She sat down on a bench and watched small cars go by. Could she really?
She got into her tiny rented car and unfolded the directions with shaking hands. She began the drive she had imagined so many times.
THE GATE AND the park leading up to the house were not exactly as she had pictured them. She realized, as she drove up to the front of the house, that she might actually suffer a different kind of torment on this trip.
She’d come here prepared to blow up the universe as it existed, pumped with adrenaline and ready to do the deed. But what if there was no point? What if the house wasn’t especially familiar or resonant at all? What if she didn’t find any letter? What if there never was one? What if her connection to the place was nothing special at all? Maybe it had been used as the set of an old movie she’d seen and forgotten. Maybe her knowledge of it could easily be explained. That seemed to her drearily likely as she drove over the silted, sad-looking river. That was no Rubicon. She parked the car and got out.
It looked the way she expected in its broadest outlines, but different in almost every particular. It didn’t help that the place was practically falling down. It was hard to imagine the gardens had ever been magnificent. On one side of the house a farm stand stood, and a shop where you could buy postcards and teacups with a picture of the house on them. On the other, she knew, lived an old man. He was Constance’s nephew, or something like that.
Lucy walked toward the shop. She knew they offered a tour of the house and grounds for a mere seven pounds, and she had come prepared.
The middle-aged woman running the farm stand was also in charge of the shop, it appeared. “How can I help you?” she called to Lucy, who stood in the door of the deserted shop.
“I’d like a tour of the house, please,” Lucy said, walking over.
The woman shook her head. “I’m afraid our tour guide is out today.”
“I thought there were tours between ten and three every day,” Lucy said. “Should I come back tomorrow?”
The woman cast a long-suffering look at the other side of the house. “You can try. The truth of it is, he comes when he pleases.”
Lucy had not anticipated this problem, but it turned out to be a boon. She opened her purse and took a ten-pound note in her hand. “I’m a student from the United States, studying English country houses.” She held out the note. “I could just give myself a tour. I don’t mind. I promise you I won’t drag in mud or touch anything,” she said.
The woman hesitated, but not for very long. “That’s all right, then,” she said, accepting the note. “I suppose there’s no harm if you take yourself around. Just stay out of the rooms behind closed doors. And as you say, you mustn’t touch anything.”
“Of course,” Lucy said. “I won’t be long.”
“Come back this way on your way out, will you, love?”
“Yes, I will.”
She pointed. “The tour starts from inside the shop. Just go to the back and through the double doors.”
“Thank you,” Lucy said with a drumming in her head.
In the front of the shop Lucy noticed that alongside the postcards and gooseberry jam was an impressive-looking monograph on the history of the house and gardens. She ran back out to the farm stand and gave the woman another ten-pound note. “I’d like this, too, please,” she said, holding up the book. She clutched it in her sweating hand as she walked back through the shop and into the house.
God, the smell. As Lucy walked into the house, the smell was enough to persuade her she couldn’t have known it from a movie or a photograph. It was neither disgusting nor sweet, but old. There was no one identifiable element in it—it was probably a mix of hundreds of things over hundreds of years—but she knew it absolutely. It suggested a feeling, a mood, a strange sort of pain that came from a deep, unused part of her. She stopped and stood still for a while and felt grateful to be alone.
The interior of the house had been reconfigured a bit, she suspected, but she knew the way to the main staircase. She passed familiar rooms. She paused outside the music room. Her eyes trailed over a sort of miniature painted piano. A harpsichord, her mind supplied unexpectedly. Had Constance played that?
She knew she should make her way up to the room. She might need to take some time there, and she didn’t want the farm-stand lady coming after her. She walked up the stairs, anticipating the give and creak of each step. There were the tapestries, faded by three centuries of sunlight and three centuries of gentle dust. A shaft of light wove feebly through a large window of dirty stained glass. She could imagine standing under it, watching the patches of colored light decorate her arms. Was that a memory?
She turned right at the landing. Now, this hallway was a place that looked exactly as she expected. The depth of the windows set in the thick plaster, the pattern of the floorboards. There were several doors coming off it. Hers was at the end. She recalled, standing in front of it, that she wasn’t supposed to open any doors. She turned the knob and felt great relief when the door pushed open. She could see why it wasn’t part of the tour. The walls were shabby but still the old yellow. There were a few pieces of furniture from the sixties or seventies, Lucy guessed, stacked up against one wall. There were some old, rusted lawn chairs pushed against another. The shape of the room was handsome and the ceilings were high, but it had been left to dust and spiders. She wondered if it had been used for anything but storage since the Second World War. Under a sheet was the armoire she’d pictured in her mind.
Now she turned to the bookshelves. Filthy sheets of plastic covered most of them. Without thinking too much, she went to the middle of the three units and moved the plastic aside. Just below eye level was a shelf with a couple of baskets and a few books. She slid the books aside. The compartment was behind them, just as she knew it would be. Shit, she thought. Here we go.
She put the monograph down. Her hands were shaking and black with grime as she turned the flat latch and opened it. She peered in, but there wasn’t enough light to see. She was scared to put her hand in. Her fear that she would find the letter was almost perfectly balanced by her fear that she wouldn’t. Both were unthinkable at this point.
She realized her throat was full and aching, and that she was barely breathing. She put her hand in. She felt nothing at first and experienced the worst kind of trauma. There was nothing there. Just rough wood and dust. What a waste. What a disappointment.
She put her hand in farther, all the way to the back, and the second trauma began. There was not nothing. There was something. Stuck against the back of the compartment was a piece of paper folded many times. Carefully, Lucy took hold of it and drew it out.
She held it for a moment. She closed her eyes, caught between two sets of perceptions, old and new. Remembering then and doing now. Was this the explanation for déjà vu? She had the sensation of both folding it up to hide it away and unfolding it carefully to discover its secrets. There it was. Yellowed, faded, but perfectly legible, written in a serious hand with little flourish or joy. She glanced to the bottom and saw Constance’s signature. It felt momentous but not grand. She could almost feel the pen in Constance’s fingers. It was the hand of a sad and determined girl. Whether she guessed it or remembered it she didn’t know.
She sat down in the middle of the floor to read it. She wiped her eyes with blackened fingers as she looked at the first words.
She had to steady herself before she went on. She had to find her courage. This was the alternate universe. She was in it now, and she couldn’t go back. This was a world where you could remember things that happened to you before you were born. This was a world where you could communicate with yourself long after you died and fall in love with a boy you didn’t know again and again.
Please believe him. Keep your heart open to him. He can make you happy. He has always loved you, and you once loved him with all your heart.
BELGIAN CONGO, 1922
CONSTANCE LOOKED OUT at the dim room from inside her fever. It swath
ed her closer and more comfortingly than the yards of insect netting. She dreamed that it was the same fever that had curled around Daniel and carried him away, and that it could somehow take her to where he was.
She heard her fellow nurses and nuns bustling around her, readying themselves for the day of mending limbs and saving souls, but she would stay where she was. They gave her encouraging looks as they left her. She wished she had as much hope for her life as they did. Sister Petra put a hand to her head and left her a glass of water. They’d tried the regular treatments. There wasn’t much you could do at this stage for the kind of malaria she had.
Constance had been in Leopoldville for almost two years. She’d received her nursing certificate six months after the war had ended and left for Africa soon after, part of a delegation that included Nurse Jones and two of the doctors from Hastonbury. Some good souls had an insatiable appetite for healing and fixing, and she liked to count herself as one of them, but she suspected her motives were a bit more complicated. Here, at least until she’d gotten sick, she’d been occupied every moment of the day. There was the noise and bustle of neediness all around her in the hospital, and at night in her dormitory, a good soul sleeping on either side. She’d needed to get away from the multitude of ghosts at Hastonbury: her mother, her brother, her grieving, deluded father. And of course, Daniel. She didn’t think she could stand to stay home and lose any more.
Daniel would be ahead of her by three years, give or take. That wasn’t much. It wasn’t so bad to think of dying, knowing she wouldn’t be far behind him.
She knew she shouldn’t think like that. She was just twenty-three. It wasn’t the full, happy life Daniel had encouraged. But loneliness had gotten its grip on her, and it wouldn’t let go.
In her fever-dreams she often thought forward to the person she would be next. It didn’t feel morbid to her but sort of exciting. Where would she turn up, and what would she be like? Would Daniel really be able to find her, as he’d promised? Would he be able to love her? What if she had warts on her nose and gas and bad breath and spat when she talked?
She thought of the note she had written and left in her old bedroom. How would she get herself to find it? How would she get herself to even remember to look? There had to be a way, and she would figure it out. She would not stay quiet inside her new self, whomever she was. She intended to give herself a very hard time.
She often thought of the very beginning. She tried again and again to pinpoint the mysterious thing that had happened in those seventeen days she’d spent with him. When he’d first woken up and called her by the wrong name, she’d pitied him and patronized him, as she’d done with many of the boys. Not out of meanness. But because there were so many of them and their needs were so vast and there was only one of her. She’d thought D. Weston was an exceptionally handsome and particularly addled version of the same, and that was all. He was too sick to be denied her indulgence. She’d listen to any madness that came out of his mouth and nod thoughtfully at the right times. She wished she’d listened more closely, less skeptically, so that she could remember it better now.
Because something happened. The addled things were true things. Too many of them to discount. And the way he said them, the odd way he saw her and knew her, cut to the very center of her. He didn’t tell his stories like someone who read about them. His vision of the world was momentous, and it included her. Nothing in her small life could compare after that. In seventeen days her pity had turned into profound regard and overwhelming devotion. He was holding on to her, all of her places and parts, in a way she couldn’t do for herself.
“Why do you always call me Sophia?” she asked him once, knowing how tenaciously he hung on to it.
“Because if I don’t, I really could lose you,” he told her.
SHE’D TRIED TO do what mattered after he died, by taking care of the neediest. For each sick, swollen child Constance sent on her or his way, she knew the child would come back something better. It couldn’t be worse. You, be a duchess, she’d say to a tiny body. Turn your nose up at the slightest error in fashion. You, be an MP, she’d say to another. Argue and bully the days away, and feed your fat belly on beefsteak and port all the nights.
She’d done her best here, but some big part of the real, living, forward-leaning part of her died when Daniel did. She’d sensed it at the time, and she knew it now. Maybe the malaria sensed it, too.
She hoped that God, or whoever it was who ruled these matters, wouldn’t punish her too grievously for it. Please forgive me for not trying harder. It’s not that I don’t love life; I do. It’s just that this one is too lonely.
HOPEWOOD, VIRGINIA, 2007
SHE HADN’T BEEN back to high school since the disastrous night of the Senior Ball, and she thought she might never go back at all. But at seven in the evening, the day before Lucy was set to go back up to Charlottesville to begin her last year of college, that’s where she went.
She went in a side door. There were maintenance people staying late to get the school ready for the start of a new year. She’d seen the mowers buzzing across the playing fields, two men painting fresh white lines on the football field. In the halls they were fixing mistreated lockers, scrubbing graffiti from the painted cinder-block walls. They should make the students do that stuff, she found herself thinking.
She watched it all with half her mind, watching herself watch it, watching herself watching herself watch it, unsure of how to think about the simplest things.
These days she took her body from place to place. She’d traveled back from England, packed up her room at home. She’d retrieved Sawmill from the thirteen-year-old neighbor who’d taken care of him in her absence. (She’d begged the thirteen-year-old to adopt him permanently, but the thirteen-year-old’s mother said no.) She’d shopped for school supplies. She’d even bought herself two new shirts at Old Navy. She’d stood in the fitting room, staring at herself in the mirror and not being able to tell who she was. She went around with a broken heart, and she wasn’t sure who’d broken it. She thought it was herself, mostly.
She walked past her senior locker, remembering the pictures and notes she had pinned to the inside of it. She remembered the little pink-edged mirror in which she’d watched for Daniel in the hallway, sneaking longer looks in reflection than she would dare straight on. She could almost see him with his slouchy jeans hanging off his butt like every single other boy in the school. He was odd and far away, but he wanted to fit in. She could picture the shoes he always wore, tan suede Wallabees that looked like they’d been made in 1972 and came untied easily. She wondered things now that she hadn’t thought of then. Who washed his jeans? Who cooked his dinner? Who gave him shit when he bombed a test? She thought maybe no one. But somebody had to have done it once.
She went into the chemistry room. She shut the door behind her and sank into a desk chair. She put her hands over her eyes. She was afraid the ghosts would come for her here, and when they didn’t, she found herself wishing they would.
She didn’t know what to do. She wanted to find Daniel. Beyond that, she didn’t know what else to want or how to live. She hadn’t set foot in a pottery studio in more than a year. She let her old garden go to weeds and blight; not even the raspberries were coming this year. She’d always had a drive to grow things and make things with her hands, but she didn’t know how to make herself want it anymore. She wasn’t sure how to care about her future. She was an adult; in nine months she’d graduate from college. She was supposed to be putting her life together right now, and all she could seem to do was throw grenades at it. How was she supposed to move on from him?
She remembered a dream she once had, where she was standing between two compartments on a train. It was dark, roaring along a curving track, and she kept trying to get into the compartment in front of her. She pounded on the door and kicked it and screamed at it, but it stayed locked. At last she gave up and went back to the compartment behind her, and discovered that it was locked, too.
>
She had wronged Daniel that night. She felt bad for it. What if she had just listened? It wouldn’t have been that hard. She could have challenged him, argued with him, even asked him a question. That was probably what Constance had done. Lucy could have said, Man, you kiss like an angel, but why are you calling me Sophia? She hadn’t given him a chance to explain himself, let alone prove anything. She had just raced away from him like a quivering hysteric.
Maybe because they got everything in the wrong order. They were practically devouring each other before they could introduce themselves. No Where do you come from? or Do you have any brothers or sisters? It seemed natural to get right into his arms at the time. It seemed necessary. She was hungry for him, and she now understood a little better why. She couldn’t keep her hands off him, actually. Maybe that was not a good thing.
It was too intense. It was too much for her. The visions that invaded her mind made her think she was going crazy, and that was always her worst fear. She didn’t want to end up like Dana. She’d always held on to her mind as tight as she could.
Maybe she feared a mind invasion because that’s exactly what Constance was trying to do. It made sense now why Lucy was prone to out-of-place memories and dark dreams, why she was so susceptible in the hands of a psychic or hypnotist. Her consciousness was full of holes, and Constance was the one who’d poked them. Constance was dying to press her message through. She buried her treasure in plain sight and begged Lucy to find it.
Sometimes Lucy wondered about the other letter, the one Daniel had written Constance before he died. It wasn’t in the compartment by the time Lucy got there. Maybe Constance had taken it with her to Africa. That’s what Lucy would have done. But really there was no way to know what happened to it, and it frustrated Lucy to think of what little she knew, what few tiny scraps she had to hold on to.
My Name Is Memory Page 17
