The Year of Fog (16 page)

37

T
HE FRONTAL
lobes are right here,” Nell explains, locating a spot on my forehead with her fingertips. “The frontal lobes control the executive functions of the mind—self-monitoring, our awareness of our own behavior.”

Nell still knocks on my door once or twice a week, bearing a homemade dinner. Under her watchful eye, I force myself to eat while she talks about some interesting tidbit she’s uncovered in her research. Tonight, the menu is comfort food—lima beans, mashed potatoes, and meat loaf.

“There’s this tiny blood vessel in the brain called the anterior communicating artery,” she continues. “When this blood vessel erupts, it cuts off the normal flow of oxygenated blood to the frontal lobes. The result is something called confabulation.”

I stir the beans in with the potatoes, hoping she won’t notice I’m not eating.

“I read about one patient, J.D., who didn’t leave the hospital for several months. When his doctor asked what he had done the previous weekend, J.D. told a story about going to the movies with his girlfriend, Anna, and mowing his lawn. The memory was incredibly vivid—down to the title of the movie, the street where the theater was located, even the dress his girlfriend was wearing. He did indeed have a girlfriend named Anna who had visited him at the hospital, but of course he couldn’t have gone to the movies or mowed his lawn, because he’d been in the hospital the whole time.”

“So he was lying?”

“Not lying. J.D. thought he was reporting the events of the weekend accurately. Basically, confabulation is the unintentional creation of false memories. A common misconception is that memory is like some sort of computer that stores and retrieves information. The truth is, memory is an act of reconstruction. Every time we remember an event, we piece together rough drafts of the event based on our lifetime of experiences. A person with normal functioning in the frontal lobes would know that he hadn’t left the hospital, and that therefore he couldn’t have gone to the movies. But someone who confabulates doesn’t have any mechanism by which to filter out the fictions.”

“Don’t we all do that to some extent?”

“Of course. Mark Twain put it this way: ‘It is not so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that are not so.’”

That night, after Nell leaves, I think about how I supplied details to my mother’s fake story about the trip to Gatlinburg. How I wanted so badly to believe in this image of family harmony that I created a memory of a luge ride with my father and an evening spent watching television in the motel room with Annabel while my parents were out at dinner.

When I asked Annabel about the scene in the motel room, she conferred. We had, indeed, stayed up late one night watching
Eight Is Enough
on a tiny TV in a room with vibrating beds. But this had been in Chicago, not Gatlinburg, and we weren’t there on vacation. We were there to attend the funeral of one of my father’s friends from college. According to Annabel, my mother later confessed that the reason my entire family made the trip was that she believed my father was having an affair, and she didn’t want to let him go to Chicago alone for fear of what might happen.

Memory is not unlike a photograph with multiple exposures. One event is layered on top of another, so that it is impossible to distinguish between the details of the two. The older we get, the more multiple-exposure memories we have. Temporal relationships become elastic. As the years progress and we experience more and more, the mini-narratives that make up our lives are distorted, corrupted, so that every one of us is left with a false history, a self-created fiction about the lives we have led.

38

H
ERE IS
the truth, this is what I know: I was walking on the beach, holding Emma’s hand. I looked away, at a dead seal. Seconds passed. Three months, twenty-eight days, twelve and a half hours passed.

Another night, the two of us alone in Jake’s house, the spot on the floor in front of the television where Emma used to sit conspicuously bare. It’s eleven o’clock, and we’ve been stuffing envelopes for hours. We take a half-hour break to watch
The Office
, eating dinner in front of the television: takeout from Pasquale’s on Sloat. It’s the one holdover from before Emma’s disappearance, the one thing we still do together that smacks of normalcy. For that half hour each night, we can almost pretend things are the way they used to be.

“How are your classes?” I ask, trying to make conversation. Jake just shrugs his shoulders and says, “Nothing new.” At the beginning of October, he returned to work part-time, in order, he said, to hold on to his health insurance, but I suspect it is also a way of holding on to his sanity.

When the show is over I get up to leave, following the pattern that has become the norm. No overnights for us anymore, no casual settling into bed after the TV goes dark. I grab my purse and keys from the end table, and when I bend to kiss Jake goodbye he clutches my hand. “Don’t go.”

“What?”

I have to do a double take to make sure I heard him right. He’s pulling me down on the sofa beside him. “Stay.”

I sit down. He takes both of my hands in his and stares down at my lap. I can tell there’s something he wants to say. My purse strap is still around my shoulder, and I don’t know how to extract myself from it gracefully. I am poised for flight. I try to make eye contact with him, but he keeps his head bowed. I notice a smattering of gray hairs among the black.

Jake grips my hand harder, and I can tell from a slight movement of his head, an uncharacteristic lifting and lowering of the shoulders, that he is crying.

“What is it?”

“Today at school.”

I rub his back, feeling like some kind of impostor. It’s startling how quickly intimacy can fade, how little time it takes for two people to become strangers again. “What happened?”

“It was fifth period. I was giving a lecture on Charlemagne. The kids were so polite. No one was cutting up or passing notes or even talking. And I realized that they pitied me. Every one of them sitting in their seats feeling sorry for the teacher who lost his daughter.”

“Give them time. They’re just nervous, they don’t know what to say.”

“There was a knock on the door. It was Silas Smith, I had him last year in American History. Smart kid, very quiet, wears these leather belts with odd buckles he makes in iron shop. ‘There’s a call for you at the office,’ he said. I asked who it was, but he said he didn’t know. He said it in a real apologetic way, and I knew it couldn’t be good. So I gave the kids a free-writing topic, and I went to the office. When I got there, June Fontayne was waiting for me.”

“Who?”

“June Fontayne. She’s the new guidance counselor. Ex-hippie sort. A real quack. Long flowing skirt and all sorts of bangles and beaded necklaces. She’s got crystals all over her desk and a dream-catcher hanging over her door, a little Buddha shrine on the shelf where her books should be. I know there’s bad news coming, and I don’t want to hear whatever it is she has to say. She tells me the police were on the phone, but when she found out who it was she decided to take the call herself. She thought it would be better for me to hear it from her. Like she has any right to be the messenger.”

Oh God, I think. Hear what?

“The police found the body of a young girl and they wanted me to try to make an identification.”

“No.”

Jake’s watch peeks from beneath the cuff of his shirtsleeve. The second hand moves with painful precision. Time expands. A few seconds never felt so long. I remember the way Annabel and I used to count for hide-and-seek,
one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi
.

“June offered to drive me, but I needed to go alone. I took Portola, even though 280 would have been faster. I think I was hoping that maybe the coroner’s office would be closing by the time I got there.”

Jake gets up and paces the room, back and forth, hands in his pockets. I just want him to get to the end of the story, just want him to tell me it wasn’t her.

“I drove as slowly as I could but I got there. Of course I got there, of course it was open. And I’m sitting there in the parking lot of the coroner’s office thinking that I can’t possibly do this. I can’t possibly walk into that building and look at the body of a girl who may be Emma. But I went. I shut my brain down and I just went. What choice did I have, really? On the outside it’s just a plain white building, pleasant even, with bougainvillaea climbing the walls and nice benches positioned in the entryway, but on the inside it looks like a hospital, all white and sterile. It smelled even worse than it looked. A mixture of ammonia and some cloyingly sweet human smell—not like body odor but something else, something worse. It only occurred to me later, as I was driving home, that what I’d been smelling was death, death really does have a smell.”

Jake keeps pacing the room, and he has begun to sweat. “It’s boiling,” he says, “are you hot?” Without waiting for an answer, he goes over to the window and opens it. He leans out and breathes the night air. A faint scent of ocean drifts in, mixed with diesel fuel. A car passes slowly on the street and Jake is briefly illuminated, his body casting shadows over the sofa, wall, and rug.

He looks at me. “How do you think they’d act at a coroner’s office?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’d think they’d be sympathetic, right? You’d think they’d understand the delicacy of the situation.” He laughs—a weird, unsettling laugh. “But it’s not like that at all. They’re just doing their job. They might as well be working at the mall. It’s like they’re completely immune to the whole thing.”

He comes over and sits down again. “So I went up to the desk and I gave the girl my name. She said, ‘You here to identify a body?’ Just like that. She leaned into a little microphone and called for Mr. Brewer. A few seconds later a big white door opened and a man came through. He was in his fifties, wearing a white lab coat, and he smiled and shook my hand. Roger, he said his name was, then he motioned for me to follow him.

“We walked through an endless maze of hallways, and he told me it was his first week on the job. Then he started talking about that show
The Love Squad
, about how the night before this beautiful young woman from Manhattan had been paired up with a nightclub owner from Miami. Roger asked me if I’d seen it, and before I could answer he started apologizing profusely. Said he talks when he’s nervous.

“To be honest, I was grateful for the chatter,” Jake continues. “I don’t think I could have taken silence. He didn’t give one of those speeches the way they do in movies. He didn’t tell me to brace myself. He just walked, and talked, and at the end of one of the hallways he opened a door, and then we were in a small, bright room with three metal tables lined up in the middle. The tables were scratched and shiny; they reminded me of the cafeteria at school. But they were bare, no one on them, just tables. I was so relieved. I thought maybe the whole thing had been a mistake, maybe someone else had already come and identified the body, some other father had made the awful pilgrimage and had found his daughter there, the body had already been removed, the table washed, and now that father was driving home. I felt sorry for the guy, but I was glad it wasn’t me. I was turning to walk out the door when Roger said, ‘In here.’

“That’s when he opened the refrigerator. That’s what it was, an enormous steel refrigerator fitted with drawers. He pulled out one of the drawers, and I didn’t have time to think about it, didn’t have time to cover my eyes or ask questions or give myself a pep talk. He just slid it out and there was this body, this mutilated young girl. No sheet, no clothes, just the body, cold white skin and her little hands and these small, bluish feet.”

Jake is sobbing. He’s not the crying type, he’s only done it a couple of times since Emma disappeared, and the fact that he’s crying now terrifies me.

“I looked at her hair,” he says. “That’s the first thing I saw, the hair. She was blonde, this poor little girl was blonde.”

My heart settles back into place. Time resumes its natural movement, and he puts his arms around me and holds on so tight it feels as if my ribs might break. I find myself crying, too, with the relief of it, and also the guilt, knowing what Jake has had to go through because of me, knowing all the pain I’ve brought down on him, all the grief and horror I’ve dumped on his previously happy life.

After a couple of minutes he lets go. He sits up straight, wipes his eyes, and puts his hands on his knees. “After that I was able to look at her face. Her eyes were closed. She had the tiniest ears, and little pinpricks where her earrings had been. She must have been about Emma’s age. There were bruises around her neck, like she’d been strangled, and scratches all over her body. Roger must have thought I’d made a positive identification, because he put his hand on my back and stared down at the floor, and I could tell he was trying to think of something to say. When I told him it wasn’t her, he seemed very relieved.”

Jake reaches over, puts his hand on the back of my neck, pulls me toward him, and kisses me. It’s an aggressive, hungry kiss. There is nothing apologetic in this kiss, nothing reserved; he kisses me as though he must have me, as though letting go of me at this moment is not an option. And something in me stirs, too, a desire I haven’t felt in months, haven’t wanted to feel because it didn’t seem fair to Emma. He slides his hand up my shirt, and minutes later we’re in the bedroom, unclothed and desperate, awkward as high school kids. “Wait,” I say, rolling off him.

“What?”

“Let’s go slowly.”

We lie there for some time, just touching, talking quietly. I run my fingers over his body, feeling the tiny hard knob lodged beneath the skin at the top of his right thigh—that small anomaly I’ve come to love. He touches the wide scar below my belly button, a remnant from a skating accident when I was ten. In this way we reacquaint ourselves. And as he moves into me, I am reminded of our first time, at a bed-and-breakfast in Bodega Bay, while the ocean roared just outside our window and a group of teenagers played a loud game of hacky sack. Afterward, we sat on the balcony in complimentary bathrobes, drinking fizzy water, making plans. Watching the teenagers, I had a pleasant sensation of the future, when we would bring Emma to places like this and she would meet kids her age, and we would watch her closely, but not too closely. I vowed that she would have a happy childhood, an even happier adolescence. I thought of my parents’ miscalculations in child rearing and swore not to make them myself. A beanbag sailed over the balcony rail. One of the hacky sack players waved up to us, a bright-eyed girl in a green bathing suit. “Good throw!” she said, after Jake tossed the beanbag into her waiting hands.

Around two in the morning we disentangle, each of us retreating, as we have always done, to our separate sides of the bed. Jake snores softly, and I lie awake thinking of the blonde girl, the steel refrigerator in which she lies, waiting to be identified. I think of her tiny ears, the bruises around her neck. She is embedded in my brain, an image I can’t shake, a horror that won’t let me sleep. At three a.m. I get out of bed and walk across the hall to Emma’s bedroom. The door is shut. I turn the knob. The floor is uneven, the room at a slight tilt after seventy years of frequent tremors. I’ve felt them many times, the house rattling and jerking slightly, but always standing, always remaining intact. When the latch is loosened, the door slowly swings open. I sit on Emma’s bed. In this room there is a still faint smell of her, that sweetish, muddy odor that she always carried with her into the house after she spent the afternoon playing outside, mingled with the milk-salty smell of Elmer’s glue and the musty scent of construction paper.

Time passes. I look up to see Jake standing in the doorway, hands at his sides, tears in his eyes, watching me.