She thinks about my question but then shakes her head. “It’s long, complicated, and I’m not even sure I can answer that. I’ll just tell you I’ve been lost for a while, but now I have focus. Purpose.”
Then it happens again, the feeling of the universe shrinking around me. My understanding of the world grows a few inches, and with it, a certainty I’m supposed to know this woman for a reason. Still, nothing about her looks familiar. Now that I know about her reclusion, I see signs of it. Hair a bit unkempt, skin a bit pale. What I first registered as thin now seems closer to scrawny.
“Well, that’s good, then. Does this purpose have something to do with why you’re headed to Denver?”
“Yes, actually. Though I’m not going to Denver. I’m headed up to Aspen. To the Maroon Bells.”
This sounds familiar, but I can’t place it.
“What are the Maroon Bells?”
“Two mountains. Maroon Peak and North Maroon Peak. Just southwest of Aspen.”
“I see. So this is a vacation, then?” I ask.
“No, not exactly.”
“So what, then?”
Clara looks at me as if I’ve just asked her the meaning of life. She’s thinking, and thinking hard. I realize she’s not mulling how to explain something complicated, but rather deciding if she wants to tell me at all.
And then she does, saying simply:
“I’m going there to die.”
Seven
I have no fucking idea what to say to this.
“You’re the first person I’ve told,” she says. “Imagine that.”
She must be sick. Incurable cancer, something like that. I look away from her, because now it feels as if my eyes are scanning her for disease. I grab for my drink, wishing there were more of it left.
“I’m sorry,” I manage. It sounds weak.
“I don’t have any real family left,” she says. “I never socialized with anyone at work. And now I’ve literally closed myself off. I didn’t expect to tell anyone what’s happening to me, mostly because I’m not really sure myself. I was telling my story here.” She taps her pen on the journal in her lap.
“What is that?”
“I call it the Book of Clara. I’m writing memories of my life, starting from right now and working back. It’s fitting you’re in the first chapter. The stranger on the plane who wasn’t really a stranger.”
“So, a memoir.”
“A suicide note.”
My stomach tightens. Suicide. So, an incurable disease, and she’d rather take her own life than suffer. Maybe Colorado has legalized assisted suicide?
I don’t ask what’s wrong with her. I don’t want to be like the people looking at Em and asking what happened to her face.
Instead, I ask, “Who’s going to read the Book of Clara?”
“Well, whomever finds it, I suppose. I just…” She looks down and studies the finely crafted words on the vanilla pages. “I just want someone else to know me.”
“That’s a big project. It’s going to take some time.” I look at the book, the vast number of unfilled pages. “Maybe by that time you’ll…”
“Change my mind?”
“Yes.”
“No, I don’t think so. I’m not going to cover my entire life, just the things I remember most. Which isn’t that much these days.”
I instinctively open my mouth to commiserate but shut it again. Talking about my memory loss only makes it seem more real, more threatening. “You’re writing a memoir,” I say.
“Yes, a memoir.” She smiles. “I like to think a part of me will still exist through my book. That someone will understand my decision. My absolute need for death.”
“Need?”
“Yes. Need.”
“So…so you’re not sick?” I ask. “I assumed maybe a degenerative condition, or—”
“No. I’m perfectly healthy.”
“I don’t even know what to say to that.”
“I don’t need you to say anything. I’m just telling you.”
“But you’re having trouble remembering things?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “And it’s getting worse. So maybe I have some kind of dementia. But that’s part of the reason for the Book of Clara. I want to see how far back I can remember. A lot of my memories are fragments, especially those of childhood. Pieces of a mosaic. Scattered.”
Part of me wishes Clara had never sat down in seat 2A. What was once an intriguing connection is suddenly feeling like a vortex I’m getting sucked into. But if I couldn’t let this go before hearing of her impending death, I’m really dug in now.
I take a deep breath. “Do you ever look at old photos of yourself and can’t remember the moment the picture was taken?”
“There are very few old photos of me,” she says. “But yes. It’s like looking at a child actress playing me.”
“Right.” I don’t feel years of my past are gone. They are gone, as lost and irretrievable as a deep, dreamless sleep.
“So you have the same thing?” she asks.
I don’t want to admit the truth, because then I become her. I don’t want to be her, a person with an unwavering desire to die.
“Maybe that’s another way we’re connected,” Clara says. “We’re both losing our past.”
She becomes more inquisitive as I feel myself wanting to retreat into my shell.
“Are your parents alive?” she asks.
“What?”
“It’s just something that occurred to me. Are your parents alive?”
My breathing quickens. “That depends on who you’re talking about,” I say. “I’m adopted. And yes, my adoptive parents are still alive. They live in California.”
I know what she’s going to ask next, and the thought of it scares the shit out of me. There will be some other thread between us, something else making this more surreal than it already is. Before she does, the flight attendant leans in and asks if we want more drinks. I jump at the offer, ordering my third. We don’t talk as the attendant retrieves another mini-bottle of whiskey for me, and after she moves down the aisle with the cart, I pour but don’t speak. If Clara wants to ask, she can ask.
And she does.
“What about your biological parents?”
I bring the glass back to my mouth and keep it there, letting the alcohol slowly breach my lower lip and trickle onto my gums, numbing them. For a moment, I have a flashback. A vague memory, sometime after my parents died. My adoptive parents had a large bathtub in their bedroom, and I used it often. I think, perhaps, it was a cocoon for me, a safe place to disappear. The water was always just a bit warmer than my own body heat, cloaking me like a soft blanket at bedtime. After soaping up, I would often lean back, take a deep breath, and go under the surface. Mouth closed, breath held, eyes open. I’d see the wavy, shimmering bathroom light through the water. It felt so right under the surface, so comforting. I would hold my breath until it became a struggle, and then, if I really focused and pushed all thoughts out of my mind, I’d break through to the other side, where it was no longer hard to resist. Where all I felt was peace, brilliant comfort, and a heavy pull toward sleep. I’d never give in to the pull, though sometimes I wanted to.
Every now and then, in the water, in that in-between place bridging consciousness and the deep black, I’d have a flash. A snippet of a memory. Of me as a younger child, happy, curious. Wondrous. A pureness, whole and still. In those moments, I became convinced death was simply a state of complete innocence.
“They were killed when I was eight,” I say.
“How?”
I suck in a deep breath. “Drunk driver. They were coming home from a restaurant. I was having a sleepover at a friend’s house.”
This is not something I talk about much, partly because it doesn’t exist in my mind. Occasionally, I’l
l have a glimmer of my parents, but when I think about it, the images I see in my mind are from photos I still keep, not actual remembrances. At least I’m lucky not to remember the moment I was told their lives had been snatched away, quick as the wings pulled off a moth.
Clara doesn’t tell me how sorry she is. Her face doesn’t register shock.
“You’re an only child,” she says.
“How did you know that?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Let me guess,” I say.
“You don’t have to guess,” she says. “You already know.”
“You lost your parents as well.”
“Yes.”
“How?” I ask.
“Also a car accident. They went out to the movies, slid on ice. I was with a sitter.”
“And you’re an only child?”
“Yes.”
“So we were both adopted.”
She nods. “I was seven.”
Clara is a dream. A dream, a ghost, or a hallucination. The people behind me must be wondering why the man in 2B is talking to himself. He must be crazy or drunk. Probably both.
“Do you remember any of your childhood before you were adopted?” Clara asks.
Whatever is happening, I’m deciding right now to go along with it. Real or not. Sane or not. This is the weirdest flight of my life, and I’m both scared and fascinated to find out what happens next. Hell, maybe this is like Lost and the plane crashed on takeoff.
I smell the alcohol on my breath as I speak.
“No. No, Clara, I don’t. I don’t recall a single damn thing.”
Eight
The Book of Clara
10/10/2018
To know me, you have to understand the last year of my life. I feel like I should have a name for this time period—the Troubles, or some such thing—but I can’t think of any way to tie it all up nicely in a choice description.
I took a sick day last December. I was feeling fine physically, but I remember an overwhelming need to stay inside. Perhaps the biting Boston cold had something to do with it, but more than seeking coziness, I simply wanted to avoid the outside world. That’s okay, I thought. We all need to escape inside to our little worlds every now and then. I called in sick to school, hoping they could find a sub on short notice.
I spent the day doing all the things one would seek during a sick day—watched a little TV, read for a while, lay under a fleece blanket on my couch, web-surfed. Even made myself some hot cocoa. But none of it felt quite right. Nothing I did addressed this nagging sense that the world outside the walls of my apartment was suddenly scarier than I had ever realized. There was just…too much going on out there. Too many moving pieces, too much chaos, and if I went back out there, I’d get swept up by some current and dashed away forever. My apartment was the anchor keeping me safe and grounded.
One day off turned into two. The second day was a Friday, and I’ve always wondered what would have happened if my second day off had been a Tuesday. If so, perhaps I would have felt just normal enough to go back to work on Wednesday, and that one day back would have been enough for me to “shake it off.” But it wasn’t. It was a Friday, and then I had the whole weekend to stay inside. And those two extra days cemented my path. By Sunday evening, the idea of going back outside terrified me.
I tried. Monday morning came; I dressed and got as far as about twenty feet outside my apartment building’s front door. The wind was stinging cold, and I remember wrapping my scarf around my face, then having the feeling of wishing it was long enough to disappear completely within. Mummify myself with wool. It’s a seventeen-minute walk from my apartment to the middle school where I used to teach, but that day, it might as well have been a three-week trek. It wasn’t going to happen. Outside, on the sidewalk, people weaving in and out of one another’s paths, cars whooshing by, horns blasting, buildings casting dooming shadows on dirty streets, garbage bags piled in heaps. The sickening sense that I could get swallowed by some creature at any moment was so powerful, it nearly buckled my legs.
I went back inside, heart pounding, struggling for breath, stripping naked and crawling under my sheets. I yanked the covers over my head as a child does, following the illogic of “If I can’t see the monster, it can’t see me.” In that moment, I knew something was wrong with me, permanently wrong, and it was real and unfixable.
I never went back to my job again.
Funny how easy it is to become a recluse. As long as you pay the bills, no one really cares. My expenses were relatively modest and my savings enough for at least a year, at which point I assumed I’d have some kind of answer as to what to do next. Yes, there were people concerned for me, but I have little family to speak of, and my social circles were very limited, even back then. My adoptive parents sent me some funds and suggested therapy, but otherwise seemed to care little about my erratic behavior. We’d never been very close.
Some fellow teachers sent concerned emails, as did a few women from the yoga class I used to attend regularly. I assured them I just needed to unplug for a bit. I disconnected my internet service and turned the ringer off my landline so no one could reach me except by coming to my apartment. A few of them did, and I’d open the door and politely tell them I just wanted to be alone. A couple of them pushed back, insisting I must be crazy and in need of psychiatric help. In the end, they too went away. A handful came back a second time, but none of them attempted a third. After time, I was completely and totally alone. Just me and my sweet, comforting books.
My period of isolation all began two months after I went to see a man.
He’s the reason I decided to kill myself.
Nine
Jake
She’s writing again, just like that. Suddenly, and with a sense of urgency.
I’m tempted to reach over and touch her arm, just to make sure she’s real. I don’t.
She’s focused, her words flowing from her pen with speed and precision.
“What part of your life are you writing now?” I ask.
Her pen stops. “Sometimes I have a memory. I just had a snippet of one, and I wanted to write it down.”
“What’s the memory?”
The buzz of alcohol is making me dizzy.
“There’s a man,” she says. “It’s the only time I’ve had the same sense of knowing someone. Though it’s much stronger with you.”
“Okay.”
“Wait,” she says. She goes back to writing, filling a page. I’m tempted to read over her shoulder, but I restrain myself. Minutes pass.
Then she stops writing and turns her head to me. “Have you ever lost something, Jake? Something you were sure was gone forever? You searched and searched everywhere for it. Frantically. Then, after you’ve completely resigned yourself to it being gone forever, it appears, and it does so in a place you are absolutely certain you already checked? It’s like magic. Yet you don’t question it. You don’t try to explain it. You just let that magic exist in the world, and your day goes on.”
Immediately I think of a watch. Not a watch I remember, but one I have a photo of. A Mickey Mouse watch bought for me by my biological father for my sixth birthday. I have no memory of either my father or the watch, but I do have a photo showing both, a boy and his dad, the boy proudly showing off his favorite birthday gift, all captured on fading photo paper, bleeding saturation. Like all things from my youth, the watch was barely more than a photo memory, and I always wondered what became of it.
“I’m not sure where you’re going with this.”
Pen down. A strand of kinked hair falls over her left eye.
“When I asked you about your parents, I was thinking about a man I went to visit in Boston a couple months before I locked myself away in my little apartment. I wanted to write about the day I met him before my memory of it went soft.”
Soft memories. I k
now about those. Clouds of the mind, which cannot be held or contained.
“Who was the man?”
She looks poised to say something, then shakes her head.
“You can tell me,” I add.
“No, Jake. I don’t think I want to say any more.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why we were put here together. On this plane, at this moment in time. I think you’re something I lost, perhaps a long time ago. Now that I’ve found you, I’m not going to question it and I’m not going to explore it any further. I’m just going to let this magic exist in the world.”
“What are you talking about?”
She smiles, and it’s the gentlest thing I’ve ever seen.
“I need to do this. I’m going to the mountains, and I’m never coming back. That’s how it’s supposed to end.”
She returns to her journal. Clara says nothing more to me for the remainder of the flight.
Ten
Airplane wheels bump and squeal on the Denver airport tarmac, and Clara still remains silent. She’s been writing in her journal without pause since she stopped talking. I’ve snuck a few peeks and have been able to catch a few words (book, aroma, alone), but not much more than that.
My hands are slick with a film of sweat, and there’s a noticeable spike in my heart rate. Clara and I have a connection that’s deeper than just seeming familiar to each other, and in a way, I feel like I’m seeing my future self in her. What if my memory issues make me start thinking like her? I shudder at the thought of considering death the only option.
I can’t just let this end here. It’s not that I feel I have to save her. More like I need her to save me.
I unbuckle as other passengers rise and start opening overhead compartments. We’ll be walking off this plane in less than a minute.
“This isn’t magic, Clara,” I say. “This is purposeful. We need to understand what’s happening.”
She shakes her head. “Jake, I—”
“Maybe you’re not really supposed to kill yourself. Maybe the real reason for you to take this trip was to meet me. I can’t just let you get off this plane and never see you again.”
The Dead Girl in 2A Page 3