“Before it was requisitioned.”
“Really. You lived here?” It was clear from her accent and her manners that she was well born, but I hadn’t realized quite how well. I considered this. “So I have been sleeping in your bedroom.”
She nodded a little mischievously.
“I like that.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. Very much. Where do you live now?”
“In one of the cottages by the river.”
“Do you mind it?”
“Not at all. I’d be happy to stay, even after the war.”
“But you’ll move back here?”
“I suppose we will. If it ever ends.”
“You don’t want to?”
She shrugged. “It’s not cheerful here anymore. It’s far too big for just my father and me, and the gardens are all grown over.”
The thought of her being born in this grand house made my claims on her seem a bit far-fetched to me. She was probably Lady Constance. She was back to being the magistrate’s wife, and I was the barefoot orphan.
Once I knew her relationship to the house, it started to fascinate me. It was an old house and full of old things. Because I was dying, she brought me some clothes from a grandfather or great uncle and discreetly vanished while I struggled to put them on. Because I was dying, she agreed to take me on a walk through the upper floors and pointed out places where famous men and women had slept, sometimes together.
The next afternoon she brought me books from the vast library.
“If you’ve lived as long as you say, you’ve probably read all of these.”
I studied the spines. “Most of them.” I pointed to the Ovid. “I read this in Latin. And the Aristotle in Greek.”
“So you read Latin and Greek, do you?” She could tell by my accent and my rank that I was not a product of public school. She had that challenging look, but it had a few parts of affection in it, too.
“How could I not, being around so long?”
“What other languages do you know?”
I shrugged. “A lot of them.”
“Which ones?”
“Ask me one and I’ll tell you.”
“Arabic?”
“Yes.”
“Russian?”
“Not the modern way, but yes.”
Her nod was dubious but amused. “Right. And German?”
“Of course.”
“Japanese?”
“No. Well, a little bit.”
“French?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head. “Are you being honest with me?”
“Absolutely. Always.” My face was more serious than hers.
“It’s hard to believe what you say.”
I touched the curling ends of her hair, and she let me. I was happy. “Why don’t you search your library. Try to find a book in a language I can’t read.”
She seemed to like the challenge. That night she brought me eight books in eight languages, all of which I read parts of and translated for her. She was able to test me a bit in Latin and Greek, and she knew enough Italian, French, and Spanish to be convinced.
“But these are easy,” I protested. “These are all Romance languages. Bring me Hungarian; bring me Aramaic.”
The look of teasing was gone from her face. “How do you do this?” she asked in a low voice. “You are beginning to frighten me.”
OVER THE NEXT several nights she brought me artifacts from the house. Our second challenge after books and languages was musical instruments. Her great-grandfather had been a collector. And I was able to explain the origins of all of them and play most of them. I played an aulos made of bone and a panpipe rubbed with ancient wax, and blew into a buccina of a type I actually played at two points in my military career in Anatolia. They were too old to get a true sound out of, but at least I could demonstrate.
She could only bring the ones she could carry, but one night she led me out of her old bedroom, I dressed in her grandfather’s riding breeches, to the harpsichord in the music room to play for her, which I did, and joyfully. My fingers were rusty and did not possess a great deal of talent to begin with, but the girl and the moment and my memory carried me.
Afterward, I wanted to kiss her so badly.
“You are extraordinary,” she said. “How do you do it?”
“You wouldn’t think I was extraordinary if you knew how many years I’d played. These fingers I have now can’t quite keep up with me.”
“You say that like you’ve had other fingers.”
“I have. Hundreds. You need to develop the muscles and to have certain physical gifts to play really well.”
She looked away, and I was scared I had gone too far with my hundreds of fingers. I came down from my high and realized I was tired and out of breath and felt frustrated by my stupid failing body. How was I ever going to kiss her?
“I honestly don’t know how you can be so young and do so many things,” she said softly.
“And nearly all of them are quite worthless, aren’t they?”
“How can you say that?”
“What good does it do me to play an aulos or a panpipe? They are extinct. You have no idea how much time I wasted on each of those instruments. It doesn’t add up to anything anymore.”
“It wasn’t a waste,” she said passionately.
I couldn’t help smiling at her warm, pink face. “You’re right. They gave me a chance to try to impress you.”
She regarded her ten fingers and then looked at me thoughtfully. “Didn’t it give you pleasure to learn them?” she asked. “Didn’t you like being able to play?”
“It was a long time ago, but yes, I loved being able to play,” I answered.
“Then that’s the good of them.”
OUR THIRD CHALLENGE was nautical instruments. Another of her ancestors had been a collector, so she tried me on those. Not only did I know how to work each of them, but they were tremendously rich in memories. Each one suggested a story to me. Sailing the Cape of Good Hope in a storm, navigating the straits of fire under a providential ceiling of stars. I told her about massive typhoons, terrifying landfalls, pirate invasions, and many drownings, two of which were my own. She loved to hear about sailing in and out of Venice, and I told her about Nestor the dog. She took off her shoes and sat on my bed with her feet tucked under, listening for as long as I could talk. She leaned her head against my knee, and I prayed she wouldn’t move it.
She sighed when the last lights blinked off in the hallway and she knew she had to leave. “How did a boy from Nottingham get so terribly clever at telling stories?”
“I am a boy from a lot of places. I’m just telling you things I remember.”
She looked at me critically. “I am struggling against believing you. That was no trouble at first, but now it’s become difficult.” She studied my face carefully. “There is something about you that’s not like any person I’ve met. You have a strange kind of confidence. Like you really are a man who knows the entire world. Or at least believes it.”
I laughed, just happy that she let me hold her hand so long. “It’s both, I suppose.”
“Why aren’t you famous? Why aren’t the writers writing about you and the photographers taking your picture?”
I felt hurt, and I didn’t hide it. “No one knows these things about me. I don’t tell anyone. I don’t want to be famous. And why would anyone believe me?”
“Because you can do extraordinary things.”
“And so can many others.”
“Not like you.”
I touched the bandages on my ribs. “I want to live my life as serenely as possible. I don’t want to be thought of as mad. I don’t want to be thrown into the lunatic bin, where the other people with old memories go. I don’t tell anyone these things.”
“But you told me.”
I turned to her. I felt grave, and I couldn’t act otherwise. “God, Sophia. You aren’t anyone. Haven’t you heard anything I’ve sai
d to you? You might think I’m another pathetic boy in your care, and I am. But you are everything to me.”
I was sitting up and flushed, and so determined I could barely feel my lungs or any other part of me. Sophia had dropped my hand, and she looked as though she was going to cry.
“Please try to believe me,” I said. “This didn’t happen by accident. You have been with me from the very first life. You are my first memory every time, the single thread in all of my lives. It’s you who makes me a person.”
HOPEWOOD, VIRGINIA, 2007
LUCY SPENT THE majority of her days in solitary speculation. She stood behind the back counter at Healthy Eats, blending fruit smoothies out of mountains of ingredients for a seemingly endless line of customers, but she was so deep in her thoughts that she was essentially alone. The sound of crunching ice in the blender looped in and out of constant wondering. It was the soundtrack to her summer.
She hadn’t told Marnie. She’d barely told herself. She was waiting for the right moment.
She wondered about Daniel most often. She didn’t know whether to think about him as alive or dead, but she thought about him anyway. Inside her head, he was the one she could talk to.
She felt as though she understood his solitude better. She understood it so well that she felt as though she had caught it from him like a fever. Well, first she’d caught his craziness; the solitude came more slowly. When you knew you were different, when your interior world didn’t make sense to anyone, including you, it naturally set you apart. You couldn’t keep track of what normal people were supposed to think versus what you actually thought, and the gap between them widened. The simplest interactions were a little more strained, until maybe you gave up on most of them.
I think this might be called “mental illness,” she said to herself on a few low occasions. But maybe I am on to something true, she would argue to herself. Maybe a lot of crazy people are on to something true, her self would argue back.
She’d long ago called it quits on finding a rational explanation. She was searching for the irrational explanation that best fit with all the things she had experienced. Internal consistency was as good as she was hoping for.
Some people thought you could access previous lives through hypnosis. Past-life regression, it was called. Of course, that meant accepting the premise that you had past lives, which was big, but she was putting that aside for the moment. She was accepting it in a probationary way, for the sake of conjecture. Conjecture was, after all, her constant companion, her new BFF.
So that would mean the English girl was her, Lucy, in a previous life. That, indeed, was a big one to swallow, but there it was. That would mean the enormous house really existed or had existed somewhere, presumably in England. That would mean she’d once had a mother who’d made gardens and died when she was young. That would mean that there had been a real boy she had loved who had died, whom she had called Daniel, whom she considered in her dreams to be the same person as her Daniel from high school.
That would mean there really was, or had been, a note left for . . . well, for her. That would mean there were these things in the real world and that she could, presumably, find them if they had not been lost or destroyed. It felt like quite a leap to connect these pictures in her mind to real things in the world, but that was what her hypothesis demanded. She wanted to find out. She couldn’t let it go until she did. She was going to keep chasing her craziness; she wasn’t going to let it chase her. If there was a real place and a house and a note, she was going to try to find them.
Her summer break really was turning out to be a vacation after all—a vacation from sanity. She thought fleetingly of Dana. She hoped she could make a safe trip back at the end of it.
HASTONBURY HALL, ENGLAND, 1918
She wanted to know about Sophia, so I told her. Not everything but many things. She listened with so much intensity that it was almost as though she was remembering it herself. That was what I fantasized, anyway, in the hours I had to spend without her.
“So what did we do when we rode into the desert?”
She was partly joking with me, still challenging me to see when I would run out. And she was deigning to believe me a little bit. She had begun, in spite of herself, to believe what I told her about my past. I could tell. But when she asked about herself, when I recollected her role in these adventures, she was still just playing.
“At first we were in a hurry. As I said, I needed to get you away from my beast of a brother as quickly as I possibly could.”
“And then?” I loved it when she took off her shoes and got on the bed with me.
“And then we slowed down. The desert was utterly empty. We began to feel safe. You were hungry. You ate most of the food.”
“I didn’t.”
“Oh, you did. Greedy girl.”
“Was I five hundred stone?”
I shook my head, seeing her as she was in my mind’s eye. “Hardly. You were as slender and beautiful as you are now.”
“So I was greedy and ate all the food. And then what?”
“Then I made a fire and set up a very primitive tent and put our blankets under it.”
She nodded.
“And then we both realized that the stars were extraordinary, so we moved out from under the tent.”
“That sounds nice. And then what?”
“We made tender love with the open sky as our witness.” I also loved to see the blush in her cheeks.
“No, we didn’t.”
I smiled at her. “You’re right, we didn’t.”
“We didn’t?” Now she looked disappointed, and I laughed.
“No.” Boldly, I touched her cheek. “I wanted to.”
“Maybe I did, too. Why didn’t we?” She brought her knees up to her chest.
“Because you were married to my brother.”
“The one who tried to strangle me.”
“Yes. He was murderously jealous, because he thought I was betraying him and taking advantage of you. I didn’t want to prove him right.”
“He deserved it.”
“Yes, he did. But we deserved better.”
I could see the emotion in her face. “Do you think so?”
“Yes. The regrets stay with you. They distort you over time. Even if you can’t remember them.” I touched her feet through her socks. I was hungry to touch every part of her. “And anyway, we’ll have our chance.”
I DON’T KNOW what happened to Sophia that night, but when she came in the next morning, she was different. She was both solemn and urgent.
“Dr. Burke is wrong about you. You are going to be fine.”
I couldn’t lie to her.
“You are,” she said combatively.
“Tell that to my lungs.”
“I think I will.” She put her arms around me and pressed her cheek to my chest. She had always seemed concerned about somebody else seeing us, but she didn’t seem to care now.
She held me for a long time, and then she looked up at me. “I’m sorry for what you’ve been through,” she said. “I can’t stand to think of the pain you’ve been in. You deserve better.”
“It’s all right,” I said quickly. “I’ve been through worse.” Her eyes were full of sorrow, and I didn’t want it for either of us.
“But that doesn’t make it hurt any less, does it?”
“Yes, it does,” I said forcefully. “Pain is fear, and I’m not afraid. I know I’ll have a new body soon enough.”
“You say that like your body is a room you can go in and out of.” She had her hands on my arms. “But this is you.”
I felt frustrated all of a sudden. I pointed to my chest. “This is not me. This body is breaking down, but I am not.” I didn’t want her look of sympathy. I hated to be weak in front of her. “I promise you. I will be healthy again, and I will find you.”
Her expression was tender. She was quiet for a while, and it occurred to me that she looked older than she did the first day I woke up to her.
“We deserve better,” she said softly.
“We will have better.”
“Will we?”
“Yes, we will.” I looked at her with absolute seriousness. “I don’t mind this. I can wait a little longer if I have to, because I know I will be with you again, and I will be strong again. I will take care of you and make love to you and make you happy.”
“You make me happy,” she said. She put her arms around me, and I realized I was crying into her shoulder and I didn’t want her to see. My fever was riding so high it was hard not to shiver in her arms.
“One thing, though,” she said after a while, and her voice was lighter.
“What?”
“When you find me again, how will I know it’s you?”
“I’ll tell you.”
“But what if I don’t believe you? I’m a stubborn chit, you know.”
I held her hard. “Yes, you are. But you are not hopeless.”
ON THE LAST sunny day of my life, Sophia brought me her father’s coat and led me outside. I can remember the effort it took to stay on my feet from one step to the next. We walked just far enough from the house to forget it was a hospital. She wore a bright blue wool hat and a fuzzy red dress that felt like contentment itself between my fingers. She didn’t look like a nurse but like a lovely girl without a care on a stroll with her beau in the garden. That’s how we pretended it was.
We found a patch of grass in the sunshine and lay down on it. I felt the warmth of the sun and the sweetness of her head on my shoulder, and I put my arms around her. I wished I could crawl into that moment and stay inside it without letting another one pass. In rapt silence we watched a yellow butterfly land on the toe of her boot.
“This was a butterfly garden once,” she told me. “The most magnificent thing you have ever seen.” She turned to me and smiled. “Well, maybe not the most magnificent thing you have ever seen.”
I laughed. I loved the sound of her voice. I wanted her to keep talking, and she seemed to know it.
My Name Is Memory Page 15
