by Lois Metzger
Rose had to adjust to the light, the color of the ocean when a storm approaches. At first she thought maybe she was seeing things behind her eyelids, but she was blinking, which meant her eyes must be open. She felt she was half awake, half asleep, and half something else . . . but that was too many halves. . . . Would she be waking up to blue light from now on?
“Does the light affect you, too?” she asked.
“I wear special contacts,” Dr. Star replied.
“So your eyes aren’t really green?”
“They are not.” Dr. Star sounded a little disappointed. “Now, I’ll walk you through it. You will remember things as I tell them to you. We began by talking about memory, which we hold sacred here at Forget-Me-Not; we honor and cherish it. Without memory, one philosopher said, we’d be no better than a looking glass, constantly receiving images and reflecting them back, never the better or worse for it.”
“You mean mirror.”
“It was a quote, Rose; no one says ‘looking glass’ anymore. Memory molds our personalities, shapes our possibilities, lends depth to our consciousness, depth like the buried cities near Mount Vesuvius, one on top of the other, the present cities on top of increasingly long-ago ruins of cities.”
“I tried talking to Mr. Slocum about Mount Vesuvius. He didn’t want to hear it.”
Dr. Star ignored this and adjusted the lamp.
The blue light seemed to intensify, as if the ocean was darkening, or maybe her eyes were playing tricks on her.
Dr. Star’s teeth looked like smooth glowing stones. “When a person suffers a terrible experience, the memory is seared into the brain. From an evolutionary standpoint, this is beneficial. Next time there’s a challenge to be faced, she’ll remember what happened, remain alert, and handle things better. But in some cases the memory is as fresh as the trauma itself and doesn’t diminish over time. It’s like a dog that keeps bringing the pain back to you, wagging its tail. The young woman in the car? She put it all behind her. Accidents happen! In your case—your father died seven years ago, and you weren’t, shall we say, moving on?” Dr. Star smiled briefly; was that kindness shining through? “Here is the beauty, the art of Memory Enhancement. While the red light is on and Alitrol is in your system, we come up with new perspectives, new feelings to attach to your memories, to your sense of yourself. Think of it as a salad bar. You pick and choose. A slice of cucumber, a tomato wedge, a radish flower.”
Yes. Clara had wanted so much. She was starving.
“Best to narrow it down, I told you. You can’t take everything; your plate would be overfull and you would never finish. We chose happiness, of course. Every day was like a gift you didn’t need to unwrap. If sadness reared its ugly head, I told you there’s no sadness, no need for it; if anger flared up, it could be banished like a bad king, never to return. You said you had no friends, that you had one long ago but she was lost to you now. I said that once you became happy, bursting with happiness, you would find yourself with lots of friends, the old one and many new ones, and do all kinds of fun things together, and have a boyfriend, too, why not? Most of all, you wanted to live your life fully, not sit at the bus stop and miss the bus or some such thing. I told you that you were at the center of your life, not the edge. Oh, and you had to love animals.”
“Because the girl in the jean jacket had a dog. She’d put a sweater on the dog.”
Dr. Star shook her head. “You kept saying, ‘Make me like her’—even though she was a stranger.”
But to Clara the girl in the jean jacket wasn’t a stranger. Clara knew her through and through, inside and out.
“I asked you to come up with a new name or nickname for yourself; that often helps the enhanced person seal the deal. You latched onto Rose immediately. ‘My name is Rose,’ you said. ‘I am Rose Hartel.’”
Of course she was Rose. On the back of the jean jacket, for all the world to see, there was an embroidered rose, lovingly sewn by the girl’s mother.
“Then you took a virtual visit to the zoo. It was Rose who saw the animals; Rose had a perfectly wonderful time. You were so eager to have people call you by your new name. I specifically told your stepmother it would help things along if she called you Rose. I wonder if she decided not to—?”
“She called me Rose.”
Dr. Star snapped off the blue light.
“You were happy, Rose, weren’t you?”
“I still am,” she said, in her despair.
CHAPTER 25
“Dr. Star,” she said, “you have to fix this.”
“Mm?”
“I can’t—I don’t know—”
“Rose. Take a deep breath.”
She did, but it felt like no air entered her lungs. “So what happens now? Do we just reverse the procedure?” I’ll simply go back into the glass coffin, she thought.
“There’s no reversing it. I am sorry.”
She thought she hadn’t heard Dr. Star correctly. “You’re sorry . . . about what?”
“Reversal isn’t possible, Rose. It’s not as though we removed pieces of you like books out of a library, and we can just put them back on the shelves. We fundamentally altered your physiological responses to your memories.”
No reversal . . . fundamentally altered . . . What had been done to her? What was she going to do with the feelings Rose wasn’t even supposed to have, now or ever again? “Dr. Star . . . what’s me and what’s ME?”
“I don’t follow—”
“Okay. . . . Okay. We can’t reverse it.” She breathed more giant gulps of air, as Dr. Star had instructed her to do. Why wasn’t the air getting to where it was supposed to go? “Just do it again,” she said finally. “Put on the red light—let’s pick new things from the salad bar. . . .”
“Rose, it’s not so simple.”
“You have to!” she cried out. And then, more softly: “Please, I need the red light.” Oh God. The blue light had turned her into a crazy person. A couple of years ago, walking on Belle Heights Drive, a woman heading toward her was yelling nonstop, cursing up a storm. But when she passed Clara, she looked right at her and said sweetly, “Have a nice day, darlin’.”
“There is an option available, upon request.” Dr. Star was scrutinizing something on her computer.
“What is it? What?”
“A refresher. It’s not a ‘fix,’ but it might help. We can reinforce the idea that you never had Memory Enhancement.”
“Yes. Good.”
“You’ll remember that you tried it once but it didn’t take. It’ll become a casual anecdote of your past. You’ll tell people you went for Memory Enhancement but it didn’t work—because of your exceptional strength.”
“Sure, okay, fine.” Get on with it, she thought. It was too much for her, what she was feeling on one side, and who she was supposed to be on the other. Rose.
“We won’t use the zoo this time, and we’ll put a special emphasis on the weather, maybe double your dose of Alitrol—”
“Triple it.” She leaned back into the elephant foam. “I’m ready.”
Dr. Star frowned. “We have to wait at least seventy-two hours.”
She felt the color drain from her face. “No! It has to be now!” She tried to lower her voice. “Is it the money? I have a job, I’ll pay, even if it takes a really long time.”
“It’s not that, Rose. Refreshers are actually free if breakthrough occurs within two weeks. Listen to me carefully. You know how when you get a perma-braid, you can’t do anything to your hair for several days?”
“This has nothing to do with my hair.” She put some hair behind one ear but not the other.
“Just an example,” Dr. Star said. “After a perma-braid, your hair needs to rest. You’ve just been under the blue light. Your brain needs to rest.”
“It’s rested.”
“I don’t make the rules, Rose.”
“Okay”—she counted on her fingers—“that’s Wednesday. I’ll stay here until then.”
“
Excuse me?”
“The chair won’t mind.” She patted the arms.
“Rose, we have other clients.”
“I’ll wait in the other room. I won’t be in the way.”
“You can’t just live here, Rose. Besides, I said at least seventy-two hours, which means, more precisely, Thursday. Which isn’t available,” she said quickly. “We’re booked solid. The earliest we have is Saturday, two p.m.”
“A week—a whole week?”
“More like six days. And today is nearly over, isn’t it?”
No, today wasn’t nearly over—there was the whole evening to get through, and the night, the long night. “Wait, I have an idea. What about Memory Lane in Spruce Hills? Maybe they can see me Thursday.”
Dr. Star took a deep breath. “There have been some . . . issues at Memory Lane. It’s closed. Temporarily. Saturday, two p.m. is the earliest. It might not be me that day but a different Dr. Star. Do you still want the appointment?”
“Totally.”
“Well, I just thought, because you and I have gotten to know each other, you might want to wait for my availability.”
God, no! she almost shouted, but—did Dr. Star sound a little hurt? Someone who was kind and had a big heart might think so. “I’d prefer you, but it would be really, really hard to wait longer. Is that okay?”
“I understand perfectly.” Dr. Star looked satisfied. She got up, opened the door, and gestured for Evelyn to come inside.
Evelyn reached out for her, but she stepped back.
“Oh, she’ll settle down!” Dr. Star said. “The blue light—it can be like taking an ocean voyage. A bit of seasickness might set in.”
Seasick? More like thrown overboard and drowning. But—there was a life raft to cling to. It had letters on the side: Saturday two p.m. She just had to hold on until then.
Dr. Star and Evelyn spoke for a few minutes about the return visit. “No charge,” Dr. Star said, but Evelyn did not look pleased about coming back for the refresher. “We’ll need you to bring her in and take her home.”
“Of course,” Evelyn said, “if that’s what you really want, Rose. Or is it Clara?”
“Best if you continue to go by Rose.” Dr. Star turned to her. “Clara belongs to the past. But you, Rose—you have a future.”
CHAPTER 26
Outside, the girl—which was how she couldn’t help thinking of herself—felt even more unsteady. Who was she now, no-longer-Clara, not-yet-Rose? She was too full of blanks, like an unsolved crossword puzzle. The biggest blank of all—
Her name. She didn’t even know how many letters it was supposed to have.
It didn’t help that the sidewalk had the most enormous, treacherous-looking cracks, like something left by an earthquake—how could Rose not have noticed them? If the girl wasn’t careful, she could come crashing down.
Evelyn kept pace with her, even when the girl walked slower or sped up.
She’s practically breathing down my neck.
“You must be hungry,” Evelyn said.
True, the girl had to eat. This was something that needed to be done between now and Saturday, two p.m. Rose would want something new and exciting, something to make her taste buds dance. Clara, on the other hand, would’ve been fine with stale bread.
“How does pasta primavera sound?” Evelyn put a hand on the girl’s shoulder, trying to get her to stop. The girl kept going. “Listen, I just want to say, if you’d like to talk about it—”
“I’ll eat in my room, if it’s all the same to you,” the girl said evenly.
Evelyn said, “I understand.”
She wasn’t asking for understanding, especially not from Evelyn.
At home she went straight to her room and grabbed the bald elephant. She looked at it carefully, trying to imagine her mother doing the same thing. But she couldn’t. Her dad used to read to her in this room. She rummaged around inside herself, wanting to feel what Clara had felt, and not felt, all that time in the glass coffin, after suddenly losing her dad, and not having Kim, either, and living with Evil Lynn all those years. She had Clara’s memories, of course, but because of the Memory Enhancement, so much of Clara was gone forever. The girl felt a pang for this previous self she would never really know—a pang Rose hadn’t felt, it occurred to her. Well, maybe Rose hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
But Rose reached out to people who seemed alone. Shouldn’t the girl somehow try to feel closer to Clara, a lost soul if ever there was one?
That, as Rose would say, was as worthy a project as any.
In the meantime, she picked up her phone. An ad came on for antiaging skin care. Poor Clara, there wasn’t an antiaging ingredient in the world strong enough to penetrate her inner self. The girl swiped the ad away and tapped the calculator. It was seven p.m., so there were five hours until midnight, then five twenty-four-hour days until midnight Friday, and add twelve to get to noon on Saturday, plus two more final hours until two p.m. Total: 139 hours. Then of course each hour had sixty minutes, so there were 8,340 minutes, or 500,400 seconds before the red light would get turned on. She kept recalculating and watching the numbers, emerging and disappearing, in a cold, detached sequence.
The girl ate two full plates of pasta at the desk in her room. She slept through the night—with the light on.
Monday morning the girl woke to the hoo-hoo-ing of birds on Mrs. Moore’s windowsill. They sounded genuinely heartbroken. Memory Enhancement for birds—it was something Dr. Lola could start offering. The tagline was obvious—birds hoo-hoo-ing before and ha-ha-ing after.
Then she realized—the red light was gone. No blue light, either.
The girl had to get ready for school.
In the shower, which soap to use? Clara would’ve chosen the unscented soap; Rose had used Evelyn’s. Or should there be a third bar of soap? This was ridiculous, facing paralysis over soap. She closed her eyes and reached for a bar—which turned out to be Evelyn’s. Fine. The same thing with clothes—just grab a few things without looking and put them on. She ended up in blue pants and an old sweatshirt. She didn’t wear lipstick. She tucked some hair behind one ear and not the other.
At school, the halls felt small and stuffed with jostling, bellowing kids. One of them was talking about how Dylan Beck got in trouble last year on Halloween—“showing up in his underwear as the Invisible Man who didn’t know he wasn’t invisible.” But she noticed a girl with the most gorgeous purple hair. She couldn’t help stopping her, putting a hand on her arm, and saying, “Your hair is fantastic—it’s like the scent of lavender got captured in a hair color.” Oh God, should she have said that? But the purple-haired girl looked thrilled, which gave the girl a thrill, too.
Outside homeroom, Selena rushed up to her. “So this Saturday I booked you a DJ! Isn’t that great?”
“Huh?”
“Don’t you remember? You promised. At brunch.” Selena jabbed an elbow into her ribs.
The girl saw that Selena had deep frown lines between her eyebrows. Rose had thought Selena was always cheerful and smiling. “This Saturday?”
Selena narrowed her eyes. “What’s wrong with this Saturday?”
The girl remembered how much Rose had needed to sleep last weekend, all the rest of Saturday and until two o’clock Sunday. With the extra Alitrol she might sleep clear through to Monday. “How about the weekend after? I’ll be ready by then.”
“I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that. This party is on.” She turned around and said over her shoulder, “Here’s your chance to actually get with Nick again. Don’t blow it like last time!”
In the cafeteria, the girl picked up a sesame-seed bagel, oatmeal-raisin cookies in a pack, and pineapple juice sticks.
At the scanner, Cooper had a little glint in his eyes—beautiful eyes, brown with flecks of green. But that unibrow—ugh. “Hey, how you doing? Want to talk later, about what happened at Forget-Me-Not?”
She shook her head. “Nothing happened, as it turned out.”
“Wasn’t tampered with.” Wait, Dr. Star had told her what her new cover story would be. “I mean, I tried Memory Enhancement, but it didn’t work. So that’s the end of that.” She put her money on the counter.
“Are you sure? It really seemed like something happened—”
“I’m totally fine. I don’t have any more pain in my jaw, either.” She’d forgotten all about that, until now. “Turns out I got a shot there. Maybe it went too deep.”
“Ouch.” He made a face. “Hey, we got lucky. This Sunday, Ball of Fire is coming to You Must Remember This.”
For a second she forgot that Ball of Fire was a screwball comedy; it sounded like a plummeting meteor. “Sunday . . . I can’t, I can’t.”
He looked really disappointed. “It’s only playing that one day.”
“I have to sleep—I don’t know for how long.”
“Really? Can’t think of a better excuse?”
“I’m handling it the best I can,” she said, “under the circumstances.”
“What circumstances?”
“Here.” She shoved the money toward him.
“Jeez, Louise, are we having our first fight?”
It sounded exactly like something her dad would’ve said. “It’s not Louise. It was never Louise.”
“I’m kidding. I’m just kidding.” The glint in his eyes grew dimmer.
The girl sat by herself at her old corner table with its view of a brick wall, which darkened within minutes, soaked by a sudden driving rain. The air in the cafeteria changed, too, and got heavy and damp with a smell of leaves and dust. Rain spattered the window. Nobody looked up, but didn’t they understand that something outside had seeped into the inside? She took out her phone, bypassing the ID pic, and went straight to the calculator. It was Monday, noon, so there were now five full twenty-four-hour days until Saturday noon, plus two more hours.
“Good for you—you’re not out with Thing One and Thing Two,” the girl heard over her shoulder, and looked up to see Kim in a football referee shirt. Kim pulled up a chair, opened the girl’s pack of cookies, and helped herself to one. “I ate already but I’m still hungry.” She snapped off a piece of a juice stick and popped it into her mouth. She peered over at the girl’s phone. “New puzzle?”