My Name Is Memory (29 page)

Lucy slowly unwound her scarf and hung it carefully on a hook in the closet instead balling it up and tossing it on the hall table as she would have ordinarily done. She took her time looking through her bag for her phone.

“I think I’m different, too,” she said into the hungry silence. “Definitely different than I was in high school.”

Marnie stretched her legs out in front of her. “You don’t like him as much as you used to like him is what you’re saying.”

“No, it’s not that,” she protested reflexively. “I was so stupid then, as you’ve pointed out.” Lucy fiddled around with her cell phone charger. She didn’t want to sit down in the chair across from Marnie, because then she’d have to be honest.

Marnie looked wistful. “Well, I liked you stupid. And anyway, I never said that.”

“You know what I mean. I was just . . . slavering over him. I don’t think I’m like that anymore.”

Marnie looked particularly sober. She circled her slack computer cord around her foot. “Why aren’t you?” She had to credit Marnie for keeping on asking, even as she must have feared what it would bring.

She held Marnie’s eyes for a minute and then let them drop. Lucy was the coward around here. “Just older, I guess.”

“Did you kiss him this time?”

“A little.”

“How many times have you gone out with him?”

“I don’t know. Seven or eight, maybe. Something like that.”

“You kissed him a little? Are you twelve?”

“I have a crit tomorrow.”

Marnie shook her head. “Is this the same Daniel?”

Lucy swallowed and nodded.

“You don’t like him anymore.”

DANIEL WAS DRIVING from the VA hospital to Charlottesville early one evening after a long, tiring shift, and when he saw the traffic backed up on the beltway he decided to take a different way.

He found himself thinking of his grandfather Joseph, Molly’s father. He thought of Joseph not so much as he was when he was old and sick in hospice in Fairfax, but as he was when they lived in Alabama by the pond. There were geese in the pond through the winter, and they fed them bits of stale bread almost every morning. It wasn’t easy to get a goose to trust a couple of humans, but they had succeeded. They didn’t plan it, really. They were both early risers, and they showed up there. He could still picture Joseph’s delighted expression in the center of a whirling globe of black heads with white chinstraps and gray wings and dark, squawking beaks. Geese paired up like humans, Joseph explained. Better than humans, because geese stayed true.

Daniel also remembered the days in the spring when the first flocks would go back up north to Canada or wherever they came from. He and Joseph would look up at the racing V overhead, a single thumping bird soul, and watch them with the excitement of travel and the sadness of being left again. Daniel remembered envying them their purpose and connectedness, and how they could just fly away. He collected feathers as a way to hold on to them. His grandma said they were dirty, but his mother secretly let him keep them.

Joseph dreamed of being a pilot, and he would have been if he hadn’t had polio when he was a teenager, which left his leg weak. Daniel told Joseph that’s what he would do, too, and he fully meant it at the time. After they moved, Joseph used to send pictures of the planes he thought Daniel should fly. Daniel felt sorry that he ended that life before he could do it.

HE WAS TWO miles out of town on a small road and heading south when he realized that the road was familiar to him, and it explained why he kept thinking of Joseph. He kept going for another couple of miles, looking for the cemetery on the left, where his grandmother Margaret and undoubtedly Joseph, were buried. Instead of keeping on, he surprised himself by turning left and driving under an alley of oak trees.

He was partly surprised because he almost never thought of grave-yards. They meant so much less than most people thought they did. He remembered a woman from his old neighborhood in St. Louis driving fifteen miles to the cemetery every day to mourn her long-dead husband at a cold gray stone, while the husband was busy selling milk at the 7-Eleven just half a mile down the road from her house.

Daniel hadn’t seen his grandfather since he’d died, though he had been keeping an eye out for him. They would likely be about the same age now. He’d thought they would have crossed paths, being as close as they were. But they hadn’t, and it made him wonder if Joseph had lived his last life. It fit, as he thought of it, and it made him sad. Some chances you really did lose.

He parked the car and walked up to a hilltop. It was good to get out and walk a bit. He was drowsy, and his focus turned so deeply inward he half expected his body to stop breathing.

His grandfather’s gravestone looked as he thought it would, except that it didn’t have the bunches of dahlias he had pictured. He looked around and saw the familiar flowers a little way down the row, an armload of them, fresh-cut and deep pink. He was confused by that, and slightly alarmed. Was there a new death in the family? He hoped his brothers were all right. Curiosity drew him down the row to the decorated grave. He read the name twice before it meant anything to him. “Daniel Joseph Robinson, beloved son of Molly and Joshua.”

It was possible he really had stopped breathing, as his breath came fast and painfully now. They’d engraved the name they’d given him second and the name he’d given himself first. There were not only flowers but two candles and a photograph in a frame. He didn’t want to look at the photograph, but he reached for it anyway.

It was him, of course. It was him in his cross-country uniform, standing next to Molly. He was sweaty, the hair on his neck in wet spears. It was just after a race, and Molly carried the trophy. She wasn’t holding it up for the camera, just dangling it in her hand. He won most of the races, and she knew he didn’t care about the trophy.

He must have been about fourteen. He wasn’t quite as tall as her yet. He was leaning his head against her shoulder. His eyes were closed, and he was laughing about something, not posing but really laughing. He knew why she kept this picture. Maybe there had been a moment or two of satisfaction for her.

He never looked at his own graves. He never wanted to see an old picture of himself. He had avoided those things, not knowing exactly why, and now he knew why. He sat down. He realized he held his car key in his hand and it was shaking. He put the key in his pocket.

He remembered the races. He remembered being fast, just effortlessly fast in that body. He remembered those autumn days and his favorite course that wound through the hemlock forest of the land trust. He’d never been so good at running before. No matter how much diligence and strategy you brought to a race, those legs were just faster than the others.

He thought of Molly tending this grave, bringing these flowers, lighting the candles. His impulse was to go and find her. “I’m fine,” he wanted to say to her. “I still love you, and I think about you all the time. I’m not down there, I’m right here.”

He looked at the photograph again. He looked down at his hands and remembered his old hands—the nail of his left middle finger, which grew in funny, his bony knuckles, his freckled skin. Those hands weren’t here; they were down there. Or whatever was left of them. Those fast legs weren’t here; they were buried, too. That was him, Molly’s son, and he was under there; he wasn’t right here. That was me.

He missed that body. He heard music so well in that body. His fingers were graceful and quick on the piano keys. It was a talented body, and it was a shame to throw it away.

As he looked at Molly’s face in the picture, he knew he hadn’t loved that body because it was fast and heard music well. He would have liked to think so, but he knew it wasn’t true. He loved it because he’d been loved. Because Molly had loved him.

In this present body he hadn’t been loved, and he found almost nothing to love about himself. He didn’t want to give a mother that kind of power, but Molly had it anyway.

It was amazing how he thought he could take his whole self with him to every new life, not remembering that when you left someone like Molly, you left a part of yourself behind forever. Sometimes he wondered if his memory for the important things was really very good at all.

He glanced at the photograph for the last time before he got up on trembling legs. He hadn’t been able to see it or accept it then, but it seemed so obvious now. He’d looked just like her.

ON THE FIRST Friday of spring break, after Lucy had turned in a research paper on Jefferson’s “pet trees” at the Grove in Monticello and taken two exams in three days, Daniel showed up in the lobby of her building and called up on the intercom a little after noon. She was so surprised and anxious at the thought of him standing there that she went racing out of her apartment and down three flights of stairs without considering changing out of her sweatpants and T-shirt or putting on a bra.

He held out his arms for her, and she reluctantly went into them. Because she failed to look up, he kissed the top of her unshowered head. “I have a huge surprise for you,” he said. He was obviously excited.

His being there, in the bosom of her life, felt like a huge enough surprise. She didn’t know if she could take another one. She shuffled him toward the alcove with the defunct pay phone. She didn’t dare take him upstairs, because Marnie and Leo were asleep up there. “What’s that?”

He pulled some papers from the pocket of his long coat and held them out for her, not to take but to see.

“Plane tickets?” she asked.

“Yes. Well, not the actual tickets but our itinerary.”

“ ‘Our itinerary’?”

“It’s your spring break, isn’t it? You said you didn’t have plans. I’m taking you to Mexico for a week.”

She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know their relationship could contain this kind of thing. If somebody had told her a few months ago that Daniel would come back into her life, and furthermore, that he was going to sweep her off to Mexico for a week, she would have been ecstatic. But now she felt skittish and unnerved.

“I was going to see my folks for a few days. I told them I’d—”

“You’ve got two weeks off. You’ll have time.”

People straggled in and out of the lobby. People she recognized. What if Marnie came down just now? Lucy didn’t want to prolong the discussion.

“We fly out tomorrow afternoon,” he said buoyantly. If he picked up on her hesitance he didn’t show it, and that, like so many things, seemed strange to her. “Go get packed. Do you want me to pick you up tomorrow or meet you at the airport?”

“Meet me at the airport,” she blurted. “I’m totally out of your way.”

“Great.” He kissed her. “Let’s meet at noon. I’ll call you with the gate number.”

She watched him go with an urgent feeling of relief. She wondered if she was going with him to Mexico for a week just to get him out of there.

DANIEL DID SOMETHING he promised himself he would not do. Late Saturday morning he drove to her apartment building. It wasn’t enough to hangaround spying on her any longer. He needed toget over himself and actually talk to her. He needed to find a way to warn her. He’d been in a state of anxious alert since he’d returned from India, but in the last twenty-four hours he’d been haunted—dreaming of her in the bare hour he slept and gripped by panic the rest of the time. He wasn’t sure whether it was his experience at the cemetery that woke him up or some strange premonition in his dream, but the idea of waiting another moment to see her seemed unbearable. He found her name by apartment number 4D and pressed the intercom button. A familiar voice answered, but it wasn’t hers.

“Is Lucy there?” he asked.

“No. Who is this?” it asked.

“This is . . . ah . . .” He felt desperate. “Is this Marnie?”

“Yes. Who is this?” she asked again.

“It is Daniel. Grey. From Hopewood.” He felt stupid shouting into the intercom. “You probably don’t remember me, but—”

“Oh, I remember you all right. You’re in the lobby? What are you doing here?” Her voice was something less than friendly.

“I was hoping to see Lucy.”

“What are you talking about?” Marnie was strident, impatient, even through the fuzzy speaker. “Aren’t you two sauntering off to Mexico together? Lucy left for the airport an hour ago to meet you.”

“I’m sorry?” His mind froze. He was polite if nothing else.

“I thought you were taking her to Mexico.”

“Mexico? I was taking her? What do you mean?”

“She went to meet you! That’s what she said. I don’t understand what you are doing here. Are you really Daniel Grey, or is this some lame-ass prank?”

The churn of dread began somewhere in his lower intestine. “Can I come up and talk to you? Would you rather come down?”

“I’ll come down,” she said.

He watched the elevator fetch her on the fourth floor and bring her down. He didn’t want a mystery. He didn’t like to have Lucy far away where he couldn’t find her.

“It really is you,” Marnie said when the elevator doors parted. She was openly surprised. “Over here,” she said. She led him to a tired-looking couch at the back of the lobby. She studied him for a moment before she sat down. “You don’t look all that different,” she said. “I’d say you look about exactly the same.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lucy keeps talking about how different you are now, how she could barely recognize you.”

The churn spread upward and down. Had she spotted him when he thought he was being invisible? Or was it something else? “When did she say she saw me?”

Marnie stared at him as though he was an imbecile and shook her head at him slowly. “All the time. Last weekend. The weekend before. Yesterday. You guys go out all the time.”

“And she said I was taking her to Mexico?”

“Yes.”

He realized that underneath her haughtiness, Marnie was spooked, too.

“And she’s gone?”

“She’s gone.”

“You’re sure.”

“I know she packed and went someplace.” Marnie’s face was still hard, but she wanted to trust him. “She could have lied about who she went with. She could have lied to me about the whole thing.” Under the peaked eyebrows, her eyes reminded him of when she had been Sophia’s mother.