Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

by Gabrielle Zevin

  “Yeah, I was on the fence between that and ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Part I.’ And also ‘To Whom It May Concern’ by John Wesley Harding. I eliminated that one first ’cause I had another of his songs I wanted to use and it’s bad form to duplicate artists. The one I used instead is called ‘Song I Wrote Myself in the Future,’ and it’s the next to last track.”

  I was about to ask him how we had met, but I was interrupted by the arrival of someone who made me forget the mix and William Landsman for the time being.

  “Hi, Mrs. Miles,” Will said to my mother.

  “Hello there,” she replied uncertainly.

  Will laughed. “We’ve never met before, but I’ve seen your picture. I’m William Landsman, Will.”

  “Could we have a moment alone?” my mother asked Will.

  Will looked at me. “You’ll be okay?”

  I nodded.

  “I should be getting back to yearbook anyway,” Will said.

  “There’s yearbook in the summer?” I asked.

  “It never quits.” He took my hand in his and shook it rather formally. “I’ll call you,” he promised. “Don’t forget to charge up your cell phone.”

  After Will closed the door, neither my mother nor I spoke.

  My mother is beautiful, and since I’m adopted you can know I’m not saying that as some sort of backhanded way of telling you how pretty I am. Besides, everyone says so. And she isn’t beautiful in any of the clichéd ways. She’s not tall and skinny and blond with big boobs or something. She’s little and curvy with wavy light brown hair halfway down her back and almond-shaped ice blue eyes. It felt like I hadn’t seen her in forever. I almost started to cry, but something kept me from doing it.

  Mom, however, did not hold back. She burst into tears almost as soon as she got to my bedside. “I told myself I wasn’t going to do that,” she said. She mock-slapped herself across the face before taking my hand.

  “Where were you?” I asked.

  “Your dad told me not to come, that you didn’t want me. But how could I not come?” She looked at my face. “Your poor head.” She ever so gently stroked my brow, and then she leaned over to hug me. I pulled away. I needed to know a few things first.

  “You and Dad are divorced.”

  She nodded.

  “But why?”

  Dad came into the room then. His voice was hard as bricks. “Yes, tell her, Cass.”

  “I can explain.” Mom’s eyes started to tear again. “You were twelve when I ran into Nigel. It was just by chance.”

  “Who’s Nigel?”

  “Her high school boyfriend,” Dad answered for her.

  “Just by chance,” Mom repeated. “I was waiting for the subway, and it was the most random thing in the whole—”

  I told her that I didn’t want a story, only facts.

  “I…” she began again. “This is so hard.”

  I told her that I didn’t want adjectives and adverbs, only nouns and verbs. I asked her if she could handle that. She nodded and cleared her throat.

  “I had an affair,” she said.

  “I got pregnant,” she said.

  “Your dad and I divorced,” she said.

  “I married Nigel and moved back to the city.”

  “You have a three-year-old sister.”

  “Sister?” It was a foreign word on my tongue, gibberish. Sisters were something other people had, like mono or ponies.

  “But I thought you couldn’t have children,” I said.

  Dad whispered to my mother something about how he had been trying to break this to me slowly, how I had already been through a lot. He had never mentioned my sister or Mom’s pregnancy, which seemed odd, especially when you consider all his list-making. I wondered what else he’d been holding back.

  “Sister?” I repeated. It felt even more made up the second time.

  “Yes. Her name is Chloe.”

  “Are we close?” I asked.

  “No,” Mom said. “You refuse to see her.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “It’s probably a lot to hear all at once,” Dad said.

  “How are you feeling, cupcake?” Her voice was high and whispery. She sounded like she was floating away.

  How did I feel? “About what? Which part?”

  “About everything I’ve just told you, I suppose.”

  What I felt was that all of these were very good reasons for us not to be speaking. It was one thing for Mom and Dad to have gotten divorced, but for Mom to get together with her high school boyfriend and have an affair and a daughter and a whole new family…“I feel like”—her eyes were wide and expectant—“I honestly feel repulsed. I honestly feel like you’re a slut.”

  “Naomi,” Dad said.

  “What?” I asked. “She is. Women who cheat on their husbands and get pregnant are sluts. Why don’t you add that one to your list, Dad?”

  Mom stood up and started backing away from my bed, not quite able to look me in the eye. “I understand,” she said, “I understand. I understand.” Finally, Dad said that he thought she should go, which was funny because she seemed to be heading in that direction already.

  “What happened to the Wandering Porters?” I asked after Mom had left.

  “They wander no more.” Dad tried to make a joke out of it. “The last book was Iceland. Do you remember that summer we went to Iceland?”

  I did. We had left right after Mom’s show, which may have even made it my last memory. I was twelve, and it had pretty much been fifty degrees all summer long, the coldest summer of my life. My mom and I used to say that it was the summer without any summer.

  “What do you do now?” I asked.

  “Your mom still takes pictures. I still write books. We just don’t do it together. And the Wandering Porters are still in print mostly.”

  “What are your new books about?”

  “Um…well, the last one was about…I’m not good at describing. It was about lots of things really,” Dad said. “But the jacket copy said it was about ‘the end of my marriage as seen through the prism of larger world events.’”

  I interpreted. “It’s about the divorce?”

  “Basically. You could say that. Yes.”

  I asked him if I had liked it. He said that I hadn’t even read it, but that the reviews had been pretty decent.

  “Maybe I should read it now?” I said. “If my memory doesn’t come back.”

  “Yeah, you could just skip through the parts about the Middle East,” Dad suggested. “There’s quite a bit about that, too. Not that you shouldn’t be informed, but even I think it gets a little dry. Naomi, are you crying?”

  I guess I was. “I’m sorry,” I said. I turned onto my side, away from Dad. I didn’t want him to watch me cry. In all likelihood, the reason he hadn’t already told me about Mom and Chloe was because he hadn’t wanted to discuss it himself.

  Whenever Dad said anything serious, he would usually undercut it with a joke. That was his style. When he and my mom used to throw parties, he always had a funny story and could make everyone else laugh. My dad certainly wasn’t what anyone would call shy, and yet he was. By himself, he was always a bit stingy with saying certain things. Like, he rarely said “I love you.” I knew that he did love me. He just didn’t say it a whole lot. My mom was the one with all the “I love you’s.” But I understood what Dad was like because I was like that, too. This was why I couldn’t look at him.

  “Why are you crying, kiddo? Is it your head?”

  The doctors had told us that people with head injuries could be emotional, but it wasn’t that. It was just…everything.

  “It wasn’t entirely your mother’s fault. Mainly hers, but…” Dad laughed. “I’m kidding. Mostly.”

  I felt so alone.

  “What is it? Please, tell your old man.”

  “I feel like an orphan.” I was sobbing to the point that Dad couldn’t understand me the first time and I had to repeat myself. “I�
�m an orphan.”

  It probably won’t make any sense, but it was like my mother was less my mother than she had been before. Or maybe that I was less her child now that she had a new one. I was a vestigial daughter: an obsolete girl with an obsolete brain and an obsolete heart. I could hear my dad’s breathing, but he didn’t say anything and I still couldn’t bear to look at him. I closed my eyes.

  “Naomi?” Dad said after a while. “Are you sleeping?”

  I kept my eyes closed and let him think that I was.

  He kissed me on my forehead. “I’ll never leave you, kid.” He wouldn’t have said this if he’d thought I was awake.

  2

  BY MONDAY MORNING, THE DOCTORS HAD DETERMINED that I couldn’t remember most things after sixth grade, which I’d pretty much known since that first conversation with Dad, and they sent me home.

  No one knew anything really. I was a bona fide medical mystery. In their genius opinion, the head trauma wasn’t severe enough to have caused the kind of amnesia I had, so they said I was probably repressing, or some such crap. Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure it was the fall down the stairs.

  They said my memory might come back or it might not. And in any case, we should all act as if it wasn’t going to. There wasn’t anything to be done anyway. In a couple of weeks, there would be more pictures of my brain that probably wouldn’t show anything. Therapy, maybe.

  “Rest,” they said.

  “And then?”

  “Resume ‘normal’ life as much as possible,” they said. “Go back to school when you’re ready.”

  “Maybe it’ll help you remember,” they said. “But then again, maybe it won’t.”

  “The human brain is mysterious,” they said.

  “Good luck to you,” they said, handing me a sample-size bottle of Excedrin and an excuse note from gym; and Dad, a bill as thick as a National Geographic.

  I scanned the hospital parking lot for our car, which in my last recollection had been a silver SUV (Mom’s) or a red truck (Dad’s). I didn’t see either. “Dad, you think it’s a bad sign that I don’t know which car is ours?”

  “I don’t believe in signs,” Dad said as he pointed to a compact white vehicle that was wedged between two other compact white vehicles.

  “You’re joking. You loved that truck!”

  Dad muttered something about the new one being more fuel-efficient. “It’s covered in the memoir,” he added.

  It was, though I wouldn’t find this out for many months. He wrote about the truck on page ninety-eight of his book. He claimed to have sold it because it reminded him of Mom. He didn’t mention a thing about fuel efficiency. It was funny how Dad was more honest in a book that anyone in the world could pick up and read than he could be talking to me. Or maybe it was sad. One or the other. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

  I got into the passenger’s seat and put on my seatbelt. Just as we were pulling away, Dad’s cell phone rang, and he asked me did I mind if he took it. I said it was fine; after the doctors’ near constant interrogation, I appreciated not talking.

  “Yes. Hello. Me too. I’ve been meaning to call you…” Dad said stiffly to someone. He seemed embarrassed to be talking in front of me.

  “Who is it?” I whispered.

  “No one. Work,” he mouthed to me. He rolled his eyes and slipped on a headset.

  I decided I’d misread his tone and turned my concentration to the view outside. The trees were still green, but you could feel that summer was over. It made me think of a day I could remember, and how it had definitely been summer then. I didn’t necessarily remember the trees, but I remembered the air that day. It had that fresh-cut-lawn smell, where it feels like all of nature is just sighing with relief. My parents and I had left for Iceland about a week later.

  I wondered if Mom was having her affair even then. She must have been. She had said that her daughter was already three. My mother’s daughter. My sister. I couldn’t think about that yet.

  Out the car window Tarrytown looked familiar enough. I noticed a new subdivision of houses and a new McDonald’s. The place where they used to sell apple cider and doughnuts had been torn down. But basically, nothing much had changed, and this was reassuring.

  All of a sudden, Dad turned onto a street I didn’t recognize. Even though Dad was still on the phone, I asked him where we were going.

  Dad hung up before answering. “We moved,” he said simply. “I should have mentioned it before, but there were so many things. I’ll add it to the list when we get home. We’re almost there.”

  His list was turning out to be a complete waste.

  Dad informed me that they had sold our house after the divorce. He had bought a different house about a half mile from our old one. He mentioned that the new house was “larger” (why we needed a larger house when fewer people lived in it was beyond me) and “closer to school” and “besides, we hadn’t lived all that long in the other house anyway, not like Brooklyn.”

  The new house was much more modern than our old house had been. The back wall looked like it was made entirely from glass, and it was incredibly drafty inside. Our old house had been two stories with all these strangely shaped rooms and narrow flights of stairs. I think it had been built in 1803 or something. The new house was, well, new. It was on one level, and seemed more, I guess you might say, organized, if you were being kind. Sterile, if you weren’t.

  There were a few artifacts from the old house, but not many. At a glance I recognized a clay planter in front of the fireplace, a small braided rug near the laundry room, a cast-iron umbrella stand. They all looked awkward and out of place, like orphans.

  “What do you think?” Dad smiled. I could tell he was proud of his house.

  I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I told him it was nice. Truly, there was nothing much to say. It was all very beige. The sofa was beige. The stain on the wood floor was beige. The walls were beige. What in the world can you say about beige?

  To Mom, any reasonably flat or bare surface was a potential canvas, and she had always been painting and changing the colors of our walls. Our house smelled of paint, but also of all her other projects. Like melted crayons and clay and weird incense and glue and newsprint. Like people lived there and things were happening there. Like home. This new house smelled like…synthetic citrus. “Dad, what’s with the weird orange scent?”

  “Just something the housekeeper uses. I didn’t like it at first, but now I’m kind of used to it. It’s organic.” Dad sighed and then he clapped his hands together. “Okay, I assume you’ll be wanting the official grand tour.”

  “Could we do it after lunch maybe?” I told Dad I was really tired, and he led me down the hall to “my room.”

  “Look at all familiar?” he asked.

  Unlike the rest of the house, my room did share some similarities with the bedroom I remembered. The furniture, for one, was exactly the same. I practically wanted to hug my wicker dresser or, like, give my desk chair a massage.

  I told Dad I wanted to be alone. He had just been standing there, and I sensed he needed to be told to leave. Dad nodded and said that he had some work to do, but that his office was down the hall if I wanted him.

  “Oh hey, you’ll need this!” Dad called just as he was about to go. He took the list out of his pocket. It was on five sheets of paper and one hundred eighty-six items long.

  “It was lonesome here without you, kid,” he said. He kissed me on the forehead to the right of my injuries. I closed the door behind him, and then I went to sleep.

  Dad woke me for lunch and again for dinner, but the meals made no impression. I didn’t really wake until around eight that night. I was alone for the first time in what felt like years, but had really been almost no time at all.

  At the hospital I had basically avoided mirrors. It was easy. I just slipped past them, holding my breath as if there were a ghost in the room.

  Partially I think it was because I didn’t want to see my injuries. It probably
sounds like vanity, but it wasn’t. In my opinion, wounds are like water set to boil—they heal best left unwatched.

  But every now and again I would accidentally catch a glimpse of myself. In a glass on my food tray, in the lenses of a doctor’s spectacles, in the window at night before all the lights were turned out. For a moment, I would not even realize who I was looking at, and, instinctively, I would turn away. It is rude to stare at strangers and that is what I was to myself. I did not know the girl in the glass nor did she know me.

  Now that I was finally alone, I felt braver. I decided that it was time to reacquaint myself with myself. The meeting couldn’t be put off any longer.

  The first thing I did was remove all my clothes and examine my body in the mirrored closet door.

  It was what I had been expecting. Even though I had lost four years of memories, I had never actually thought that I was twelve. I’m not saying that it’s like this for other people, but this is how it was for me. I instinctively knew I was older. And although my body was surprising in certain ways, it looked more or less how I felt inside, so it was okay.

  My face was a bit more shocking to me, and not because of my injuries either—Will’s description had been accurate on that front, and the whole mess was already changing colors, which I interpreted as healing. My face was strange because it looked like someone I knew, a cousin maybe, but not me. My hair was about the same length, halfway down my back, but it might have been highlighted, I wasn’t sure. My jaw was narrower; my nose, sharper.

  “Hello,” I greeted myself. “I’m Naomi.” The girl in the mirror didn’t seem convinced.

  “Anything you have to say for yourself?” I asked.

  She stared at me blankly and said nothing.

  I decided that mirrors were completely useless.

  I found a T-shirt in my bureau and put it on.

  I opened my closet door. The person who lived in my room (for I could not quite think of her as me yet) was incredibly organized. It was as if she had been preparing for just such an occasion.

  I looked at my clothes. Several school uniforms: dark gray wool kilts, white dress shirts, maroon ties, various hoodies, and V-neck sweaters. Gym clothes. Tennis whites. All of it neatly pressed, folded, or hung. In a zipped garment bag was a black velvet dress for a formal I could not recall having attended. I decided to put it on, just to see what it looked like. The dress was a little tight around my breasts. Evidently, I had grown since I had last worn it. I didn’t bother zipping it all the way up.