Page 66 of White Lights
Dez realizes that no one will believe her about the masked man until she proves it.
“Do you watch police procedurals?” Donegal asks.
She shakes her head.
“Well, there’s a phrase you’ll hear on a lot of them: ‘Wait until this all blows over.’ That’s what we’d like you to do.”
“But what if it never blows over?” Dez asks.
“Every artist has skeletons in her closet,” Donegal says. “Skeletons disintegrate over time.”
Dez leaves the lawyer’s office stiffly. When she boarded the plane to come to Acheron, the promise of free legal counsel soothed her. But in the five minutes she spent in Donegal’s office, the lawyer said more to frighten her than to reassure.
And Dez can’t help but wonder if that wasn’t the point all along.
“I need your help with something,” Dez tells Rafe at the end of her second week as they close themselves inside her Lens.
“At your service.”
She feels his closeness, smells his petrichor scent. She consciously avoids the trap of looking at his lips. He’s too good at acting like nothing happened between them, while somehow also making her feel embarrassed that it did.
“There’s a scene I want to include in Mo’s film, but I can’t find it.”
“The archive is huge, and you’ve been at this for eight days.”
“The archive of my father isn’t huge,” Dez says. “He left when Mo was six, and even before that, he was barely around.” She turns around in the Lens, to a portion of the screen where she’s keeping all the scenes featuring her father and her brother.
“What’s the missing scene?” Rafe says.
“This hockey game Dad took us to in Vegas. I was twelve, and I remember feeling so special. Like, of all the things my dad could have been doing that day, he wanted to be with us. To drive us two hours to this city we’d never been to before, to watch this sport we knew nothing about. Toward the end of the game, everyone was standing up, and Mo was too small to see the rink, so my dad picked Mo up and put him on his shoulders. My brother loved it. He was laughing his head off. And the cameraman picked it up. They played it on the Jumbotron. So I figured that would be in the Vault, you know?”
“It would be,” Rafe confirms.
“I think it’s the one happy memory Mo has with my dad. I’ve got to put it in. But I’ve searched and searched the files, and it isn’t there.”
“This is why assignments aren’t given to first-years who know the subject personally,” Rafe says. “Memory is subjective.”
“Not this memory.”
“Something you think happened a certain way may actually have played out very differently.”
Dez shakes her head. “I know this happened. I was there. It was simple. Just a flash of joy in a little boy’s life.”
“It was a dozen years ago in a childhood marked by trauma,” Rafe says. “It could have been another kid up on another father’s shoulders, and you wish it had been Mo. You wish it so much that your memory—”
“I didn’t make this up.”
“If it’s not in the Vault, maybe you did.”
“Why are you gaslighting me?” Dez says, angry.
“I’m concerned by how saccharine you seem to want to make this film. Happy little hockey memories with your abusive dad? Come on, Dez. Don’t waste your time digging for a syrupy scene that may only exist in your mind. You’re not doing Mo any favors by neutering his life.”
“I’m not neutering his life,” she says through her teeth. Rafe has a rare ability to set her on the defensive. And to make her want to cut him.
“Then tell me the main conceit.”
“The conceit?” Dez says. She hasn’t been thinking in those terms. All she knows is she’s doing this for her brother.
