My Name Is Memory (32 page)

“Did I what?”

“Did you . . . spend a lot of time kissing him?”

“Not much. No.”

He was embarrassed but stubborn. “Did it go further than kissing him?”

“Is that any of your business?”

“No.”

“Daniel.” She stood up. She felt like shaking him. “I didn’t have sex with him. I wouldn’t let him touch me. I couldn’t stand it. Last night I slept in a chair. Is that what you were trying to ask?”

He nodded, with a look of chagrin. “But why did you go anywhere with him if that’s the way you felt?”

“You know why. Because he told me he was you.”

He shook his head. He was quiet for a moment. “And that seemed to you like a good thing?”

Her eyes were suddenly full. “How can you ask me that?”

He got up the courage to put a finger on her finger, a thumb against her wrist. “The last time I saw you at that party at the end of high school you ran away from me. I understand why. It was my fault, I know. But the last thing you did was to push me away from you. I’ve been trying to stay away, because that’s what you wanted. I didn’t want to cause you more distress. And I didn’t know how to try again and make it right. I didn’t want to ruin what little chance I might someday have with you.”

She wiped at her eye before any tears could get going. “Everything changed since then. I was scared of the things you said, but I was more scared of the way I felt. I started having these . . . visions out of nowhere, and I thought I was going crazy. I kept thinking about them and about the things you said. I wanted to find you, but I thought you were dead. Somebody saw you jump into the Appomattox River.”

He nodded morosely. “I jumped, but I didn’t die.”

“So I gather. But I didn’t know that then. I looked everywhere for you. You have no idea how much I wanted to find you and how much I’ve thought about you these last five years.”

His surprise was not the kind you could fake. “I had no idea.” He was shaking his head slowly. “I wish I’d known.”

“Well, you didn’t know, maybe, but somehow he must have known how desperate I was to see you again. He came up to me at school saying he was you. I didn’t believe it at first. But he knew these things he couldn’t possibly have known otherwise. That’s what I thought, anyway. I’ve learned such unexpected things about the world in the past few years, I don’t know what is possible and what isn’t. The same kinds of mysterious things you said to me at that party, he seemed to know. He said you’d died, which is what I already thought, and had come back in a new body. He even explained this complicated thing of how he went from an old body to a new one.”

Daniel’s face was pained. “That was the only part of what he told you that was true,” he said.

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“He said he didn’t hurt anybody with it.”

“He hurts people with it,” Daniel said.

She closed her eyes. “I didn’t know that. I didn’t know anything. It scares me the things I told myself. But I would have told myself almost anything, because I wanted to believe him.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to be with you.”

THEY WENT DOWN to the sand to put their feet in the surf. It was dark, but the moon was full and bright. The water was calm and practically calling out to them, and Daniel really wanted to go for a swim. He sensed she did, too, but he felt awkward about making the suggestion. He could strip down to his boxers, but she just had that housekeeper dress and very possibly nothing under it.

Thinking of that, he thought of the way her body looked in it, and then he thought of the way her body looked under it. And then he pictured her unzipping it to go into the water, and then he realized it would no longer be a good idea to strip down to his boxer shorts. He sat there tangled up in his own awkwardness, and the most he could finally do was reach out and hold her hand.

“What happened to you?” she asked, looking at his arm where his sleeve had bunched up.

“What do you mean?”

“These scars.”

“It’s nothing.” He put his sleeve down again.

She lifted it up again. “It doesn’t look like nothing.”

To his astonishment, she bent her head and kissed the burn marks, each of the three, slowly and deliberately. He stared at her. As much as he’d wanted her lips on him, he wished she would leave that part alone.

“I had a tough set of foster parents,” he said quickly. “The mother was a smoker with a bad temper.”

She looked horrified. “Your mother did this to you?”

“She wasn’t my mother. She was just the woman I lived with when I was a kid.” His voice was so dismissive it was rude, but he couldn’t help it.

“Who was your mother, then?”

“The woman who gave birth to me was a heroin addict. I haven’t seen her since I was little. I was too young to really remember her.” He sounded impassive, and he was.

She kissed his arm again. She was sadder about it than he was, and he wished he could make her see.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said to her. “I’ve been through worse. I didn’t care about her. She might have thought she could hurt me, but she couldn’t.”

She lifted her head and looked at him. “How can you say that? How can you say it doesn’t matter? You were a child, and she hurt you. She burned your skin and left scars. Of course it matters. That’s why you hide them.”

He shook his head, suddenly irritated. “I don’t hide them.”

“You do! I don’t care how many times you’ve lived or what you remember, it still hurts. It does matter.”

“Not the way you think.” He felt angry at her. This was not what he wanted to talk about, and he wished she would stop. “I’m different from you, Sophia. That’s the thing. I’m different from everybody. You don’t get that.”

“Oh, I get it, all right.” Her eyebrows came down. “And by the way, I am Lucy. I am right here, and I am Lucy. You are you, and you are not as different as you think. You are this man right here.” She held his arm with two hands. “With this skin and these scars on your arm and your fucked-up mom. That is who we are.”

“You’re wrong.” He glared at her. “We’re more than that.”

She looked mad, and that was fine, he told himself. He would rather she be mad than sympathetic. She provoked him, and he hated her in that moment, but he hated himself most. God, maybe she would run away again. Maybe he’d blown it again. Maybe for a lifetime. Maybe for all lifetimes. It wasn’t meant to work with them, was it? He didn’t know if he could try anymore.

She stared at him for a long time. She was tough when she wanted to be. She put her hands on his shoulders, and he half expected she was going to start shaking him, but she didn’t. She leaned in very close until he could feel her warmth. He felt shaken, and he couldn’t breathe right.

“You know what, Daniel?”

He held his breath. “What?”

This was where she said good-bye and walked out. He didn’t know where she would go, but he felt sure that’s what was coming. He hoped at least she would let him help her get somewhere safe.

“If it doesn’t matter, then this doesn’t matter.” She turned her head to the side and put her mouth to the hollow at the base of his neck and kissed him long and slow. He could feel the moisture. He could feel her tongue.

He was too shocked to respond. He was frozen. He didn’t know what to do. His body was suddenly a mass of throbbing nerves, and his brain didn’t even work.

She pulled away and looked him right in the eyes as she began to unbutton his shirt. In astonishment he watched her as if it were happening to someone else. She pulled the shirt off his shoulders and left it in a pile on the sand behind him. He was breathing hard, but he didn’t dare move.

“If that doesn’t matter, then this doesn’t matter.” She leaned down to his chest and kissed it.

His hands were clenched. He drew in a sharp breath.

“And this doesn’t matter.” She slid her hands around to his back and came up to kiss him on the lips. She kissed him hard, and in a rush like a tide he kissed her back. He didn’t think about anything. He kissed her with all he had, because he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t hold back if he tried. His hands were making their hungry way around her hips when she pulled away from him.

She held him away and looked at him, and his whole big, stupid body just hurt. He physically could not stand to be apart from her any longer. Once started, there was too much to feel. He couldn’t help that, either. He was drowning.

Her eyes were unflinching on him, but they were filled with tears. “Does that not matter?”

She was going to cry, he realized. She was going to cry for him, and he didn’t want her to.

He closed his eyes.

“Daniel, tell me. Does it not matter? Because if it doesn’t, I’ll stop.”

He didn’t want to open his eyes. He felt a tear escape under his eyelid. He couldn’t lie to her. He never had, and he couldn’t now. “Don’t stop.” His voice was barely a whisper.

“Why not?”

He felt as though he would die if he couldn’t touch her. “Because it matters.”

When she kissed him again he was crying, too, for the good and the bad. They were down on the sand, a wet blur of kissing and tears. He didn’t try to make sense of it anymore. He didn’t try to organize it or record it for the long future. This was what he had. It not only mattered, it mattered the most. He kissed her with everything, because loving a person was all you could do.

HE DIDN’T KNOW how long they’d been kissing in the dark sand or the things he said to her. There was nothing that separated him from her anymore. At some point, without really thinking, he lifted her from the sand in his arms. He wasn’t thinking, he just let his body do. He was long past fighting it anymore. It was a strong body, and it lifted her with ease and walked her into the house and into the bedroom. It parted the mosquito netting and put her on the bed.

Time lost its meaning. The regular sequences he kept such careful track of were gone. If anything, the circle of his long existence clicked back to the start and made him new again.

He unzipped her housekeeper smock with aching tenderness and found her naked under there with a burst of unexpected wonder, even though he knew that’s how she would be. He felt as though he’d never seen a woman’s body before, and when he put his hands on her, he felt as though he’d never touched anyone before. He discovered every part of her with his fingers and his mouth as though it was new. He went up every so often to kiss her wet face and look at her eyes and make sure she was still with him. She gave him everything unstintingly.

“I love you,” he whispered to her, and if he’d ever said it before, he couldn’t remember.

After he’d found every part of her, she wound her legs around him and pulled him inside. She clung to him. She held his neck and kissed him damply and fiercely.

He could lose himself in her forever, he thought. He might never come out. She was right here, and she was Lucy. He was this man in this skin, and that was all. Lucy was right. That was all they were.

At last he came and came and came inside her. It was just raw senses. It was a moment big enough to scatter all memory of before and after. Maybe he wouldn’t get to keep it, and that was the thing that always scared him most. But he felt a delirious joy in setting his burdened mind free. He let it all go. The rest of the world and all record of everything that had ever happened to him. He pressed his sweaty body along her beautiful, sweet skin. He curled around her, and he was as raw and new as if he had just been born.

SHE WOKE TO a sound. Not his breathing or occasional sighing, which she incorporated pleasurably into sleep, but a sound she wasn’t sure of. Regretfully and carefully she unwound them, his leg back to him, her arm back to her. He’d gotten up to pee a little while before and had put on his boxer shorts.

There was a faint light of dawn making its way into the room. She crept quietly out of bed. She found the housekeeping smock in a ball on the floor and pulled it on, zipping slowly so she wouldn’t wake him up. She turned to the window. She could barely make out the leaves of a mango tree. She stood, alert.

She heard something again from the same direction. It was probably a bird or some other little animal. The landscape was tropical and busy around here. She walked along the edge of the room toward the window, trying to tune her eyes to the dull light.

“Daniel!” She screamed his name before she had time to think it. There was something there. She couldn’t make out a face, but she was almost certain she could make out the shape of something in the half-open window. She tried to make sense of it. Was it a gun?

Several things happened at once and without any perceptible order. He sat up at the sound of her voice. She ran toward him as fast and as hard as she could to push him out of the way. The gun fired and she screamed and Daniel was suddenly on his feet shouting.

She didn’t know what was happening. He was holding her and yelling like crazy. She saw blood, and she was scared that he was shot. He pulled her off the bed and carried her out of the bedroom to the big room. She heard another shot behind them. She was crying. “Are you hurt? Are you okay? Did it hit you?” She wasn’t sure what she was saying and what she was just thinking.

He was running through the house, out of the house, onto the beach. He was running with her across the sand, and she heard a third shot. They were going to die. Where could they go? They couldn’t go back to the house. They were easy targets on the wide-open beach. Ahead of them was only water.

There was blood on his chest. Oh, God, was he hurt?

He ran with her down to the surf and pulled her into the water with him. It wasn’t until she was trying to swim that she realized she could barely move her arm. Distantly, she heard another shot. “Take a big breath,” he ordered her. They went under together and he pulled her along and she swam as best she could. It dawned on her that her shoulder hurt. Had she injured it somehow? He was swimming so powerfully for the two of them, it made her think he couldn’t be badly wounded. He pulled her up for a breath and then down again.

When they came up for the next breath she saw the floating dock right in front of them. This is what we would do if we were on vacation, she reminded herself incongruously. He swam her around to the other side, pushed her onto it, and quickly scrambled up behind her.