"Who's Thomas?"
Melody jolted and blinked, feeling like she was waking up. She looked around. Pots, pans, an oven, a stove, a fridge. She could smell onions and garlic and could taste bitter medicine on her tongue.
Right, she was in the kitchen. In the Palace at Versailles. Someone was talking to her about Thomas. She looked up.
Key was kneading dough on the countertop, his thin arms straining with the effort. He had asked the question so casually to the open air that Melody looked around to make sure there was no one around that he could be talking to instead. But she and Key were the only ones in the room.
"You read my notebook," she said. Melody tried to make it sound sharp and bitter, but it came out as tired and exhausted as she felt.
Key's ears turned a bright red shade. He focused on the dough as if it was about to attack him. "Only the first page," he said. "Just to see who it belonged to."
"Right," Melody said, then rubbed her eye. It was only after she had done this that she noticed she was holding a blue plastic knife. She was cutting... carrots? "When did I get here?"
Key shrugged, his eyes darting away from the dough for a second. "About a half-hour ago or so."
"How did I get here?"
"Jordan walked you in, holding your hand and she left you here. The doctor said that was okay, so now she's with Jordan. Everyone else is outside." In his hands, the dough began to form into a well-shaped ball. He had a line of flour on his cheekbone, like he had accidentally wiped his face and not noticed.
"Why aren't you with them?"
He took in a loud, exaggerated breath and a high-pitched wheeze came out. "The cold air makes my asthma worse. And then it worries Cypress, and then everyone is annoyed. So most of the time when it's cold, I stay in here. I don't mind, I don't really like the dirt anyway."
Key didn't seem like much of an outdoor person to Melody. Then again, she didn't seem like an outdoor person either.
"Did Cypress steal my notebook?" she asked.
Key froze. That gave Melody the answer that she needed.
"Did he read it?"
Key rubbed the flour off his hands and looked at Melody, giving her his full attention. "I told him not to. I don't know if he did. He's been waiting for someone like you for a long time, I think."
Melody nodded. "I can tell."
"So who's Thomas?"
She rolled her eyes. "You don't give up, do you?"
"I don't like giving up," Key said. "So no."
"He's my ex," she said. "According to the cops, I stole his kid for a few hours."
He hummed and nodded. "That makes sense."
Melody weighed the knife in her hand. It was light, cheap. "It does?"
The heating system above the fridge started to rattle to life. "A lot of us have that one person who made us crazy. You know, like I was always BPD, and you were probably always—" he paused— "what's your deal?"
"Depressive bipolar alcoholic."
"And you were always a depressive bipolar alcoholic, but then there's that one person who made us coo-coo crazy. You know what I'm saying?"
She nodded. "I know what you're saying. But it wasn't Thomas who was my person."
"Yeah? Who was it?"
Melody thought back to that night. The night of the phone call, of her pending graduation. They always say in books that the loved one, be that the spouse or child of the person being killed, never heard the gunshot. But Melody heard the gunshot. She had been a city away, but she heard it eventually. She heard it that night in her dream. The shot was explosive, life-shattering, earth-changing. She saw it, too. Saw her father at the gas station, filling up the old car with terrible gas mileage that Melody had been trying to convince him to trade in for six years. His card had failed, they never found out the reason why, so he went inside to pay. And there was the murderer— the part of the dream that Melody didn't see, all she saw was a shadow— ready and waiting. There was an exchange of conversation: the shadow wanted her father's money, her father didn't have any cash. The shadow was nervous— or so it seemed— and his hands were shaking. He started screaming, his voice trembling, that he needed the money.
Melody always knew her father was too kind for his own good. He was always too caring, too willing to help. Some deep, dark part of Melody wondered if he saw his daughter somewhere in that shadow. If he was thinking that if it was his child standing there, screaming and shaking, he would want someone to help her. So he tried to save a stranger's child, and reached out.
But who knew what the shadow was seeing. Whatever it was, it scared them, and they had a gun. An explosion, and suddenly her father's brain matter was scattered over the cracked Chicago sidewalk.
That, Melody saw in person. She went to the gas station when was still a crime scene. That was before the drinking started. She didn't remember getting to the gas station. In fact, she didn't remember leaving her college campus. But there she was, standing at the place where her father had just been killed. The radio outside the gas station was softly playing an 80s song about dancing all night long. Every once in a while, the music would crackle out of existence and come back weak and defeated.
Melody lifted up the caution tape and walked under it. A few cops were standing there and glanced at her and between each other, but no one stopped her. It seemed they saw the connection. A forensics cop was kneeling down. No one was in a rush. It's not like they could save anyone. The man who had been killed was dead. The shooter was in police custody. The case was an easy one: another junkie desperate for more money to shoot up. It was nothing out of the norm for the cops. But that had been Melody's dad.
The Crime Scene Investigator was cleaning up the sidewalk with a soapy sponge and bucket Melody saw as she stood behind him. He didn't seem to notice her standing there. She wondered why he was doing that. Cleaning up wasn't CSI's job. Looking back, she would regret not asking. Did the man feel sorrow? Guilt? Remorse? Did he not have anything better to do? Melody would never know.
The radio flickered out again, and the lights ahead buzzed. The red and blue cop lights glittered.
"I want to talk to him," she said out loud.
The CSI and the cops that had let Melody pass all startled at her voice. It was quiet, almost silent with the exception of the cars and trucks on the freeway half a mile away.
"Sure, kid," one of the police said. "You can talk to him tomorrow."
That night when Melody fell asleep next to her crying mother, she saw and heard the killing.
"It's not important," Melody said to Key. "It doesn't matter."
Key nodded. "Okay." He put the dough in a bowl and threw a dish towel over it. "I think I've gotten pretty good at this." He raised his flour-covered hands and blew on them, letting the dust fall through the air. Then he coughed into his elbow. "Damn it."
"Are you okay?" Melody asked.
"Jesus," Key wheezed out between coughs, "not you, too! I already have two people who flinch every time I breathe too hard."
"Sorry."
"Do you want someone else to do that?" Key said, pointing at the knife and the carrots that were still uncut. "You seem a little out of it, still."
"What else would I do?"
Key looked at the knife Melody was holding. She lowered it. "I dunno," he said. "What do you do in your free time? You talked with Cy a lot about books. He usually goes to the living room to read when he has free time. It's the next room down."
Melody knew when she was being dismissed, so she left. The house was quiet. She missed the piano. She went to the doorway of the room that Key had gestured to and found the lights turned off. She fumbled in the dark for a light switch. The lamps around the room turned on slowly as if waking up. Melody wished she could come back from her blackouts so easily.
The living room was a picture-perfect library in an old Victorian house. Tall, dark bookshelves covered the walls and reached up to the ceiling. It smelled of old paper and dust. Large paintings of people in elaborate, thick clothes decorated the walls and a few old tapestries hung down. Old books in boring shades of red, gray, and black made up the bookshelves. Melody walked to one and gave it an experimental shake. Sure enough, it was bolted to the wall. She went to the lamps and the tables in the room. All were bolted down so well, they didn't shake even when Melody used all her strength. Which, admittedly, wasn't much. She glanced up above the doorway. The light on the security camera blinked at her. Melody gave up a peace salute and threw herself onto one of the couches. It was cold and despite how soft it had looked, it was as hard as a rock and her joints cracked loudly against it. But she was a prisoner. A prisoner who could choose to be alone in a room, surrounded by books. She glanced at the camera. Almost alone, at least.
The kitchen had been the first blackout since the baby. Relatively short, too, if the thirty minutes Key had told her was true. Usually, her episodes were at least an hour long. Then again, it wasn't an exact science. No one could even tell Melody why she had blackouts. Having lapses in memory and dissociation was fairly common for people with bipolar disorder, but it was usually only during manic episodes. As far as Melody knew, she always had her manic episodes in perfect clarity and could remember the anxiety, the fast talking, the hunger. She could remember not eating or sleeping for three days in a row once. In those three days, she wrote forty news, pets, culture, and television articles. Her boss had been floored by her work ethic. She shook her head and marveled at how much Melody went against the laziness of "her generation." At the time, fueled by her energy and creative jubilation, Melody had ignored the jibe. She shouldn't have, she knew that right after the mania faded. Especially when looking back. If she had stood up for herself then (calmly, hopefully) would her employer have been more accepting?
Why hadn't she written about mental health? Why hadn't she helped the problem?
Well, Melody knew the answer to that. It was because she didn't want to help the problem. Because helping the problem would be acknowledging that there was a problem. And like hell Melody was going to bring that into the workplace. And especially not when she felt like that.
More not sleeping. More not eating. And then the mania ended. Then three days later she read the negative comments on an old article, one that she knew at the time wasn't her best work, and then she fell into a depressive episode, with one blackout her journal told her was two hours long. As far as she could tell from the security cameras in the office, she didn't move the entire time, just stared at her computer screen the entire time.
The depression could go away in a flash of nothing. She remembered all of the mania, though. So, she guessed, to the medical and psychological world at large, she was a unique case.
Great.
Melody stood up again and made her way back to one of the bookshelves. She pulled one of the books off the shelf and pages through it. It was scientific, with studies on birdwatching and native birds of the midwest. Nothing Melody would like to read, but she enjoyed the smell of the pages. She put it back and picked out another one. It was blue and the pages were cut in an old-fashioned way and stained. She opened it. The book was about psychological studies after World War II. Melody smiled at the irony of such a book being there, so she went back to the couch and began to read.
She was almost halfway through the book when a loud bang made Melody jump and look up. The book fell open onto the floor.
"You are so annoying!"Puzzle screamed somewhere in the distance
"Oh, this is going to be interesting," Melody muttered. She looked around for a bookmark and eventually found a weathered embroidered handkerchief.
Several gates buzzed through at once and Melody heard someone running around. Puzzle started yelling in Spanish and footsteps clattered up the stairs before another, quieter buzz and a door closing.
"That girl is crazy," Melody said to a painting of an old man on the wall. Then she thought about how stupid that was and went back to the couch to continue reading.
That was quickly interrupted when Colt literally skipped into the room. The boy's huge frame skipped a foot in the air and landed with a heavy thud. His cheeks were flushed pink and he had a huge dopey grin on his face. His hair, grown out from a buzz cut, was damp and flopped onto his forehead. Colt's shirt had been stripped off and all of his bare skin was covered in dry, flaky dirt.
"What. The. Fuck," Melody said.
"She said a bad word," he said to the hallway in the most terrifying baby voice Melody had ever heard.
"What's wrong with you?" Melody asked, wondering if she could possibly run away from him. The room that had been so welcoming before now seemed like a cage, with the only way out where a burly young man was staring at her with a crazed expression on her face. She grit her teeth. She was far from defenseless, but she detested violence. Especially since it seemed like her relationship with Colt was becoming something concrete.
Someone sprinted down the hallway toward the room, soft slippering pattering on the ground. Diana burst through the doorway and stood between the two of them. She was panting and her hands were also covered with dirt.
"Wait, wait, wait," she gasped out. "Melody, this is Zac."
"Zac? Who's— what?"
"Zac, get out," Diana said. "Go to the hallway."
Colt— Zac? — frowned dramatically, lowered his head, and shuffled out of the library.
"What the hell?!" Melody said.
"Okay, could you like, put down the book of death so we can talk?" Diana said, her hands defensively up.
"What?" Melody blinked. She realized, a second later than she should have, that she was holding up the book, raised like a weapon. "Oh." She set the book down on the couch.
Diana lowered her hands just a little. Her eyes were wide. "What are you in here for, again?"
"People say I kidnapped a baby."
The girl gnawed on her bottom lip. "Oka-ay then. Can I trust you to not kill me?"
"Why would I kill you?"
"I just—" Diana took a deep breath. "That's Zac. He's one of Colt's Others. He's a little kid, and he's weird. I'm so sorry, we should have warned you. He snuck in with Puzzle."
Melody's tongue felt stuck in her mouth. "Colt has the personality of a little kid inside him?"
"Yes."
"And none of you thought to warn me about this?"
"Sorry."
Melody shook her head. Then she sighed. "Okay. Got it."
Diana mustered up an attempt at a smile. "Are you okay?"
"I'm... it's okay."
"Can I come in now?" Zac's squeaky voice said from the hallway. Melody winced.
"That might be a problem," Melody said.
Diana nodded and rolled her eyes. "You get used to it. Mostly. You want me to send him away? I hear you want to talk with all of us."
Melody glanced at the camera again. "You can do whatever you'd like to do," she said. "Will that hurt him?"
"Nah, he's a tough cookie, believe it or not," Diana said as she shook her head. "Zackie, could you go to your room, please? Melody and I need to talk."
"Aw," he said, but Melody could hear him leave.
"Give me a minute," Diana said to Melody. She turned on her heel and left. After a stunned second, Melody sat back down again. Diana returned a minute later, cleaned and her hair in a ponytail.
Diana seemed to float into the room, almost mimicking the careful dancing movement of Puzzle. There was something ethereal about her, Melody thought, that she couldn't put her finger on. "Can I sit down?" she asked.
Melody nodded, pressing her back into the opposite side of the couch. The cushion wasn't soft at all, but it did mold in the spaces between her spine, and Melody sighed at the feeling.
"What did you say you were in here for?" Diana said as she sat down. She crossed her long legs at the ankles, as if she was wearing an expensive dress and heels, instead of gray sweatpants and slippers.
"I was accused of stealing my ex-boyfriend's baby. I don't know if I did it or not. I don't remember it."
"So that thing that happened today has happened before?"
"My blackouts, yeah. I've had them for years."
"And are you always angry after them?"
Melody sputtered and coughed. Then she laughed. She thought back over time, to her blackouts. Usually, she did feel angry after them.
"Yeah, I guess so. How did you know?"
Diana sighed. She wasn't wearing makeup today, as far as Melody could tell. Freckles, a few birthmarks, and spots of acne spotted her cheeks. The area under her eyes was dark. "Guess it takes a ragefest to know one. So you've never killed anyone?"
"No."
"Have you ever hurt anyone?"
"No."
"Have you ever wanted to?"
Melody didn't say anything, and that seemed to answer Diana's question because she nodded slightly. "Yeah. I get that. But if you ever feel like that again, take it from me. It's not worth it. It will never be worth it."