I Remember You

by Elisabeth de Mariaffi

  Arden stopped and shook out her hand where she’d been sharing the weight of the larger bag.

  — Seven is a fine number in a story, she said.

  She juggled the bakery bag from one arm to the other, so as to switch sides. Heike waved her away, taking the canvas bag herself by both handles. They walked on together, slowly now.

  — I’ll be up here for another few weeks, Arden said. I mean, if you need a place to stay. You can keep on with me at our place. John won’t mind if you do.

  Heike shook her head.

  — You’ve already done too much. But maybe I can have the rest of my clothes.

  — Best of the best right here. Arden gave the canvas bag a poke. Plus a few extras. A good pillow. I thought I’d bring you things in shifts, while you figure out . . . While you figure yourself out. You know, unless . . .

  — Unless?

  — I figured you might want to leave these memories behind.

  — No. I’m not going anywhere else. Where would I go?

  — I thought you might run away to California.

  — Oh. You mean with Leo? No. He came to see me, Heike said. I think maybe he thought the same thing.

  Dolan cutting his way down the path to her door in his travelling clothes. A grey felt Trilby instead of the Milan.

  — He found it funny, I think, for me to be there. At the cabin. He said I used to be so afraid of it, and now look, here it is—like a refuge for me.

  — I don’t know. I’d say just about the safest place you can be is somewhere that used to frighten you.

  — I think men prefer not to think about fear, Heike said. But what frightens you is so important. Your whole self is hidden in there.

  — So, no palm trees?

  — No palm trees.

  They could see Arden’s car, parked up ahead in front of a white two-storey house with a knee-high garden fence. There was some architecture at the foot of the drive, a construction of wooden milk crates stacked together, and two little boys standing behind it. They had a pitcher of lemonade and another one that was empty and a row of plastic glasses sold to their mother at a Tupperware party. When they got close enough, Heike dug a handful of change out of her purse.

  — How much?

  — Two cents a glass. We used to have cake, and that was a penny for a square of it, but we ate it all already.

  — Arden, we missed it! What kind of cake was it?

  — Chocolate. But no icing, just powdery sugar on the top.

  Arden let her arms hang down in a droopy way.

  — This is just my luck, she said.

  — Here. Heike counted out a few pennies. I will pay for two glasses from you.

  She took the bottle of bourbon out of Arden’s bakery bag and unscrewed the lid. Here, she said. Just put it right in here.

  The boy filled the plastic glass, then picked it up and carefully poured the lemonade from the glass to the bottle. He did that two more times and they were out of lemonade. Heike counted out two more pennies.

  — Business is very good for you, yeah?

  She could see now that the two boys were not quite the same age. The smaller of the two still had her pennies in his hand, wrapped tight, and he opened his fingers slowly so as to put the money into the cash box without spilling any of it out onto the ground. Heike watched him and only recognized how long she’d been standing there when Arden took the bottle and its cap from her, sealing it up again and tucking it away in the bakery bag.

  Arden took Heike’s hand. There was a breeze, and the boy’s hair fluttered, light and soft as a little chick’s. He pushed the pennies around in the box, counting them silently. His lips moved as he counted. There was a tiny dimple in his wrist.

  Heike turned away.

  — Take me home, will you? She stepped closer and linked her arm in Arden’s. Everything has been lost for so long, she said. Or I’ve been lost. It feels good to have found something. It was my home once: that pond, that little house. Maybe it still is. Besides, no one else is using it. She almost smiled, but it was mostly to herself. It seems a good place to start, she said.

  * * *

  The layer of dust that had covered everything inside the cabin was gone. The very first thing she’d done: kettle after kettle of hot water, every corner scrubbed clean. In the bedroom, she’d found a hole through to the outside, just big enough for a mouse, or perhaps even a chipmunk, and filled it in with a torn rag and carpenter’s glue. She was waiting for some sense memory to return: the wood floor against her knees, the curve of the baseboard, the smell of the damp plaster as she wiped down the walls. At night, she lay in bed and counted the corners of the room. A way to have a wish granted.

  Now she slipped her sundress over her head, trading it for a bathing suit she’d left hanging off the arm of a chair. There were some papers strewn on the wooden table, and a makeshift easel pinned with pages she’d ripped from her notebooks: bird studies, pen and ink, or the birds’ motion captured with a few strokes of charcoal. A perfect descent of black ravens, spilling down the page like a bright helix, sharp in their relief.

  Trying to pick up where the other Heike had left off.

  Outside, the ground was warm and firm beneath her, the path clear but banked with wildflowers to one side, under the window, the colours catching the light. Cosmos, like cocktail umbrellas floating high on tall stems.

  She waded into the pond with a few long strides, swam out cleanly, then pulled up onto the raft, crouching there with her toes curled over the edge, looking down at something just below the surface.

  Her body was cool from the water, her hair wet and away from her face. She pushed up to standing, a hand at her hip, listening—but there was only the low rumble of a car far up on the road somewhere, already fading into the distance, and back in the reeds, a loon. She could hear it calling to its mate and the echo of the call.

  The sun was strong behind her. She turned away again to gaze down at the girl, her skin shimmering green and gold just below the surface of the pond. When she leaned out over the water, the girl pulled closer. Blond hair falling around her face, already almost dry in the midday heat. Heike had an urge to reach in and take her hand.

  The breeze picked up. Her reflection rippled there.

  She sprang forward off the raft, the dive almost soundless. Below the surface, her arms pulled out wide and back in again.

  One good kick and she was already halfway to the other side.

  Acknowledgements

  I’m very lucky to have had the support of some wonderful friends, family, and colleagues in the writing of this book. First thank you goes always to George Murray, whose keen ear and eye and hours of conversation allowed me to take what felt like a dream and fine-tune it into a proper story. I’m grateful to my early readers, Andreae Callanan, Megan Coles, Miranda Hill, and Bianca Spence, for their time and their thoughtful consideration of the novel when it was in draft form. My mother, Eva de Mariaffi, for looking over the German to make sure I had it just right. My children, Nora and Desmond, Silas and August, for keeping me grounded and for the final-draft-panic high fives and kind words—and Desmond especially for the memory of his childhood adventures with tadpoles and turtles. Financial support from ArtsNL made it possible for me to devote much-needed focus to the project. As always, my agent, Samantha Haywood, provided unfailing support and sharp ideas. And, of course, a huge thank you to my wonderful editor, Iris Tupholme, who loved the book from the start and has pursued it with me rigorously—exactly what I love best.

  A Note on Sources

  All of the characters in I Remember You are fictional. While I created the character of Leo Dolan, his body of work is based largely on the work of Rod Serling, an American writer/ producer and creator of the groundbreaking television series The Twilight Zone. Serling really did write a teleplay for The United States Steel Hour that aired in 1956, originally based on the story of the lynching of Emmett Till, and it was changed and rewritten at least twice to suit the networ
k executives—something Serling only occasionally spoke about in interviews. Serling’s experience with network censorship was one of the factors that led him to write and produce his own series The Twilight Zone, which did not air until 1959. In the scenes where Leo Dolan and Heike Lerner discuss his work, several real-life Twilight Zone episodes are referenced, including plots and characters from “Walking Distance” and “Nightmare as a Child,” in forms that have been altered to suit my story. Fleeting references are made to “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine,” “The Hitch-Hiker,” “The Lonely,” and “Living Doll”—these are Easter eggs that only a real Twilight Zone aficionado will spot. It was a fun surprise to find that Serling’s own production company was called Cayuga Productions.

  I visited Ovid, New York, the site of the former Willard State Hospital, in 2015, and also spent time in Aurora, Union Springs, Lansing, Ithaca, Auburn, and Skaneateles. The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic by Darby Penney and Peter Stastny (Bellevue Literary Press, 2008) was useful to me in imagining the world of the asylum as it existed. The character of the old man, Marek, is based on the real-life Willard patient and gravedigger Lawrence Mocha. The authors of Lives gave Mocha the pseudonym Marek, and I have maintained it here. A man can only have so many names.

  Among other resources, Ernest Hemingway’s short story “A Way You’ll Never Be” was useful in my imagining of Heike’s experience hiding out in the barn and afterward, as she escaped from Germany in 1945. I was interested in the aftermath of battle not from a soldier’s perspective, but as it might be experienced by a young girl.

  Where Heike’s long solo trek across a whole country is concerned, my own great-great-grandmother, Maria Sieber, left Switzerland on foot in the late 1800s, arriving some time later in Hungary—alone, with only her little brother in tow. She was fifteen at the time. So I know such things can be done.

  Epigraphs

  Dr. Frank Berger’s comment, quoted here on page 17, was made to the Senate Antitrust and Monopoly subcommittee in 1960, and was reported by Joseph A. Loftus in his article “Costs Held Small in Making Drugs,” which appeared in The New York Times on January 27, 1960.

  Rod Serling’s conversation with journalist Mike Wallace, quoted here on page 191, originally took place on The Mike Wallace Interview, airdate September 22, 1959.

  The excerpt from L. Wilson Greene’s classified document “Psychochemical Warfare: A New Concept of War,” on page 359, was quoted by Raffi Khatchadourian in his December 17, 2012, New Yorker feature “Operation Delirium.”

  The quotation from “Cinderella,” also on page 359, is from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, translated by E.V. Lucas, Lucy Crane, and Marian Edwardes (Grosset & Dunlap, 1965).

  Dejan Stojanović’s poem, “A Fairy Tale and the End,” quoted on page 433, is part of the sequence “Forgotten Place,” published in English in The Sun Watches the Sun (New Avenue Books, 2012).

  The full title of the work quoted in the very first epigraph on page 7 is Niederlausitzer Volkssagen Vornehmlich aus dem Stadt und Landkreise Guben Gesammelt und Zusammengestellt (Folktales of Lower Lusatia Collected and Compiled Principally from the Town and County of Guben) by Karl Gander. The translation of the epigraph is my own.

  About the Author

  Elisabeth de Mariaffi is the critically acclaimed author of the Giller-nominated How to Get Along with Women and The Devil You Know. The Devil You Know is currently in development for television with New Metric Media. It was shortlisted for the prestigious Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award. Born and raised in Toronto, she now makes her home in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

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