Due Preparations for the Plague (5 page)

But Salamander’s number is unlisted.

Your call cannot go through as dialed, the recordings say. Please check your information and try again. This is the answering service, a voice advises. Please leave a message and we will get back to you. That is not our department, people say. That person is no longer with us. That happened before our time. All matters falling within the purview of national security are beyond the scope of our … We have no records, we are unable to confirm, we cannot release that information, we cannot be answerable for acts of God, acts of terrorism, acts of double agents, acts of rogue elements of foreign powers, acts of war.

Sometimes people Samantha is talking to thin out into block capitals and blacked-out spaces before her eyes. At other times, images with torn edges, scraps of them, flicker without warning across the screen of her mind: butt of machine gun, severed arm, child on inflatable slide, gas masks (bug-eyed), breathing snouts. She slaps at them feverishly, she brushes them away, but they dart and sting. Her dream-films are always jump-cut. They do not add up. When she and Jacob—with whom she first collided at the bottom of an airplane chute, with whom she huddled on a camp cot in Germany—when she and Jacob find someone, when they track down some new link, they treat the pieces like chips from a precious mosaic—from Byzantium say, or Pompeii or Ravenna—from some lost world, fabulous and perhaps impossible to reconstruct. Samantha searches for fragments of cobalt, hunting for the child in the forget-me-not outfit, but the blue notes always disappear. She and Jacob piece together faces but their edges are never sharp and they drift into fog. The task gives them vertigo.

They are inside us, Jacob tells her. We could find them if we concentrated long enough. The brain is a massive retrieval system, he insists, a mainframe of electronic impulses. Everything is there, he assures her, if we could nudge the right nerve ends. He rakes his fingers through his hair and across his skull. He clasps hanks of his curls and pulls as though pulling will give relief. I have a crowd in my head, he says.

“I can’t put my baby brother’s face back together,” Sam tells her aunt. “I’ve tried. I can feel him in my arms. I have certain kinds of physical memory that are quite intense, but not a visual one. I can remember the weight of him, and the sound of his crying, and the fever coming off him, and the way his skin felt bumpy like a plastic bubble-sheet used for packing, but when I look, he doesn’t have a face.”

Her aunt straightens a photograph in the album. “Please don’t do this, Sam.”

“Believe me,” Sam tells her, “I’m working on improving the ending. We’re all working on it. Jacob’s migraines are getting so bad, the medication can’t help him anymore.”

“Who is Jacob?”

“Jacob Levinstein. He’s one of us.”

“One of …?” Lou’s eyes widen. She closes the photo album. She seems distressed. She seems angry. She moves away from Sam as though Sam might be infectious. “I would have thought,” Lou says in a strained voice, “that contact … that it would exacerbate …” She hugs the album to her chest. “I read somewhere,” she says reproachfully, “that survivors of the
Titanic
avoided each other. Reporters tried to arrange reunions, but survivors resisted. I found that easy to understand.”

It
is
easy to understand, Samantha thinks, especially for the survivors, especially for the children of Air France 64, but the kind of intense connection that her lot shares—physical proximity is irrelevant—is not something Sam is likely to discuss. “We don’t care to be circus acts for the media,” she tells her aunt. “But we tend to link up. There’s a website now, and we find each other. We need to do it, the same way that war vets do.”

“A
website
.” Lou paces from one window to another, the photo album pressed against her chest like a shield. “This is amazing to me, Samantha. Of course I can see … when I think about it, I can see how necessary, how inevitable …”

“It’s just that there are things I don’t know,” Samantha pleads, “and they drive me …”
You have to be extremely careful
, Jacob warns,
about what you reveal
. “The gaps keep me awake sometimes,” she says. “That’s all. Well, they keep me awake a lot, actually. I hoped you might fill in some blanks.”

Lou’s hand is shaking. Lou is Samantha’s mother’s sister and Sam knows everything and nothing about her.

“For me, Samantha …” Lou says, but her sentence peters out.

“Can I see the photograph again?”

“This is hard for me.”

Samantha pulls the photograph album from her aunt’s hands.

“It’s not what I was expecting,” Lou says in a low voice. “When you called. After such a long time.”

“What were you expecting?”

Lou turns away and makes a dismissive gesture which Sam translates as:
That’s of no consequence now
. She leaves the room so abruptly, she trips on the rug and almost falls into the hall. Sam hears her locking herself in the bathroom. She decides to wait.

There is turbulent history between Lou and Sam. There is something more complex and more volatile than aunt and niece, and how could it not be so? When Lou came to collect Sam from the warehouse of camp cots and frightened children in Germany, Sam kicked her simply because she was Lou. She was not Sam’s mother. This is not something that Sam has ever let her aunt forget, not in principals’ offices nor counselors’ rooms, not in police stations, and not when teachers came to call. “Lou is my legal guardian,” Samantha would say, sulky. She would roll her eyes. “But she thinks she’s my mother.” Her aunt’s tolerance has been without limit. It is as though her aunt has worn Sam’s labels as penance: runaway, disturbed child, troubled teen.

Ten minutes pass, fifteen, and then Sam knocks on the bathroom door. “Lou?” she says. “Are you all right in there?”

Silence.

“Lou?”

“I’ll just be a minute,” Lou says, though her voice sounds strange.

In the living room, she speaks quite calmly again. “Would you like more tea?”

“I have to relive it all the time,” Samantha says, defensive.

“I know that, Sam. Whereas I try not to. I try to stay back here in the photo album, before it happened.” The muscles in Lou’s shoulders and back are taut. “Two different ways of coping, that’s all.”

“You have more
before
than I have,” Sam accuses.

Lou breathes slowly. Samantha can see her counting silently to keep her agitation in check. “Sam, don’t you think this is pointless? You’ve already won the gold medal for suffering—I’ll sign a certificate if you like—and I’m not even a runner-up. Nothing we do will change the past, will it?”

“I would just like to
have
a past.”

Samantha’s aunt presses her fingertips against her brows, the way Jacob does when his migraines come. She pushes hard at the edge of her skull. She presses the pads of her thumbs against her temples. She speaks so quietly, Sam has to lean forward to hear. “I’m sorry, Sam, I don’t know what more I can tell you. I can’t do it. I can’t give you what you want.”

“Won’t, you mean.”

“The truth is, I don’t see you for six months at a time, I miss you, I feel so happy when you call to say you’ll come by, and then it takes me weeks to recover when you do.”

“Okay, then I won’t visit anymore.”

“I think that would be best,” Lou says, and Samantha feels a small lurch of panic.

“Fine,” she says bitterly. “I’ll head for the escape hatch, then.”

“Sam, Sam.”

Even Sam is embarrassed by herself, though she does feel queasy. She can see the dark nothing below the hatch, before she was pushed from the plane. “I’m sorry. That was cheap. I didn’t mean—”

“Of course you didn’t, of course you didn’t. I’ll try, Sam. What exactly did you want to know this time?”

“What were we all doing in Paris? I’ve never known that.”

“You never let me talk about it.”

“Now I’m letting you. Why were we there?”

“You were there because I was,” Lou sighs. “Officially I was studying French painting.”

“We were there because you were. All these years and you never once said.”

“You always storm out before I get to that.” Lou goes to her shelves and takes down books on the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, large heavy tomes of colored plates. “I was twenty-four. When you’re twenty-four, you think living in Paris will be the most glamorous thing you’ll ever do. You think you’ll be in seventh heaven, and in fact you live in some miserable little studio apartment in the thirteenth arrondissement where it’s cheap, and you have to share it with someone you don’t much like, and you’re so lonely you’d take the next plane home except your pride and your scholarship won’t let you.” She stares for a long time at Manet’s
White Peonies with Secateurs
. “My roommate was a French girl and we didn’t like each other much. She was moody and strange and she despised Americans.”

“Why?”

“She had an American father, she said. I guess she didn’t think much of him, but he wasn’t around, so she took it out on me.”

“And that’s why you were miserable.”

“Françoise didn’t help, but it wasn’t her fault.” Lou traces Manet’s secateurs with a fingertip. Only the black blades are visible; the handles are outside the frame. “I was depressed when I went and I got into one of those—”

“Depressed.”

“—downward spirals …”

“Why were you depressed?”

Lou studies Sam without speaking for some time, and her melancholy eyes irritate her niece. “I’d really gone away to get over someone,” she says.

“Oh. A broken heart.” Sam gives the statement a sardonic edge.

“Yes.”

In the page of text opposite the peonies, Samantha manages to read:
Manet’s “Olympia” caused a tremendous scandal in 1865 because of its subversive reinterpretation of the past and its almost satirical echo of Titian’s
—Her aunt turns the page. There is a double spread of
Olympia
, the center fold passing through the creamy thighs of the woman lounging on satin sheets. “When you’re desperate,” Lou says, “you do things that you—”

“I know about desperate.”

“I suppose you do, Sam.” But Lou is lost in the desolation of thirteen years ago in Paris.

“So what did you do?” Sam demands.

Lou turns away and presses her forehead against Manet’s brushstrokes, but Samantha does not relent. “What did you do?” she prods.

“I gave in and called my big sister.”

Big sister
. A rush of excitement seizes Samantha: a new angle; another puzzle piece; something that might jar a two-dimensional image into life.

“You were close.” Samantha keeps her voice neutral. “You and my mother.”

“Of course we were. We used to be so close that you couldn’t have put—”

“
Used to be
.”

“Before you came along. Before she got married.”

“You resented me.” Samantha pounces on an undernote and will not let go. “You resented my father and me.”

“Nothing’s that simple, Sam.” Lou studies her niece, deciding what to tell. “I needed to see you again so badly—”

“Me?” Samantha says, startled.

“All of you, I mean. When your mother had Matthew, I went into a tailspin. I can’t explain. I just had to—Rosalie and you, and the new baby, and Jonathan, before you all dis—” Lou’s hand flies to her mouth. “It had been so long.”

“You were going to say
disappeared
.” Samantha is watching Lou closely, riveted. She does not believe in chance or coincidence. Every thread, in her experience, leads into the knot.

“I was going to say:
disappeared into terminal respectability
. You wouldn’t understand.”

A word comes back to Samantha from nowhere.
Disreputable
.
Your sister is so disreputable
.

“Were you disreputable, Lou?”

Lou gives her niece a strange look. “What made you say that?”

“My father said it. Grandma and Grandpa used to say it.”

Lou looks as though Samantha has struck her. She stretches her fingers out flat and covers
Olympia
with them. Her veins crisscross the backs of her hands like string. She picks up the photo album and turns the pages. She stops. She points to a photograph. Sam’s mother and Sam’s aunt, her father between them—a happy threesome—are ankle-deep in white sand. All three are in swimsuits. Sam’s mother wears a one-piece suit, demure; her aunt is in a bikini and has a flower in her hair. Her father, in the middle, has his arms around them both. “The good sister and the disreputable sister on the beach at Isle of Palms, South Carolina,” Sam’s aunt says in a sardonic tone. “The summer after my high school graduation. Rosalie and Jonathan were engaged already. Look, you can see her ring in the photograph. And I was supposed to be getting ready for the College of Charleston in the fall, but I ran away to New York instead.”

She points to another photograph. Lou must be about eighteen, Rosalie twenty. They are standing in front of a church. “Someone else’s wedding,” Lou says. “Later that same summer.” In the photograph, Lou has bright red bad-girl lips and wears an off-the-shoulder dress. Her eyes are outlined in kohl. Sam’s mother looks sweet and shy. “The disreputable one,” Sam’s aunt says, tapping her own image on the head. “And you’re in the photograph too, though nobody knows it yet, not even your mother. Did you know your parents had to get married sooner than planned?”

Samantha closes her eyes for a moment, the better to rehear the pinprick of malice.

“I figured it out,” she says. “So what? Is that a big deal?”

“It was, back then. In Charleston, South Carolina, believe me, that sort of thing was still a very big deal. At least, in the best families it was. When she found out about the pregnancy, your grandmother was distraught. She was actually hospitalized with ‘nervous prostration’.”