My Name Is Memory

by Ann Brashares

  She laughed in spite of herself.

  “We can go anywhere we like.”

  “And what else?”

  “We can do anything we like. We can get married. We can not get married and live in sin. We can get jobs. We can not get jobs. We can loaf around. We can live at the top of a skyscaper. We can live in the middle of the water in a house on stilts. We can make love every day.”

  “Twice a day.”

  “Three times a day.”

  She lifted her eyebrows. “Three times a day?”

  “We’ve got a lot of making up to do.”

  She nodded. “We can get old together.”

  “That’s what I wish for.”

  “Maybe have a baby or two.”

  Her face was so rapt in the fantasy that he hated to let her down. He knew his expression was hard to read. “I don’t know if that’s in the cards for me,” he said.

  He could tell she wanted to ask him why not, but the loudspeaker blared and they were suddenly calling her flight.

  He picked up her bag and they hustled down the terminal to the last gate. First class was most of the way through boarding.

  “This is you,” he said.

  “This is first class.”

  “So’s your ticket.”

  “No, it’s not. Is it?”

  “The big Mexico swimming vacation I took you on wasn’t very comfortable. I was hoping to improve my record.”

  “I’d rather be uncomfortable if we could stay together.”

  “I know. We will be together soon. I’m going to start making plans for our first real vacation. I’m going to take you to Budapest and Athens, and then I want you to see Turkey again. I don’t think you remember it as well as I do.”

  She shook her head.

  “We’re going to stay in a palace in Istanbul and then go back to Pergamum, and you are going to get a tour like nothing you ever imagined.”

  She nodded. There were tears in her eyes, and he put his arms around her. “Once he is gone, Lucy, we can do anything in the world we want. But until he is gone, we will live like prisoners and we can’t. I don’t want to wait around for things to happen anymore. I’ve spent too long doing that. I get defeated or discouraged, and I die because I figure there’s always a new life and it will be better. But nothing can be better than this life, because I have you.”

  She held him hard. He felt her sniffling in his armpit. “Where will you go?”

  “I’m going to find him. I’m going to destroy him before he can destroy us.”

  “How do you destroy someone like him? Is that even possible?”

  “I think it is. I’m sure it is. I need to figure it out, but I have a friend I think can help me.”

  She lifted her head. “It scares me to hear you talk like that. He’s vicious, and you’re not. It makes me scared you aren’t coming back.”

  “I am coming back.”

  “In this life.”

  “In this life.”

  “But how can you be sure?” She was crying openly now. They were down to boarding the very back of the plane.

  “Because I’ve got something to live for, and he’s only got vengeance. Because I can see and he can’t.”

  “Yeah, but he’s probably got ten guns and five bombs and a whole set of knives.”

  “So I’ll get that, too. I’m smarter than him, Lucy. If I have the time to think it through, that will be my advantage. I’m bigger than him, and I won’t be the victim any longer. I won’t be running from him.”

  “What if you don’t come back? I feel like Constance and Sophia and all the others who got left with a broken heart.”

  “It was me with the broken heart, Lucy. I carried it longer than anyone.”

  She looked at him thoughtfully. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did we ever . . . you know . . . do stuff before?”

  He loved the blush in her face. “You mean like hook up?” he asked her teasingly.

  She smiled. “Yeah. Did we ever hook up before this?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Never?” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “I think I’d remember.”

  “Not once in all those thousand years?”

  “Not once.”

  “I don’t just mean actual sex, but not even like, you know.” She had to stop because she was laughing. “Third base?”

  “No. Not even. Not even like, you know, second. Barely first.”

  “Well, there. We’ve got something to be proud of, don’t we?”

  He laughed and picked her up off the floor. “If that’s not enough to keep me alive and coming back for you, Lucy, then there’s nothing in this world that is.”

  PARO, BHUTAN, 2009

  THE LANDSCAPE WAS more beautiful than he had promised. The monastery was laid out on a remote hillside over the Paro River valley in the Eastern Himalayas. Every morning she looked beyond the valley to a far line of peaks so stunningly high and deeply faceted and glittering white she counted them more as sky than earth.

  Lucy was treated by the monks as a most honored guest, and she understood that was because her arrangements had been made by an Indian woman, a close friend of Daniel’s, whose name, oddly enough, was Ben.

  She understood why Daniel wanted her to come here. The devotion to the spirit was more pervasive than anything she’d experienced, and their belief in reincarnation was fundamental. They picked their highest lama not by any hereditary line but by searching for the boy the old lama had reincarnated into. She understood why Joaquim would not come here.

  She’d had a few small adventures. With her eager guide, Kinzang, who was all of twelve, she’d visited the capital city of Thimphu and gone to an archery contest and the weekend market. She had made treks through the valley and seen things she’d never thought to see in her life. Terraced rice paddies, orchards flowing down the mountainside, a monastery called the Tiger’s Nest perched on a cliff. She’d worked alongside the monks in the monastery garden and learned the names of dozens of unfamiliar plants in Dzongkha. She’d begun to learn weaving from a local woman in the village, and she’d taken to it quickly and eagerly. She’d begun wearing the traditional kira.

  But mostly she stayed within the confines of the monastery, reading, writing letters, weeding in the garden, and learning to meditate. The monks were kind to her and patient to teach her, but they spoke very little, and she couldn’t understand what few words they said. She was cut off, and she was lonely. She missed her parents, and she missed Marnie. She’d told them she’d been awarded a last-minute fellowship—an opportunity she couldn’t possibly turn down—to study Himalayan gardens and could be reached only by letter.

  More than anything she missed Daniel. The ache of missing him hung on her like a cloud and followed her everywhere she stepped. It got into her eyes and her nose and her mouth and her ears and changed the air around her.

  She read each of his letters hundreds of times, trying to wring out every feeling, every scrap of information, every possible smell or molecule of him that might have traveled with it. She lingered for hours over the list he’d written for her in the airport. It was just a stupid list, but he’d spilled a drop of his drink on it as they sat together in the bar, and now she put her finger on the brown blurring dot and felt as though he was real.

  She’d begun to feel sick to her stomach after the first month. She thought it was the yak meat or the butter tea or the vast number of chilies that turned up in every dish. The food was mostly delicious, but it just didn’t agree with her, she thought. She’d tried to eliminate various ingredients from her diet until she was barely eating at all, and that made her stomach feel worse. By the second month she realized she hadn’t gotten her period since before Mexico and put the evidence together.

  And then she began to feel scared. A baby was the one thing Daniel had not dreamed up for their life together. It was the thing he didn’t want. She didn’t know why
, and she didn’t know what to do about it. She couldn’t tell him. She tried, but she couldn’t. She was twenty-three years old, unmarried, and alone in a strange world. She couldn’t have a baby, but she had no idea how not to. She wrote him letter after letter intending to tell him, but she didn’t tell him.

  At the beginning of her third month in Paro his letters stopped. She continued writing to him every day, but with diminishing hope as the days passed that he would ever read them. She thought of him with a deepening anguish.

  Time stretched out horribly, but comfort came from three unexpected places. First were the letters from Marnie, full of questions and doubts Lucy couldn’t answer, and yet overfull of uncomplicated, unstinting love. It was a miracle, almost, how Marnie could love even when she didn’t understand. It was a miracle and a lesson.

  Second were the letters from her father. He described his latest Civil War reenactment with humor, his concerns for her safety with intimacy. In an age of cell phones and e-mail, she’d never realized this was his métier. As rigid as he seemed in person, he was oddly demonstrative in ballpoint pen. She found herself wondering whether he’d ever written a letter to Dana.

  Third, as the weeks passed, was the heaviness in the bottom of her abdomen. It turned every taste and smell sour, and yet it provided an odd sense of companionship. She wasn’t quite alone. It was hers and his together, no matter whether he wanted a baby or not. She prayed it wouldn’t be all she had of him.

  You promised me, she said to him in her thoughts every morning and night and a thousand times in between. I love you. I won’t give up on you.

  NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA, 2009

  Dearest Lucy,

  I may not be able to send this letter today or even tomorrow, but you are in my mind and my heart every minute. I won’t try to describe exactly where I am. But I am safe and will tell you everything when it is done. There is a lot to say that can’t be written or even thought right now.

  I’ve begun to see what this adversary of ours can do, and it is beyond what I imagined. This thing I am trying to do has to be done. I know that even more urgently now. To kill him is not enough. I’ve learned to think on a big canvas, if nothing else. I know what I have to do and how to do it.

  So what do I do for fun, you ask?

  I think of you. I think of you wearing a kira and digging your hands in the dirt of the garden they have there. I think of you taking off your shoes and socks and dunking your feet in the fishpond. I think of you putting your hair behind your ears. I think of you drinking tea. I think of you sleeping. (Seriously, I do. That’s my idea of fun, and I don’t care what you say.) I think of all the different parts of your body—and no, not just the ones you think I’m thinking of. I picture the scar on your shoulder, and I picture me kissing it as though that’s going to help it heal right. I picture us together. I picture us making love three times a day. (You promised.) I picture you lying in my arms for hours and hours after all this is done, and me telling you everything that’s happened. It’s quite a story, and by then it will be a better story, because I’ll know how the ending goes.

  I don’t want to say more now. You are with me, my Lucy, in every idea, every calculation, every lust, every stumble, every triumph, and every grief. What I see, I see with your eyes, too, and with you I am more determined and better than I could ever be without you.

  I know this letter is devoid of any real information, and I apologize for that. You can punch me for it later. But I realize I write it as a kind of prayer. I pray that even without getting it (or the letter I wrote you last night or the one I will write you tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow) you will know what’s in it: that I am safe and above all that I am with you wherever I am, that there is no force on this earth or length of time that will keep me from you. I will come back. My love for you is truer than anything I have known in this long, very long, life.

  Love demands everything, they say, but my love demands only this: that no matter what happens or how long it takes, you’ll keep faith in me, you’ll remember who we are, and you’ll never feel despair.

  Yours forever,

  Daniel

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With love and thanks, I acknowledge Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, my muse for this story. I thank my editor, Sarah McGrath, for giving her immense talent wholeheartedly. I thank my two most enthusiastic readers and advisers, Margaret Riley and Britton Schey. I am deeply indebted to Tracy Fisher and Alicia Gordon, both great champions of this book. And with warmest appreciation, I acknowledge the entire outstanding team at Riverhead and Penguin, including Sarah Stein, Stephanie Sorensen, Geoff Kloske, and Susan Petersen Kennedy.

  I thank my wonderful, inspiring parents, Jane Easton Brashares and Bill Brashares. Last and most, I thank my beloved family, Sam, Nate, Susannah, and Jacob. We are five good trampoline builders.