Her Here

by Amanda Dennis

  I mount fresh paper. The question is rhetorical, but I answer anyway:

  —There are cases of people forgetting who they are, dissociating, inventing a persona.

  —As soon as I read the green journal, Siobhán says distractedly, I knew that whatever happened to her—whatever she did—had to be connected to it.

  It’s clear now why the only chance of finding Ella lay in the journals. It was always clear, though how could Siobhán have insisted? Ella’s disturbance was too dramatic to be unrelated to her disappearing; coincidences of that order are too unlikely. Ella’s adoptive mother fought the Thai police for listing Ella among the dead, and what I’ve found is more unsettling. Siobhán doesn’t seem surprised. At some level (this might be what she’s trying to tell me), she suspected, and feels an odd relief, reading the confirmation of her worst fears in my story.

  It’s my turn to print. I botch the copy. Siobhán takes it from the machine and tells me not to worry. We put things away, wipe down the press, then sit together in the doorway of the gallery, on its low step.

  —If you knew, why put me through all the searching? I ask, too exhausted to be angry.

  —I didn’t, Siobhán says, as surprised as if I’d struck her. I still don’t. What you’ve written is a fiction, one in which I can live, but it’s not the same as certainty.

  —Only a body could give us that, I say, and regret it, the crudeness of it.

  Siobhán looks at me evenly. When she speaks, she seems sunk in on herself.

  —I became an architect because I wanted to design space, give it order. Painting was the opposite—feeling anchored to material. It made ordinary things volatile. I saw it this way. Ida disagreed.

  It makes me smile to think of how my mother hated order, of how, when I was five, we made the kitchen wall our canvas, to my father’s horror.

  —In Ella’s case, Siobhán says, I wanted to give order to some part of what happened. It was too painful thinking she might turn up at any moment. And … you helped me see her.

  —What was I then, a vessel? I ask, feeling a noble anger, a spirited sarcasm in my voice.

  Siobhán frowns, drawing away from me.

  —The project was your design as much as mine, she says.

  The idea’s force sends a shudder through me. Siobhán’s gaze is calm, her chin tipped up slightly. She looks the way she did a year ago, except for a trembling in her lower lip, so slight that it would be easy to miss. My mind rushes back over our early meetings, her air of authority that so impressed me. Was it hers, or had I invested her with a conviction I badly needed? After six years of disorientation, only the journals made me feel I was writing myself—and someone else—alive. It was as if Ella found herself a body, adopting my memories just long enough to write over them with her own. I don’t believe this, but it accounts for my connection to Ella.

  —This has been hard for me, I say, sorry for my outburst, for my anger.

  Siobhán nods as if she knows.

  —During the time I can’t remember, people say I acted like myself. Except I had to be told things, personal details you don’t forget. The hardest part, though, was afterward—whole months, December to June, nothing. It’s as if the time never happened.

  When I look up, Siobhán’s lips are parted in shock.

  —Working on the journals was strange, I say. They felt more real than my own life.

  Beside me, Siobhán draws in breath. She understands, but I say it anyway:

  —I started thinking once memory slips how fallible it all might be. …

  She looks at me a long time. Then her arm circles me, comforting, and we sit like that, awkwardly, until the streetlamps flicker on in the dusk.

  —I want to show you something, she says.

  We cross the park, and in the elevator of her building, our images multiplied by mirrors, she squeezes my arm, nervous. What can she have, still, to show me? There is the slim, tender hope that whatever it is will change the end I’ve written for Ella.

  She leads me past her flat to a low door at the end of the corridor. A small key opens it. We duck up a set of stairs into sharp smells of wood and dust. A bare bulb suspended from the ceiling gives off little light. Beyond a single window, remarkably clean, the evening sky is a violent blue. The walls of the small room are lined with paintings, all different sizes, all turned to the wall like timid children, their canvases fixed to their slim wooden backs. The only furniture is an armoire with a missing door, inside of which are shelves of figurines, shadowy in the dim.

  Siobhán switches on a lamp, and dust flies up from its pleated shade. She picks through the paintings, peeling them one by one from the wall. The heterogeny of objects—suitcases, easels, records, and sketchbooks—makes Siobhán’s flat downstairs, with its white couches, designer lighting, and evenly spaced Oriental rugs, seem like a fantasy from a different life.

  The lamplight strikes the figurines in the armoire, revealing their curves: humorous, expressive, and deeply familiar. It takes effort to look away when Siobhán calls out, having found what she was looking for.

  She positions the life-size painting so that I can see. Within its straw, orange, and butter shades, there is a woman’s face and body, patterned by rectangular brushstrokes. I notice her curving belly and bright eyes, challenging. Eyes that could open your soul with their sharpness. I know her immediately. Moving closer to it, I touch the painted scarf, her black hair.

  —She was pregnant with you.

  I study the curve of the belly, Siobhán’s name in a corner of the canvas.

  —It’s the last painting I made, she says. Ida asked me to.

  I turn from the painting to the figurines, all wooden. The limbs are long, like dancers.

  —They’re hers.

  Siobhán nods. Setting the painting against the wall, facing us, she goes to open the other side of the armoire, taking a large envelope from a high shelf. I sit with her on the dusty carpet under the lamp as she sorts the photographs, selecting which ones to show me, and spreads them in front of us. Black and white. My mother: black hair, big boots, and a large jacket. She’s looking out to vineyards and hills, her face in profile. I’ve seen many pictures of her—even at this age—but my emotion is still fierce. There is so much of her in the image, something so alive and strong that my stomach twists with longing. Next is a series of her and Siobhán together, making faces, flowers behind their ears, a tenderness and uncertainty in Siobhán’s gaze that isn’t there now. Siobhán’s hair is long and messy, freckles on her nose and cheeks. In another of the pictures, my mother, smiling, is pressing her ear to Siobhán’s round stomach. They must have taken the photos themselves. The angles are too close. In a last photograph, my mother is lying supine on a low wall, sticking out her stomach to match the curve of a hill in the distance. Remembering her love of patterns, her body humor, I laugh.

  —Where was this? I ask, because all around them is countryside, fields and stone walls.

  —Near Beaune, a farmhouse that belonged to an older couple. I let a room there.

  The painting faces us, propped against the wall.

  —I left London suddenly. I didn’t want anyone to know, Siobhán says.

  She looks at the painting wearily.

  —In some ways, my life has been a success. I’ve been able to do what I do because I don’t get weighed down. I made only one mistake. For a time, I thought it would lead to my greatest happiness. Ella was an error. An affair with someone unworthy.

  Siobhán shakes her head.

  —Much as I rebelled against my parents, much as I believed in the right to choose, I wanted the child. I don’t know why. Ida said I should trust my instinct. I found a farmhouse in France and hid out there until I gave birth. Those were the happiest months of my life.

  Siobhán’s voice breaks.

  —The plan was for Ida to join me. The day she showed up, she told me her news, news of you, due five months after Ella. I’d had a feeling. What I hadn’t guessed was t
hat your father had accepted a job in the United States, a good academic job.

  I nod. It’s the job he still has.

  —Ida was meant to join him in September, but she stayed with me until Ella was born. We had four months together, summer into fall.

  Siobhán pauses, her voice full of emotion.

  —She always knew she’d go but was lagging. We would walk in the vineyards, help in the gardens, and make things. We went to markets. We talked. She kept saying she was too happy in Burgundy to really sculpt, but I still have what she made there. She never came for them.

  Siobhán gestures to the figurines in the armoire.

  —The sculpture in the gallery, I ask, that, too?

  —No. She sent that from London. After she left.

  Siobhán gathers up the photos, her hands nervous.

  —She wasn’t conventional, but she was loyal to your father.

  Siobhán looks down quickly, unable to hide a look of pain.

  —You know the rest, she says, her voice controlled. Ella went to a friend, who, desperate and thrilled, cut me out of their lives. I did other things. I tried to forget, until, decades later, the two people I’d loved most in the world were lost in the same month. You are neither of them, yet you remind me … and you came to get in touch. It made me feel Ella was alive.

  So little of this was visible to me. I think how difficult our first meeting must have been for Siobhán, seeing the grown child who had drawn my mother to a different life. From the top photograph in the pile, my mother stares up at me, very alive. I have never seen her so happy.

  Siobhán, following my gaze, shakes her head.

  —Our lives, she says, Ella’s, yours, everything would have been different if she’d stayed. I wanted her to. You and Ella would have grown up like sisters.

  Siobhán smiles at the ground; then she sighs.

  —It wasn’t only up to me, she says, standing to replace the envelope of photographs, then closing the door to the armoire.

  42

  TWO WEEKS PASS. WE FINISH PRINTING. In place of Ella’s journals on the writing table I’ve stacked some of my old books: Bazin, Bergson, and an English translation of a Marker screenplay. I open the screenplay, my eyes lighting on phrases the way they used to with the journals: “I’d have your death / on the tip of my memory.” Or: “One day my image would / begin to blur, you’d realize / the scraps / of words, / scraps of life filling your memory, / were shifting out of focus.” I flip the page: “A real fairy tale, one of them / falls asleep / and never changes.”

  Suddenly, I no longer feel like watching the old films or reading the old books. So I walk.

  I bring nothing with me on these walks, drifting farther each day from what is familiar. I cross the Périphérique and wander up the canal de Saint-Denis, sometimes as far as the basilica, where I took shelter once during a cloudburst. Doubles of my mother no longer appear, but Ella’s words won’t leave me. I read somewhere that by killing, you become what you’ve destroyed.

  After the markets and hawkers by the porte de Clignancourt, the canal peels northward from the city until there are no more shops, just cranes and warehouses. Smells are wet asphalt and exhaust from the boulevards. The sky is overcast, yellow with unbroken storms. Across the water, a cement manufacturer—CEMEX emblazoned on the building—raises its silo towers to the clotted sky. By the canal, there are no other pedestrians, only a few scraggly trees.

  Ahead, there’s a flash of orange—the color of the inside of a nectarine, or of the stiff blossoms of a bird-of-paradise. The flash was smaller even than the stripe of a scarf in dark hair. On a stucco wall a moth lands, pressing its wings together, a somber creature to match the dun-colored buildings and the canal made sluggish by plastic bags and bottles. Then the creature, too large to be a moth, opens its wings of orange, rimmed and spotted with black and violet.

  Often, I’m disoriented as I navigate back to the city. When there is sun, I work out which way is south from its position in the sky. Other times, it takes a while to find a landmark. Hunger and thirst don’t bother me on these walks, but I eat ravenously when I return. Or else I stop at a bookshop close to home, where the owner is a woman wearing glasses with bright red frames. She is very learned, and she recommends books. Then, reading them in cafés or parks, I recognize human gestures: glances, manners of asking, negotiating, courting, consoling. I pick out a notebook of my own to house this noticing.

  Some evenings, I go out with Zoë or Jérémie, or both. They get on well. I meet their friends: artists, photographers, writers. Dinners with Siobhán are full of laughter now, and we’ve gone together twice to the cinema. Still, for hours each morning, I walk with no purpose or plan. There is a world in color I can’t inhabit now that the journals have ended. Or, rather, there are different lives in me now, different threads of lives, and my own is less important. I want to remain in the fiction, delaying my return to the gray.

  One afternoon, after a particularly long walk, I lay my head down for a moment on the writing table, my notebook open beside me. A familiar voice wakes me.

  —The door was open, it says.

  It takes a moment to attach the voice to the body, gesturing to the door propped open in the heat of Indian summer. Z in the flesh. Seeing him feels like a long exhale.

  He makes a show of looking around the room, even checking under the bed. I shake my head. No, no, I haven’t hidden a lover. We laugh. He finds my waist and brings me next to him.

  —I smell like the airplane, he says quietly.

  My voice muffled, my cheek grazing the buttons of his shirt, I say:

  —You smell like you.

  We hold this pose, my cheek against his body, which does smell slightly of airplane and feels strange to me. His lips graze my forehead. He breaks away, moving to the kitchen bar. He pours himself water, asking with his eyebrows if I want a glass.

  After almost a year—ten months since our trip to the Loire—I notice things about him that are different, physical details that don’t match my memories: gray at his temples, purple half-moons under his eyes. He looks tired.

  —Writing? he observes, leaning over the notebook.

  I smile, still groggy, not quite believing he is here.

  —You look tired, I say.

  —You look amazing.

  He moves swiftly to catch me in the center of the room.

  His kiss finds my cheek.

  —You look good but tired, I say.

  We are magnets with the same charge, gently pushing each other around the space. He retreats to the far window. He won’t sit down. His large suitcase is still in the doorway.

  —How are you here? I ask, knowing how demanding his work is.

  He sits down on the bed, grins, and makes a show of reclining.

  —Technically, I’m in Brussels. The next round of client meetings should be in person but can also be by video call. I have to be back for a presentation on the first, but … until then I can work from anywhere.

  Ten days. I realize with pleasure that I want Z to stay.

  —I’ll go if it’s not a good time for you, he says.

  He sits up, looking at me.

  I move next to him on the bed and put a hand on the thigh of his khakis. The gesture feels odd, unlike me. We are nervous around each other.

  —You’ll be here for the vernissage, I say. There’ll be photographs by a Thai artist Ella knew in Chiang Rai. We found descriptions of his work in her journals. Siobhán contacted him through the gallery—

  I break off because Z is staring at me.

  —What? I ask.

  —Nothing.

  Ashamed, I think of how Z’s anecdotes are always tailored to me. He speaks only of what might interest me, in compliance with some personal code of ethics—burdening others with facts irrelevant to them is out of tune with self-reliance. It gives me the illusion that I know Z completely, and that I’m the focus of his thoughts and days.

  —When is it? he asks, stretching out aga
in, propping himself on an elbow.

  —The thirtieth, in the evening.

  —Do you want me to come?

  —Of course.

  —Then I’m there. I’ll book a night train and leave straight from the varnish thing.

  —Vernissage.

  —Simple, he says, dusting his hands together.

  He pulls me down next to him on the bed, folding me into place in the crook of his arm.

  HIS VISIT WEARS AWAY AT BOTH OF US. We’ve been living on top of each other for a week, working and thinking in the same space, so close that we hardly see each other anymore.

  Z gets up early. There are croissants on the breakfast bar, coffee brewed, and his work things by the far window, the corner he has colonized because he likes the chair and the view. When I wake, he comes to sit on the bed to say good morning.

  —This is nice, I say—about this routine, about everything we do—until the phrase accretes the automatism of a mantra. This is good.

  My walks stop. We work in different corners of the room, sometimes making love in the daytime or strolling through the neighborhood or taking the Métro to walk along the quais. Z’s mother likes the Botticelli frescoes in the Louvre, so we go look at them. Evenings we talk, and the phrase—this is good—beats its refrain under everything we say.

  This is nice. Agreement. Accord.

  On my way to the gallery, alone, the city is my own again. Light, people, and façades of buildings come alive and gather my attention. And yet having Z here is good. Very good.

  Lately he has grown preoccupied, things untalked about thickening between us. And I wonder more about his life when he’s not with me: the atmosphere of his office, bars he likes, weekend drives to parts of New England he’s coming to love, people he talks to, cares for.

  —Are you seeing someone in Boston? I ask casually, though I know it will trouble an evening that is beginning well.

  We’ve opened a bottle of rosé just as dusk is settling, earlier now, over the city.

  —Is that where we are now? Z asks, sarcastic.

  I stare, intrigued by his flash of anger, real emotion. Z is always so careful around me.