Unbreakable. Elizabeth Norris
alt="Image Missing"/>e stand there—me and this stranger—for a minute, unsure of what to say next. I still can’t believe he’s real. Ben told me he’d never run into a double in this world. I guess I’d assumed one didn’t exist.
The guy must know I mistook him for someone else, because he says, “I just moved down here from San Clemente.” He gestures to another guy behind him who is a little thinner with dark hair that’s cut a little shorter but has the same curl at the ends, and he has the same deep-set eyes. He looks almost identical. “My brother and I came after the quakes took out our house. We heard there was more food down here.”
His brother—Derek.
“It’s the military presence,” I mumble. Hopefully that’s enough of an explanation. I can’t force myself to say anything else. I’m too busy looking over his shoulder. His brother looks so much like him, just an older version. I don’t ask what happened to their parents or what kind of lives they used to have. I just stare.
Finally the guy who’s not Ben says something that’s half grunt, half mumble, then bends down and starts picking up the books he dropped.
I almost help him. I ran into him, which is why he dropped the books, but for some reason, I can’t make myself help. I don’t want to get sucked into a conversation with him. I don’t want to know who he is or why he’s here or what he’s like. It doesn’t matter. His similarities and his differences will both feel the same. They’ll hurt.
I look over my shoulder. Cecily is handing two bottles of water to the guy with the broken glasses, but she’s looking at me. I have an overwhelming need to get out of here.
So I do.
I head back to the car, grabbing Cecily and pulling her with me.
“Hey, wait, is that Ben Michaels?” she says. “Oh my God, I thought—”
“It’s not him.” I don’t want to explain what little I know of the multiverse and doppelgängers. Not now.
“But—”
“Cee, I said it’s not him. Do they have anything you want?”
Cecily shakes her head.
“Can we get out of here?”
She must see it on my face, whatever it is that I’m feeling. Or maybe it’s just her good-friend instincts that let her know this is a dead topic. Either way, she nods and moves around to the driver’s side. “Out of here it is.”
I get into the car, my door slamming shut behind me.
Cecily starts the car and we pull away, leaving Ben’s lookalike behind. I curl my hands into fists to keep them from shaking, and lean my head back against the seat.
A few times, I catch her glancing at me, and I know she wants to ask what my deal is. But she doesn’t. Because that’s what makes our friendship work. We tease each other—she’s too high-spirited and I’m too bitchy—but we’re there for each other when it matters.
Which means she knows when I need to be left alone.
I think about Ben Michaels all the time.
Sometimes I wonder if I chose wrong—if I should have asked my Ben to stay. If I had that day to do over, I wonder if I would still make the same choices.
Mostly I just wonder if I’ll ever see him again.
Normally I like being here. Something about the way Cee has adopted the shelter and all its inhabitants as her personal responsibility makes things feel a little less bleak. Hanging out and being bossed around makes it seem like we’re all in this together.
But not right now. This isn’t that kind of visit.
When she sees me, she doesn’t sugarcoat it. “There’s another missing person,” she says, her white-blond hair hanging disheveled from something that might have been a ponytail. Her gray T-shirt is dirty, and her jeans are ripped in a few places. If I’d ever wondered what it looked like to carry the weight of part of the city—the homeless part—on your shoulders, now I know.
Our missing person this time is Renee Adams. She’s twenty-two years old, and according to the description, she’s five-four and thin, with wavy, shoulder-length brown hair, and brown eyes. The only possessions she has to her name are a white long-sleeved sweater, a pair of 7 jeans, flip-flops, a last-season Coach purse, and a gold ring. She worked downtown, and before the quakes, she lived with her boyfriend in Pacific Beach. He’s presumed dead now, and she arrived at Qualcomm after seeing that her apartment building had collapsed in on itself.
Assigned to a cot in Club Level section 47, one of the areas reserved for single women, Renee kept to herself, spent more time sleeping than awake, and cried a lot. She was even assigned to the suicide watch list for one of the grief counselors.
But she wasn’t in her group therapy session this afternoon. And at this moment, a little past nine thirty on Monday evening—more than three hours past city curfew—she isn’t anywhere in section 47. The all-call announcements in the stadium have gone unanswered. Her cot is empty.
Except for the ripped sheet and a tiny, yellowed fragment that unmistakably used to be part of a fingernail.
I hold a ruler between gloved fingers and take a picture of the measurement. The rip is four and three quarters inches long, half an inch at its widest point, and the nail looks like it might be from her thumb.
I imagine a girl pulled off the cot, reaching out to grab on to something—anything—and catching hold of the sheet. Only sheets aren’t very strong, so it rips easily, and she leaves a tiny piece of herself behind.
“When did she go missing?” Deirdre asks, her voice quiet but weighed down with a sense of gravity.
I don’t look at Cecily when she says she doesn’t know. She’s trying to look calm and in charge, trying to hold it together, but her eyes are red-rimmed, and her face has that splotchy look it gets when she’s cried too much.
Deirdre has been an FBI agent for a little more than ten years. She worked with my dad for eight of them. She doesn’t know Cecily like I do, but she can recognize undeserved guilt when she sees it. “Cecily, none of this is on you. The best thing you can do right now is give us information.” Rephrasing, she says, “When was she last seen?”
Cecily swallows forcibly. “She missed the group meetings yesterday, too, which was why someone wanted to check on her after she missed again today. I’ve talked to everyone, and by everyone I mean everyone I could find, but she didn’t know many people, or I guess not many people knew her. So as far as I can tell, the last time anyone saw her was the group therapy meeting on Friday at four p.m.”
Three days.
Even though I’m in jeans and a hoodie, I shiver. My dad used to say that, in an endangered circumstance, like an abduction, if you didn’t find the person within twenty-four hours of their disappearance, the chances you’d find them alive were less than 10 percent. And those chances diminished every hour.
“I’m going to talk to the counselor,” Deirdre says, and I can tell by her tone that she’s talking more for Cecily’s benefit than mine. We’ve been opening enough of these files lately; we have a routine. “Finish up and meet by the ramp. Cecily, if you remember anything—”
“Of course,” Cecily says, her eyes wide and eager to please. Her blond hair bounces with