Forget to Remember

and the farm. Then she reluctantly hung up. He was one of her few friends, and he was thousands of miles away. Maybe she should catch the next flight back to L.A. and then quit breaking the law.
    She knew she couldn’t do that. She had to do everything possible to find out who she was. Laws were enacted by governments, ostensibly for the protection of their citizens. She wasn’t a citizen of the United States because she had no documentation. No other country would recognize her, either. As a non-citizen, non-person, she wasn’t under the protection of any government. Why, then, should she obey laws?
    She couldn’t tell Rigo and his parents what she was doing because they were law-abiding citizens. Rigo hadn’t asked her how she’d been able to fly, probably because he didn’t want to know the answer. However, she was sure he’d ask when she returned. She didn’t know what she’d tell him.
    ***
    Carol wandered around downtown Chapel Hill until she found an Internet café. She bought an hour of time and sent a test e-mail to Rigo. She surfed the net but didn’t find any useful information that might lead to discovering her identity. She walked along the streets teeming with scruffy looking college students from the University of North Carolina.
    She knew UNC was a basketball power, but she didn’t know how she knew. She was sure she hadn’t gone to college here, but it was entirely possible she had attended another university. She had vague memories of walking on a college campus and taking classes in ivy covered buildings. Perhaps she’d gone to a school that was a rival of UNC in basketball.
    She ate a cheap dinner at a fast-food restaurant while reading a copy of the News and Observer , the newspaper that had carried the obituaries of the Sakais. There was a story in the paper about Duke University, in nearby Durham. She knew Duke was also a basketball power and a rival of UNC. Maybe she had attended Duke. The chances were infinitesimal, but it would give her something to do tomorrow.
    ***
    On Wednesday morning, Carol rented a car from an Avis agency within easy walking distance of the Carolina Inn, showing her fake driver’s license and giving the clerk cash for a deposit, since she didn’t have a credit card. She was glad they accepted cash, but maybe she should have asked Paul for a credit card. She suspected that was too much to ask. He would have told her to go to hell.
    She almost climbed into the right side of the car before she remembered the steering wheel was on the left. As soon as she got behind the wheel, she knew she could drive the compact car, but it felt strange, somehow. It had an automatic transmission. She had to check to see where Reverse and Drive were. It occurred to her she was used to driving a stick shift. Not only that, but she had an urge to shift with her left hand.
    When Carol pulled out onto the street and almost drove head-on into another car she realized what the problem was. She must have been driving in England where the driver sat on the right and drove on the left, and where most cars had stick-shifts, operated with the left hand. If she’d been driving there, she must have lived in England for some time. She was more than ever determined to go back. Maybe it held the key to her identity.
    Using the map Avis gave her, she drove to the Duke University campus in Durham. She quickly adjusted to driving on the right, and shifting wasn’t a problem because she didn’t have to do it. Duke had a beautiful campus with lots of green—green trees, green lawns. Sturdy buildings protected the accumulated knowledge of the academic setting and nurtured new research and discoveries in the arts and sciences. These thoughts convinced her that she had gone to college somewhere.
    Carol walked around the campus, looking for something familiar—a building, a walkway, a vista that would connect with some sleeping cell in her brain, but she didn’t find anything. She went to the library and asked where the Duke yearbooks were kept. She browsed through several from the early twenty-first century, looking at group photos, individual photos, any kind of photo. She kept the picture Paul had given her on the table where she could look at it, because she still had trouble remembering what she looked like.
    Two hours of doing this netted her tired arms, from turning pages, and blurry vision. She returned to her car and on a whim drove north toward Virginia, intending to go for a while