by Adi Alsaid
She recalled her favorite part of the story, the bit about the warrior. She waited for her dad’s voice to continue the story, waited for the details surrounding the story’s telling to start to fill in. But that line was repeating itself through her head in the same unclear voice in which she’d been recalling the story ever since she woke up in the hospital.
The Lights were as beautiful as she’d been hoping for, and she refused to blink as she stared up at them, scouring her empty mind for even the dregs of her past life, even the ashes of it, one single spattering of dust left over from her life before the accident. But no catharsis stirred within her, no epiphany bubbled up to the surface, not a single memory presented itself at the sight she was beholding.
Leila tried shutting her eyes and clenching her jaw, as if her memories were just hiding in some dormant muscle. The only images that flashed through her mind were those of photographs she’d been shown at the hospital, her sister’s school pictures and her parents’ wedding album. She remembered the picture of the four of them at the beach, how surreal it had felt to be staring down at herself without knowing when or where the picture had been taken. She shut her eyes so tightly, they hurt, and when she opened them again, little white spots appeared.
The Northern Lights were absolutely breathtaking and absolutely meaningless. She might as well have been staring at an exceptional sunset or sunrise. She might as well have been looking up at the starry Mississippi sky alongside Hudson. Truth be told, the latter would probably carry more weight. Her entire trip had been for naught, a pleasant, deluded distraction from the reality she had to face: Her previous life was lost to her, perhaps entirely.
Leila looked down from the sky and put her hand on Dee’s back, happy to see that Dee was wearing a sweatshirt that looked to be warmer than hers. She wiped her face dry, then said, “I’m glad you’re okay.”
Dee gave her a confused smile before turning back to the lights. “I’m glad you’re okay, too. Aren’t they pretty?”
Exhausted, Leila dropped down to the cool grass. “They definitely are.”
Dee joined her on the ground, laying her head on her shoulder. The Lights continued their display as if aware of their audience and purposely putting on a show. Slight changes caught Leila off guard, spurring involuntary noises of delight, which were gone just as easily as they came, as if carried off by the wind.
* * *
Brendan and Harriet ran to where the girls were sitting by the creek. Ranger Rick lagged behind, speaking into his radio and nodding as if he’d known all along. The couple was in tears and smothered their daughter in a flurry of hugs and kisses.
“I’m just glad Leila found you,” Harriet said, Dee in her arms. She smiled at Leila and mouthed a thank-you.
Other campers from the birthday party were showing up, keeping a respectful distance to let the family have their reunion. Leila stared on, happy that the night had not, after all, ended in tragedy.
She tried to keep the disappointment over her lack of memories away for now. There was a time for that grief, and that time was when she was on her own.
Dee giggled, delighted by the attention showered down upon her. “I didn’t know I was lost. I was just sad and wanted to be alone for a little while.”
Brendan put his forehead against his daughter’s and smiled, hugging his wife at the same time. “Next time you’re sad, please be sad somewhere a little less big and scary.” He kissed the two most important women in his life and closed his eyes, thankful, no doubt, for the ability to hold them both at the same time.
Watching the family, Leila realized that a happy, tearful reunion was what she’d been hoping for all along, maybe even expecting, despite reality. I’ll never have that, Leila thought. No one’s going to scoop me up into their arms like that, make me feel that I belong nowhere else. I will never have that reunion, and it’s time I understood that.
Her thoughts went to her aunt and uncle in Louisiana, the only family she had left. They were young and didn’t have any children of their own yet. They’d opened up their home and their hearts to her, and they’d even wished her luck on this misguided trip she’d been so intent on having. They’d helped her buy the car, helped her learn how to drive it. Leila didn’t remember a thing about them before the accident, but they were the only family she had left.
It was time, she realized. It was time to stop chasing after all that she’d lost. She had gone on this trip because she needed to be away from an unfamiliar life, and somewhere along the way she’d become lost herself. She’d come to believe that a few lights parading gorgeously across the sky could change something within her, something that had very likely been damaged beyond repair. It was time to let go of the mad desire to remember. It was time to start living whatever life would come. In the present, not the past. It was time to go home.
4
LEILA WOKE UP slowly, allowing herself to nod off a few times until it was clear that sleep had left her. She sat up and took a drink of filtered creek water from her thermos. Then she unzipped the flap of the tent, tossed her packed duffel bag onto the grass, and climbed out into the late-morning sun.
The air was quiet around the campsite. The smell of breakfasts cooked over open fires lingered, sausage and bacon and instant coffee’s second-rate aroma. Through the trees she could spot the colorful fabric of other people’s tents but no movement. Everyone was probably out on their morning excursions, hiking, fishing, bird-watching. Leila grabbed her phone and plugged in her earphones. Before she unlocked her screen, she tried to clear her expectations that a notification would be there, but she was still disappointed when the phone had nothing new to tell her. She disabled the repeat-song option and clicked away from Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Oh Comely,” swiping her finger up and down the screen to select a random song.
As music filled in the world around her, Leila began dismantling the tent poles. She worked languidly, in no rush to be gone. For some reason, music sounded particularly good at that moment. Each note sounded crisper, each lyric’s meaning clear and poignant. It wasn’t even a new song; she remembered listening to this one in the car with Bree.
When she finished with the tent, she carried it and her bag over to the campsite office, leaving them by the door as she went inside to check the mail.
“You sure you don’t want to stay a few more days?” Liza said, once Leila told her she was leaving. A batch of mail had arrived, and Liza was working her well-manicured fingernails through the stack painfully slowly, sorting envelopes and junk mail into different piles. “What made you decide to go?”
“It’s just time,” Leila said, trying to read the envelopes over Liza’s shoulder. One earphone dangled between them while the other kept piping in background music just for her. “Do you know where Dee and her parents are? I wanted to say bye before I go.”
“They went into town to buy some supplies,” Liza said. She reached the last envelope and placed it on one of the small piles on her desk. “They should be back soon.”
“Nothing?” Leila gestured at the stacks of mail.
“Sorry.”
“That’s okay,” Leila said. She thought about leaving a forwarding address, but maybe it was time to let go of Hudson, too. If he’d wanted anything to do with her, he would have made it known by now. She was going to have to content herself with the memory of that night. Ironically, maybe she had to learn how to forget.
Leila went back outside, carrying her things to her car. She placed them in the trunk, then walked around and plugged her phone into the car’s jack. Lowering the windows and turning up the volume, Leila took a seat on the hood of her car and waited for Dee and her family to come back. When certain songs played, Leila could remember exactly where she’d been driving when she’d first heard them: an endless straight stretch of cornfields somewhere in Kentucky; stuck in traffic between Indiana and Illinois; in a lonely hotel breakfast room, th
e cord from her earphones dangling and dipping into her maple syrup as she watched a girl’s junior-high soccer team line up for the Continental breakfast, chattering nonstop.
She closed her eyes against the sun, wondering for some reason how Elliot’s meeting with Maribel had gone. Within a few minutes Harriet, Brendan, and Dee pulled up in an olive-green Prius, parking in the spot next to Leila. Harriet was driving, her hair up in a ponytail for a change, exposing a long, elegant neck. As soon as the car stopped, Dee unbuckled her seat belt and scampered out the door to greet Leila.
Leila slid off her hood and was immediately wrapped up in Dee’s hug. Even though Leila was short herself, Dee’s arms barely reached Leila’s waist.
“Good morning,” Harriet said, popping the trunk and bringing out a couple of reusable grocery bags stocked with vegetables and handing one to Brendan.
“Morning,” Leila said.
“Mom and Dad bought me some watercolors today,” Dee said, unwrapping herself from Leila’s side. “They came with a bunch of brushes, so if you want to paint with me, you can. Are you busy?”
“I don’t think I can,” Leila said, leaning over to be at eye level with Dee. “I have to go back home.” She’d done it quickly so as to not stretch out the good-bye, but now that the words were out, they seemed brusque. She worried how Dee might react.
“Oh.” Dee looked down at her feet. “It’s not because of me, right? Because I was lost but not really lost?”
“No, of course not. I did what I came here to do. I saw the Lights.”
“That’s true.” Dee offered a smile. Leila studied her eyes, which didn’t seem to be wetting. “It’s okay that you can’t remember. I know it’s not your fault, or my fault, or anybody’s fault. I was sad about it, but I’m okay now.”
Leila laughed and ruffled Dee’s blond locks. “Good. I’m okay, too.”
“You’re not...” She trailed off. “You’re not going to forget about me, right?”
Leila’s breath caught in her throat, tears threatening to come. She pulled Dee in for another hug. “No way.”
* * *
Without the spontaneous detours or the ambling curiosity that had defined her trip north, Leila made it back to Louisiana in a little over a week. Pulling into town, she found it strange to be somewhere that felt even a little bit familiar.
Leila still needed her phone’s navigation system to guide the way back to her aunt and uncle’s house, but the area looked familiar. It was strange to have memories attached to the places that passed by the window, to look at this particular arrangement of fast-food chains and stores and remember. All she could remember was leaving, and the occasional trip with her aunt up the highway to a nearby mall or movie theater, but it was still more than she was used to.
The lights were on in her aunt and uncle’s house when she pulled into the driveway. She engaged the emergency brake, shut off the engine, and sat there for a few seconds. She patted the dashboard, congratulating the car for its efforts. Hudson must have done wonders to keep an old car like this running fairly smoothly for over 10,000 miles.
“Stop thinking about him,” she said out loud. Languidly, she pushed open the door and made her way up to the house.
She could hear clamoring in the kitchen, something sizzling in a pan, a knife coming down repeatedly onto a chopping board. “Hey, guys!” Leila called out. Immediately her aunt Cathy emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands dry on a towel that was draped over her shoulder.
“Leila! God, it’s good to see you again. We missed you.” They embraced briefly. “Come to the kitchen. Tom and I are making your favorite.”
Leila followed along. “My favorite?”
“Yeah! We figured you’d be hungry by the time you got here. How was the drive back, by the way?”
“It was fine,” Leila said. “Long.”
“I’d say! You’ve driven more at the age of seventeen than many people will their entire lives.” Her aunt laughed, entering the kitchen and going straight to the cutting board to continue chopping vegetables.
Tom, busy sautéing onions, celery, and bell peppers in a large pot, laid the wooden spoon down and gave Leila a quick hug. “Good to have you back.”
“What are you guys making? It smells delicious.” She examined the kitchen, unsure what to make of all the ingredients. Sausage, a pot of rice, shrimp, chicken, canned tomatoes, bell peppers. There was a spicy aroma she couldn’t quite identify.
A look passed between Tom and Cathy, one that Leila had caught plenty of times on the faces of classmates in Texas. The look that said, “She doesn’t remember.” Before, seeing that look had embarrassed her, as if she were to blame for not remembering. Now she was resigned to the fact that she would have to get used to it, that unless she cut everyone completely out of her life, it was a look she’d always encounter.
“Jambalaya,” Cathy said. “This was your mom’s recipe. Our mom, your grandma, used to make the absolute worst jambalaya, and your mom swore she’d never feed her kids bad jambalaya.” She grabbed a handful of chopped okra, holding the pieces against the flat side of the knife to help her transfer them into the pot of rice. Wordlessly, Tom put a hand on his wife’s waist and kissed her cheek, holding his face against hers for a moment before returning his attention to the pot of softening veggies.
Leila resolved right then and there to not get too involved in herself, to not allow her own sorrows to make her forget others. Her aunt was still grieving the loss of her sister, and Leila could not remember the last time she’d asked her how she was coping.
“Can I help with anything?” Leila asked.
“You must be exhausted. Why don’t you sit down? We weren’t sure exactly when you’d arrive. This might still take another thirty minutes or so.”
“I’d rather stand, actually. It feels good to stretch my legs. I can set the table, if you want. I’m experienced now. I’ve seen the world. On my travels, I even met an expert table-setter. I think I learned a thing or two.”
Tossing the cutting board and knife into the sink, Aunt Cathy took out a skillet and placed it on the stove with a drizzle of olive oil. Then she turned to look at Leila, her hands on her hips, a smile spreading across her face. “We would be honored to have the services of someone who’s witnessed an expert table-setter. I only hope our place settings are not too plain for someone so revered. Please use our finest china.”
Leila, always happy to engage in banter, was about to respond, but something stopped her before she could get a word out. That smile.
God, it wasn’t even a clear image, but she remembered that smile.
Her mom used to smile like that. That exact angle, the deep dimples, the perfectly straight if not entirely white teeth. It wasn’t from a picture or a video, either. This was a memory. Fuzzy and barely felt, like a word that she knew the meaning of but couldn’t quite define. But a memory nonetheless. Leila’s aunt had her mom’s smile.
Almost immediately after the joy of this realization—and it was a split-second realization; her aunt was still looking at her expectantly, waiting for the repartee to continue—Leila felt, maybe for the first time, the ache that her family was truly gone. She’d done plenty of feeling sorry for herself since the accident, but she hadn’t had anything real to miss about her family until now. And now it hit her that anything she gained of them, any sliver of a memory that managed to break through the fog in her brain, would carry with it a feeling of loss. For the rest of her life, any thought about her family, regardless of how happy she’d be to have it, would be tinged with grief.
“If you hear the sound of breaking glass, it means your china is not up to my standards,” Leila said finally, meaning to leave the kitchen to go set the table but not being able to bring herself to do it until her aunt’s smile had faded.
5
LEILA GLANCED AWAY from the book for a second, keeping her fin
ger on the spot where she stopped so she could easily find her place again. The song that had come on the speakers was a great one, and under normal circumstances she wouldn’t dare to change it. But the book she was reading was enrapturing, too, and the song’s lyrics were so good, it’d be like trying to read two things at once. She hit the skip button until she found an instrumental piece that would serve as good background reading music and then went back to the book.
At the foot of the couch was a book she’d finished earlier that day. A glass of sweet tea was sweating a ring onto the coaster-less wood of a nearby end table. The window behind the couch was open to the green backyard, a breeze coming through that could never be matched by a fan. Aunt Cathy and Tom had gone into the city for the day, leaving Leila with hours full of music, books, and leftover jambalaya to look forward to.
Since coming back, Leila had discovered the following: 10:30 a.m. was the perfect time to wake up; it struck the just-right balance between sleeping in and not wasting your day. Jambalaya was the greatest food on earth, especially how her aunt (and her mom) made it. A scar on her elbow, barely noticeable, had come from a fight with her sister when they were little. Exactly what they’d fought over, Leila couldn’t remember, but the image of Olive scratching her and then tearfully apologizing when she saw the blood had come to Leila only instants after she’d discovered the scar while showering.
Rather than attempt to remember everything, Leila was going to focus on discoveries. Whether she was rediscovering something from her past or unearthing something completely new, she realized, didn’t matter.