My Name Is Memory (19 page)

I think this might be called “mental illness,” she said to herself on a few low occasions. But maybe I am on to something true, she would argue to herself. Maybe a lot of crazy people are on to something true, her self would argue back.

She’d long ago called it quits on finding a rational explanation. She was searching for the irrational explanation that best fit with all the things she had experienced. Internal consistency was as good as she was hoping for.

Some people thought you could access previous lives through hypnosis. Past-life regression, it was called. Of course, that meant accepting the premise that you had past lives, which was big, but she was putting that aside for the moment. She was accepting it in a probationary way, for the sake of conjecture. Conjecture was, after all, her constant companion, her new BFF.

So that would mean the English girl was her, Lucy, in a previous life. That, indeed, was a big one to swallow, but there it was. That would mean the enormous house really existed or had existed somewhere, presumably in England. That would mean she’d once had a mother who’d made gardens and died when she was young. That would mean that there had been a real boy she had loved who had died, whom she had called Daniel, whom she considered in her dreams to be the same person as her Daniel from high school.

That would mean there really was, or had been, a note left for . . . well, for her. That would mean there were these things in the real world and that she could, presumably, find them if they had not been lost or destroyed. It felt like quite a leap to connect these pictures in her mind to real things in the world, but that was what her hypothesis demanded. She wanted to find out. She couldn’t let it go until she did. She was going to keep chasing her craziness; she wasn’t going to let it chase her. If there was a real place and a house and a note, she was going to try to find them.

Her summer break really was turning out to be a vacation after all—a vacation from sanity. She thought fleetingly of Dana. She hoped she could make a safe trip back at the end of it.

S
he wanted to know about Sophia, so I told her. Not everything but many things. She listened with so much intensity that it was almost as though she was remembering it herself. That was what I fantasized, anyway, in the hours I had to spend without her.

“So what did we do when we rode into the desert?”

She was partly joking with me, still challenging me to see when I would run out. And she was deigning to believe me a little bit. She had begun, in spite of herself, to believe what I told her about my past. I could tell. But when she asked about herself, when I recollected her role in these adventures, she was still just playing.

“At first we were in a hurry. As I said, I needed to get you away from my beast of a brother as quickly as I possibly could.”

“And then?” I loved it when she took off her shoes and got on the bed with me.

“And then we slowed down. The desert was utterly empty. We began to feel safe. You were hungry. You ate most of the food.”

“I didn’t.”

“Oh, you did. Greedy girl.”

“Was I five hundred stone?”

I shook my head, seeing her as she was in my mind’s eye. “Hardly. You were as slender and beautiful as you are now.”

“So I was greedy and ate all the food. And then what?”

“Then I made a fire and set up a very primitive tent and put our blankets under it.”

She nodded.

“And then we both realized that the stars were extraordinary, so we moved out from under the tent.”

“That sounds nice. And then what?”

“We made tender love with the open sky as our witness.” I also loved to see the blush in her cheeks.

“No, we didn’t.”

I smiled at her. “You’re right, we didn’t.”

“We didn’t?” Now she looked disappointed, and I laughed.

“No.” Boldly, I touched her cheek. “I wanted to.”

“Maybe I did, too. Why didn’t we?” She brought her knees up to her chest.

“Because you were married to my brother.”

“The one who tried to strangle me.”

“Yes. He was murderously jealous, because he thought I was betraying him and taking advantage of you. I didn’t want to prove him right.”

“He deserved it.”

“Yes, he did. But we deserved better.”

I could see the emotion in her face. “Do you think so?”

“Yes. The regrets stay with you. They distort you over time. Even if you can’t remember them.” I touched her feet through her socks. I was hungry to touch every part of her. “And anyway, we’ll have our chance.”

I DON’T KNOW what happened to Sophia that night, but when she came in the next morning, she was different. She was both solemn and urgent.

“Dr. Burke is wrong about you. You are going to be fine.”

I couldn’t lie to her.

“You are,” she said combatively.

“Tell that to my lungs.”

“I think I will.” She put her arms around me and pressed her cheek to my chest. She had always seemed concerned about somebody else seeing us, but she didn’t seem to care now.

She held me for a long time, and then she looked up at me. “I’m sorry for what you’ve been through,” she said. “I can’t stand to think of the pain you’ve been in. You deserve better.”

“It’s all right,” I said quickly. “I’ve been through worse.” Her eyes were full of sorrow, and I didn’t want it for either of us.

“But that doesn’t make it hurt any less, does it?”

“Yes, it does,” I said forcefully. “Pain is fear, and I’m not afraid. I know I’ll have a new body soon enough.”

“You say that like your body is a room you can go in and out of.” She had her hands on my arms. “But this is you.”

I felt frustrated all of a sudden. I pointed to my chest. “This is not me. This body is breaking down, but I am not.” I didn’t want her look of sympathy. I hated to be weak in front of her. “I promise you. I will be healthy again, and I will find you.”

Her expression was tender. She was quiet for a while, and it occurred to me that she looked older than she did the first day I woke up to her. “We deserve better,” she said softly.

“We will have better.”

“Will we?”

“Yes, we will.” I looked at her with absolute seriousness. “I don’t mind this. I can wait a little longer if I have to, because I know I will be with you again, and I will be strong again. I will take care of you and make love to you and make you happy.”

“You make me happy,” she said. She put her arms around me, and I realized I was crying into her shoulder and I didn’t want her to see. My fever was riding so high it was hard not to shiver in her arms.

“One thing, though,” she said after a while, and her voice was lighter.

“What?”

“When you find me again, how will I know it’s you?”

“I’ll tell you.”

“But what if I don’t believe you? I’m a stubborn chit, you know.”

I held her hard. “Yes, you are. But you are not hopeless.”

ON THE LAST sunny day of my life, Sophia brought me her father’s coat and led me outside. I can remember the effort it took to stay on my feet from one step to the next. We walked just far enough from the house to forget it was a hospital. She wore a bright blue wool hat and a fuzzy red dress that felt like contentment itself between my fingers. She didn’t look like a nurse but like a lovely girl without a care on a stroll with her beau in the garden. That’s how we pretended it was.

We found a patch of grass in the sunshine and lay down on it. I felt the warmth of the sun and the sweetness of her head on my shoulder, and I put my arms around her. I wished I could crawl into that moment and stay inside it without letting another one pass. In rapt silence we watched a yellow butterfly land on the toe of her boot.

“This was a butterfly garden once,” she told me. “The most magnificent thing you have ever seen.” She turned to me and smiled. “Well, maybe not the most magnificent thing you have ever seen.”

I laughed. I loved the sound of her voice. I wanted her to keep talking, and she seemed to know it.

“There were thousands, tens of thousands, of them in all colors. And you should have seen the flowers. I was very small, but I would just lie here and let the butterflies land on every part of me and try not to laugh when they tickled.”

“I wish I had seen it,” I said, watching the slow flap of the butterfly’s wings on her boot.

“My mother made it. She was famous for the gardens she made.”

“Was she?”

“Yes. And for being beautiful. And reckless.”

“Reckless?”

“She liked fast things. My father said she had jumpy legs, because she couldn’t stand still even for a second.”

We thought about that for a while. I wanted to be careful.

“And what about the butterflies? What happened to them?”

“They went after she died. My father didn’t try to keep up the gardens after she was gone.”

My carefulness hadn’t helped me. I wished I hadn’t asked that question. It cast us out of the shelter of that moment and back into the wash of time. Time was loss, and Sophia had suffered too much of it.

She didn’t lift her head, but I felt the sadness of her body pressed against mine, and I was too weak to resist it. It filled me, too.

“I love you,” I told her. “More than anything. I always have.”

I heard the wetness in her breathing. I lifted my hand to her face and felt her tears.

“I love you,” she said.

Those were words I had waited lifetimes to hear, but they gave me a deep ache. I wished she didn’t. She had lost too much already. I wished I had died in the muddy valley of the river Somme and not made her lose one more thing.

FOR TWO DAYS I went in and out of feverish sleep. Sophia was there. I saw her when I opened my eyes and felt her when I couldn’t. I wondered if she had been fired from her nursely duties, she was with me so constantly. I talked to her, and she talked to me, but I have only the blurriest idea of what we said.

And then I woke up. My body ached, I could barely get air, but my head was clear. Sophia was initially ecstatic when she saw me sitting up with my eyes open. The innocence of her response was both a joy and an agony to me.

But on further examination, she must have known that the color of my skin wasn’t right. My breathing wasn’t right. Dr. Burke said something to her in a low voice outside my door, and her manner changed when she came back in. Her eyes were full, and her mouth was pressed into a cooperative shape.

“Back again, are you?” I asked her teasingly, talking in a low voice to suppress an upheaval of fluid and coughing. “Haven’t you gotten yourself tossed out yet for spending too much time with patient D. Weston?”

“They can’t really toss me, can they? They can’t spare an extra set of hands. And it’s touchy, being that it is my house.”

“But tell me the nurses are giving you a respectably hard time at least.”

“I think they understand how I feel about D. Weston.” She touched my ear tenderly. “All the nurses say you are the most handsome we’ve got.”

I smiled because I didn’t have the air to laugh anymore. “Is that what you talk about?”

She sat on my bed quietly for a while. Her face had turned solemn. “I want to go with you,” she said.

I put my hands on her waist. “What do you mean, my darling?”

“I want to go where you’re going. I’m not scared of dying. I want to stay together and come back together. You said that souls cohere. I want to stay with you.”

“Oh, Sophia.” I kissed her ribs through her sweater. I pressed my face into her abdomen. “You can’t take your own life.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re young and beautiful and healthy, and you can’t. Anyway, rebirth comes from wanting to live. Suicide is rejection; it’s the end. If death is truly what you choose, you might not come back after that.”

“But I don’t want to reject my life. I don’t want to choose death—I want to live. I just want to live my life with you.”

I took both her hands, and I looked in her eyes. “You can’t possibly know how much I want to live my life with you. For now you have to try to live as fully and happily as you can. You’ll become a nurse. Maybe a doctor. You’ll fall in love.”

“I’ve fallen in love,” she said, and her eyes spilled over.

I kissed her hands. “You’ll fall in love again. And maybe you’ll have children and you’ll grow old and die when it’s time. And maybe you’ll look back and remember me every so often. And when you come back again, I will be waiting for you. I will find you.”

She was shaking her head. “But how? You say that, but how will you find me?”

“I just will. I always do.”

“But I won’t even know you, will I? I’ll treat you like a stranger. My memory is only average. I’m not even as good as Nestor the dog.” She started to cry, and I held her as close as I could.

“You don’t need to know me. I’ll know you.”

I felt her wet sobs against my chest. “I won’t know me,” she said.

IT TURNED OUT it was difficult to locate a young man named Daniel Grey (spelled both Grey and Gray the two times he was listed in the high school yearbook) about whom you thought incessantly but had no information. Lucy tried all the normal Internet searches and found a dizzying number of Daniel Grey/Grays. The only narrowing factor was his age—she didn’t know his exact birthday—and that didn’t help much. The school had no forwarding address and no record of him, but on the bright side, the morgue had no record of him, either.

She’d pressed Claude, the desk guard from Whyburn House, as hard as she’d dared for information about the mystery man who’d come looking for her, but Claude’s initial certainty seemed to disintegrate under questioning. He wasn’t truly sure his name was Daniel; it might have been Greg. He wasn’t sure if his eyes were green. They might have been brown. “I’d know him if I saw him,” he said apologetically.

It turned out, though, that it was easier to locate a young woman without a name who was long dead, based on a psychic, a hypnotist, and the contents of her mind, than a person she had actually known and kissed in high school. Hythe was an actual town in England, and of the handful of manor houses in its vicinity, only one had been used as a hospital during the war. She’d thought at first it was the Second World War, but the family who owned it had not been living there in the years leading up to it. It seemed that much more remote to extend her search back to the First War, but that’s what she did.