Remind Me Again What Happened

by Joanna Luloff

  I can tell that today has been a good day. When I enter the garage, Rachel is sitting with her, and together they have been sorting through boxes from our graduate school days. Rachel is wearing a mangy-looking knitted scarf that Claire began, but never finished, when she was asked to join a short-lived knitting group. Claire is sifting through a stack of old VCR tapes. I recognize some of the titles: Vertigo, The Third Man, Charade, The Big Sleep. She’s unearthed our noir phase, I see. Neither of them looks up from the boxes when I come in. Rachel’s chin is resting on Claire’s shoulder and they are speaking in hushed voices, a conspiracy of remembrance. I am jealous for a moment before the calm of just watching them takes over. I can pretend, however briefly, that we have all been transported back to a happier time. All three of us coming and going in Rachel’s parents’ brownstone in Brookline. Watching old movies with a makeshift dinner on our laps. Assignments cast to the side for a spell as we drink wine and marvel at the cigarettes, the femmes fatales, and the thick shadows on the television screen. A happier time for me, certainly. Less so for Rachel, I imagine. I wondered, and even now still wonder, if she was putting on a show for all our benefits, always masking her own sadness for the sake of our shared equilibrium. She may be doing the very same thing in our garage this early evening. Selfless, stoic Rachel. She would probably hate to know I see her this way.

  I shift in the doorway, and Claire and Rachel look up at the same time, displaying a little pleasure, perhaps also a little annoyance, in seeing me. Rachel waves and pushes a milk crate in my direction. “Take a seat,” she says, leaving her hand on Claire’s back.

  Claire pushes onto her knees and kisses me on the cheek. “Welcome home, Charlie,” she says in a slightly too boisterous voice. She smells of my soap, and also of mothballs. “We thought we could watch this tonight.” She places Vertigo in my hand. The tape is dusty. I have no idea where the VCR is.

  “Seems like an appropriate choice.” I find it hard to smile lately, and yet I am always, always trying.

  “That’s what Rachel said too.” Claire smiles at Rachel; Rachel smiles at me. We make a triangle of good intentions. This is a good start to the evening for all of us.

  “Do we even have a VCR anymore?” I ask. It is a foolish question. None of us will have the answer.

  “We can stream it off Netflix. I have an account.” Rachel stands up and unwraps the half-finished scarf. “I’m going to start dinner. I picked up some scallops and leeks at the co-op.” She kisses the top of Claire’s head as she goes and gently traces her fingers across my shoulder.

  When she leaves, Claire studies the neat piles of memories stacked all around her. We are quiet in each other’s company these days. There are too many questions we want to ask each other, but I sense neither of us knows how. We both use Rachel to fill in our silences, and we are sheepish with each other when we are alone.

  Claire takes the film back from me. She turns it over in her hands a few times. “Rachel says this is an appropriate choice.”

  I look at her closely. I do this every time she trips over something recently said. It brings out the worst in me. I get impatient. I don’t trust her. I don’t think she’s trying hard enough. I think she’s pretending. “Yes, we’ve already gone over that.” I know my words are harsh and I feel guilty immediately.

  “Right.” She begins to stand up.

  I go to her, place my hands into the warmth of her armpits, and lift as if she is a child.

  “I can manage, thanks.” She smiles but I know she is upset with me. “Let’s go get in Rachel’s way.” She walks to the mudroom door and concentrates on every step she takes on every stair. Every movement comes with a hesitation. She turns to me and waves me toward her.

  “In a minute,” I say. I start repacking the videos as Claire enters the house. I am not so interested in what fills these boxes that she has put out today. They hold memories that are safe and easy. It is some of the other memories I am keen to have her explore. There are boxes that I want to empty out at Claire’s feet, to force her memory to make sense of the more recent past, force her to retrace all the reasons why she left me and all these old boxes behind.

  Rachel

  Although it’s been several days since I arrived, I still feel strange in this house with Charlie and Claire. I’m used to the three of us being in my house—my parents’ house—in Boston. Or I’m used to Claire, alone, being there with me on her quick visits back to the States. Before the hospital in Florida, it had been almost two years since I’d seen Charlie, although we do write to each other regularly and occasionally have halting conversations on the phone that tend to focus on Claire and her absence. I have never told him about the many times Claire came to visit me without him. Nor about the confessions she has made to me only after I promise not to reveal them, usually after we have finished a bottle of wine out on my parents’ back porch. It has been my porch, of course, for too many years now, but I am as stuck in the past as my two friends, it seems. Up until recently, Claire had been the one pushing forward and away, and I have to admit, her drifting filled me with a tangle of emotions I’d rather not admit: jealousy, smug satisfaction, anger. She was providing me with a passive revenge, which, if I can be honest with myself, is the only kind of revenge I’m probably capable of.

  But then there was Charlie’s call from the airport and later his strangled voice on the phone from Florida. Please come, he had managed to say. I need you. And that was all it took to collapse the distance created by all the years that had passed since Claire and Charlie moved away. I made travel arrangements in a blur, much as I imagined Charlie had done, and I felt his proximity, and Claire’s too, more than I had in a very long time.

  In my memory, I was always the one who needed help. When my parents died and my two best friends moved here to look after me, I collapsed into their care like a rag doll. I don’t think I prepared a meal for myself for three months. If it hadn’t been for Claire and Charlie, I wouldn’t have finished grad school. I wouldn’t have clipped my fingernails. I wouldn’t have boxed my father’s clothes and dropped them off at the Goodwill. If it weren’t for them, I’d most likely still be living (if I were living at all) in a dirty heap, surviving off inheritance and take-out food in my childhood bedroom.

  Now, I’m usually the one who prepares dinner in Charlie and Claire’s kitchen. I am soothed by the errands I run—to the local co-op, to the farmers’ market, to the bakery. I like it when Charlie’s car fills up with the smell of sourdough bread and fresh greens and trout. I think back to the meals we used to share, the experiments we tried in my parents’ kitchen, all exercises meant to cheer me up and provide me with distractions. I have become a good cook, even though I usually have only myself to feed. Here I make grilled salmon on the back porch; I roast potatoes with rosemary and olive oil. I bake apple pies in the late afternoon, so that the house grows saturated with sweet autumn smells. The nights are getting quite cold, and I like to fill us up with warm, heavy food to help us grow sleepy and quiet as the day winds down.

  Even though everyone is trying very hard to be kind and patient with one another, there are sparks of tension that fuse unexpectedly. It happens if Claire has spent too long in the garage and has forgotten to take her nap. If Charlie pushes Claire too hard to remember some event important to him but lost to her. If Claire forgets to take her noontime meds or if Charlie scolds her for misplacing her calendar. And of course there are the triggers that Claire can’t possibly understand she is responsible for. She doesn’t remember the hurt she caused Charlie with her increasing months away on assignment. She doesn’t remember that the last time she came to the States, she asked Charlie to meet her in New York instead of coming home to their house. She doesn’t remember Charlie’s trip to India to visit her or the reasons why he left early. When she asks Charlie questions about their home (Who chose to put the carpet there? Do I even like antique furniture? Why did we choose to live so far from town?), she can’t know the resentments and injure
d feelings she is drawing out. What is Charlie supposed to do with all that pent-up anger? What am I supposed to do with mine?

  I do my best to ignore the old hurts and confusion. I cook and clean and take Claire for short walks up and down the dirt road. We crunch over leaves while Charlie is at work. I help Claire make piles of things from her past, bring her sweaters and hats when the chill encroaches. I try to repay her for her kindnesses to me all those years ago. She is giving me a chance to forgive her, and I hope I am strong enough to take it.

  When I got to the Keys, I checked into Charlie’s hotel and stared at the swimming pool from my window for far too long. Its turquoise water was shimmering from a late summer breeze, and behind it was the sea, dotted with regal sailboats whose grace hurt my mind. I had never been to Florida, nor had I ever looked out on a vacation paradise that offered up umbrella drinks without irony. I remember thinking I should have packed a bathing suit, then hating myself for the thought. My eyes felt too big for their sockets. I had been traveling and crying for over ten hours straight. I turned away from the window, took an icy shower, and then headed out to meet Charlie at the hospital.

  When I first arrived, the nurses wouldn’t let me into Claire’s room because I wasn’t family, so I roamed the hallways and attempted to do some work in the waiting room, soap operas blasting from the television, as others received good and bad news around me. The waiting room was a strange place. The other hospital visitors smelled like sunscreen and ocean, their tanned skin suggesting an interrupted vacation. Beyond that room, there was the sea, the tourist trolleys taking people to Old Town, the hum of mopeds and rustling palm trees.

  I wanted to explain to the ICU nurses that I was, in fact, Claire’s family. If I had claimed to be Claire’s sister, would they have asked me for proof? Charlie had made the mistake of identifying me as a friend. The nurse had apologized, explained their policy in the ICU, and directed me to the waiting room with further instructions on how to get to the cafeteria and the guest shop and back onto the streets of Key West, where I might be more comfortable waiting. Claire was in an induced coma, for how long, the doctors couldn’t say. Charlie was already feeling guilty for summoning me, but I had told him, truthfully, that I was there for him as much as for Claire. I had never heard him sound so terrified, so uncertain, as when he had called only the day before. Before he had hung up, he managed to say, “She might not make it. I don’t understand, Rachel. She was awake when I arrived and seemed only a little shaky, but then, suddenly a switch flipped in her brain and she was gone again.” Charlie explained that after her last seizure, the doctors felt it would be safer for her to be kept in a drugged sleep until they got a handle on what was causing the inflammation in her brain.

  During the plane ride, I was surprised to find that I was talking to myself, whispering promises that Claire would be okay. She had always been the strong one. This time I would hold her hand and make sure she knew that she wasn’t alone, that she would get better and be herself again in no time. Later, in the hospital, I walked through the hallways making similar promises, practicing what I would say to Claire once she opened her eyes and I was allowed to touch her skin, move the hair out of her eyes, help her stand and walk out of that place where none of us belonged.

  If the staff had been willing to listen, I would have explained to them how Claire and Charlie and I were family. We had adopted one another more than ten years ago. First Claire had moved in, and then Charlie a couple of months later. Living in what had been my parents’ house, we painted rooms and moved furniture and stained the stove with overly ambitious cooking. We filled each other’s absences and made a new family in the process. But rules were rules at the hospital, and the only encounter I had been able to have with Claire was a stolen glimpse into her room when no one was around. Charlie acted as my lookout as I pushed against the heavy door and then the dreary curtains. And there she was, almost unrecognizable, a tube hissing at her neck, monitors telling the secrets of her blood and breath. I still wish I hadn’t looked in.

  In the evenings, I made Charlie leave the hospital with me. We walked through the touristy streets of Old Town, holding hands while neither of us talked. Eventually one of us pulled the other into a fish restaurant and we went through the motions of ordering a meal that neither of us really tasted, while the cheery wait staff offered us another beer or margarita. I could sense their need to brighten our mood, and we tried to smile and be pleasant and might even have grown a little bit tipsy. On the way back to the hotel, we leaned into each other’s exhaustion, and laughed at the posters of Hemingway impersonators or the shockingly blue drinks that appeared in the bars lining our walk home, and agreed that only Claire could have brought us to this place.

  Claire had always been the one who created our adventures. In our first year of graduate school, it had been Claire who insisted I renew my passport, who then insisted we use our financial aid loans to go to Barcelona, who landed us both jobs at the Washington Square Tavern that summer to pay back some of the money we had spent on our travels. She was the one who had gotten Charlie to travel all the way to the other side of the world, to risk a sunburn, and to taste unfamiliar foods. Even after they had moved to Vermont, she had been the one who was always exploring, her curiosity pushing against the borders of our day-to-day lives. Charlie and I had always looked to her for what came next, and there we now were, baffled and paralyzed without our guide.

  It had been a long time since Charlie and I were alone in each other’s company. Because we were tired and drunk and because there was such a sense of festive play all around us, for brief moments it almost felt like we had taken a vacation together. I couldn’t help thinking about our earliest moments of friendship, a few years before either of us had met Claire. We had wandered a very different coastline together, a colder one, in England, very young and clumsy in our flirtation. I had tried to ignore most of those memories over the years, but there they were, announcing themselves at perhaps the most inappropriate time.

  While my mind wandered, Charlie translated the conversations he’d been having with the doctors. Claire had been brought in with a high fever. Her seizures had been severe. The induced coma would allow her body to calm and start to repair itself. Her brain would have been traumatized from all the swelling and the seizures. It would be impossible to know the extent of the damage until she woke up. He squeezed my hand and leaned into my shoulder. He draped his arm across my back.

  When we got to the hotel, he left me there and returned to the hospital to sleep beside Claire in a reclining chair. In the morning, I brought him coffee and a pastry from the bakery in our hotel.

  Our job was to wait. We were instructed to be patient. In case she had memory loss, we were told to be prepared with photographs and stories. Our presence alone might help her reorient herself. We were told to be prepared for her confusion, her anger, her fear, her anxiety. Our job was and continues to be to remind her that she is not alone, that we are with her to help her navigate from here to wherever there might be.

  Claire

  I have been trying to find my way back into this house. It is filled with things I recognize, but encountering them is like returning to a bed-and-breakfast I might have visited once. The plates in the cupboards have scalloped edges and floral stenciling. There are coasters on every table next to stacks of magazines. I held one of these frilly bits of nonsense in my hand the other night while Charlie and I sat silently in front of the television and Rachel cleaned up in the kitchen. When I asked Charlie if we picked these things out together, he laughed at me. “They’re hand-me-downs from my parents’ old place. My mother sent them to us after the wedding. Are you serious? They aren’t exactly your taste, Claire.”

  “Then what are they doing in our house?” I asked in return. It seemed like a logical question, and I really don’t think I meant to be aggressive when I asked it, but Charlie remained still as stone and kept his eyes on his show, a BBC production, some kind of detective drama.
I hadn’t been following it very well and had reached for a magazine, which is when I had picked up the coaster and asked my question about it. It is important that I keep track of the cause and effect of our anger toward each other these days, because if I don’t, I really can’t make sense of it at all. I have been tracking Charlie’s sighs, the deep, exaggerated ones he offers while he works hard at not looking at me. On the day of the coaster question, my tally came to six.

  The hardwood floors of this house creak underfoot and are scratched with wear. Shredded area rugs cover empty spaces here and there, so torn at the edges that you’d think we had a puppy in the house, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a pet. We certainly don’t now, though I think I might like one to help interrupt the careful stillness that exists between Charlie and me. When I go into the kitchen, I open the cabinets and try to guess what I’ll find in them. I roam the house, touching surfaces and smelling candles. I have been back here for 23 days, but it might as well be 223. Everything feels like an expected surprise, if such a thing is even possible.

  The strangest things to discover are the framed photographs here and there. I look at myself in these pictures. I am in a wedding dress in one, and in another I am sitting on a beach in an orange bikini with black flowers. I touch my belly, feel the contours of my body, and wonder how long ago the picture might have been taken, whether my body might fit into something like that bikini today. On the bookshelf I see a photo of myself wearing a dusty smile, a camera around my neck. I look fearless. I see Charlie as a child, his parents on either side, hands resting on his shoulders. He looks just as serious then as he does these evenings. I want to tell his younger self a joke; I want to tell him he needs to loosen up a little.