Page 44 of Snow Creek

Her voice soothes.

Leads.

I knew she wanted to help me.

Me: What if I don’t want to?

Dr. A: There isn’t a choice. We can’t free you from the past, without acknowledging it. Go on. Tell me about what happened after you got off the boat.

Me: I needed to look like Mom in order to get into the safe deposit. I had her ID and my hair was pretty much Mom-ready. I needed clothes though. I dragged Hayden to the Lost and Found office in the ferry terminal at Seattle’s Colman Dock, where I told the attendant that our mom had lost her jacket. I grabbed a bag. I still have it. It’s black leather with a fake Chanel clasp. Oh… I managed to find a white silk scarf and a pair of vintage Foster Grant sunglasses.

* * *

The clerk, a young man with an X-Acto blade-sharp nose and unibrow, looks over my ID and compares it with the signature card that he pulls from a file cabinet behind him. It seems like a very, very long time, but it was probably only a second. His hair is blond—golden, really. I wonder if my hair looks as bad as his.

“This doesn’t look like you,” he says curtly.

“I get that a lot,” I answer in a throatier version of my voice, one that I assume sounds like my mother —or at least someone older than fifteen. I offer no excuse. Sometimes the less you say, the better the odds are of getting what you want.

“Hair looks better the way it is now,” he says.

I wonder if he’s hitting on me and if he is, he is breaking the law. I am underage, no matter what that ID card states.

He leads me to a doorway and turns to face me. “Passcode?”

“What?” I ask.

“You need to enter your passcode,” he says, his eyes riveted to mine.

I feel sweat collect on the back of my neck. Passcode? I don’t have any passcode. His nicotine-stained index finger points at a keypad.

I think hard and fast. Now my face is hot. It must be red. Great. Nothing’s coming to me and I think Unibrow knows it.

He shifts his weight. “If you don’t have the passcode, you can’t go inside.”

Think. Think.

“You only have three chances and if you don’t get it right, we’ll need to arrange for the bank manager to create you a new one. He’s a real stickler for security around here.”

I know I’ll like the bank manager even less than Unibrow, who, by the way, is now in my personal top five of all annoying people.

I punch in my brother’s birthday.

“Let’s go see the manager,” he says. A slight smile on his face indicates that he’s happy that I can’t remember the code. He must want to go on a smoke break, because he smells like an ashtray to me.

Then it comes to me. My mind flashes to the day that my mom and dad set up the router for our internet connection. The password they used was the same one they used on everything— whenever anything required some kind of security code.

“Wait!” I say. “I have it.”

My finger goes to the keypad:

LY4E1234

Love you forever, and a digit for each member of our family.

A green light flickers on the keypad display.

* * *

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