I Remember You

by Elisabeth de Mariaffi

  — You didn’t have brothers.

  — No.

  — You’ll find you go through a lot of sandwiches.

  — More liverwurst, yeah?

  Heike let her gaze fall away from the window, but she didn’t look at him or even down at her own body, focusing instead on some point in the tangle of bedclothes, as though they were a puzzle to be solved. She played with the sheet, loosening it where it was wound too tightly around her waist.

  — At night, when we are sleeping, he curls right here. She lay a hand softly against her breastbone and turned on her side to face Dolan. And his little hair. His hair is always just a bit damp from sleeping so warm, close in together. And he smells of soap, and sweet milk. His breath.

  She was quiet then and lay on one side with her arm tucked under her head like a pillow. Her hand wrapped the back of her own skull, and she felt herself rocking slightly. Her jaw was tight.

  Dolan pushed back against the headboard and reached for his cigarettes.

  — I’ll light my own, Heike said. He shook the box at her, and she picked her favourite. She put her hand out for his lighter and let her tongue run along the seam of the cigarette, quick, before sparking the flame.

  — How do you speak to him?

  She exhaled a little curl of smoke.

  — What do you mean?

  — In English or German?

  — The two together.

  — Both?

  — German when we are alone. Or when I tell him stories. Or when I sing. But some English, too.

  — Tell me a story.

  — In German? I think you won’t understand it.

  — Tell me your best story. Dani’s favourite.

  She looked away.

  — I don’t keep track. Every story can be built a hundred ways. All you need are the bricks: a castle, a dark wood, a beautiful child. A clever little animal.

  She left it there. After a moment Dolan turned his face to her.

  — You think it will make you sad. He flicked his cigarette into the ashtray and set it down and let it burn there, resting on the edge of the nightstand, and rolled toward her and crooked his elbow so that he could lean up on one hand. I think it will make you feel better, he said. Not worse. I think it will make Heike feel more like Heike.

  — You’re making me nervous now.

  — Whatever for? Go on.

  His free hand slid along her hip and nudged at the inside of her thigh.

  — Alright. Yes. Once upon a time . . . She pushed the hand away and drew her knees together, rolling away from him with the cigarette between her lips, an arm folded under her head like a woman lying on the beach. There was a queen, she said. Now don’t distract me.

  He lifted an eyebrow.

  — I’ll nurse my own wounds, shall I? He cast a hand toward the ashtray on the nightstand and took his cigarette back.

  — Okay, Heike said. So where am I? This queen. Every day she sits in the window, doing her needlework, and every day there is a raven who comes to perch on the windowsill beside her. The queen scatters a few bread crusts for the raven, and the bird tells her stories of what is happening out in the world, outside the castle. There is only one thing the queen loves more than this pet, and this is her small daughter, Gretchen.

  Heike sat up, cross-legged, and drew the sheet up over her breasts and held it there with one hand.

  — The little girl sits at her feet, she said, and catches the crusts that the raven drops, and the ends of thread as her mother snips them off her embroidery.

  She settled herself in her new position, and then leaned in to Dolan, her face instructional.

  — Now, she said. The king is a jealous and resentful man. So much so that even this raven is a source of competition for him, and one day, upon finding the two of them there again, he threatens the bird and nails the window shut. Every morning the queen comes to the window to do her needlework, and every morning the raven joins her there, but they no longer share bread or stories. He is confined to the other side of the glass.

  Heike stubbed out her cigarette with a series of small jabs before continuing.

  — At this time, the king is hunting every day in the forest, hoping to find once and for all a magic hind.

  Dolan’s brows came together. A little ash toppled onto the sheet.

  — A what?

  — Like a lady deer. A magical one. Heike brushed the ash away, off the bed. Evening falls, she said. The king corners the animal and draws his bow, but the hind is really a powerful witch, and although he begs for mercy, she falls upon him with her wickedness. The king is a coward, and he cries and pleads for his life. The sound of the crying is so terrible that the witch decides to let him go. He is instantly transported back to the castle. But at that very moment, Gretchen is taken ill; when the queen goes to check on her, she finds the bed empty. The little girl has disappeared. Heike leaned back on a hand. Of course, you know what has happened.

  — I suspect the witch.

  — The witch has stolen Gretchen in place of her whining father. Heike’s eyes softened. But do not be afraid, she said.

  (Here Dolan had to swallow a laugh, and she smacked his shoulder.)

  — Do not be afraid, I said. The raven, who was all the time sitting outside the window, disguises himself as a beautiful golden bird and allows the witch to capture him. Day by day, he and Gretchen plan their escape. When the king returns to the castle, he is embarrassed by what he has done—I told you he is a terrible coward—therefore, instead of pleading for his wife’s forgiveness, he locks her up in her sewing room and tells all the servants that it was she who killed their daughter. But the queen does not despair. Day by day, she sits and stitches in her window and waits for her raven to return.

  There was a pause, Heike shaking her head slowly.

  — Alas, she said. The raven in his disguise is killed. But! There is his voice to guide Gretchen out of the forest, and together they finally manage to slip away. Locked in her room, suddenly the queen feels a firebrand go through her, a flame running from her crown right down to the tips of her toes, and in this very moment, Gretchen’s feet first touch the soft grass of the meadow. This is how the queen knows that her daughter is free.

  Heike stopped and adjusted the bedsheet and took a moment to smile a little. Dolan stubbed out his cigarette.

  — And? he said. And?

  — The queen lays down her embroidery and goes to the window where her raven used to sit. There she sees a thousand black birds descend upon her husband. And tear his body to pieces.

  — Gruesome.

  Heike thought about this.

  — We Germans really tell the best stories, she said.

  * * *

  She didn’t have a dress to wear, and she put on a pair of his work pants and belted them tight, and a shirt with a collar. With the sleeves rolled up: she didn’t want to lose his cufflinks, she said. She had to hold still and stand on a chair while he sheared off the bottoms of the trousers with a pair of black-handled kitchen scissors. Afterward, she creased them sharply up into floods, to hide the ragged edges. They accomplished all this in his office, a long room on the second floor of the house.

  The way he reached his arms out to help her down, the physical gesture, made her falter. How many times had she helped Daniel jump down from a bench in the park, or a chair pulled up next to the kitchen counter? She realized she’d gone a little time without thinking of him, and this made her panic. She didn’t look for him here, around every corner, as she would have at home. This was in some ways a reprieve. The thought unnerved her.

  Dolan waited, his hand held out.

  — You’ll get him back, Heike.

  — I feel like I’m doing nothing at all.

  — You’re coming off a pretty heavy dose of tranquilizers. It might take a day or two to come up with the right plan. That’s not nothing.

  — It feels it. It feels like nothing.

  She took his hand and jumped down. The on
ly windows were at one end, facing south, and they gave a vague, steady light. There were no curtains. He must have thought she needed a moment to steady herself and kept his hand in hers until she noticed and shook it off, embarrassed. She walked over to the other side of the room, and busied herself with looking around the office.

  — What’s this?

  — What do you think? Take a look.

  He’d pinned a length of twine along one wall like a clothesline. Hanging from this were fifteen or twenty pegs, each peg pinching a stiff white page the size of a poster. She reached out to touch one and held it away from the wall, the corner firm between her thumb and forefinger. It was plain card, well made, the edge raw and soft as torn fabric. He’d scrawled on them all in pencil, each sheet divided into boxes and in each box a kind of scene: stick figures and bits of text. Description or maybe dialogue, or even just a single question, repeated:

  Going my way?

  Picture a woman.

  Street scene, summer, man on a sidewalk.

  The time is now. The place is here.

  Walking distance.

  Heike moved along the row, examining each sheet in turn and letting them fall back in place as she went. The clothesline bobbed.

  — These are your stories. She turned to him slowly, one sheet still held loosely between her fingers. Her face shone in the afternoon light, wide open and pleased. Your stories for the television. The . . . The Mind’s Eye. Isn’t it?

  — These are them.

  — There are so many.

  — I’m not a guy who gets bored.

  She turned back to the page she was holding and ran a hand over top of it, as though trying to clear away some fine debris that had settled there.

  — Tell me about this. What’s happening in here?

  Dolan moved forward to where she was standing.

  — You call that a storyboard, he said. Mitigated. Like a sketch. So each sheet is one story. He unfastened the peg and pulled the page away from the wall and held it out to the light. I’ll have to write a script for each one of these.

  — Yes, yes, I know this. But what is happening in it?

  — What, the story? There’s this man, see him? Call him Jones. See, here he is. (Dolan pointed to a rough figure, head and limbs, and next to it, some low thing. A dog. A cart? A car, Heike thought, she could see the circles now, for wheels.)

  Dolan kept on:

  — Ad man type, he said. Out for a drive, looking for a day pass from Madison Avenue, and his car breaks down. Wouldn’t you know it, the service station needs an hour or so to do the job. But he looks up and sees a road sign pointing to his own hometown. The thing is, Jones hasn’t been back there in years, and it’s only a mile down the road. So he decides to give it a shot.

  Heike took the sheet back.

  — Walking distance, she said. The words were repeated at the top and bottom of the page. She tapped at them with a finger.

  — You got it. It’s walking distance. Only when he gets there, he hasn’t just walked down the road. He’s walked back in time. He sees himself as a kid. Dolan stood a few feet from her now, bouncing with energy. He goes to the soda fountain and orders an ice cream—a triple scooper—and the jerk only charges him a dime. And here’s Jones, he’s thinking, This is great, this is wonderful, nothing’s changed. Nothing’s changed, not even the price of ice cream. There’s a calliope and a merry-go-round, and he can watch himself ride it, his kid self.

  — What does the child do?

  — The kid? You mean the kid Jones?

  — The kid Jones. When he sees the man.

  — I haven’t got to that part yet, he said. Here’s the thing: this man, Jones, he’s idealized his childhood. He’s rhapsodized the whole place, the whole town.

  Heike pegged the board back on the line. It was fastened there, but she held on to the bottom corner anyway, regarding the rough panels for a moment before turning back to face him.

  — So, it’s that childhood was so wonderful? Or because he is so unhappy as a man?

  — Neither. It’s like a dream. No, not a dream. Dolan was moving around the room again. The opposite, he said. It’s the opposite. It’s like waking up. He stopped. Like you wake up from a night of hard dreaming and you have that moment, this is my bed, my pillow, that’s my yard out the window. My car, my shoes, in the kitchen the same coffee is brewing in the same pot. You can smell it brewing. You know what that is?

  Heike opened her mouth and closed it again. He wasn’t taking a breath.

  — It’s grace, Dolan said. He sank his hands into his trouser pockets. That’s what it is. Grace.

  He quit talking for a moment and stood there with his hands in his pockets and nodded to himself, then looked over to where Heike was standing.

  — So you must also yearn for this, she said. For Leo Dolan, the child. For the merry-go-round.

  — Don’t you?

  Heike stared at him.

  — I mean, isn’t there some time you’d like to go back to? What if your first husband was never killed. Wouldn’t you like to live that other life?

  — With Harry?

  — With Harry.

  — I only remember little things.

  — But you remember the feeling.

  She looked at the storyboard again, frowning.

  — It’s funny, what I remember. I remember the coffee percolator, the way that sounded in the morning. And his cologne, the smell of his cologne. She dropped the sheet back into its place on the line. We wanted a baby, she said. Or I think we did. She brought her hand to her belly and looked down at it, her fingers grazing the borrowed shirt. Her brow furrowed. But then I wouldn’t have Daniel, she said. She shook it off and looked up. So I can never choose to go back like that, she said. Even if I could. Even if it wasn’t just a nice story.

  Dolan stepped toward her.

  — Nah. You hit the nail on the head. That’s the whole problem right there. Our man walks down his old street to his old house, but then he sees his folks. And his folks don’t recognize him. Why would they?

  — Hasn’t he been back to see his parents in the meantime? Or his parents are really dead?

  — His parents are dead.

  — Aha. So. Now he is an orphan, and this scares him. That’s why he is out driving. And why he wants again to be a child.

  — All grown men are orphans, Dolan said.

  Heike tilted her head.

  — Everyone has such fears, she said. Orphan is another word for lonely. That’s all it means. It means alone.

  She turned away and started to move down the length of the wall, tracing the line of pages with her fingers. She hopped the fingers over each peg.

  — You should write another one, she said. You should write one where instead of the man going back in time, the child comes forward. You know what you call that? A phantasm.

  — You mean phantom.

  — No, I don’t. Phantasm. Not a ghost; more like a projection. She looked up and gave him a little shrug. You’re surprised I know these things. I used to read some of Eric’s books in the evenings, after Daniel went to sleep. When Eric was busy working.

  — An armchair psychologist. Just my luck. I’d better watch my step before I get a diagnosis of my own.

  Toward the far end of the clothesline she stopped.

  — What’s this? she said.

  Dolan was silent, still lost in thought over the Jones story. Heike slowly unpegged the sheet and took it over to the window. For the first time, she used his given name.

  — Leo.

  There were only three panels on the page. In one, a woman’s face, rough-drawn, and in the next, a smaller figure, pigtails, something tucked under her arm. A blanket. A teddy bear. Something in the drawing of the little girl. Indefinable, the angle of her face, the eyes. Her name, a loose scrawl across the bottom of the page. Heike felt a quick wave of nausea, the rise and fall of a boat churning in the ocean.

  She let her arm drop to her side, and the page
with it. She was small against the window and felt smaller dressed in Dolan’s clothes. Like a girl who’d been into the dress-up trunk. The light coming in washed through her, her face pale and tenuous, crystalline.

  She held the page out to him.

  — Where did you get this?

  Dolan took his hands from his pockets and crossed the room in a few long strides. Standing next to him, Heike had to tilt her head up more than felt comfortable. She wished for a small stepstool, or that he would sit down. Instead, she stepped back. Dolan took the page and looked it over.

  — This is my third-grade teacher. Miss Healey. I came up with a whole story about her. This little girl appears out of nowhere, see? She just shows up one day, on the apartment steps. Says her mother is missing, she can’t find her. And Miss Healey has a soft spot for lonely kids, on account of her own mother being killed when she was a girl.

  — Is this a real story?

  — Is it true? Nah, I made it up. Like an apple for the teacher.

  — You kill her mother and call this a gift?

  — It’s a real shiny apple, I promise you. I don’t have much yet. Fiona comes home from work one day—Miss Healey’s first name was Fiona—and there’s the girl, sitting on the steps outside her door. A new girl, she thinks, and she invites her in. But then an old friend of hers drops by from out of town, and the kid makes a break for it, she doesn’t want to see him—

  — What about this . . . this part? Heike pointed to the text at the bottom of the page. Where did you get this?

  — What’s the matter with you?

  — I just want to know how you came up with this.

  She’d taken the sheet back and was examining it steadily.

  — I don’t know. I was looking at a list of names and I saw that one. Lisa. So I gave it to this kid here.

  — Lisa.

  — What’s with you all of a sudden?

  — I thought it said Tessa.