Recursion(41)

But the chair has been unmade, she has vanished, and there is no threat to memory and time but the knowledge in her own mind, which she will take to the grave.

The thought of killing herself has occurred to her on more than one occasion. It would be the ultimate insurance policy against Slade finding her and forcing her cooperation. She’s gone so far as to make potassium chloride tablets in the event that day ever comes.

She keeps them with her at all times, in a silver locket around her neck.



* * *





Helena parks in a visitor’s space near the entrance and steps out into the sweltering August heat. The grounds are well kept. There are gazebos and water features and picnic areas. She wonders how her father is affording this place.

She checks in at the main desk and has to write her name on a visitor’s sign-in form. As the admin makes a copy of her driver’s license, Helena looks around, nervous.

She’s been three years on this new timeline. Slade’s false memories of their time together on his oil platform would have found him early in the morning on July 6, 2009, the same moment (in the previous timeline) when she died in the deprivation tank and returned to the memory of Jee-woon coming to her lab at Stanford.

If Slade wasn’t looking for her prior to that, he will be now. In all likelihood, he’s paid off someone here to alert him if Helena ever turns up.

Which she just has.

But she didn’t come here ignorant of the risk.

If Slade or one of his men tracks her down, she’s prepared to handle it.

Reaching up, she clutches the locket hanging from her neck.

“Here you are, hon.” The admin hands Helena a visitor’s badge. “Dorothy’s in Room 117, end of the hall. I’ll buzz you through.”

Helena waits as the doors to the Memory Care wing slowly open.

The smells of cleaning products and urine and cafeteria food comingle to conjure the memory of the last time she set foot in an adult-care facility—twenty years ago, during the final months of her grandfather’s life.

She passes a common area, where residents in a heavily medicated stupor sit around a television showing a nature program.

The door to 117 is ajar, and she eases it open.

By Helena’s math, it’s been five years since she last saw her mother.

Dorothy is sitting in a wheelchair with a blanket over her legs, staring out the window toward the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. She must have seen Helena in her peripheral vision, because she turns her head slowly toward the doorway.

Helena smiles.

“Hi.”

Her mother stares at her, unblinking.

No sign of recognition.

“Is it all right if I come in?”

Her mother lowers her head in a gesture that Helena takes for assent. Moving inside, she shuts the door after her.

“I like your room very much,” Helena says. There’s a muted television showing a news channel. Photographs everywhere. Of her parents in younger, better times. Of her as a baby, as a child, as a just-turned-sixteen-year-old sitting behind the wheel of their family’s Chevy Silverado, on the day she got her driver’s license.

According to the CaringBridge page her father made, they moved Dorothy into memory care after last Christmas, when she left the stove on and nearly caught the kitchen on fire.

Helena sits down beside her mother at the small, circular table by the window. There’s a bouquet of flowers that’s old enough to have shed a carpet of leaves and petals around the vase.

Her mother’s frailness is birdlike, and the late-morning light that strikes her face makes it look as thin as paper. Though only sixty-five, she looks much older. Her silver hair is thinning. Liver spots cover her hands, which still look remarkably feminine and graceful.

“I’m Helena. Your daughter.”

Her mother looks at her, skeptical.

“You have a really nice view of the mountains.”

“Have you seen Nance?” her mother asks. She doesn’t sound anything like herself—her words coming slowly, and with considerable effort. Nancy was Dorothy’s older sister. She died in childbirth more than forty years ago, before Helena was born.

“I haven’t,” Helena says. “She’s been gone a while now.”

Her mom looks out the window. While it’s clear over the plains and the foothills, farther back, black clouds have begun to coalesce around the high peaks. Helena thinking—this disease is some sadistic, schizophrenic form of memory travel, flinging its victims across the expanse of their life, tricking them into thinking they’re living in the past. Cutting them adrift in time.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been around to see you,” Helena says. “It’s not because I didn’t want to—I think about you and Dad every day. But these last few years have been…really hard. You’re the only person in the world I can tell this to, but I was given a chance to build my memory chair. I told you about it once, I think. You were the reason I built it. I wanted to save your memories. I thought I was going to change the world. I thought I’d gotten everything I ever dreamed of. But I failed. I failed you. And all the people like you, who could’ve used my chair to save a part of themselves from this…fucking disease.” Helena wipes her eyes. She can’t tell if her mother is listening. Maybe it doesn’t matter. “I brought something awful into the world, Mama. I didn’t mean to, but I did, and now I have to spend the rest of my life in hiding. I shouldn’t have come here, but…I needed to see you one last time. I need you to hear me say I—”