My Name Is Memory (5 page)

I HAVE WITNESSED many deaths and tragedies. I have caused a few since then. But I’ve never taken perfectly innocent lives again. I’ve never destroyed such beauty or felt so much shame. I try to keep my distance, but I still feel a sickness in my soul when I think of it, and the feeling doesn’t lessen over time.

The stench of burnt wood and tar and flesh in my nostrils was so thick I believe it took a permanent place there. The blur of gray smoke got in my eyes and altered my senses forever.

“YOU’RE SUCH A doubter, Lefty. Just come.”

“I haven’t slept in two nights,” Lucy argued. “This place is a dump. I need to clean up.”

Marnie looked around their small dorm room. “You can’t clean it up without me, because then I might feel guilty. We’ll do it tomorrow. Come on. Jackie and Soo-mi are downstairs already. We have to celebrate.”

“What if I don’t feel like celebrating?” Lucy was in fact a doubter and a lefty, and she was also superstitious about celebrating before she got her grades back. “What if Lawdry notices I turned in my paper two days late?”

Lucy’s resistance was barely a sigh in Marnie’s typhoon of will. “Here. Here are your shoes.” Marnie chucked them one flip-flop at a time. “Bring some money.”

“I have to pay for this thing I don’t want to do?”

“Twenty bucks. People pay for a lot of things they don’t want to do. The dentist. Wars in Iraq. Dead mice for Dana’s snake.”

“You aren’t making it sound any more inviting.” Lucy got her bag and put on shoes. Not the flip-flops Marnie threw at her. She had the energy for only small rebellions.

“Don’t worry about Lawdry. He loves you.” Marnie opened the door of their room and ushered Lucy out.

“No, he doesn’t.”

“I’m afraid he does.”

“Whose car are we taking?”

“Yours.”

“Oh, I see.”

On the way out on Route 53 toward Simeon the sun was sliding into the flat roof of a Bed Bath & Beyond. Marnie put on one of her brother Alexander’s terrible rap mixes and cranked it up while Jackie and Soo-mi started opening beers in the back. “Who is this person we’re going to?” Lucy asked over the din.

“Madame Esme,” Marnie said, studying her handwritten directions in the darkening car. “Two miles and turn onto Bishop Hill.”

“Don’t you two want to be sober for your twenty-dollar psychic reading with Madame Esme?” Lucy asked, glancing at Soo-mi’s face in the rearview mirror.

Soo-mi held up her Miller Lite. “Not particularly.”

“Is this really where we’re going?” Lucy asked, turning onto a gravel road dotted with trailers and rusting carcasses of trailers.

Marnie was trying to figure out addresses. “Do you see any numbers?” she asked. “We want Twenty-three thirty-two.”

“I think it’s that one.” Lucy motioned ahead to an aging mobile home surrounded by trellises woven through with roses. It might have had wheels once, but it didn’t look like it was going anywhere anytime soon. “Are those roses real or fake?” she asked.

Marnie squinted. “I think real.”

“I think fake,” Lucy said as she pulled into the driveway.

Madame Esme met them at the door. Lucy saw more or less what she expected to see. Long green robe. Hair piled up. Lots of rouge. Oversized gestures.

“Who goes first?” Madame Esme inquired.

“Marnie, you set this up. You go,” Jackie said.

“You three can sit in there.” Madame pointed to a tiny living room/kitchen. There were a painted wooden table and four mismatched chairs. “You follow me,” she said to Marnie.

We watched Marnie follow her through a door into a dim room pulsing with candlelight. Madame closed the door after them.

“What are we doing?” Lucy asked, sitting on a metal folding chair.

“Alicia Kliner said she’s supposed to be really amazing,” Soo-mi said in a whisper.

Lucy didn’t know what was potentially amazing in this. Her mother went to psychics every couple of years and was amazed when they said things like “You are at peace by the water. Books feed you. You cannot help but nurture.” Her mother was also amazed by polarity, chakras, foot massage, and many items featured on the Home Shopping Network. Lucy suspected she had a higher threshold for amazement.

LUCY WAS FINE with waiting until last for the great Madame Esme, but it was hard to keep herself awake. Especially after Marnie emerged with a look of bursting smugness but claimed she couldn’t talk about it until they had all finished their readings.

“Oh, come on.”

“I can’t. Seriously.”

“Who do you care about more, me or Madame Esme?”

“Don’t make me choose.”

Lucy shook her head and put it back down on the table.

At last Madame Esme emerged for the third time and let Jackie out the door. “I’m ready for you,” she said to Lucy.

Lucy yawned and approached. The small room was dark but for three fluttering candle flames on a card table. Two more folding chairs were pulled up to the table. As Lucy’s eyes adjusted, she saw the open shelves of clothing. Sweaters and piles of pants and a mound of socks. It was more than Lucy wanted to know, and it badly undercut the veneer of mystery. Along the wall was a twin bed with one pillow. There was a poster, but Lucy couldn’t make it out because it was mostly behind a shelf.

Madame Esme closed the door and sat. Lucy sat in the chair opposite. Esme closed her eyes and put out her hands facing upward. Lucy wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do.

“Give me your hands,” Esme said.

Lucy did so awkwardly. Madame Esme’s hands were warm and clutched hers with surprising intensity. It was hard to tell with all the makeup, but sitting close and feeling her hands, Lucy sensed that Madame Esme wasn’t much older than she was. How had she found her way into this profession? Lucy wondered. It took a certain amount of nerve.

Esme closed her eyes and rocked back and forth. As for acting, Lucy decided, it was only so-so. This was what you got for twenty dollars. She tried to shut down another yawn.

Esme opened her mouth as if to say something and then closed it again. She was quiet for an uncomfortably long time. Lucy strained to hear the voices of her friends on the other side of the door. “I’m seeing a flame, red lights, a lot of noise,” Esme finally said. “Is it a school?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy said. She knew she was tired and grumpy, but she didn’t feel like doing the work here.

“It feels like a school,” Esme said. “A lot of people rushing around, but you are alone.”

Lucy was ready for this. You feel alone in a crowd. You are shyer than people think. This was your basic psychic bait.

Madame Esme’s eyes were twitching under her lids, but they became still. Her expression changed.

“You aren’t alone. He is there with you.”

“Okay.” Lucy wondered if they were getting to the romantic wish-fulfillment part.

“He has been waiting for you. Not only now, but for a long time.” Esme was quiet for a while. The silence stretched out, and Lucy wondered if maybe that was it. But then Esme spoke again, and this time her voice was different, lower and more intense.

“You wouldn’t listen to him.”

“I’m sorry?” Lucy said politely.

“He was trying to tell you something. He needed you then. Why didn’t you listen?” The voice was higher now, and plaintive.

“Listen to who?” Lucy cleared her throat. “I’m not sure what you are talking about.”

“At the dance. The party. Something like that. I feel that you were scared. But still.” Esme was squeezing her hands a bit harder than Lucy liked.

Lucy didn’t especially want to know what Esme was talking about. Esme didn’t know what Esme was talking about. She was just fishing. Saying standard stuff and trying to get Lucy to bite on something.

“You should have listened.”

“To what?” Was a psychic supposed to be giving opinions?

“What he told you.” Esme’s voice was deeper and stranger. Her trance was getting more convincing. She was warmed up, obviously. Lucy had a sadistic impulse to kick her under the table. “Because he loved you.”

“Who loved me?” Psychics never named names. They waited for you to tell them.

“Daniel,” she said.

Lucy sat back. She made herself breathe. “Who?”

“Daniel.”

“Okay,” she said slowly. She sat up straight and felt the chair creak and reset. What did this woman know about her? Did she know them from school, somehow? Had Marnie somehow briefed her?

“Daniel wanted you to remember. He kissed you, and you did remember for a moment, didn’t you? But you ran away.”

Marnie couldn’t have told her that. No one could have. Lucy felt a wave of fear followed by a wave of nausea as her mind raced to find a rational explanation. She didn’t want to say anything more. She wanted it to be over, but Esme had not finished with her.

“You said you’d try. When you were Constance you promised you’d remember, but you turned your back on yourself. You wouldn’t even try.”

Lucy felt tears burning in her eyes. Two years ago she’d packed that night away. She’d sealed it up carefully and tightly. How could anyone have known about it?

“He was lonely. You know that. And you are Sophia, his great love, and you said you’d try.”

“What am I supposed to try to remember?” Lucy asked. It was a voice she hardly recognized. It escaped from some part of her, she couldn’t tell where, airy and thin and hissing like a leak.

“You were supposed to remember . . . him.” Esme said it loudly and with indignation. “You were supposed to remember how you loved him. He said he would come back, and you promised you would remember him.”

Esme’s head was almost vibrating, and though she held Lucy’s hands, Lucy had the distinct feeling the rest of the girl’s body was going somewhere else.

“In the war. You took care of him. He couldn’t breathe. You knew he was dying. He didn’t want to leave you, but you said you would never forget. You forget and he remembers. He told you what he was. He trusted you. You know, don’t you?”

Lucy felt herself recoiling. She felt bitten and criticized. “I don’t know.” This girl had circumvented Lucy’s defenses.

“You know what he is. You understand.”

“I don’t. What is he?”

“Please. You are Sophia, and he needed you.”

“Stop! Who is Sophia? Why do you keep talking about her?” It’s what Daniel had done, too. It had scared her then as it did now.

“I’m talking about you.”

“No, you’re not. I’m Lucy,” she said hotly. She’d once seen a movie about a girl with a split-personality disorder. The way Esme talked, it was as though there were somebody else inside Lucy listening and even responding, and the thought of it terrified her.

“Now you are Lucy. But before.”

“Before what?”

“You should find him if you can.”

“How can I find him? I talked to him once. I don’t even know him.”

“Yes, you do. Don’t tell me that lie.”

Lucy yanked her hands away. “Can you stop this, okay?” Lucy heard the tears of her own confusion, the sound of herself betraying herself. Since when did a psychic scold you? She wrapped her arms around her body. She had to stick together.

Esme opened her eyes and looked at Lucy as though surprised to see her there. She blinked a few times. She and Lucy stared at each other as strangers. “You should find him because he loves you,” Esme said faintly, coming back in stages.

It was worse with Esme’s eyes open and fixed on her. Lucy didn’t want the words to land where they landed. But they did.

“I don’t even think about him anymore,” Lucy said, half hoping Esme would be willing to make a deal and forget everything that had just happened. It was weird for both of them, she knew. And Lucy had yet to pay her.

Esme looked at her with a sharp reproach. She didn’t look like a twenty-something-year-old person with too much green eye shadow and a desire for her payment. She looked like the oldest judge in the world. “How can you even say that?”

Lucy shook her head. She wished she weren’t crying. She wished she could keep pretending that she had no fear and no faith in any of it.

“I don’t know,” she said, and she really didn’t.

I
told you about the girl in the village near Leptis in North Africa in my first life. My second life started roughly thirty-one years later in another part of Anatolia. Lives tend to cluster, you know. This second life was uneventful in external ways, but in my mind it was extraordinary. It started normally enough. I didn’t know yet what I was.

But as soon as I was old enough to think—or old enough to remember the thoughts—I thought of the girl in the little thatched house. I saw her face in the doorway. Later I saw the flames and I understood what was happening to her and what I had done.

I thought of her every time I closed my eyes. I screamed at night. I cried in my dreams. I began to think of her in the daytime, too. I was probably only two or three years old and not old enough to understand my guilt or shame or the significance of her face to me. But I experienced the pure horror of it every day, almost as if it were happening to me.

I had a kindhearted mother in that life, but even she got tired of me. I lived in another world. I couldn’t let it go.

The kind of memory I have is extreme, but many people have some small degree of it. I once knew a boy in Saxony whose family lived a few doors down from mine. One day when he, Karl, was very small, his mother came by with him to deliver something or borrow something—I wasn’t paying attention to that part—and he saw my knife, my prized possession. I was probably ten or eleven at the time, and he was not even three. This tiny kid could barely talk yet, but he followed me into the garden, desperate to tell me how he was stabbed three times through his ribs by a thief, a footpad, who accosted him on the road to Silesia. He saw my confusion and wanted very badly to make me understand. “Not now, but before, when I was big,” he kept saying, holding up his arms to make the point. “When I was big.”

He lifted his shirt and sucked in his belly to show me the jagged birthmark along his rib cage. Needless to say, I was fascinated and astonished by all this, and I asked him many questions. I thought I had discovered a kindred mind. When his mother came to fetch him she saw his animation and gave me a long-suffering look. “Did he tell you about the thief on the road?” she asked wearily.