Undeath

by Lily Levi

  Jolene looked from him, to Riley, and the room that surrounded them. “It’s all very French, isn’t it?”

  He nodded as he worked. “More true than you know.” He pointed absentmindedly to the elaborate vanity, to the bed, to the drapes, to the carpet. “All imported, but there weren’t even trains. No, all of this came by the sheer strength of horse and oxen, can you believe it? ‘Pioneer days’, they like to call it.”

  She took a paintbrush into her hands and twirled it slowly between her fingers. “It’s incredible,” she said “Must be wonderful to be rich, isn’t it? Maybe I was rich, too. Am rich, I mean. But who knows?”

  Laurie eyed her between setting paints onto the palette. “Would it matter if you weren’t?”

  She twirled the brush slower. “Not really,” she said. “I don’t think it would, no.”

  “And you,” he ventured, wondering if he might spark some memory in her, “do you remember anything at all about your family? Are they French just like everyone else?” He wanted to hear the way she laughed again.

  She stopped the brush in her hands and shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember. But if they’re French, that might be okay.”

  He smiled at her. Distinct disinterest in oneself, he’d emphasize in his notes on her. Were Maman to ever return to her ashen body and share a similar disinterest, that disinterest might extend to him, to his father, and maybe beyond that as well. He wondered if that weren’t a small cause of the amnesia the girl seemed to suffer from. If she were truly disinterested in herself, why should she struggle to regain the lost memories of her own past life? They would mean nothing to her.

  He thought briefly of showing her the clothes he’d found her in, but dismissed the suggestion as soon as it came to him. It might traumatize her. And then, of course, there had been the obituary. It might be too much, too soon. He would wait.

  He felt her eyes on him as he worked and neither spoke again until he’d finished setting the paints out for her to use.

  “Why painting?” she asked.

  “Ah,” he said, moving the easel towards her. “I thought it might help you remember something. Maybe you’ll paint and voila, it’s no longer a painting, but a memory.”

  “Or maybe I’ll only think it’s memory when really it’s nothing but paint.” She stared down at the brushes in her lap. “I can tell you’re trying to help me, though, so thank you.”

  “Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t I want to help you?”

  Cautiously, she pushed the tip of the brush into a burnt orange color. “You could’ve taken me to a hospital,” she said. She pressed the length of the bristles against the canvas in a small swoop.

  “I don’t trust them,” he said. It was the truth, if not the truth he thought she was looking for.

  She shrugged this off, almost casually, and dipped the brush back into the orange paint. “Maybe I don’t trust them either. Who can remember?”

  He tried for a smile although she wasn’t looking at him.

  “So this is a good thing between us,” he said. “I get to relieve my inner Samaritan and you get to avoid the hospital.”

  “Yes,” she whispered, slowly filling in the small circle she’d drawn at the corner of the canvas. “I guess this is a good thing.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “You paint, too,” she said between brush strokes. She was well into completing her third canvas. She’d filled the first two with a mirage of objects and things that made little sense. Scribbles, really.

  He nodded from the chair that he’d taken to sitting in through the passing weeks. “Yes,” he said after a pause. “A little, on occasion. It’s nothing very serious. I painted much more as a boy.”

  Jolene nodded as if this made perfect sense and she’d somehow already known this about him. Maybe it was the way he took so long looking at everything before he moved or said anything about it, as if he were taking in the shape and the color of whatever it was he was looking at, including herself.

  “It’s strangely satisfying,” she said. She was halfway complete with a small beach scene at the center of the canvas.

  “Yes,” he said. “Most things carry their own brand of satisfaction when done well.”

  She laughed at her own sad attempt at moving the brush to create waves. “I wouldn’t call this ‘done well’.”

  He narrowed his eyes at the mess of colors and shapes. “I don’t know.” He pointed to the top of the canvas. “This square is done very well.”

  Her cheeks warmed, even at the false praise. “Why paint?” she asked in a bid to turn his focus away from her.

  Laurie leaned back in the chair and away from her painting. “I was in a terrible accident, much like you were. It took all of a long October until I was able to walk again. Bedridden at eight-years-old, can you imagine?”

  “What happened?” she asked.

  He folded his hands in his lap and shook his head. He laughed, but it was tinted with a dark irony. “Oddly enough I can’t say I remember. An icicle, an avalanche, a great bear, who’s to say?”

  Jolene pressed the excess paint back onto the palette. “We have some things in common, then.” She could let herself wonder what other things they shared, but she seemed to know more about him than she did about herself. It didn’t bother her, but it seemed that even the effort it would take to wonder why would be too much.

  So she didn’t wonder anything at all, and instead she let the white noise of what she couldn’t remember envelop them both.

  June rolled sleepily into July and Laurie leaned in beside her to examine her newest piece.

  He smelled both clean and musky. It was a pleasant scent and she felt herself momentarily thrilled by it.

  He pointed to the right side of the canvas. “What’s this?” he asked. “This orange oval, you’ve painted it on the others as well.”

  The side of his arm touched hers and she moved her elbow away from his.

  She lifted her brush from the crooked lines of a house she was drawing and followed his gaze to the small, orange mark. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think it’s anything. A practice mark?”

  Her stomach growled, interrupting whatever thoughts were preparing to rise to the surface.

  “Dinner soon,” he said.

  She lowered her head. “Do you think we can have the meat a little more cooked this time, not as rare?” She hated to ask it, but she had to. The bloody meat had become too much.

  He smiled at her, but she could tell by the way the smile stretched awkwardly across his face that he didn’t feel the emotion behind it. “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

  July danced onward, undisturbed and warm. Jolene continued to paint and Laurie sat with her while she did, changing out her canvases, refreshing her palette, and cleaning her brushes. She still couldn’t walk and so he entertained her in the best way he could have known how, with books and impossible stories of his own. What she liked most of all was that as the days passed, he stopped asking her questions that she couldn’t possibly answer. She could lie back in the bed and listen to his voice, dark and gentle. He never seemed to tire until she grew tired herself, and then he would leave her to her own devices, and, when she called for him again in the morning, he would arrive with Riley at his heels and a fresh batch of mixed paints.

  It was a routine that she felt a deep contentment with. A small part of her mind sometimes poked sharply at her and demanded to know forgotten things, but there was nothing to be done. Instead, she let herself bask in the hot white noise of the long summer days in that antique-laden bedroom.

  Truly, she was content.

  She almost felt that she could stay there for one hundred years and not want anything more than what he provided her.

  But nothing lasts forever and even she knew that.

  The question came suddenly to her lips, like a cold breeze that slips through the trees in the middle of summer, weighted by an unbearable heat.

  “Did you find
anything else when you found me?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, lowering the worn copy of Moby Dick that he’d been reading aloud. “You had nothing but your clothes.”

  She tried to remember what it was she’d woken up in the month before, but reaching back was too difficult. “Pajamas?” she asked, pinching the front of the starched white material, like a long shirt. “Was it a shift like this one? God, I hope not. Please tell me I wasn’t wearing this when you found me.”

  He studied her for a moment and she could see how his jaw worked to form words he wouldn’t say. He reached into the drawer of the bedside table. “You don’t remember letting me help you out of these, I know, but here they are.” He pulled a pair of cut-off shorts and a green plaid shirt out from the bottom of the drawer.

  Her face grew hot and she shook her head. “I must’ve been… must’ve been…” She let her words trail off. Naked, she wanted to say.

  “A little woozy at the time,” he finished for her. “Here, you can see how dirty they are. I didn’t think you’d like to wake up in them. I ought to have cleaned them for you. I will, if you’d like.”

  She stared at him, at the angle of his jaw, his straight nose, his dark hair, his gray eyes, his broad shoulders, his olive-colored skin. She thought she should’ve been upset, but the only thought that raced through her head was that he’d seen her naked – or nearly naked.

  “It’s okay,” she said, reaching out for them. “Did you go through them, through the pockets?”

  “Yes,” he said, unabashed. He handed her the folded clothes. “I thought I might find a wallet or something else to identify you with, but all I found was that.”

  Jolene pulled the folded piece of newspaper out from the front pocket of her old shorts. How strange to think of them as her shorts. She couldn’t remember ever wearing them at all.

  She unfolded the clipping.

  Laurie lit a cigarette for her.

  She held the cigarette near her mouth with one hand and the newspaper clipping in the other. “It’s an obituary,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “Jean Rose Lipton,” she read. Below the name, there was a picture of a freckled woman with curly hair standing in front of a small rosebush. “Forty-six,” she read. “Jean was a devoted wife and mother. She’d liked to ski and co-chaired a mental health awareness foundation in Willapa Bay, Washington, where she’d lived with her husband Mark and their two children, Shaun and Jodie.

  “Someone you loved?” he asked quietly. “I hadn’t wanted to upset you. I should’ve told you.”

  Jolene refolded the newspaper and brought the cigarette back up to her mouth. “I don’t know.”

  She closed her eyes against the warm glow of the orange sun that had invaded the room through the open window. “But I would think I knew her,” she said. “Why would I have something like that with me?”

  She dreamt of falling. When she landed, she found herself standing in the middle of a vast desert.

  The baked mud beneath her feet stretched on for miles in all directions. There was no wind and no clouds in the oddly-colored sky. There were no trees or rocks.

  She found herself moving forward in the direction of the setting sun, only it couldn’t have been the sun. She knew in some instinctual way that there wasn’t supposed to be a sun in this red wasteland, but nevertheless, she marched towards it.

  Until she wasn’t anymore.

  The sun-that-wasn’t-a-sun darted across the sky and she had to turn to find it. It quivered, orange and hot, a circle but not a circle.

  She started back in the direction she’d already come.

  It flew back over her head without a sound, but this time she could feel its massive heat against her skin.

  She stopped where she stood and waited for the strange sun to switch positions in the sky once more.

  Sweat trickled down the sides of her forehead. It burned her eyes and she could taste the salt on her lips. She closed her eyes to mop the sweat away and when she opened them again, the darting sun was gone.

  When she woke, the room was dark and heavy with heat. She pulled the sheet away from her body and lay quietly in a damp pool of her own sweat. The orange sun was gone and somewhere deep within her, in a place she couldn’t quite reach, she felt the gnawing of disappointment and loss.

  Her heart thundered at the feeling of a memory, if that’s what it was. She’d lost something very important.

  She tried to recall the freckled face of the woman in the obituary, but she couldn’t match the feeling of loss with the woman’s face. There was something else connected to the newspaper clipping and it was far darker than loss or disappointment.

  She closed her eyes and searched for sleep, but the ghosts of memories, at once there and not there, refused to let her rest.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When she opened her eyes again, the dark heat of the night had died away. Cool morning air filtered in through the lace curtains. Filtered sunlight played against the silver handles of a dark wood dresser. The gold trim of the peeling wallpaper glimmered fadingly.

  She sat up in the bed and let her mind wander back to the obituary, now safely tucked behind her pillow.

  There was a gentle knocking at her door. He was never late.

  Jolene ran her fingers furiously through her hair and stretched to see her face in the warped mirror at the other side of the room. She didn’t find herself pretty, but Laurie never made her feel like she was anything else. In fact, it didn’t seem to be something that he paid very much attention to at all, though she found him to be entirely handsome. She couldn’t tell him that, of course, and secretly imagined that he felt the same way about her.

  She frowned at the sallow tint of her skin. It needed to feel the sun.

  He knocked a second time.

  “Come in,” she said.

  The savory smell of hot blood sausages and coffee swam into the room.

  Her stomach turned. She didn’t know how to tell him that she didn’t want to eat the blood sausages anymore. It was probably the only thing he knew how to cook and she didn’t want to offend him.

  “Breakfast is served,” he said, balancing the silver tray in one hand.

  “You look nice today,” she said, idly lighting a cigarette. “Maybe ‘dapper’ is the word you’d use, though.”

  His red suspenders contrasted brilliantly with a cream-colored linen shirt and brown trousers. Balancing the tray, he offered her a small bow. “A swell compliment, my dear Miss Summers.”

  “Are you going on a fancy little errand?” She’d come to enjoy their innocent banter.

  He pushed the cigarettes across the table and set the tray down. “I must always be put together,” he said. “One must be entirely presentable when one is hosting such a refined guest as I find here, settled into my own home.”

  She wrinkled her nose up at him and allowed herself another glance into the vanity mirror. It was strange that she hadn’t forgotten her own face, but she couldn’t remember the parents who’d given it to her.

  She pushed up the sides of her wavy, knotted hair to add more volume. “I’m a mess,” she said, letting her hands fall.

  “Yes,” he agreed, sitting down beside her. “You’re a little bit of a disaster.” He began to cut the bloody sausages for her with a pearl-handled knife.

  She tried not to breathe in the smell, but it was impossible. “Do you think I knew how to cook before all of this?” she asked.

  He stopped cutting and pretended to examine her face very closely. “Hmm, I see none of the common telltale markings of a chef,” he said. “What’s more, you don’t strike me as the kind of girl to enjoy a well-lit kitchen.”

  She lifted her chin up at him. “Well then, what do I strike you as?”

  “A romper,” he said, cutting into the sausages again. “You like to be outside, going places, doing things. You’re nothing like me and that’s all very well.” He paused as though to consider what he’d said. “I’m afrai
d you must be terribly bored.”

  She shrugged at him. “I’m not. Maybe we’re more alike than you think.”

  A warm breeze reached through the curtains, bringing on its arms the fresh scent of pine needles and saltwater.

  Outside.

  It had always been there, just on the other side of the window, but she realized in that moment that she’d never had any interest in seeing it.

  You liked to be outside, he’d said.

  She reached her hand out and touched his, stopping him. “Laurie,” she said.

  His lifted his eyes to hers and lowered the knife. “Yes?”

  “Can we eat outside today?”

  He licked his lips before speaking. “Would you like to try to walk again?” He looked to the window as if to examine the weather.

  She nodded. “I’ll still need help but I’d like to see what’s outside.” She pointed to the window. “I’m starting to find that being in one room all of the time can get a little, what’s the word I’m looking for, claustrophobic.”

  He smiled warmly at her. “You grow in curiosity like a spring weed.”

  She laughed and pushed the sheets away from her legs. “And you speak like someone from a Shakespeare play.” She moved her bare legs around to the side of the bed. She still couldn’t walk on her own, but she was getting there. Laurie was patient and spent time every day helping her to shuffle around the carpet.

  “I could do worse than a Shakespearean character,” he said. “Hamlet? Macbeth? Othello? Which do you prefer I be?”

  “All of them,” she said. “All of them at once. Will you grab the cigarettes?” But the tin was already in his hand.

  He wrapped an arm around her waist and helped her stand. “It doesn’t hurt today, does it?”

  Her feet sunk into the plush carpet. “No,” she said. “But it still kind of tickles.” She wrapped her own arm around his waist and instantly felt how muscled and warm he was beneath his linen shirt. She bit her lip.