It’s all standard, but there’s an energy about her that makes me glad she was back on shift before I was discharged. After spending so much time with Xavier, I’ve come to look at people differently. I know I’ll never be able to see them through his eyes. I have a strong connection with him and can understand him better than anyone else, but I know in the greater scheme of things I’ll never really know exactly how he experiences everything around him. But what I’ve learned is that he feels things. He feels people.

  I can’t explain it. He’s tried—which, admittedly, poses a challenge, considering the basic paradox of trying to explain what is a normal, everyday experience to someone who doesn’t understand it and has a fully different normal, everyday experience that you don’t understand. But I’ve scraped together enough little pieces of it that I recognize how the way a person he encounters feels changes the way he interacts with them.

  Most earn a fairly neutral response. Or at least Xavier’s version of neutral, which doesn’t always come across great. Others are instantly rejected, as if a thick wall drops down between them and Xavier, keeping them from getting anywhere near him. Those are people he wants nothing to do with and never will. He is an incredible person who I adore, but in a lot of ways, Xavier is not people-friendly. He’s the human equivalent of those do-it-yourself furniture building instructions that are nothing but line drawings, tend to give paper cuts, and come with no customer service phone number.

  There is also the small handful of people who get a different response from him. These are the rare few he’s drawn to. There’s no particular rhyme or reason. It’s not a certain type of person, or a way he has to encounter them for it to happen. It’s not a sexual or romantic situation. There’s just something that very occasionally shows up in someone that pulls him. These are the people he wants to be close to, that he wants to touch because, as he’s said, it fills something in him. There are degrees of trust in Xavier, and these are the people who get his full trust, his absolute transparency.

  And in between the neutral and these chosen few are the ones he likes, those he may at some point bond to if given enough time and all the right circumstances. He can see something in them. It might not mean they will play an important role in his life in the grand scheme of things, but they are a little pinprick of light in a world that can seem very dark for him. These are the compulsively huggable ones. He doesn’t know them, he doesn’t need to, and it won’t affect him in any way to just walk away from them when their time together is over. But he wants to hug them.

  Cady is huggable.

  She has an energy that is warm and nurturing, and instantly likable. She’s exactly what a nurse should be.

  We get to the door and she smiles at me.

  “If you need anything, you know where to find me,” she says.

  I’m not sure what she means, but I nod and smile back.

  “Thank you. I appreciate you taking care of me. And keeping me from going out of my mind,” I say.

  “Any time.”

  She waves and walks back toward the nurse’s station as I go through the door to the waiting area. The officers are sitting at the edges of the cushions in two of the blue-upholstered wood frame chairs organized around the room in small clusters. They aren’t sitting directly beside each other and aren’t talking. Just looking at them, it seems like they are in their own bubbles, buffered from the other. If it wasn’t for the uniforms, it wouldn’t even look like they were associated.

  They stand and I hold up my prescriptions. “I need to fill these, then we can go.”

  I choose to ignore Jones rolling his eyes.

  Xavier

  “What are we singing today, X?”

  Xavier looked up as Nicole walked through the gate into the backyard. Her enormous round black sunglasses made her look like a fly, and on anyone else, the vibrant orange and lime green pattern against the cream of her knee-length dress would overwhelm him, but somehow on her, it worked. She took a sip from the thick plastic straw in the cup in her hand. It was a coordinating shade of orange, which he appreciated.

  “I’ve been on a ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head’ kick the last couple of days,” he told her as she came to the glider swing where he was sitting and dropped down beside him. “Still there.”

  She nodded. “My grandpappy used to sing that when I was little. While he was whittling. He’d sit out on the porch and sing and make little things to put around the house.”

  “Was he good at it?”

  “The whittling or the singing?” Nicole asked.

  “Both,” Xavier said.

  “No. Come on, let’s sing. You get it started.” She bounced her head to Xavier singing the first line. He liked watching the tight dark brown and golden blonde coils tumbling down from her head spring in response to the movements. He finished the line and she started. “And just like… that guy… something… something about a bed? I don’t think I remember the words.”

  “Feet too big for his bed,” Xavier filled in for her.

  Nicole made a face. “That doesn’t sound right.”

  “It is.”

  “It doesn’t make sense. How could his feet be too big for his bed? Is the bed too short? Does he have some sort of medical condition? Wouldn’t it be that all of him is too big? Why are we discriminating specifically against his feet?” she asked.

  “Maybe there’s some kind of dysphoria happening involving his feet,” Xavier suggested. “He could be tempted to Cinderella himself.”

  She took another sip of her drink. “I don’t think shoes would help in this situation. And what’s with making those shoes out of glass? What kind of patriarchal bullshit is that? No woman is going to be able to go out and do her little dancing thing all night while wearing some glass on her feet.”

  “Glass has no give.”

  “None.”

  “I was actually talking about cutting off his toes or his heel to make his feet more likely to fit. In this case, fit in his bed,” Xavier said.

  That gave her pause. “Excuse me, what?”

  “In the original telling of Cinderella, the stepsisters try on the slipper and it doesn’t fit, so one cuts off her toe and gets called out by the birds outside when they see the blood. Then the other sister does the same thing with her heel,” Xavier explained.

  Nicole pointed at him. “Alright, no. That—that’s unacceptable.”

  “The birds peck out their eyes at the end,” Xavier offered, his voice tilting up with hope the revelation would somehow make it better.

  Nicole gave a partial shrug. “I mean, they kind of had that coming, but still… wow. A lot to unpack there.”

  “Down with the man,” Xavier said, raising a fist.

  “That’s right,” Nicole added, mirroring his gesture. She took another sip of her drink. “Seriously, though, cutting off her toe?”

  “And a heel.”

  “And a heel.” She shuddered. “Holy hell. That took a dark turn I was not aware of.”

  “In the Little Mermaid the sea witch cuts Ariel’s tongue out and makes it so that every time she walks it feels like she’s walking on knives, and then at the end, she refuses to kill the prince even though he married someone else, and so she got turned into seafoam,” Xavier explained. He took a breath and let it out quietly. Nicole just stared at him. He felt the need to fill the silence. “Snow White had a poison comb shoved into her scalp.”

  “Well, that’s worse than biting a poison apple. But at least the Queen gets the bejeezus scared out of her by a thunderstorm and ends up falling off a cliff, so she gets hers,” Nicole replied.

  “In the original, she showed up to Snow White’s wedding and the guests forced her into a pair of iron shoes that had been heated over coals and then made her dance until she died.”

  “They what?”

  “There isn’t a princess involved so I don’t know if you’ll count it, but Hansel and Gretel was written in response to the Great Famine and people really abandoning their children in the woods when they couldn’t feed them. Or eating them,” Xavier went on.

  Nicole nearly choked out the sip of the drink she had just taken.

  “Jiminy Cricket?”

  “I don’t remember him in any of those. But, you know, in the Pinocchio story…”

  “Nope. Nope. I don’t want to hear any more,” Nicole cut in, shaking her head and waving her vibrant cup. “You are not going to ruin any more of my childhood bedtimes by telling me he was carved out of a cursed hanging tree and stabbed people through the eye with his giant nose when they lied, or gave bad people giant splinters that got infected or some shit like that.”

  “I was going to say I liked his outfit,” Xavier said, his eyes slightly widened. “The top hat and tails. Blue was a bold choice. Unconventional. Usually people go for black or charcoal. But I suppose it makes sense. He’s not a person. He’s a cricket.”

  “I thought you meant the outfit the puppet wears,” Nicole said.

  Xavier shook his head. “I don’t think I could pull off lederhosen.” He swiped his hands back and forth across his thighs. “Short.”

  Nicole opened her mouth like she was going to say something but thought better of it and closed it again. She paused for a second, then tilted her head to the side.

  “You want to go bake something, X? Some cupcakes?” she asked.

  “I do enjoy a cupcake,” he mused.

  “Cupcakes it is.” Nicole stood and started toward the back door. “Maybe we could even add a few sprinkles.”

  Xavier stopped and she turned to him with a questioning raise of her eyebrows. “I’m not a child.”

  “Oh, Xavier, I—”

  “I can have as many sprinkles as I want.”

  Nicole smiled. “Yes, you can. Come on.”

  “Maybe you can meet Doughregard Jackson Pickett Burnside. He’s new.”

  “I’m still not in that place, X,” Nicole said.

  He nodded and they continued to the door. Just before they got there, he stopped.

  “Nicole?” She stopped and turned around, making a questioning sound. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  Nicole smiled. “I am, too.”

  “I like you more than Bellamy. Don’t tell Emma.”

  “Well, I don’t know who that person is, so I don’t think there’s much risk of that.”

  Xavier walked up to her and wrapped his arms around her. The hug she gave him in return smelled like fruit and vanilla and filled him up a little more.

  Considering that I was in and out of consciousness in the back of the ambulance while going from the park to the hospital, I don’t recognize what’s around us as we head that way. I’m not sure how long it will take to get there and that causes little bubbles of anxiety to burst and fall in shards to the pit of my stomach. I don’t like feeling this out of control. I don’t like not knowing where I am or having a way to get away. Being with the officers is far from comforting.

  Harris got a shirt out of the trunk of his car and tossed it to me before we got in, explaining he keeps a stash there for people he encounters who could benefit from a fresh shirt. Images of the kinds of people that may be flash through my head and I’m acutely aware that Jones believes I should probably be listed among them. Wearing a clean shirt feels better, but also makes me feel a little like I am one step from a jail cell, and that’s not my favorite feeling.

  We park in a small parking area that is little more than a dirt clearing a few yards from a trailhead. I get out of the car and Harris gestures toward the trail.

  “This is the most direct way to get to where you were found,” he explains. “The ambulance had to park near the reception center because it’s easier to access for large vehicles, but this is a shorter trip just on foot.”

  I don’t know if he feels I need the justification because he’s just that kind of person, the kind who wants to give context to everything and make sure everyone around him feels informed so there are no questions, or if there’s a test hidden in the choice to park here and the explanation. Maybe he’s waiting to see if there’s some flicker of recognition in my eyes when I see the area, or if I argue with him about where we are in relation to where I woke up and the proximity of this lot versus the reception post. Maybe he’s planning on dropping back while we walk to see if I can navigate the paths myself and get us back to where I was, proving I am actually more familiar with the surroundings than I’ve said.

  It doesn’t bother me to think he might not trust me. I wouldn’t expect him to trust me fully. And if he didn’t at least try to gauge my actual memory, he wouldn’t be doing his job well enough. I know that’s part of this. Bringing me here isn’t just about them showing me that there was nothing in the woods when they came to search. If it was that simple, if they didn’t find anything at all and both really thought for sure I’d made it up, it would have ended with the visit back to the hospital to tell me there was no dead woman anywhere near where I was found by those hikers.

  The fact that they agreed to bring me here, and that both of them, not just Harris, seem eager to come back with me and let me walk them through that afternoon tells me there’s something in the back of their minds. They aren’t totally convinced that there’s nothing happening here. Even if Jones believes I am half-cracked and showed up at the hospital raving rather than telling the truth, he is still here. He didn’t just tell me there was nothing and leave it at that. He’s here. Which means he still thinks I could have something to tell them.

  This is strategic. Every word and movement is intentional.

  Coming here is the first of what could eventually become an investigation—into me. They are seeing if I was lying about having the memory lapse and not being able to recall why I was at the park or what happened to me in the more than twelve hours that I likely lay there in the woods. They want to see how I react to being here, how I move around the space, and how I respond to them being there. Focusing just on what someone says during an investigation only gives a limited perspective. It’s the nonverbal communication that tells the rest of the story.

  A good investigator knows to watch the person’s face, to look into their eyes and watch how they move, where they look, how their hands settle at their sides or compulsively touch what’s around them. It’s in these tiny movements, the way a person moves toward something in a space, avoids an obstacle they shouldn’t know about, avoids looking at something that could be incriminating, or tensely watches the other people who are there to see what they are doing, that hidden truths are revealed.

  I’m not hiding any of those truths. At least, not where I can access them. I’ve told them everything I’m able to bring up to the surface of my mind. I’m searching and wondering right alongside them.

  We walk to the head of the trail and I purposely linger back to allow them to go first. I know how to read trail markers, and from the crude map carved into the wood sign just before the trail opens into the woods, there aren’t a lot of options once you get on the main trail. I could have gone in first and still found my way to where I passed out even without knowing where I am. But I’m keeping up with the show. I want the officers to see that I’m following them to where they searched rather than leading them to something.

  The walk is quiet as we make our way down the trail. In other circumstances, it would be peaceful. Hiking through the woods like this used to be a favorite activity of mine. It’s been years since I was able to spend much time doing it, and I can’t exactly relax and find particular enjoyment in it this time. Instead, I’m looking around with every step, waiting for something to trigger more flashes of memory. They’re there. I know they are. Bits have already cracked through. I just need something else to jostle whatever is blocking the rest and get it out of the way.

  Nothing does it. Aside from looking very much like every other national or state park I’ve visited, nothing particularly strikes me as familiar in this section of the trail. It could mean it’s just another piece of memory that was wiped out by the lapse. Or it could mean I was never actually in this section. I still don’t know how I got to where I was in the woods. For all I know, this stretch is completely new to me.

  It still doesn’t look familiar when Jones stops and holds out his arms like he’s encompassing the entire area.

  “Here it is,” he announces. “This is where they found you.”

  “Do you recognize it?” Harris asks.

  I glance around. It honestly doesn’t look much different than the rest of the trail and the woods that flank it.

  I notice lines in the dirt of the trail and realize they are tire impressions from the cart they say came to bring me to the ambulance. I follow them to where they stop and then look to the edge of the trail. Some broken saplings and torn undergrowth mark where I clawed my way up the embankment and onto the path.

  “Right here,” I point. “This is where I climbed up.”

  Harris nods. “Yes.”

  “What’s the easiest way to get to where I was when I woke up?” I ask. “Just down the way I climbed?”

  “That’s certainly the most direct route. There’s another trail that veers off the main trail and heads down toward a lower camping area that is a flatter, easier terrain to get to that spot. But it’s technically a further distance,” Harris says.

  “Then I guess we’re climbing down,” I say.

  “Careful,” Jones warns from behind me in a tone that belies absolutely no true concern. “You wouldn’t want to hurt your leg more.”

  I turn to look at him over my shoulder. “I’ll be fine. I’ve been through worse.”

  Like it always does when I think about the injuries my body has gone through, my brain briefly goes back to the days and nights in the desert and the brutal things I saw and experienced. I don’t let it linger there for long. I’ll never forget any of it. I don’t even want to. That’s a part of me and something I always need to hold onto. But I don’t need to sit with it anymore.