And She Was

by Alison Gaylin

  “Name.”

  “Brenna Nicole Spector.”

  “Age?”

  “Fourteen and seven-eighths.”

  Dr. Lieberman gives her a smile. “Well aren’t we specific today?” He’s wearing a bright red tie with dogs and fire hydrants all over it. Dr. Lieberman has a million of these ties, which Brenna’s mother calls “whimsical,” but Brenna calls dorky—each one exponentially dorkier than the next. She wonders if Dr. Lieberman wears these idiotic ties because he actually likes them, or if he thinks they put his young patients at ease. She hopes it’s the former because on her they have the opposite effect and she’s about to tell him exactly this when Dr. Lieberman says, “March 13, 1982,” and Brenna gets knocked back three years and three months, just like that.

  She was eleven and a half, and it was her third visit to this office. Instead of Bob Dylan, there was a print on the wall, with a picture of a stained glass window—flowering branches over a blue lake and the words “New American Wing. Metropolitan Museum” underneath.

  On March 13, 1982, the office smelled like Brenna’s kitchen did when her mom forgot to clean out the coffeepot. Dr. Lieberman was wearing a brown tie with a giant Superman S at the center and when he smiled, Brenna noticed a poppy seed stuck between his two front teeth. She still wasn’t sure she liked him. It was very hot in the office, and her head hurt a little. Brenna wanted to ask for an aspirin but she didn’t feel she knew him well enough for that, and so she just sat there, hurting, as he pushed play and record on the big tape recorder.

  “Alrighty, Brenna, I’m going to put some blocks out,” Dr. Lieberman said. Then his phone rang . . .

  “On March 13, 1982, I took some blocks out of a box and set them in a line on my desk,” Dr. Lieberman says now. “Do you remember the order?”

  “How is your dog?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your dog, Shelly? She had pythiosis. Your wife, Gwen, said the doctor prescribed Natamycin?”

  Dr. Lieberman stares at her. His mouth is tight, and Brenna can see his throat moving under the collar of his blue and yellow striped shirt. Slowly up, slowly down. He removes one of the tape recorders from his top drawer, as well as a cassette with a piece of masking tape on it marked “MARCH 13, 1982.” He puts it in the recorder and presses play, and Brenna hears his voice—exactly the same as she’d heard it in her head, the same cracks and cadences. “Alrighty, Brenna, I’m going to put some blocks out—” The voice is interrupted by a ringing phone. “Sorry, Brenna. Just one moment. Hello? Gwen? I’m with a patien—Oh, how’s Shelly? What? That’s pythiosis, Gwen, not pathosis . . . Yeah, I’m familiar with—No, no, no. Natamycin is perfectly safe for a dog—”

  He clicks the tape recorder off. “Amazing,” he whispers.

  Brenna says, “Can I be blunt with you? It’s about your tie.”

  Brenna Spector felt something purr against the top of her thigh. It took her several seconds to identify it as her cell phone, to get that this was September 29, 2009, rather than June 29, 1985, that she wasn’t in Dr. Lieberman’s office at 250 West Fifty-seventh Street in New York, but . . . God. She was working.

  Brenna was in Las Vegas, at an off-the-strip casino named Nero’s Playground that Caesars Palace needed to sue for both copyright infringement and defamation of character.

  Nero’s Playground smelled a little better than the public restrooms at Nassau Coliseum, but that was only because it was less crowded. It was also a hotel, which terrified Brenna a little, as did the name of the lobby bar she was standing in right now: Orgi. With an I. Which somehow made it worse.

  Honest to God, this whole place could benefit from a good, long liquid nitrogen bath.

  Brenna was leaning against a papier-mâché Corinthian column (painted gold, to match the waitress’s mini togas and gladiator sandals) holding the world’s largest glass of cheap white wine—the Emperor’s Goblet, the shivering waitress had called it—and she was standing face-to-face with her missing person—Larry Shelby aka Rod Clement, John Thomson, Julio Vargas, and no doubt several other identities she’d yet to unearth. Because Larry had supposedly perished in a single-engine plane crash in the Berkshires five years ago, Brenna and her assistant Trent had been referring to him as the Dead Guy, which was ironic considering all the living he seemed to have done since then.

  “You checkin’ out on me, babe?” the Dead Guy asked.

  “I’m . . . getting a call.”

  “At five-thirty in the morning?”

  Brenna shrugged. “Eight-thirty my time.” She slipped her vibrating phone out of her pocket and glanced at the screen. Trent. He could wait. “Telemarketer. Once they get hold of your cell number, they’re relentless.”

  “They haven’t found me yet.”

  Why am I not surprised? “Lucky.”

  “You’ve got a real sweet smile, you know that?”

  “Thanks.” Brenna normally didn’t talk to her subjects—it was best if they didn’t see her at all—and here she was, drinking with one of them in Orgi at dawn. But her job was, by nature, unpredictable, and the best thing to do in a situation like this was to act naturally, ignore the prostitute in hot pants at the end of the bar who kept glaring at her like she was competition, and to not, under any circumstances, lapse back into another memory.

  Brenna called one of the waitresses over—a fluffy blonde with eyes so big and green and utterly bored that, with all the kohl liner she was wearing, she resembled an angry tabby cat. “Yeah?”

  “Can I get a glass of water, please?”

  “You want a twist with that?”

  Brenna was pretty sure she was being sarcastic, and so she said, “No, but if you have one of those sweet little umbrellas . . .”

  Tabby rolled her eyes and walked away.

  “Somebody’s on the rag,” the Dead Guy said.

  “Really.” Brenna hoped she was sounding natural, but she was still rattled from that scene with Dr. Lieberman. How could she have let her mind go there, and for so long? She’d suffered from this disorder—or “special gift,” as her mother used to say—since she was eleven. It was called hyperthymestic syndrome and it meant she recalled every day since then perfectly, down to the date and with all five senses—every emotion involved as if she was reliving it.

  Hyperthymestic syndrome was “ridiculously rare,” a neurologist had once told her. It affected a handful of people with “differently shaped brains” and could be triggered by any major life change—a move to a new home, the birth of a sibling . . . The change didn’t need to be very traumatic. Though, in Brenna’s case, it had been.

  At any rate, the syndrome was huge—a great big gift she’d never asked for, like a trampoline or a polo pony. Brenna had needed to rearrange her whole life in order to make it fit, yet still it poked into everything—her work, her relationships, all that she cared about. There’s a reason why most memories dull with time, Brenna now knew. There’s a reason why we see the past in softer and softer focus until it’s forgotten down to snippets, sensations. Few people understood what a luxury that was, the ability to forget. But Brenna did. She understood completely.

  Over the years, Brenna had developed tricks to keep her memories at bay—reciting the Gettysburg Address, digging toothpicks into her palms, biting her lip so hard, she sometimes drew blood . . . Not pleasurable, but they kept her in the present. It had been a very long time since she’d had a memory on the job that lasted as long as this one had. She didn’t want to think about that too hard, though, for fear she’d slip back to the last time it had happened (February 27, 2003), and then the Dead Guy might really start to wonder.

  “So, that was really your husband, wasn’t it?” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “The telemarketer. The one who called you.” He sighed. “Oh never mind. It was a joke. Kind of.” Brenna’s gaze slipped from the Dead Guy’s face to the beer he was holding, and she realized what had triggered the memory. His tie. No dogs and fire hydrants, but it did have cats
and canaries all over it, which was close enough. “You like the tie?” he asked.

  “Can I be blunt?”

  “First things first. You chained?”

  “Chained?”

  “You got a husband? It’s okay, baby. What happens in Vegas stays in—”

  “I’m divorced.” This was the first true statement Brenna had made all night. It was a good thing the Dead Guy was so drunk, because she’d let loose some awful whoppers this evening, starting from when he first approached her, asking why she was taking his picture.

  Brenna had slipped the new HRC–20HEX she’d borrowed from Trent back into her bag and smiled up at him. He was a big man—taller and broader than he’d seemed in the family pictures she’d seen, but the curly mullet (now dyed jet black), the swollen-looking eyes, the jaw so square it seemed to have been drawn with a protractor—they were all unmistakable. “You mean,” she had said, “you’re not George Clooney?”

  The Dead Guy had told her he was a lawyer named Paul, and Brenna had told him she was a Web site architect named Sandy, in Vegas for an IT conference. “You’re a tall drink of water, Sandy,” he’d said. “I like that.” Then, he’d bought her the Emperor’s Goblet, which she’d nursed while watching him polish off two Jameson/rocks, and a Jack straight up before moving, very quickly to his latest, a Heineken.

  This is one guy, she’d thought, who really wants to escape. Then she’d glanced at his tie and sailed back to Dr. Lieberman’s office.

  “I’m not married, either,” he said now. This was a lie. His wife, Annette Shelby, had retained Brenna on April 23. I know he’s alive, Annette had said in the office Brenna kept in her New York apartment, her eyes trained on those spread-out family photos, glistening . . . I can feel him.

  Brenna asked him, “Ever wish you were?”

  “What?”

  “Married.”

  “No. You?”

  “Yes.” Another truth. “But then again, Paul, I wish for lots of things.”

  “Like . . .”

  She reached for the goblet and took a gulp. “Being . . . loved, I guess. Having someone care enough about me to really miss me.” Is this sinking in? Brenna watched his gaze travel from her face to her cleavage to the cleavage of a nearby waitress to the ass of the glaring prostitute at the end of the bar.

  “You know,” Brenna said, “sometimes I feel like if I just left town, no one would care, no one would—”

  “Shit.”

  “Huh?”

  “My wife.”

  He was staring over her shoulder. Slowly, Brenna turned around and saw a woman heading toward them—busty and redheaded and not Annette at all. “Gregory! What the—”

  “Vivica, I can explain,” he said, which Brenna used as her cue to get away from the couple, as fast as possible. On her way out the door, she plucked Trent’s spy camera from her bag and got a few shots of Vivica. Poor Annette . . . Too many times, it was a mistake to find the missing—especially guys like this, who worked so much better as memories than as living, breathing men.

  “Sorry, no umbrellas.”

  Brenna turned and saw the tabby-faced waitress. Here by the door, the air wasn’t as close, and she was standing near enough so that Brenna could smell her perfume.

  Brenna breathed, “Shalimar?”

  The waitress squinted at her.

  “My sister . . . she wore Shalimar.” Brenna dug her fingernails into her palms, but still her mind took her back to the room she had at eleven, to the coolness of the Marimekko sheets and her grandmother’s handmade quilt weighing heavy on her chest. To her sister’s T-shirt. Clea’s T-shirt. Extra large, pale gray, with the tag cut out of the collar. The Led Zeppelin ZOSO logo printed small and black on the front and on the back—in huge, gothic red letters—“THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME.” Clea had stolen it from one of her boyfriends and used to sleep in it all the time . . .

  Brenna sleeps in it now. It’s been washed so many times that the cotton is thin as Kleenex, but if Brenna stretches the collar over her nose and breathes very deep, she can still smell Shalimar. Shalimar and cigarettes and . . .

  September 30, 1981. One month after the syndrome had kicked in. A month and nine days after Brenna’s big sister, Clea, had gotten into that blue car, and the car had driven away.

  “Please come back,” Brenna whispers to the glow-in-the-dark stars on her bedroom ceiling. “Please, please God let Clea come back . . .” She squeezes her eyes shut. Tears seep out the corners. They feel hot enough to leave marks.

  Brenna’s phone vibrated again.

  “Are you okay?” the waitress asked.

  “Yeah, I’m . . .”

  “Because you look like you’re—”

  “I’m fine.” Brenna yanked her pulsing phone out of her pocket and looked at the screen. She expected Trent again, but this time she read a number instead of a name. It had a 914 area code. Westchester County.

  Brenna hit send and said her name into the phone. And when a Brooklyn-accented voice asked if this was Brenna Spector, she remembered the voice, remembered it the way she always remembered voices—the same cracks and cadences. She remembered where she was when she’d first heard the voice, and started to feel the way she did back then, too . . . October 16, 1998. Brenna bit her lip. Stayed in the present. Yet when the caller told her his name, she couldn’t stop herself from saying it along with him. “Detective Nick Morasco from the Tarry Ridge Police Department.”

  Morasco drew in a sharp breath. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Have we ever met?”

  Brenna wanted to explain—but tiredness, combined with that swelling memory, had done away with her filter, and again, the words on her mind flew out of her mouth: “Is this about Iris Neff?”

  Morasco said nothing for a very long time.

  Chapter 2

  Brenna was exhausted—not a bad thing, as it kept her from thinking. Immediately after she ended her conversation with Morasco, she headed back to the Mirage, ate a huge plate of pancakes at the lobby café, rode the elevator up to her room, and passed out until midnight, when she showered, dressed, packed, checked out, and caught a cab to the airport to make the red-eye back to LaGuardia. All this, without a single, memorable thought.

  She continued on that way at check-in, then as she moved past the slot machines lined up along the center of Las Vegas Airport, one dinging softly as a sad-looking old woman fed it a twenty (Think of the odds, Brenna wanted to shake her and yell. Would you please just think of the odds?) And then still as she waited dully at the gate, listening to Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life album on her MP3 in order to drown out the CNN feed—something about a fire at a group home in upstate New York—that kept looping, over and over again, through the two overhead TVs on either side of the gate, the screens glowing like devil eyes with footage of the blaze. (Why was cable news so pyromaniacal?)

  It wasn’t until Brenna was in her seat and the plane had taken off and the pilot had announced they’d reached cruising altitude that she allowed herself to recall the truncated phone conversation she’d had with Morasco, twenty-four hours earlier.

  “Why did you ask about Iris Neff?”

  “Sorry. I’m a blurter.”

  “Mrs. Spector—”

  “Brenna. Mrs. Spector is my mom.”

  “Your assistant here tells me—”

  “My assistant here?”

  “He says—”

  “You’re with Trent right now?”

  “He says you’re out of town.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like to meet with you as soon as you get back.”

  “Could you please tell me what this is regarding?”

  “I think we’re better off discussing it in person.”

  “Discussing what?” Brenna said out loud.

  The woman next to her—a nervous flyer who had been fingering a rosary right up until the pilot’s announcement—looked at Brenna as if she’d just sprouted another nose and the nose was about to detonate.

  “S
orry,” Brenna said. “I was just . . . remembering something.”

  “Oh,” said the woman, whom Brenna never would have pegged as the rosary type. She had spiky pink and white hair, rhinestone-edged librarian glasses, and a filmy, black vintage dress, a rose tattoo snaking up the length of her thin, pale arm. She was about Brenna’s age, and back in New York City, where she no doubt lived, she was probably the coolest teacher at the Center for Design. But here she wasn’t much, was she, other than scared? She asked, “Have a daughter?”

  “Odd question, but . . . yes, actually,” Brenna said. “Maya. She’s thirteen. How about you?”

  “What?”

  “Do you have a daughter?”

  Yesterday, at 3:28 P.M., Brenna had gotten a rare text from Maya: Dad says you’re picking me up a day late.

  Brenna, who viewed texting as a form of torture, had poked out a few sentences on her most-basic-of-nonsmart-phones, explaining how her hotel source had told her Larry Shelby was coming in from Los Angeles a day later than he’d initially planned, how Brenna was so sorry but there was nothing she could do, how she missed Maya and loved Maya and would make it up to Maya for sure . . .

  No response. Of course. Ever since she was a first grader, Maya had chosen to express her deepest anger by saying nothing at all.

  “I was asking for water,” said the hipster design instructor.

  “Huh?”

  “Water. Not daughter. I was trying to get the flight attendant, but she didn’t hear. Nice you have a daughter, though. I’m going to sleep now.”

  Edging away from Brenna, she squeezed about as much of herself as she could into the space between her chair and the window, and then she closed her eyes. Disappearing. That was fine. Brenna shut her eyes, too, disappeared in her own way . . .

  October 16, 1998. The first and last time Brenna had ever spoken to Detective Nick Morasco of the Tarry Ridge Police Department, but that hadn’t happened until after Jim had come up behind Brenna in the kitchen while she was in her tank top and pajama pants, scrubbing the remains of last night’s salmon out of the Calphalon pot. It wasn’t until after she’d felt the gentle pressure of Jim’s palm on her bare stomach, shirt buttons against her back, his lips at her ear . . . “I should be home by six.”