A Clean Slate

by Laura Caldwell

  He was right. Absolutely right. Everyone had to begin somewhere, and I should know that by now, but the thought of the famous Coley Beckett shooting some kind of animal-farm ad that would probably run in the free homeless newspaper seemed strange. Obviously, though, Cole was starting over after whatever had happened to him in New York, and I, of all people, should be more sympathetic to that. Wasn’t I starting over myself? Besides, it was probably an ad reminding people to pick up their dog poop, and I’d get to play with puppies all day.

  I constructed my seamless again. A few minutes later, the elevator opened, and a tall, burly woman dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt stepped out.

  “Cole Beckett?” She looked around the room, reading from a scrap of paper. She looked inordinately stressed out. Her brown hair fell in dirty clumps around her face, and her ruddy face gave the impression that she’d just run ten miles.

  Cole came out from his living area and looked her up and down. “You’re Tina?”

  She nodded.

  “Bring him in,” Cole said.

  Tina breathed heavily, as if she was preparing herself for major lifting. She stepped back inside the elevator, then with a grunt, pushed out a large, silver metal crate on wheels. Rustling and a low grunting sound came from the crate, and I found myself taking a cautionary step back. That was no puppy.

  “Where do you want him?” Tina said, moving back and forth on her feet like a boxer.

  Cole ducked his head down and looked inside the crate. “Right,” he said, and pointed toward me.

  Tina began pushing the crate in my direction. More grunting sounds came from within the metal cage. I wasn’t afraid of animals—although to be truthful, I hadn’t been exposed to much more than dogs, cats and mosquitoes—and yet I felt increasingly nervous as the crate rolled closer.

  Finally, Tina reached me. “Where do you want him?” she said.

  I lowered my head a few inches, bending at the waist, until I could see inside the tiny metal squares of the crate. Inside was something quite large, the size of a very fat German shepherd, but the thing had pearly pinkish skin. It swung around in the crate and looked right at me.

  I stood back up, all my thoughts of a glamorous Tiffany’s shoot, or at least a cute puppy shoot, screeching to a halt in my head. “It’s a pig, right?”

  Tina nodded. “His name’s William.”

  William, it turned out, was a bigger diva than any model could have been. The picture that Cole built step-by-step started with plunking William’s fat ass in a red toy car in front of my sky-blue seamless. Apparently, the public service announcement was an ad for road rage, which would read Don’t Hog the Road.

  “Get it?” Artie said to me at least four times. “Don’t hog the road! Get it?”

  I nodded and attempted to seem interested, but the truth was that William made me jumpy, so I tried to fade into the background, hoping Cole would forget that he’d hired me. Instead, he kept calling me to the set and asking me to add another item—a silk scarf around William’s squirming, fleshy neck, a pair of sunglasses on his thick, snorting head. Each time, I approached the pig like Clarice approached Hannibal, sure that he was going to attack at any minute.

  “Why can’t Tina do this?” I asked Cole once as I tiptoed up to William with a different scarf.

  “Because you are my assistant, not Tina.”

  That was true enough, but I hadn’t signed up to be a pig whisperer.

  “Hey, William,” I’d say, sidling up to him. “Nice piggy…Nice piggy, there you go, sweetie. I’m just going to put this little scarf on you. Won’t that look nice?”

  Inevitably, William would stare at me with eyes like two black marbles and then start snorting and squirming viciously in his little car. Tina, his handler, continued to disappear for cigarette breaks, and so I would wrestle the scarf around William’s stout body, only to have Cole or Artie tell me that the tassels of the scarf needed to be realigned.

  Strangely, thankfully, William didn’t smell like a pig. Tina said she’d given him a bath before they drove into the city, and as a result William smelled a little like soap and a little like dirt, which was not altogether horrible considering that I’d expected him to smell like shit.

  “For Chrissakes, Kelly,” Cole said at one point. “The scarf should look like it’s flowing back behind him.”

  I glared at him, then tried to readjust the scarf, but it just kept hanging limply over William’s shoulder. I wondered absently whether pigs had shoulders, while trying to take my mind away from how much I was beginning to despise Cole.

  “Kelly. Please get it right,” Cole said, after I’d spent ten minutes with the scarf and with William’s oddly sweet breath in my face. “It must be flowing.”

  “Why don’t you just use a fan?”

  Tina, who was actually nearby this time, and not outside sucking down a cigarette, coughed and held out her hands. “No, no. William doesn’t like fans or high winds. At all.”

  Cole gave me a smug look, and since I didn’t want to test William’s patience, I flicked and fluttered the scarf, all the while listening to Cole’s mutters and impatient orders and Artie’s useless and contradictory suggestions.

  As the day went on, Cole grew more and more irritated that he wasn’t getting the shots he wanted. It wasn’t apparent whether he blamed me, himself, the pig or Artie, who did little as far as I could tell, but either way it put Cole in an absolutely foul mood. Due to some animal labor laws or some such, we couldn’t make William work two days in a row, so if we didn’t finish the shoot today, we’d have to wait until Friday and start all over again. This wasn’t such bad news to me, since I now smelled like dirt and pig soap and couldn’t get the feel of William’s squirmy, faintly hairy flesh off my skin.

  By five o’clock, Tina had materialized from another round of smoke breaks and once again stood close to the set. “Cole,” she said, her ruddy face even more red at the thought of hauling William back to wherever they were from. “I’ve got to get him in the truck before it gets dark or he’ll freak.”

  Cole let out a huge sigh. “Bloody hell,” he said. He bent over his butcher-block table, which held all his equipment, and picked up a large lens he hadn’t used before, securing it to the camera. “Just one more shot.”

  Tina scurried close to me, getting ready, I supposed, to wrestle William into his cage. Meanwhile, I crossed my arms over my chest, relieved that my pig-whispering was about to come to an end, at least for the day.

  “Ready,” Cole said, peering into his viewfinder.

  I watched his finger hesitate for a moment, then it pressed down on the shutter, and at the same time the flash, a huge burst of white, boomed from the strobe that was attached to his camera. I blinked to clear the light from my eyes, but instead of seeing William on the little red car, I saw a man. Not Artie or Cole, or anyone I recognized, actually. His face was close to mine, leaning over me. He was murmuring something, words I couldn’t make out. His hair was dark and thick and rippled, like a pot of melted chocolate. His eyes were a brilliant blue, and there were two distinct freckles under one of them. His mouth kept moving. What was he saying? He seemed kind—I could tell that much from the way his eyes looked into mine, searching for some indication of understanding—but I still couldn’t hear him properly. What was he saying? What was he—

  “Kelly! Kelly!”

  Kelly? Was that what he was saying? Was the man saying my name?

  “Kelly, are you all right?”

  His voice sounded British. His face got hazy. I blinked again, a few more rapid flutters of my eyelids, and then everything seemed clearer. There was a man leaning over me, and it was Cole.

  “Kelly,” he said, “are you all right?”

  “Yes, sure.”

  Was it Cole the whole time? That didn’t seem right. Cole’s hair was inky-black and spiky, while the other man’s was a rich, warm mahogany. Cole had brown eyes, not blue, and there were no freckles underneath the one.

  “Can
you stand?” Cole said.

  I looked around and saw that I was slumped on the hardwood floor of the studio. Tina and Artie hovered behind Cole, their eyes concerned. Even William seemed to have his black-button eyes focused in my direction.

  “Yes, I’m fine.” I let Cole pull me up by the arms. “What happened?”

  “You just sort of sat down on the floor and lay back,” Cole said. “Your legs were flopping around a bit and then you didn’t move.”

  “My legs were flopping?” I tried to imagine it, to remember it, but there was a blank in my mind, just like the space where those five months had disappeared.

  “Are you all right, then?” Cole said.

  “I’m fine.” Truthfully, I felt rather lightheaded. “I’m fine,” I said again to reassure myself more than anyone else. “I just need to eat something, I think. I didn’t eat lunch today.” That was a total lie. I’d brought a turkey sandwich and eaten it a few hours ago, but I needed an excuse for my tumble, and my stomach did feel nauseous.

  “Well, why don’t you go home now?” Cole said.

  “Yeah, why don’t we call you a cab?” Artie said.

  “Or maybe you should go to the emergency room?” Tina suggested.

  “No, no, I’m absolutely fine.” And, in fact, the light-headedness was dissipating, and now all I felt was a growing embarrassment at the commotion I’d caused. “I’m really fine. I’ll hail a cab home and go right to sleep.”

  “You’re sure?” Cole said, and I could have sworn I saw real worry in his face.

  “Absolutely. I’m sorry about that.”

  I put my coat on and grabbed my bag, mumbling more apologies and reassurances about my condition. A minute later, I was tucked in the back of a warm cab, wondering what in the hell had happened and whether I was starting to remember my lost months.

  11

  All night I tried to find him. My blue-eyed man with the two freckles.

  I ignored the potential ramifications, too overcome with curiosity. I ignored the queasy feeling in my gut that wouldn’t seem to go away.

  I thought maybe the boom of light from Cole’s flash had scared a memory out of my head, so I tried to recreate sudden light flashes to trigger another one. I stood in the doorway of my bedroom, flicking the lights on, then off, then on again, waiting expectantly, holding on to the door frame so I wouldn’t fall again. This exercise got me nowhere.

  Next I got out my Nikon and every flash I owned, which totaled only three. With each one, I tried the same process—I secured the flash, turned the lights off, pointed the camera at myself from very close range and clicked. Each time, the light burst like a firecracker in my face, leaving me blinking, startled, frazzled, but with no new memories.

  When I wasn’t looking for the two-freckled man, trying to scare some image or memory out of my brain, I spent the rest of my night trying to figure out who he was and what he’d been saying to me. The first thing I did, of course, was call Laney, but I couldn’t reach her at home or on her cell.

  I wished desperately that I could call Dee, who had the keenest memory and the most annoyingly perfect sense of observation. I’d first realized that on my twelfth birthday, when Dee was only six. It was the first time my mother had let me baby-sit, a moment that she’d been waiting for longer than I had. She hated paying for babysitters and had thought for a long while that I was old enough to take care of Dee and myself on my own. But because of some news segment she’d produced on babysitters, where an expert had said that the sitter should be twelve years old at the very least, we both had to wait. My mom was smart enough to know that she wasn’t a natural parent, and so she regarded words of such “experts” as law. The day I turned twelve, though, it meant she had a built-in baby-sitter, which would drastically open up her social schedule.

  She’d had a party for me that day. It wasn’t as if my birthday got ignored. We were living in Atlanta at the time, in a tiny apartment on the third floor of an old house in a neighborhood called Virginia Highlands. A few of my friends came home with me after school, and Sylvie provided the requisite cake and candles. But my classmates’ parents picked them up at six, and by seven o’clock Sylvie was dressed and ready to go out for the night, her eyes bright.

  I remember she was wearing some sort of Madonna getup with black tights and a black short skirt and lots of those ridiculous rubber bracelets that were popular at the time.

  “Here’s the number of the restaurant,” she said, tearing a page out of the phone book and circling a listing. She rifled through the book, ripped out another page, circled something there and handed me that, as well. “And here’s the number of the bar where we’ll be after that. You okay, birthday girl?”

  I nodded, as happy about this as she was.

  As soon as my mom left, I made sure Dee was all right in front of the TV, and I started going through my mom’s things. I was, at the time, still curious about my dad and where he’d gone. Sylvie had always given me the he-just-disappeared-into-the-night kind of a story, which I now realize was probably true, but at the time, it only made Ken McGraw seem more mysterious. She’d shown me only two photos of him—a posed, stilted one of them on their wedding day (“I look so thin there,” she would say) and a very out-of-focus shot of him holding me after I was born. He looked to me like most of my friends’ dads, which mystified me all the more. If he was just like them, why hadn’t he stuck around?

  And so I spent that night digging through my mom’s desk drawers, pawing past tubes of out-of-favor lipsticks and the multicolored matchbooks she collected but never kept in one place, paging through the stacks of work documents and leafing through the photo albums she was always halfheartedly trying to start. The only picture I found that I hadn’t already seen was a closeup of him holding up a can of Budweiser the way others might present a bottle of Dom Perignon. His light brown hair was the same color as mine. His green eyes, the color of old grass, were mine, too, but after those few things, the similarities seemed to end. I couldn’t remember him, and presumably we had nothing in common other than a few physical features.

  After twenty minutes of staring at the picture, I tucked it back in my mom’s denim-covered album and went to the living room where Dee was quietly building a Lego house while watching a made-for-TV movie. I ruffled her soft, curly hair, switched the channel to Dynasty and helped her with the Lego until my mom came home at ten that night. She was earlier than usual, and she hadn’t brought her date inside, which meant it hadn’t gone well.

  “So what did you do tonight?” she said, pulling off the rubber bracelets and piling them on top of the TV like a slinky.

  Dee looked up and spoke for the first time in over an hour. “I watched TV and played with Lego’s, and Kelly was in your room and in your drawers. She looked through your picture book, and she stared at one picture for a long time.”

  My mom and I were both silent for a moment, just gazing at this kid who rarely put two words together.

  “Kelly, is this true?” my mom said at last.

  I gave Dee the nastiest glare I could muster, which, as intended, brought an expression of terror and teariness to her face. She ran off to her room and piled pillows on her head, something she did when she was scared or upset. I found her that way after Sylvie’s lecture on respecting others’ privacy. By that time, I felt horrible that I’d upset Dee when all she’d done was tell the truth. True to her nature, she forgave me immediately, but she never forgot. She never forgot anything, and that would have helped me immensely now when I couldn’t remember a chunk of my life.

  The fact that I couldn’t call Dee to ask whether she remembered the two-freckled man, that I could never call Dee again, made me feel even more confused that night in my Lake Shore Drive apartment, even more lonely. But thinking about my twelfth birthday had given me an idea. I could look through my own photos, just the way I’d rifled through my mom’s that night.

  I settled on the couch with a glass of merlot, a candle on the coffee table and a
pile of mismatched photo albums at my side. Like last weekend, when I’d gone through Laney’s photos, I found I could recall perfectly the pictures from before my birthday in May. I could remember where each one was taken and names of the people in them. But there was no sign of a blue-eyed guy with two freckles, and the photos were only making me feel worse. So many of them were of Ben and Dee and my mom, people who were now, for one reason or another, gone from my life. I also felt a strange distance from the person I was in those pictures. The Kelly McGraw who smiled out of those photos knew who she was and where she was going.

  I picked up my wineglass and sat back on the couch for a minute. I wanted more than anything to just shut the albums and put them away, to put away all the memories and any possible reminders of the time I couldn’t remember. Because I really didn’t want to remember the summer months, after all. Hadn’t I been saying that all along? That the memory loss was the best thing that had happened to me, since it had led me to my new life? The problem was that my new life wasn’t feeling so fabulous right now. I was alone, living in an apartment devoid of character and working as a pig wrestler for an asshole Brit. But the flash of that man had intrigued me. So I took another sip of the warm, spicy wine and again started paging through the album.

  I stopped at a shot of Ben and me, taken at Ben’s cousin’s wedding a few years ago. Ben looked confident and gorgeous in an olive suit I’d found on sale at Field’s. I was wearing a sleeveless black dress with a boat neck. We both had goofy grins on our faces, which were slightly pink from dancing and the infusion of bubbly we’d had by that time. I’d been so happy that night. Dee hadn’t died yet, things with Ben were wonderful—or so I’d thought—and I was reasonably content every morning to head for work.

  I slipped the photo out of the plastic and raised it close to my face, wondering whether it had all been so perfect back then. Did I really have it together, the way I wanted, or had I simply decided that was the case? I liked my job, thought it was decent enough, and that made me feel fortunate because I knew people who absolutely despised their jobs. I also felt lucky because I had Ben. I’d gotten past the period where I needed to go out and get loaded every Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and I was ready to be a little more adult. I was ready to spend Thursday nights at a nice restaurant with a man, rather than at the local bar with a few hundred other people. I wanted to rent a cabin with Ben on the weekends and spend our days antiquing and cozying up to a fire.