Chapter 3: Roots and Aftermath

The red zero blinked four times, then went dark.

Viv, Lex, sat on the edge of the sagging mattress and stared at the answering machine like it might offer a retraction. The room held its breath around her. The Christmas lights on their thumbtacks. The bass propped against the milk crate. The ashtray spilling over with butts that Lex had smoked in some other life, before Viv had woken up wearing her skin.

Her mother’s voice still echoed in the silence. Cigarette-roughened. Deliberately casual in the way of someone delivering news they’d been sitting on for two decades. The real one. I told him you were dead.

Viv pressed her palms into her thighs. The denim was cool. The body’s breathing had gone shallow, a physical response to shock that Viv registered as if from a great distance. Lex’s chest tightening. Lex’s pulse hammering at the base of her throat. Somewhere underneath the adrenaline, a deeper hurt stirred. Not Viv’s. Lex’s. The original Lex, buried somewhere in this gray matter, responding to a wound that predated her current inhabitant.

“How the hell am I supposed to handle this?” Viv whispered.

The room didn’t answer. The radiator clanked. In the apartment below, the television switched from news to static.

She stood. Paced to the window. The brick wall was still there, six inches away, laced with February frost. The fire escape where Lex had almost jumped, where Viv had not been, thank God, because she had no idea what would have happened to her consciousness if this body had died before she arrived. She pressed her forehead against the cold glass. The shock of it helped.

Think. You’ve handled worse.

Had she? She’d negotiated hostile takeovers. She’d survived the dot-com crash, would survive it, in this timeline, was technically two years away from surviving it. She’d built a fifteen-billion-dollar company from a dorm room. But none of that had prepared her for the particular vertigo of inheriting someone else’s existential crisis.

She turned from the window. The apartment looked different than it had an hour ago. Less like a discovery and more like a crime scene. The evidence of Lex’s life surrounded her, the posters, the clothes, the bass guitar with its sticker-covered case, and every piece of it was built on a lie. A father who wasn’t her father. A mother who’d told the real one she was dead.

Portland.

The word surfaced from Lex’s memory, unbidden. Born 1974 in Portland, Oregon. Moved to New York at nineteen. Her mother had mentioned it in the message, hadn’t she? Something about the press digging. If the album was about to drop, if reporters were going to start excavating Lex’s biography, the story would surface eventually. Better to find it herself before some journalist with a deadline and an expense account got there first.

The phone sat on the nightstand next to the answering machine. A landline. Beige plastic. A spiral cord that stretched to the bed. Viv picked it up and dialed before she could talk herself out of it.

The voice that answered on the third ring was groggy and irritable. “What.”

“Mikey.”

A pause. Sheets rustling. “Lex? It’s two in the morning.”

“I need to go to Portland.”

Silence on the line. Then a long exhale that crackled with static. “Why?”

“Family stuff.”

“Family stuff.” The words came out flat. Mikey, Viv was learning, had a limited tolerance for Lex’s evasions, and she’d already burned through most of it in the twenty-four hours since she’d woken up in this body. “Lex. The album drops in two weeks. Rehearsals start Monday. You can’t disappear right now.”

“I’m not disappearing. I’m taking a trip. Forty-eight hours.”

“And Richie?”

“Tell Richie I’m workshopping lyrics. He’ll buy it. He buys everything if you say it’s about the creative process.”

Another pause. Mikey was weighing something, whether to push, whether to trust her. The silence stretched long enough that Viv could hear the faint metallic ping of the radiator in his apartment, wherever that was.

“Fine,” he said finally. “But I’m coming with you.”

“No.”

“Yes. Last time you went somewhere alone after a late-night phone call, I had to talk you off a fire escape. I’m not doing that again.”

Viv opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. He had a point. And she had no idea what she was walking into. Having backup, someone who knew Lex’s history, who could fill in the gaps when Viv’s borrowed memories failed her, might be the difference between finding answers and getting lost.

“Fine,” she said. “Book us a flight. First thing tomorrow.”

“Morning. It’s already tomorrow. I’ll book us a flight for morning.”

“Morning.” She hung up.

The apartment settled back into silence. Viv stood with her hand still on the receiver, feeling the weight of what she’d just committed to. Forty-eight hours. A trip to Portland to find a man she’d never met, who thought she was dead, who she didn’t even have a name for.

Lex’s father. Her real father.

She crawled into bed. The sheets smelled like cigarette smoke and something floral, the same shampoo she’d found in the bathroom, a brand that had been discontinued in 2003, which meant she had three more years of good hair before it vanished from shelves. An absurd thought. She was in 1999. The Twin Towers were still standing. Y2K hadn’t happened yet. And she was worried about shampoo.

Sleep came in fragments. Dreams of airport terminals, endless corridors, a man with her eyes who turned away every time she got close. She woke to gray light filtering through the filthy window and the sound of Mikey’s van idling outside.

The Portland airport was smaller than she’d expected. Single terminal. Beige walls. The particular antiseptic smell of west coast municipal buildings in the late nineties. Viv stepped off the plane with Mikey behind her, carrying a duffel bag she’d packed in ten minutes flat: jeans, sweaters, the velvet dress because some instinct told her to bring it, though she couldn’t imagine what occasion would call for burgundy velvet in the middle of a family reckoning.

“Where do we start?” Mikey asked.

Lex’s memory supplied the answer. Her mother’s voice, dredged up from wherever the body kept its oldest wounds. Portland. Northeast. The house on Alberta Street before the neighborhood got gentrified. She didn’t have an address. She had a last name, at least: Voss. Her mother’s name, presumably, since Lex had never known her father’s.

“The county records office,” Viv said. “We look up the birth certificate.”

“Bold of you to assume I know where that is.”

“Phone book.”

The Portland Yellow Pages lived in a booth outside the terminal, its pages dog-eared and water-stained. Viv flipped to the municipal listings while Mikey stood guard like a scarecrow in flannel, scaring off a panhandler who’d been eyeing them since baggage claim. The records office was downtown, a brutalist concrete box that smelled like dust and old paper. They arrived twenty minutes before closing.

The clerk was a woman in her sixties with reading glasses on a chain and the weary efficiency of someone who’d been asked for too many things by too many people over too many decades. She didn’t look up when Viv approached the counter.

“Birth certificate request,” Viv said. “Alexandra Voss. Born 1974.”

“ID.”

Lex’s wallet appeared in Viv’s hand. She’d learned to trust the body’s autopilot, and she slid a New York driver’s license across the counter. The clerk glanced at it. Then at Viv’s face. Then back at the license.

“This is you?”

“It’s an old photo.”

The clerk made a sound that could have meant anything. “Twenty-five dollars. Takes two weeks by mail.”

“I need it today.”

“Rush processing is forty. Three business days.”

Viv leaned forward. Her palms pressed into the counter. The gesture was instinctive, Lex’s instinct, the body’s muscle memory for persuasion, and she let it happen. “Please. It’s a family emergency. My father is sick and I need to verify some medical information.” The lie came out smooth, oiled by desperation.

The clerk studied her over the rims of her glasses. Something shifted in her expression, not quite sympathy, but a grudging acknowledgment that this particular request wasn’t worth the fight. She sighed. “Wait here.”

Twenty minutes later, Viv stood on the sidewalk outside the records office with a manila envelope in her hand. The paper was crisp. Official. She tore it open.