My Name Is Memory

by Ann Brashares

  Because you don’t know this new version yet.

  I didn’t know the old version, either.

  The old Daniel was the one Constance loved. And Sophia loved. That had made sense to her before. Why didn’t it make sense now?

  She put her hand to her mouth. She saw bits of icy lace on her dark glove and looked up to see big, uncoordinated flakes of snow drifting around her. It was a Virginia snow, where the sky didn’t look like it really meant it and the flakes were out on their own.

  Maybe it was she who had changed. Maybe that was the real problem. She was so much softer then, so much more willing to fall in love, or believe she was. She was colder now, more solitary, and her outlines were scratched in deeper. Maybe she wasn’t capable of that kind of connection anymore.

  But why not? Because of the things she’d learned from Madame Esme and Dr. Rosen and the falling-down mansion in England? Maybe she’d buried herself with the discovery of the old people she’d been. Maybe she’d lost that old self under the weight of them.

  She felt sad, and she put her hands to her eyes. She wondered if it was really her he’d ever wanted.

  He was different now, too, and maybe that was good. Not only in how he looked, she realized. For one thing, he called her by her name. He called her Lucy.

  KOLKATA, INDIA, 2009

  HE GOT THE CALL from the woman in Kolkata in early 2009. It was not too long after he’d seen Sophia in the library at the university. The woman introduced herself as Amita. She chattered to him in Bengali for a full minute before he could convince her he didn’t speak it.

  “How can you not speak Bengali?” she demanded of him in accented English.

  “I . . . don’t. How would I?”

  “You’ve not lived here, have you? Hindustani? Do you speak that?”

  “A little; not much. Can we stick to English for the moment?”

  She laughed, and he realized she was Ben. “Ah, it’s my old friend,” he said in the extinct Italian dialect they used on the boat.

  “Now you want to speak languages, do you?” she asked back in English.

  “We have many in common,” he said in Latin.

  “Can you come for a visit?” she asked him gaily in English.

  He knew to come when Ben summoned. “Yes. When?”

  “Soon! Whenever you like.”

  She gave him an address, and he bought a plane ticket the next day. He had plenty of vacation days to use up at the hospital.

  HE FOUND HER in a small apartment on the top floor of an old house in a crowded and shabby district of Kolkata. She was young, with a face constantly on the move. She wore a lovely peacock-blue sari and jingling gold bangles at her wrist. She embraced him immediately. She led him back to her small, old-fashioned kitchen, where she was cooking up a storm.

  “You are very handsome, Daniel,” she said, lifting her eyebrows flirtatiously.

  “I got lucky this life,” he said. “If handsomeness is lucky.”

  “Sometimes yes, sometimes no.” She tasted something from one of her pots with her finger. “Delicious,” she declared.

  “I’m glad to see you,” he said sincerely.

  “And I am glad to see you.” She moved toward him with a spoon in her hand and kissed his chin. “I’d like to kiss you more,” she said. She gestured with her spoon to a small room behind a half-open door. “I’d like to take you in there, but I know you love another girl.”

  He laughed. He couldn’t tell if she was serious or not, and regardless, he couldn’t imagine getting into that unmade bed with Ben. First because she was Ben, and also because he’d known her briefly as Laura and several others. He could never let the old lives go. He couldn’t with anyone, let alone Ben. The first time he met a person, if he was a man, Daniel had a complicated time being attracted to any subsequent version of him as a woman. He wasn’t good at living in between.

  “I am Amita,” she said imperiously, reading his thoughts in the usual way.

  “You are a shape-shifter,” he said jokingly.

  “No, this is called living,” she shot back fiercely. “And what you do is not.” Her eyes remained affectionate, but he couldn’t help recoiling.

  “Tell me about your girl,” Amita said sweetly. She didn’t want to be hurtful to him.

  “I know where she is,” he said.

  “Why aren’t you with her?” she asked.

  You could always be sure that Ben would cut to the quick of it. Daniel was tired and he was in Kolkata and he needed to be honest. “I tried to talk to her a few years ago and I really fucked it up. I went too fast; I scared her. I don’t think she’d want to see me after that. I’m giving her some time before I try again.” His explanation sounded weak to his own ears. How much time was he going to give her?

  “Maybe she doesn’t want your time.”

  He rubbed his cheeks. He felt the sweat and grit of long travel. “I don’t know what she wants.” His voice drifted quieter. “But I don’t think it is me.”

  Amita stood poised with her spoon, looking at him thoughtfully. “Oh, Daniel,” she said finally. “You need to be loved. That’s what you need. You are terribly out of practice.”

  He laughed. “Is that why you want me in the bedroom?”

  “Love is love,” she said.

  He shook his head. Her flirtation was a mercy he didn’t quite understand. “I don’t think it’s the right time to try again with Sophia,” he said. “If I wait for a while, maybe I’ll have another chance.”

  She looked sad. “And that’s a thing you can keep forever.” She slopped the spoon back into a pot and hiked herself up to sit on the counter. She put her chin in her hand for a few moments, thinking. “Maybe if you had approached her as herself and not someone else, you wouldn’t have scared her away.”

  “What do you mean? I didn’t approach her as someone else. I approached her as herself. I called her Sophia, but she is Sophia. Is it wrong to remember her?”

  “Sophia is not her name. Sophia is a memory.” Amita hopped down from the counter. She resumed her stirring. “I believe her name is Lucy.”

  “Same girl.”

  “Yes and no.”

  “What do you mean by that?” He sounded like a child to himself.

  “You are a hoarder,” she said. It was something Ben had accused him of several times before. “Love who you love while you have them. That’s all you can do. Let them go when you must. If you know how to love, you’ll never run out.”

  Ben sounded as chirpy as a self-help book, but still Daniel felt overwhelmed and strangely fragile. He didn’t know how to respond, and she recognized it. She came forward again with her spoon. “Taste this,” she said tenderly, holding it out to him.

  He did. “God, that is hot.”

  She nodded and widened her eyes. “Isn’t it?” She consulted her cookbook for a moment and then snapped it shut. “Since my husband joined the army, I cook and I read. Cook and read.”

  “Your husband?” He felt guilty for having gazed at the shapely brown region of ribs and stomach revealed by her sari.

  “Yes. And when he comes back, I will amaze him with my dishes,” she said, flourishing her spoon like a magician.

  His mouth was burning. “You will. I am sure.”

  He watched her for a while. She stirred things and chopped things and scattered ingredients with abandon. She seemed to enjoy throwing her peppers into the pot, as opposed to just putting them there. “Sometimes you have to make a mess,” she informed him merrily. She tasted the green stuff in a small brass dish. “Oooh,” she said with a gasp. “Well, that is surprising.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes! Perhaps not in a good way. Cooking is always surprising, don’t you find?”

  He hadn’t found cooking surprising in four centuries, not since he’d cooked in the galley of a ship sailing the Adriatic for seven long years.

  “I don’t,” he said honestly.

  “Oh, but it is. It always is.” She went back to he
r cookbook. “I don’t have a mother or a sister to teach me, so I have to teach myself,” she explained.

  He was feeling subdued by this time. It was the jet lag and the tendency Ben had to push him into uncertainties. “How is anything new to you?” he asked her. “How do you still find anything surprising?”

  She stopped for only a moment and looked at him. She stuck her finger in the green stuff and held it out to him. He took a lick, and it was shockingly horrible. Even poisonous. He relented. “You’re right. That is surprising.”

  For some reason he thought of a thing she had said to him once when she was Ben and they were gazing up at the starry night sky on a long, quiet watch in the Aegean: “I don’t see patterns easily.”

  DANIEL KNEW SHE would get to the point of his visit eventually, and it happened as they sat on the warm roof after dinner, chewing fragrant seeds and watching a large family reclining on beach chairs on the roof across the narrow street.

  “The shape-shifter is not me,” she said, apropos of nothing. “It is your old brother.” She examined a seed and tossed it to the sidewalk below. Her face stayed still for only a moment, but she clearly meant to warn him.

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes. He steals bodies easily now. He has a dangerous friend.”

  “What do you mean? Who?” Daniel’s mind raced through various characters he’d met or heard of over the years. There was the man who’d once approached him in Ghent who claimed to have been the archangel Azrael. The woman in New Orleans, Evangeline Brasseaux, and her bevy of followers who said she’d seen the apocalypse. There was a whole underworld of these people, and though he’d dipped into it a couple of times long ago, he’d mostly avoided it. Surrounding the ones with authentic memories were the hangers-on, the mythmakers, the rumor spreaders, and the out-and-out liars. He found it hard to keep his bearings among them. Only now he wished he’d taken the pains to know more.

  She scratched her arm. Her bones were thin and definite, like a bird’s. “He’s been gathering his powers for a long time now. While you are not finding your girl, he is looking for her.”

  He felt a painful sting in his ears and throat, and he couldn’t swallow it away. “He’s looking for Sophia?”

  She crunched loudly on a seed and picked it out of her teeth. “By finding her, he will find you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She thought for a moment. “Maybe he already has found her.”

  Daniel stood and walked. The terrible, albeit surprising, dinner was seizing up in his stomach. “How can that be? He can’t recognize souls. You told me that yourself. Don’t you remember?”

  She joined him at the parapet wall and spit another seed. “It’s possible he has help,” she said again.

  “How? Who? What do you mean?” He felt like an idiot saying the same thing again and again, knowing it was the kind of question Ben would never answer, but he couldn’t get his mind settled.

  He paced, and for the first time she stood perfectly still. “How do you know this?” He was in agony.

  She shook her head, but she must have seen his state. Out of pity she gave him an answer. “I remembered.”

  He watched her intently. “But it hasn’t happened yet, has it?”

  She flicked that away with her narrow, jingling wrist.

  “I’VE BEEN READING Proust,” she declared to Daniel as he helped her clean up the disaster in her kitchen. She didn’t want to talk about Joaquim or Sophia anymore, and he had to accept it. He knew how Ben was. He gave you as much as you could process and not more.

  “Is that right?” he said distractedly, wanting to be companionable.

  “Yes. We have a fine library at the end of our street.”

  “Haven’t you read it before?’

  “I suppose.” She laughed in a way that was remarkably ditsy, considering she’d lived forever. “I love it.”

  He nodded, wiping some sort of sauce from the ceiling. “What became of him?”

  “Proust, you mean?”

  “Yes. Did he have a memory?” If you caught Ben on a topic that interested him and was irrelevant, you could get odd bits of information to fall out.

  She shook her head so her little gold earrings wobbled. “Not a stitch.” She thought for a moment. “He’s a housewife in southern Kentucky. A very competitive bridge player.”

  “Not a stitch?” he said, surprised.

  “Not a stitch. And Joyce, you know, is gone.”

  “He’s gone?’

  “He only lived the one life. But he lived it brightly.”

  “Huh. No memory there, I guess.”

  “No. And Freud, neither. Did you know that?”

  “I couldn’t have guessed,” he said.

  “But Jung certainly did,” Amita said animatedly. “And so did his mother.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course.”

  He wound around to the question he needed to ask. “Does this . . . dangerous friend have a memory?” he asked slowly.

  She shrugged in her carefree way, but her eyes shone with a complexity he couldn’t read. “It isn’t just us, you know,” she said a little sadly.

  AMITA WANTED HIM to stay the night. She offered him half her bed with a solemn promise not to lay a hand. The lift of her eyebrows made him laugh, which he might have thought was impossible at that moment. But he told her no. He had to get home.

  She seemed sad when she hugged him. “You love your memory, but you need to love your girl,” she said by way of parting. “You remember what is lost, and you forget what’s right in front of you.”

  He knew what she was trying to say, but he couldn’t be like her. “If I let go, who else is there to remember?” he said with unavoidable melancholy. “It will be gone.”

  She sighed. “It is gone.”

  CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA, 2009

  DANIEL STOOD IN front of Campbell Hall. He looked at the windows where the lights shone and wondered if she was behind any of them. He’d come to Charlottesville three times in the last ten days, and he hadn’t set eyes on her, but still he felt a sense of comfort. She’d graduated. She could choose to live anywhere in the wide world, yet she’d come back here. He had the address of her apartment on Oak Street, but he hadn’t gone there.

  In a few small ways he’d gotten warmer. He’d made friends with the guard who manned the entrance to the architecture studios. He’d spoken with a graduate student named Rose who was acquainted with Lucy and seemed to spend every waking hour in the studio. He’d made it sound to them as though he and Lucy were friends, and he felt a bit guilty for that. He hated to be creepy, and he didn’t want to intrude on her, but his worries had become acute since he’d returned from India. He wouldn’t bother her. He’d just make sure she was all right.

  He hung around the entrance until he saw Rose, returning from dinner, he guessed.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” he asked.

  “Good. You waiting for Lucy?”

  “Yes, we were supposed to grab a late dinner,” he lied. “You haven’t seen her, have you?”

  “No,” Rose said knowledgeably. “She used to be here every night until midnight, but she hasn’t been staying late the last few nights.” She took on a conspiratorial look. “The rumor around the studio is that Lucy has a boyfriend.”

  Daniel wondered if Rose had a cruel nature. “Oh, yeah?” he said casually.

  “She was all dressed up when she left on Wednesday night. Nobody’s used to seeing her wearing heels and makeup. She made a big impression.”

  Daniel found himself hating Rose. “Okay, well. Good for her. I hadn’t heard about that.” He had an uncomfortably fake look stamped on his face, and his only challenge was to keep it there. “I might have forgotten to leave her the message about dinner,” he added lamely. He pictured Rose as a Stasi informant in her previous life.

  So Lucy was suddenly a girl with a boyfriend. What a dumb term that was. He tried to remember when, in the history of the language,
that had started up. He’d never be her boyfriend. You’d be anything she wanted you to be, a more honest part of himself countered.

  As he walked away from Campbell Hall, Daniel felt immature and jealous, but he didn’t feel alarmed. That was the one good thing. Lucy got dressed up. She went out with her boyfriend. There was no sign of Joaquim in any of that. It was depressing to think of her having a boyfriend, but he felt sure Joaquim couldn’t get close to her in that way. If Daniel knew anything, Lucy would find Joaquim’s presence deeply discomforting.

  He trudged to his car slowly and with a craving he didn’t often feel or, in any case, allow.

  Without thinking, he drove north to Fairfax. He followed roads he’d learned as a teenager in the eighties. His mother used to let him borrow her red Toyota Celica, and he’d drive across the Potomac River at night to see the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials glowing white against the dark sky. His father had discouraged it, but Molly almost always said okay.

  He had an aching feeling as he drove up to the old house. He didn’t really mean to drive all the way to the house and stop, but now he was here. He hadn’t been here in twenty-two years.

  If he could have left the world alone, maybe he’d live around the corner now. He could see Molly and his dad and his brothers all the time. Maybe he’d be married and well employed, using his huge experience for some good. Maybe he’d be a teacher like his parents. He could offer a unique perspective on history, that was for sure. Or maybe he’d just mow his lawn and whack his weeds and try to forget everything but the games on Sunday. Sometimes he felt sure that the key to happiness was a poor memory.

  His old parents would be pushing seventy, assuming they were still alive. Did they still live here? He looked up at the front porch and squinted at the flowers. Even in the dark he knew they were dahlias, and that was his answer.

  A light was on in the kitchen and a bluish TV light upstairs. He could picture the house as though it were his. It was his, once. Why couldn’t it belong to him anymore? Why couldn’t he belong to it? Because he gave it up. He held on to himself, and he threw the other things away.