My Name Is Memory (27 page)

He looked different before, but now that she took a moment to think of it, she looked different, too. In high school, every time she saw him it was in full pose and pucker. She had a constant coating of lip gloss and her cheeks sucked in and her precise jeans and hair all going in one direction. Now she was distracted and absorbed by other things, forgetting to look in the mirror at all. She forgot to make her face for anyone’s eyes anymore. She was lucky he didn’t run in the other direction.

Her entire life had once ground to a halt because of him. Her sense of the world was blown open because of him. Would she really not take this chance? Her cowardice had kept her from him before, and it would stop her again if she let it. She was older now. She was on her feet. She could handle it now.

“Yes,” she said. Another tear got out.

He smiled at her. It was a different smile from the one she expected. And then she wanted to punch herself. No expecting.

“I’m up in D.C. now, working at a marketing firm. I’ve got to go back for a business thing tonight. I didn’t know I’d find you on my first try. If I’d known, I would have left myself all night. But I’ll be back this weekend, all right? Can I take you out on Saturday? What’s your favorite restaurant here?”

She was a little bit crestfallen that he was leaving already, but she was also frankly relieved. She could torment herself better on her own. “Yes. Okay.” She named a place twenty minutes east. “I’ll meet you there,” she said nervously. She realized she didn’t want him coming to her apartment. She wouldn’t know how to explain him to Marnie.

“Great.” He leaned in and kissed her cheek, catching the very corner of her mouth. He straightened up and strode away, calling good-byes over his shoulder.

She stood still, feeling the kiss sitting unabsorbed on her face. When he was very small and ready to disappear around the bend into a parking lot, she composed her face with the thought that he would turn around another time, but he didn’t look back. Shut up. You don’t know anything, she said to her own disappointment.

She began to walk. Without thinking, she ended up at the serpentine wall, where she climbed up and sat with her knees pressed to her chest and her arms holding her together. It was a hard world to know anymore.

What was wrong with her? Daniel had come. Why was she so weird and prickly feeling? Why didn’t she throw her arms around him? We have the chance to start again, he’d said. What was her problem? What more had she wanted to hear?

This isn’t how I thought it would feel.

Could she not get over the fact that he looked different? Was she really that superficial? It wasn’t that he didn’t look good; he did. He was plenty handsome in every objective sense. Maybe more so than before.

A stubborn, renegade memory of the fateful night with the old Daniel came to her. It gave an instant stretch and tingle to her abdomen. When he pulled her in that desk chair to face him. When they were knee to knee. When he kissed her. A four-year-old overworn memory had more punch than a fresh kiss sitting on her face.

Because you don’t know this new version yet.

I didn’t know the old version, either.

The old Daniel was the one Constance loved. And Sophia loved. That had made sense to her before. Why didn’t it make sense now?

She put her hand to her mouth. She saw bits of icy lace on her dark glove and looked up to see big, uncoordinated flakes of snow drifting around her. It was a Virginia snow, where the sky didn’t look like it really meant it and the flakes were out on their own.

Maybe it was she who had changed. Maybe that was the real problem. She was so much softer then, so much more willing to fall in love, or believe she was. She was colder now, more solitary, and her outlines were scratched in deeper. Maybe she wasn’t capable of that kind of connection anymore.

But why not? Because of the things she’d learned from Madame Esme and Dr. Rosen and the falling-down mansion in England? Maybe she’d buried herself with the discovery of the old people she’d been. Maybe she’d lost that old self under the weight of them.

She felt sad, and she put her hands to her eyes. She wondered if it was really her he’d ever wanted.

He was different now, too, and maybe that was good. Not only in how he looked, she realized. For one thing, he called her by her name. He called her Lucy.

HE GOT THE CALL from the woman in Kolkata in early 2009. It was not too long after he’d seen Sophia in the library at the university. The woman introduced herself as Amita. She chattered to him in Bengali for a full minute before he could convince her he didn’t speak it.

“How can you not speak Bengali?” she demanded of him in accented English.

“I . . . don’t. How would I?”

“You’ve not lived here, have you? Hindustani? Do you speak that?”

“A little; not much. Can we stick to English for the moment?”

She laughed, and he realized she was Ben. “Ah, it’s my old friend,” he said in the extinct Italian dialect they used on the boat.

“Now you want to speak languages, do you?” she asked back in English.

“We have many in common,” he said in Latin.

“Can you come for a visit?” she asked him gaily in English.

He knew to come when Ben summoned. “Yes. When?”

“Soon! Whenever you like.”

She gave him an address, and he bought a plane ticket the next day. He had plenty of vacation days to use up at the hospital.

HE FOUND HER in a small apartment on the top floor of an old house in a crowded and shabby district of Kolkata. She was young, with a face constantly on the move. She wore a lovely peacock-blue sari and jingling gold bangles at her wrist. She embraced him immediately. She led him back to her small, old-fashioned kitchen, where she was cooking up a storm.

“You are very handsome, Daniel,” she said, lifting her eyebrows flirtatiously.

“I got lucky this life,” he said. “If handsomeness is lucky.”

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no.” She tasted something from one of her pots with her finger. “Delicious,” she declared.

“I’m glad to see you,” he said sincerely.

“And I am glad to see you.” She moved toward him with a spoon in her hand and kissed his chin. “I’d like to kiss you more,” she said. She gestured with her spoon to a small room behind a half-open door. “I’d like to take you in there, but I know you love another girl.”

He laughed. He couldn’t tell if she was serious or not, and regardless, he couldn’t imagine getting into that unmade bed with Ben. First because she was Ben, and also because he’d known her briefly as Laura and several others. He could never let the old lives go. He couldn’t with anyone, let alone Ben. The first time he met a person, if he was a man, Daniel had a complicated time being attracted to any subsequent version of him as a woman. He wasn’t good at living in between.

“I am Amita,” she said imperiously, reading his thoughts in the usual way.

“You are a shape-shifter,” he said jokingly.

“No, this is called living,” she shot back fiercely. “And what you do is not.” Her eyes remained affectionate, but he couldn’t help recoiling.

“Tell me about your girl,” Amita said sweetly. She didn’t want to be hurtful to him.

“I know where she is,” he said.

“Why aren’t you with her?” she asked.

You could always be sure that Ben would cut to the quick of it. Daniel was tired and he was in Kolkata and he needed to be honest. “I tried to talk to her a few years ago and I really fucked it up. I went too fast; I scared her. I don’t think she’d want to see me after that. I’m giving her some time before I try again.” His explanation sounded weak to his own ears. How much time was he going to give her?

“Maybe she doesn’t want your time.”

He rubbed his cheeks. He felt the sweat and grit of long travel. “I don’t know what she wants.” His voice drifted quieter. “But I don’t think it is me.”

Amita stood poised with her spoon, looking at him thoughtfully. “Oh, Daniel,” she said finally. “You need to be loved. That’s what you need. You are terribly out of practice.”

He laughed. “Is that why you want me in the bedroom?”

“Love is love,” she said.

He shook his head. Her flirtation was a mercy he didn’t quite understand. “I don’t think it’s the right time to try again with Sophia,” he said. “If I wait for a while, maybe I’ll have another chance.”

She looked sad. “And that’s a thing you can keep forever.” She slopped the spoon back into a pot and hiked herself up to sit on the counter. She put her chin in her hand for a few moments, thinking. “Maybe if you had approached her as herself and not someone else, you wouldn’t have scared her away.”

“What do you mean? I didn’t approach her as someone else. I approached her as herself. I called her Sophia, but she is Sophia. Is it wrong to remember her?”

“Sophia is not her name. Sophia is a memory.” Amita hopped down from the counter. She resumed her stirring. “I believe her name is Lucy.”

“Same girl.”

“Yes and no.”

“What do you mean by that?” He sounded like a child to himself.

“You are a hoarder,” she said. It was something Ben had accused him of several times before. “Love who you love while you have them. That’s all you can do. Let them go when you must. If you know how to love, you’ll never run out.”

Ben sounded as chirpy as a self-help book, but still Daniel felt overwhelmed and strangely fragile. He didn’t know how to respond, and she recognized it. She came forward again with her spoon. “Taste this,” she said tenderly, holding it out to him.

He did. “God, that is hot.”

She nodded and widened her eyes. “Isn’t it?” She consulted her cookbook for a moment and then snapped it shut. “Since my husband joined the army, I cook and I read. Cook and read.”

“Your husband?” He felt guilty for having gazed at the shapely brown region of ribs and stomach revealed by her sari.

“Yes. And when he comes back, I will amaze him with my dishes,” she said, flourishing her spoon like a magician.

His mouth was burning. “You will. I am sure.”

He watched her for a while. She stirred things and chopped things and scattered ingredients with abandon. She seemed to enjoy throwing her peppers into the pot, as opposed to just putting them there. “Sometimes you have to make a mess,” she informed him merrily. She tasted the green stuff in a small brass dish. “Oooh,” she said with a gasp. “Well, that is surprising.”

“Really?”

“Yes! Perhaps not in a good way. Cooking is always surprising, don’t you find?”

He hadn’t found cooking surprising in four centuries, not since he’d cooked in the galley of a ship sailing the Adriatic for seven long years.

“I don’t,” he said honestly.

“Oh, but it is. It always is.” She went back to her cookbook. “I don’t have a mother or a sister to teach me, so I have to teach myself,” she explained.

He was feeling subdued by this time. It was the jet lag and the tendency Ben had to push him into uncertainties. “How is anything new to you?” he asked her. “How do you still find anything surprising?”

She stopped for only a moment and looked at him. She stuck her finger in the green stuff and held it out to him. He took a lick, and it was shockingly horrible. Even poisonous. He relented. “You’re right. That is surprising.”

For some reason he thought of a thing she had said to him once when she was Ben and they were gazing up at the starry night sky on a long, quiet watch in the Aegean: “I don’t see patterns easily.”

DANIEL KNEW SHE would get to the point of his visit eventually, and it happened as they sat on the warm roof after dinner, chewing fragrant seeds and watching a large family reclining on beach chairs on the roof across the narrow street.

“The shape-shifter is not me,” she said, apropos of nothing. “It is your old brother.” She examined a seed and tossed it to the sidewalk below. Her face stayed still for only a moment, but she clearly meant to warn him.

“Is that right?”

“Yes. He steals bodies easily now. He has a dangerous friend.”

“What do you mean? Who?” Daniel’s mind raced through various characters he’d met or heard of over the years. There was the man who’d once approached him in Ghent who claimed to have been the archangel Azrael. The woman in New Orleans, Evangeline Brasseaux, and her bevy of followers who said she’d seen the apocalypse. There was a whole underworld of these people, and though he’d dipped into it a couple of times long ago, he’d mostly avoided it. Surrounding the ones with authentic memories were the hangers-on, the mythmakers, the rumor spreaders, and the out-and-out liars. He found it hard to keep his bearings among them. Only now he wished he’d taken the pains to know more.

She scratched her arm. Her bones were thin and definite, like a bird’s. “He’s been gathering his powers for a long time now. While you are not finding your girl, he is looking for her.”

He felt a painful sting in his ears and throat, and he couldn’t swallow it away. “He’s looking for Sophia?”

She crunched loudly on a seed and picked it out of her teeth. “By finding her, he will find you.”

“What do you mean?”

She thought for a moment. “Maybe he already has found her.”

Daniel stood and walked. The terrible, albeit surprising, dinner was seizing up in his stomach. “How can that be? He can’t recognize souls. You told me that yourself. Don’t you remember?”

She joined him at the parapet wall and spit another seed. “It’s possible he has help,” she said again.

“How? Who? What do you mean?” He felt like an idiot saying the same thing again and again, knowing it was the kind of question Ben would never answer, but he couldn’t get his mind settled.

He paced, and for the first time she stood perfectly still. “How do you know this?” He was in agony.

She shook her head, but she must have seen his state. Out of pity she gave him an answer. “I remembered.”

He watched her intently. “But it hasn’t happened yet, has it?”

She flicked that away with her narrow, jingling wrist.

“I’VE BEEN READING Proust,” she declared to Daniel as he helped her clean up the disaster in her kitchen. She didn’t want to talk about Joaquim or Sophia anymore, and he had to accept it. He knew how Ben was. He gave you as much as you could process and not more.