The Never List

spinning out of control. A world whose evils were driven home to me more each day as I documented them with increasingly sophisticated software.
    Then one day the buzzer rang, and Bob said it wasn’t a delivery but a flesh and blood man. Someone from my past. I shouldn’t have let him up, but I felt I owed this particular visitor at least that much. That’s where it all began again.
    “Caroline.” Agent McCordy was rapping at my door, while I stood frozen to the spot on the other side. I hadn’t spoken to himin two years, since the last letter came. I wasn’t ready for another communication from that other life.
    It was when that last bit of correspondence from the prison had arrived that I had stopped going out entirely. Just touching something he had touched, reading something he had thought, was enough to send me spinning into that circle of despair and fear I thought I’d left behind. Dr. Simmons had started making house calls at that point. For the first month afterward, though she wouldn’t say it, I knew I was on quasi-suicide watch. My mom flew in. My father called every night. I was invaded. And here it was, beginning again.
    “Caroline, can you open up?”
    “Sarah,” I corrected, through the door, annoyed that he was following protocol, using that other name, the one I reserved for the outside world.
    “I’m sorry—I mean, Sarah. Can you let me in?”
    “Do you have another letter?”
    “I need to talk to you about something more important, Car—Sarah. I know Dr. Simmons has talked to you about this a little already. She said I could come by.”
    “I don’t want to talk about it. I’m not ready.” I paused, but then, feeling it was inevitable, I methodically unlatched the three deadbolts and the regular lock on the door. I opened it slowly. There he stood, badge in hand, held wide open to me. He knew I’d want to confirm that he was still official. I smiled at that. Then I folded my arms, defensively, my smile disappearing, and took a step back. “Why does it have to be me?”
    I turned, and he followed me into the room. We sat down across from each other, but I didn’t offer him anything to drink for fear he’d get too comfortable and stay awhile. He looked around.
    “Immaculate,” he said with a slow smile. “You never change, Sarah.” He took out his notebook and pen, placing them carefully on the coffee table, at a perfect ninety-degree angle.
    “Neither do you,” I said, noticing his precision. I smiled again, despite myself.
    “You know why it has to be you,” he began slowly. “And you know why it has to be now. This is it.”
    “When is it?”
    “In four months. I came early to prepare you. We can prepare together. We will work with you every step of the way. You won’t be alone.”
    “But Christine? Tracy?”
    “Christine won’t speak to us. She won’t speak to her social worker. She has completely cut us off. She married an investment banker who doesn’t know about her past or even her real name. She has an apartment on Park Avenue and two daughters. One started preschool at Episcopal this year. She won’t go near this.”
    I had some vague knowledge about Christine’s life, but I could never believe how thoroughly she had managed to cut the whole experience out of her existence, to isolate and excise it like the cancer it was.
    I should have expected it, given that Christine had been the one to suggest we change our identities when the press couldn’t get enough of our story. She had walked out of the police intake with a purpose, as though she hadn’t been starved for the past two years and hadn’t been crumpled in a corner crying for the past three. She didn’t look back. Didn’t say good-bye to me or Tracy, didn’t fall apart like Tracy did, didn’t hang her head in defeat, battered from the years of humiliation and pain. She just walked.
    After that, we knew only the outline of her story through the social worker who met with us all, and who each year tried to get us together on the questionable theory that we could help one another recover. The message back from Christine was that she had already recovered, thank you very much. And good riddance to us all.
    “Tracy then.”
    “Tracy is coming, but you have to understand it can’t be Tracy alone.”
    “Why not? She’s stable, brilliant, articulate. You could even call her a small-business owner of sorts. Isn’t that legit enough?”
    He chuckled. “I suppose she is a productive