“You’re joking. You loved that truck!”
Dad muttered something about the new one being more fuel-efficient. “It’s covered in the memoir,” he added.
It was, though I wouldn’t find this out for many months. He wrote about the truck on page ninety-eight of his book. He claimed to have sold it because it reminded him of Mom. He didn’t mention a thing about fuel efficiency. It was funny how Dad was more honest in a book that anyone in the world could pick up and read than he could be talking to me. Or maybe it was sad. One or the other. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
I got into the passenger’s seat and put on my seatbelt. Just as we were pulling away, Dad’s cell phone rang, and he asked me did I mind if he took it. I said it was fine; after the doctors’ near constant interrogation, I appreciated not talking.
“Yes. Hello. Me too. I’ve been meaning to call you…” Dad said stiffly to someone. He seemed embarrassed to be talking in front of me.
“Who is it?” I whispered.
“No one. Work,” he mouthed to me. He rolled his eyes and slipped on a headset.
I decided I’d misread his tone and turned my concentration to the view outside. The trees were still green, but you could feel that summer was over. It made me think of a day I could remember, and how it had definitely been summer then. I didn’t necessarily remember the trees, but I remembered the air that day. It had that fresh-cut-lawn smell, where it feels like all of nature is just sighing with relief. My parents and I had left for Iceland about a week later.
I wondered if Mom was having her affair even then. She must have been. She had said that her daughter was already three. My mother’s daughter. My sister. I couldn’t think about that yet.
Out the car window Tarrytown looked familiar enough. I noticed a new subdivision of houses and a new McDonald’s. The place where they used to sell apple cider and doughnuts had been torn down. But basically, nothing much had changed, and this was reassuring.
All of a sudden, Dad turned onto a street I didn’t recognize. Even though Dad was still on the phone, I asked him where we were going.
Dad hung up before answering. “We moved,” he said simply. “I should have mentioned it before, but there were so many things. I’ll add it to the list when we get home. We’re almost there.”
His list was turning out to be a complete waste.
Dad informed me that they had sold our house after the divorce. He had bought a different house about a half mile from our old one. He mentioned that the new house was “larger” (why we needed a larger house when fewer people lived in it was beyond me) and “closer to school” and “besides, we hadn’t lived all that long in the other house anyway, not like Brooklyn.”
The new house was much more modern than our old house had been. The back wall looked like it was made entirely from glass, and it was incredibly drafty inside. Our old house had been two stories with all these strangely shaped rooms and narrow flights of stairs. I think it had been built in 1803 or something. The new house was, well, new. It was on one level, and seemed more, I guess you might say, organized, if you were being kind. Sterile, if you weren’t.
There were a few artifacts from the old house, but not many. At a glance I recognized a clay planter in front of the fireplace, a small braided rug near the laundry room, a cast-iron umbrella stand. They all looked awkward and out of place, like orphans.
“What do you think?” Dad smiled. I could tell he was proud of his house.
I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I told him it was nice. Truly, there was nothing much to say. It was all very beige. The sofa was beige. The stain on the wood floor was beige. The walls were beige. What in the world can you say about beige?
To Mom, any reasonably flat or bare surface was a potential canvas, and she had always been painting and changing the colors of our walls. Our house smelled of paint, but also of all her other projects. Like melted crayons and clay and weird incense and glue and newsprint. Like people lived there and things were happening there. Like home. This new house smelled like…synthetic citrus. “Dad, what’s with the weird orange scent?”
“Just something the housekeeper uses. I didn’t like it at first, but now I’m kind of used to it. It’s organic.” Dad sighed and then he clapped his hands together. “Okay, I assume you’ll be wanting the official grand tour.”
“Could we do it after lunch maybe?” I told Dad I was really tired, and he led me down the hall to “my room.”
“Look at all familiar?” he asked.
Unlike the rest of the house, my room did share some similarities with the bedroom I remembered. The furniture, for one, was exactly the same. I practically wanted to hug my wicker dresser or, like, give my desk chair a massage.
I told Dad I wanted to be alone. He had just been standing there, and I sensed he needed to be told to leave. Dad nodded and said that he had some work to do, but that his office was down the hall if I wanted him.
“Oh hey, you’ll need this!” Dad called just as he was about to go. He took the list out of his pocket. It was on five sheets of paper and one hundred eighty-six items long.
“It was lonesome here without you, kid,” he said. He kissed me on the forehead to the right of my injuries. I closed the door behind him, and then I went to sleep.
Dad woke me for lunch and again for dinner, but the meals made no impression. I didn’t really wake until around eight that night. I was alone for the first time in what felt like years, but had really been almost no time at all.
At the hospital I had basically avoided mirrors. It was easy. I just slipped past them, holding my breath as if there were a ghost in the room.
Partially I think it was because I didn’t want to see my injuries. It probably sounds like vanity, but it wasn’t. In my opinion, wounds are like water set to boil—they heal best left unwatched.
But every now and again I would accidentally catch a glimpse of myself. In a glass on my food tray, in the lenses of a doctor’s spectacles, in the window at night before all the lights were turned out. For a moment, I would not even realize who I was looking at, and, instinctively, I would turn away. It is rude to stare at strangers and that is what I was to myself. I did not know the girl in the glass nor did she know me.
Now that I was finally alone, I felt braver. I decided that it was time to reacquaint myself with myself. The meeting couldn’t be put off any longer.
The first thing I did was remove all my clothes and examine my body in the mirrored closet door.
It was what I had been expecting. Even though I had lost four years of memories, I had never actually thought that I was twelve. I’m not saying that it’s like this for other people, but this is how it was for me. I instinctively knew I was older. And although my body was surprising in certain ways, it looked more or less how I felt inside, so it was okay.
My face was a bit more shocking to me, and not because of my injuries either—Will’s description had been accurate on that front, and the whole mess was already changing colors, which I interpreted as healing. My face was strange because it looked like someone I knew, a cousin maybe, but not me. My hair was about the same length, halfway down my back, but it might have been highlighted, I wasn’t sure. My jaw was narrower; my nose, sharper.
“Hello,” I greeted myself. “I’m Naomi.” The girl in the mirror didn’t seem convinced.
“Anything you have to say for yourself?” I asked.
She stared at me blankly and said nothing.
I decided that mirrors were completely useless.
I found a T-shirt in my bureau and put it on.
I opened my closet door. The person who lived in my room (for I could not quite think of her as me yet) was incredibly organized. It was as if she had been preparing for just such an occasion.