My Name Is Memory

by Ann Brashares

  “You do.” She was giving me that same look of indulgence, but it was less confident.

  “We all do.”

  “Because we live again and again?”

  “Most of us.”

  “Not all of us?” Her face showed more signs of genuinely wanting to know.

  “Some live only once. Some a very few times. And some just go on and on and on.”

  “Why?”

  I put my head back on my pillow. “That’s hard to explain. I’m not sure I really know.”

  “And you?”

  “I’ve lived many times.”

  “And you remember them?”

  “Yes. That’s where I’m different than most people.”

  “I’ll say. And what about me?” She looked as though she wasn’t going to believe the answer but slightly feared it anyway.

  “You’ve also lived many times. But your memory is just average.”

  “Clearly.” She laughed. “Have you known me for all of them?”

  “I’ve tried. But no, not all.”

  “And why can’t I remember?”

  “You can, more than you think. Those memories are in there somewhere. You act on them in ways you don’t realize. They determine how you respond to people, the things you love and the things you fear. A lot of our irrational behavior would look more rational if you could see it in the context of your whole long life.”

  It was amazing the things I was willing to say if she was willing to listen, and she was. I touched the hem of her sleeve. “I know enough about you to know you love horses and you probably dream about them. You probably dream of the desert sometimes, and maybe of taking a bath outdoors. Your nightmares are usually about fire. You have problems with your voice and your throat sometimes—that was always your weak spot . . .”

  Her face was rapt. “Why?”

  “You were strangled a long time ago.”

  Her alarm was a mix of real and pretend. “By whom?”

  “Your husband.”

  “Awful. Why did I marry him?”

  “You didn’t have a choice.”

  “And you knew this man?”

  “He was my brother.”

  “Long dead, I hope.”

  “Yes, but bearing a grudge through history, I fear.”

  I could see by her face, she was trying to figure out where to put all of this. “Are you a psychic?” she asked.

  I smiled and shook my head. “Although most psychics, if they are any good, do have some memory of old lives. And so do most of the people we consider insane. An asylum is about the densest concentration of people with partial memory you will ever find. They get flashes and visions but usually not in the right order.”

  She looked at me sympathetically, wondering if that’s where I belonged. “And is that what you do?”

  “No. I remember everything.”

  WASHINGTON, D.C., 2007

  IT WAS A far cry from Madame Esme’s trailer with the roses. This was an office in an actual office building off Wisconsin Avenue in Upper Georgetown. There was an actual elevator and a waiting room and framed diplomas on the wall. Lucy doubted Esme had gotten so much as her GED certificate, but this guy had diplomas from Haverford College, Cornell Medical College, Georgetown University Hospital, and a few other places, too.

  When Lucy stopped to consider it, it was pretty strange to find herself here. After all of Dana’s hideous experiences with psychiatrists, Lucy never thought she would go to one of her own volition. But maybe that’s what made this feel different to Lucy. Dana had been committed, strapped down, drugged up, dragged in. She’d never chosen it.

  In a way, Lucy had more evidence than ever for her own brand of madness, but turning to face it made her feel less crazy than running away from it. Rational or not, because of Daniel and Madame Esme she was beginning to suspect that these discordant images in her head corresponded to some reality, and she just needed to figure out how. She wanted information. She needed it. She hoped it would make some order out of the disorder that threatened at the edge of her mind. And besides, she didn’t know what else to try.

  When Dr. Rosen walked in, he looked as serious as his diplomas suggested. She stood up and shook hands, hoping she looked less young and desperate than she felt.

  “So I gather from our phone conversation that you are interested in hypnosis,” he said, gesturing to the sofa for her to sit down again.

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “It can be helpful in cases of anxiety, as you’ve described to me, but it really works best in connection with therapy, and in some instances medication.” He said these things almost as though he was supposed to.

  “I realize that,” Lucy said nervously. “But I live two and a half hours from here, and I can only afford one session right now. Can we start with hypnosis and see how it goes?” Lucy had done enough research on the Internet to know that Dr. Rosen had a reputation for being somewhat unorthodox in his use of hypnosis and willingness to work with good candidates.

  He studied her. He nodded. “We can give it a go. Some people are more responsive to it than others. We’ll see how you do.”

  He got out a tape recorder from his desk drawer. “Would you like me to record it? Most people want to listen to the session later.”

  She hadn’t thought of that, but it seemed like a good idea. What if she’d had her session with Madame Esme on tape? “Yes, please.”

  He started by having her lie back and relax. He instructed her to focus on his gold pen until her eyes closed. He talked to her in a soothing voice for quite a while about being relaxed and listening to the sound of her breathing and that kind of thing. Then he said he was going to guide her through an image. He was going to lead her into a house, he explained, and she was going to tell him what she saw there. She felt herself settling into his voice until she felt a deep weariness come over her. The next thing she was aware of was walking down a hallway.

  “And tell me what it looks like,” Dr. Rosen said in his calm voice.

  “The wood creaks under my feet. I don’t want to make too much of a noise,” Lucy said. She wasn’t thinking so much as reporting.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want anyone to know I’m going into his room again. I’m always creeping up there.”

  “Whose room?”

  She wasn’t sure if she didn’t know or didn’t want to say, so she kept going. “His room is right ahead of me. It used to be my room.”

  “But now it’s not?”

  “No. Because of the war. Now it’s a hospital.” Lucy was saying these things without really understanding what she meant or why she said them, but the oddness of that did not concern her for some reason.

  “Do you want to go into the room?”

  “Yes. I want to see him.”

  “So why don’t you go ahead in,” he suggested.

  “Okay.”

  “Tell me what you see?”

  She felt horribly sad all of a sudden. As though there was a terrible thing that she’d forgotten and now she remembered. She felt a painful swelling in her throat. “Daniel’s not there.”

  “You’re upset.”

  “There are three other soldiers. Not him.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She felt the tears in her eyes and coursing down her cheeks. “Why did I think he would be there?” She was crying too hard to speak for a moment.

  “You cared for him.”

  “I loved him. He didn’t want to leave me. He said we’d be together again. He said he wouldn’t ever forget me, no matter what, and I have to try not to forget him. That’s why I wrote the note.”

  “What note did you write?”

  “I wrote a note to myself. For later. To make me remember. I hid it in the compartment behind my bookshelf in my old room. That’s where his letter is, too.”

  “His letter to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “In your old room?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where
is that room?”

  “In our old house. The big house. Not the cottage by the river, where we live now.”

  She described the landscape around the big house, and the village of Hythe not too far away, and the river and the chicken coops and the old kitchen garden that had become a car park because of the war. She described the old gardens, the magnificent gardens from before.

  “Before what?” he asked.

  “Before Mother died. She was the one who made the gardens.”

  “When did your mother die?”

  “When I was small, but I remember her.”

  At some point his slow voice walked her out of the house and back to the office where they were sitting. He talked more about relaxing and breathing. When he told her to open her eyes, she did.

  She felt disoriented but not muddled or uncertain. She felt that she had been crying; she felt the residual sadness but not the real emotion. She tried to piece it together.

  “Lucy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you feel all right?”

  “I think so.”

  “Do you remember what you saw?”

  She thought back over it. “I think so. Most of it.”

  Dr. Rosen looked somewhat taken aback, she realized, as she focused on his face. “You went under quickly and very deeply,” he said.

  “Did I? Is that not how it normally is?”

  He had an equivocal look. “There’s not really any normal, I wouldn’t say. But you were certainly responsive and . . . perhaps unusually clear about where you were and what you saw.”

  She nodded.

  “Do you know what it meant? Was it based on some experience that was familiar to you?” he asked.

  “Not an experience, no. But it felt familiar.” She looked down at her fingers. “Would you call it a regression, do you think?”

  He looked vaguely uncomfortable. “Could be. That can happen.”

  “I don’t think it’s any place I’ve been in my life. But do you think it could be . . .” She couldn’t quite finish her sentence, and he seemed in no big hurry for her to finish it.

  He let his breath out. “Lucy, our time is about up. That was a . . . dramatic experience for you, I’m sure. If you are feeling unsettled, you are welcome to sit in my waiting room for as long as you need to.”

  “I think I’m okay,” she said. She thought it over again. It didn’t feel as though it had happened to her, but it didn’t feel as though it had happened to anyone else, either. Where was the house? Was it a place she could have ever been?

  “Do you think any of it was real? Do you think I really left a note for myself? I don’t remember anything like that.” She felt oddly numb asking the question.

  Dr. Rosen looked reluctant to offer any hypothesis. “You can expect that odd and incongruous things will come up in hypnosis. As they do in dreams. These pieces of information can be extremely helpful in terms of self-knowledge. But it’s probably not wise to take them too literally. I think the wisest thing is to think of them as metaphor.”

  Lucy looked at him straight. “It didn’t feel like metaphor.”

  LUCY LISTENED TO the recording of her hypnosis that night in her bedroom on a low volume with her door closed. The thing that struck her first and most powerfully was her voice. As she had pictured herself heading down the hall at the prompting of Dr. Rosen, she had stopped sounding like herself and begun sounding like an English girl. It was almost uncanny. She replayed that part three times, her heart pounding, to make sure she was hearing right, that it really was her speaking. And it was.

  In real life, Lucy was terrible at accents. She’d played a Cockney in a school production of Oliver! in eighth grade with an accent that slid and scooted all over the map. It was worse than Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. But her accent on the tape sounded eerily subtle and consistent. She couldn’t have repeated it now at gunpoint.

  She listened to her words as though they were someone else talking, but she remembered saying what she said and seeing what she saw. The voice, the images, were part of her but also not part of her. She remembered seeing the house, and as she closed her eyes and listened to the tape now, lying on her bed, she saw it again. The hallway, the door to the bedroom. Her old bedroom, the girl on the tape—she—said it was.

  She was no longer under hypnosis. It couldn’t last that long, could it? Dr. Rosen said he had brought her out of it. Since she’d left his office and gotten in her car to drive back home, she’d done many normal things and thought many normal thoughts. She’d pumped gas and bought a pack of Skittles. She’d cut a bunch of blue hydrangeas from the backyard and put them in a vase. She’d replenished Sawmill’s water and fished another molted skin out of his glass box. She’d helped make and eat an early dinner with her mom. She’d heard her dad come home and helped him put away the Confederate uniform he wore in the living museum at Chancellorsville every year. She certainly hadn’t continued speaking like an old-fashioned English girl. Her voice sounded normal again, and she felt, in spite of the strange and slow upheaval taking place in her head, more or less like herself.

  But as she closed her eyes and listened to the tape, the things she saw under hypnosis she saw again. She pictured herself opening the bedroom door; she saw the room just as she had before. But in the recording the girl—she—was suddenly buffeted by emotion and stopped seeing clearly. Lucy didn’t feel the pain she had felt then, so she tried to get a look around the room.

  Keeping her eyes shut, she pictured the faint glow of the yellow walls, the green, leafy cast of the light coming through two high windows. She didn’t feel as though she was making it up. She didn’t know where the image came from, but she felt as if she was investigating, poking around something that was already contained in her mind in great detail.

  There weren’t three soldiers in the room. There weren’t any, now that she looked. She could hold up a brief and fleeting image of the soldiers in there, but it didn’t stay. The picture that stayed was an empty room with a tall, canopied bed, a heavy armoire, a bureau with a cloudy mirror over it, and a row of elegant bookshelves built into the far wall. She had the strange sensation that if she could get over to that shelf, she could see the title of every book on it. But the girl—she—hadn’t gotten that far. She’d stood in the doorway, weeping.

  Downstairs in her own house a door slammed and startled Lucy. She sat up, eyes open, back in her room, which also happened to have yellow walls. She closed her eyes and opened them again. She felt as though she’d come up through fifty feet of heavy water. Now, back up on the surface and looking down, the image she’d had was blurry and far away. She couldn’t really see it anymore.

  That night she dreamed of the yellow room—the other yellow room. She saw Daniel in it, which didn’t surprise her dream-self in the least. He didn’t look the same as the Daniel she’d known in high school, but she knew it was him nonetheless. That was often how it was in dreams. He wanted to tell her something. He had that same agonized expression as on the night of the senior party. He was trying to tell her something, but he couldn’t make any noise. He had no air in his lungs. He tried and struggled, and she felt sad for him. And then she realized she knew what he was trying to say.

  “Oh, the note!” she said, taking hold of his hands. “I know about that.”

  HASTONBURY HALL, ENGLAND, 1918

  I could not believe I was dying. The good Dr. Burke knew it, and at first I didn’t believe him. I was absolutely certain he was wrong, because fate could not be that cruel, I decided, even though I had every reason to know that fate is not paying attention on that scale. But as the days passed it was impossible not to recognize that my lungs were deteriorating rather than improving. I had died of tuberculosis before; I knew how it went. And this time my lungs were already ravaged by gas. I was perhaps the person in the world least afraid of dying, but this time I could not stand it.

  There had been so many lives I had been happy to leave, even if painfully. So many times I had
been eager to start again, to see where a new life would lead with the hope that it would lead me back to Sophia. And now I had her and couldn’t stay.

  How would I find her again? Fate might eventually drop her in my lap again, but at what pace? Five hundred years? I couldn’t do it again.

  I had the power to bring an end to my life. That was wrong, maybe, but I did. Why couldn’t I live if I wanted to? I should have been able to. That’s what I thought. I wanted to live. I’d never asked my body for that before. All the stuff I knew, my head packed so full of things, it should have made some difference. I could speak Euskara. I could play the fucking harpsichord. That should have bought me something. But it didn’t. My body didn’t care.

  I knew Sophia could leave me behind. She could disappear for whole centuries, never knowing I even existed. I did the searching and remembering, she did the disappearing and the forgetting. I hated to be the one to leave her. I held on to those seventeen days as hard as I’ve ever held on to anything.

  All I could think to do was love her. That’s all a person can do.

  SOPHIA MUST HAVE known, too. She had a sorrowful, questioning look in her eyes when she came into my room that evening. As if to say, You’re not really going, are you?

  The two other occupants of my room were gone, one released from his life and the other to a facility close to his family in Sussex. I can’t say that I missed them. It gave our meetings, Sophia’s and mine, a different feel.

  “Can I tell you a secret?” she asked, looking around the room.

  “Please.”

  “This was my bedroom.”

  I sat back against the pillow. “This was your bedroom?” I glanced at the yellow walls, the tall windows with the flowered draperies, the bookshelves along the wall. It was true that it didn’t exactly have the feel of a hospital. “How can that be?”