Elusion(39)

I look at the label again, but this time I read everything on it. When I do, my legs almost buckle beneath me.

Patient: David Welch

Contents: Granulated Zolpidem 30mg

Instructions: Take as directed.

Authorized by: Meredith Welch, APRN



“Are you okay?” Josh asks.

I’m not okay. Not even close.

“Why would my dad have granulated Zolpidem at his office?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

My eyes remain fixed on the label, even though my thoughts are going wild. “Do you think he needed it for the same reason as your sister and her friends? Do you think he might have become addicted to Elusion?”

Josh is silent for a minute. “Do you?”

Do I? I think about all the nights my dad worked late. In fact, toward the end of his life, I barely saw him. But in the moments we were together, I can’t say that I saw any of the signs or symptoms that Josh said Nora had. He was still the caring father he’d always been.

Still, there’s this pestering voice in the back of my head, asking me if it was possible that my dad was also one of Avery’s original E-fiends?

I don’t want to believe it. I can’t believe it. But why else would he have that prescription? Who takes granulated Zolpidem? Why would my mom have prescribed him something like that?

“If my dad was addicted, do you think my mom knew? Do you think that’s why she wrote him the prescription?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know your mom, but trust me, it’s pretty scary seeing someone you love become addicted to anything. I can’t imagine any wife enabling her husband like that.”

“You’re right,” I say, letting out a deep breath. “If my mom had any inkling that my father might have developed some kind of weird dependency on Elusion, there was no way in hell she would’ve written him that prescription. And if she thought Elusion was dangerous, she never would have allowed anyone to go near it, even if it was my dad’s creation.”

Suddenly, a perturbed voice speaks up from behind us.

“What are you doing in here?”

I quickly shove the pill bottle into a side pocket of my skirt as I spin around. My mom is in the doorway, dressed in her scrubs and looking at us with shades of anger coloring her eyes. Since she never comes into my father’s study or goes through his things, the fact that I’m doing both has got to be sacrilegious in her mind.

“I’m sorry, Mom, I thought you left for wor—”

“I forgot my dinner in the fridge, so I turned around,” she snips, not even letting me get a full sentence out. “And who is he?”

I’m about to explain, when Josh pipes up and responds for me.

“Josh Heywood, ma’am.” He approaches my mother with a kind, outstretched hand, and when they shake, I think I see her face soften a little. “I know Regan from school.”

My mom gives him a semipolite nod and says, “Josh, could you give us a moment alone, please?”

“Sure,” he replies, glancing over at me so he and I can share a sympathetic look.

Once he leaves, my mom charges over to the desk and begins putting everything back into the silver box, her lips pursed.

“Why, Regan? Why would you do this?” Her voice doesn’t have an edge to it anymore. It’s just filled with disappointment.

“Do what?”

“Rifle through your father’s belongings. You know how much he hates that.”


A cold chill prickles at my skin when she refers to him in the present tense. She does that a lot, and I know it’s because deep down she can’t accept that my father’s gone. She keeps his things in order at the house for the exact same reason—she desperately wants to believe that he’s coming back to us. Which is why I can’t seem to tell her what brought me here, or confront her about what I’ve found. Emotionally, she’s still pretty weak.

But when I think about the passcard and the powdered Zolpidem, I wonder if there’s a real chance for my mother to hold on to hope.

My dad’s body was never found.

And I saw him in Elusion.

What if . . . what if my father is still alive? What if he was secretly addicted to Elusion and faked his own death because he’d rather spend his life inside the Escapes?

It hurts so much to even think he might have betrayed us like that, but I have to find a way to rule this crazy theory out—without my mother knowing.

“It won’t happen again,” I say, backing up toward the door.

Just as I’m about to leave, I hear her call out for me.

“Regan?”

When I turn around, she walks toward me, holding the copy of Walden that Josh and I just discovered in my dad’s things.

“Looks like he saved one for you, too,” she says, offering it to me like a gift.

After I take it and say thanks, she pulls me into an embrace. But this time, hanging on to her doesn’t make me feel stronger.

So I’m the first one to let go.





NINE


“HOME SWEET HOME,” JOSH SAYS SARCASTICALLY, holding his helmet under his arm as he pushes open the front door to his house.

Josh’s uncle lives in a triple-wide FEMA trailer with pewter-color siding, right in the middle of at least five hundred others just like it. They are lined up in rows, like a huge box of mud-covered bullets. Above them is a tangled network of satellite dishes and power grids, a metallic weave of black electrodes stacking into the sky. The Quartz Sector wasn’t much before but the region was practically leveled by the string of tornadoes that struck it three years ago, and reconstruction has been slow, probably because most of its citizens are blue-collar workers or people on government assistance and they lacked the political connections that were necessary to get things done.