Flashback (3 page)

“Eve?” she said.

“Yes.” I crossed to the bed and bent down beside her. “Sorry to wake you.”

She sat up, propping her shoulders on the headboard, resting her hands on top of the quilt. There was a long red welt on her right cheek, and the backs of her hands were raw and scratched. She'd been the dearest to me of all the sisters, and though I felt guilty thinking it, I was relieved that she was the one who had been spared.

I put my hand gently on hers. “You all right?”

She nodded, and I could tell she was fighting back tears. “There was a man,” she said. “I left compline early. I was going to the kitchen.”

Her hair was loose around her face. I reached up and brushed a stray strand from her cheek. Normally, we took that walk together each night, from the chapel to the kitchen to finish the next day's baking.

“I don't know how I did it.” She looked away from me, out the bedroom's window toward the floodlit yard and the darkness beyond. “I just ran, Eve, as hard as I could. I could hear them, you know, the others. At first I thought they were singing. It sounded like they were singing, but they were screaming.”

“Shush,” I told her. “We can talk about this later.”

She shook her head, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “One of the men, he had me in his hands.”

“It's okay,” I said, feebly trying to reassure her.

“No,” she insisted. “Listen.” She hardened her face, as if this was something she had to get through, as if she couldn't rest until she did. “They were looking for something, someone. The American, he said.”

I straightened slightly, the hairs along the back of my neck bristling.

Heloise looked up at me. Her eyes were huge and dark. “They came for you, Eve.”

THREE

Most amnesiacs are not nearly as lucky as I am. Of the scant number of people who suffer some kind of brain trauma and lose their memories, the overwhelming majority lose not only their grip on the past but their ability to form new memories as well. Put simply, their brains can no longer learn. Introduced to someone at a cocktail party, they will forget that person's name before the next sip of their martini. Give them a trivial task, like making tea, and they will need to be reminded five or six times of what they are doing. Most people like this live in constant terror, each moment groundless, independent of the one that came before.

Among the few with simple, retrograde amnesia, only a miraculous few, like me, can remember skills from the time before. Most have to be retaught the simplest things, how to fry an egg or flush a toilet. Many find that their talents and handicaps, likes and dislikes have changed drastically. I knew a man once, one of Dr. Delpay's patients, who had been a successful lawyer in his old life, and in his new one had taught himself to paint. He never set foot in a courtroom again, and had no desire to, but his paintings, beautiful, dark canvases, now sell for tens of thousands of euros.

In the first few days after the accident my memory was utterly lightless, black like the depths of the convent's wine cellar, that terrifying blindness of not being able to see your own hand in front of your face. Then, slowly, my knowledge of the world came back to me in dozens of daily discoveries, things I'd learned and forgotten I'd learned. My ease with several languages, passable French and German, a smattering of Spanish and Russian. The names of constellations. How to drive a car. These all resurfaced like the tattered relics of a shipwreck, tide-driven to the nearest shore. And though I was familiar with the mechanics of these things, the pattern of a gear shift, the conjugation of a verb, the shape of Orion, I could not tell you how I'd come to know them.

In the beginning I'd tried to piece together a life from these scant clues, women I would have liked to have been. A housewife separated from her group, a stray from a wine country tour. A travel writer. A teacher. But there was other, less comfortable evidence that just didn't fit, how when I took a seat for prayer I felt compelled to scan the chapel for the closest exit, how my eyes were always turning toward the woods, as if I expected something to come from them. Or how I knew from the day I arrived every place on the abbey grounds where a man might conceal himself.

Then one morning while Heloise and I made our way to the kitchen, I'd reeled at the distant crack of Monsieur Tane's old rifle, the sound ricocheting up from the farm below us.

“The fox,” Heloise had explained, her hand on my arm, her voice calm. But her face had betrayed me, her eyes reflecting some deep and instinctive terror in my own.

For an instant I'd looked at her fragile body, the pale V of skin where her shirt opened around her neck, and I'd thought of my fingers on her throat, the heel of my palm against her breastbone, all the various ways in which I could hurt her with only my hands.

For a long time after that the only mysteries I'd wanted to understand were those of the kitchen, the secret properties of yeast, the alchemy of combining butter and flour to make air, the way Heloise marked the tops of the
bâtards
so that they split like overripe fruits in the oven.

*   *   *

I sat with the Tanes through dinner, trying unsuccessfully to force down a small plate of food. I should have been hungry, but I wasn't. I felt stretched thin, tired and edgy at the same time. I managed a glass of Monsieur Tane's homemade wine, then excused myself and went upstairs.

Careful not to wake Heloise, I let myself into the little guest room, kicked my shoes off, and stretched out on the free bed. I switched the bedside lamp off and let my eyes adjust to the semidarkness. The light from the yard below threw spidery shadows onto the dormered walls, the crooked outlines of tree branches, the narrow thread of a power line. I could hear Heloise breathing, and the sound of the cotton sheets rasping against each other when she moved.

They came for you, Eve,
I heard her say, and once again goose bumps stippled the top of my spine. She'd been afraid, I reassured myself. She didn't know what she'd heard. And yet, whoever did this had to have wanted something.

Shuddering at the thought, I pulled the thick wool blanket up over my shoulders and rolled onto my side. Sleep seemed an impossibility, but somehow my exhaustion overtook me. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again the moon was sitting high in the room's one window, a thin crescent like the pared tip of a fingernail.

I swung my legs off the bed and let my feet touch the cold floor. I'd been dreaming, running on legs that stubbornly refused to move with any speed. There was a child in my arms, a little girl with Heloise's face.

Resting my head in my hands, I took a deep breath and felt my pulse slow. Yes, I thought, the knowledge sudden and inexplicable, they had come for me. And they would be back.

*   *   *

It was beginning to snow when I set out up the dark road to the convent. A thin smattering of flakes whirled landward, settling in a downy film on the asphalt. The Tanes' retrievers were inside for the night, and the only sound was the almost imagined hush of snow collecting on the dry leaves and deadfall in the dark woods. When I'd passed through the Tanes' kitchen on my way out, the clock above the stove had read three-fifteen. I could only hope the inspector and the others had left for the night.

The abbey was still floodlit, the gray stone gleaming through the trees as I rounded the road's last curve. I stopped for a minute, straining against the quiet. Something moved in the woods, something small, an animal turning in its dreams, an owl on the hunt. Up ahead a car door closed, the sound muffled by distance, sharpened by the cold.

I stepped off into the underbrush and continued upward, picking my way through the darkness till I emerged at the edge of the grounds. The crowd that had been there earlier was gone, but there was still one car in the large drive that didn't belong to the convent. The motor was running, and I could see the orange coals of two cigarettes brightening and dimming through the windshield. An unlucky assignment on a night as cold as this.

Skirting the drive, I headed for the far end of the priory. I ducked through the woods, came around the back side of the building, and crossed the snow-covered yard toward the kitchen door. The chapel loomed behind me, the windows dark, the door slightly ajar. There was a dusting of snow on the threshold, like a sprinkling of confectioner's sugar, the final delicate touch of the maker.

I had my keys out, but I didn't need them. The door was unlocked and swung open at my touch. It was warm inside, the air heavy with the smell of yeast, of dough left too long. The lights from the yard shone in through the windows, bringing a sort of eerie false daylight to the inside of the priory. The loaves Heloise had set out the night before for their first rise had overrun their pans and were lying in shapeless mounds on the large wooden baking counter.

I headed through the kitchen, out into the dining room, and down the first-floor hallway to the stairwell and the upstairs quarters. Whoever the killers were, they'd gone through the priory, looking, it seemed, for something. The quarters had been turned inside out, the sisters' meager possessions scattered roughly about. To me this seemed almost the worst of violations. There had not been much privacy at the abbey, so what little there was had been treated with reverence.

My own room lay at the far end of the hallway, a small but comfortable cell like all the others. The door was open, and the room's few furnishings had been scoured. The desk drawers were ajar, the contents strewn across the floor: papers and books, old pantry inventories, letters from the U.S. consul, my Bible. My clothes had been dumped from the dresser and lay in a mound on the bed. The mattress lay askew on the narrow frame.

A tattered North Face rain jacket, ripped Levi's, a black turtleneck sweater from Old Navy, and a muddy pair of Nike running shoes—these were all the possessions with which I arrived in the world. I carried no purse, no wallet, no money or passport. The only clue to the mystery of myself, the only hint at where I'd come from or where I was headed, was a worn slip of paper tucked in an inside pocket of my jacket, a dog-eared receipt for the Tangier-Algeciras ferry. It wasn't much of a clue, but it was the only one I'd come with, and I'd kept it.

I picked up my Bible from the floor, then moved toward the window and peered down at the yard, the expanse of unblemished snow between the priory and the chapel. The two cops were on the other side of the building. I could chance a light. I flicked on the bedside lamp. Opening the book to the front cover, using the tip of my fingernail, I loosened the glue that held the lining in place and carefully peeled it back. There, taped securely to the inside of the cover, was the ferry ticket.

The ticket was printed in English and Spanish and Arabic. It was a one-way fare, used, the date marked as the thirtieth of October, just two days before I'd been shot and left for dead. Freeing the paper from its hiding place, I set the Bible down and held the ticket closer to the light. In the left-hand margin of the paper, in fading pencil, were five Arabic characters, sketched one above the other.

Sad. A'in. Ya. Ha. Kaf.
And following the five letters, the number 21. One of the investigators assigned to my case, a young officer of Algerian descent, had translated for me, shaking his head when I'd asked what the writing meant. They're just letters, Mademoiselle, he'd said with a shrug, an acronym perhaps. A thorough search of Moroccan companies and organizations had turned up no matches, no possible answers to this strange riddle, this single fragment of my past, and deep down I'd been happy to let it lie, relieved to tuck the ticket, and whatever dubious past it had carried me from, under the faded overleaf of the Bible. Now, though, it seemed that past had come on its own. Wherever I stayed would no longer be safe, for me or for those who sheltered me.

Folding the ticket, I slipped it into my pocket and started next door to Sister Theresa's room. I needed a backpack, something more practical than the overnight bag I used for my trips to Lyon. On the top of Theresa's wardrobe I found an old rucksack, the leather aged and worn to a dark patina. Hauling the bag down, I went back to my own room and gathered a couple of changes of clothes and essentials.

Theresa and some of the other sisters had taken a trip to the Holy Land earlier that fall, and there were a few souvenirs still in the pack: postcards of Bethlehem and Jerusalem, a half-used tube of Israeli toothpaste, a ticket stub from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In the sack's little front pocket was Theresa's passport. I took it out, along with the mementos, and set everything aside on my bed.

A passport, I thought, stuffing my own clothes into the rucksack. I would need one if I was going to leave the European Union, and a real name, something more official than the one the sisters had given me. I ran through the sisters in my mind. Theresa was too old by several decades to be anything near a match. Heloise was too short, and brown-eyed, as well. Sister Marie was close to me in age and build. Her eyes were blue, and if I dyed my hair blond I might just be able to fake it.

Hooking the rucksack over my shoulders, I turned the light off and headed into the hallway. Marie's room was on the opposite side of the priory, and I had to search in semidarkness, but I finally found the passport in one of her desk drawers. Tucking it in my bag, I headed down to the kitchen and back out onto the snowy lawn.

It took me a moment to get my bearings. I stood for a second in the glare of the lights and watched my breath rise up and vanish. More than anything, I wanted to go back to the Tanes' and crawl into bed next to Heloise. I wanted Magda reading the morning prayer while the older sisters slept and the younger of us struggled to keep our eyes open. And the feel of Heloise's arm touching mine at the breadboard, the smells of flour and proofing yeast. I wanted to take back what had happened, as the snow had already reclaimed the last traces of the sisters' passages across the yard: heel prints in the mud, grain scattered on the way to feed the chickens. If they had not found me that day, I told myself, they would still be alive.