only after crossmatching—was human blood.

Having witnessed Ferrilyn's spinal tab in the ER a year before, I'd developed an anathema bordering on the phobic when it concerned all things long, sharp, and for lack of a better, more adult word, stabby-jabbity.

The thin flexible needle they'd use for my procedure was almost a foot long!

I hoped I could use the "Twin Defense" to defer the whole crossmatching thing. If Carville thought he was going to shove a foot-long piece of surgical steel up my spinal column, he'd need to knock me out cold. Period. End of story. "Induction" was one memory I could live without!

If the procedure worked. According to the booklet, results could present in as little as twenty-four hours or take up to a week. But sometimes, again, in "rare instances," they might not materialize at all. With a direct genetic connection to my donor, being one of two peas from the same pod, the last one didn't worry me at all.

I tossed the book on the couch, thought about watching TV, decided against it, then glanced over at the dollhouse. Charlie had left all its lights on when she went to bed. Though Scarlett Cape still lay prone in the attic room, missing from the scene were the flowered shroud and doll who'd lain beneath it. I didn't recall Charlie moving her or the moment she placed one of her GI Joes in the living room armchair either, but there he sat, stiff-limbed, staring at the fire. Beneath its swaths of torn and faded tissue paper flames, a small bulb burned bright red. Sconces, set on either side of the fireplace, cast small distorted shadows over its stones.

Closing my eyes, I imagined myself back at the lodge again. Sensing, in excruciating detail, the sudden silence that would blanket the house whenever my father took up sentry duty for another night. My poor, aggrieved father, trusty twelve-gauge shotgun by his side. Maybe-drunk and maybe-delusional, his thin frame swallowed by his oversized black bathrobe robe.

Black as night to see in the night...

Charlie's rhyme shivered through my head. Then another voice, one from a recent and all-too painful past, soon subsumed her words.

But I didn't see as well as a father might. 

I couldn't keep her from that place, couldn't keep her from her fate.

Eyes squeezed shut against impending tears, I whispered back, "Where she ended, I will—"

No, Amara!

His voice, so close, so real, I could smell the whiskey on his breath and feel the pressure of each of his words in my ear.

"I will start!"

Burn the flesh and break the heart!

Nearby, something landed on wood with a loud thud. My eyes flew open.

Lights blazed in Loon Lake Dollhouse. Legs splayed, neck twisted at an odd angle, Scarlett Cape now lay on the polished tabletop.

Trembling, trying to tell myself a vibration from snow sliding off the long sloping roof had caused her fall, I tottered over to the dollhouse. After closing and locking its door, I kneeled down and reached behind the table to turn out its lights. What I saw sent me scuttling crab-like across the rug.

There was no plug in the light socket.