I hesitated outside the kitchen. I felt scared. I was about to meet him, as if for the first time. What would he be like? Would he look as he did in the pictures? Or were they, too, an inaccurate representation? Would he be older, fatter, balder? How would he sound? How would he move? How well had I married?
A vision came from nowhere. A woman—my mother?—telling me to be careful. Marry in haste…
I pushed the door open. Ben had his back to me, nudging bacon with a spatula as it spat and sizzled in the pan. He had not heard me come in.
“Ben?” I said. He turned around quickly.
“Christine? Are you okay?”
I did not know how to answer, and so I said, “Yes. I think so.”
He smiled then, a look of relief, and I did the same. He looked older than in the pictures upstairs—his face carried more lines, his hair was beginning to gray and receding slightly at the temples—but this had the effect of making him more, rather than less, attractive. His jaw had a strength that suited an older man, his eyes shone mischief. I realized he resembled a slightly older version of my father. I could have done worse, I thought. Much worse.
“You’ve seen the pictures?” he said. I nodded. “Don’t worry. I’ll explain everything. Why don’t you go and sit down?” He gestured back toward the hallway. “The dining room’s there. I won’t be a moment. Here, take this.”
He handed me a pepper mill and I went to the dining room. A few minutes later, he followed me with two plates. A pale sliver of bacon swam in grease, an egg and some bread had been fried and sat on the side. As I ate, he explained how I survive my life.
Today is Saturday, he said. He works during the week; he is a teacher. He explained about the phone I have in my bag, the board tacked on the wall in the kitchen. He showed me where we keep our emergency fund—two twenty-pound notes, rolled tightly and tucked behind the clock on the mantelpiece—and the scrapbook in which I can glimpse snatches of my life. He told me that, together, we manage. I was not sure I believed him, yet knew I must.
We finished eating and I helped him tidy away the breakfast things. “We should go for a stroll, later,” he said. “If you like?” I said that I would and he looked pleased. “I’m just going to read the paper,” he said. “Okay?”
I came upstairs. Once I was alone, my head spun, full and empty at the same time. I felt unable to grasp anything. Nothing seemed real. I looked at the house I was in—the one I now knew was my home—with eyes that had never known it before. For a moment I felt like running. I had to calm myself.
I sat on the edge of the bed in which I had slept. I should make it, I thought. Tidy up. Keep myself busy. I picked up the pillow to plump it and as I did, something began to buzz.
I wasn’t sure what it was. It was low, insistent. A tune, thin and quiet. My bag was at my feet and when I picked it up I realized the buzz seemed to come from there. I remembered Ben telling me about the phone I have.
When I found it the phone was lit up. I stared at it for a long moment. Some part of me, buried deep, or somewhere at the very edge of memory, knew exactly what the call was about. I answered it.
“Hello?” A man’s voice. “Christine? Christine, are you there?”
I told him I was.
“It’s your doctor. Are you okay? Is Ben around?”
“No,” I said. “He’s— What’s this about?”
He told me his name and that we have been working together for a few weeks. “On your memory,” he said, and when I didn’t reply, he said, “I want you to trust me. I want you to look in the closet in your bedroom.” Another pause then, before he went on, “There’s a shoebox on the floor in there. Have a look inside that. There should be a notebook.”
I glanced at the closet in the corner of the room.
“How do you know all this?”
“You told me,” he said. “I saw you yesterday. We decided you should keep a journal. That’s where you told me you’d hide it.”
I don’t believe you, I wanted to say, but it seemed impolite and was not entirely true.
“Will you look?” he said. I told him I would, then he added, “Do it now. Don’t say anything to Ben. Do it now.”
I did not end the call but went over to the closet. He was right. Inside, on the floor, was a shoebox—a blue box with the word SCHOLL on the ill-fitting lid—and inside that a book wrapped in tissue.
“Do you have it?” said Dr. Nash.
I lifted it out and unwrapped it. It was brown leather and looked expensive.
“Christine?”
“Yes. I have it.”
“Good. Have you written in it?”
I opened it to the first page. I saw that I had. My name is Christine Lucas, it began. I am forty-seven. An amnesiac. I felt nervous, excited. It felt like snooping, but on myself.
“I have,” I said.
“Excellent!” he said, and then he said he would phone me tomorrow and we ended the call.
I did not move. There, crouching on the floor by the open closet, the bed still unmade, I began to read.
At first, I felt disappointed. I remembered nothing of what I had written. Not Dr. Nash, nor the offices I claim that he took me to, the puzzles I say that we did. Despite having just heard his voice, I could not picture him, or myself with him. The book read like fiction. But then, tucked between two pages near the back of the book, I found a photograph. The house in which I had grown up, the one in which I expected to find myself when I woke this morning. It was real, this was my evidence. I had seen Dr. Nash, and he had given me this picture, this fragment of my past.
I closed my eyes. Yesterday I had described my old home, the sugar jar in the pantry, picking berries in the woods. Were those memories still there? Could I conjure more? I thought of my mother, my father, willing something else to come. Images formed silently. A dull orange carpet, an olive-green vase. A yellow romper with a pink duck sewn onto the breast and snaps up the middle. A plastic car seat in navy blue and a faded pink potty.
Colors and shapes, but nothing that described a life. Nothing. I want to see my parents, I thought, and it was then, for the first time, I realized that somehow I knew that they were dead.
I sighed and sat on the edge of the unmade bed. A pen was tucked between the pages of the journal, and almost without thinking I took it out, intending to write more. I held it, poised over the page, and closed my eyes to concentrate.
It was then that it happened. Whether that realization—that my parents are gone—triggered others, I don’t know, but it felt as if my mind woke up from a long, deep sleep. It came alive. But not gradually; this was a jolt. A spark of electricity. Suddenly I was not sitting in a bedroom with a blank page in front of me but somewhere else. Back in the past—a past I thought I had lost—and I could touch and feel and taste everything. I realized I was remembering.
I saw myself coming home, to the house I grew up in. I am thirteen or fourteen, eager to get on with a story I am writing, but I find a note on the kitchen table. We’ve had to go out, it says. Uncle Ted will pick you up at six. I get a drink and a sandwich and sit down with my notebook. Mrs. Royce has said that my stories are ‘strong’ and ‘moving’; she thinks I could turn them into a career. But I cannot think what to write, cannot concentrate. I seethe in silent fury. It is their fault. Where are they? What are they doing? Why aren’t I invited? I screw up the paper and throw it away.
The image vanished, but straight away there was another. Stronger. More real. My father is driving us home. I am sitting in the back of the car, staring at a fixed spot on the windshield. A dead fly. A piece of dirt. I cannot tell. I speak, not sure what I am going to say.