Part 7: Crying Wolf

"I've fought, and I've bullied for this thing from the first day I got to Roswell… and for what? For an endless pursuit of some thing I couldn't possibly achieve? Do you know what that feels like?" Liz raised her eyes, tentatively. "It aches. You feel helpless. Humiliated. Furious. It's maddening, I tell ya." Tess growled. "It was maddening to try to open Max's eyes to the truth… maddening to keep trying after he refused to see it… And I did try… I tried with all my might! I wanted to show Max that his destiny lied with me… I was certain that as soon as he saw me, he would…"

Liz arched her eyebrows; she wanted to ask Tess why she thought Max would immediately recognize her, but she was too afraid to anger her further with such questions. Tess went on with her speech in a tone that Liz imagined as thinly veiled remorse... but how could she know for sure? The alien could easily be mindwarping her.

"He was almost remembering me when we got to the Pod Chamber, until he went off on a rant about some guy named William Atherton… if I hadn't insisted so much, he wouldn't have remembered anything… I tried to explain to him what our destiny was and he just took off as if I had handed him a death sentence…"

It was nothing but, Liz mused.

"If it wasn't for me, he would have never gotten out of that White Room… but, how did he thank me?... he didn't even look me straight in the eyes after he pushed me away in the Pod Chamber! He only tried to be nice to me after Nasedo died, and even then, the further the distance, the better he felt about it… When I offered to teach him how to remember our world, the cold reluctance in him was painfully palpable… His coldness towards me was even worse after you slept with Kyle… I tried to be there for him… but he wasn't interested in anything I had to offer. When we were in New York, he protected me from Lonnie and Rath…" She said, with a nervous laugh. "I thought he had remembered, that maybe the summit had helped him remember about us…" She shook her head, slightly. "But I realized that despite my best attempts to comfort him, the only two things on his mind were the Granilith… and you."

Liz glanced at the clock: it was normal. She felt her blood turn to ice in her veins. She gulped, trying to breathe, and she put her hand on the door's handle. She's gonna kill me if I don't leave, she's got nothing to lose anymore, she thought.

"I gave him a sweater… on that day that Brody went crazy, remember that?" Liz nodded, as calmly as she could. "He treated me as if I had offered him a bomb, or something…" she snickered. "I think I knew, even then, that Max would never admit his love for me… I mean, even Larek remembered how we had met back on Antar, how we had fallen in love there… even when Max heard the story from someone other than me, he refused to acknowledge it! Oh, when he came up to my bedroom that night, and told me he had remembered me, I just wanted to leap with joy… But his eyes… his eyes didn't lie… I realized that he believed our past because I had showed it to him, not because he felt it… Even so, I kept hoping that Max would remember the truth, sooner rather than later, and then everything would be all right… Do you have any idea how it felt when he told me he was going to the Prom with you? No, I'm sure you don't… you were too busy shattering his heart again, weren't you?"

There's that angry tone again, Liz thought. She looked out the window, trying to contain her pain over what she had said to Max on the night of the Prom. She wished she could've just told him that she had lied about Kyle, that she had been a fool for staying away from him for the entire summer, and that she just wanted to stay with him forever. The memory of how much it had pained her to say those words to Max shook her and made her dizzy. She swallowed her tears and faced Tess again.

"What happened between you that night really destroyed everything; Max was not the same after that… he was even more displeased about the idea of our past life than before… displeased about the idea of being alien! I don't know if it was in spite of what he remembered, or because of it. You would think that after a few memories, he'd give up on this miserable excuse for a life he called planet Earth and rethink his options, but everything you did to him created nothing but a self-loathing alien. And he remained that way right up until I left! I was forced to watch as he accumulated more and more feelings for you – old and new, positive and negative – always increasing ... I couldn't wait for him to remember our past life on his own any longer, I had only one chance to justify my whole existence... I had to take it!"

Growing up would have been better than kissing Kivar's ass, Liz thought, realizing that Tess was talking about her and Max sleeping together. "And so, you mindwarped him to make him sleep with you?"

"He was sinking on his own, thanks to your handiwork! Why would I volunteer to be his executioner? I only had to make him believe the baby was sick… I knew everything would be lost if I didn't," Tess continued. "Then again, maybe things wouldn't have been so difficult if he hadn't gone with you on that wild-goose chase in Las Cruces, only to end up kissing you in the Jeep. That kiss was only the last of a long list…"

Tess' words made Liz clutch the door handle with renewed fervor. Wishing she had misheard the last moments, she hoped she had enough strength in her legs to slip out of the car and hide in the surrounding bushes, before Tess decided to stop talking and get rid of her for good…

"He stored that memory in his mind," Tess continued, "as he stored every other emotion about you… I think 'hoarding' is the right term for what Max does: he hoards every sight, every sound, every scent in his brain," she said in her now familiar unknown tone. It was a mere shadow of her former tones: not quite angry, not at all pleased. Each word rolled slowly off her tongue as if she was dragging them out of her… It was bizarre! Was it even real?... Liz didn't want to stay in there another minute to find out, but she feared that Tess wouldn't let her leave; she feared that Tess would kill her at the faintest provocation… "That's what Max has been doing every day since he got off of that bus when he was a little kid," Tess continued. "The first time he was ever happy was when you smiled at him on the playground," she said, fixing her eyes away from Liz. "The first time he was ever unhappy was when he saw you laying on the floor of the Café on the day you got shot… He was so distraught about your grandmother that he wished he could give one of his brain hemispheres to her if it would spare you that suffering… Just how ecstatic he was the first time you two kissed and he finally got to hold you in his arms..."

Liz's fear melted with the alien's slurred words; she lacked the strength it took to swallow the hatred that speech conjured up in her. How dare Tess desecrate her most sacred memories? How could that monster commit yet another blasphemy? The barely contained rage mingled with the terror that had long seized her; she was shaking uncontrollably, while one unmerciful thought pounded in her brain. There's only one way to shut her up… Hoping against hope that Tess wouldn't move, she closed her eyes, clutched the pocketknife, felt her heart do a back flip and tasted the bitter nausea reaching her mouth, while the alien went on with her lit up speech, fixing her gaze on the far horizon.

"How he enjoyed living the dream of being with you, and doing fun things like learning how to play pool… and how it took every ounce of his strength not to climb back up the ladder after you kissed him… The relief he felt when he got drunk and managed to finally tell you everything that had been stuck in his throat for so many years… To know how surprised he was – well, incredulous, at first – when he learned how you really felt about him…"

Liz didn't want to hear any of it anymore! She wanted to stop Tess from contaminating all of her memories with Max… She looked at the clock and felt a cold, sharp shock at the base of her spine. No lost minutes. The hatred and anger burning through her veins got mixed with the humiliation that numbed her muscles... She fixed her gaze at the clock and wondered how many seconds it would take her to unfold the blade and plunge it into Tess' coronary artery… how many times she would have to plunge the knife to shut her up, how many seconds it would take for her to just bleed out…

"Do you have any clue how he felt when you abandoned him in the Pod Chamber… after you told him you loved him… and that you were going to make your own destiny? Do you know that he spent every moment after that wondering when you were going to come to your senses and come back to him? Every single minute… until you returned from Florida. Do you think he blamed you for what happened with Kyle? No! For a long time he wanted to believe you were innocent, he wanted to believe that Kyle had forced you in some way, had done something to you… even after you admitted it to him… but don't think he suffered any less by trying to absolve you in his mind and in his heart… Don't think he didn't torture himself wondering if you had ever loved him at all…" Tess shook her head, chuckled softly, stared at Liz with a haunted gaze and murmured in a tremulous, bitter voice: "You know… I will never get my husband back… but you sure as hell don't deserve his love." After that, she inhaled deeply, stared back at the horizon and just kept on talking...

Liz could hardly understand her words over the maniacal beating of her heart. She could feel the cold stabs of adrenaline through her body each time Tess made a movement (however subtle); her hand still clutched the pocketknife, as the rage and the spew threatened to overpower her. She squeezed her eyes shut, and tried not to think about Tess' words... Each word was like a bullet (she knew how much those hurt!) She realized now there was no way to prevent Life from fading between her fingers... How had her existence become such a heavy burden? Throughout her life, all she had had to do was follow the rules and Logic, and everything would be okay. But Logic was missing from her present life. It had been since she dove head first into the alien abyss. Each decision she made, like bars of a gate, was an attempt to shield herself and her loved ones. To keep Hell away. But nothing worked the way she wanted… Lately, it seemed that she could peek at a better world through that gate and she wondered on which side of Hell she had been all this time… Had she really made the right decisions? Or was the pain and suffering they had caused proof she was wrong about everything? Those bars felt so heavy in her hands… How could she ever get out of the Hell she had built for herself?...