Marked Read online

  I could feel a flush burn across the breadth of my exposed skin, its surface going from chilled to burning in a wave of something that was almost shame.

  A small, terrified part of my mind screamed, What are you doing?

  My answering thought was only half-convinced. If I don’t start trusting someone, I will always be alone.

  After an eternity feeling his gaze on my back, Jacob said, “That is amazing work.”

  You have no idea how amazing. I pulled the top of my sweat suit back on. The damp fabric now felt frigid against my skin. I turned around to study his face, looking for signs of some sort of reaction. I don’t know what I was expecting, if I was expecting anything.

  I think I saw puzzlement.

  “You can see why I work out dressed like this.”

  “Yes.” Then he shook his head. “No.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s such an elaborate back piece. Why . . .” He trailed off, studying my face. I realized he didn’t know how to go on. He didn’t want to upset me, but I had opened the door to so many questions that he would have never dared ask me before.

  I asked for him. “Why would I get such a dramatic tattoo, only to spend all my life hiding it from people?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because I didn’t put it there.”

  Jacob looked at me, puzzled for a moment, then his expression darkened. “Someone did that against your will? What happened?”

  I opened my mouth and stopped. I was suddenly paralyzed again, unable to reveal my secrets. What was the matter with me? I had exposed myself to Jacob; he had seen the heart of my mystery, and he was still here. . . .

  He was still here.

  I realized that, on some level, I had expected that seeing the Mark on my back would drive him away. I had expected him to react cruelly, like the children who mocked me in grade school or the teachers who thought my markings were disruptive. I could still hear the chanting, half the words I didn’t know because I had still been learning English. Tramp, ho, slut . . .

  I could deal with mockery. I didn’t know what to do with concern.

  “Dana?”

  “It is a long story,” I said. I turned away from him again. “Damn, that’s a weak cliché.”

  “I have time.”

  “I—”

  “Why don’t you tell me over dinner? You can talk as long as you want.”

  “You’re asking me out?” I said in slow disbelief.

  I looked across at him and saw no trace of mockery in his face. In fact, the lines of his face softened just enough to make him look vulnerable. His smile wasn’t forced, but it was tentative, almost as if the words represented a risk on a par with revealing the Mark. “You look like you need to sit down and have something to eat.”

  As bad as I was at understanding people on a personal level, I knew then that I could hurt him badly by withdrawing again. “I . . . Thank you.”

  “Over dinner, say as much as you need to,” he said. “All of it, none of it. I see how hard it is for you.”

  “I need to go shower,” I turned to face the locker rooms because I didn’t want him to see my eyes tear up. “I’ll meet you downstairs; I’ll follow your car.”

  “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  “Yeah.” Thank you.

  * * *

  —

  EVEN though I was the only one in the women’s locker room, the way I moved in that environment was second nature. I stripped with my back to a wall, and a large towel was over my shoulders before I stepped away from the corner of the room. I stood under the showerhead farthest from the entrance, by the tile wall. Again, my back faced the wall as if I was expecting an attack.

  It was how I survived gym in high school. Somehow, I had managed to eke through the minimum PE requirement without drawing attention to my back—though I think the Mark was smaller then. It had been years since I had worn only a T-shirt in public.

  When I shut off the shower, the towel went over my shoulders again.

  I was still alone in the locker room. Exiting the shower, I passed a full-length mirror. I stopped a moment, glancing at myself. My oversized towel covered everything, which was why I had bought it. I saw nothing of the Mark in my reflection.

  Something made me unwrap the towel. I dropped it like I had dropped my top in front of Jacob, shrugging it off my shoulders so that it dropped in a deep arc between my elbows, sagging to just between my hips, revealing everything from my shoulders down to the small of my back.

  I stared at myself, turning away from the mirror. I could see about half of the Mark crawling across my skin, thick black lines emerging from a twisted spiral heart six inches above the small of my back to embrace shoulders and hips without ever crossing themselves, branching and rebranching to echo the whole mazelike pattern in repeatedly smaller scales; like a black, leafless vine growing across my skin, twisting into elaborate spirals.

  It resembled a tribal tattoo, and it also resembled a Celtic spiral pattern, and it resembled neither. It could have been a representation of the tree of life if the tree did not distinguish between roots and crown or the spaces in between.

  In the end, the Mark resembled nothing so much as itself, which is why I knew the old man was somehow connected to me. His Mark was the only thing I had ever seen that bore the same style as my own Mark.

  I thought I heard a noise and quickly pulled the towel back around myself. I stood a moment, heart racing, but I was still alone.

  I went back to my locker to get dressed.

  EIGHT

  IT WAS STRANGE, going out to dinner with Jacob. I don’t know why it felt so alien. It was something people did all the time without thinking about it, like driving a car or brushing one’s teeth or using an ATM machine. Just because it wasn’t something I ever do . . .

  Of course, that’s why it felt strange. I didn’t socialize with people. For all I tried to act normal, I really wasn’t normal. If I was really honest with myself, I had to admit that the Mark was only part of it. It might not even be the largest part.

  Jacob was more accommodating than I had the right to expect. He didn’t push me to talk about anything, when I trailed off into silence, he just fell into the almost-scripted pattern of small talk about work that filled every lunch hour we’d spent together over three years. Nothing personal, nothing threatening . . .

  It was wrong for the setting. He had led me to a steak house down in the Flats, all low lighting and wood paneling. Lunch was paper plates, plastic silverware, and condiments that came in a little foil packet. Here, a fresh cut flower sat in a bud vase on our table, and the menu didn’t even have prices printed on it. It might have been his favorite restaurant, but if it was, I didn’t think he could afford to eat here very often.

  While we ate our salads, he was quietly deconstructing Jessica Whedon’s attempts to unearth some sort of racial bias on his part over the course of an otherwise pointless conversation with her. I finally said, quietly, “I’m sorry.”

  He placed down his fork. “For what?”

  “For not knowing how to do this.”

  “You’re fine.”

  “No.”

  Silence filled the air, growing almost solid, like a wall between us. I knew I had built the wall with all the things I had never said.

  I was the only one who could break it.

  “There are a lot of things I’ve never told you,” I finally said.

  “But things you want to tell me now?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know, really. These aren’t things I talk about. Ever. I think I need to talk to someone, and you’re the only one I have to talk to—and it is asking way too much of you.”

  “Dana, you didn’t force me to come here. I’m here because I want to help.”

  I forced a weak smile. “And I can’t help th
inking it’s only because you don’t know what it is you’re dealing with.”

  He shrugged and said, “There’s only one way to find out.”

  He was right.

  I had a choice. I could talk to him and risk driving him away for good, or I could return to the silence and know I’d never have him as more than a coworker.

  “There’s a lot,” I said finally.

  “Whatever you think you need to tell me.”

  I think I need to tell you everything. And I don’t know if I can.

  The waiter, with impeccable timing, came with our entrees, and I had a blessed moment to reflect on what I was going to do, what I was going to tell him. And more importantly, what I wasn’t going to tell him.

  I couldn’t tell him everything. Not all at once.

  When the waiter was gone, I told Jacob, “I was adopted.”

  Jacob nodded slowly. I could read in his expression that he read a good part of the significance I had placed in the word. More than was in the flat statement.

  “My dad, Michael Rohan, was a uniform working down in the Flats. Twenty-two years ago he found a naked six-year-old girl, rooting in trash bins for food. She was filthy, feral, violent, and didn’t speak any language anyone could identify. She was identified only by a large abstract tattoo on her back.”

  “You?” Jacob asked. “That happened to you? What happened?”

  “I don’t know. No one does. I don’t have many coherent memories from before the point I started learning English. The doctors all agreed I suffered some sort of trauma, but no one could get any details from me. I don’t even remember my dad finding me, or what I was doing on the street.”

  “Nothing?”

  “My real memories start around seven or eight. When I think of my parents, my family, the only image I have is Mom and Dad, the people who adopted me.”

  “Your birth parents?”

  “No clue. Dad started fostering me shortly after he found me. I’m not even sure how long it was before they legally adopted me.”

  Jacob nodded.

  There was something about his expression that worried me. “What is it?”

  “Just my cop brain engaging inappropriately.”

  “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “Just the type of investigation that would have caused. Hard to believe that there weren’t any clues to your identity.”

  I nodded. “I know. It’s hard to believe myself.”

  “Are you sure they found nothing?”

  I said, “Yes.” But Jacob had just put the itch of something into my brain. Yes, Dad had told me the story, on several occasions. But he was talking to a nine- or ten-year-old. By the time I was a teenager, it was not a subject I had wanted to talk about. Then I wanted to be normal, and my past wasn’t normal.

  Everything I knew about my origins came from a story told to a child. What had Dad omitted? What didn’t I remember? Suddenly, another part of my life felt as if it was crumbling.

  “Dana? Is everything okay?”

  “Huh?” I realized I had stopped talking.

  “I hit a nerve again, didn’t I?”

  “No, it’s not you.” I forced myself to go on, talking about what I did remember.

  I told him about the Mark, at least how it affected me growing up.

  It had been the strangest thing about the girl Michael Rohan had found. A six-year-old with a tattoo was unusual, and alarming, by itself. Such marks were usually something homemade inflicted by stoned teenage parents with a sewing needle and ink from a ballpoint pen.

  My Mark was nothing so crude. Even at six, it covered my back fully, a strange interwoven pattern drawn in curving ebon strokes.

  For an artist to do something like that would require the skill of someone like the late proprietor of Asia FX over the course of weeks, if not months. I told Jacob of my few memories of Dad taking me to places like that, showing my back to the men who worked there. I told Jacob how my own Mark seemed to frighten and fascinate them.

  “You’ve had it for so long,” Jacob asked, “how is it not distorted or faded? What I saw looked . . .”

  “Freshly inked?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a piece that dark.”

  I sucked in a breath. “It’s not a normal tattoo,” I said. “It may not even be a tattoo. Over the years, it’s grown.”

  His expression told me I had reached the edge of his credulity. We weren’t going to talk about what the Mark really was, or what it did. Not tonight.

  But there were enough other things to tell him.

  I told him how isolated I was in school, how I tried to hide my difference, and how I grew into being an almost normal teenager. Then I told him how I decided to become a cop.

  “It was because I lost my dad. Because of the stupid and pointless way he was shot.”

  “What happened?”

  “A month after my seventeenth birthday, he was called to a domestic. A bad one. The husband was high on meth, the wife had a skull fracture, and their three-year-old had a broken arm and was unconscious.”

  “Christ, what a mess.”

  I nodded, frowning, remembering. “My dad tried to control the situation, and he was preoccupied with subduing the husband while his partner removed the child from the scene for the paramedics. No one noticed the wife grab a gun. She didn’t mean to hurt my dad, but it was a .44. Two of the shots passed right through her husband and into my dad’s chest. One clipped his aorta. Her husband had three more holes in him, and he outlived my dad by about twenty minutes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I didn’t explain to him the nature of the guilt I still felt over that. I could have gone to some future, seen some version of those events, and I could have warned my dad. I had grown up enough to know intellectually that my guilt made no sense, with or without the Mark, but I’d yet to come up with a way to explain that to myself so it sunk in.

  “When I lost my mom, I lost all the family I’d ever known. No grandparents left. Dad was an only child. . . .”

  “Your mom?”

  I snorted. “An aunt, I suppose. Mom’s sister—but I’ve never seen her. Apparently, when they adopted me, Mom’s sister objected. She decided that Dad was somehow manipulating her sister into taking care of a damaged child. Mom did not take it well. Her sister didn’t even show up at the funeral. They were so estranged that I don’t even know what the woman looks like or where to find her if I wanted to.”

  “You don’t want to?”

  “The woman wants no part of me. The feeling’s mutual. I don’t have a family anymore.”

  When I said it, I felt the itch Jacob had planted in my brain earlier. Could Dad have known something more about where I’d come from? What was in that box in my bedroom closet? The one with my name on it, the one I was almost frightened to look into.

  “You’re pondering something,” Jacob said.

  “Just some old papers I have, pictures and stuff from Mom’s condo.” I changed the subject as if I was still afraid of the box and what it contained. “You understand now why I’m interested in John Doe? You saw the picture in his file?”

  “Yes.”

  “You saw how he was marked, and how I am marked?”

  Jacob nodded slowly. “You have some connection to that man?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. He didn’t speak English, yet he ran up to my car and babbled things at me as if I was supposed to understand him. As if he knew me.”

  “I can see how that would be distressing—”

  “Jacob, I think I did understand him. He wasn’t speaking any language I know of. But I understood part of it.”

  He leaned back and looked at me. I didn’t know if the look was critical or sympathetic. In the depths of whatever he was thinking, most of the emotional cues in his expression se
emed to fade, as if he wasn’t quite here anymore. I had an urge to reach across the table and grab his arm, pull him back into the present, back to me.

  When he spoke, I realized that he hadn’t left me. He had just left the restaurant. “Dana, do you know what language you spoke when you were a child? Before you learned English?”

  “No. Dad told me that the doctors, at some point, had decided that I had invented my own language. Apparently, it’s been known to happen.”

  “But you think this John Doe spoke the same language?”

  “Unless I imagined I understood what he said.”

  “What do you think he said?”

  “‘Wealcan has fallen. They’ll come for you. The shadows are coming.’ That’s what I remember.”

  “Wealcan?”

  “I don’t know. It might be a word I didn’t understand, but it feels like a name.”

  “Can you say it in the original language?”

  I had to think hard, as if I was pulling long unused switches in my brain. However, I could still see the old man at my window, still hear his words, and I was able to slowly pull it out, syllable by syllable.

  He listened, and finally said, “It sounds like a language to me, though I have no clue which one. Maybe Germanic?”

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said quietly.

  “Of course you do,” Jacob snapped. It was such a sudden change in tone that I stared at him as if he had just slapped me. He almost glared, and his expression was hard.

  “W-what?” I suddenly felt very small and weak and perilously close to breaking down. After all, I had exposed myself in front of Jacob; his disapproval and his scorn would be devastating.

  “Dana, you know exactly what to do. You’ve been doing it all your professional life. You’re a cop, and one of the best detectives we’ve got. Act like it.”

  All I could do was stare.

  “You have twice as much to go on as your dad did, and you have the luxury of being on paid leave. Follow up on what you do know. Write down that phrase so you don’t forget it. With that and a translation you should have no problem tracking down the language. You have the tattoo on you and John Doe, so you know it’s not unique—there have to be other people out there with the same mark.”