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Naturally, Maya wanted to go straight to her “feast,” but it was not that simple. For one thing, the police needed to take her formal statement.
For another thing, she had to undergo a medical examination.
Maya protested, of course. She was fine! Or at least, if she wasn’t fine, it was nothing that a few rounds of cocktail shrimp couldn’t fix! Why did there need to be such a fuss over her? The police were already pursuing her kidnapper. She couldn’t tell them anything they didn’t already knew. So the best plan was to skip the police department and go straight to the hotel’s banquet hall, right?
But nobody listened to her. Or, rather -- Nick was listening to her very attentively, bending down to hear her better in the loud lobby, his mouth set in a thin line. Every time she paused for breath, he would nod and say, for the fourth or fifth time, “We’ll go eat, Maya. But first, the police station.”
None of the other people jostling around them paid any particular attention to her demands, though they had plenty of other things they wanted her to say. People kept running in and out of the room; people kept coming up to talk to Nick or to talk to her. To them, Maya said yes or no or I don’t know, but she barely registered their questions or their faces. She was focused on Nick’s face. There were lines etched around his mouth that had not been there a week ago. There was dark sleepless smudges under his eyes.
Pearl was silently pressed against her side, and Maya stroked the top of her head as she said to Nick, for the sixth or seventh time, “I don’t have anything useful to tell the police.”
Nick nodded, as if he were agreeing with her, before saying, once again, “We’re going to the police station, Maya.”
Maya opened her mouth for the ninth or tenth time to argue -- and then she sighed and rolled her eyes and said, “Okay, whatever,” because she could no longer bear to argue any longer, because she could no longer look at Nick’s gaunt, pale face and pretend that nothing much had happened, nobody really had been harmed after all.
Pearl’s grip on her tightened.
Somehow, Nick cleared a path for Maya through the frenzy of people in the courthouse. He got her outside, with Pearl clinging to her like a limpet. There was a patrol car waiting for them at the curb, and the three of them wearily climbed into the back seat.
Pearl was in Maya’s lap, her head tucked under Maya’s chin, her heartbeat a steady tap-tap-tap against Maya’s throat. Maya wrapped her arms around her and pressed her mouth into the softness of her hair.
Beside them, Nick leaned forward to say something to the officer driving the car and then slumped back against the seat.
“It’s not too late,” Maya said as the car moved forward into traffic. “We can still make a detour. Get some fries and a milkshake.”
Nick made an attempt to smile. “Sure. Afterwards.”
Now that they were together in close confines, Maya realized that she could smell Nick. Not in a bad way, but she could tell that he had probably not had a shower in the last 24 hours, which meant that his aura of Nick-ness -- sweat and polyester and something else she normally only registered when she was giving him a full-contact hug with her nose pressed into the shoulder of his suit jacket -- was noticeable.
In contrast, Pearl smelled like soap and laundry detergent. Which meant that even as Nick sleeplessly wore the same sweaty shirt over and over, he had been carefully making sure that Pearl had her naps and took her baths and put on clean clothes every day.
Maya closed her eyes and counted to ten, waiting until the wild and inexplicable urge to cry had passed.
Suddenly, she wondered how she smelled.
“Maya?”
She opened her eyes. “Hey. Can we swing by the office first? Or go...somewhere? I’d like, um, a change of clothes? Or a shower?”
There was a pause, and Nick said, “Franziska said not to do that. Remember?”
Maya remembered the stern prosecutor talking to Nick in the lobby, but she did not remember anything Franziska von Karma had said. Although, now that she was thinking about it, certain things were emerging in her memory: Franziska’s matter-of-fact tone, her repetition of the phrase any surviving physical evidence.
Something must have shown on her face, because Nick said, pleadingly, “It’s just a little longer, Maya. Then you can take a shower. Put on clean clothes. Eat as many hamburgers as you want.”
Pearl pressed harder against Maya’s chest.
“Okay,” Maya said. “Okay, Nick.”
Afterward, Maya did not remember her time at the police station very clearly.
Which was probably for the best.
There was an early moment of unpleasantness because Pearl did not want to be separated from her. She cried. For a moment, Maya thought about saying But she can stay with me, right?
Then she had made eye-contact with Nick, and she thought about what lay ahead of her, and then she knelt next to the sobbing girl and said, “Hey, Pearly, I need you to stay with Mr. Nick, okay? He’ll get scared if he’s left alone. Can you do that for me, Pearly?”
Pearl scrubbed at her wet cheek and nodded bravely.
Maya’s last sight of them -- before she followed an officer back into a grim little interview room -- was the two of them seated side-by-side on hard plastic chairs in a waiting area. Pearl had taken Nick’s hand and was saying something to him -- probably don’t worry, everything is going to be fine, Mr. Nick, Mystic Maya will be right back -- and Nick was staring after Maya, his eyes shadowed and exhausted.
Maya gave them a little wave, and then she had to turn a corner, and she could not see them any longer.
In the interview, there were two police officers, both women. One of them asked terse, flat questions -- what did you see? what did the perpetrator look like? and the other made long statements and waited to see how Maya reacted.
“This must be hard for you. You must have been so confused. You must have so many questions about what happened.”
Not really, Maya thought. Zero questions, actually. Not curious at all.
On the whole, she preferred the other interrogator. Those questions were easier. She had never seen very much. She had been kept in darkened rooms, mostly. On occasion, her kidnapper had blindfolded her. He did not otherwise touch her. He did not otherwise acknowledge her.
Yes, of course, he had let her use the bathroom.
No, he had not given her food. She had been so hungry. Not thirsty, though.
An involuntary flicker of memory: cupping her hands under the bathroom faucet and then lifting the water to her dry mouth, listening for the knock on the door that meant her five minutes was up, that she needed to go back into her darkened cell.
“You must have been frightened about what he intended to do with you.”
“Sure,” Maya said, thinking No.
She had been angry. She had been hungry. But she had not been scared.
“I figured someone would find me,” Maya said. “I figured it would all be okay, eventually.”
The two officers exchanged a glance, and Maya could see their skepticism and pity.
“Are there any other questions?” Maya asked. “Or am I...free to go?”
One of the officers -- the terse one -- said, “No. There’s also a medical check-up.”
“Oh,” Maya said.
Maya remembered nothing of the medical examination.
It happened in the police station. Apparently there was an on-call doctor who belonged to the department. Apparently this kind of “check-up” was routine for the victims of crimes.
For about ten minutes, Maya waited in a little room, sitting on a paper-covered bed, swinging her heels back and forth, thinking about the questions the doctor would ask, the places where she or he would want to touch Maya, all the unnecessary questions Maya would have to answer.
She thought, with grim amusement, of how horrified her captor would be at the assumption that he had injured her in some way. He was a professional (as he had told her frequently). He had not laid a finger on her (aside from the actual kidnapping itself, of course, or the several times in which he had to restrain her from trying to escape).
Nevertheless, the police wanted a “check-up.” They wanted “any surviving physical evidence.”
Abruptly, Maya decided, Nope. Not doing this.
Channeling the spirits always felt like falling backwards and waiting for someone to catch her. As she went through the mental rituals in the doctor’s office, Maya stretched back and back and back -- until a warmly familiar presence rose up to meet her.
Thanks, sis, Maya thought as her consciousness faded. Tell the doc to give me a clean bill of health. I’ve got shrimp to eat.
When Maya came back to consciousness, she was standing in a empty hallway in the police station. She was wearing the same clothes as before, although her robes felt tied a little tighter than before -- and as Maya registered the subtle change, she was reminded of a childhood memory: she was four or five years old, standing very still so her sister could finish tying the shoelaces on her brand-new sneakers. She could remember her intense concentration as she watched Mia pull a knot tight with a clean and decisive motion.
Thanks, sis, Maya thought ruefully. So the exam is over. What now?
There was a vending machine in front of her. It was full of brightly packaged snacks.
Maya’s pockets were empty, of course.
“Sis,” Maya sighed. “I wish you had taken this particular heist just one step further.”
A door opened behind her.
“Maya?”
Miles Edgeworth was standing there with a thick folder in one hand.
“Hey, Mr. Edgeworth,” Maya said wearily. “Do you have more questions for me?”
Edgeworth blinked and said, very gently, “No. Your statement has been submitted and filed. You don’t need to answer any more questions.”
“Okay,” Maya said and then turned back to regard the vending machine.
There was the clicking sound of Edgeworth locking the door that he had just come out from, and then Maya felt him join her in front of the vending machine.
“Have you had anything to eat since...coming back?” Edgeworth asked quietly.
“They gave me a box of apple juice earlier. It was….okay.”
“I saw Wright a little while ago,” Edgeworth said. “He called the Gatewater. He made a dinner reservation for...everyone.”
“Good,” Maya said vaguely. She knew she should be pleased by this, but she mainly just felt like it was too late. She had missed her chance to slip back into the past, where everything was fine, and instead everything was different now.
She felt dull and foggy.
She continued to study the vending machine.
There was a long pause.
“But a snack before dinner couldn’t hurt,” Edgeworth observed blandly.
Maya turned to look at him, to really look at him. He had spoken to her earlier, when they had been standing in that heated frenzy of the courthouse lobby, but Maya -- hungry and tired and laser-focused on the weary exhaustion on Nick’s face -- had paid him little attention. She had nodded and shrugged and said banal commonplaces at appropriate intervals, but everyone who wasn’t Nick or Pearl had blurred together for her.
But now that she was looking at Edgeworth by himself, she could see that he, too, had changed. His jacket was wrinkled; his hair was untidy; there was a gray ghost of unshaved stubble against his jaw. He and Nick might have made a pair -- but where Nick was hollow-cheeked and pale, as if he had been drained of some vital essence, Edgeworth was merely...softer. Like a crumbling marble statue, where every sharply broken corner revealed unsuspected ripples and curves in the stone.
“What do you want?” Edgeworth asked, jerking his head toward the vending machine.
“I don’t have any money,” Maya said.
An expression of amused exasperation crossed his face, and for a second, he looked like the Miles Edgeworth of a year ago. “It’ll be my treat, Maya.”
She smiled. “Surprise me.”
Leaning against the wall beside the vending machine, they split a bag of red licorice twists.
As soon as Maya bit through the tough braided strand and began to chew, she began to feel clearer.
Not better, maybe, but definitely clearer.
Edgeworth swallowed and said, “These are terrible.”
Maya nodded. “Yeah. Can I ask you something, Mr. Edgeworth?”
“Yes.”
“Will anything I said today matter for the investigation?”
Edgeworth chewed slowly before saying, “It might.”
Maya squinted at him. “But will it really?”
Edgeworth shrugged. “We’re dealing with a professional here. He took pains to prevent you from learning any identifying information about him. Perhaps your information will be useful. But perhaps not.”
Maya chewed fiercely.
“Are you angry that we made you come down here to answer questions?” Edgeworth asked quietly.
“Yes,” Maya said.
Edgeworth nodded. He did not seem dismayed at her reaction. “That makes sense. But there was no avoiding it. If given the chance to do it over, we would make the same decision.” He paused. “Or, at least, I would. I suppose I should not speak for Wright.”
“Hmph,” Maya said. “Do you want to ask me any questions?”
“Nothing you tell me informally in this hallway will be admissible in court--”
Maya irritably poked him in the shoulder with the end of one of her licorice twists. “Yeah, yeah, but do you want to?”
Edgeworth regarded her impassively. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Ha. No.”
“Perhaps, instead,” Edgeworth said, “you want to ask me questions.”
Maya squinted at him. “Like what?”
“Perhaps you are curious about how Phoenix Wright has been doing during your captivity.”
Maya shuddered. “Stop it. I already know how he was doing, just by looking at him.”
“Yes,” Edgeworth said, and a shadow crossed his face. “It has been hard for him.”
“I don’t get the point of it,” Maya said, speaking rapidly. “I mean, I figured I’d get rescued. Either that or I’d get killed. Either way, there was nothing to be worried about.”
“Nothing?”
Maya shrugged. “I’m not afraid of dying. I know what dying means. Professionally speaking, I’m an expert.”
“Hmmm,” Edgeworth said, passing her back the bag of licorice twists. “I could see that. But other people are less sanguine about your death, you know.”
Maya scowled. “I know.”
“Are you afraid that Wright is going to read your police report?”
Maya flinched. “There’s no reason for him to do that. I’m back! Everything’s fine! We can just go back to normal.”
“Are you afraid that your report is going to cause Wright pain?”
“You do want to ask me questions after all.”
“I suppose,” Edgeworth said. “You do seem very worried about Wright.”
“Have you seen him? He looks like he’s going to come apart at the seams any minute.”
“True,” Edgeworth said. “Even so. You are the one who had the traumatic experience. Not Wright.”
Maya frowned at him.
“I will accept your point that you were not afraid of dying,” Edgeworth said. “But I think you probably were afraid of how other people would feel about your death. I think you are still afraid of how they are feeling right now.”
“But I didn’t die. So there’s nothing for them to be sad about now. I wish...I wish Nick and Pearl would stop being so sad now. I wish we could have gone to eat shrimp cocktail this afternoon, instead of doing this. Talking about what a bad time I had isn’t going to help anything. Not really.”
The corner of Edgeworth’s mouth lifted in a half-smile. “It can be good to talk about bad times. You may feel differently in the future.”
“Not likely.”
“Yes, you may not. But.” Edgeworth paused and licked his lips, and when he spoke again, his voice was a little fragile, a little uncertain. “As you may remember, my father died when I was a child.”
Maya considered the various ways she could potentially respond to this statement, but she ended up settling with the most banal option: “Yes, I remember.”
“Afterwards, I did not really want to talk about it. I wanted to continue living the life I’d had before his death. I wanted everything to be as it had been before. I did not see the point of rehearsing his death over and over again.” Edgeworth shrugged. “And years passed, and I did not speak of it, and then...subsequent events forced me to confront the whole thing again. As you might remember.”
“Yes,” Maya said.
“And I have come to feel...differently. It was not enjoyable to talk about my father’s death. It was, frankly, unbelievably painful. But. It was undoubtedly...better. It was better to be truthful to myself. It was better to stop telling myself falsehoods.” His mouth twisted to one side. “Although, I share your reservations about processing a past trauma with Wright. He complicates things unnecessarily. He is...extremely empathetic. It is easy for one to feel as if one is responsible for managing his feelings as well.”
There had been a strange note to Edgeworth’s voice when he mentioned Nick, and Maya considered it as she chewed and swallowed her last licorice twist.
“So what’s your advice?” she asked at last.
“Come again?”
“Your advice,” Maya repeated. “What should I do? Going forward. After this...thing that happened.”
“You don’t need my advice,” Edgeworth said as he began to fold the empty licorice-twists bag into smaller and smaller squares.
“Yeah, but I want it,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. “I think...you can just take it day-by-day. And you can feel whatever you feel. And you should let Wright feel however he feels.”
“I don’t want to spend weeks with Sad Nick,” Maya said tartly.
“You won’t,” Edgeworth said. “Do you think he’s sad now? I think he’s just...overwhelmed. He’s like a man who watched an avalanche come down a mountain and miss him by six inches. He's shell-shocked. But I wouldn’t call him...sad.” He paused. "We're all...tremendously glad to have you back, Maya. All of us. Wright is not alone in feeling many emotions right now."
Maya pushed her shoulder against the wall and straightened. “Okay. Okay. Okay. But I still think that endless piles of cocktail shrimp are the best solution to our collective problems .”
“That may be,” Edgeworth said gravely.
“Are you coming to dinner with us?”
“Yes.“ A pause. “If that’s okay.”
Maya glanced at him, startled. “Of course. I want you there. I want everybody there.” She frowned. “But first we need to find Nick. Do you know how to get to him? Because I have no idea where I am.”
A ghost of amusement passed across Edgeworth's face. “I think I can figure out a route to Wright. Follow me."