by Daniel Lowe
She stopped there because she could remember nothing else. She wanted to open her eyes, but was afraid to. She wanted to open them to California and that other life. She felt Genevieve shift next to her, she felt her shadow over her, and when she felt her lips on hers she didn’t flinch, didn’t turn her head. Genevieve left them there for several seconds, and when she pulled away, Claire raised her head to keep them there a moment longer. She opened her eyes, and Genevieve was still close, blacking out most of the sky.
“I’m sorry, Claire,” she said. Genevieve rested her hand on the side of Claire’s face, her thumb lightly stroking her temple. “There’s no Lucy. No Jack. No motel in California where you learned to love the summers.”
“I know that,” she said. “I know that now.”
She felt the ache in her belly and arms where Lucy had never been, but she would not cry.
“And I promise you, I promise you, that he won’t know that you know. That I would never tell him that you know.”
Claire did not think to ask who he was.
“Do you still want to hear the rest of Marc’s story?”
“Yes.”
“Claire, it would make him so happy that you still want to hear it.”
“I know that, too. I do know that, Genevieve.”
She closed her eyes and waited.
15
Marc could discern only the sounds of a city slowly waking—cars on a street several blocks away, the warning signal of a truck backing up, then a shout, a train in the distance braking on its rails. A man coughing as he walked past. He was still turned away from the window, but light now shone dully off the walls.
He realized he was barely breathing, waiting for Josephine to continue, waiting for her to rescue Claire from the moment of her … the moment of her …
But she goes on living, doesn’t she? he thought. She’ll climb out of the back of that truck bed, and when the sun rises, she’ll drive down the toll road toward Chicago, and Genevieve will tell the story of Marc and Kathleen at the lake house, and in the quiet and the cold, they’ll find a way to start talking again, and that night Marc will sleep curled next to Kathleen, and when Claire and Genevieve arrive outside of Chicago, Claire will drop her off at an L station, and they’ll say good-bye, and Claire will think about Lucy as she drives the two hours that will take her to the hospital where Marc lies dying.
He waited. But Josephine sat so quietly she may as well not have been in the room. He made a quarter turn toward her and felt the pain in his shoulder where he’d fallen.
“You’re not going to leave her there, are you?” he heard himself say. “Alone and dying in that room?”
“Marc, it’s dawn. It’s all we have time for.”
“I don’t hear anyone.”
“They’re coming.”
“I don’t hear anyone yet. How can you leave her alone like that, after everything?”
“It’s her story to tell. And she’s not alone. She’s with Genevieve.”
As she said the name, he heard the car quietly pull up outside the door. He felt himself break into a sudden sweat.
“Turn and look at me, Marc.”
He heard a car door thump, then another.
“Turn and look at me.”
He knew he had only the moment, and something like panic filled him, as if this opportunity to see her face were his last line to the world, and he ignored the sharp pain in his shoulder as he rolled over, and the two men came through the door where Saabir stood guard.
She sat with her large hands in her lap, looking down at him, her hair covered by a deep-blue hijab, her mouth drawn into the slightest smile, her lips full. The bones of her face were slightly masculine, her skin so pale in the light of early dawn that she looked luminous, though plain, her eyes decidedly gray. She held his gaze as the men pulled him up to his knees, her expression almost serene, and then one of the men yanked a black sack over his head.
“For whatever it may mean, Claire wants to hear the rest of your story, too.”
This was the last thing she said as the men lifted him to his feet and led him through the door to the car. But her face seemed imprinted on the black cloth, if not onto his own face, and cloaked an image of Claire’s that he couldn’t reach. He thought it was the kind of face that someone could look at for a long time, not for minutes or days, but for weeks and years. And as the men pushed him into the backseat of the car for what he knew would be a short drive, it struck him that it was the last face he would ever see.
Epilogue
For a long while I thought, Now, the sunrise. Now, a woman at my bedside who says she’s my mother. Now, a morning cup of coffee. Don’t misunderstand me. I knew the way to pull the sheet under my chin, knew to loop my finger around the handle of the coffee mug, knew what a mother was and believed the woman when she said she was mine. And in a few months, as I healed, I saw the emerging pattern of the days, and I remembered to expect the rising heat of a July morning, expect—as I made my way down to the porch, and spent long afternoons in a rocking chair, my strength slowly returning, my hair growing in—the slow turning of the heads of the flowers toward the summer sun, wildflowers that my mother had planted, plants that I could name—cosmos, daisies, black-eyed Susans—but could not tell you where I learned to name them, and couldn’t tell you how I arrived at expectation at all. It was some kind of underweaving that had preserved language and the naming of things that weren’t people, weren’t the ones that I loved, or that I had once loved. I couldn’t remember loving anyone.
Or, more accurately, I could remember the capacity to love, but could remember no one at all. For two weeks, my mother wouldn’t even speak to me about the attack, and then she wouldn’t tell me how it happened, and she never did tell me why it happened, since she said she didn’t know, and I believe she is being honest about that. She told me, once I was released from the hospital to come to her house, that I was twenty years old, and, when I stood and could bear to see my reflection in the mirror, my hair covering the scar on my scalp, a T-shirt over the bandage over the wound where someone drove the knife through, I did look young, but for what it’s worth, for whatever it may mean, I felt years and years older.
Someone had phoned 911 when I was hurt, but he’d reported a name that wasn’t his, though the address where I lay was real, and by the time the paramedics reached me, apparently I’d lost a lot of blood, and banged my head badly on the floor or a corner table, and between the blood loss and the surgery on my skull, the doctors said, I had lost my memory, had lost any recognition of anyone I ever knew, including myself. They told me they thought some things would return to me when the trauma eased, but it’s been months, and nothing has, or, if it has, it’s impossible to discern what I remember from what others have told me, several others, but especially my mother, who I try to remember to address as Ma or Mom, rather than by her name, Lynne.
She is a lovely woman. Bright blue eyes that are youthful well into her late forties, a rope of hair that she keeps in a long, blond braid because, she said, when she was praying for my life, she’d had it woven into that braid, and worried if she changed anything, anything at all, from what she was eating for breakfast to what she wore to the hospital, it would tip the balance. She told me that before the attack, I’d been going through what she called a wild period, and she said from the time I was small I’d always been spirited, and that she’d hoped that spirit was revealing itself for a short time in wildness. But after I was hurt she was consumed by guilt, consumed with the realization that she’d let me move away from her, further away than she should have, though not in terms of miles, and if she hadn’t, if she’d tried harder to stay close, none of this would have happened.
“People always say that,” I told her as she sat across from me almost knee to knee on that porch.
“What people?” Lynne asked. “Are you remembering someone right now?”
I said, “No, I don’t mean it that way. I’m just saying of course you would
have done different things. But you should know I didn’t end up here because you didn’t do them. You should let yourself off the hook, Lynne. I mean Mom.”
She nodded, and then her eyes filled up for the thousandth time since I’d regained consciousness.
“Why is it so hard for you to remember to call me Mom? I’m staying at home, taking care of you, like a mom, aren’t I? I’ve told you everything I can remember to tell you about who you were. Who you are.”
And she was doing that. She’d taken family leave from the marketing company she worked for, at least for the first three months, and then even afterward she’d check in throughout the day, afraid that I might have wandered off. But for a long while I was afraid to take so much as a few steps from that porch, even those days when the temperature hit ninety, and in my little enclosure I could see the heads of the flowers nod in a breeze that didn’t reach me, one that I could remember would feel cool on my skin.
And I thought then that mothering is different from being a mother, and that I wished I could remember everyone that ever mothered me, even if I wouldn’t call them Mom. But seeing the look of hurt on my mother’s face, I regretted slipping up again. So I said, “I’m sorry, Mom. It’s just so strange because I don’t remember your face. But you’re right, you’ve taken such good care of me. I can tell you’ve been doing it all of my life.”
She nodded her head, glassy-eyed, and smiled thinly. “You’re so different from how you used to be. The way you say things. Your tone of voice. Even sometimes the words you choose. It’s like you’ve become brutally honest.”
I didn’t know about the brutal part, but if there is a blessing that goes with remembering no one, it’s that there’s nothing to conceal, and no one you reflexively feel that you have to or want to protect. But only for a while, and I knew that time was ending.
So I told her, “I love you. My body remembers loving you, anyway. It always feels good when you give me a hug. It’s the closest thing I have to a specific memory.”
I said this to make her feel good, but I also meant it, and she stood up and smiled and came over to me, and I squeezed her hard, to show her the strength that was building in my arms.
Strangely, I didn’t ask about my father for weeks and weeks. You’d think I would, and, if not, that Lynne would have volunteered a story about him, or at least his whereabouts, but neither happened, and with my memory erased, it simply didn’t occur to me to ask, and I didn’t even have the curiosity that an adopted child might have about her biological father. When I did finally ask, it was almost impulsive. I was lying on the couch on a late August evening, my mother sitting in an armchair across from me, reading, while I watched the ceiling fan spin above my head as it circulated the air in the room. I was tracking the blades with my eyes in a way that seemed irresistible, and when I got tired of this, I closed my eyes, and saw the fan circling in the darkness under my eyelids. And I heard myself whisper, because she often fell asleep in the armchair while watching over me, “Mom, are you still awake?” I’d remembered not to call her Lynne.
“Yes, sweetheart. I’m right here.”
My eyes were still closed, following the fan blades.
“What happened to my father?”
* * *
After I moved west, it was the sense of this, the way everything at my mother’s house in those months seemed both sudden and familiar, even the apparition of my father, emerging in parts from my mother’s description of him as I watched the ceiling fan, that I described to Jeremy as he lay next to me in my bed in the apartment above the little diner where I wait tables in this tiny Nevada town. I’d met him when he’d stopped to eat one evening on his way home from the mines. He was older than I was by maybe ten years, and his face was rough-cut out of that dry land, and permanently red from working on it, his eyes brilliantly blue. He was kind and quiet. When we started seeing each other, he didn’t ask many questions about me, though this seemed to come from a well of respect for my privacy rather than disinterest. The first few times we went out, we would go for long drives in his truck, because no place you’d want to visit during a cold November in northern Nevada is close to anyplace else. During those drives, we were mostly silent, other than the country music on the radio. Once he turned to me as we headed down another empty stretch of road, and said, “You know, most women aren’t content to sit quiet like this.”
I smiled at him. “Maybe most women from around here.”
“I always thought back-east women could talk a mile a minute.”
“Michigan isn’t what I’d call back east, Jeremy.”
He gave me his strong smile, his teeth bright in his red face.
“East of here, Miss Claire.”
I’d told him about my home, about my mother, who hadn’t wanted me to leave, and how my father was killed in Pakistan, but for a while I didn’t want to tell him how I lost my memory. He seemed content to wait for me, in the way that a good man who gets used to the desolation of that land—the rocks stacked on rocks, the outcroppings of wind-beaten pines, the mountains on the far horizon that always make me feel lonely when I take a few moments to look at them—knows that it yields its stories warily.
On an evening when he’d taken me to a movie in Elko, after holding my hand for the half-hour drive back to the diner, I was ready to have him come up to my room. That first night, he didn’t ask about the heavy purple scars on my back and chest. I could tell, for him, it had been a long time since he’d slept with anyone, and he felt as much relief as desire at lying naked together, and when he was inside me, I felt how some of the isolation that my loss of memory caused was driven out of me for a while.
Next morning, when we woke up together, he watched from the bed as I made coffee in the kitchen, and when I walked over to hand him his mug, my robe fell open, and I saw him glance at the scars.
“That must’ve hurt,” he said. It was a cold morning, with a winter storm moving in, and his skin was run over with goose bumps, but he was used to it and didn’t cover his bare chest with the blanket.
“I don’t really remember,” I said, after setting my own cup of coffee on the nightstand and crawling back into bed beside him.
“Seems like it’d be a hard thing to forget.”
He was looking at my face, and in his eyes I could see concern and perhaps the first glimmer of love. So I told him what I knew about what happened to me, the things my mother said, the details I’d sought from the brief articles on the Internet, how they’d not caught the man who’d stabbed me or found the man who’d lived with me. But mostly I described what it was like to wake each morning in my mother’s house and recognize everything but remember none of it.
He listened very carefully, glancing occasionally out the window as the panes rattled in the wind, and a few flakes of snow were whipped about. Finally, he said, “So for all you can tell, last night might have been your first time with a man.”
“No, no. I’m sure it wasn’t,” I told him.
“How do you know?” he said, smiling. “You’re young.”
I smiled back at him. “Did it feel to you like it was my first time?”
He looked away from me and lay back against the pillow.
“No, I got to admit, it didn’t.”
“My body can remember other men. My body does. It’s only my brain that doesn’t.”
He thought about this for a while, running his hand over his whiskered face. I liked the way the winter light made the pale skin glow on his arms and chest, and his muscles underneath reminded me of fish just under the surface of the water.
“What are you thinking?” I asked him.
“Well, I’m trying to figure out if I envy you. I mean it’s an awful thing to be attacked like that. But I’m talking about losing your memory. On one hand, it would be terrible to not be able to remember anybody. Your friends. Your family. Gotta be hard on your mom and … sorry.”
He glanced at me, but when I said nothing, he looked out the window where the
wind was howling.
“On the other hand, maybe it’s better not to remember being hurt. And it’s kind of like a fresh start. Not obliged to anybody. Nobody bothering about who missed you at Christmastime when you didn’t show up.” He looked back at me. “I didn’t tell you I got a kid.”