The Memory Sessions 9781684481514

Citation preview

The Memory Sessions Q

The Memory Sessions Q A Memoir

S u z a n n e Fa r r e l l S m i t h

lewisburg, pen nsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Farrell Smith, Suzanne, author. Title: The memory sessions : a memoir / Suzanne Farrell Smith. Description: Lewisburg, PA : Bucknell University Press, [2019] | Includes   bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2018054491 | ISBN 9781684481477 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Farrell Smith, Suzanne—Childhood and youth. | Farrell Smith,   Suzanne—Mental health. | Memory disorders—Patients—United States—   Biography. | Autobiography—Authorship—Psychological aspects—Case   studies. | Psychic trauma in children—Case studies. | Fathers—Death—   Psychological aspects—Case studies. | Fires—Psychological   aspects—Case studies. Classification: LCC BF376 .F37 2019 | DDC 153.1/2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018054491 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2019 by Suzanne Farrell Smith All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-­Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www​.­bucknell​.­edu​/­UniversityPress Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press Manufactured in the United States of Amer­i­ca

For my parents Edward (1942–1983) and Dolores (1941–2015)

Without memories of what happened early in life, we effectively have no early life. —­Patricia Bauer

CON TEN TS

I.

The Bridge

i.

Tele­v i­sion ​ ​  3



ii. Time of Death ​ ​ 4



iii. Blaze of Gloria ​ ​ 7



iv. ­Table for Five ​ ​  15



v. Bridges and Tunnels  ​ ​ 18 II.

A Peculiar Darkness

i. ­Going on a Hunt  ​ ​35

ii. Of Myth and Memory  ​ ​97 III.

To Light

i. Another Version of Us  ​ ​113



ii. To Make One’s Way through the Earth  ​ ​116



iii.

The Death ­Thing ​  ​122

vii

viii C o n t e n t s



iv.

Every­t hing Reaches to Light ​  ​132



v. Light  ​ ​136 Acknowl­edgments ​  ​151

The Memory Sessions Q

i.  Tele­vi­sion The eve­ning our ­father died—­t he night before my entire childhood memory evaporated—my s­ isters and I did something we w ­ ere not normally allowed to do: watch tele­v i­sion. My m ­ other preferred that we crochet and play school before bed. Debbie remembers red flannel jammies with white plastic feet that made her toes sweaty. I like to think of our feminine foursome in matching nighties, soft and pale pink with flowers. I won­der if I felt excited to be shuttled into that February night, along the brick path and through the pachysandra patch to the neighbor’s ­house, where we ate SpaghettiOs, according to Tammy, and watched tele­v i­sion, according to all. I remember that part. The show was Knight Rider: “a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist.” In February 1983, the show was over halfway through its inaugural season. It was a Monday, and new Knight Rider episodes aired on Friday nights, so perhaps NBC was showing a rerun of the latest installment, “The Topaz Connection.” I’ve since rewatched the episode. The publisher of a men’s magazine is murdered. Michael Knight and his sleek supercar, KITT, head to Vegas to investigate. Miss November plays a role—­topaz is November’s birthstone, something my f­ ather and I shared. The dead man’s ­daughter, the standard 3

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love interest, sums up the episode: “Glamour and sex. Fashion and sex. Cars and sex!” On the screen: a supposedly dead ex-­cop and an indestructible supercar on a grisly but glitzy investigation. Watching: four ­little girls, in jammies or nighties, perched on a neighbor’s couch while their ­mother is told by a cop and a priest details of their f­ ather’s death. KITT could sustain impact at top speeds, destroying the other guy without receiving a scratch. My dad’s small gold Honda stood no chance against the drunk driver’s oncoming car. My s­ isters and I remember the red lights on the “mouth” of the talking car. We differ in how we recall my ­mother’s phrasing of the terrible news. But ­after thirty years, none of us has forgotten t­ hose lights. To us, watching the show, watching tele­v i­sion at all, had been as strange as the strangers at the door. I tell my eldest ­sister, Beth, I am trying to remember the night our ­father died. “Mom knew the minute she opened the door,” she says. “But I thought, it’s a ­mistake. He’s just hurt or asleep, not dead. I thought that ­until I saw him in the casket.” “You saw him?” “We all did. We drew pictures for him. We gave him flowers, too. ­Don’t you remember? We wore matching cranberry-­colored velvet jumpers with ruffles along the straps. I remember placing my picture next to him.” My s­ isters say I’m lucky that I d ­ on’t remember. His skin looked like Silly Putty, they tell me. His knucklebones, pronounced. ­After the funeral our m ­ other put us to bed and lay down on the porch, where she would sleep for many years, her only com­pany the blaring tele­v i­sion.

ii.  Time of Death My ­mother, ­because it’s November, is gearing up for the holiday blues. Several names on the card list ­will be scratched out. Funeral cards wait to be

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love interest, sums up the episode: “Glamour and sex. Fashion and sex. Cars and sex!” On the screen: a supposedly dead ex-­cop and an indestructible supercar on a grisly but glitzy investigation. Watching: four ­little girls, in jammies or nighties, perched on a neighbor’s couch while their ­mother is told by a cop and a priest details of their f­ ather’s death. KITT could sustain impact at top speeds, destroying the other guy without receiving a scratch. My dad’s small gold Honda stood no chance against the drunk driver’s oncoming car. My s­ isters and I remember the red lights on the “mouth” of the talking car. We differ in how we recall my ­mother’s phrasing of the terrible news. But ­after thirty years, none of us has forgotten t­ hose lights. To us, watching the show, watching tele­v i­sion at all, had been as strange as the strangers at the door. I tell my eldest ­sister, Beth, I am trying to remember the night our ­father died. “Mom knew the minute she opened the door,” she says. “But I thought, it’s a ­mistake. He’s just hurt or asleep, not dead. I thought that ­until I saw him in the casket.” “You saw him?” “We all did. We drew pictures for him. We gave him flowers, too. ­Don’t you remember? We wore matching cranberry-­colored velvet jumpers with ruffles along the straps. I remember placing my picture next to him.” My s­ isters say I’m lucky that I d ­ on’t remember. His skin looked like Silly Putty, they tell me. His knucklebones, pronounced. ­After the funeral our m ­ other put us to bed and lay down on the porch, where she would sleep for many years, her only com­pany the blaring tele­v i­sion.

ii.  Time of Death My ­mother, ­because it’s November, is gearing up for the holiday blues. Several names on the card list ­will be scratched out. Funeral cards wait to be

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filed. She has a number of Catholic masses to dedicate. One cousin died suddenly from a blood clot, so she must send flowers and a donation. She clipped his obituary with vigor; we bought her a small copy machine, so she can spread word of the newly deceased without having to reproduce the notices in longhand. Managing death has long been a priority, while other tasks—­rearing ­children, cleaning out the empty nest, shoring up against deterioration, baby-­proofing all over again for grandchildren—­ have cycled. This November day is also the end of daylight saving time, an other­ wise ordinary day, both dreadful and delightful to her, as she must set the clocks back. All forty-­two of them. Wall clocks, ­table clocks, alarm clocks. An antique mantel clock, a Waterford crystal piece, a sandstone sundial in the overgrown garden. A longcase marking the lunar phase. A terra-­ cotta circle on the shed. My ­mother is proud of her clock collection, amassed since my f­ ather’s death. He was forty, my m ­ other forty-­one. Time moved on. At least to forty-­two. Each hour, a wild jangling awakens the critters in the walls. Horologists would delight in my ­mother’s midnight. She’s making her way to the ­family room and its four clocks when the phone rings. She jumps. My m ­ other fears life. She worries that happiness ­will sneak in, and ­she’ll accidentally let out a lighthearted laugh. Nothing is life threatening, but every­t hing in life threatens. She wears protective gear against such life. She finds the worst and weaves it into a mourning cloak wrapped tightly around her shoulders. In the past, my ­mother would screen calls; now, with ailing joints, she ­can’t get to the phone in time. She listens to my voice filter through the wheezy answering machine. “Mom, it’s me. Just wanted you to know I’m thinking of you t­oday. I miss him too. I love you.” It takes my m ­ other a few seconds to identify which “me” has left the message. By day’s end, she ­w ill have received four such communications. We ­daughters call when something happens. We call on holidays. And we call on her anniversaries: the anniversary of her f­ ather’s death; of her m ­ other’s death; of her best friend’s death; of her second ­daughter’s stillbirth; of her wedding; of her

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husband’s birth; of her husband’s death; and so on. The annual sum of ­t hese messages is likely five or ten minutes. ­Today, we call b ­ ecause it’s my f­ather’s birthday. He was born nine months a­ fter the start of War Time, President Franklin Roo­se­velt’s energy-­ conserving mea­sure that moved clocks ahead and left them that way for over three years. His birthday often coincides with the end of daylight saving. When he lived, he got one more hour to celebrate. When he died, she got one more hour to mourn. My ­mother keeps moving, her thick sandy-­brown hair pulled into a mass atop her head and barely contained by a scarf. Shuffling across the beige kitchen linoleum, she’s unsteady. But she knows how to get around the ­house. Whenever her disease-­eaten knees refuse to support her weight, my ­mother’s knowing hands find purchase on a ­counter, an end ­table, a chair’s straight back. She passes the dining-­room win­dow. Out back, beyond the brick patio that she installed where a pool used to be, stands the Memorial Garden. Spookee 1982–1995. Twinkle 1985–2000. Charcoal 1987–1996. In the graves rest brittle cat bones, wearing dolls’ clothing and arranged in baskets. On to the ­family room, where e­ very square inch of wall space is adorned with an archaic farm tool, a tarnished trinket, or a musical instrument long ­silent. Antique glove stretchers, a broken dairy scale, the Mas­sa­chu­setts license plate from her parents’ light-­blue Ford Gran Torino, my ­father’s orange Keds. Close to the flag that draped his coffin hangs a wedding photo in an antique brass frame. Across the top is a red ribbon, retrieved from the casket arrangement, bearing the nickname “Hon.” If she plucked the picture from its tomb, she would read on the back in her own perfect cursive: No two ­people loved each other more. She would nod in agreement with herself, replace the photo­graph, straighten the frame, dust off the glass. Before she was bent by her condition—­a collection of infections and diseases she’s ­either hiding or denying—my m ­ other would drive to the town cemetery and pick leaves off the ­family headstone. Her own

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name—­Dolores, from the Latin word “dolor,” meaning grief or sorrow—is already ­etched ­there, next to my ­father’s, marking the plot of earth where her body ­will fi­nally rest. ­After my f­ ather died, I believe, my m ­ other asked Death to take her, too. And Death, in a manner, did. Came to her with an offer of marriage. She would live on, would provide a space for Death to flourish, with all the trappings and tokens of h ­ uman life to play with, all the nooks and crannies of her ­house and her mind to inhabit. In return, Death would provide the income, payouts from the life insurance policy, and remain her unfailing companion u ­ ntil the time had come to return my m ­ other to her husband. She accepted Death’s proposal, whispering that now she would never be alone. By the time three more messages beep on her machine, my m ­ other makes the final turn of the final clock. Forty-­two hours are added, but the day is shortened. Her own birthday most often falls on the winter solstice. Around the world each year, cele­brations of the coming sunlight unfold, while my ­mother watches murder mysteries by the glow of a heater switch and one digital clock.

iii.  Blaze of Gloria “A rotting log, or snag, provides food and shelter for many animals and plants,” reads Colin, deliberately. I’m Colin’s after-­school homework helper, one of the several part-­time jobs with the elementary set I’ve taken since leaving my full-­t ime teaching position to attend gradu­ate school. “Some plants and animals eat the decaying materials and dead organisms in snags.” He circles the information needed to answer question one: What do rotting logs provide that plants and animals can eat? b. decaying materials and dead organisms. Colin and I both excel at multiple-­choice questions.

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name—­Dolores, from the Latin word “dolor,” meaning grief or sorrow—is already ­etched ­there, next to my ­father’s, marking the plot of earth where her body ­will fi­nally rest. ­After my f­ ather died, I believe, my m ­ other asked Death to take her, too. And Death, in a manner, did. Came to her with an offer of marriage. She would live on, would provide a space for Death to flourish, with all the trappings and tokens of h ­ uman life to play with, all the nooks and crannies of her ­house and her mind to inhabit. In return, Death would provide the income, payouts from the life insurance policy, and remain her unfailing companion u ­ ntil the time had come to return my m ­ other to her husband. She accepted Death’s proposal, whispering that now she would never be alone. By the time three more messages beep on her machine, my m ­ other makes the final turn of the final clock. Forty-­two hours are added, but the day is shortened. Her own birthday most often falls on the winter solstice. Around the world each year, cele­brations of the coming sunlight unfold, while my ­mother watches murder mysteries by the glow of a heater switch and one digital clock.

iii.  Blaze of Gloria “A rotting log, or snag, provides food and shelter for many animals and plants,” reads Colin, deliberately. I’m Colin’s after-­school homework helper, one of the several part-­time jobs with the elementary set I’ve taken since leaving my full-­t ime teaching position to attend gradu­ate school. “Some plants and animals eat the decaying materials and dead organisms in snags.” He circles the information needed to answer question one: What do rotting logs provide that plants and animals can eat? b. decaying materials and dead organisms. Colin and I both excel at multiple-­choice questions.

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I know snags pretty well, having spent many hours in my m ­ other’s yard cutting them down. Dead from fire, lightning strikes, disease, or age, ­these rotted-­out trees beg to be severed from their roots and stacked elsewhere. ­They’re wormy. Unbecoming. Sometimes t­ hey’re so rotten you can tug lightly and the ­whole tree comes loose. A snag makes you feel stronger than usual, while the tree acts weaker than it looks. My ­mother often asks me to drag the branches and trunks into the woods b ­ ehind the h ­ ouse, piling them by the stream, where their musky odor mingles with the wet dirt and the skunk cabbage growing along the banks. I used to believe that most trees ­were transferred to such a setting ­after they died, that even when burned or killed by drought, trees ultimately met a wet end. But standing snags, according to Colin’s science book, provide a home and a food source to a g­ reat number of living t­ hings in the ecosystem. Woodpeckers, chickadees, bats, beetles, frogs, moss, fungi—­t hey all love a good, dead tree. Better to leave the trees to their afterlife, sticking up among the dense pachysandra. At least the dead trees in my m ­ other’s yard have never been sentenced to the chipper. Piles of branches become complexes of soft, secret ­little h ­ ouses. The wood decays and nourishes the dirt, which in turn nourishes the pungent bouquets of skunk cabbage, one of the greenest plants I’ve ever seen. Colin finishes for the day. I r­ ide the bus home, straight down Second Ave­nue but still a long, halting trip due to rush hour, and think about trees. I’ve been in New York for years, but I still miss my New E ­ ngland home. Connecticut, hilly and woodsy, always draws leaf-­peeping crowds in autumn. Some years, when the nights turn cold early enough, the leaves reveal their fiery hearts of orange, yellow, and red in September. Other years, even in late September, green lingers. When my three older s­ isters and I w ­ ere kids, a typical Thursday after­ noon, they tell me, included record-­breaking swing-­set marathons or roller-­skating down the driveway that must have seemed like a precipitous slope given my fear of speed and heights. But one Thursday after­ noon in late September, when I was eight years old, we spent our time

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calculating how close to the h ­ ouse certain trees w ­ ere leaning, triple-­ checking battery-­operated lamps, crisscrossing the win­dows with masking tape, and taking inventory of the canned food stored in the basement. My ­mother stockpiled hundreds of cans, jars of pickles from my grand­ mother’s ­recipe, and scores of b ­ ottles—­mostly ketchup, soda, and salad dressing. The basement was a playground for us, especially when we gave in to troublemaking impulses. Someone unscrewed soda caps and took just a sip from each ­bottle, letting them leak out their gas. (I’m told that I was the culprit.) Someone cracked the basement fridge and stole one of the hard-­boiled eggs intended for potato salad or Easter coloring. (No one has yet confessed to that crime.) Our basement antics infuriated my ­mother, and saddened her too, since her basement was her own haven, not for tricks, but for her beloved t­ hings. Fabric, mostly. And the piano, a significant purchase she and my ­father made ­after I as their youn­gest was out of diapers, officially making us a f­amily of four lesson-­ready kids. The basement held my ­father’s effects, too—­his workbenches laden with tools and his model trains. My ­mother’s basement hideaway, shelter from the bomb-­bright world, h ­ adn’t changed a bit since my f­ather was alive. That Thursday in late September, our basement trips w ­ ere restricted to fetching supplies. Hurricane Gloria was rushing up the East Coast, and as the radio blared the song by the same name, the sky darkened, the wind picked up, the electricity flickered, then failed. We lit candles. Throughout the following day, as the hurricane overwhelmed our small state, my ­mother stood at the kitchen win­dow, peering through its taped-­ off triangles at the back yard. The black tarp over our shallow above-­ ground swimming pool collected rainwater and leaves, sinking deeper and deeper into the pool ­water below. A branch swung out over the pool and back into the shelter of the tree again. Out and in with the wind, as if to taunt my ­mother: I’m ­going to drop. I’m g­ oing to drop right ­here on this pool and send its thousands of gallons of chlorinated w ­ ater into that basement of yours. The branch did fall, but straight down, crashing against the

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tree’s base. My m ­ other sighed deeply and unfolded her hands. But she ­d idn’t remove her gaze from the wind-­torn yard. One of us must have dragged that tree branch into the woods the next day. It had been so pretty before it turned malicious and then rotten. Late after­noon, the eye passed over, and the neighborhood’s modest ­houses emptied of curious p ­ eople picking through sticks. We ventured out to the driveway and discovered that a sizable limb had fallen onto our cardinal-­red AMC Matador station wagon. The branch had snapped in two, leaving just scratches on the roof. Maybe my ­mother felt proud that ­she’d been driving her ­family around in an indestructible red box. Nightfall brought the wind back, and we slept fitfully in our pink lacy rooms.

In 1972, my ­mother and f­ ather purchased land for a ­house, half an acre on a short, hook-­shaped street in a quiet hilltop neighborhood. They ­were offered an add-­on—­the lot next door—­for $2,000, but they d ­ idn’t have the money. For the h ­ ouse, they chose a saltbox design, the kind of h ­ ouse that makes you think you could lift its steeply slanted roof and find baked goods inside. ­Every day my m ­ other drove from the apartment where they w ­ ere living to watch it go up. She and my dad painted it a dusky orange, called “burnt sienna” in paint stores, not unlike the copper orange of fall fo­liage. The ­house sat on a slight rise, its front yard an En­glish garden overrun by tiger lilies and hydrangeas. My m ­ other, a seamstress and craftsperson, quickly wallpapered all the rooms. When bedrooms ­were ­later occupied by her growing ­daughters, she asked us what kind of curtains and bedspreads we wanted, but only showed us a few se­lections from the J. C. Penney cata­log, only the kinds of curtains and bedspreads that matched the feminine wall­paper now permanently pasted. Our rooms ­were called “Monet” and “country garden,” and they came complete in one boxed set.

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The first-­floor bathroom provided my m ­ other with a unique design opportunity. Just off the kitchen, the bathroom had no win­dow, and she wanted to brighten it. She covered its walls with scraps of fabric, leftovers from this proj­ect or that, and slathered on polyurethane, a common product for home use at the time, ­until the scraps stayed flat and shined. The bathroom, an explosion of colors and textures, revealed her talents as an installation artist. The h ­ ouse served as a vessel holding the best years of my m ­ other’s life: marriage to my ­father, the birth of her ­daughters, an energetic environment loaded with craft materials and little-­girl t­ hings. She lost one baby—­ her second—at birth. The ­house held that tragedy for her, too, the only tragedy it would need to contain for a de­cade.

When we awoke on Saturday morning ­after the hurricane, Gloria’s song had ended. What remained of the storm made its way up to Maine, where the winds would take, much too early, the fall fo­liage from the trees. The local weatherman reported that the storm was the strongest on rec­ord to hit so far north. He said that for some neighborhoods along the Connecticut shore, it had been “a few hours of terror.” As the story goes, we girls rallied. ­After a quick breakfast, we zipped outside for raking and hauling branches and scooping up clumps of wet, green leaves. We skipped, jubilant, through chores. With downed trees and power lines everywhere, school would be closed on Monday. Excitement trumped the tedium of yard work, for we had experienced an event we considered big, and only darted in and out of the h ­ ouse to get drinks of w ­ ater or to use the bathroom. My m ­ other, my ­sisters tell me, remained somber. “We lost six trees,” she said, as if ­she’d forgotten ­t hose trees had threatened the car and the pool. The trees had fallen when they w ­ ere still tough and dense. A neighbor would need to cut them apart with a chainsaw, keeping the logs as payment.

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While raking up a pile in the small square patch of grass ­behind the garage, I heard sounds from inside the ­house. My memory of the event begins: clang, clank, bang. Someone was dropping t­ hings, throwing them around. But we ­were all outdoors. My ­mother asked, “What are the cats ­doing?” That’s when the smoke alarm screamed. We froze. “Is someone cooking something?” my m ­ other asked. “Where’s Debbie? Is Debbie making something?” ­There was a new scream—­t his one ­human—­t hat pulled me taut like a rubber band. How bizarre it seems now, the fear that freezes the body in a full stop but electrifies the mind with a charge that’s as thrilling as it is terrifying. Debbie yelled from the top of the driveway, “Fire!” She bolted. I moved then, too, ­running to the garage door where she had been standing, and saw yellow. My ­mother shouted at us to get to the mailbox, the spot she and my ­father had chosen long before as our safe zone in times of danger. She saw three ­daughters hovering round the mailbox, but lost track of Debbie, who had run to the neighbor’s ­house to call 911. My ­mother, whose joints w ­ ere just beginning to stiffen with arthritis and who would lose the ability to bend them in a few years’ time due to Lyme disease, dropped to her knees and crawled into the ­house, looking for her. She dis­appeared in blackness, into the ­house that looked normal from the outside save for the smoking front door and the fiery throat of the garage. The man from next door brought Debbie to our mailbox at last. His wife, fearing for my s­ ister’s safety, h ­ adn’t let her leave. We three s­ isters knew, then, that she was fine. But my ­mother was still inside our burning home. Did it cross my mind that my m ­ other could be dead, too? Did I know what an orphan was? I d ­ on’t remember. When my ­mother fi­nally emerged, sobbing and choking, she was hoarse and the front of her dress was blackened. The Volunteer Fire Ser­v ice of Gales Ferry had just two trucks in the garage along Route 12. They w ­ ere rarely used. It should have taken five

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minutes to reach our neighborhood. But on this day, the roads ­were blocked ­because Hurricane Gloria had ripped down the tree branches and chucked them onto swimming pools and station wagons, over power lines, and across roads. For many minutes, from b ­ ehind the curtain of my m ­ other’s handmade dress, I heard the sirens, but no one came. Our ­house looked peaceful even as it groaned and smoked. We listened to the clangs and bangs, what we now knew w ­ ere pots and pictures falling off the walls as brass hooks melted. ­There was a sudden absence of the smoke alarm as it melted, too. Tammy remembers crying and screaming, “I hate you, God,” and when the neighbor told her, “You d ­ on’t mean that,” she said, “I do, and I hate you, too.” How hopeless it must have all seemed. The world outside our home had swallowed up our ­father, and now the interior of the home, with its innumerable and invaluable marks of our f­amily’s past, was being destroyed. The volunteer firefighters fi­nally arrived and doused our home u ­ ntil it sizzled. Even when burned, it met a wet end.

Months l­ater, investigators closed the case as an accident. The fire had begun in the windowless first-­floor bathroom. A candle, still necessary without electricity, had been set on the sink, close to the wall. One of us, the last to use the bathroom, had closed the door, creating a tiny gust, a hush that blew the candlelight into the wall like a kiss. A tiny spot, the size of a quarter, had started to burn. Eventually the wall, covered in fabric and glazed with polyurethane, had exploded in fire. Since we ­were all outdoors, we d ­ idn’t know u ­ ntil it was too late. Before that moment, the candle had emitted minimal light. As we came inside from the bright outdoors, we must have had to adjust our eyes to the dimly lit interior of the bathroom. Yet that single flame initiated an event of such magnitude that it converted definable objects—­with edges, curves, textures, and colors—­into alien shapes, molten, shrunken, desiccated. Like

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a small bomb, it wielded extraordinary power over the surrounding objects, causing them to collapse into themselves, and over the f­amily that lived in the h ­ ouse, causing it, too, to collapse into itself. The contents of the first floor ­were irretrievable, but only ­because they could no longer serve their original function. I won­der what happened to them, if the pieces ­were trucked to the incinerator about ten miles away. Or could they still exist, buried deep in a landfill? Our bedrooms on the second floor ­were shrouded in smoke. The basement had been flooded with ­water from the hoses, and much of what my m ­ other had stored t­ here was damaged beyond repair, except for the canned food, which remained intact and went with us to the rental ­house. The den next to the bathroom bore the brunt of the damage. Books that ­were lost: If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, Thirty Stories to Remember, Trees of North Amer­i­ca. Two hundred in total. My m ­ other meticulously listed each ruined ­thing by hand. One receipt from an electrician reads, “Description of work: House had fire. Turned on three cir­cuits that ­were not in the fire so they could see. No charge.” But the frame of our ­house stood as it always had, preserved. Our ­house was like a body struck by lightning, organs fried but shell unscathed, not even marked by an exit wound. I remember this well: From my spot at the mailbox, the ­house looked perfect. But I knew that its central light source had been snuffed out.

Hours a­ fter the fire, my ­mother was allowed to reenter the ­house to survey the damage. Once more we watched her, erect this time, walk into the home she had painted and wallpapered with my f­ ather. At some point during the fire, Twinkle, the younger of our two cats, had escaped through a broken win­dow and was rescued in the woods. But Spookee, our oldest, the cat my u ­ ncle had given to my m ­ other two months before my f­ather died, was still missing. For the second time that day, my m ­ other crossed the charred threshold to search for someone. She called Spookee’s name,

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and our skinny black cat, now dull with soot, emerged from the flooded basement. My m ­ other picked her up and laid her over her shoulder. Spookee mewed, but my m ­ other stayed quiet. ­After crackling, ­after alarms, a­ fter the sirens . . . ​silence. It took several months for the cleaners, carpenters, and electricians to rebuild the ­house. When we returned, we moved back into a dif­fer­ent world, all white walls and bare floors.

iv. ­ Table for Five A few years ­after my ­father died we started ­going out for dinner again, so my ­sisters tell me. My parents had apparently taken us out often, but a­ fter my ­father’s death, such treats became rare and dear. We did make it to church on Sundays for mass and donuts. Mostly, though, during the years of mourning, we stayed in the h ­ ouse. In summertime I’m sure we went stir crazy, but in a quiet way so as not to disturb our ­mother. “She’s already having such a hard time, girls, so be very, very good,” our grandparents instructed when they brought casseroles and soup, the customary comfort foods. I won­der if I knew what that meant, or what it meant not to be good. I won­der if my s­isters and I thought that “be good” meant “­don’t cry.” The dinners began modestly as a trip down the hill to Spiro’s Pizza for takeout, a cheesy moussaka pie. My ­mother recorded ­t hese visits ­after the fire and added them to the insurance claim: twenty-­seven pizza nights during our rental-­house stay. My ­sisters remember that we’d send in a two-­girl team while our ­mother kept the motor ­running on the station wagon. She said it wasted gas to turn the car off and on again. She told me years ­later that she hated to go inside ­because Spiro was single, and we girls would mercilessly tease her about how much he liked her. The pair with the pizza fought for box-­holding privileges while our ­mother crept the car back up the hill, ­eager to get home but ner­vous about driving ­t here. It’s almost as though she prophesized the icy eve­ning years ­later,

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and our skinny black cat, now dull with soot, emerged from the flooded basement. My m ­ other picked her up and laid her over her shoulder. Spookee mewed, but my m ­ other stayed quiet. ­After crackling, ­after alarms, a­ fter the sirens . . . ​silence. It took several months for the cleaners, carpenters, and electricians to rebuild the ­house. When we returned, we moved back into a dif­fer­ent world, all white walls and bare floors.

iv. ­ Table for Five A few years ­after my ­father died we started ­going out for dinner again, so my ­sisters tell me. My parents had apparently taken us out often, but a­ fter my ­father’s death, such treats became rare and dear. We did make it to church on Sundays for mass and donuts. Mostly, though, during the years of mourning, we stayed in the h ­ ouse. In summertime I’m sure we went stir crazy, but in a quiet way so as not to disturb our ­mother. “She’s already having such a hard time, girls, so be very, very good,” our grandparents instructed when they brought casseroles and soup, the customary comfort foods. I won­der if I knew what that meant, or what it meant not to be good. I won­der if my s­isters and I thought that “be good” meant “­don’t cry.” The dinners began modestly as a trip down the hill to Spiro’s Pizza for takeout, a cheesy moussaka pie. My ­mother recorded ­t hese visits ­after the fire and added them to the insurance claim: twenty-­seven pizza nights during our rental-­house stay. My ­sisters remember that we’d send in a two-­girl team while our ­mother kept the motor ­running on the station wagon. She said it wasted gas to turn the car off and on again. She told me years ­later that she hated to go inside ­because Spiro was single, and we girls would mercilessly tease her about how much he liked her. The pair with the pizza fought for box-­holding privileges while our ­mother crept the car back up the hill, ­eager to get home but ner­vous about driving ­t here. It’s almost as though she prophesized the icy eve­ning years ­later,

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when our car would skid into the oncoming lane and back across a road ­toward the ravine. Her anx­i­eties turned to cold sweat that night, and then crystallized like the ice on the hill. At some point we began sitting down at restaurants—­a lways an event. Lum’s offered activity placemats that kept us busy scrawling tic-­tac-­toe games in crumbly crayon. The Ground Round’s tele­vi­sion played cartoons nonstop. My m ­ other welcomed freebies. We’d be out at Denny’s celebrating someone’s birthday, or at Friendly’s as a reward for straight As, when a waiter would sweep crumbs onto the floor or plunk our sundaes down in the m ­ iddle of our dirty dinner plates. My m ­ other, who had saved just enough to take us out, would be plainly horrified—­“Where’s the sense of decency?”—­and insist something be ­free: desserts on the ­house or coupons for next time. She bud­geted well but always seemed ten dollars from the poverty line. My ­sisters ­were proud of her, for she had become President of the ­Family. Then ­t here was the Steak Loft, a staple that we frequented well into my teen years, making it the only restaurant I remember. The Steak Loft was farther away—­two highway exits—­which qualified it as a trek. We dressed neatly in cheap clothes, something I still do now: thrift skirts and sale flats and hand-­me-­downs. We sat in the rear-­facing seat of the car, the “wayinback,” where we found bits of the dried seaweed we collected from the beach in winter to spread over the vegetable garden. We rocked and rolled to playful oldies like Lonnie Donegan’s “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?” I’d never had chewing gum—my ­mother thought it unhealthy, unladylike, a choking h ­ azard—so I c­ ouldn’t know what the flavor was to begin with. The Steak Loft boasted a magnificent octagon-­shaped salad bar, and when the red bow-­tied waiter asked for our order, he seemed to glare at us if my m ­ other announced we’d be having the all-­you-­can-­eat buffet. Years ­later, while waitressing at another steak h ­ ouse, I learned about the inverse relationship par­tic­u­lar to buffets: the higher the number of dishes to clear, the lower the tip. We girls ­were very grown up, sipping Shirley ­Temples

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through skinny red straws and asking for seconds. I wondered what was inside the menu at the Steak Loft, though now when I think about it I laugh ­because of course it must have been steak. As far as I know, we ­didn’t often crack the menus, opting instead to make multiple trips to our octagon orgy. How I loved that buffet—­eight long sides of the bar teeming with stacks of deli meat, vats of chopped vegetables, buckets of dressing. I loved the shiny plastic spoons, tongs, scoops, forks, and spatulas, all beckoning, ­handles sticking out e­ very which way. Even in high school, I always started with the same delight: five slices of salami, arranged like the Olympic rings, providing the bottom to a pool of Italian dressing, topped with croutons and cucumbers adrift. At our Steak Loft t­ able, the old round one in the corner, with way too much elbow room between us, I would pick at my cucumber slices, slowly folding them in half, biting out the seedy ­middles. I liked to leave the perfect circles intact, no bites, w ­ hole rings. Life preservers. Someone would snicker about the waiter’s bow tie—­“The boy tie! Hahaha!”—­and my ­mother would say, “Lower your voices! Every­one in the restaurant can hear you,” and we would look around to see if it was true. Tammy remembers one Steak Loft dinner when a w ­ oman at the next ­table eyed us and whispered into her husband’s ear at the exact moment our m ­ other gave her breathy reproof. To my s­ ister, the memory is a sour one, something she wishes she could forget, one of ­t hose memories she shares and then leaves on the ­table between us as if hoping I might throw it away for her. I take it, as I take so many ­others. I pick up the memory and taste it, and of course I ­don’t like it. When I re-­create the ­woman’s expression—­ left brow up, lips pulled in, head shaking—my face and stomach burn in shame. The unknown past becomes a vivid pre­sent: this ­woman’s annoyed at our high-­pitched laughing. ­We’re a ­family of ­idiots, one big silly chicken without its head, somehow still flapping and cackling. Are we pitiful? Perhaps she won­ders where our ­father is and knows about the monthly

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envelopes with cellophane win­dows. Does she judge our ­mother for using the money on dinners out when she should be at home clipping coupons and mea­sur­ing cups of U ­ ncle Ben’s rice? Are we a burden on society? Maybe this w ­ oman feels bad for us. Maybe she can detect in our laughter a loneliness that makes us look and sound distorted, like witches dancing around a ghost, matching lace collars hiding talismans strung about our chubby necks. I want to escape my ­sister’s memory. Hot in polyester pants, I’m sticking to the fake leather chair, feeling embarrassed to be out with this f­ amily of females, all too aware of our high voices. I glance at my m ­ other. Am I to blame? I want to hug her and say, “­We’re a normal f­ amily. Y ­ ou’re d ­ oing fine. We w ­ on’t grow up to be criminals or deadbeats.” Suffocated, I put the memory back down.

v.  Bridges and Tunnels Deep into hypnotherapy, I lift my right forefinger, signaling to the practitioner that I want to speak. “Where are you?” she asks. “It’s the train t­ able in our basement,” I say. “It’s huge. Two levels of electric trains.” “What are you ­doing?” “Playing with plastic ­people. I put them in front of the train that’s coming. But I save them.” “Who’s around you?” “My s­ isters. Th ­ ey’re laughing. It’s so funny to put the p­ eople on the tracks and rescue them before the train comes. We love playing heroes.”

My ­father devoted much of his f­ ree time to model trains. My grand­father, my ­mother’s f­ ather, got him into it. Dziadziu (our derivative of the Polish word for “grand­father,” pronounced “jah-­joo”) built an elaborate layout

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envelopes with cellophane win­dows. Does she judge our ­mother for using the money on dinners out when she should be at home clipping coupons and mea­sur­ing cups of U ­ ncle Ben’s rice? Are we a burden on society? Maybe this w ­ oman feels bad for us. Maybe she can detect in our laughter a loneliness that makes us look and sound distorted, like witches dancing around a ghost, matching lace collars hiding talismans strung about our chubby necks. I want to escape my ­sister’s memory. Hot in polyester pants, I’m sticking to the fake leather chair, feeling embarrassed to be out with this f­ amily of females, all too aware of our high voices. I glance at my m ­ other. Am I to blame? I want to hug her and say, “­We’re a normal f­ amily. Y ­ ou’re d ­ oing fine. We w ­ on’t grow up to be criminals or deadbeats.” Suffocated, I put the memory back down.

v.  Bridges and Tunnels Deep into hypnotherapy, I lift my right forefinger, signaling to the practitioner that I want to speak. “Where are you?” she asks. “It’s the train t­ able in our basement,” I say. “It’s huge. Two levels of electric trains.” “What are you ­doing?” “Playing with plastic ­people. I put them in front of the train that’s coming. But I save them.” “Who’s around you?” “My s­ isters. Th ­ ey’re laughing. It’s so funny to put the p­ eople on the tracks and rescue them before the train comes. We love playing heroes.”

My ­father devoted much of his f­ ree time to model trains. My grand­father, my ­mother’s f­ ather, got him into it. Dziadziu (our derivative of the Polish word for “grand­father,” pronounced “jah-­joo”) built an elaborate layout

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in his basement, which kept him busy and out of my grand­mother’s beehived hair. So stunning and magical was the layout, my ­mother says, that even the mailman or milkman would linger on the stoop of their four-­ room home on Meeting House Road, hoping for an invitation inside. Of course, no invitation was needed. Dziadziu loved to show off the latest addition to his train kingdom: a new switcher or a miniature welder spraying real sparks. His grand­daughters made an especially captive audience. He would perch us on folding chairs so that we could see over the side. My ­mother remembers his quiet chuckle as he watched us while we watched his trains. Given my dad’s love of electrical engineering, my grand­father had an easy time persuading him to build his own layout in our basement. My ­sisters recall that Dziadziu and Babci (our grand­mother, pronounced “bop-­chee”) would drive down from Mas­sa­chu­setts on Sundays, give a dollar to each of us, and then split up—­Babci to the kitchen with my ­mother, Dziadziu to the basement with my f­ather. The two men consistently talked trains. My ­father’s layout was a rectangle, about the size of a pool ­table, with two sets of tracks on the main level and a third loop on an upper deck around the perimeter. My dad painted green sections to mimic grassy areas, and glued down fish tank rocks for gravel driveways. He bought the popu­lar Plasticville to construct the town, designating one side of the ­table residential, and the other industrial. L ­ ittle railroad men emerged from the station to turn on signal lights, and tiny bulbs wired straight down through holes in the t­ able kept the town’s homes aglow. My ­father let us select engines and cabooses, and even showed us how he operated the complicated controls: circle the board, stop and reverse, blow smoke, and whistle. We laid l­ittle dolls called “­peoples” across the tracks and saved them from getting creamed by swiping them off at the last pos­si­ble second before a train rolled by. The p ­ eoples w ­ ere from Fisher-­ Price’s famous L ­ ittle ­People line—­armless, legless, single-­peg figures in primary colors.

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When my ­father died, my m ­ other ­couldn’t bear to disassemble his train ­table. During the fire, as firefighters doused our burning home, ­water from the hoses poured into the basement. It ­didn’t flow directly on the t­able, but the moisture left the tracks rusty and uneven. The extensive cleaning and rebuilding in the months ­after the fire resulted in the upheaval of the layout, as if an earthquake had struck Plasticville and all the l­ ittle p ­ eople had lain down in submission.

By heart, I know the story of my f­ ather’s death. He was driving on Interstate 95 in Connecticut; just as he crested the gentle arch of the Groton–­ New London Bridge, his car was smashed head on by a drunk driver. If my dad saw it coming, he had nowhere to go, with an eighteen-­wheeler to his right and the side of the bridge to his left. The bridge is actually two ­gently arching parallel bridges, one for northbound traffic (which runs eastward on the Connecticut stretch of I-95) and one for southbound. It spans the Thames River, linking the city of New London to the town of Groton. Connecticut College is on the New London side, along with the Coast Guard Acad­emy, the hospital where I was born, my m ­ other’s l­awyer, our orthodontist’s office, and the stately train station where I bought a ticket back to New York one Christmas ­because my ­sister and I w ­ ere fighting so much we ­couldn’t find peace in the car. The Groton side holds the naval base and the USS Nautilus museum, the Ponderosa Steak­house where I waitressed as my first job, the Mystic gift shop where I worked before it burned down, and our hilltop neighborhood, with its streets named a­ fter U.S. presidents and birds. I won­der if the town’s planning commission realized their homage to the fight-­or-­ flight response to stress. We lived on a bird street—­perhaps that’s why I perpetually daydreamed of leaving. Cresting the bridge now, ­every time I visit my ­mother, I look down to the mouth of the Thames and my favorite light­house, the New London Ledge. Just beyond is the Branford House, on a rare span of green with an

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uninterrupted view, right on the ­water where the river empties into Long Island Sound. The rest of the area is concrete and ­water, a tidal estuary lined by shipyard cranes, docks, and h ­ angars. Huge slabs in the w ­ ater form old base structures for rail bridges or ferry landings no longer in use. Just as many locals departed their offices that eve­ning, my dad left his nuclear power plant job and headed north t­ oward Groton. Th ­ ere w ­ ere no cell phones back then, and he never listened to m ­ usic in the car. I’m told he was a cautious driver. The northbound bridge is six lanes across. My ­father must have been in the leftmost lane, so that he could merge onto the Gold Star Highway for a thousand feet, then take the Route 12 exit and drive north along the Thames River, past the submarine base, home. The ­woman who killed him—­let’s call her Sarah White—­while drinking vodka in her car, drove south ­toward New London, but on the wrong side of the bridge. Many ­drivers must have seen her that eve­ning and said, “What the hell? Somebody’s g­ oing to get killed.” I’ve driven the area hundreds of times. I’ve studied the maps. Still, it’s hard to understand how, or why, it happened. The Groton side is an asphalt spider­web that connects Interstate 95 to the Gold Star Highway, Route 12, and the famous Route 1, the old Boston Post Road. Sarah White would have had to enter the interstate on the exit ramp, weave around the oncoming cars, drive the thousand-­foot section of the Gold Star Highway that normally serves as an exit from I-95, and merge onto the interstate just where cars veer off it, getting herself onto the wrong bridge. That’s over a mile into oncoming traffic. It was rush hour. Once she was on the bridge, with six lanes of cars and trucks rushing straight at her, Sarah White’s dumb luck ran out. At the time, she told police she ­didn’t remember the crash, so it’s impossible to know if she registered the black-­haired man in the golden car. I like to believe that he ­didn’t register her ­either—­t hat he ­didn’t foresee his death. I like to believe that he was thinking of us, his wife and d ­ aughters in matching dresses. At some point the bridge was renamed the Gold Star Memorial Bridge, like the road it bleeds into. In military terms, the Gold Star is given to the

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­w idows of soldiers who die in combat. Getting it is a survivor benefit according to Public Law 534. You must apply for the Gold Star, proving ­you’re next of kin. It’s difficult to get a replacement if your star is lost or broken. “Open the sides of your vision into a pa­norama,” says the hypnotherapist. “Discover what’s in front of you, to the sides, b­ ehind.” “­There’s a windowsill. Sunlight. Bright green and blue glass vases.” “How old are you?” “I’m ­little. But standing. I’m six, I think.” “Six is prob­ably too young to touch the trains. You can watch the trains go, play with the plastic ­people, see the light in the win­dow.” “It smells like a workshop. Grease and metal. It sounds like a workshop, too. Crackling. Th ­ ere’s a ­little train car with barrels that go up a ramp. I love watching it. All of it. A real, live town.”

“You are bidding on a train from my ­father’s and grand­father’s collections,” I write at the start of all my eBay auctions for the Lionel trains I’m selling for my ­mother. E ­ very year, my m ­ other lets just a few t­ hings go. Her growing anxiety—­over h ­ ouse repairs, property taxes, her failing health—­ surpasses her attachment to the trains just long enough to pack up one box at a time. Stephanie of Harrisonburg, ­Virginia, writes me about the Lionel Operating Hand Car. She says that her dad ­really wants the car for Christmas, and she’s so excited that she won my auction. ­She’ll pay immediately. “Thanks, Stephanie,” I write. “I’m glad this piece is g­ oing to someone who loves trains.” But I wish I could keep it, with all the rest of them, ­here in my small city apartment. “My grand­father loved his Lionel layout,” I write in my auction descriptions. I d ­ on’t add that late in his life, when he was disabled by cancer that took both an eye and the skin off his leg, when he wore a protective outer

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covering like plastic skin, he still hobbled down the narrow steps to fiddle with his layout. “He taught my f­ ather every­t hing ­t here was to know about Lionel,” I decide to tell Stephanie so ­she’ll pass it on to her ­father this Christmas. Robby from Elk Grove, Illinois, writes to say that the Timken is a “great-­ looking car” and he hopes h ­ e’ll win it. Lionel released the Timken in the 1960s with versions in ten dif­fer­ent shades of yellow, from pale sunshine to rich amber. “The Timken Box Car is in superb condition, with just two small marks on one side, and none on the other.” It’s a golden car, perfectly intact, one of my favorites. Buyers always want to know about the boxes, too. I d ­ on’t know enough about collectors’ editions to write box specifications, so I just describe what I see. “The box is in very good condition, with one tape repair and a blue ink mark.” The best part of the box is its price tag, from the now-­closed Madison Hardware in New York. I won­der if my ­father ever made buying trips to the city. My ­mother tells me that Dziadziu, on the other hand, bought most of his cars through the mail, from a store in Linden, New Jersey. The owner knew my grand­father so well that he’d ship the cars to Mas­sa­chu­setts before receiving payment. Robby wins the Timken with a last-­minute bid. The Bucyrus Erie Work Crane is heavy, so I mark the shipping cost a ­little higher. Packing the box is ­going to be tricky. “The Work Crane shows very slight signs of wear,” I write. “The box was repaired several times, one end being held together by what I call my grand­father’s vintage tape.” Though normally I clean up the boxes, on this one I opt to leave the l­ittle sticker my grand­father used to indicate which way was up. Carl of Strasburg, ­Virginia, writes, “What a nice piece of Lionel history.” Like my grand­father, my ­father was a nut for cleanliness and organ­iz­ ation. He ­housed his trains with their original boxes in large plastic containers u ­ nder the layout, hidden b ­ ehind a burlap curtain. Wires ­were fed through the train ­table and tacked under­neath. Without vis­i­ble evidence of wires or boxes, Plasticville looked, ironically, even more plastic. My

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­father decorated the walls with Lionel signage, special cars on display shelves, his conductor’s cap, and trestle bridges that looked just like the ones traversing the Thames River alongside the Gold Star Memorial. Bill, a Yankees fan from Aurora, Colorado, thinks the Lionel Coal Elevator Number 97 is a “quality product.” On the Number 97, small buckets scoop coal from a repository and carry it up a steel shaft. The buckets dump the coal pieces onto a slide that carries them to a waiting car at the back. Something about the lifting makes me want to keep it. But the cord has vanished, so I ­can’t power the elevator to see if it still works. I pull the chain manually and the buckets rise, so I report that on eBay. “This piece has been stored in my m ­ other’s clean, non-­smoking home for many, many years. It’s time to let it go to another Lionel lover.” I choose not to write about the h ­ ouse fire, figuring it’s been over two de­cades and t­ here’s been no smoke since. “I am not a train collector, nor am I a train enthusiast, hobbyist, or reseller,” I write at the end of my auction descriptions, hoping to stave off questions that I ­can’t answer. I’ve yet to find an appropriate way to explain that I am simply the d ­ aughter of a train lover who is now dead, the grand­ daughter of another train lover also now gone, and the d ­ aughter of a w ­ oman who, like me, wants to keep all the trains but, like me, needs the money.

My boyfriend, Justin, and I visit my m ­ other for a long autumn weekend to help in the yard. We slice limbs off of trees that have grown too close to the house—­one limb at a time—­until my m ­ other, from her wooden bench, says, “Oh, just take the w ­ hole t­ hing down. Take it.” “This one?” I hesitantly ask, playing the city dweller who longs for trees. “Yes, that one.” She points out how close the tree is growing to the ­house. “Look. Look at the rotting wood ­under Debbie’s win­dow. I ­can’t afford to have that fixed. So take the tree.” Justin saws and I drag the trees to the woods ­behind the ­house, laying them down alongside the brook. I pause to check on the rotting tree stump

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that, my s­ isters tell me, served as a throne for the s­ ister in charge for the day. The magic light of the woods barely permeates the overgrown mountain laurel that used to pass for secret tunnels. As I start on another pile, my m ­ other says, “I c­ an’t tell you how much I appreciate this help.” An opportunity for a joke: “I just hope I’m not a drag, Mom.” I grab the branches and go, glancing back to see her laughing. “­You’re the drag queen!” she says. My spine tingles for this moment with my ­mother.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the drunk driver who caused my f­ather’s death. A few weeks ago, I asked Justin to look her up online. He works in the news and can access more comprehensive databases than I can. “Are you sure ­you’re ready?” Justin had said to me. “I’m ready,” I said. “I just ­don’t want to be the one looking at the names.” Justin found no rec­ords from years e­ arlier than 1986, despite the more than five hundred returned listings per search engine. Then, one eve­ning, an article from much l­ ater popped up. “­Here’s something about your dad,” he told me. It was a New York Times article about a candlelight vigil my ­mother and I attended in 1994, when I was seventeen. My ­mother is severe in her quotes: “I would like much stricter enforcement and I would like to see them serve a lot more time,” she says of drunk ­drivers. “They should do community ser­vice in an emergency room and see the effects of drunk driving. I would like them to feel some of the pain we feel.” For my part, I’m described as “tearful” and paraphrased as saying no ­little girls should have to grow up without their ­fathers. At first, ­every few days, Justin found a new bit of information. Sarah White never left the area. She has relatives in the Midwest. No, that’s another Sarah White. It appears that our Sarah White never married or had ­children. No known associates. No employment history, but no unemployment rec­ords e­ ither. No death notice, so she is likely still living. She

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is five-­foot-­t hree, like me. She has hazel eyes, as do I. Like me and my ­father, she has a November birthday. Her last known address is from several years ago. The trail stops ­t here. Now, at my m ­ other’s h ­ ouse, I pull out my notes on Sarah White. I feel tugged by the portrait of this w ­ oman. Not necessarily to meet her, but to see her. If she did glance into my ­father’s car, if she caught his pale, round face through the windshield, then she was the last person to see my ­father alive. I want to share in the seeing. I spend the witching hours on the floor of my m ­ other’s study as she sleeps and Justin stands watch. I ease open the file cabinets to thumb through her papers for what I need—­more information about Sarah White, about her trial, numbers I can call. The cat skulks. ­Don’t tell Mom, I whisper. I find a file marked “­Daddy.” My ­mother turns over in her sleep. Justin yawns. That’s enough for to­night, I tell him. My heart beats heavi­ly over my bedtime reading material: photocopied articles, the first page only of each, with the photo­graphs removed. The articles reveal what Troop E’s accident investigators ­were learning in real time 1983. And they reveal a dif­fer­ent story from the one I’ve been carry­ ing. I tick off details new to me. The crash was in the after­noon, not at night. My f­ ather had left work early to clear snow from our driveway. So it was snowing, too. The police thought the weather played a role but quickly dropped that suspicion. Sarah White struck my dad’s car, pushing it across the highway, where it was hit a second time, by a speeding tractor-­trailer g­ oing too fast to avoid the collision. I’d known about the truck. I h ­ adn’t known that it skidded five hundred feet on the highway, up an embankment, and into the parking lot of a commercial center, tearing up pavement along the way. It ­stopped just shy of a bank’s drive-up station, closed for repairs that Monday. A football-­sized chunk of asphalt smashed through the bank win­dow, but the truck driver walked away from the crash. The bank’s vice president said the accident could have been so

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much worse had the drive-up win­dow been open. “It was a blessing in disguise,” he told the reporter. Sarah White hit another car as well. Its driver, a twenty-­year-­old ­woman, was treated for minor injuries. Sarah White was injured, too. Multiple traumas. Liver surgery. She was thirty-­four years old. She lived in New London, her address given in the papers. I have a headache. Every­thing I thought I knew is incorrect. For as long as I can remember, I have held my breath over the bridge where I thought my f­ather died. But, according to the paper, my f­ather never made it to the bridge. The crash happened before he got ­t here. He was killed in New London. Why did I never look for ­t hese details before? Another stunning revelation: Sarah White ­didn’t enter via an exit ramp. She drove the proper approach to the northbound highway. Just when she should have merged into the flow of traffic, when she should have glanced back and seen my f­ather’s car coming, when she should have waited for him to pass by or to let her in, she turned entirely around, a hard left, almost 180 degrees, and sped straight into his car. Th ­ ere was one witness to her turn. She was called the “wrong-­way driver,” but she ­wasn’t wrong, not ­until the very end. She was on my ­father’s side of ­things. She approached the highway the proper way. Then she just turned. The last article states that by the end of that week, police still c­ ouldn’t fathom why she made that turn.

My ­father’s train t­ able stood untouched ­after his death. We girls knew it was ­there, of course, but played around it. ­After the fire, my ­mother tacked a new curtain around its edges, to replace the burlap that smelled of smoke. The cats utilized the hiding spot, but we always found them. “It’s a shrine,” my m ­ other told us. “Too painful to touch.” Lately, however, something has happened to my m ­ other: grandchildren. My m ­ other wants to watch them watch the trains. She’s thinking full

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circle. “I want them to see trains r­ unning,” she tells us over dinner. “One ­going in one direction, one g­ oing in the other. And lights, too.” She’s even mapping out a tunnel through a plaster of Paris mountain. Though exhausted from yard work, I’m drawn into this new proj­ect. “Let’s keep this a secret from your s­ isters,” my ­mother says, and I am surprised to be welcomed in like that, to stand out from among my more communicative, more helpful, more available ­sisters. And I’m ­eager to help my ­mother work through this miniature trauma. Mold covers every­thing. I’ve never seen mold like this—­mold collected into piles. ­Little mold colonies, eerily the same color as many of the plastic ­peoples. We should be wearing masks, I think. Cleaning between tracks, Justin and I use paintbrushes to detail the intersections. We vacuum the mold, accidentally taking up gravel, too. Fi­nally, we crawl under­neath to hunt for power, while my ­mother sits on her ­father’s old chair, writing notes about loose wires and missing switcher caps. She peppers us with questions: “­Can’t you just get electricity to the tracks? What are t­ hose wires for? I d ­ on’t want any wires dangling.” She becomes exasperated. “Pack it all up, sell it all on eBay. It’s never ­going to run again.” Then she chastises herself. “I feel so guilty. I’ve left it for too long.” I listen from u ­ nder the ­table, grateful for the fabric cover. My ­mother falls quiet. I peek out and see that her eyes are teary. Maybe she’s thinking about her grandchildren, her ­father, her husband. Justin and I shine our flashlights on the hundreds of wires ­under the board as we trace the loops in some kind of logical map and hunt for the main power source. We talk with confidence for my m ­ other’s sake. “Do you see this aqua one? If I can just reroute it . . . ​to . . . ​­here! ­There. That should work.” We find a handmade generator in a dusty wooden box. If that’s the power source, w ­ e’re out of luck. I plug cords into a new surge protector and crawl out to my ­mother. I ­c an’t see her expression b ­ ehind her praying hands, but her eyes are bright red. “I’m g­ oing to turn it on,” I tell her.

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“I’m scared of it,” she says. “I’m scared of another fire.” With my big toe, I press the red switch. ­There’s a hum, then a few mini­ ature street lamps flicker on. Electricity is still feeding the ­table. “It works!” I say, and embrace my ­mother. She ­doesn’t hug back—­her hands are still in prayer. Justin places a locomotive on the track. It d ­ oesn’t move. He lifts it up and tries again. Not even a crackle. My m ­ other watches it with a stony face. It’s time for bed. ­We’re leaving in the morning. She thanks us for our help and makes her way upstairs. “Whose trains are they?” asks the hypnotherapist. “­Daddy’s trains. He works hard on them.” “What are the trains ­doing?” “One train is stopping. It’s g­ oing backward now.” “Are you r­ unning the trains?” “No. I’m not allowed to touch the dials.” “­You’re just a l­ ittle girl. The dials are mysteries. Who is making the train go backward?” “­Daddy. He’s at the controls. He makes the train go backward for us, ­every time we ask.”

“I’ve been sitting ­here since I got up at five,” my ­mother says the next morning, her arms crossed on the kitchen t­ able. “You know, I never thought to flip all t­ hose switches in the front, all at the same time.” “We ­aren’t ­going yet, Mom,” I reassure her. “Let’s give it another try. Fresh eyes.” Justin and I bound downstairs to the train layout, rejuvenated with hope. My ­mother descends slowly ­behind us. I flip up all the silver switches. Nothing. U ­ nder the t­ able, I search for a new source of power, and find a switch hidden ­behind a voltage regulator. We missed it last night. I push it up, and the needle jumps to the center of

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the dial. Justin places a black engine on the track and aligns the wheels. I crawl out and turn on the surge protector. ­There’s a spark. Whiteness illuminates the inside of the engine cabin. The wheels crackle. It moves. A l­ ittle. About a foot. Come on! You can do it! Make it all the way around! My m ­ other is crying. She says to the train, “Go. Please go.” Slowly it chugs. Smooth on good track, rough on a bad turn, it completes a loop. When the locomotive passes the railroad station, a ­little man emerges from the building, holding a lantern high above his head. We whoop, as if at our own basement revival. A second locomotive added to the inner track buzzes to life on contact. My f­ather’s trains glide round and round. If they can run again a­ fter so many years, I think, they could prob­ably run forever. My ­mother watches each train head out, one g­ oing in one direction, the other g­ oing the opposite way. They pass, each on its own track, without incident, and return to their home positions in front of the control panel. My ­mother swings the lever back and forth, controlling their speed. She’s not only thinking full circle, she’s living it. For me, ­things feel incomplete. Or, rather, unzipped. The story—­wrong-­ way driver enters highway via exit ramp and kills ­father of four on bridge—is not my story anymore. I’ve been rehearsing a scene that I never saw, from a time that I c­ an’t remember, and now it is gone. Each time a locomotive passes by the l­ ittle man with the lantern, I think not about its completion of a loop, but that it has to start its journey all over again. “Add a piece that’s not true,” says the hypnotherapist. “Allow yourself as an adult to time travel, to go back and visit yourself at the train ­table. What do you want to say to the six-­year-­old?” “Nothing.” “Nothing?” “Nothing. I ­don’t want to look at her. I want to look at ­Daddy.” “What do you want to say to him?”

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“I ­don’t know what to say. I just want to take a picture of him. I want him to smile and look at me. I want to remember this forever. I can see the top of his head, his black hair, but he’s looking down. He’s making the trains move forward and backward. I ­can’t see his face. And he ­doesn’t see me.”

We leave. I ask Justin to take me down the street where Sarah White lived in 1983, to the address named in the articles. We find a one-­story home on a small lot, the effects of c­ hildren scattered around the front yard. Traveling from that h ­ ouse back t­oward the highway, we feel out the route she might have taken. Near the highway’s entrance, Justin pulls to the side of the road. We study the single-­lane on-­ramp, the yield sign, the spot on the highway where my ­father died. I want to go further. Soon we are pulling up to Sarah White’s most recent address, the one Justin found in his database. It’s only a few streets away, not far from the river. He pulls up in front. House fifty-­t hree, apartment three. We park on the opposite side of the street. I stretch to take pictures of the apartment ­house out the back win­dow. I’ve worn dark shades for the occasion. I’ll look at the photos l­ ater. I’ll look for a ghost in the win­dow. Leaving Justin in the car, I walk up the rotting porch steps to the row of mailboxes. “White,” in punched letters on red label tape over mailbox three, tells me it’s the right building. The tape is the kind my ­father used to label pickle jars he repurposed for storage: lead weights, metal trucks, switchers, nails, fish tank rocks, smoke fluid, connectors. He nailed the jar lids to the basement ceiling, creating a mosaic inventory above his head. Rather than unscrew the jar caps counterclockwise, my ­father would unscrew the jars from the ceiling, clockwise. If someone comes out of the building, I’ll ask, “Are you Sarah White?” If she says yes, I’ll say, “I’m Ed Farrell’s ­daughter. His youn­gest.” Maybe ­she’ll say, “I d ­ on’t remember.” Maybe I’ll say, “I d ­ on’t remember, e­ ither.” Or maybe I’ll tell her that I have the wrong ­house.

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I read “White” again, but I ­don’t press the buzz­er, and nobody comes out of the building. On this dingy porch, chilled by the dropping temperature and the nearness of the river a few blocks ­behind me, I feel something, and I think it’s supposed to be disgust. I return to the car, and we idle for over a half hour. I study Sarah White’s home. The siding is crumbling. One end of a gutter has fallen, the dirty metal piping now hanging in a diagonal across the façade. The something I feel takes up most of me, so that what­ever I think is just a very narrow beam in the center. I ­don’t feel anger or disgust. It might be pity, but no. I think that I feel sorrow. Every­t hing is backward. The rusty train board hums. The locomotive sparks and shudders along its track. My ­mother and I share a secret. I have discovered a secret. Something in the public rec­ord but hidden in the back of a drawer. It was the after­noon. Th ­ ere was another car. And it was snowing. Sarah White drove a clean route to the highway. ­There was no confused trip through the tangle of highway merges and exits and on-­ramps. She made just one left turn. I have entered a long, dark tunnel, but I’ve entered in reverse, so I c­ an’t determine where I’m g­ oing. It’s cool and damp, and I’m watching the light in front of me, the light that is every­t hing I know about my life with the death of my f­ ather, get smaller and smaller as I take steps backward. I feel as if I’ve lost something inside, and I ­don’t know what it is, what I’m looking for. I ­don’t know how to make sense of this, of Sarah White. I ­don’t know what I need from her. I ­don’t know what I’m d ­ oing ­here. “It’s time to go home,” I tell Justin. He drives slowly back to the highway and heads south. I stare ahead, not at the taillights in front of us, but at the headlights of cars traveling in the northbound lanes. ­There is new territory in which to hold my breath. My f­ather never reached the bridge.

i. ­ Going on a Hunt The doorbell chimes. Shouts: No! No! My ­mother’s voice. I peer at the men entering. A policeman, a neighbor. A priest. ­Later—­twenty minutes? two hours?—my ­sisters and I watch tele­v i­sion at the neighbor’s h ­ ouse. Two girls per couch cushion. My six-­year-­old mind ­doesn’t register the name Knight Rider. In 1983, I just think of it as a show about a talking black car with red lights. ­We’re back at our ­house. I’m on my ­mother’s lap as she says, “God loved ­Daddy so much, he de­cided to take him early.” A long line out the door of the funeral home. ­People waiting in the cold. The coffin. My m ­ other bent double. And he w ­ ill raise you up, sings the congregation. Swinging brass and the smell of incense. Do I see the coffin lowered into the ground? A mound of dark, wet earth. (A mound, or just part of the crowd u ­ nder umbrellas?) It’s raining. ­After that: darkness. My memory is buried with my f­ ather.

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I remember nothing of the years before and a­ fter my ­father died. All of childhood hides b ­ ehind the bold memory of death. Did I collect pencils with my name on them? Did I hurry through my homework or poke around the margins? Did I request my sandwiches cut into triangles? When was the first time I rode a bike? Visited the aquar­ ium? Made a mud pie? Was I the sort of child who made mud pies? I ­don’t remember t­ hese t­ hings. I d ­ on’t remember creeping into the woods b ­ ehind our Connecticut h ­ ouse, the way my ­sisters say we did, to divine a royal bloodline and claim mountain laurel canopies as princess chambers. I ­don’t remember walking down our street two by two, gossiping about ­children who lived in the modest raised-­ranch ­houses, especially the tiny green one, the ugly brown one. Should we have pumped our bicycles west and up the hill, to the sand dunes left b ­ ehind by a construction com­pany that went bankrupt before it could complete a planned road, I ­wouldn’t know for sure. I think a s­ ister told me that once, and it seems real enough. Perhaps we spent eve­nings working out math prob­lems on the classroom-­ sized chalkboard our ­mother stored in the basement. Or maybe we spent ­t hose hours together but also alone ­after prickly disagreements, gnawing our fingernails in vague apprehension that the trauma was not yet over.

Two and a half years ­after the death scene, my memory zaps to life. It’s the day ­a fter Hurricane Gloria swept over our tiny town. I see leaves. Clumps of wet, green leaves. Crashes from inside the h ­ ouse. Clangs, metal hitting the floor. The smoke alarm screams. Debbie screams too. I sprint up the path from back yard to front. The kitchen glows. Yellow, hot, loud flames push into the garage. Seconds ­later, I’m at the mailbox. But w ­ e’ve lost track of Debbie. My ­mother crawls through the front door, dis­appears u ­ nder the smoke.

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Debbie reappears, then my ­mother. We wait. The fire trucks take a long time to come. I ­don’t smell wood or paper on fire. I smell crocheted afghans and leather shoes burning. Hours ­later, every­t hing drips and steams. The phone is a melted mass of burned plastic; it looks like gray clay roughly hewn into shapes—­rotary dial and coiled cord. Our cat surfaces. My ­mother lays her over her shoulder. Again: black.

The holes in my childhood memory have brought me ­here: a nondescript, overly air-­conditioned waiting room at my university health center. Goose bumps spread across my bare arms. I’m uncomfortable, exposed to the frigid air and to the student receptionist. I recognize her from her beanie, knitted, the color of rust, falling limply down the back. Beanies are signature hipster, and this Manhattan school collects hipsters. She hands me a clipboard with a form attached, and I take the chair opposite the only other person in the waiting room: a girl, pretty, much younger than I am, tapping her pen on her clipboard. Tap tap. I try to tune it out, but like all small sounds—­smacking-­lip sounds and rattling-­change sounds—­t he tapping agitates me. Name: Suzanne Year in school: gradu­ate, second year Parents or ­legal guardians: Married? Divorced? I assume they need to know b ­ ecause most patients h ­ ere are undergraduates. Dolores, widowed. Edward, deceased. I could add “killed by a drunk driver speeding the wrong way on the highway,” but ­there’s no room. “Killed in car crash” ­will do. At some point I learned to use the word “killed,” not “died,” the word “crash,” not “accident.” I seek out stories of other crashes and make sure the language is correct. Two killed in high-­speed collision. Four ­people, including two c­ hildren, killed in fiery crash.

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Tiny red hives dot my hands. I get hives from cold temperatures, salt ­water, and stress. I scratch, leaving long white lines across the bumps. Justin reminds me to bring a sweater, even when it’s hot outside. In summer I never listen and freeze at the grocery store or on the bus. Medical history. Of the forty-­three conditions listed, I check off two: anxiety and sleep prob­lems. The girl in the beanie stands and stretches, starts for the w ­ ater cooler. Tall and thin, she’s wearing a minidress with argyle socks pulled up over her knees. I won­der if she brought the socks just for warmth. With my thick legs, I could never pull that off. As she walks by my chair, I return to the form, adding a check next to “depression.” I ­don’t know if it’s true, or if it’s pos­si­ble to be both anxious and depressed. Inside I feel flat: anxious about feeling depressed, and depressed about feeling anxious. Briefly describe reason for appointment. How best to explain to Eliza, the counselor I’m meeting for the first time, the reason? I have a memory prob­lem. It’s not that I’m an amnesiac, or melodramatic movie material—­Who am I? Where am I? I’ve never lacked self-­awareness. I know who I am. My memory loss, though it’s drained me of almost ­every childhood minute, is not incapacitating, nor is it total. I’ve long recalled the two events that comprise my entire prepubescent childhood memory: doorbell and funeral, hurricane and fire. Then came the blood. In my darkened bedroom, I listened to Q105’s late-­night love songs: Whitney Houston, Belinda Carlisle, Richard Marx. I needed to sleep, but my lower abdomen felt tight. It must be a stomachache, I thought, as I rummaged through the bathroom cabinet for antacids, quietly so as not to awaken my eldest s­ ister across the hall. The chalky tablets d ­ idn’t help, and the discomfort grew worse u ­ ntil it burned. I helped myself to more medi­ cation—­ibuprofen this time—­and covered my stomach with a cloth soaked in cold ­water. In the morning I found dark blood on the toilet paper. I believed I had cut myself while washing. Or had I sat on something sharp? Bent over,

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naked, I examined myself. I ­don’t know if this was the first time I had examined myself, or if at five and seven and ten I had wanted to probe my body for mysteries. I found no scratches or wounds. I took the bus to school. When I came home that after­noon, t­ here was cherry-­bright blood in my underwear. ­After filling the tub to its brim with hot w ­ ater, I stepped in gingerly but with the determination of a patient enduring critical treatment. Sliding down to my eye line, I waited for what was meant to happen next, for the ­water to draw from my body what­ever was making it bleed. Packages of pads ­were piled high in the storage closet near the bathroom. I used one to absorb the blood. Shame, tethered to my instinct for privacy, told me to ball up my underwear, conceal it in a paper towel, and chuck it in the trash. I remember the blood, the sharp citrus taste of antacids, and the sting of hot ­water. I ­can’t remember how old I was, or anything ­else about it. I do recall the awkward moment by the washing machine years ­later, as I was packing up to attend college, when my m ­ other asked me if I’d ever gotten my period. Yes, I’d told her. Some time ago, yes. “Susan?” I look up, irritated, ready to correct the hipster who’s back ­behind the desk. At least once a week I have to tell someone my name is Suzanne, not Susan. I ­don’t understand why it’s so hard to detect the “z.” My m ­ other likes to tell me how stubborn I was about nicknames. Adults ­couldn’t resist shortening me to “Sue,” and I spat back, “My name is Suzanne,” as I’m ready to do now. But the student worker is addressing the pretty pen-­tapper. Susan is directed to an office down the hallway while I return to the form. I have a memory prob­lem. I still did well in high school, left for college, and never moved back home. I studied sociology, got involved in scores of activities, and met Justin. A ­ fter graduation, I began to build a life, moving to New York, working at an elementary school, living with friends. But beneath the surface, I d ­ idn’t s­ ettle. I d ­ idn’t enjoy the kind of emotional and m ­ ental health I perceived in o ­ thers. Communication with my

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­family was tense, and I c­ ouldn’t name the reason. My relationship with Justin stalled. I was quick to anger, blowing up at salespeople and parking garage attendants and cable com­pany representatives—­a ll ­people who delivered news that something I needed was unavailable or broken. Seesawing between irritability and fatigue, I dreaded getting up in the morning and drank myself to sleep at night. I ­didn’t know what to make of my two traumatic memories. I d ­ idn’t know what to make of the ­whole emptiness of my childhood. The story of me, of how I got to be an agitated twenty-­something, was the story of trauma, a borrowed story, or simply no story at all. I ­didn’t know who I was or wanted to be. On my twenty-­ninth birthday I de­cided to quit my job as an elementary school teacher and go to gradu­ate school. “For what?” my ­mother asked. I ­d idn’t know exactly. For thinking and writing and sitting in a classroom with other adults rather than c­ hildren—­children I loved but ­couldn’t understand. I applied to just one gradu­ate program. Two years with few requirements besides a thesis, open se­lection of social science courses. Perfect. I’d think for two years, then work at a think tank. The first assignment for my first professor, in a class on cultural criticism, was to write a short memoir. I assumed that the content had to be from childhood, since our reading that week—­George Orwell, Mary McCarthy, Edward Said—­ recounted childhood events. I knew I ­didn’t want to tell the sad stories of my ­father’s death or the h ­ ouse fire. Reluctantly, I e-­mailed my ­sisters for help, choosing what I thought was a benign topic: ­family dinners. They responded with tales full of humor and detail, but also pain. Pain that belonged to all of us. And pain that belonged to each alone, to the one who suffered at the hands of a ­family friend, to the one who suddenly became our ­mother’s caretaker, to the one who hardened. Pain I ­hadn’t ­until then acknowledged was irrevocably a part of every­thing we did a­ fter our ­father died. I wrote the essay, passing their memories off as my own. My professor liked it but wrote in the margin: “Power­f ul stuff, if it’s all true.”

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It was all true. Each detail I wove into the essay had happened, or a ­sister thought it had happened. Then again, I’d selected strands from each ­sister and braided them into something that looked like a single memory of my own. It ­wasn’t true, or was just a dif­fer­ent kind of true. For as long as I could remember, back to ­middle and high school, college, and into adulthood, I had been borrowing from my ­sisters and projecting their remembered lives as my own. H ­ ere I was, twenty-­nine, and d ­ oing it again for a grade. The following summer, I attended a conference in central Ohio. A late-­ June storm blew in one after­noon, soaking me as I returned to my classroom from a coffee break. When our workshop concluded for the day, I de­cided not to venture back out in the rain, opting instead to wait it out in a basement room, letting my clothes dry, watching the storm through the sliding glass doors. As the heavy rain flattened the lawn, littering the grass with spiky green oak leaves, I thought, it’s too early for t­ hese green leaves to fall. It’s only June. Wind swept leaves into the glass doors, where they stuck. Thunder collected in the ravine and thrust itself over the edge and across the campus. Rain cascaded. A hurricane erased Ohio. Crashes. Screams. D ­ on’t go into the h ­ ouse, Mommy. No, I thought. Not now. I’m an adult, safe in this basement. This is no place for me t­ oday. But I slid effortlessly into the chaos. I smelled the acrid smoke overpowering the still-­wet lawn. I heard the hissing fire, the pop pop as air pockets exploded in our ­house’s wood beams. Then I seeped out of my body, rising like smoke, to watch my little-­girl fin­gers clutch my ­mother’s cotton dress. Once inside the scene, I found myself looking for more memories. But ­t hings that happened before the fire, and t­ hings that w ­ ere about to happen, remained hidden to me. No m ­ atter how hard I strained to find something, I failed. It’s as if the eye of the hurricane blinked open to let me witness the destruction, then closed again. I evacuated the memory.

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As the rain continued, I wrote down every­thing I could remember from the fire, producing a scant but salient document. Then I did the same with my ­father’s death. I left blank lines to represent the gaps. Writing the stories, and then studying the extensive spaces on the page, created urgency that ­wasn’t t­here before. I felt sick with need. Like a pebble striking a windshield, the experience caused a tiny crack. Who was I exactly, if I c­ ouldn’t remember my past, my formative years and my ­father, myself? I suppose this is how a crisis of identity is born. The after­noon storm died over Ohio. I realized I was crying. I’d cried before about the death of my ­father, but never about the death of my memory. “I’m a half-­a mnesiac,” I scribbled on scrap paper, a printout of my round-­trip itinerary, during the flight back to New York. At the receiving end of a long arrow across the page: “Can I start therapy for this? Who ­will help me?” When I ask friends about earliest memories, most talk of early childhood. Justin recalls breaking his leg at three. “My m ­ other was so mad at my f­ ather for taking me skiing,” he says. “I remember extreme pain, and how all my preschool classmates drew pictures on my cast.” One describes standing in his crib and peeking between the slats when he was still the only child, a crib that would become his ­little s­ ister’s. He was two. My ­mother’s earliest memory is also from when she was two. She remembers waiting in the kitchen of her small, single-­story childhood home, fussing with her velvet dress. Her grand­mother had been killed by a drunk driver, the same way her ­f uture husband would die. She sat at the ­table on one of the wooden chairs with thin vinyl seats, chairs I now have in my apartment, while her parents dressed for the funeral. ­These recollections are in line with Western cultures, where the average earliest memory is between ages three and four. Most of us ­can’t remember anything before that age, which is a normal occurrence called “childhood amnesia.” But as toddlers turn to preschool kids, memories become more detailed and permanent. Each new memory is like a

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tributary, so that as c­ hildren grow through grade school and adolescence, their autobiographical rivers are flowing. My river starts moving at age thirteen or fourteen, off-­t he-­charts late. I won­der if getting my period woke me up. Perhaps this was the ele­ment needed to open the wound, to let the blood surge in my body and in my mind, too, inciting the hormones and neurons to once again charge up and fire. When I told another friend about my memory prob­lem, she said, “I barely remember anything ­either. It’s not that big a deal.” But it is a big deal to me. So significantly does my memory prob­lem loom, it feels like the only deal. When I think back to my childhood, every­t hing is skewed. Sometimes I sense my ­father more than anyone or anything ­else, simply ­because of the profound absence of him. It’s darkness when you ­don’t remember. It’s peculiar darkness, an airless void, when you ­can’t remember—­a room without light or even oxygen. I feel the urge for something more. I want to remember what I was like before I knew death. I want to remember what my ­father was like too. I want a memory of my ­father that has nothing to do with his funeral. A visceral himness, a tangible connection that serves as a touchstone to my very being ­here. I’d s­ ettle for a memory of the time when he was alive, even if he is not actually in the memory. A childhood moment in which my f­ather is outside the visual memory field—­a memory in which he is the scrape of the glass door opening or the roasted walnut scent of pipe smoke that sneaks out the vent in the garage. And I want a memory from the life I shared with my smaller ­family right a­ fter my ­father died, when his ­human essence was still in the ­house, on pages of the book he was reading or his winter coat. Memory of the space in which he lingered. When the ­house was still our ­house, before the fire destroyed so much of it. I’m hungry to add years on to my life. Time c­ an’t move two ways at once, but maybe memory can. We can discover old memories while making new ones. Add to our lives at both ends, the way we grow bones.

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“Suzanne?” I look up. It’s not the hipster. It’s a short, angular ­woman, standing in an office doorway just off the seating area. “Ready to come in?”

“Do you remember anything about your ­father?” Eliza asks. She’s tiny, with gaunt cheeks and dark, heavy eyebrows. She wears no makeup. As she listens, she tucks her thin legs ­under herself and wraps her shoulders in an oversized scarf. The room, like the counseling center waiting area, is cold, its air conditioner set high. School has started, but sticky summer heat persists. The scarf’s long black fringe matches Eliza’s hair. “I thought I did. I thought I remembered one moment with him.” My f­ ather was standing at the bow of a sailboat. He was wearing a yellow polo shirt, bright as a sunflower, and smiling u ­ nder a wave of black hair thick with pomade. “But it was just a photo.” “How did it make you feel to have what you thought was a memory?” “It was nice to know he r­ eally existed. The memory meant he was ­human.” My f­ ather had taken us to visit friends who had a boat. Maybe they w ­ ere friends from his power plant, or the Navy, or church. My m ­ other, though she enjoys being near the w ­ ater, is terrified of boats. But my f­ ather loved being on the ­water. “What was comforting about that par­tic­u­lar memory?” I expand the image of my ­father at the bow. He must have made my ­sisters and me feel safe on the slick deck. Or he let us find balance on our own. Or he encouraged us to hold to each other as we dared to step closer to the edge. Suppose I watched him on the bow, one sneakered foot up on the rail, looking like a captain. Suppose I was sick with worry he would fall, or sick with the motion of the boat. I ­battle motion sickness now; maybe it started with that early outing. Most ­people trace ­t hese ­t hings to their roots. I have to guess. I’m a master of inference.

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“I think I loved my ­father’s yellow shirt,” I tell Eliza. “I know I loved my f­ ather—­I must have, or I loved my memory of him. But then I found the picture. The w ­ hole t­ hing was ­t here: yellow shirt, black hair, sailboat.” “That’s a common experience,” Eliza says. “Believing something is memory when it’s just a story, photo, or film.” I knew she would say that. But while o ­ thers have said it while sweeping the air with a disregarding hand, Eliza looks patient and interested. “I need more than the photo,” I tell her. “I want to try to recover ­actual memories.” For a long time, I thought memory might be simply a ­matter of skill. Sculptors have strong sculpting skills; memoirists must have strong memory skills. If I could make my memory healthier, the past might push to the surface and bloom. I’ve tried ginseng, fiber, antioxidants, rosemary, sniff boxes, gingko biloba tree extract, a Chinese herbal blend called bu nao wan, brisk walks, breathing exercises, m ­ ental math games, crossword puzzles, avoiding artificial sweeteners, keeping blood pressure low, keeping stress down. Apparently a side effect of memory treatment is tip-­to-­ toe health. But such treatments aim at the aging who wish to stem deterioration of the mind. For finding long-­ago memories, for my sculpting, all of it was superficial. Nothing worked. Twice before t­ oday I’ve broached my memory loss with professionals. Once was in college with a PhD student in psy­chol­ogy who used her counseling center time to test short-­term memory. We talked a l­ ittle about my past, but mostly she listed number sequences and asked me to recite them back to her in reverse order. I was skilled at it. The other trial run was in my mid-­twenties, with a social worker who told me to talk to a pillow and pretend it was a “­little me.” The social worker withdrew from the conversation, leaving me to talk to a floral brocade pillow as foreign a “­little me” as the one I tried to conjure in my mind. I ­couldn’t play along. I stuck it out with her for a few weeks, too timid at the time to cut it off, ­until my teaching salary did so for me.

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Eliza and I, on the other hand, spend most of the session in one-­on-­ one conversation that comes naturally. We pluck the memories I do have out of isolation and place them on a continuum. That’s a start. I love the continuum. I love how feasible it seems to fill in the big gaps between known markers. Age six: my ­father’s death. Age eight: ­house fire. Sometime around age twelve: first period. At least my memories exist in relation to time. By asking questions, Eliza invites links that might other­wise be lost on me. “How do you feel about your memory?” Easy. Disappointed. “How do you think the image of your ­mother crawling into the burning ­house affected your sense of safety?” Harder question. My ­mother’s protective instinct has always been power­f ul, but some ­t hings ­were, and still are, beyond her control. “What kind of bond do you have with your s­ isters?” “Has it changed?” “What is the significance of your relationship with your boyfriend?” Much harder questions, tangled together. “What do you imagine you w ­ ere like right a­ fter your f­ ather died?” Eliza asks. “Angry,” I say without pause. “I imagine we ­were all ­really, ­really angry.” “Aside from a number of other prob­lems,” Eliza says, “stored-up anger can prevent access to memories.” “I may have been angry, but I d ­ idn’t act out. My s­ isters say I was the quiet one. More than quiet—­withdrawn. And glum.” “It’s pos­si­ble that during the years a­ fter your f­ ather died, you got caught in an emotional fog, stuck in a child’s ambiguous version of grief. This would make it hard to take in new information about the world, to make new memories.” Our session is just forty-­five minutes, and it’s not enough time to tell Eliza every­t hing: how I resent that the path that conveys us from birth to teen years and beyond—­t he path that leads to our pre­sent selves—­sits submerged b ­ ehind me. How I d ­ on’t know how far down it rests, or if it’s in a state of disrepair, like fallen chunks of an ancient monument. How I envy my ­sisters ­because, ­whether they want to or not, they can turn on

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their heels and walk back along the path to find meaning in critical moments. To find context. If I follow, I’m ­stopped short by cold ­water lapping my toes. What I would give for a thin but unbreakable through-­ line to my own life, before and ­after my ­father died. Some awareness that I was I, that I existed, that I was in fact a child. What I want seems pos­si­ble from my vantage point on Eliza’s couch. My brain needs to make connections it h ­ asn’t made for a long time. I believe Eliza can help me. Perhaps she can dive in and adjust t­ hings, direct my neurons to fire, like a conductor making a masterpiece out of the arrangement. I believe that by talking about it, over and over and over during all the sessions I am allotted by the university, I ­w ill remember something. I sense that Eliza can help me construct a stage, a realistic and detailed set design, in the hopes a memory play w ­ ill be performed. Stage directions for myself and my ­family—­markers so I’ll know where to place every­one—­ will become easier to script. I can leave big glow-­in-­t he-­dark X’s for my ­father and wait eagerly for him to step into the spotlight.

I like to say that I grew up on the waterfront. Technically, I grew up in a ­little pink room in a big orange h ­ ouse atop a Connecticut hill that rises from the banks of the Thames River. Few ­people have heard of my village, Gales Ferry. But they know of its parent town, ­Ledyard, and its shoreline neighbors, Mystic, Groton, and New London. London has its Thames, and New London has its Thames too, pronounced by locals not the British way but phonetically. At an unremarkable spot along the river’s eastern bank, a few miles north of where the Naval submarine base would l­ ater be built, Roger Gale used to slide his ferryboat up to a grassy lane. Gale bought the ferry from its builders, “the Ferry Men,” in the mid-­eighteenth ­century, in order to shut­t le ­people and goods across the river. Pro­gress took hold, and a ferry ­house was built, followed by a post office, shops, and eventually an entire village. “Gale’s ferry” became Gales Ferry, a village by the

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river, a tiny place to grow up, never quite a town but still maintaining its own volunteer fire com­pany. The view from my bedroom included nothing of the Thames River. My room, atop the kitchen, was always loud and warm. A screened-in porch sat u ­ nder my win­dow, its steep sloping roof patched with moss. The back yard included the swing set, shed, and pool. And just beyond that, the woods. Next to my room was Beth’s. Four years my se­nior, Beth was a mature and elusive figure; by the time my memory begins, she was in high school and dating the boy who would eventually become her husband. I remember him, my brother-­in-­law, as if he has always been h ­ ere. Down the hall slept Tammy and Debbie, who, at ten months apart, fought constantly. My ­mother held us to a strict policy of no fighting; when we did, we ­were forced to sit in a locked room u ­ ntil we could hold hands. It d ­ idn’t m ­ atter so much that we resolved the issue. “Just hold hands,” she would say. “Stop fighting and just hold hands.” What I remember of living in the ­house is circumscribed by teen angst. I felt caged when it was sunny. Light tempted my mind to the river, but I was stuck on top of the hill, landlocked and shaded by trees. I wanted to raft down the river and see where it took me, out of the mouth of f­ amily and into Long Island Sound. A raft would have been essential—­fresh ­water, from the Yantic and Shetucket Rivers fifteen miles inland, flows on the river’s surface, but salt w ­ ater, my skin’s nemesis, lurks under­neath. On gray days, I’d part the lace curtains that shrouded my bedroom win­ dows and study the outline of trees against cloud cover. In winter, without leaves to soften their branches, the trees stood still and stark, moody like a black-­and-­white photo­graph. Then, life seemed fair enough. The sky over the hill mirrored the river’s dull w ­ aters, and all of us—­sky, river, and restless teenager—­could sit together with nowhere to go. My dad grew up on the Jersey shore, a block from the Atlantic Ocean. His youn­gest s­ ister told me that as a kid, my ­father had been a tinkerer, fixing old tele­v i­sions and cobbling together walkie-­talkies. He’d sit at his

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win­dow listening to the scratch scratch spitting from his creations. I imagine the scratching of the walkie-­talkie and the crashing of ocean waves mingling while my f­ ather, “Eddie” then, waited for the sound of h ­ uman contact, his long, thin fin­gers coiling and uncoiling spare wire, bending it into the shape of a car or a ship. I find it easier to imagine my ­father as a child than to imagine myself as one. Trained as an electrical engineer, he joined the Navy and served on the USS George Washington, a submarine built on our Thames River. I think he sailed to the South China Sea during the Vietnam War. “Vietnam” is inscribed on a plaque at the foot of his grave, but I d ­ on’t know anything about what my f­ ather did ­t here, hidden within the sleek cylinder beneath the ­water. His hair must have mirrored the submarine, black and wet-­ looking. It’s the first t­hing Debbie mentions when she talks about him: his hair, treated with grease to tame the waves. Or, she says, perhaps his hair was naturally shiny. As an adult, my f­ ather loved to build, craft, carve, and glue t­ hings. At his basement workbench in our h ­ ouse, he sanded scraps of wood and pieced together miniature buildings for his train display. I’ve inherited a model ship he assembled during his time on the submarine. I won­der why, when submerged, he built tall ships. Perhaps he in his gray bunk was very much like me in my pink room, wondering about the w ­ ater that flowed just beyond us—­for me, down the hill, and for him, above and all around. How dif­fer­ent it would have been to have a view of the ­water, to study it, to know it, rather than just sensing it, heavy and ­silent. I imagine my f­ ather floating through w ­ ater, like Gale’s ferry, from one side to the other of a synaptic cleft.

By session three with Eliza, I admit something I’ve long held secret. “I’m afraid of the doorbell.” “The doorbell?” she asks with just a hint of surprise. “And the phone,” I say. “The doorbell and the phone.”

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So this is what revelation feels like. I thought it would be grander. But once contained by words, the heavy feeling I’ve had about the doorbell actually loses weight. To my ears, fearing the doorbell now sounds terse, maybe even silly. “I know it’s strange, but I d ­ on’t answer the phone or door u ­ nless I know who it is and why they might be calling or coming over.” “It ­doesn’t sound strange. It sounds like you d ­ on’t like spontaneity.” “I’ve got to plan well in advance. Spontaneous visits make me panic.” “Why do you think you panic?” “What­ever it is, it’s not good,” I say. “So I d ­ on’t answer.” “Do you feel threatened?” “Yes. I feel threatened. I know what the doorbell means.” “It sounds like y­ ou’re afraid of what the outside world w ­ ill bring in, the moment you answer the door.” “I ­don’t know what I’m scared of exactly. Bad news or getting swept into something I c­ an’t control, something that w ­ ill never end. You can see why I ­don’t answer the door.” “Yes,” Eliza says. “But I’d say that response has outlived its purpose. Fearing the doorbell back then was a normal reaction to its meaning. Fearing it now is maladaptive. ­There ­isn’t something scary at the door e­ very time. ­There ­isn’t something horrible on the other end of the phone.” I look at Eliza’s phone on her desk. It’s rung a few times during our sessions, and I would actually welcome it ringing now. I feel tangled by my own admission and need time to sort out what I mean. “When my ­mother’s number appears, it seems like a bad omen. When I was a teenager I’d be terrified when she called my name from the bottom of the stairs.” “Is it just your m ­ other’s calls, or the phone in general?” “It’s every­one. When the phone rings at home, or t­ here’s a knock or a buzz, I freeze for a minute. It’s as if I can actually see a man with a gun outside the door or smell propane leaking from the neighbor’s illegal tank on the roof, and if I open the door, it ­will somehow ignite the propane and

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blow up the w ­ hole floor.” I tell Eliza that sometimes I creep to the door and peer through the hole, but worry I’ll sneeze or breathe too hard and give myself away. I hide in the bedroom or even turn on the shower to give myself an excuse that ­won’t sound like lying ­later. I was in the shower, so I ­didn’t hear the door. “­Don’t other ­people do that?” I ask. “It’s not healthy be­hav­ior, if that’s what y­ ou’re asking,” says Eliza. “We’ve talked about your anxiety. I think you have some ele­ments of PTSD as well.” It’s not the first time I have heard of PTSD, or post-­traumatic stress disorder, but it’s the first time I’ve heard it used in reference to me. It feels wrong to link myself to soldiers and victims of abuse, the two groups most commonly associated with PTSD. Plus, I d ­ idn’t witness the crash that killed my ­father. I learned about it ­later, a­ fter he was dead. “How could I have PTSD?” I ask. “The doorbell and the fire rendered you helpless. So you react now the way you did back then, as if spontaneity is an ongoing attack. The constant threat of disruption to your routine. What ­you’re experiencing sounds similar to the symptoms of PTSD.” We discuss PTSD’s three primary symptoms: intrusion, hyperarousal, and constriction. Intrusion is the reliving of the traumatic event in a waking state or in nightmares. The event is not recalled as a cohesive story, but rather as snippets of images, sounds, and smells. Core aspects. The traumatized person often ­can’t figure out how ­t hese pieces go together. Hyperarousal means that a traumatized person is constantly on alert for danger. Sensitive to even minor noises, a traumatized person ­can’t fall asleep easily. The ner­vous system is buzzing too much. Constriction is numbing, the deer-­in-­t he-­headlights reaction. It’s counterintuitive. The traumatized person grows calm and detaches from choice and thought and pain. While in this state, consciousness is choked off to such an extent that terror, and then memories of that terror, may be left outside of the conscious mind. Though hesitant to give me a formal diagnosis, Eliza suggests I might have been conditioned by trauma to fear the doorbell. A new neural

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pathway was carved, from doorbell to death. My current doorbell, just a buzz­er, and so unlike the chimes in my m ­ other’s ­house, still means bad news. “Furthermore,” says Eliza, “PTSD symptoms can inhibit memory.” I hate noise. I c­ an’t sleep. My only memories are fragmented: the doorbell, black car with red lights, the coffin, melted phone, mewing cat. The rest is somewhere e­ lse. I d ­ on’t feel normal, however subjective “normal” is. “When I replay the memory of the night my f­ ather died, it begins with the doorbell and, much of the time, ends ­t here too. I ­don’t want it to continue, the way I d ­ on’t want to watch a sad movie when I already know the ending.” “It takes reconditioning to get over fear. And if you can lessen your fear of spontaneity, stop seeing it as an attack, perhaps you can fill in t­ hose memories.” I came to Eliza to look for memories, to break open my brain and spill its secrets into the palm of her hand. But I’m starting to see it w ­ on’t happen in ­here. We talk and talk. I’m learning about memory. But it’s too academic. Too passive. “Can you tell me who e­ lse to see about memory recovery?” “Let me think about it,” Eliza says. Perhaps she’s not comfortable with the promise inherent in giving me names. “­We’ll talk more next week.”

Details of PTSD treatments unnerve me when I find them online. The goal of cognitive therapy is to discover and manipulate the connection between thought and stress by articulating grave fears. Through eye movement desensitization and repro­cessing, patients focus on the disturbing memories while keeping their eyes trained on a methodically moving object, hoping to transform their reactions. In exposure therapy, patients repeatedly confront memories ­u ntil their anguish lessens. When I search for “traumatic memory therapy,” I find websites devoted to dream study, body

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memory interpretation, guided imagery, hypnosis. One site is maintained by a “renegade PTSD expert” who believes he can help eradicate nightmarish memories in a single thirty-­minute session, “as seen on TV!”

At our next session, Eliza hands me a list of three prac­ti­tion­ers she trusts. The first is a trauma specialist who ­will walk me through the memories of my ­father’s death and the ­house fire. “So I have to deal with the bad memories first,” I say, studying the first name and number on the paper. “I can use the doorbell memory to literally open the door to other memories. Sounds like a plan.” “Just remember, this c­ an’t be a calculated scientific experiment,” Eliza warns me. “Memory d ­ oesn’t work that way.”

Chill gusts slap my cheeks as I hike through Central Park to my first session with Billy. I should have taken the cross-­town bus, but believed the long walk across the park would do me good, clear my head of tasks unfinished and my body of jitters over the coming appointment. “I think I can help you,” Billy had said on the phone. “But I’m apprehensive about the kind of memories you have, and the kind you want to find.” I assumed she meant memories of abuse. A hostile debate infests psychological studies and practice. On one side, adult patients who suddenly recall memories of being abused—­often by parents or other close relatives—­when they w ­ ere c­ hildren. Th ­ ese patients go on to name their alleged abusers, the most extreme cases being adult ­children who get their parents imprisoned. On the other side, ­family members and friends who believe ­t hose patients have been misled, who accuse clinicians working with versions of Freud’s early repression theory of encouraging patients, overwhelmingly ­women, to recover previously “lost” memories as a way to understand current psychological symptoms. Skeptics contend that

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such memories are questionable at best, implanted by reckless therapists at worst. The content of this debate is mostly sexual abuse memories, and ­because of that, politicians and activists are involved. The first book I found on the topic was a pro-­repressed-­memory guide for sexual abuse victims and suspected victims. Inside, someone had penciled a note to t­hose who might seek comfort in its pages: “warning! This book destroys families. Recovered memory is false memory. False memory leads to false accusation. Always get a second opinion. Always seek the ­whole truth.” Memory researcher Richard McNally, rather than feed the debate over ­whether repressed memories of abuse can be recovered, says so-­called repressed memories never existed in the first place. Instances of abuse, he says, are not forgotten; rather, they are strongly recalled. C ­ hildren who are abused by trusted caregivers remember it forever. “I’m just seeking good memories of my f­ ather,” I’d said to Billy on the phone, cutting off her doubts before she voiced them. “I already remember the bad events. I want to remember the good stuff, too. The ordinary.” Billy is in her mid-­fifties and has wide blue eyes. She looks like a college economics instructor, like someone who retires with the paper in the eve­nings and never turns on the tele­v i­sion except to catch the news and weather. As she talks, she leaves lengthy spaces between her sentences, modeling serenity. “Is ­there anything I should know about you before we begin?” she asks. Yes, ­t here is every­t hing to know about me. That’s exactly why I’m ­here. “I have only two memories of childhood,” I tell her. “And both are traumatic. But ­t here’s nothing before, between, or a­ fter, ­until much ­later.” I tell Billy that the first part of my life is not available to me as a resource. That I ­can’t remember anything about my ­father—­his voice, his clothing, his face. That I felt sullen in high school. I hated sunny days. I have panic prob­lems, panic attacks. “A c­ ouple of years ago I had a root canal that just about killed me,” I add, thinking that w ­ ill help her understand. I detail my superstition about

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phones and doorbells. And I explain that I have this big blankness in my past and want to know how to look at that time period, how to go back ­t here and find t­ hings. “I want to get to know myself, and I ­really want to get to know my ­father.” I’m nearly begging now. “That would be the nicest part, I think. To see him again. To know him.” Billy regards me for a few seconds. Was I too wordy? I’m about to begin again when she says, “You seem a ­little anxious.” “I am a ­little anxious.” “It seems that the memories you do have might be causing you this anxi­ ety,” she says. “Where in your body is that anxiousness located?” “My stomach,” I say. “Always in my stomach.” “What does it feel like?” “Um, I guess it turns upside down, then shoots up into my heart.” “What feels good right now?” I consider my body. Nothing feels good. But my feet ­don’t feel anything at all. ­They’re pretty square on the floor and resting, I suppose, unlike my shifting insides. “My feet,” I tell Billy with resolution, like I’ve found the answer to a riddle. “­We’re g­ oing to do a ­little somatic experiencing. Calm down by breathing. Focus on your stomach. How does it feel? Move that feeling. Let it run down your legs and out your feet.” Somatic experiencing is based on a central biological fact: wild animals fight, flee, or freeze when threatened. A ­ fter the threat has passed, animals continue their lives as if nothing ever happened. Trauma researcher Peter Levine believes h ­ umans have the ability to do the same, but d ­ on’t. When threatened, ­humans, according to Levine, fall back on their logical reasoning to assess the danger, sometimes without releasing “survival energy,” a physiological response aroused in the ner­vous system. Levine believes the stuck energy ­causes symptoms of stress. By learning where that energy is stored in the body and what it feels like, and by releasing that “felt sense,”

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we can “renegotiate” our traumatic memories. Levine offers a lengthy list to help define the body’s sensations: “tense, power­f ul, fuzzy, smooth, jagged, tangled, numb, hot, loose, sticky, relaxed, heavy, light, cool, dense, warm, invigorating, tingling, vibrating, shaking, slimy, solid.” Levine’s treatment does not immediately fit with my rational mind, yet I want in. I want to gain power over my body and soften the jagged edges in my mind. I want Billy to take me to the height of trauma—­t he moment I was frozen to the floor upstairs while the man in the uniform upended my world—­and show me how to get out of it, to unfreeze, to continue living and making memories. I want Billy to make a wild animal of me. I have no idea, however, what I’m supposed to be feeling. I h ­ aven’t aired the details of my two traumatic memories, and Billy is asking me to dive into my body. My stomach spins. I decide that I feel “slimy.” Breathe. I try to move the slime around, but that has a nauseating effect. I think about trauma research. What might be ­under the slime? Is it true that if I exorcise the slime from my stomach, my head ­will clear and allow me to see the ­whole of my childhood? The slime must come out. Does it have to come out ­here in therapy with Billy? It’s expensive, this slime-­letting. My stomach stays slimy. “How do you feel?” asks Billy. “Much better,” I lie. I just want to get to the memory part. My memory of the night my f­ ather died is so slim, so short. If it’s the key, if I just need to clean it off and fill it in with new ele­ments, then maybe I can go on remembering the next week and the next month and the rest. It’s been de­cades. I d ­ on’t want to deal with my stomach. “How long w ­ ill it take me to work through the night my f­ ather died?” I ask. “How long would you like it to take?” “A few weeks?” For the first time, Billy’s eyebrows flutter. “This is hard work,” she says. “And I d ­ on’t want to leave you in an unsafe place. I d ­ on’t want us to dig into anything ­here that we ­can’t resolve. And resolving it could take a long,

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long time. I’d say this i­ sn’t something we can get done in a few weeks. This could take months, even years.” “I can only afford a few sessions,” I admit. “A few sessions are enough just to open t­ hings up.” “And a­ fter that? Could I find the rest of my memory?” “You have to understand something,” says Billy. “­W hether you work at it for a few sessions or a few hundred, if the memories w ­ eren’t encoded in the first place, then t­ here’s nothing to find.”

One night two years ago, Justin and I came home late from a party, tired and hungry. As the pasta boiled we fell asleep. By the time the smoke alarm woke us up, the w ­ ater had evaporated, the pasta had burned, and the pot was scorched. A foul chemical odor—­Teflon releasing its toxic gases—­ polluted the kitchen. Though we scrambled to save the rest of the apartment from the smell, throwing all the win­dows open on a freezing December night, it was too late. The odor permeated every­t hing, from bathroom towels to the bedroom rug. ­There are, remarkably, ­people to call for this kind of prob­lem. A cleaning com­pany arrived the next day, armed with three ozone machines that looked like large, complicated box fans. The machines would fill the space with oxygen molecules, which would in turn stick to the smoke particles and change their chemical makeup to become non-­smelly. We vacated to Justin’s parents’ ­house outside the city, borrowed cash from them to pay the cleaners, and returned the next day. We had been instructed, “Before you go in, take a deep breath and hold it. Then run to the win­dows and open them as fast as you can.” It seemed so dramatic, taking big breaths and sprinting across the apartment—­only twenty-­five feet from door to win­dows—as if we could die. How? I supposed we could both trip and be knocked unconscious. Airlessness was much more dangerous than fire. Talking about memory with Eliza was one ­thing. Diving into the death memory I’ve long tried to avoid, with a new therapist I’ve just met, is

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another. And for what? The memories might not be ­there; they might have burned up and blown away, a wisp of black smoke.

“What is the first ­thing you want to do with the memory of the night your ­father died?” Billy asks during our second session. I’m sweating ­under the four layers I’ve worn against the near-­zero-­Fahrenheit air. I suppose that I’ve worn all ­t hese layers against Billy, too. Her wide-­set ice-­blue eyes disarm me. She seems to know something about me and is waiting with uncanny patience for me to catch up and figure it out. I’ve thought about not returning, but I hate the idea of veering off course. Plus, t­ here’s the chance a session ­will be the session—­for one gain, however small. “The sound of the doorbell is the part that bothers me so much. I’d like to separate it from every­t hing ­else, so I can get through the rest of that night.” For so long, I’ve both protected and despised the memory of my f­ ather’s death. But I h ­ aven’t doubted it. Recently, however, deep into a b ­ ottle of red wine, I rehashed part of my memory to Debbie—­our ­mother’s scream, the swift single-­file walk along the night-­darkened brick path to the neighbor’s ­house. She put her hand on mine. “It ­wasn’t a brick path back then,” she said, sounding patient and wise. “It was dirt.” I want the path to have been brick—­red and rough. Dirt seems too soft and idyllic for the job of trafficking the d ­ aughters of the newly dead. I’ve been replaying the memory over and over, looking for other pos­si­ble ­mistakes. I’m wearing thin with the repetition. Billy said last time that ­t here might not be anything to find, that the loss of my f­ather could have sent me into something like a state of sleep, leaving b ­ ehind not a hidden memory but an empty one. Like a server overwhelmed by web traffic, my brain could have ­stopped pro­ cessing, a question mark blinking on its screen. T ­ oday I picture my brain more like the grand­father clock in my m ­ other’s living room, its deadbeat escapement ticking with each pendulum swing. Tick. Tick. My six-­year-­old

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life flowing in and out in mea­sured time. Tick. Tick. But then the doorbell chimes, and its sound waves collide with the ticks and swallow them ­whole. The clock stalls, I stall. Tick. The pendulum swings low and muddy now. Tick. A few more seconds on the clock, assorted images over the next ­couple days, and the clock stops ticking. The pendulum hangs straight and still. Stop time, stop memory, stop. Id ­ on’t think Billy likes me. I c­ an’t say that I r­ eally like her, so I s­ houldn’t care what she feels about me. But I do care. I want us to like each other the way Eliza and I like each other. Therapists and patients should like each other, at the very least. Billy says something that catches me off guard. “Are you afraid to find memories?” Afraid? No. I’m not afraid. “Why would I be afraid?” I ask. “It sounds like ­t here are ­t hings you might not want to remember,” she says. I’m on a search to find memories. I ­can’t be afraid to find them. If I already remember the two worst ones, what e­ lse is t­ here to be afraid of? “­Things about what happened to you when your ­father died, about what you w ­ ere like ­after that,” Billy continues. “Could you be afraid to remember the atmosphere in your h ­ ouse? The way your m ­ other acted in her grief?” “My m ­ other faced the impossible,” I say, defenses gathering. “She acted in the only way she knew how. She suddenly had to raise four ­little girls alone.” “That’s true,” Billy says. “And you can be understanding about however she acted. But it might have affected you. If she changed, became distracted or sad, you might have been afraid that she was leaving you too.” Billy and I talk about my ­mother and ­sisters. I’m very, very good at this talking. I can talk for an hour straight with few breaths, delivering the same idea in multiple ways. Justin often halts me mid-­sentence. “I get it,” he says. “­You’ve made your point.” Halfway through our session, Billy halts

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me, too. “Close your eyes,” she says. “Go back to that night. Where are you? What do you see? What does your body feel like?” I describe the scene. “I was in my old bedroom, getting ready for bed. I shared a room with my ­sister Tammy. We used to have to share. I c­ an’t remember that at all. A ­ fter the fire, my m ­ other built two more bedrooms so we could each have our own space. Other­wise we would have killed each other.” “­Really go back ­t here,” Billy stops me with her flat, eerie voice. “Put yourself in that bedroom again. Feel the floor u ­ nder your feet. Feel the nightgown on your skin.” “I’m upstairs,” I start again. Our h ­ ouse, in my mind, looks like it does now, so I need to change the carpet from the post-­fire beige I know well to the multicolored shag rug I’ve seen in photos. Wait—­I need to remove the rug from the upstairs hallway altogether. I think it was a wooden floor in 1983. “Where upstairs?” asks Billy. “I’m standing in the doorway of my old room, facing out.” The door swings into the room and rests against the wall to my left. It’s a plain wooden door, no carvings or decorations. I’m small. The knob is at my shoulder. Something tells me I should close the door to my room. “The doorbell is about to ring,” says Billy. “When it does, slow it down. You told me it had eight chimes. Listen to them one at a time.” The doorbell rings loud and fast. Each chime bleeds into the next. I ­can’t slow down the menacing cycle: dingdongdingdongdongdingdingdong. My head spins. Acid creeps into my throat. I’m g­ oing to pass out. Billy tells me to move to the next part of the memory, to let the policeman into the ­house, but I’m frozen in place. My head and stomach are moving, but my feet stay rooted to the floor of Billy’s office, to the wood planks in the upstairs hallway. Noise squeezes my t­ emples u ­ ntil I’m certain I’ll explode. I open my eyes but ­don’t focus on Billy, instead staring at the complicated pattern on the oriental carpet, the wavy maroon lines, the medallion pattern in the center.

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“Are you all right?” Billy asks. “How do you feel?” I have no idea what I must look like to Billy. Can she tell what’s happening to my insides? “I just need a Diet Coke,” I tell her. “To get my head right.” Wait—­did she mean how do I feel in terms of slime and fuzz and heat? Billy is jotting something in her notebook now. Patient refuses to follow therapist’s advice, she’s prob­ably writing. She ­will not slow down the memory as instructed. She ­will not listen to the doorbell. Patient has failed. “Would you like to stop for ­today?” she asks. “Definitely,” I say, springing from the couch. Billy’s eyes widen even more than usual—­she meant stop somatic experiencing, not stop the session altogether. But I’m already up. I have to get out. The weather has turned misty, and I pause on the sidewalk to wipe dampness from my face. I should go back inside—­I’ve paid for an entire hour. But I ­can’t go back. Maybe somatic experiencing is working. The fight-­ or-­flight response is in full effect. I flee. I wait for the bus. The subway is so much faster, but better to stay out in the light. A loaded bus glides by, too full for more passengers. The next one stops for the long line. I climb on and stand at the front, b ­ ehind the driver, my left hand on an overhead bar. They put ­t hese bars too high; grasping it strains my elbow. Central Park West. Fifth . . . ​Lex . . . ​next stop, Second. Pedestrians cross Eighty-­Sixth Street. We have the red. We should be stopping. Panic: Ribs expand, connective tissue fails, lungs pivot away from each other, abdominal muscles tighten. Stop. Stop. Stop the bus. Stop. A man in a business suit talks on a cell phone while he crosses. ­We’re ­going to hit him. I bet he has kids. Why ­isn’t the bus stopping? Stop the bus. Stop. React to panic: Grimace at the rising wave of nauseated tingles. Brace against the uncontrolled forward acceleration.

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The bus stops; the man is fine. We stop, just like ­we’re supposed to. Massaging my elbow, I mouth to this vision, fuck you. I mouth it to Billy, to the anxiety that is intensifying the more I work on memory, to my stubborn brain, fuck you brain. And to the ­woman who killed my ­father, who took him from me, took my memory and my childhood: fuck you.

“Tell me about your earliest memory,” says Rebecca, cofounder of a center for neurolinguistic programming, to begin our first session of hypnotherapy. I recount the story. With just two memories of childhood, the night my f­ ather died and the day our h ­ ouse burned in a fire, I am seeking to remember anything e­ lse. “So, your very first memory is of your ­father’s death?” Rebecca asks. “We have a lot to look at.” I used to think hypnotism was a show. Entertainment. For Valentine’s Day one year, J. C. Penney ran a commercial featuring a luminous diamond heart, swinging on a chain held by a hand wrapped in a sleek black cuff. “Shiny, i­ sn’t it?” asked a deep, sexy male voice. “You love how it looks. You think I’m the perfect man.” As if hypnotism, just sound and rhythm, could propel a person out of her consciousness and into someone ­else’s. In hypnotherapy, however, patients enter a trance-­like state in order to confront prob­lems such as panic disorders and addictions, the roots of which, hypnotherapists believe, reside in the unconscious mind. To a hypnotherapist, the unconscious is also the realm of memory, and only when it is “unlocked” can long-­forgotten memories flood into consciousness. Memory, like so many mysteries, invites such a meta­phor. It has been likened to a tape recorder, copying the entirety of our lives onto the brain’s folds, or a library, housing neat rows with thousands of volumes, as if you could browse through the titles and pull one out to peruse. But neuroscience has proven t­ hese descriptions to be misleading. Neuroscience, and an accident. In 1953, a twenty-­seven-­year-­old man named Henry was robbed of his memory when his hippocampus was sucked out of his brain

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through a metal straw. Meant to relieve him of epileptic seizures, the operation robbed him of an autobiography instead. The botched surgery was tragic, but it provided science with the key ingredient to memory: without his hippocampus, Henry was unable to form new memories. I want to believe my hippocampus is chock-­full of memories just waiting to be unleashed. But it d ­ oesn’t work that way. The hippocampus stores patterns of neuron firings by which we see m ­ ental images. When we remember an image ­later, w ­ hether by chance or choice, it’s b ­ ecause the hippocampus activates that pattern again. Vari­ous neurons around the brain follow their ­orders to fire across synaptic clefts, and a picture comes to mind. We recognize it as a memory, attend to it, and might even feel emotional about it. Most of the time, we let it quiet again, and our attention moves on. I c­ an’t stop reading about the hippocampus. I want to touch it, massage it, plump it up with vitamins. ­People say it looks like a sea­horse. So many diagrams color it green that it starts to look, to me, like a sugar snap pea pod. I’ve read in journals and on websites with unsettling titles about child abuse that emotional stress might cause physical damage to the brain, including the hippocampus. I had an MRI several months ago to investigate symptoms of minor hearing loss, and I took the pictures back to my apartment. Now I pull them from the file cabinet and search for evidence of reduced hippocampus size. Has my pea pod shrunk? I ­can’t even find the hippocampus on the scans, but I pin one to the bulletin board above my desk. Memory shifts, far too fluid and dynamic to pull out neatly. We ­don’t just dig around a ­mental storage box for slides and hold them to the light. But we can, according to hypnotherapists, attempt to reactivate the old pathways, par­t ic­u ­lar neuron patterns that have lain dormant for a long time. We can consciously offer ourselves images from the past. I’ve signed up for three hour-­long hypnotherapy appointments. I’m in no position financially to sign up for more. But Rebecca, in her fifties with an auburn bowl cut and a well-­tailored pantsuit, seems to think three is a magic number.

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“All hypnosis is self-­ hypnosis. You learn how to give yourself suggestions.” The steps for hypnotherapy: one, enter a state of relaxation; two, travel back in time; three, focus on pleas­ur­able childhood memories. I ­don’t understand the mechanism, so I look around for Rebecca’s device. Obviously ­there’s no diamond pendant, but maybe a metronome? But it’s a stark place. In the waiting room I’d sat in the lone metal chair with its cracked black leather seat, listening to a fan in the ventilation system rumble loudly overhead. The office contains just a couch, a large black armchair, Rebecca’s desk, and bookshelves stuffed with volumes on the pro­cess: The Patterns of Her Magic. Sleight of Mouth. Words That Change Minds. I sink deeper into the soft yellow sofa and let my hands fall to my sides. I try to see myself hopping from happy memory to happy memory as if they are lily pads. “Hypnotherapy is kind of like age regression,” Rebecca says. I consider the effort it ­will take to regress in age, like swimming upriver. We talk about the riverside village where I grew up. “­Water must mean something to you,” Rebecca says. Asking question a­ fter question, she writes details on her steno pad: my s­ isters’ names, the games we might have played as c­ hildren, the fact that I started playing the piano when I was very young, all particulars she can use to guide me. Then she describes age regression as a plunge, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. That’s comforting—­Alice’s fall was hardly a strug­gle—­but a l­ ittle unnerving, too. Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? Rebecca says ­we’re ready to begin, and offers me a choice of seats. I move to the big leather chair with high arms and close my eyes, sitting perfectly still, feet planted on the floor, hands planted on thighs, elbows perched on arm rests. I concentrate on Rebecca’s voice, now at a lower register. Her words ebb and flow in volume, but they ­don’t stop. Like the ocean, she’s never completely ­silent. Her voice reminds me of the nature ­music played in spas—­insistently gentle. This must be Rebecca’s device, just her voice.

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I follow it down the rabbit hole. Even the noise of traffic on East Twelfth Street dis­appears. It’s not muffled; it’s erased. My hands and feet fall asleep. Rebecca asks me to decide which fin­ger seems like “yes” so that I can indicate to her when I want to speak. I am absolutely sure that my right forefinger means “yes.” I strug­gle to raise the heavy fin­ger from its slumber. My left thumb is g­ oing to be “no,” and my left pinky, “I d ­ on’t know.” Rebecca tells me to choose a memory from recent times. Focusing on my first class when I became a teacher, I watch my students run around the playground, dodging equipment, bumping into one another. I’m about to move on when Rebecca tells me to stay t­ here longer. Look: Adam’s light-­blue polo shirt with a paint stain on the sleeve. Kristen, cross-­legged against the brick wall, her white-­blonde head close to Joanna’s, both girls whispering intently. They are five. I’m new at this. I c­ an’t guess at what they are whispering about ­because I was never five years old. I’m twenty-­four in the memory. “Go a ­little younger now,” Rebecca says. As Rebecca speaks, my mind drifts backward. I’m adding green spiked hair to the sketch of a protester, part of a mural w ­ e’re painting on a seminar room wall in college. Now I’m a high-­school se­nior, zipping up a rose-­ colored costume gown to play Glinda the Good Witch. At Rebecca’s urging, I stay long enough in each scene to fill it in with sounds and smells. “Feel the rise and fall of your breath as it widens and deepens,” Rebecca says. “Your mind holds the key to unlocking your memories.” High-­school hallway. “Just open it up like a book. Look at the dif­fer­ent chapters of your life.” Opening my locker. I’m in the southeast corner of the freshman wing, in front of my pale-­ green locker on the upper row. A win­dow is ­behind me—­the locker is even uglier in the bright sunlight. What is inside? I still know the combination: twenty-­four, twelve, twenty-­seven. “Through t­ hese chapters you are ­going back in the past.” Sleepover.

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Three friends are at my ­house. I’m thirteen or fourteen. ­We’re recording a cassette tape of ourselves, singing and cracking jokes. It’s so funny. I’m laughing. A wool sweater scratches at my neck. My chest, light and full, expands with giggled breaths. “All dif­fer­ent chapters.” Piano bench. Ner­vous to play. How long have I been sitting h ­ ere? Five minutes? A half hour? I try to open my eyes but ­can’t. I lift my eyebrows like a stage curtain, but my eyelids ­won’t follow. A thick sponge separates me from Rebecca’s office. Her voice suspends me between consciousness and unconsciousness. I’m on a rope, deep in the rabbit hole but not letting go. “All dif­fer­ent ways of discovering your stored memory.” Skunk cabbage by the brook ­behind our ­house. It smells awful. The mountain laurel branches hang so low they touch the ground. I can hide in h ­ ere, gazing at the sunlight that filters through the trees. I can always get out again. I’m ready to talk. Eyes still closed, I tell Rebecca about the skunk cabbage and the brook, as sweet barbecue smoke wafts through the trees and mingles with the must of the woods. What a wonderful smell, a barbecue. “The memory is so close to you. It’s right ­t here.” I rest by the brook, contemplating skunk cabbage, its huge leaves a brilliant tropical green. The dinner ­table. I’m in my assigned seat. Debbie is across from me, Tammy to the right, Beth diagonal. They are so young, in pigtails. My cup is in front of me, but ­t here is no plate yet. Spaghetti sauce on the stove. I can smell it. I think it’s been simmering all after­noon. I tell Rebecca I’m at the ­table. “Allow yourself to explore all the dif­fer­ent ways of being with your ­family. You know what ­those dinners are like, where you sit, what the rules of the ­table are.”

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The garage door is opening. It’s loud. This ­can’t ­really be happening. Or it can be, ­because it did, a thousand times over. I know that garage door. I open it each time I visit my ­mother. It’s on a rope and pulley system, and it makes a g­ reat rumbling sound. The side door is opening, the one from the garage into the h ­ ouse. My ­sisters erupt in cheers. “­Daddy’s home!” It c­ an’t be him. He’s dead. But my s­ isters are so excited that he’s home. I sense him, just around the corner. I wait for him, but he ­doesn’t come in. He is t­ here, just around the corner. Why ­doesn’t he come into the room? To have dinner? To see me? Come around the corner, ­Daddy. Come around the corner. “It’s time to come back,” Rebecca says. Slowly I wake, as if from a catnap, to horns on East Twelfth. The hour has passed.

­There’s a spot in my vision. I think it comes from my left eye. When I look to the left side of the room and trace an arc across the ceiling to the right wall, I drag with me an imprint. It looks like a droplet of liquid that has been flattened between slides in a microscope, but I c­ an’t look at it directly, for it’s not on my lens. If I ever forget it’s ­t here, and I sweep my eyes to the right, say, to grab a towel or look for my keys, the spot startles me. I used to think it was a mosquito, so I’d stand still, waiting for it to land so I could strike. But of course, once I stood still, the spot no longer revealed itself. When I figured out it was actually coming from my eye, I thought of it as shrapnel, a piece of the first part of my life being dragged along. But it’s just a speck, a floating bit of the eye’s jelly-­like substance—­a normal part of the pro­cess of the aging eye—­t hat casts a shadow on the ret­ ina. Like a constant, private eclipse. Sometimes it seems the speck might be a tiny, w ­ hole memory, like an after­noon in the swimming pool or a board game with my ­sisters or even my ­father’s slack face as he naps on the couch.

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I draw the spot with me, pulling it along, over and over, everywhere, across the ceiling and down the walls and across the page.

“How’s the heat?” asks Rebecca as she dims the lights to begin our second session of hypnotherapy. “It feels ­great,” I tell her, shedding my scarf. But the bulky sweater stays on—­t he temperature this winter eve­ning hovers around ten degrees, and I’m still shivering. “When we finished last time, you said you w ­ ere having a memory of being around the dinner ­table. And your f­ ather was about to come in?” “That’s right. He was so close. This time maybe I’ll hear his voice or even see him.” I’ve let myself get carried away, imagining ­whole father-­daughter scenes. In the hammock next to the shed, wearing weekend clothes—­blue slacks, yellow polo shirt, no socks or shoes—he rests with his eyes closed, a book open on his chest. I run to the hammock’s edge and poke him. “Sing me something,” he says without opening his eyes. Twinkle, twinkle, ­little star. I climb aboard, sending the hammock into a deep swing. My ­father opens his eyes, maybe to figure out which d ­ aughter I am, and reaches his arms around my shoulders to pull me into his chest. I rest my cheek on the book’s front cover. “It’s ­really wonderful, ­isn’t it?” Rebecca says. “You found an opening.” “My ­father opened the door,” I say, thinking of the door to the kitchen I heard open during my first session. “But I want to actually see him. Since then I’ve been d ­ ying to get back to that precise moment.” “You need to let go of the pressure. It’s essential. When ­you’re d ­ oing hypnotherapy, y­ ou’re asking yourself to let t­ hings happen as they may. The pressure of thinking something has to happen? That’s your rational mind talking. You might go back, you might not. In ­here, just allow yourself to be open to where your mind takes you.”

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I’m sitting comfortably, more at ease now that I’ve done this once before, but a sharp pain makes me realize I’m picking at the skin around my thumbnails, a sure sign of stress. I pull my fin­gers into the cuffs of my sweater. “Relax,” Rebecca says. “Be aware of your breath. Let go of anything from t­ oday that ­you’re holding on to. You have this time for yourself, for discovery. Let your unconscious go deeper so you can open the door, enter the childhood space.” I loosen from the outside in, first my fingertips and toes, lips and cheeks, then my jaw and thigh muscles. Even my knees, normally stiff, start to open up as my hips fall away from each other. “­Today I think we ­shouldn’t put pressure on finding your ­father. Let’s look at childhood.” Reluctantly I release my f­ ather, just a l­ ittle. Maybe Rebecca is right. If I remember being a child, I might remember being a child with a living ­father, a six-­year-­old girl worried only about learning the alphabet and catching up to her s­ isters. “It’s helpful you ­were a teacher,” Rebecca says. “And that you have nieces and nephews. You have a good understanding of what it should be like to be a child. Hold on to that experience. Part of your search is to let yourself be comfortable with being l­ittle. What is it like to have small hands, small feet? What is it like to practice your letters? To tie your shoes? You deserve to reclaim t­ hese parts of your childhood.” Even as Rebecca’s words wrap me in calm, I get hung up on the word “deserve.” What have I done to deserve such a ­t hing? I desire it, but does that mean I deserve it? I close my eyes and won­der how Rebecca views me. She treats patients with prob­lems much more severe than my own. Debilitating issues: substance abuse, per­sis­tent pain, crippling depression, morbid obesity. What must I look like, a thirty-­something w ­ oman dressed in the practical wardrobe left over from teaching, a gradu­ate student who regards therapy as an experiment as much as treatment, an adult who lost

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her f­ather long ago and just c­ an’t get over it? Suddenly my friend’s comment about my lack of memory—­it’s not that big a deal—­stabs my consciousness. How do my ­mother and s­ isters view me? They suffered the same loss, yet they must endure the memory of what was lost. I’ve escaped that. I am the lucky one. My hands find their way out of their knitted hiding place, and the nails on my ­middle fin­gers once again ravage thumb skin. Who is to say I deserve to reclaim anything? “Feel the smallness,” Rebecca is saying. “You ­really can become that younger self again. Let yourself experience the freedom of being a child.” I step backward along the path I plotted last time, from teaching in New York to the high-­school hallway to the middle-­school sleepover, u ­ ntil I am swimming in the above-­ground pool, flipping like a dolphin, feeling woozy in my stomach. Someone stands next to the pool and holds my arms as I cling to the edge. I ­don’t know how this is pos­si­ble; a tall fence surrounded our pool. A five-­foot-­high deck stood on one side. To get in, we climbed the stairs to the deck and jumped into the pool from above. A person ­couldn’t stand next to the pool the way it seems to be happening. At least, I ­don’t think so. But I’m h ­ ere, at the far edge opposite the h ­ ouse, looking into the woods. I ­don’t want to let go of the white metal side. I ­don’t want to release the grip of my unknown helper. W ­ ater swirls softly around my legs. Slick metal sits cold u ­ nder my arms. I throw my head back and look up through the branches to blue sky. White clouds drift. My legs drift up ­behind me and I half float. Hold the side, clutch the metal. Stay, stay. In a drowsy voice, I tell Rebecca where I think I might be. “­Children have to learn to swim,” she says. “Sometimes we learn ­t hings so early we ­don’t remember that ­there was a time we ­didn’t know how to do them. The body has the memory. The body remembers what it was like not to know how to swim. What does it feel like to let go, to let your body be buoyant in the w ­ ater?” “I ­don’t want to drift away. I want to stay by the side.” “At some point you did, though. You let go. ­There’s this beginning, this place of fear, and then you have to release, just like y­ ou’re d ­ oing in your

My parents on their wedding day in 1971.

The saltbox h ­ ouse my parents built in the Connecticut woods.

My parents, always smiling back then, always showing their love for each other. My ­sisters tell me we danced around them, singing, “Kissing cuties!”

Iconic four-­girls picture in the front garden, matching dresses made by my ­mother.

­Daddy and his girls in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, summer 1980.

My ­father’s work portrait, taken a few months before he died.

­ ere I am at six years old in San Diego, a few H days before my f­ ather died.

Posing with my f­ ather’s gravestone on the day of my first communion, spring 1985. I have no memory of this event.

Dedicating a softball field in memory of my ­father. I do not remember this event or anything e­ lse from this time period.

In this school portrait, I am twelve or thirteen. My uninterrupted memory begins about this time.

The Farrell s­ isters grown up: Tammy, Debbie, our m ­ other, me, and Beth.

Justin and me on our wedding day. We live with our c­ hildren in a h ­ ouse in the Connecticut woods, seventy-­five miles west of my childhood home.

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search. You have to let go, swim in your own memories, in your own childhood.” Fear of the ­water makes me panic, inhale, choke. But soon my feet ­will rise from the bottom, soon my hands ­will slip from the side, soon my body ­will stretch flat and remain at the surface. My arms ­will extend and rotate to power forward movement. But what if no one is standing at the side? How do I teach myself to swim? For the rest of the session, I grip the edge of the pool, my legs kicking up a spray ­behind me. When it’s over, I’ve remembered nothing, and as I slip my hands back into gloves, my thumbs sting—­I’ve pulled long skin slivers clear off.

“It’ll be like detox,” says Stephanie, an acupuncturist and Eliza’s final suggestion to me for memory work. Stephanie explains that acu­punc­ture can help with both focus and freedom. “­Every organ holds emotions,” she says. “The heart and lungs are both grief centers. They can be physically blocked.” In Chinese medicine, the body is believed to consist of pathways called meridians. When meridians become congested, the body is thrown off balance. Every­t hing slows down, an internal traffic jam, and the body gets cranky. Acupuncturists attempt to clear the meridians by stimulating par­tic­u­lar points, thereby releasing energy and soothing every­t hing from allergies to anxiety. Acu­punc­ture ­doesn’t sound entirely dif­fer­ent from somatic experiencing to me. Both practices view memory as something that can get stuck—­a snag in the river—­but that can also be set f­ ree. Just poke a hole in my skin, as if memory is a blister to be lanced. The skeptical part of me knows this is too literal. Yet I find myself waiting for an easy fix. I want to believe memory is just stuck and must be freed. I hustle through the Lower East Side crowd. ­Grand Street is lined with Eu­ro­pean cosmetics shops, Asian trading companies, Italian restaurants,

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and dumpling ­houses, all jammed together as Chinatown continues its years-­long expansion north and west, and L ­ ittle Italy shrinks. Stephanie practices in a clinic ­housed at the back of her husband’s Chinese herbal pharmacy. The pharmacy’s narrow aisles are made by shelves loaded with gnarled roots displayed in clear glass jars. On one wall runs a long glass ­counter, b ­ ehind which several men mea­sure piles of tea leaves on antique brass hanging scales. The tinkling of the register, the staccato of Chinese, and the overwhelming scent of tea trail b ­ ehind me as I enter the clinic’s warmly lit reception area. White-­coated prac­ti­tion­ers glide quietly to and from the desk, summoning patients. I take a business card from a bamboo ­table: “Acu­punc­ ture. Herbs. Bodywork. Tea Bar.” Stephanie, a strikingly pretty and soft-­spoken w ­ oman in her thirties, leads me to a treatment room. At six months pregnant she is lovely. “You look good,” she says when I tell her my age, but I hardly believe her. My already deep-­set eyes have been sinking further into their hollows lately. As with any first visit to a doctor I list the basics: sleeping prob­lems, anxious stomach, overall health. Then I tell Stephanie about my memory prob­lem, my almost-­memory at the ­family dinner ­table that materialized in hypnotherapy. In well-­practiced words, I tell her what I’m looking for. “It’s like I’m supposed to find my ­father,” I say to Stephanie. “It’s the logical next step.” “Obviously ­t here’s a block with him,” she says. “Acu­punc­ture can help you open up the channels of memory. Get ­t hings flowing.” On the phone, Stephanie had asked me to bring a f­amily photo­graph that includes my f­ ather. I chose one in which my s­ isters and I are lined up in front of the living room fireplace. Homemade greeting cards perched on the mantle read, “Happy M ­ other’s Day!” I am on the lower left of the frame and partially cut off, but that ­doesn’t detract from the chubbiness of my cheeks. Tammy is next in line, head turned away but eyes fixed coyly on the camera, then Debbie pulling a closed-­mouth smirk, and Beth showing off gaps in her six-­year-­old’s smile. And, sitting, our f­ ather. His teeth

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are showing—­rare in photo­graphs of him. I look carefully at the teeth and recognize my own. Rounded with a sizable gap between the front ones, the left tooth sneaking forward and over the bottom lip. He’s wearing a yellow shirt. “Do you have more photos?” Stephanie asks as she smiles at the one I’ve brought. “And objects?” I have a number of items stored at my ­mother’s h ­ ouse. A few are in New York, in boxes u ­ nder the bed and on top shelves in closets. My ­father’s camera and chessboard, his coffee mug. While many mugs display witticisms or vacation scenes, my f­ ather’s, the one he used at the nuclear power plant, reads in block letters: “Pressurized ­Water Reactor Simulator.” My ­mother lettered his name on it in silver. “Get your hands on every­t hing you can,” Stephanie says. “Take each object and study it. H ­ andle it. Smell it. Memories w ­ ill come up.” The feel of an object, an odor, the expression on a face, all can trigger a memory. A single cue, like Proust’s madeleine. “When you collect the objects, make sure to digest them,” Stephanie says. “It’s easy to gather memories of o ­ thers. It’s harder to make them your own.” The plan for acu­punc­ture is, like somatic experiencing and hypnotherapy, s­ imple: dress in a thin cloth gown, lie on a white-­sheeted treatment bed, be stuck with fifteen to thirty ­needles, focus on the photo, and relax. Justin, a seasoned acu­punc­ture patient, swears it works won­ders for his migraines. He told me not to worry. “You feel the n ­ eedles go in, then you fall asleep.” Stephanie presses on my belly to see if it hurts. It does. “That’s stomach twenty-­one,” she says. “It’s associated with stored emotion.” What does emotion look like when it’s stored up in the belly? A viscous blob? A glass marble or ball of yarn? A dense lump like a kidney stone? Stephanie travels to my sternum: more piercing pain. “That’s another grief center.”

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She starts with the ­needles. Breathe in, stick, breathe out. One on top of my head. Breathe in, stick, breathe out. Another in the m ­ iddle of my forehead, right between the eyes. Stephanie reaches my stomach. As if drawn to it, she pricks an intensely sensitive spot with a needle. My legs spasm. The point of pain grows rapidly into a hot circle, the burn widening ­u ntil it envelops my entire abdomen. Is my skin okay? I distract myself: pain on the point, one dimension; pain fanning out, two dimensions. Now comes pain u ­ nder the skin—­three-­d imensional pain. It makes me think of vaccines or bee stings. I think of the tick that bit my ­mother, the Lyme rash that may have shown up without her seeing it. They call it a bull’s-­eye rash. How could you ever find such a rash b ­ ehind your knee or in the center of your back if no one was ­t here to see it for you? One bite, one infection, then years of erosion. One point of pain. Stick. Stephanie asks me to think of a color. “Yellow,” I say, focusing on my ­father’s shirt in the photo. I ­don’t know if his clothes w ­ ere donated or destroyed in the fire. They would have smelled. Did my ­mother preserve his scent ­until the fire? Did the clothes absorb Teflon the way our apartment did during our small kitchen fire? Did she have them cleaned? Would that have been worth it? I bet the clothes are in boxes deep in her closet. I should ask my m ­ other if she saved the clothes. But each time I face my m ­ other with such a question in mind, I shrink, grow pale, talk about something ­else. “Yellow,” Stephanie says, “is associated with overthinking.” Stephanie darkens the room and slips out. A heat lamp warms my sore belly. The skin on my forehead tenses around the intruding point. I try to think of yellow blankets surrounding me, but my mind drifts. I fight to hold on to my ­father’s yellow shirt as brown enters my head, the brown suit Debbie says he always wore. Yellow ­doesn’t want to leave, so yellow and brown wage a color war in my imagination. ­A fter a few minutes I think of neither yellow nor brown, but red.

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Hot minutes lapse. I worry that if I move, I’ll dislodge a needle and poke something that ­shouldn’t be poked. I try to imagine memory ­bubbles ­under each needle. Memory encapsulated for de­cades, deep as the earth’s center, now drilled, punctured by fragile rods, released. But I ­don’t see memories floating up and drifting t­ oward the room’s vents. Th ­ ere’s no whiff of long-­entombed air. I smell tea and bamboo and my own sweat. I ­can’t feel anything but pain. Stephanie returns at last. She removes the n ­ eedles in silence, then asks me how I feel. I open my mouth to tell her it failed, that sticking n ­ eedles into my body is hardly a treatment for lost memory, that my stomach and forehead now burn like hell and I’d like my ninety dollars back. Instead, I watch her as she places each used needle in a refuse bin. They make the faintest noise as they hit the bin floor. “That ­really hurt,” I manage to say. “It does hurt,” she says. “It hurts at first. It’ll get better.” She pauses the cleanup and smiles at me. “See you next time?” I nod. I d ­ on’t know why I want to return. My adherence to hope surprises me. I sit on the bed with my legs dangling u ­ ntil the burning starts to fade.

­A fter acu­punc­ture, I ask my ­sisters to e-­mail me every­t hing they think may be relevant to my search for memory. They respond with the kind of flood I’ve been hoping to have on my own. Each memory from one s­ ister precipitates new memories from the other two, and as bits of their shared childhood collide, the effect is nothing short of a chemical explosion. Tammy even creates a spreadsheet and categorizes memories by type: clothes, vacations, fire, ­Daddy. Hanging sheets from monkey bars and performing plays; racing around the h ­ ouse as our f­ather times us on his stopwatch; speaking into his microphone and watching the needle jump on the oscilloscope; building cardboard box forts; praying around the

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Advent wreath our ­mother made from snipped pine branches and red ribbon; digging tracks for hermit crabs at the beach near the power plant; swimming in the pool ­until ­after dark and watching steam rise from the surface as bats fly overhead; rolling newspapers for our ­father to use as fireplace kindling. Each memory is a moving image that could, for my s­ isters, be expanded into a full narrative, projected forward in time and blended with their pre­sent lives as adults. I can almost see the memory fragments fluttering around me like dollars in a money-­blowing machine. Relying on my ­sisters’ detailed input, I create in physical space what brains cannot do in ­mental space: a timeline resembling a school history proj­ect. Fifty-­one photos tacked to posters alongside index cards bearing my ­sisters’ memories:

1976 Photo: dimly lit baptismal scene. Mom’s hair teased high. Photo in black and white: me as a wide-­eyed drooling infant. “You coming home from the hospital is my earliest memory.”—­Beth 1979 Photo: me in a red velvet dress, trimmed with lace and ribbons. “I loved ­t hose long ribbons. I would pull them across my knuckles. So silky smooth.”—­Tammy

On a fluo­rescent yellow card I write my contribution: “­Daddy’s home!” The year my f­ather died is nearly empty. Just one photo­graph. I’m sitting in metal bleachers, smiling. A w ­ oman in the photo’s background wears a bathing suit. I have on a short-­sleeved shirt streaked with diagonal lines of hearts. (I cross-­reference and see a clothing item on the fire-­ insurance list: one cotton tee with hearts.) A white ribbon holds my hair, though strands of it still escape. The bleachers face a large tank of aquamarine w ­ ater, glass sides supported by vertical metal poles. I am turned away from the tank to smile for the photographer—my ­father?—­sitting

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­behind me. I assume this was taken at Mystic Aquar­ium, not far from our ­house, a favorite summertime spot. I turn t­ hings over, investigating for further clues. I scan some papers and blow up the images. I group and separate. Stretching out on the carpet, I fin­ger the clear plastic pushpins that hold up the years. I’ve read about a w ­ oman—­“A.J.” in scientific lit­er­a­ture—­who can remember in detail ­every moment of ­every day of her life. She wakes up with minutiae in her head. Imagine: At noon on the second of August when I was nine years old, my friend Tracy called to ask if I could play. It was a Saturday. I wore a blue dress. A.J. is an anomaly, one of only about fifty ­people in the United States. Her type of memory has its own name now: hyperthymestic syndrome. Some have explained her memory as a conscious act of collection, as if she’s obsessively hoarded memories like baseball cards, memorizing memories the way one memorizes stats. ­Others believe her memory is in fact a symptom of obsessive-­compulsive disorder. I envy A.J. without begrudging her. I like that such memory exists. I think we could commiserate in some topsy-­turvy way. For her, with such memory, discovery is not pos­si­ble. For me, without memory, every­t hing is discovery. She cannot grasp what is impor­tant when every­t hing comes to mind; she cannot determine what carries more and less weight. I cannot grasp what is impor­tant e­ ither. The sound of the doorbell, bright green leaves on the lawn, an episode of Knight Rider—­t hese t­ hings seem crucially impor­tant b ­ ecause ­t here’s nothing ­else to compare them to. I ­don’t want to be a person for whom the image of a melted phone is emblematic of my entire childhood. But h ­ ere I am. My memory boards are extremely or­ga­nized. The contents of a life. I want to suck them back into my brain through a metal straw and have Stephanie needlepoint them into permanence.

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“This is childhood reconstruction number one,” I say, only partly joking, into the digital recorder. “My name is Tammy,” says my often-­sarcastic s­ ister. She bends low over the recorder, a white plastic rectangle no bigger than a pack of gum, that I’ve placed on my ­mother’s kitchen ­table. “Wait,” she says. “It’ll be distracting if we can see it the ­whole time. Should we put it in the plant or something?” I drop the device into my ­mother’s silk flower centerpiece, where it gets caught by the crescent leaves on a stem of baby’s breath. “Yeah,” she laughs. “That’s not obvious at all.” I’ve asked my f­ amily to come to my m ­ other’s h ­ ouse for memory work. Id ­ idn’t ask outright, since requesting a f­ amily gathering is not part of my role as the youn­gest and most distant ­daughter. I planted the idea in my ­mother’s mind. Then I sat back while she developed the idea into an opportunity to weed through long-­closeted materials and worked her rotary phone to gather the troops. We ­w ill reminisce ­today. Reminiscing is a social activity with rules for participation. It’s give-­and-­take, best done when all members build off each other’s scraps u ­ ntil a full group memory is in place, like a guild quilt. I usually draw on a cache of early childhood stories, one constructed from each school year, as if the linear organ­ization of t­ hese stories means I have an autobiography and can play along. First grade: peeing in my polyester pants. Second grade: throwing up peas. Third grade: entering an occupied bathroom and discovering what penises look like, that they even exist. Each is a funny, archetypal childhood story. Shocking, body-­ centered ­t hings. I’m not sure ­whether they happened to me, a ­sister, or some combination. My ­mother can only corroborate what she remembers of ­those years. Hard to keep track of who threw up when. One friend pointed out that they all sound the same: peeing, peas, penises. He tells me that’s a sure sign I ­don’t actually remember the stories, that my brain is making links based on a sound. I still scoop peas out of soup like t­ hey’re poison.

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­Today’s tasks: pick through boxes of memorabilia; sort the clutter by type (photos, papers, books, three-­ d imensional objects); swap what­ever stories are sparked. It’s a straightforward memory-­trigger scheme. I’m planning to take back to New York as much as I can fit in my car. The kitchen t­ able, covered by a bedsheet for protection, has dis­appeared ­under the mishmash. We’ve parked in our old seats. My f­ ather’s chair, usually occupied by a significant other or grand­child, is empty. Debbie leafs through beach pictures from trips to our f­ather’s ocean-­ side hometown. “I remember building t­ hese sand c­ astles,” she says. “I remember sitting on the beach and peeing in the sand. Wait, was that my memory? I hope not.” “Of course it was you,” Tammy adds. “You would pee in the sand.” Debbie looks at me soberly. “In the interest of memory science, I share about peeing in the sand.” Debbie and Tammy laugh together, as if ­they’re each pleased with the exchange, Debbie relishing in storytelling, Tammy cracking a wry joke. My s­ isters seem so at ease with this exercise, like t­ hey’ve done it before, like the stakes ­aren’t high. It’s a game. They seem confident, each one jockeying for space to tell their stories. Envelopes stuffed with vacation photos leave dark smudges on our fingertips. ­They’re still sooty from the fire. “Do you remember how sick you ­were in Alaska?” my ­mother asks me. She’s just dumped out a box of mementos from the trip. I barely remember our trip to Alaska, but I think I remember how sick I was. We slid northwest on a ship, the mountainous shore on our right, glaciers and icebergs popping up h ­ ere and ­t here. “Did we go to Alaska in ’88 or ’89?” Tammy asks. “Look on Homer,” says my ­mother. Homer is a polyfill-­stuffed moose with corduroy face and plaid antlers and bulbous glass eyes. In the porch off the kitchen, Homer is mounted on a board with an engraved brass plaque that reads “Seized by the Farrells” and the date.

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“July 1988,” reads Tammy. “God, it was July. Remember how hot it was? In Alaska?” Was it hot? I ­don’t remember. I ­don’t remember the heat. I was almost twelve. Sometime before or a­ fter, I got my first period. I just remember we went to Alaska. Mountains slid by, icebergs appeared. I lay out photos in chronological order. Beth, a toddler lying on the rug, then Beth playing with baby Debbie; then Beth and Debbie flanking baby Tammy; then me on Beth’s lap, Debbie and Tammy still in diapers. “You w ­ ere always placed last in photos,” says Beth, standing b ­ ehind my chair, looking at a photo of us posing with our grandparents in front of a Christmas tree. “­Because you ­were the baby, of course.” I look just like my ­sisters. I can see it in the pictures. Our features land in approximately the same arrangement, our ­faces round as dolls. Should I compare our brains, line up each seahorse-­shaped hippocampus and look for shared traits, what would be dif­fer­ent about mine? We excavate deep to our parents’ wedding. “Look at this one—­oh—­ there’s a ­whole stack!” We sigh over the candid photos my ­father took of my ­mother when they ­were newly married, honeymooning in Boston and visiting the Jersey shore. We marvel at how tiny each cat was when first ­adopted. I glance at my m ­ other. Her eyes are bright as she observes. I imagine she’s happy to both fill her ­house with ­daughters and empty it of long-­ held t­ hings. She is, I believe, loosening her grip on the archives. Across from her, in my ­father’s seat, my ­mother’s cat now takes up residence. Her first two cats, Spookee and Twinkle, lived through the fire. Now Smudge, her sixth, sniffs the stale smoke in the air. Looking at all t­ hese items, I am struck by how inclusively my m ­ other stored anything and every­t hing, yet how carelessly my mind did. I pass through the day in a haze. My hands shake, and I feel overwhelmed by my f­ amily and their stories laid out flat on the t­ able and rising in the air. In fact, as the air in the kitchen fills with more and more words, they seem less and less comprehensible, and I ­don’t have my highlighter or my

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notecards or my pushpins to help me or­ga­nize. I sink into a hidden world, separate and secret, but this world is empty of such stories. It’s like the hollow ­under a tree, and I sit inside, waiting. As often happens when the ­whole f­ amily is together, I start to wear thin. I tape together boxes, and my ­mother directs me to this item and that. “Take t­ hese,” she says, handing me stacks of photos. “Take this too. And this.” In go brittle corsages, porcelain cat figurines that belonged to my aunt, a patch from Hershey Park, a box whose h ­ andle is a statue of a resting baby deer, a miniature wooden bucket engraved with the state name Georgia. “This i­ sn’t even the surface,” she says. “­There is so much more in this ­house.” Living the farthest away, I’m usually the first to leave. But I sense an opening ­today, as if, despite multiple f­ uture visits, this is the only chance I have to ask my ­mother a question. While my ­sisters pack up, I find her alone on the porch. “What was I like a­ fter D ­ addy died?” “What do you mean?” “Debbie says I was very quiet. Do you remember that?” “I ­don’t,” she says. “I ­don’t remember.” She looks stung. “I remember Tammy the most,” she offers. “I remember how much it changed her. But Id ­ on’t remember you.” I ­settle deeper into my hollow. I want something from my ­mother. I want her to make me feel three-­d imensional. Given my ­sisters’ robust memories and the stories she loves to tell about us, especially when set against her grandchildren, it’s not as if my m ­ other dis­appeared. She was ­t here. I was ­t here. But I ­don’t remember her, and she ­doesn’t remember me. Perhaps we took each other for granted. I want her to see me now as she saw me then, be a mirror for me. But I d ­ on’t want to upset her. I d ­ on’t want to add another pound to her burden. “I did my best,” she says. “What ­else could I do? I did my best.” As I pull out of the driveway, I open my win­dow to wave. As usual, my ­mother stands at the front door, half waving, half praying.

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Back in New York, we h ­ aven’t seen our living room rug in a week. Paraphernalia from eight boxes are now spread across the floor. I ­can’t seem to sort this out. Even Justin, uncommonly patient, has grown tired of the mess. A faint odor of dust and soot makes the air feel brittle on my skin. The memory boards still lean against the couch. In front of them, piles. Photos from my m ­ other’s ­house mostly. Drawings I made, papers from elementary school, birthday cards sent to me by aunts and ­uncles. Wall hangings bearing inspirational quotes like “Cherish yesterday, dream tomorrow, live t­ oday.” One by one I pick them up, trying to follow Stephanie’s advice and h ­ andle them, as if I can divine their secrets. I place them in rows like offerings to the memory gods. I retrieve my infant blankets from the bedroom. Both are checkered yellow and white, mended several times over. My ­mother sewed them while she was pregnant. They lasted through childhood and the fire, my teen years and my twenties, and they still sit folded on the bed, sometimes used as extra pillows. The fire plan Justin and I have created for our New York apartment includes rescuing the hard drive, personal papers, and ­t hese blankets. It may be a bad plan—­rescuing the blankets could mean wasting time rifling through tangled sheets or reaching ­behind the bed. But I ­won’t stand ten stories below our win­dows and watch smoke waves roll and twist as they escape t­ hese burning blankets. I buy a ­bottle of Coppertone, sun protection ­factor of eight. My ­sisters tell me we used Coppertone exclusively, and I prefer its heavy jasmine scent to any other. Now I use a dif­fer­ent brand—­natu­ral, rich with antioxidants, minimum SPF of fifteen. My Polish/Irish skin is thin and pale and chronically dry. Cancer—­breast, lymphatic, skin—­dots my ­family tree. As I rub my expensive lotion in small circles around my face, I sometimes think about using Coppertone instead. But Coppertone is a beach brand, and beach trips are relegated to the part of my life I ­can’t remember, the part that sits b ­ ehind frosted glass.

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A t-­shirt from my ­father’s power plant. The neck is tattered. I sleep in it at least one night a week. I can no longer dry it in the dryer, for it would shred. Though if that happened I would find a way to repurpose it, pasting the fabric strips onto a wall the way my m ­ other once did. I look through an envelope of photo­graphs I ­don’t think I’ve ever seen before. In one I’m wearing a blue costume with a white hat—­a Smurf costume from my first-­grade play. This might be an unimportant statement—­I played a Smurf in first grade—­but nobody, as far as I know, has told me this. I just know it, or I’m interpreting the costume. But ­there’s something ­else. As I look at the picture, the knowledge that I played a Smurf expands like a balloon. I played a Smurf and I sang a song. I’m sure ­every first grader in ­every school sings a song. But ­there’s something about this costume that links to a song, a solo even. Where has that idea come from? Perhaps I’m trying too hard, forcing my mind open with a crowbar. I set the picture aside. My f­ather’s pipe. Cherry wood and still smells of tobacco. Lacquered red, the pipe’s body is smooth. Its bowl is lined with ash. I place the bit in my mouth and pull. I taste nothing. An early diary, one I d ­ on’t remember writing. From January 1988, when I was eleven: I’m an awful person. I hate myself. My mom hates me. I recorded the double loss back then too, as if to remind myself, or perhaps to tell the diary for the first time the way I would have told a new friend: ­Daddy died in 1983. Hurricane and fire in 1985. About the year ahead, I concluded: ’88 ­will be bad, I can tell. I rub my thumb back and forth across the diary’s cover, soothing. A ­children’s book. Amazing Jell-­O Desserts. “This was a gift to you when you turned five,” reads my ­mother’s sticky note attached to the book. It’s from my ­mother’s best friend, who was my godmother. On the yellowed cover is a picture of Marvello the ­Great, a magician in top hat, surrounded by floating Jell-­ O delights. The pages are warped. My ­mother’s note continues, “It did get water-­damaged during the fire.” I sneeze while I unstick the pages. Illustrated in bright primary colors is a

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wonderland ­house surrounded by trees s­ haped like sundaes, mountains ­shaped like cakes, cars s­ haped like candles. Each dessert leaps from the page in 3D, with a ­recipe alongside. The book—­its colors, words, cartoons, elementary ­recipes—­seems obscure and alien. It’s not an easy, friendly childhood in its pages. It’s fear of clowns and getting lost in bizarre landscapes. I won­der why, of the hundreds of c­ hildren’s books we owned growing up, only this one survives. The o ­ thers must have been casualties of fire. My ­father’s high-­school yearbook is h ­ ere. He appears first on page twenty-­two, his jet-­black hair slicked back, wide-­set light-­green eyes looking to the right of the camera. I think I would have found him handsome, with his long, straight nose and look of utter congeniality. “Eddie” is described u ­ nder his se­nior photo­g raph as a “roving reporter” with an “obliging and enthusiastic manner, calm disposition, and carefree air.” In the activities section, I learn he was a coeditor of the Courier, the news­ paper published six times a year. My s­ isters and I all filled the editor-­in-­ chief role for our high-­school yearbook. A candid captures my ­father in the midst of a proofread. In another picture he huddles up with the basketball team, not in uniform but in a suit, as team man­ag­er. Tammy and I logged statistics for our high-­school basketball team, both of us not skilled enough to play but wanting to participate in our favorite sport. Without him to suggest the activity, did our DNA remember for us the fun on the sidelines, the contentment to be included? And ­here, a playbill. “Springtime with the Smurfs.” I check for my part—­“Gardener Smurf.” Under­neath, an envelope of more photos from the play. In one picture, I am at the microphone, center stage, my mouth open, my eyes wide as if I’m concentrating on the words. Another child holds up a handmade set piece, a gigantic book titled How to Catch Butterflies. I must be singing. That kernel—­singing—­must have come from my brain. I laugh out loud. My brain. When I was in first grade, I played

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Gardener Smurf and sang a song about butterflies. My ­father ­hasn’t stepped into the spotlight of my memory scene, but I have. I’m the one standing center stage. Is this just a story? If so, am I remembering being told the story, complemented by the photos and program? Does that constitute a real memory? Who is ­t here to ask? ­There’s no one to ask. I must define the rules of my memory. I’m exhausted. And I’m proud of my hippocampus. To­night I w ­ on’t dream of doorbells and crashes. I’ll dream of butterflies and pipe smoke, Jell-­O and ­music.

“Happy Valentine’s Day!” Justin announces. “We said no gifts,” I complain, but Justin hands me one anyway. When we first started dating, as college students, we had just enough spending money from our campus library jobs for pizza and movies. In the years since, we have leaned t­oward conservative gifts, preferring long notes in birthday cards and homemade coupons to be redeemed during Saturday outings. So when he gives me a white envelope featuring a drawing of an American Airlines plane complete with seats marked, I’m stunned. “­We’re ­going on a trip?” Incredulity puts girlhood in my voice. A trip somewhere mysterious and exciting! I tear open the envelope and unfold an itinerary. Depart New York. Arrive San Diego. We leave in a few weeks. Crap, I almost say, but check myself. I hate San Diego. My dad traveled for business a fair amount. He’d go to Maine and Wisconsin, destinations I’m sure seemed far away to us. He’d buy us trinkets, silver lockets, animal figurines. My ­sisters and I would send him with a notebook made from construction paper so that he could write in it ­every night, like a travelogue. I know this ­because one notebook found its way into a box of childhood memorabilia now sitting in my living room. I

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suppose we wanted our ­father to feel like he was tucking us in. “­Daddy’s Note Book,” it reads on the cover. Entries are short:

October 4—­Monday The leaves w ­ ere beautiful t­ oday. I had three meetings. I miss every­body. October 5—­Tuesday Long day ­today. Took a lot of pictures. Love you all so. October 6—­Wednesday Never guess what I did t­ oday! Love you all so!

I am fascinated by the sentence-­ending “so.” Sentimental and old-­ fashioned. It invites more: so deeply, so much. In February 1983, my ­father had to go to San Diego for work. He and my ­mother thought it would be fun for the ­whole f­amily to accompany him. I’ve heard a few stories of the trip. We visited SeaWorld, the zoo, Disneyland. While my f­ather was in a meeting, my m ­ other drove us down the coast ­toward Tijuana, but a violent rainstorm flooded parts of the highway, and she was forced to turn around. From the memorabilia boxes, I’ve recovered four San Diego mementos: an airline ticket stub, a brochure from SeaWorld, a Disneyland patch still in its plastic wrapping, and a postcard I wrote, with pretty good spelling for a kindergartener, to our new cat: “Dear Spookee, I am haveing a good time. It is grate her. I miss you. I love you. Suzanne.” My ­mother wrote out Spookee’s official address—­ “Miss Spookee Farrell”—­and sent it for me. Postage was thirteen cents. As usual, my f­ ather took lots of photo­graphs. He mailed the finished rolls to our local developer, so that when we arrived home the prints and slides would be waiting. We w ­ ere fans of the vacation slideshow and, Debbie tells me, took turns narrating. My ­mother bought a large terra-­cotta pot in

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Old Town and packed it in dirty laundry. She also bought a sizable cactus that she protected with white plastic bags and placed between her feet for the flight. We dragged bulky sombreros on the plane, drawing irritated glances from the flight attendants who had to find storage room. We flew home on the sixth of February, a Sunday. The next morning, we woke up, prob­ably tired and sunburned but excited to share our trip adventures with friends. My f­ ather drove to the power plant, facing what might have been a g­ reat deal of backlogged paperwork. We all went to school—­I to my morning kindergarten class where, my m ­ other says, I loved learning to read and was also fascinated that the bathroom contained a child-­sized toilet. That eve­ning, five of us ate dinner and possibly planned to narrate our slideshow. But my ­father d ­ idn’t come home. The crash happened that after­noon. San Diego, my vaguely personified version of the city, seems like it ­shouldn’t have needed my f­ ather. My m ­ other says our trip was unusual, a break from school and work. So we should have stayed in the normalcy of February. If we’d never gone to San Diego, my ­father ­wouldn’t have had so much work to do that Monday. He would have come home midday, before the snow started, to help us with homework and eat dinner with us. And I would have added Tuesday to Monday, and Wednesday to Tuesday. Weeks, months, and years would have gone by without incident, and soon enough I’d be an adult chatting with my parents over dinner about memorable moments from all our trips. “You often mention San Diego,” says Justin. I stare at him for a moment, noticing the chip on the bridge of his glasses. I’ll need to fill it in with dark nail polish. “Since ­you’re d ­ oing all this memory work, I thought maybe we should see if you can remember anything.” My m ­ other says Justin reminds her of my ­father—­he’s tall and thin, with dark hair and unvarying courtesy. His tenor voice is clear, his attitude low-­key. He’s the most likeable person I know. Justin even uses one of my ­father’s tripods, an unsteady t­ hing that surprised us as the perfect fit for one of his cameras. They would learn from each other, the two tall, quiet men. At moments

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like t­ hese I am pierced in new places, as if t­ here r­ eally are grief centers yet to be discovered.

I visit Stephanie for acu­punc­ture before our trip. This time I bring the ­bottle of Coppertone suntan lotion. Stephanie chooses a back routine, and I lie on my belly with my face pressed through the hole in the headrest. “I’m g­ oing to concentrate on your spine ­today,” she says, lining ­needles along both sides of my backbone from neck to coccyx. My skin flares up with each prick, and I think of the luminaria my ­mother used to make with tea lights and sand-­fi lled bags and place along the driveway’s edges in winter, like an airport runway guiding her husband home in the dark. Stephanie squeezes a glob of Coppertone into a bowl and places it on a stool beneath my nose. She plays her fin­gers atop the n ­ eedles’ heads, “stroking the dragon” and sending electric sensations to the end of each nerve. “Concentrate on one image from the past,” she says. “To give you a way in and keep you grounded.” She dims the lights and leaves me to my memory. The lotion smell wafts up into my nose. My sinuses feel waterlogged. A cottage by the beach where my ­father grew up. I love to touch the beads hanging from the ceiling. A long room with a kitchenette. I’m on the floor, and I think someone is about to come in from outside. My mind floats downriver to the pre­sent. I imagine grasping the cottage’s beaded curtain as if it’s keeping me from being swept out to sea. I ­don’t know if the beads are real, or if my mind has conjured them just to give me a safety net. The sea. I’m on the beach. It’s hot! I draw sand onto my legs. Beth runs up to me, smiles, takes something from ­behind me, runs away. My ­mother is near me, on a bedsheet she’s brought to the beach. I think my f­ather is ­here, too, making a sand c­ astle with my s­ isters. I ­can’t make out his face. A yellow pail with a cracked h ­ andle sits between hands that must be my ­father’s. Red shovels litter the sand. My ­sisters wear colorful bikinis tied at the shoulders.

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I focus on my ­father’s hands, trying to see more. But as the rest of his image materializes, wrists to arms to shoulders and torso, he freezes into a photo­graph. A man in a brown suit. I try to get up, but I ­can’t. The sand holds me down. No, it’s more than the sand. I’m too ­little to get up. I try to push myself up with my hands. Pain pulses down my right arm and out my fin­gers. Immediately I am back in the treatment room. Muffled voices on the other side of the wall grow more noticeable. I move my hand but regret it as a painful shock stiffens it into a claw shape. I feel cramped and hot. I want to get back to the beach, but it feels wrong now, the brown suit out of place ­under the glaring sun. I’m hot in this room, so maybe I subconsciously added the brown suit to the scene. If I did, I likely created the w ­ hole scene from scratch. I ­don’t trust myself or this memory. I close my eyes again, trying to keep my body still. I’m at home, in the basement. I’m playing with Spookee. She runs into ­Daddy’s workshop. I follow. ­Daddy’s t­ here. His back is to me. He’s bent over something on his workbench. Spookee runs out again, and I trail her. Reversing the scene, I go back into the workshop, hoping ­he’ll turn around. But he ­doesn’t. I know he ­c an’t. Not this time, not ever. I ­don’t know where I am—­have I become lost in a dream or a sequence of remembered photo­g raphs? Or have I stumbled, at last, upon a memory that I can be sure of? ­Daddy stood at his workbench while I chased the cat. I’m motion sick when I leave the clinic. The memory ­ride has taken me whirling about the brain channels. My head feels heavy, pressing down into my neck, as I walk sluggishly to the subway. The train stops somewhere between the Thirty-­Third and Forty-­Second Street stations. Gazing unfocused across the car, I notice a man in a brown suit. He looks just like my f­ather. A doppelganger. Hi ­Daddy. But when the train moves again, he fades into a much older man, one who looks nothing like my ­father. His hair is curly and gray. His face is large and square. He’s not even a wearing a suit, never mind a brown one.

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I read about a ­little boy whose ­father died. He tells his ­mother that he sees his ­father everywhere, mostly as a “very small man in the kitchen cabinet.” I bet t­ here’s a ­whole breed of us spread across the world, c­ hildren who see our tiny dead parents in random places. The subway, the kitchen cabinet. I can keep my ­father in my pocket.

Our flight from New York to San Diego starts off tense. Traffic and delays edge me out before we even board. When clear-­a ir turbulence hits, the plane dips and rolls violently. Our win­dow view changes from blue sky to brown earth and back again. “That was . . . ​d if­fer­ent,” Justin says as the plane rights itself and the pi­lot’s apology buzzes through the intercom. He takes my hand and says, “Hey, ­we’re about to land in the city where you ­were last with your dad!” ­There was a last time to be with my dad, and it ­wasn’t at home, it was ­here in a city that might other­wise have no meaning to me at all. We are the only guests at the three-­room inn. Over breakfast the first morning, our hostess, ­eager to offer suggestions, asks about our plans. I explain my unusual reasons for returning to San Diego. “I have a theory,” says our innkeeper as she pre­sents us with organic blueberry pancakes. “Your memory loss—­it’s like when you break an arm. Your body goes into shock so you ­don’t feel the pain. You ­were numb for years ­a fter your ­father died. That’s why you ­can’t remember. But it’s in ­t here. It’s all still in ­t here.” She sounds as if she knows more about my memory than I do. It’s entirely pos­si­ble that she’s right, I tell myself, as I sprinkle powdered sugar on the pancakes. Justin and I play the archetypal tourists, following the itinerary developed by my parents when I was six. I ­can’t wait to get to SeaWorld, where, I now guess, the only photo I have from 1983 was taken. I’d thought it was our local aquar­ium, but the photo shows a much larger setup. The huge

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glass tank of ­water, the metal bleachers—we must have seen one of the park’s shows. Photo­graph in hand, Justin and I visit SeaWorld’s three stadiums, settling on the biggest, where we think the tank looks most like the one in the picture. Long a­ fter the show ends, we try spot a­ fter spot in the stadium, narrowing down more than five thousand seats u ­ ntil we find a perspective that matches. I, so much taller now, and the tank, so much newer, ­can’t fit the picture exactly. Justin climbs up a few rows ­behind me, instructing me to turn and smile just so, as he snaps photos. We stay u ­ ntil a security guard kicks us out. Hours ­later, at the San Diego Zoo, I’m ­stopped by the flamingo exhibit. All ­t hose elliptical bodies packed tightly together, stringy pink legs sticking into shallow ­water, even the plastic dispensers full of kibble selling for twenty-­four cents a cup. Something closes in on my peripheral vision, like an aura before a migraine. I recognize the birds, but nothing more. “Do you remember something?” Justin asks. “I ­don’t know,” I tell him. I just think, flamingos, and want it to be a memory. I create space for it.

flamingos

But it’s not a word in my head. It’s ink, a rudimentary sketch. As we leave the zoo, the green cable cars of the Skyfari r­ ide sail overhead. “I think I was too scared to go on,” I tell Justin. I’m afraid of heights now. Was I afraid of heights back then? Or am I trying too hard to find a source of my fear, to assign to this random piece of equipment some meaning? If I can find the source, perhaps I can undo the damage and become, suddenly, not at all afraid of heights. I’m desperate to make meaning of the ­ride. But the more I concentrate on trying to remember, the more foreign the r­ ide becomes.

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My m ­ other tells me that for us l­ittle girls, the most exciting destination in San Diego was the Wild Animal Park. We rode the monorail and relished the impor­tant job of being very, very quiet near the white rhino and its new baby. She always tells the story that way: very, very quiet. Tammy says she took the task so seriously she held her breath. De­cades l­ ater, we just need to follow the red dots on the map, it seems, to the park’s only significant r­ ide. Past the meerkats, between the red river hogs and the petting kraal, down through the Mombasa Island Market. But ­after several turns, I know something is wrong. “Have you noticed a monorail anywhere?” I ask Justin. “We just turn left at the gibbons, and walk through the ­Great Rift Lift station,” he says. “Then, w ­ e’re t­ here.” No rail spans overhead. I think we must be lost, but we are true to the map. Fi­nally, tired and hot, we find the tail end of a long line and wait. Thirty minutes from this point. I anticipate the sensation of being on the train. Twenty minutes from this point. I hope for a memory rush that has yet to come. But by the time we reach Zero minutes from this point, I’ve had plenty of time to work up my skepticism. Ahead are caravans of connected carts, pulled by electric vehicles. “Where is the monorail?” I ask the ­ride’s attendant. “They took it down last March. Oh, just one year ago!” She sighs. “But . . . ​my ­father.” “I’m sorry?” “I was h ­ ere with my f­amily a long time ago and we went on the monorail.” “Well, I’m sorry about that. But the monorail was old. It was a g­ reat monorail, though,” she says through another sigh, as if reliving the loss. “It was meant to last fifteen years, and it lasted thirty-­five!” We take the r­ ide anyway, justifying our wait in line. As our caravan snakes along the narrow paved road, tourists lean out the sides to snap photos of the antelope and giraffes. Justin watches me. “Anything?” He wants to know if I’m remembering the sight or scent of the animals. I’m not, but I perceive transposition; the six-­year-­old and the adult are together

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in this space. Pre­sent and past cannot meld, exactly, but I carry her along, that six-­year-­old, as I travel, even if I c­ an’t remember or understand her. It’s like she’s riding ­under the cart, or even on my own back like a koala or an anteater. Maybe I’m on her back, and she’s the one carry­ing me as she points to her favorite animals and chats about her s­ isters, m ­ other, and ­father. In the last bit of daylight, we drive back to the city, to Coronado, where we sit on the beach. Justin leans back to doze while I sit cross-­legged, watching the ocean. The setting sun pulls me off this continent, not leaving me but beckoning to what’s next, what’s just on the other side. What is memory?, I find myself wondering for the hundredth time. Information, seized by the senses, enters the brain. The first time it’s called up again, it’s called up as a memory. By nature, that memory is subjective, filtered through the brain’s unique formula of emotions and desires, fears and stress. The second time it’s called up, it’s colored a bit more, set by borders and patterns, ­limited. I’ve long envied o ­ thers for their childhood memories, distorted as they are. What happened m ­ atters less than the fact that something did: we existed before now. What I would give for one meager memory that grants me a heartbeat with my ­father. But when it comes to him, and to my childhood, my brain ­isn’t making ­t hose connections, ­isn’t presenting me with memories—­slippery, multilayered images that are, despite their inaccuracy, deeply comforting. I unfold my legs and stretch them t­ oward the ocean. Though I feel the urge to run into the w ­ ater, I c­ an’t, b ­ ecause my skin reacts so poorly to salt ­water. One summer when I was a teen, I waded into the Atlantic off the coast of Maine and felt on my ankles a hot itch. When I emerged, I saw a line like a farmer’s tan around each. Above the line shone clear, white skin; below the line prickled red, bumpy skin. It looked dazzling, the way the straight lines circumnavigated my bony ankles. It meant an erasure. No more plunging into the surf. ­Wouldn’t it be wonderful to remember plunging into the surf? I’ve been in salt w ­ ater as an adult, but rarely, and only

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to wade or float before quickly getting out to rinse off. I’m sure that I plunged headfirst into the surf at some point in my early life, perhaps when we visited the Jersey shore. Of the many, many memories that I should have, plunging into the surf is high on the list of t­ hose I want. I must have done it with my f­ ather. If I could plunge into this ocean, surely memory would come back, but I’ve developed this allergy, this deep physical re­sis­tance, as if my body wants to make the knowing of my ­father as difficult as pos­si­ble. But my ­father is salt w ­ ater. He’s of an ocean-­side town. He must have dreamt of exploring that ocean; he must have loved diving in his submarine the first time. He is the salt ­water in my body. Maybe my hives are actually bursts of him. Tomorrow we return to New York. I’ve already squeezed a bit of Coppertone into an empty prescription ­bottle and stashed it in my purse so that, like a memory junkie, I can return to the beach with a quick sniff. Right now, on the beach of Coronado, in the city of San Diego, the last place I was with my f­ ather, I imagine pushing into the surf, seawater sliding over my back. Even in my mind, I resist putting my face into the salt, the salt that stings my eyes and burns my skin. But I have to. I flip, and my belly feels cold. I put my forehead down to meet the sea. All the way up to my hairline. I linger just another moment, then dive to stir up the particles of memory. I descend to darkness. Every­t hing is just shape and color, and then, no more color, just shape, the long, slick shape of a shark or the jagged edge of a reef. I’m deep now, deep inside my brain, and the world has turned red. Red w ­ ater pulses slowly in my ears and through my heart. And t­ here he is, a shape. It’s his submarine. I reach out to trace it with my milky white fin­ger. It is much smaller than I thought it would be, like a miniature. I know he’s inside it. His hands are shaking as they hold together the tiny pieces of the model ship he’s building. He ­can’t see me from inside his submarine, but I can see him. When I find t­ hese pieces of my f­ ather, I put them together, but I still d ­ on’t have a memory.

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I taste the sea. The back of my tongue is alert with it. Salty bumps. Suzanne. I jump, look at Justin. He’s asleep. I close my eyes again. Suzanne. I think I hear someone calling my name. It’s a clear tone. Th ­ ere’s no gravel in his voice. The sound wave across the sand ­doesn’t displace even a tiny granule. Suzanne. It’s my dad. Just his voice. With each ocean wave, I hear my name. “­Daddy,” I whisper. “You’ll never guess what I did t­ oday.” I listen for his reply. It’s just the sound of the ocean, now. ­Going home tomorrow, love you so.

“Let’s begin again,” Billy says. Weeks have passed since I last saw Billy for somatic experiencing. Memory hunting is filling in the gaps, not with images and details so much as with a comforting awareness that something was t­ here, that it was not, in fact, a void. That I lived. And I’ve begun to construct a clearer picture of my f­ ather and of the night of his death. Perhaps Billy can help me move through that memory. But it’s push and pull in this office. I want to talk, to rationalize why it’s so painful to relive the night my ­father died. Billy wants me to sit in the memory and feel my body and be vulnerable. I ­can’t do it. Each time, we have to start again, only to get nowhere. “This w ­ hole t­ hing—it does feel like a series of beginnings.” “It might always. Now, what is the first t­ hing you remember?” “The doorbell. My m ­ other. The priest, the cop.” “Where are you?” “I’m upstairs. In my bedroom. It’s dark. I should be in bed. I ­shouldn’t be standing in the doorway. The doorbell is about to ring, and every­t hing is about to happen.”

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“­You’ve been having trou­ble getting past the doorbell. Let’s approach it a dif­fer­ent way. What would you want for the six-­year-­old you, to help her get through the eve­ning?” Billy asks. The obvious answer: to have the event not happen at all. But that’s not an option. I likely felt so lonely that night. I decide I want to give myself com­pany. “I’d want her to have an adult t­ here with her.” “Who would that be?” I won­der if she thinks I should travel back in time to talk to my younger self. But I loathe that “­little me” game. “I guess it’s supposed to be me, now, as an adult. But it’s not.” “Who is it then?” I ­can’t picture my ­mother well enough at that time to place h ­ ere in the scene. Plus, s­ he’ll be busy in a few minutes getting gutted at the front door. I ­can’t put a ­sister next to me. We are all too young. I ­don’t even consider a relative or teacher. I know who I want t­ here with me. “It’s my dad. Sort of a vision of my dad. I can pretend he’s with me that night.” He’s small at first, my pocket-­sized version, so I enlarge him to Justin’s size. “What is he d ­ oing?” “He’s holding my hand. My right hand is in his left. My hand is small. His is big and cool.” “What do you think he’s feeling?” “He’s calm, I think, b ­ ecause he already knows what’s about to happen.” I ­can’t see his face, but ­t here ­isn’t a trace of sweat on his palm. For a man who has just died, whose f­amily is about to learn about it, his palm is remarkably dry. “But he’s concerned about me, about all of us.” “How do you feel?” “I feel safer with him ­t here. I’ve never been so close to having a dad. Just looking for him makes me think I can see him. But I feel ner­vous, too. I’m anticipating the doorbell. It’s like g­ oing to the doctor for shots. My

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dad tells me it’s not g­ oing to hurt too badly, but I know, and he knows, that it’s g­ oing to hurt. But it ­will be all right.” “Where in your body do you feel ner­vous?” “In my stomach.” The doorbell chimes. Shouts: No! No! My ­mother’s voice. I peer at the men coming in. A policeman, a neighbor. A priest. “Slow it down. Slow down the doorbell. Can you imagine it very, very quiet?” I recoil. My stomach starts its familiar rotation, and my forehead tightens with tension. I ­can’t finish the memory. Instead, I stand in the doorway with my ­father. I feel our hands together. My ­father is h ­ ere ­because I’ve put him ­here. I’ve animated a photo­graph and put him next to me. He’s tall. He’s gentle. He’s wearing his brown suit.

ii.  Of Myth and Memory Sophomore year of high school I took Honors En­glish with Ms. Merle. She was frail and gray and sweet sounding and incapable of managing teen­ agers. “This is an honors class,” she pleaded while we chatted and passed notes, as if our collective conscience would suddenly snap to. Ms. Merle instructed us at the beginning of each day to log our thoughts on the reading in a journal. I hated writing responses, hated having to write nonstop ­until Ms. Merle told us we could drop our pens. I filled the margins with loathing. Page one: “This idea of a journal r­ eally does not work for me ­because I hate writing with a passion.” One of the latest boxes of archives I’ve borne away from my ­mother’s ­house is loaded with high-­school notebooks. I have not, u ­ ntil now, collected them from the bottom drawer of my old dresser, since notes on biology and algebra h ­ aven’t seemed impor­tant to my search for memory. But

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dad tells me it’s not g­ oing to hurt too badly, but I know, and he knows, that it’s g­ oing to hurt. But it ­will be all right.” “Where in your body do you feel ner­vous?” “In my stomach.” The doorbell chimes. Shouts: No! No! My ­mother’s voice. I peer at the men coming in. A policeman, a neighbor. A priest. “Slow it down. Slow down the doorbell. Can you imagine it very, very quiet?” I recoil. My stomach starts its familiar rotation, and my forehead tightens with tension. I ­can’t finish the memory. Instead, I stand in the doorway with my ­father. I feel our hands together. My ­father is h ­ ere ­because I’ve put him ­here. I’ve animated a photo­graph and put him next to me. He’s tall. He’s gentle. He’s wearing his brown suit.

ii.  Of Myth and Memory Sophomore year of high school I took Honors En­glish with Ms. Merle. She was frail and gray and sweet sounding and incapable of managing teen­ agers. “This is an honors class,” she pleaded while we chatted and passed notes, as if our collective conscience would suddenly snap to. Ms. Merle instructed us at the beginning of each day to log our thoughts on the reading in a journal. I hated writing responses, hated having to write nonstop ­until Ms. Merle told us we could drop our pens. I filled the margins with loathing. Page one: “This idea of a journal r­ eally does not work for me ­because I hate writing with a passion.” One of the latest boxes of archives I’ve borne away from my ­mother’s ­house is loaded with high-­school notebooks. I have not, u ­ ntil now, collected them from the bottom drawer of my old dresser, since notes on biology and algebra h ­ aven’t seemed impor­tant to my search for memory. But

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­u nder all the academic work is this journal, the only notebook that promises to reveal my deeper mind during that time. I can feel close to that high-­school teenager again, and when I read her words, I recognize my younger self—­uneasy, obsessive, hollow. In September 1992, when I was fifteen, we read Beowulf. Ms. Merle asked us to reflect on the story. My first reflection: a doodle of a screaming pencil, sucked into a sharpener to meet its violent demise, complete with blood spatter erupting from the splintered tip. My second reflection: a note about the bad weather and how much I’m enjoying it, since “gloomy and rainy is my favorite kind of day.” On September 23, Ms. Merle must have asked us about betrayal. Perhaps she wrote on the board, “Have you ever been betrayed?” My third reflection on Beowulf: “I was indeed once betrayed, I think. Actually, I ­don’t remember any of it. I ­don’t remember anything from my past. Maybe I have amnesia . . . ​I’ve had many terrible ­t hings happen to me. But I ­don’t recall any of them.” I sit on the couch, stunned and s­ ilent and shaking. I read the words again, thinking I misunderstood them the first time or misread my poor handwriting. But the words are still ­t here, and still t­ here, and t­ here again. “I ­don’t recall any of them.” When I was fifteen, it seems, I d ­ idn’t even recall the traumatic memories, the memories I have held to as an adult. Not the doorbell, the funeral, the fire. Nothing. I suspected amnesia. At the end of my reflection, my callous fifteen-­year-­old self added: “Oh well, no big loss.” No big loss. My next entry tells the tale of a razor blade who becomes depressed and decides to commit suicide but ­can’t b ­ ecause it cannot turn on itself. Id ­ on’t remember anything from my past. If this was true, what story must I have concocted, what narrative must I have been crafting for so long, to make myself believe I remembered the

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tragic events? What person must I have been to want to carry with me the terrible moments from my childhood? It’s as if at fifteen, recognizing I had nothing, I embraced my ­family’s shared traumatic memories as my own. Perhaps I wanted to be closer to my remembering ­family. Or I wanted to be close to my f­ ather, even if that meant bearing witness to his death. Now I won­der, is my inability to remember childhood not the fault of the loud-­trauma memories ­after all? Is it not the fault of my ­family being too good at telling stories to let me retain my own, not the fault of my young age when my ­father died or of the fire erasing the context of my first eight years? Not the fault of my m ­ other reliving my f­ ather’s death rather than helping me remember his life? Did I just give up the chance to be normal, the chance to remember the ordinary, ­because I sought to be extraordinary in tragedy? Did I imprison myself in the darkness? I did not remember my f­ ather’s death. But I would go on to say that I did. Psychologist Maureen Murdock believes memory is not only distorted, but distorted in a way to suit our needs. How we remember events reflects our feelings, desires, and created identities. The memoirist is “a self-­ conscious cultivator of his or her own myth.” My throat closes around the fear that I chose this life, one that served some purpose I conjured back when I was a teenager. I d ­ idn’t remember anything at all, but I wanted a story to live by. So I chose a story of sadness and loss that would help me feel grounded in the world, a story unfettered by the lightness of childhood resilience. The story of a girl, now a w ­ oman, whose losses—of her ­father and her home and her memory—­make her who she is. I wanted to hold fast to this world of sadness so that I had a world at all. Back then, I assessed what I c­ ouldn’t remember: not big. A gap, but not an impor­tant one. Just something once ­t here, now gone. Oh well. I read the words of my notebook again and try to understand each one. I ­don’t remember anything from my past. I d ­ on’t remember. Anything. They cut me from my lifeline. They remove me from my memory. I’ve had many terrible ­things happen to me. But I ­don’t recall any of them. They take away the

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only memories I had. They release me from ­t hose traumas, yet I paddle ­toward them, hoping to once again live through the night of my f­ ather’s death, to feel the heat on my cheeks and smell my childhood burning. I lie on the couch and try to remember the worst. Maybe my ­sisters told me about the noises from inside the ­house during the fire. I try, but I ­can’t hear the noises anymore. Clank, bang. It’s not t­ here. I c­ an’t hear Debbie scream. I c­ an’t hear the flames. It’s all quiet. I draw my childhood bedroom in my mind, like Harold and his purple crayon. Ding dong goes the door, and once again I feel panicked, and once again I ­can’t quite get through. I tell myself I remember Knight Rider, so I skip to that. I tell myself I remember the funeral, so I skip to that. I try hard to keep my mind t­ here, but it keeps drifting back to more recent memories, or to the pre­sent, then to an adult version of myself walking through memories ­doing research. But when my mind tries to move backward, it’s repelled, as if it shares the same charge. I c­ an’t look out through the child’s eye sockets. I c­ an’t hear with the child’s ears. Quiet. My mind feels crowded with information, but also empty. A h ­ otel room full of belongings but left vacant. My f­ ather’s submarine slips from my fin­gers, slides away and dis­appears in the undersea weeds. He’s gone.

I’m lying on Stephanie’s treatment bed, an hour a­ fter leaving Eliza’s office. With ­needles canvassing my scalp, my mind floats to dif­fer­ent dimensions. I try to find memory. But I daydream. I daydream pedestrian ­t hings, like the old bread maker I just inherited from a friend. I work to move my mind back to memory. But I c­ an’t. The bread maker grows bigger and more impor­tant in my quiet mind. I should bake my friend a loaf, I think, and I imagine what it ­will look and

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smell like. I h ­ aven’t seen him in a while. The bread maker is old. I’d like a new one, but this one has sentimental value. I feel like I’m taking a light snooze, not totally asleep, but not awake in the pre­sent moment e­ ither. The twilight of a nap. Restful. So now what? What am I even d ­ oing ­here anymore?

In the 1980s and 1990s, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus published numerous works outlining her skepticism t­oward recovered memories. She devoted her ­career to studies of how memory can be manipulated. In one book, Loftus brings up author Tim O’Brien’s distinction between happening-­t ruth and story-­t ruth. “Happening-­t ruth is the indisputable black-­and-­white real­ity of ‘at such and such time this happened and then this, and then that,’ ” writes Loftus. “Story-­truth is the colorized version, breathing luminous life into the inert shell of the past, waking up the dead, sparking emotion, inspiring a search for meaning.” Too many patients come to believe that their story-­truth—so vivid, so rich—is happening-­ truth, Loftus says. They come to live their fleshed-­out stories, believing them to be incontrovertibly real. This happened to me—­I am who I am ­because of it. ­Here’s what I now think I remember from my childhood: I think I remember being seasick in Alaska. I ­don’t know if I remember the fire anymore. I ­don’t know if I remember my first period. Maybe it was my fifth, my tenth. I d ­ on’t know. I think I remember the sound of the doorbell, but in my mind it’s the eight-­note Westminster melody. It’s always been. Was it? I send Debbie an e-­mail. I send Tammy a text message. Tammy texts back. “I think it was a ­simple ding dong.” Debbie responds. “Mom d ­ idn’t have t­ hose chimes yet,” she writes. “She bought them ­after the fire.”

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Why did I never ask before? Dingdongdingdongdongdingdingdong

The doorbell melts away. ding dong ding dong dong ding ding dong ding dong

Beth visits my ­mother’s ­house and, on a whim, empties a closet I ­didn’t even remember existed. It’s a small, low-­ceilinged hole in the wall off Debbie’s bedroom, a crawl space ­under the ­house’s steep front roof. She writes us of the bounty that she would like to throw away: school papers, proj­ ects, toys, books, and miscellaneous items. I thought I already had all my school papers, since I’ve collected boxes of them over the last few months. I’ve taken every­t hing t­ here is to take. But Beth says t­ here is much, much more. Before anything gets chucked, it needs to be photographed, at my ­mother’s request. All over again I c­ an’t believe how much is stored in the ­house. I make a trip to my ­mother’s on my own, something I rarely do. Beth was right. Th ­ ere are now six more boxes of school papers sitting in my old bedroom. Most are drawings and stories from my first few years of elementary school. I also find a folder labeled “Eighth Grade.” I debate where to start. My kindergarten box is chock-­full of watercolors and three-­sentence stories printed on big lined paper. Instead, I choose a few shoeboxes, a paper bag of odds and ends, and the single folder from m ­ iddle school. At the kitchen ­table, I empty the boxes of knickknacks. My ­mother asks, “Do you remember that? Do you remember D ­ addy bought you this?” I weed through to consolidate. I drag over the garbage can and throw t­ hings out, but she retrieves them. “­Don’t throw that away. You could mark that five cents at a yard sale.” I tell her it’ll cost more than five cents just to buy labels.

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­We’re discussing the knickknacks on the kitchen ­table when I open the middle-­school folder and start flipping through papers. Spelling and social studies quizzes. Then, a story called “Fire!” that I have no memory of typing. The pin-­feed paper, the dot-­matrix typeface, my name and the teacher’s name on the top left: strange to the point of alien. I skim while my ­mother keeps talking. The fire story is close to what I thought I knew. It starts the same way: crashes from inside the ­house. But ­there are significant details altered. In the story, I’m the one who grabs the doorknob to the kitchen, and it’s hot, and I’m the one who opens the door: I saw the most horrifying sight that ­will remain with me forever. In the story, I ­don’t stand at the mailbox waiting like I’m supposed to. I run down the street as fast as I can, to get away from the burning ­house. In the story, I’m very worried about our two cats. But t­ here’s no mention of my ­mother crawling into the burning h ­ ouse to look for Debbie. Did I add the hot doorknob for one more sensory detail? When did Debbie’s recollection of the fire enter my memory? When did I thread hers and mine together to create the story that came back to me on that Ohio campus a few summers ago? The next story in the folder is familiar at first. I’m lying in bed late at night. I feel a pain, a twinge, deep inside. I rummage through the medicine cabinet. But then the pain turns out to be a headache. That revelation comes a­ fter a dramatic ellipsis. I have . . . ​a headache. It’s the same story as my first period, but it’s a headache. Was it always a headache, and I made it my first period ­later? Or was it always my period, but I was too ashamed to write that in ­middle school, so I changed it to a headache? Or was it ever anything more than just a story I crafted for an En­glish assignment? Did this even happen to me? I turn the page. Dark, everywhere dark. Cold, too. Cold blackness. Doorbell echoes through the h ­ ouse. Mommy screams, no, no. It’s the story of the night my f­ ather died. This one is word for word as I remember it. But not in a way that confirms my memory. Rather, in a way that confirms my retelling of the same story with the same intonation and rhythm, over and

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over and over. This is how I crafted my f­ather’s death in eighth grade. This is how I built it in my own words, and this is how I would always believe I remembered it. ­These stories—­the same ones I always thought I remembered—­have been my hallmarks. But they always have been stories. Stories in a folder. Stories prob­ably in multiple folders and notebooks and on many En­glish teachers’ desks. Now I know why I thought I remembered them. I wrote about them. Again and again. They followed me. They haunted me. They ­were me. The next page is an e­ arlier draft of the death story. I’d added “cold blackness” in the margin. I’d added “nauseating smell of death.” My teacher must have driven home the need to appeal to all the senses. “Mommy says, ‘God loved D ­ addy so much, he de­cided to take him early.’ ” I’d crossed out “says” and changed it to “whispers.” On the next page, an old blue ditto: “Creating Setting and Mood.” What are the colors of the scene? What do you want the audience to see first, to hear, to smell? What is the time of day? How ­will the audience know? I’d filled in the details I wanted to use: black, doorbell, nauseating smell of death, night. Creating both setting and mood is like setting a stage for a play, says the ditto. My memory play, created when I was fourteen. I wrote ­t hese stories at the same time I was awakening from the quiet fog of my grade-­school years. I spontaneously put words to paper. Maybe they w ­ ere accurate then. As close to the original events as they could get. But I revised as I had been taught. Reor­ga­nized, expanded, heightened. I edited. I proofread. I s­ haped my tragedies into good grades. My ­mother is quiet now. ­After the ditto, the pages are covered in pictures I drew of big cartoon characters bleeding, with the words dev­il and death and hell as captions. She is watching me read. I won­der what to do, ­whether I should hide from her what I’ve just found. “I had no idea you w ­ ere writing that stuff,” my m ­ other says, looking at the violent pictures upside down. “Did your teacher ever read this?”

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“I ­don’t know. I d ­ on’t remember.” I want to keep t­ hese pages from her. But it d ­ oesn’t occur to me to close the notebook. My hand ­doesn’t even flick. I leave the notebook open like a wound. “I ­didn’t know you felt that way.” “I felt ­really, ­really dark.” “Is it hard for you to go through ­t hese t­ hings?” My ­mother has never asked me directly how I feel. I am tongue-­tied. I have a world of t­ hings to tell her about my search for memory. But I c­ an’t think of anything at this moment. I c­ an’t answer clearly. I just say, “Yes. Yes, it is hard to look through ­t hese ­t hings now. I feel sad for the person who wrote all this.” “Do you still identify with the person who wrote ­t hese t­ hings?” “I ­don’t.” But I do, in one way. I anticipated disaster back then. I anticipate disaster now. This is the through-­t hread. The sad connection to my former self. “I ­don’t remember writing ­these t­ hings,” I say. “I know I was ­really dark. I was ­really unhappy.” I flip to the next page. A self-­portrait, with the words, Devil and blood go hand in hand. Then, a note in tiny print: Dear me. I seem to have lost myself. I was writing t­ hese t­ hings when I was fourteen. I’m still afraid to show my ­mother. “Do you remember hating me?” she asks. The kitchen is loud with background noise, clock and dishwasher and refrigerator. I could back away from this honesty between my m ­ other and me. I d ­ on’t remember ever facing this opening. I could sidestep. I could work around. I ­don’t feel prepared. I want to keep it open, but I’m not ready. I sit in this moment. “Yes.” “Do you remember writing about it?”

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“Yes,” I say quietly. Though I ­don’t know exactly what she means. I ­don’t ask. I just say yes. B ­ ecause I must have written about it somewhere. Now it’s my turn. “Do you remember telling me, when I was in college, that you loved me but ­didn’t like me?” “Yes,” she says. We both look down at the notebook between us. I flip through more pages. She asks for a glass of w ­ ater. I pour myself a glass of red wine. The words bleed on the page. Some day, I believe, my ­mother and I ­will address this, the divide between us that we are just now starting to survey. But just as it took a split second to decide to let her see the violent words and pictures I’d committed to paper at fourteen, it takes a split second to decide our relationship is a ­matter for another time. “One of my greatest regrets is saying that God de­cided to take ­Daddy from us.” “Why?” “It just is.” She’s crying now. “­A fter D ­ addy was killed—­you know, I always say he was ‘killed.’ I never say he ‘died.’ It’s engrained in me.” “I ­don’t know if you realize this, but you also always say, ‘Sarah White de­cided to go the wrong way on the highway.’ ” “I do. I know that. I had so much anger. I took it out on you girls. I d ­ idn’t even take it out on Sarah White. I should have. I was lenient on her. I took it out on you girls.” “It’s okay, Mom,” I tell her. Her face is contorted, and she’s still crying. “It’s okay. What ­else could you do?” “Well—” but she ­doesn’t answer my half-­rhetorical question. “­A fter ­Daddy was killed, I became so ner­vous about our stuff. Then we had the fire. Then I became very protective of you girls and even our property. I ­didn’t want anyone to take anything ­else from me.” On top of the garbage pile is bobblehead doll of unknown origin. A girl wearing a red dress and holding a paper fan. When she saw it, my ­mother had said, “Maybe D ­ addy bought that for you?” I had said, “Well, it ­doesn’t hold any sentimental value to me, since I ­can’t remember it.” I had dropped it in the trash.

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Now I take the doll from the garbage and wrap it in a paper towel. I place it back in the box, along with a host of other knickknacks, each one in its own paper towel shroud. “I’ll keep all this stuff, Mom. When I have a ­house, I can find spots for every­t hing.”

In one of my first sessions with Eliza, she likened my childhood memory to the chalk drawings by the screever Bert in Mary Poppins—­the basic outlines of memory, easily washed away but providing hints of color and shape. I ­couldn’t remember ever seeing Mary Poppins. What came to my mind instead was the tele­v i­sion show Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings. What­ever the ­little boy Simon draws on his magic chalkboard comes to life in a world of chalk. I see my ­father and childhood in my imagination, in a state of constant potential. I stand on one side of the synaptic cleft and, like an artist, sketch on my chalkboard what might be on the other side. I mix up ages, drawing myself as a child or as an adult looking at a child, or sometimes just as a flat square on the sidewalk looking up at the scene. I copy from photos and other ­people’s stories. I draw the dead as animated, dynamic, mingling with the living. The chalk drawings are fluid and flexible, dreamlike, just like my memory. While I’m drawing, I’m inside the scenes, but once I’m finished drawing, they crumble, too fragile even to be held in reserve. But the chalk and board are always available. I feel familiar with my childhood, perhaps more than if I could remember it through the channels ­we’ve come to understand as memory. I’ve de­cided I possess a limitless way to remember my childhood. Chalk drawing: I give to the fifth d ­ aughter, the one who was stillborn, life. She’s thirty-­something with a ­daughter of her own who looks exactly like I did at six years old. They tiptoe through the front garden, admiring my ­mother’s new whiskey barrels now bursting with impatiens. I d ­ on’t talk to my s­ ister but trail b ­ ehind her like a shadow made of

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time. As the inverse of a looming death, I feel, to her, like hope sliding ­behind her feet. Chalk drawing: My grand­father sits on a metal chair in the browned August grass. Most of his great-­grandchildren play with his trains. The youn­gest is peeing in my grand­father’s lap, unnoticed by my grand­father, ­because he’s peeing in his lap, too. I giggle. This drawing is good. Chalk drawing: a jagged line signifying a loud noise. The garage door. My dad, with greasy black hair and lopsided smile, comes around the corner into the kitchen. “Hi, every­body!” he says. Each time he comes home from work he says this, as if we are a g­ iant, pleasant surprise. “Hi, every­ body!” We s­ isters, as if equally surprised, exclaim, “­Daddy’s home!” Chalk drawing: My ­father is barbecuing. This time I want him to be aged like my m ­ other is now, so I comb through his hair and color e­ very third one silver. I’ve been told he spent many hours bent double over a workbench, crafting models and mending appliances; I need to bend him at least a l­ ittle. How to do this? I set a small pebble on the back of his neck so that he must bow his head just enough to keep it t­ here. I assign my ­father perfect neurocognition, ­because I want to hear him speak memories from the last three de­cades. I give him glasses. He c­ an’t drive at night, but ever since his accident I’ve de­cided he survived, he ­hasn’t been a big driver anyway. My f­ ather spends most of his time in and around the shed. He dozes in his hammock. He loves to barbecue and ­can’t stop himself at bur­gers—he and my ­mother collude to cook hot dogs, kielbasa, chicken, and steak each time he fires up the grill, which seems like several nights a week, even when it’s raining, thanks to that green-­and-­black jumbo umbrella my ­mother bought him. Surely an attraction for lightning. I chalk a yellow sun to keep them safe. ­Here’s my ­mother again, on the mend; my ­father insisted she get knee replacement surgery a­ fter that summer with Lyme. She descends the porch stairs. She’s improved so much, each leg taking its own step, rather than the step-­together-­step-­together routine I’m accustomed to seeing. She’s

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even balancing in one hand the large eggshell-­colored platter she always uses to carry offerings from the grill. I watch them from my two-­dimensional plane at their feet. She’s kissing him on the cheek, right where it smells of hickory smoke (that’s where I’d kiss him), and ­they’re both smiling, ­because ­they’re remembering what we girls used to say to them when they kissed in front of us—­kissing cuties. As they speak of it out loud, they give me the ­imagined past to go with the ­imagined pre­sent. My f­ather looks up to the sky. He lifts his right hand, balled as a fist, and presses the end of his nose, in thought. The pebble slides from his neck and drops to the mulch in my ­mother’s garden. He sniffs the air and looks down again, at the top of my ­mother’s head, then beyond her, to the chalk path, where I, in all ages and forms, am mute and invisible and pulsing.

I was a child who played with cats. I was a child who kicked my legs in the pool. I was a child who visited the beach with my ­family. I was a child who ate spaghetti while waiting for my ­father to come home. I was a child who sang a song in my first-­grade play. I was a child who practiced piano. I was a child. I was I. I was.

i.  Another Version of Us I shimmy into another dress and arrange myself in the fitting-­room mirror. Justin steals glances. “I think we go back to the blue,” I say. For our rehearsal dinner, the ­simple navy satin A-­line ­will do. “The blue is my favorite!” he says. I’m not surprised. It’s the perfect fit and price, the perfect time to get out of t­ here and walk home. It’s raining when we exit Saks on Forty-­Ninth and Fifth, so I pull umbrellas from my tote. The walk sign blinks, and I move quickly. He blocks my way. Bouncing back from his chest, irritated, I search his face for a reason. But my mind softens. I d ­ on’t care where we walk, I’m just happy about the dress, happy that a­ fter many years together, we are getting married. At the corner of Forty-­Ninth and Madison, we stop again before crossing, this time to adjust the hanging bag so it ­doesn’t drag on the wet ground. I hear it, though I d ­ on’t know what it is. A concussion. Continuous crunching. Bright tone of cracks ripping rapid-­fire across glass. Mellow whup whup whup as tires spin ­f ree. Wheeze of bubbled liquid bursting through tiny fissures. Then: “Help me, God, please help me.” Against the blaring onslaught, I futilely cover my ears. 113

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“­Don’t go,” I say. But I know he ­will. It takes me several seconds to understand: a car, flipped over, flattened and smoking, undercarriage black and tires still rolling, sits menacingly out of place—as though a boulder dislodged and crashed on the sidewalk— on the southwest corner of Forty-­Ninth and Madison, the spot where, if he ­hadn’t blocked me, if we ­hadn’t paused to adjust the dress, we would have been standing. What­ever I’m saying to the 911 operator must be clear. She says, “­You’re the first to call” and “Help w ­ ill be t­ here soon.” I’m panicked that the smoking car ­will explode. Three bystanders hoist it so a fourth can drag out the screaming driver, whose face is veiled by a blood mask. Still in the street, Justin holds his palms up to stop traffic. “Come back,” I mouth to him when first responders arrive. We watch police and paramedics and firefighters manage the rainy scene. “Do you think the car landed on anyone?” I ask. “I ­don’t know. But a pay phone was t­ here.” He points to a concrete sidewalk square pried up on an a­ ngle. Black spots mark where metal legs ­were anchored. “Now it’s not.” “Does anyone use public phones anymore?” “Not many. Some. Or they ­wouldn’t still have them, right?” “Pay phones seem useful only in emergencies,” I say, barely registering irony. We interlace our fin­gers and step deliberately ­under the still-­drizzly sky. I stop us several feet back from each curb. I want Mexican food, hot enough to burn my mouth. Over chili at our favorite spot, Comfort Diner, we recount the event, piecing together the timeline that has already become shaky with shock. “Why did you block me?” I ask. We should have crossed to the south side of the street. That’s what you do in New York, cross when you can. “I ­don’t know. Something told me to stop you. I had this weird feeling we should walk on the north side.”

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At home, he calls his parents with the story. It sounds foreign, some details dif­fer­ent from what I remember. He describes a tire screech. I d ­ on’t remember a tire screech. He says he waited before r­ unning into the street to stop traffic. I remember him bolting. I remember this ­because by bolting, he left me on the sidewalk, alone in my fear for the driver, for pedestrians who might be ­under the car, fear for another version of us standing on that corner. And now, a few minutes ­later, I think I remember feeling aloneness ­because Justin ­dying and leaving me alone is my biggest fear. I’ve fastened my biggest fear to something big and frightening that just happened. And now, by wondering about it— And now, by writing notes to log that it happened, should I ever doubt— I have altered the memory again. I’ve ­stopped hunting for childhood memory, but I’ve started remembering the crash that killed my f­ ather as if I w ­ ere in the car. I’m superimposed on my figment f­ ather, my legs too short to reach the brake. The few times I feel in control of the scene, I decelerate the oncoming car and tell Sarah White to veer to the shoulder. If she can understand me through her inebriation, s­ he’ll be the w ­ oman in the car driving the wrong way by the guardrail rather than the ­woman in the car smashed all the way into my ­father’s hood, windshield, and torso. Just a few feet to her left. Sometimes when I’m driving in real life, I think I see her oncoming car, so I brake as if it’s real, ­because even though I did not see it when it happened, it was, once, real. I ­don’t call my ­mother, or anyone ­else. Instead, I turn on the tele­v i­sion, flipping to a Travel Channel marathon of Bizarre Foods. I empty my closet into heaps and try every­thing on, while host Andrew Zimmern tastes Sicily’s craziest cuisine—­cow stomach soup, choco­late rabbit, tuna sperm. ­We’re planning to drive around Sicily for our honeymoon. I make a note to look for tuna sperm. I’m not an adventurous eater. But aversion to something like tuna sperm has dissolved into smaller particles of apprehension, and I feel like I could try a taste. Maybe on pizza.

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I find an older dress, a black silk slip with lace overlay in rich r­ ose and moss green. I should wear this to the rehearsal. I hang up the blue dress, still in its Saks bag, and change into pajamas. Within a few hours, I can barely remember how it happened out ­t here on the sidewalk, but it imprints nonetheless. When it rains, I w ­ ill not stop on corners or near pay phones, and I w ­ ill look all around me b ­ ecause now cars come from anywhere, even the sky.

ii.  To Make One’s Way through the Earth My ­sister’s father-­in-­law died. Debbie tells me he’d been feeling ill, but by the time doctors discovered an abdominal mass, it was too late. His demise seems sudden and peculiar. Justin and I drive my ­mother to the graveside ser­v ice, a l­ ittle unsure. “I d ­ on’t know what to expect,” my m ­ other says of the traditional Jewish ceremony. “I hope ­we’re not intruding.” But in our tight-­k nit ­family, skipping the ser­v ice or the shiva is out of the question. We made potato salad and we know how to grieve. “I’m so glad ­you’re driving, Justin. Look at this rain,” says my m ­ other, pulling the sides of her jacket closed as if she feels cold. “I’m so glad it’s not me.” I’m not sure what she means. My m ­ other speaks clearly when she has her standard prompt: “Happiness is . . .” The sentence starter, written in her formal cursive on a note­pad hanging above her kitchen sink, reveals that for my ­mother, happiness is a collection of p ­ eople she’s produced. I remember when the note read, “Happiness is four ­daughters.” Right ­after Beth’s wedding: “Happiness is four ­daughters and a son-­in-­law.” Debbie was married, Beth had a d ­ aughter, then twins. The latest note hangs fresh and smooth: “Happiness is four ­daughters, two sons-­in-­law, two grand­daughters, and a grand­son.” Somewhere in storage is a crisp yellowed paper that reads, “Happiness is my husband.” “Are we getting close?” she asks. W ­ e’re crawling, just like we w ­ ere warned, through Boston traffic, and ­we’re barely ­going to make it in this rain. My ­mother wants Justin to pump the gas a ­little harder. We ­shouldn’t

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I find an older dress, a black silk slip with lace overlay in rich r­ ose and moss green. I should wear this to the rehearsal. I hang up the blue dress, still in its Saks bag, and change into pajamas. Within a few hours, I can barely remember how it happened out ­t here on the sidewalk, but it imprints nonetheless. When it rains, I w ­ ill not stop on corners or near pay phones, and I w ­ ill look all around me b ­ ecause now cars come from anywhere, even the sky.

ii.  To Make One’s Way through the Earth My ­sister’s father-­in-­law died. Debbie tells me he’d been feeling ill, but by the time doctors discovered an abdominal mass, it was too late. His demise seems sudden and peculiar. Justin and I drive my ­mother to the graveside ser­v ice, a l­ ittle unsure. “I d ­ on’t know what to expect,” my m ­ other says of the traditional Jewish ceremony. “I hope ­we’re not intruding.” But in our tight-­k nit ­family, skipping the ser­v ice or the shiva is out of the question. We made potato salad and we know how to grieve. “I’m so glad ­you’re driving, Justin. Look at this rain,” says my m ­ other, pulling the sides of her jacket closed as if she feels cold. “I’m so glad it’s not me.” I’m not sure what she means. My m ­ other speaks clearly when she has her standard prompt: “Happiness is . . .” The sentence starter, written in her formal cursive on a note­pad hanging above her kitchen sink, reveals that for my ­mother, happiness is a collection of p ­ eople she’s produced. I remember when the note read, “Happiness is four ­daughters.” Right ­after Beth’s wedding: “Happiness is four ­daughters and a son-­in-­law.” Debbie was married, Beth had a d ­ aughter, then twins. The latest note hangs fresh and smooth: “Happiness is four ­daughters, two sons-­in-­law, two grand­daughters, and a grand­son.” Somewhere in storage is a crisp yellowed paper that reads, “Happiness is my husband.” “Are we getting close?” she asks. W ­ e’re crawling, just like we w ­ ere warned, through Boston traffic, and ­we’re barely ­going to make it in this rain. My ­mother wants Justin to pump the gas a ­little harder. We ­shouldn’t

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have lingered so long at Beth’s ­house, which was somewhat on the way, but she had gifts to drop off for her grandchildren. We s­ houldn’t have ­stopped for gas, e­ ither, but she had a coupon for ten cents off a gallon. “Not too bad,” I say as we pull up to the cemetery only a few minutes late. We perch on the outskirts of the crowd, a mosaic of black raincoats and dark suit jackets and gray slacks. Hovering just outside the small canopy, we get wet. My ­mother’s lips dis­appear into a crease, and she leans heavi­ly on her cane. I d ­ on’t know what’s upsetting her most—­t he surroundings, the way the man died, or the pain in her knees. I spot my ­sister, her hand resting on her pregnant belly. ­There’s always room for more grandchildren on the note above the sink. Four wobbly folding chairs sit graveside, empty. My m ­ other ­will not approach them for fear of ­doing something improper. The dead man’s parents, ex-­wife, girlfriend, sons, daughters-­in-­law, and grandchildren stand close, sharing umbrellas. Several minutes pass, but the ceremony does not start. Instead, the rabbi and ­others grab shovels and begin digging out the grave. I have no idea if digging is an official part of the ser­v ice. I look at my ­mother, guessing that the harsh sound of metal striking rock is disturbing her, and glance, beneath the hemline of her green paisley cotton skirt, at her swollen feet. Even in the cold rain, my ­mother wears sandals, ­because her feet no longer fit comfortably into closed shoes. The skin is stretched tight. I believe she may have diabetes, which contributed to the deaths of my grand­mother and aunt. Cancer runs in her ­family, and I suspect a malignant mass is already growing somewhere. Lyme can also be blamed, but its effects on her body lurk so deep that treatment is out of reach, or perhaps just not worth the effort. She ­doesn’t see doctors or take medi­ cation. Despite her d ­ aughters’ accusations of self-­neglect, she follows her body’s failure, which is perfectly opposed to the way her husband died: it’s slow, natu­ral, predictable. Knuckles white on the cane’s lacquered ­handle, my ­mother strug­gles to keep her footing on the soft, uneven ground. “Can you get her a chair?”

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I ask Justin. The digging continues as he returns with a wooden chair from the gravestone sales office. It’ll get wet, but who cares? My ­mother smiles at him and accepts the seat.

Years ago, while teaching fourth grade, I won my school’s annual faculty travel grant with a proposal to follow my m ­ other’s footsteps. I wanted to visit the American school in Germany where she taught before she folded into the m ­ other I know. By visiting the school, I believed I could create a connection that had long eluded us both: mutual understanding. I wanted her to know how much I loved and admired her, and I trekked four thousand miles away to prove it. With the money she earned as a grocery-­store bagger, my m ­ other put herself through a Catholic college for ­women, where the top two majors ­were teaching and nursing. She chose teaching and used it as an escape route from her blue-­collar, Polish immigrant neighborhood, by signing up to teach Army kids abroad. Based in Landshut, Germany, in the 1960s, my ­mother was even considered a sort of noncombat soldier. At Checkpoint Charlie she tried to take pictures but was quickly s­ topped by German guards. I like to tell ­people my ­mother served in the Army, that she bravely faced the ­enemy. On my trip, I found the base in Landshut. Its squat, pastel buildings looked shoddy in the overcast daylight. A partially removed chain-­link fence barely protected the perimeter. The school building had been torn down. A German official, one of the base’s only remaining staff members, said dryly, “­Things have changed.” In town, I asked Justin to take a picture of me in front of the medieval St. Martin’s Church. I framed it for my ­mother. ­A fter moving back to the United States to teach m ­ iddle school, my ­mother met my Navy-­officer f­ ather. She says she loved him within three minutes and expected an engagement within three months, using her forefinger to squash each choco­late in a Valentine’s Day gift box he gave her

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as she looked hopefully for a ring. They ­were married in 1971, not in a big Army-­Navy wedding, but in a traditional ceremony at St.  Stanislaus, Bishop & Martyr. Next on the itinerary: our ­family home. While eight months pregnant with Beth, my m ­ other stretched over the living room railing to finish painting. Now she holds her breath when one of us climbs a ladder to fill her birdfeeders or change a bulb. But back then, it seems, worries about accidents d ­ idn’t materialize in my m ­ other. She hung on that wall a framed Landshut scene—­St. Martin’s—­a lthough she would never return to Germany, or to a classroom. My ­mother always says if she ­hadn’t taught in Germany she would have taught in Alaska. To her, our f­ amily trip up the Alaskan coast fulfilled a longtime dream. My ­sisters talk richly about Alaska, but in many of our photos, I’m not smiling. Instead, among my teenaged s­ isters with curled hair and delicate makeup and bright dinner dresses, I stand out as an androgynous square wearing a frown. Of course, I was also seasick for three wretched days. My ­mother, on the other hand, looks radiant in our photos. Her hair spreads out long and loose and wavy, each strand lit up as if by a spotlight. She smiles widely at the ship’s rails, her skin as bright as the ice of Alaska’s eerie blue and white glaciers, her flowered skirt caught on one side by the breeze. Perhaps I d ­ idn’t notice her radiance before, or I’m misreading the pictures now. Perhaps the photos are just overexposed. Or, like a d ­ ying supernova, my m ­ other was emitting one final burst of light. Shortly a­ fter we returned from Alaska, the unchecked Lyme disease began wrecking my ­mother’s joints. Then her best friend died of a brain tumor. And then her world shrank.

“It caved in,” my ­mother says ­after the ser­v ice. Her shoulders are tensed up ­toward her ears. “I asked Debbie,” she says. “The plot next to it was still such soft earth, it caved in. That’s why the rabbi was digging.” I’m afraid to ask the next question, but I do. “Who is buried in that plot?” I ­hadn’t

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seen the stone. She tells me it’s the dead man’s youn­gest son, who died a few years ago when a faulty heater ignited a gas explosion in his home. ­Father and son now share a gravesite. When her second d ­ aughter was stillborn at full term, my m ­ other asked hospital staff to see the baby but was told such a viewing was not done. Still, my Catholic parents wanted a proper interment for their d ­ aughter. Once a tiny coffin was procured, my m ­ other realized she c­ ouldn’t endure the ceremony, so my f­ather buried the baby alone. When my f­ather died, my ­mother dug out the paperwork from deep in his oak file drawers. She had the baby’s body exhumed and placed at rest next to my ­father; they fill a quarter of the ­family plot my ­mother purchased in our intimate village cemetery. Karen’s name is engraved on the headstone, next to my ­mother’s. Some time passes before we s­ ettle into the car for the drive to the post-­ interment reception. F ­ amily members must be kissed and dev­i led eggs must be secured. Back on the highway, I try to distract my ­mother from the rain hammering the windshield, and from Justin’s hands on the wheel, by chatting about our wedding and honeymoon plans. Like my ­mother years ago, I’m a traveler. I d ­ on’t love to travel—­I d ­ on’t love flying or feeling disconnected from health care. But I need to go. “We’ve de­cided on our trip. W ­ e’ll drive through Sicily, then fly to Greece, to the island of Santorini, and rent mopeds. It’s all mapped out, down to the snails w ­ e’re ­going to taste in Palermo.” Happiness is in all of it. In the mopeds, the snails. In the way I’ve or­ga­nized each minute of our trip to avoid the unexpected. Happiness is my husband to be. Happiness is the fact that if we die, we die together. I hear her teeth; we share TMJ syndrome, and our jaws click when we grind our molars. “Just be careful on the beaches,” she says. “When I visited the Mediterranean, I loved walking the beach. But t­ here was so much tar in the sand from the ships that the bottoms of my feet turned black.” “When did you visit the Mediterranean?” I want to open her up a bit, but I script my questions carefully, only asking her t­ hings I know s­ he’ll want to answer.

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“Oh, while I was in Germany, I toured all over. Italy, Greece, Egypt, Israel. In ­t hose days, I’d just take the next train and see where it went.” “You ­were quite the adventurer.” “I wanted to see it all.” “Sounds like you had some serious wanderlust, Mom. Despite the tar.” She starts to talk, but pauses. I won­der if I’ve overstepped. “The mom you know now is a totally dif­fer­ent person from who I was then.” She’s told me that ­after my ­father died, she reinforced our property borders. On one side, she had arborvitae trees planted in a straight line, creating a pine barricade between her yard and the neighbor’s exposed back deck. On the other, she built a stone wall. “I just wanted every­t hing to be neat and orderly. I wanted my property to be within a perfect rectangle.” I am curious about my ­mother before: before disease, before my ­father’s death, before c­ hildren. I am most curious about my m ­ other before my ­father. Could she have known, back when she was two years old and dressed up for her grand­mother’s funeral, that she would one day lose her husband the same way her grand­mother died? That she would one day lose mobility? I am curious if that knowledge fed her short-­lived but extensive travels. I am curious about how distant I feel from my m ­ other yet how closely I relate to her, how needy I am of straight lines, how sure I am of death. For now, I let the rain talk. One day, I w ­ ill sit with her over coffee and photos and meet the w ­ oman with wanderlust. Surely her body w ­ ill hold out long enough. From my seat b ­ ehind her, I study my m ­ other as she studies the slick road before us. The self-­sufficient college student, the black-­footed w ­ oman on a Mediterranean beach, the middle-­school math teacher, the m ­ other of five, and too soon, the grieving w ­ idow. Catholics believe in heaven, in eternal happiness. But I c­ an’t picture her happiness as an eternal life. Not anymore. Rather, my ­mother, on a long return journey from a faraway former self, ­will step straight from train to cemetery mound. Her body ­will

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mingle with the bodies of her husband and d ­ aughter. Happiness is just a gravitational force that attracts bodies to one another. Happiness is lying down at last. Happiness is the possession of ­people, collected safely within a quadrangle yard, on the square of a sticky note, in the rectangle of a freshly dug grave.

iii.  The Death ­Thing “Watch out!” I warn Justin, who’s driving. “Why? What’s wrong?” “Pull over!” He slows to a stop on the empty road, barely two lanes, that curves around the outer edge of the ring-­shaped Greek island Santorini. What used to be the summit of a volcano is now a crater, its broken rim the island. As dusk deepens, yellow lights appear in the towns along the ridge. From above, Santorini at night must look like a dark donut drizzled with glowing honey. To our right, at the bottom of the g­ ently sweeping slope, stretches the sea. “­Didn’t you see that truck coming?” I ask. “What truck?” “­There was a truck. It was coming straight for us.” He squeezes my knee. “I’m g­ oing to keep driving, okay? We need to find our ­hotel.” I scratch at my arms. “What’s wrong?” he asks. “I ­don’t know,” I say, scratching harder. “You have a rash.” “It’s just hives. I thought ­t here was a truck. White, like a milk truck or something. It was right ­t here.” The skin on my arms and hands resembles leopard print—­loops and patches in deepening crimson. “You know,” I say to Justin, “if we die ­here, w ­ e’ll be legendary.” “What are you talking about?”

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mingle with the bodies of her husband and d ­ aughter. Happiness is just a gravitational force that attracts bodies to one another. Happiness is lying down at last. Happiness is the possession of ­people, collected safely within a quadrangle yard, on the square of a sticky note, in the rectangle of a freshly dug grave.

iii.  The Death ­Thing “Watch out!” I warn Justin, who’s driving. “Why? What’s wrong?” “Pull over!” He slows to a stop on the empty road, barely two lanes, that curves around the outer edge of the ring-­shaped Greek island Santorini. What used to be the summit of a volcano is now a crater, its broken rim the island. As dusk deepens, yellow lights appear in the towns along the ridge. From above, Santorini at night must look like a dark donut drizzled with glowing honey. To our right, at the bottom of the g­ ently sweeping slope, stretches the sea. “­Didn’t you see that truck coming?” I ask. “What truck?” “­There was a truck. It was coming straight for us.” He squeezes my knee. “I’m g­ oing to keep driving, okay? We need to find our ­hotel.” I scratch at my arms. “What’s wrong?” he asks. “I ­don’t know,” I say, scratching harder. “You have a rash.” “It’s just hives. I thought ­t here was a truck. White, like a milk truck or something. It was right ­t here.” The skin on my arms and hands resembles leopard print—­loops and patches in deepening crimson. “You know,” I say to Justin, “if we die ­here, w ­ e’ll be legendary.” “What are you talking about?”

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“We fi­nally got married, and now, to die, h ­ ere on our honeymoon? Legendary. For a few months, maybe years. But then our names w ­ ill be forgotten. ­We’ll just be a story. Someone in twenty years ­will say, remember that c­ ouple that died on their honeymoon? And someone ­else ­w ill say, barely.” “When we get home, we need to figure out this death ­t hing. Let’s just get to the h ­ otel, okay?” “Okay. But I’m not getting on a moped a­ fter all.” “Fine. No mopeds. This is a beautiful island. You’ll love it ­here.” “Beautiful. I agree. If a truck hits us now, w ­ e’ll have died on a narrow road in the most beautiful place on earth.”

Every­thing about Hannah, a cognitive behavioral therapist, is as warm and golden as the July after­noon of our first session. Her office, full of books and furniture, vases and ­table lamps, and several boxes of tissues, feels like a home. For so long, Eliza had been my therapist. But ­after finding the diary and the journal from En­glish class, I ­stopped seeing her. I gave her a partial truth, that I just needed a break to plan the wedding. She called me several times, leaving messages to say she was thinking of me and hoped every­t hing was okay. I called her back once to say I was fine, I was busy, I was happy. Eliza was the therapeutic face of my memory hunt. I ­couldn’t stomach searching for memory anymore, so I c­ ouldn’t return to her office. Now I have to deal with the incessant thoughts of death I’ve been experiencing, the uncontrolled anxiety that I am always a hair’s breadth from losing my husband. Hannah explains that anxiety is wreaking havoc on my body. She instructs me to identify symptoms and choose the one I most want to tackle. I like the plan. I like the power of agenda building. “For one, I would like to sleep.”

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“Sleep is an enormously common prob­lem,” Hannah says. “And it’s enormously impor­tant for our health. Our physical and ­mental health.” She makes a note on my form. “I ­don’t know if this is ­because I’m not sleeping well, but I’m also having intrusive thoughts when I’m awake. Th ­ ey’re like nightmares, but they happen in the ­middle of the day, and even though I’m fully aware they are happening, I c­ an’t stop them.” Hannah places her pen on the clipboard and looks at me. “What kind of thoughts?” “Death thoughts,” I tell Hannah. “I see the immediacy of death in the world. The potential for death is everywhere.” “Your mind is stuck on that thought loop. It’s called a cognitive distortion.” “I’m sure that’s true. But what’s also true is that death r­ eally is everywhere. I know firsthand that death can take someone out of the blue.” “But it rarely does,” explains Hannah. I know this to be true, statistically. I know that less than 1 ­percent of the U.S. population dies each year, and that most deaths—­from cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, chronic diseases—­are not sudden. “To think that way is self-­perpetuating and self-­destructive,” says Hannah. “It makes you feel helpless. And that’s what we can change. We can break the loop.”

“I have something to tell you,” my m ­ other says over the phone. ­There’s gravity in her voice that drains blood from my face. It’s the sound of a heavy filing cabinet drawer sliding open for the first time in many years, a whisper of imminent exposure. “I’ve been keeping it from you, but now is the right time.” I sink to the couch and lighten my touch on the receiver. “I’m ready,” I say. “Mr. LeBlanc died.”

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I picture his death throes, without yet knowing how Mr. LeBlanc died. I ­can’t even remember what Mr. LeBlanc looked like when he was alive. I try to associate his name. I know Mr. LeBlanc was a neighbor, but I ­don’t remember which ­house. The LeBlancs ­didn’t live at sixteen—­that was my beautiful best middle-­school friend who devastated the block boys when she moved away. My ­mother and her ­mother still exchange Christmas cards. Seventeen—­too hidden by trees; I think it’s haunted. The Blackwells at eigh­teen are still t­ here; they bake a cake for my m ­ other’s birthday ­every December. At nineteen are new neighbors with a teenaged son who helps my ­mother shovel her driveway. My m ­ other is twenty. A close f­ amily friend lives at twenty-­one across the street. She sings in a choir, even sings when she laughs, and lets my ­mother use her fridge space for extra soda and casseroles. The topless female sunbather who aggravates my ­mother is twenty-­two. And twenty-­three—­bingo. It’s a new ­couple now, but twenty-­ three is where the LeBlancs used to live. A small olive-­green ­house I ­don’t recall ever visiting. The LeBlancs had three sons. I continue to listen to my ­mother, who describes the sudden heart attack, while letting my thoughts circle on something mundane. If I ­don’t, Mr. LeBlanc’s death w ­ ill become too immediate, as if I am the wife appealing to the body on the driveway. So I let myself think about the ­houses on the street. It’s like trying to act more normal by thinking abnormally, laughing at a funeral in order to avoid breaking down or picturing the audience naked in order to make it through the serious pre­sen­ta­tion. “I’m sorry, Mom. That’s so sad. How old was he?” This is always the question she wants to answer b ­ ecause it breeds new questions, and the conversation can continue. He was sixty-­two. It happened two weeks ­after he retired. He dropped dead of a heart attack while cleaning his new motorcycle in the driveway. His wife is inconsolable. “Mmm hmm,” I say. “Ohhh.” “Suzanne. ­There’s more.” It’s the clincher she’s been holding. The file drawer is open all the way, and an envelope has been pulled.

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“He died on May 30.” He died on my wedding day. “Oh.” I knew someone was g­ oing to die on my wedding day. A week before the wedding, Beth asked us what we w ­ ere most worried about. For Justin it was the weather, but I like rain. “I just ­don’t want anyone to die,” I said. “I ­wouldn’t be too happy about a broken hip, e­ ither. Or a stroke. But death—­death would be the worst.” “­You’re setting the bar pretty low,” Beth said. “I just want every­one to make it through the wedding and reception. Considering D ­ addy, let’s get them all home afterward too.” “So morbid,” she said. “Nobody’s ­going to die.” “Well, if they do, they can die on Sunday.” Mr. LeBlanc d ­ idn’t die on Sunday, of course. He died on Saturday. The weather had been perfect. “What time?” I ask my ­mother. “Five p.m.” On Saturday at five p.m. I was saying to Justin, “I choose you to be the person with whom I spend my life.” I promised him, “I w ­ ill live heart-­first.” “Suzanne, I was ­going to invite the LeBlancs to your wedding. But I ­didn’t have enough room on my guest list.” At this point, my m ­ other’s storytelling loses its sequence. “Three sons!” and “Just retired!” come through the phone between sobs. I think about the street—­eighteen and twenty-­one w ­ ere at the wedding, while nineteen kept an eye on my ­mother’s ­house. She calms down. “I should have invited them to your wedding.” If Mr. LeBlanc had been destined to die, and my m ­ other had invited him to my wedding, w ­ ouldn’t he have confirmed my worst fear? W ­ ouldn’t my worst fear and Mrs. LeBlanc’s worst fear have coincided that day? Or does my ­mother know something I ­don’t? Would Mr. LeBlanc have even died on my wedding day if he w ­ ere at the wedding? If he w ­ ere the

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extra guest tipping the numbers? Or would the blue sky and ­water, the green grass, the red brick light­house and path, colors bright enough that May after­noon to burn your eyes, have fooled his heart into beating a l­ ittle longer?

Over a few sessions, I tell Hannah about memory hunting, about Eliza, about traveling to San Diego and the visits to my m ­ other’s h ­ ouse, about finding my diary and journal, about losing my hold on the two traumatic events. From childhood, I may have retained nothing at all. I tell her the plane I’m riding in always flips over in my mind, the car I’m riding in always drifts too far into the oncoming lane. I tell her I’m afraid to fall asleep. “What exactly are you afraid of?” Hannah asks at last. “Death.” “Be more specific,” Hannah says. “I’m afraid Justin w ­ ill die in a mysterious or gory way. He w ­ ill, very suddenly, be gone—­but the story of his death w ­ ill linger.” “Take that further. What would happen if he died?” “I’d become incapacitated with grief.” “And a­ fter a few months?” “I’d still be incapacitated.” “And a­ fter a year or two? Would you recover? Move on?” “I’m afraid I w ­ ouldn’t. I’d live a lonely life first, then die miserably.” Hannah hands me a list of commonly distorted thoughts and instructs me to pick the one that most defines me. Th ­ ere’s “filtering”: You magnify negative details while filtering out positive aspects of a situation. And “personalization”: You see yourself as the cause of negative external events for which, in fact, you ­were not primarily responsible. I choose “catastrophizing”: You believe that what has happened or ­will happen ­will be so awful and unbearable that you ­won’t be able to stand it. “Why that one?” she asks.

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“I used to think I was afraid of, simply, death,” I tell her. “Of Justin’s death or my own. But I’m afraid of life ­after death. If he dies, my life ­will be horrible. Or worse, blank. I think I’ve been catastrophizing for a long time.” Maybe it started when Justin and I became engaged. Or when we first starting dating. Or maybe it started before I knew him, back when I was in m ­ iddle school and drawing pictures of pencils being mutilated. Or maybe it started when I was six. “So your automatic thought is, if your husband dies, you ­will not die right away. Rather, you’ll live out a long, miserable, lonely life first.” “In a void,” I tell her. “Awake but unconscious. Breathing for no reason.” “Okay. You are worried that Justin w ­ ill die and the results w ­ ill be catastrophic. Let’s start with his death. He is not dead. He is alive and well. Follow that thought. How does it make you feel to know that someone you love is in fact alive and well?” “It makes me feel good. ­Every hour he’s alive and well is an hour I d ­ on’t have to spend alone. But I feel afraid it’ll be the last hour.” Just ­because I have such thoughts, Hannah explains, d ­ oesn’t mean they are true. We all have them. They are just thoughts, as murky and malleable as memories. If we restructure the thoughts, strip them of their importance, we can change the feelings and be­hav­ior that result. “I’m anxious all the time that something is about to happen, about to become true. Just a c­ ouple months ago, Justin and I w ­ ere walking in Midtown when a car flipped over right across the street. It could have killed us. I was worried someone would die on my wedding day, and someone did. That’s a fact.” “Was it someone at the wedding?” “No, but— “Did the car flip over and land on you and Justin?” “No. But I think it could have been true.” “So the facts are that t­ hese t­ hings did not happen. What’s true is that bad t­ hings have happened. Bad t­ hings can happen. Accept the fact that

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bad ­t hings can happen. But they d ­ on’t happen e­ very time. In fact, they hardly ever do.” I start to see the mind’s thinking pro­cess like a big flow chart. Start h ­ ere: Have a worry? Yes or no. Yes? If it’s about the weather, go this way. About death, go that way. Did someone die or are you worried someone w ­ ill die? It’s pos­si­ble we all do this ­mental charting, and some of us are just more aware of it, our thinking about thinking. The flow chart grows inconceivably broad, its lines and boxes overlapping, ­u ntil the thinker stops thinking altogether. Perhaps this is an as-­yet undiagnosed caused of memory loss; ­under the sheer weight of the ­mental flow chart, the hippocampus compresses into an impenetrable mass. The sea­horse silenced, a fossil. Hannah asks me to pretend I’m taking my case to court. She wants me to defend myself, to try to prove to her, the judge, that if something happens to Justin I ­will fall into a pit and never come out. Beyond a reasonable doubt. “What’s the evidence?” she presses. “What makes you think you could never recover from grief?” “I ­didn’t when I was a child. It’s like I went to sleep. I d ­ idn’t absorb information that would ­later serve me as memories. I d ­ idn’t awaken.” “True, you d ­ idn’t.” “I lost every­t hing. My childhood, my memory. I lost it all. I became a teenager in an instant. I lost the chance to be a kid.” “And then?” “And then it was gone for good. Unrecoverable.” “And then you awakened,” she says. “I did, but every­t hing was gone already. My dad, my memories. It was all lost.” “You remember some ­t hings about being twelve and thirteen. You tell stories about childhood, even if you ­don’t remember them. ­You’re ­here, now, trying to understand what happened—to you and your s­ isters, to your ­mother.”

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“But t­ here’s nothing r­ eally in t­ here for me to find. All this work. It’s excruciating. I c­ an’t even think about my f­ ather anymore. E ­ very time I see him, he’s in a brown suit or he’s not looking at me. Th ­ ose ­can’t be real memories. Th ­ ey’re just imaginings.” “So you recovered.” “How is that recovery?” “You woke up. ­You’re awake now. And so is your ­mother. What­ever you feared, it ­hasn’t come true. ­You’re not living a lonely, despairing life. ­Here you are, awake, imagining. The ability to imagine—­that is a good, healthy ability. It may not be memory, but it’s no less valuable. You can imagine being a child, ­because you w ­ ere a child. You can fill in the gaps. Make meaning. ­There is something to go on, something to be learned. You have a life story. Your memory is not a complete failure.” I feel the urge to laugh. How can my memory be anything but a failure?

“Anyone want to sit up ­here with me?” asks the pi­lot. I glance at Justin, who lifts his eyebrows. ­Behind us, my in-­laws s­ ettle into their seats. My brother-­in-­law has his camera out, zoom lens pointing t­ oward the brush that borders the dirt runway, ready to capture warthogs. I turn back to the pi­lot. “I do.” ­We’re on our first trip since the honeymoon, a birthday cele­bration for my father-­in-­law. Three southern African countries. As w ­ e’ve traveled deeper into the bush, our planes have become smaller and smaller, ­until this one, a single-­engine Cessna that carries just a handful of passengers. I’m afraid. At the moment of impact, I would want to be touching Justin, skin-­to-­ skin, with my forehead, my shoulder, my fingertips. But, I know, during a plane’s rocky and rapid descent, I would not be able to unclasp my

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seatbelt and lunge across the aisle for him. I slide from my seat and climb into the cockpit. The pi­lot buckles me in. Across the lap, across both shoulders. If we go down, I’ll go down skin-­to-­leather. Ascent. “I ­can’t have you up ­here if ­you’re afraid,” the pi­lot says, laughing. “Would you like to fly?” “How did you know I was afraid?” “The way y­ ou’re touching your seatbelt. I can tell ­you’re afraid.” “I would like to fly.” Brief instruction: dials, ­needles, charts, levers. Not unlike my ­father’s train board control panel. Despite the complex console in front of me, ­there are only two movements: side to side and up and down. My fingertips rest gingerly on the wheel. “­You’re flying now.” The pi­lot’s hands rest on his seatbelt. I pull back on the throttle. My passengers note the lift: “Whoa!” they say in unison. I press forward, bringing us level once again. “Just bear right a bit,” says the pi­lot, studying n ­ eedles b ­ ehind glass casings. Peering over the console, I aim for a cloud. “Are you still afraid?” “A ­little.” “­You’re ­doing very well. Y ­ ou’re flying.” Out the side win­dow, the Okavango Delta stretches horizon to horizon. It’s the wet season; a labyrinth of blue channels stretches across the canvas, weaving around islands that look like tufts. From h ­ ere, animals look like the toy p ­ eoples my s­ isters and I played with forever ago. Justin says he sees an elephant. I aim for a cloud, which is nothing, which has no beginning, no history, no end, no form. It’s whisked from spare ingredients and tossed up

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into a shape for a few minutes, a few hours maybe, then dissipates. I aim for this nothing-­cloud and feel a ­little more me, a ­little less afraid.

iv.  Every­thing Reaches to Light Justin and I are at my m ­ other’s, weeding. Her lot includes front and back yard, gardens, and ample Connecticut woods. We d ­ aughters have always been the landscaping crew. As kids we lugged sloshing-­f ull watering cans to each whiskey-­barrel-­turned-­flower-­bed while our ­mother spread mulch over dry spots. I remember when she hoisted the heavy sundial onto its granite pedestal. I remember when she laid hundreds of bricks in the footprint left ­behind by the old pool, tamping each into the sand with a dead-­ blow sledge. Over the years the lawn has shrunk and the gardens have overrun their stone borders. Resin and bronze statuary, l­ittle girls frozen with bonnets and parasols, hide ­under yucca plants. My s­ isters and I, all within a three-­ hour drive, still rotate crew duty. It’s my turn. I kneel on the path and through dirt-­stiffened gloves grab at the tall grasses that have overtaken a section of garden between the patio and the shed. The weeds, to me as a city-­dwelling visitor to my small-­town former home, are not pests but rather graceful green threads unspooling from the ground, which in this par­tic­u­lar section also holds three porcelain mushrooms, a bird­house, and the remains of five cats. As I am pulling, Justin hops over a four-­foot-­wide-­and-­growing puddle ­toward me. “This is unbelievable,” he says, as the back lawn and asphalt path flood. My ­mother’s sump pump is operating, but, more than ever, her body i­ sn’t. She ­couldn’t drag the twelve-­foot-­long drainage pipes out from the garage, so ­water pours from an opening in the foundation directly into the back yard. It has been d ­ oing that all spring. ­Water seeps back into the earth, or flows t­oward the woods, or sits in puddles when the ground is too saturated to accept it, burning off in the sun. The garden where I weed—on a l­ ittle rise in the heart of the yard—is sheltered from the worst

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into a shape for a few minutes, a few hours maybe, then dissipates. I aim for this nothing-­cloud and feel a ­little more me, a ­little less afraid.

iv.  Every­thing Reaches to Light Justin and I are at my m ­ other’s, weeding. Her lot includes front and back yard, gardens, and ample Connecticut woods. We d ­ aughters have always been the landscaping crew. As kids we lugged sloshing-­f ull watering cans to each whiskey-­barrel-­turned-­flower-­bed while our ­mother spread mulch over dry spots. I remember when she hoisted the heavy sundial onto its granite pedestal. I remember when she laid hundreds of bricks in the footprint left ­behind by the old pool, tamping each into the sand with a dead-­ blow sledge. Over the years the lawn has shrunk and the gardens have overrun their stone borders. Resin and bronze statuary, l­ittle girls frozen with bonnets and parasols, hide ­under yucca plants. My s­ isters and I, all within a three-­ hour drive, still rotate crew duty. It’s my turn. I kneel on the path and through dirt-­stiffened gloves grab at the tall grasses that have overtaken a section of garden between the patio and the shed. The weeds, to me as a city-­dwelling visitor to my small-­town former home, are not pests but rather graceful green threads unspooling from the ground, which in this par­tic­u­lar section also holds three porcelain mushrooms, a bird­house, and the remains of five cats. As I am pulling, Justin hops over a four-­foot-­wide-­and-­growing puddle ­toward me. “This is unbelievable,” he says, as the back lawn and asphalt path flood. My ­mother’s sump pump is operating, but, more than ever, her body i­ sn’t. She ­couldn’t drag the twelve-­foot-­long drainage pipes out from the garage, so ­water pours from an opening in the foundation directly into the back yard. It has been d ­ oing that all spring. ­Water seeps back into the earth, or flows t­oward the woods, or sits in puddles when the ground is too saturated to accept it, burning off in the sun. The garden where I weed—on a l­ ittle rise in the heart of the yard—is sheltered from the worst

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of the flood, but still damp. Justin is tasked with changing the batteries in the clock hanging above the shed door. He glances from the two cylinders in his open palm to the expanding lake he’s just crossed. “Can your ­mother even see the clock?” On the phone with my ­mother days ago, I consented to weed, though our short visit seems too precious for cosmetic improvements. To me, more crucial tasks include cleaning out closets to find ­t hings to sell, or ripping up cat-­pee-­soaked carpeting, or emptying basement shelves of forty-­ year-­old aerosol cans, or replacing one of several dilapidated appliances, or dragging t­ hose drainage pipes from the garage to the back yard. But my ­mother is the one who has to live ­there. She decides which of the ­house’s injuries needs a Band-­Aid. I see her request for weeding as a symptom of her illuminated mind, denied the comforts of blindness. Above deterioration, her aesthetic desires soar. She asked me to hunt the oriental bittersweet, a vine that uses trees to climb ­toward the brightest light, slowly choking its hosts to death. Grasses gone, the bittersweet is exposed. It grows in tight spirals up the trunks and branches of holly, azalea, and mountain laurel. ­After I clip sections from the trunks, the bittersweet stems retain their curlicue shape as if set by hot rollers. Working my way from the m ­ iddle of each trunk, I clip upward to get to the leafy green ends that selfishly suck up the sun. Then I move down, searching the ground for roots. “Can you help me?” I show Justin a thick weed base I’ve been trying to remove. He grabs the stubborn root and pulls hard, and more than a foot slides from the earth, its red wood flesh staining his palms. “Hold on, ­t here’s some garbage in ­t here,” he says, pointing to a sliver of white plastic now exposed. He pinches the plastic and yanks, but it ­doesn’t budge. It’s part of something bigger, something buried just ­under the surface, no more than an inch down. I brush dirt away, and more plastic emerges: an opaque bag wrapped around something lumpy. I dig at the edge ­until I make out the oval outline of a basket. “Oh my God,” I say. “It’s Charcoal.”

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Charcoal had been my cat. She loved my pink comforter, especially when I rolled it into a mound at the foot of my bed. Before we a­ dopted her, the tip of her tail had been broken and healed in the shape of a hook. She hissed at boys. Charcoal minded baths a good deal more than our other cats had, and I found her fierce and funny and vulnerable when skinnied by drenched fur. ­Later in her life, she groomed herself in the ­middle of the night, waking me up with her rhythmic slurps, and I kicked at the pink mound u ­ ntil she retreated u ­ nder my bed. I lived with her for ten years; she died while I was away in college. Now, Charcoal has come back. L ­ ater I w ­ ill feel proud of my composure at the edge of the garden, of how much like an everyday occurrence I treated Charcoal’s disinterring. In the car on the way home, Justin ­will tell me he finds it curious that our long-­dead cat is accessible in the first place, never mind that she’s been accessed. In the moment, however, it seems natu­ral to me that Charcoal would be at my feet. I search nearby and find, about a foot away, askew in the wet earth, the familiar rectangular stone: Charcoal 1985–1998. Only now do I won­der how I’d known when I first saw the bag that it was Charcoal and not Spookee, not Twinkle or Casper, not Patches. Charcoal had been dull black, like her namesake briquettes before they burned. But through the bag I ­can’t make out anything but the wicker casket that holds her bones. “What do we do?” Justin asks. I ­don’t know what to do, so I study the plastic-­covered basket. It lies still and dirty. I find myself thinking about the peculiar logic that has brought Charcoal back. I have been to my ­mother’s h ­ ouse dozens of times in the years since Charcoal was buried. I have barbecued near, planted on, and stepped past this spot chosen to memorialize her cat body and cat soul (we are a ­family that believes in such ­t hings). Time passed, and she was longer and longer gone, but due to storms and erosion and cyclical New E ­ ngland temperatures, she was closer and closer to coming back. The final barrier had been the bittersweet root now ripped from the ground. Freed, Charcoal

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surfaced. In life, her fur had baked in the gold light that spilled on the porch floor. Why should it be any dif­fer­ent in death? Like every­t hing e­ lse in the garden, she seeks the sun. But no rays can warm Charcoal’s skin now, what­ever shape it’s in ­after all ­t hese years, for the plastic my ­mother had used to protect her remains also diffuses the light, like a cloud. My m ­ other’s grave waits. We ­will wear black that day, but she w ­ ill wear a colorful floral dress she’s already sewn ­under a bright brocade jacket she’s already constructed. She ­will lie in a casket she’s already chosen, lined with pearl satin. We ­will sing hymns she’s written down for us. We ­will add the date to the gravestone that marks the f­ amily plot in the shade u ­ nder the cemetery’s two tallest trees. What a strange ­thing to preserve in advance. This decay, this deadness. When I dig for memory, I find nothing. And yet, without asking for it, a childhood pet emerges from the ground. It is not shimmering or animated. It is dead. I look—­really look—at the basket, like a cat looking at a bump u ­ nder the covers, a bump that might move. A bed mouse, a toe. I d ­ on’t want it to move. But I want it to move. Both carry implications about life and death I am not prepared to weigh while bent over an old basket in the garden that smells of pine and cedar and wet earth. I ­can’t decide which I want more, ­can’t decipher the message I believe Charcoal has delivered. I stop breathing. Should the basket move, I w ­ ill surely jump, but w ­ on’t I then just rationalize the movement, guess that a living critter has taken up residence in the basket, enjoying the shelter it provides? What other explanation could t­ here be? Yet t­ here Charcoal is, and h ­ ere I am, waiting for a sign to soothe my angst about what happens when death fi­nally comes. I feel visited. I think about telling my m ­ other. We could add it to the list of chores she writes for us. Carry litter down to basement. Weed oriental bittersweet. Rebury Charcoal. I look for her through the porch win­dows but see only plants and trinkets, and, stretched out in one corner, Smudge the cat. Smudge watches me as I contemplate what to do with his pre­de­ces­sor.

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“We bury her again,” I say. Gloves off, I scoop dirt from a spot near Casper, and heap it over the plastic bag. “That’ll just wash away,” says Justin. “I mean, look.” He gestures to the hole in the porch’s foundation; the torrent has begun again, splashing onto the slate patio and sweeping weed cuttings into the grass. I find two flat rocks and lay them on top of the shallow bump, collect more dirt from around the garden and cover the rocks, then pull pachysandra from b ­ ehind the shed and stick the roots deep into the earth, hoping the robust ground cover w ­ ill take to this spot, especially given the sunlight now drenching the garden. I feel bad about the rocks weighing Charcoal down. I bend to remove them, but my m ­ other is back on the porch, leaning against the cat scratching post for support, asking Justin to pull down some dead branches caught by the bird­house pole. She tells him the garden looks lovely. “It’s so much brighter now,” she says. I’m taken aback. She speaks of beauty, of life, while I’m the one wrapping myself in a mourning cloak. I leave Charcoal ­under the stones. The trees, ­free of the vines that had been choking them, stand thin but healthy. The garden is wholly dif­fer­ent. My m ­ other eyes the new landscape from ­under the slanted win­dows that allow more sun to reach her plants, while Justin and I stuff black contractor bags with grasses and spiraled stems and drag them through puddles to the driveway in front. Before we leave, I scratch weed oriental bittersweet off my m ­ other’s list. I notice new writing at the bottom; in the time it took to trim one item, the list has grown by a dozen more.

v.  Light It’s our wedding pre­sent. That’s why my m ­ other is shipping the piano to New York. “From both of us,” she says. “Both?”

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“We bury her again,” I say. Gloves off, I scoop dirt from a spot near Casper, and heap it over the plastic bag. “That’ll just wash away,” says Justin. “I mean, look.” He gestures to the hole in the porch’s foundation; the torrent has begun again, splashing onto the slate patio and sweeping weed cuttings into the grass. I find two flat rocks and lay them on top of the shallow bump, collect more dirt from around the garden and cover the rocks, then pull pachysandra from b ­ ehind the shed and stick the roots deep into the earth, hoping the robust ground cover w ­ ill take to this spot, especially given the sunlight now drenching the garden. I feel bad about the rocks weighing Charcoal down. I bend to remove them, but my m ­ other is back on the porch, leaning against the cat scratching post for support, asking Justin to pull down some dead branches caught by the bird­house pole. She tells him the garden looks lovely. “It’s so much brighter now,” she says. I’m taken aback. She speaks of beauty, of life, while I’m the one wrapping myself in a mourning cloak. I leave Charcoal ­under the stones. The trees, ­free of the vines that had been choking them, stand thin but healthy. The garden is wholly dif­fer­ent. My m ­ other eyes the new landscape from ­under the slanted win­dows that allow more sun to reach her plants, while Justin and I stuff black contractor bags with grasses and spiraled stems and drag them through puddles to the driveway in front. Before we leave, I scratch weed oriental bittersweet off my m ­ other’s list. I notice new writing at the bottom; in the time it took to trim one item, the list has grown by a dozen more.

v.  Light It’s our wedding pre­sent. That’s why my m ­ other is shipping the piano to New York. “From both of us,” she says. “Both?”

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“­Daddy and I both want you to have it,” she says. My ­mother has communed with my dead ­father, and ­t hey’ve selected a gift. “Remember how beautifully you used to play?” At first, the man at the local moving com­pany, ­Father & Son, tells my ­mother they ­don’t typically travel to New York. He calls back to say he ­will make a special move, but it proves far too expensive. My ­sister and brother-­in-­law offer to try to fit the piano in their ­minivan, but my ­mother ­doesn’t want it to lie on its back. The mover calls again: a customer is heading to Westchester, and F ­ ather & Son w ­ ill fit the piano into their already-­ loaded truck and take it a bit farther, into Manhattan. Ner­vous about the move, my ­mother uses a Sharpie marker to fill in the piano’s scratches, then takes pictures. “Check for new marks and compare its condition,” she tells me. She writes her own “citizen’s waiver” and makes the movers sign it. At the hour the piano is supposed to arrive, I remove the screen from our apartment win­dow and stick my head out to read truck tops: groceries, UPS, knife sharpening. At last, ­Father & Son slide up the block, and I wait for our superintendent to buzz. Jack knows how excited I am about the piano, but when the call comes ten minutes l­ ater, his voice sounds flat. “It ­doesn’t fit in the elevator.” “What about the ser­v ice elevator?” “It ­doesn’t fit in the passenger elevator or the ser­v ice elevator.” I’d carefully mea­sured the space in the apartment. Opposite our front door is a wall that encloses our next-­door neighbor’s closet; the opening to our main room is diagonal from the door, creating a small square entry­ way. Using my ­mother’s report of the piano’s dimensions, I’d created a model piano with cardboard boxes and our building’s luggage cart, and figured out the exact amount of room the piano would have to slide diagonally into the apartment: twenty-­four and a half inches. The piano is twenty-­four and a quarter inches deep. A quarter-­inch between having a piano and not having one.

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But I ­hadn’t thought to mea­sure the elevators. While the movers puzzle on the first floor, I troubleshoot on the tenth. Our stairwell is too tight, with return stairs, so the piano ­won’t bend around its corners, even if the movers are willing to heave it up all ­those flights. I remember when a local sports star jammed traffic on Broadway when he hired a crane to hoist a hot tub into his apartment. I spring at the win­dows with a tape mea­sure, but they are far too narrow. The super buzzes again—­the movers can turn the piano on one end and roll it on a dolly into the ser­v ice elevator. “Sure,” I say quickly. “Do anything you need to do. Just get it upstairs.” The old elevator chains rattle, and the piano, on one end, arrives. Jack helps the movers turn it upright and wheel it in the front door. It slides cleanly through the space, a quarter-­inch to spare. The piano is pushed into the bedroom, placed against our north wall, and released from its protective quilts. Without waiting for the stool, I lift the fallboard and play a few notes. Jack encourages me to play a song. On the spot, I c­ an’t remember a t­ hing, except the first two mea­sures of Mozart’s Sonata No. 11. I play them. The movers smile. The younger one asks if know “La Cucaracha.” He must think all New Yorkers know the cockroach. ­A fter they leave, I call my ­mother. “I’m so glad it’s ­t here safely,” she breathes into the phone. I put her on speaker so I can play what I remember of a Chopin polonaise, always her favorite. “I was so worried. Are ­there any scratches?” “No, not a scratch. It’s perfect,” I tell her, though I h ­ aven’t checked. “Did it fit in the elevator?” “Yes, it fit just fine.” How can I tell her about the tipping? I play a few more mea­sures. “How does it sound? I had it tuned for you. Is it still in tune?” It is, mostly. For having journeyed from its home, and for having been stood on end, it is tuned enough to be pleasing. Hammers are still in place, strings are still taut. In our small apartment, its velvet tones drape the walls. The piano plays, to me, like a dream.

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“Play for D ­ addy,” says my m ­ other. “I hope you know he can hear you.” I ­don’t think he can hear me. It’s too much for me to stomach, imagining he can hear but not see or touch. Then again, if all he can sense is ­music, perhaps that’s what heaven is. My ­mother seems to know where he is. I ­don’t.

My ­father bought the piano on April 21, 1982, for about fifteen hundred dollars. I know this ­because my ­mother saved and sent me the canceled check. She loves to tell me the story of how we all shopped together, piling into the station wagon with its extra-­long body and rear-­facing seat, for the fifteen-­mile trip to A. Michael’s Piano. The salesman was generous and patient: “Sure! Let them all play.” We banged on showroom models in exuberant test runs. What a sound we must have made, ­little girls hammering on four dif­fer­ent pianos at once, the dissonant tones and our sharp voices filling the air. Somehow two parents and four d ­ aughters settled on a favorite. My ­mother checked the price tag to make sure it was affordable; my f­ ather checked the integrity of the working parts, plucking the strings inside with his thumbnail; we girls checked how loud it could get. Our choice was perfect: a small maple Kohler & Campbell upright, with two spindle legs in the front that screw on and off. Ideal for young ­children just learning to play. The piano sat in the largest room of the basement, near my f­ather’s trains. No doubt the clickclack clickclack of a locomotive on the fast track was timed at a perfect two-­to-­one ratio with the hush hush of a freight train on the slow track. That’s just the kind of mathematician my ­father was. The piano played treble melodies while the whistle blew next door. My ­father’s workshop sat on the other side of the wall. Lit by bare bulbs, its cement floor partially hidden ­under carpet scraps and its ceiling lined with mason jars, the workshop was as dark and drafty as a garage. My ­father placed a mini-­fridge in the corner near the sump pump and loaded

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it with Budweiser. For an electrical engineer, amateur woodworker, and model train enthusiast, I’m sure this was heaven. In her tiny sewing room, my ­mother’s foot pumped the machine in four/four time while the laundry progressed. The washer constantly cycled with the dirty clothes produced by a ­family of six. But not the dryer—my ­mother loaded wet clothes into laundry baskets and clipped them to the clothesline to save electricity. The basement—­cool, musty, and dimly lit—­was a place of practice, chores, creation, all on repeat.

Nine months ­after he bought the piano, my f­ ather was killed.

My m ­ other put the four of us into formal lessons with a local teacher. But one by one, my ­sisters dropped out. Beth quit first. She never got the hang of piano, choosing craft proj­ects like sewing and macramé instead. She would grow up to start her own quilting business. Tammy, who hated practicing, preferred to curl around a cat and read. She is now a program man­ag­er and editor. And Debbie’s big personality was far too contained on a piano bench. She wanted to play dress-up and talk on the phone, and would become a musical theater star and fundraiser. I stuck with the piano, partly by default—­I was stuck with the piano. An unplayed piano is just a ­table for photo­graphs, a cat perch, a symbol of creative potential. It’s not a piano anymore, and we had to have this piano, this relic from a time when my ­father was still alive and making big purchases. We’d already lost the train board and three workbenches to meaninglessness. As each ­sister dropped out, I stayed in lessons, even graduating to a new teacher, Mrs. Norman, who lived a bit farther away and carried many more students on her roster. Though I c­ an’t remember the piano in t­ hose years, I think I loved it. I feel it now, a relationship between the piano and me. A kind of interdependence. As a child at the piano, I imagine, I could release

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the weight of need I felt for my absent f­ ather. And perhaps I could release, too, some of the tension of the h ­ ouse and my m ­ other’s authority over my ­family’s story. An object as heavy as a piano could transform the ­house atmosphere into something light, something ­free. At eigh­teen, I moved out of the ­house to attend college in Hartford, an hour away, and I stayed to work campus jobs during the summers. I never moved back in with my ­mother, and I would not play piano again u ­ ntil now, years ­later. The piano from the basement has come back to me.

I play long into the eve­ning of my reunion with the piano. ­Simple bass rhythms, improvised mea­sures, show tunes. ­After a few hours, I realize that I am not in the basement of a small-­town ­house but surrounded by apartment dwellers watching late-­night tele­v i­sion and drifting into sleep. My m ­ other sends me yet another object that’s been hidden somewhere in her home: an old ­music case. It’s a flat, brown, zippered bag decorated with notes and clef signs. I recognize her handwriting. In Sharpie marker, s­ he’d written Suzanne Marie Farrell, as if other Suzanne Farrells w ­ ere taking lessons with Mrs. Norman. I notice, too, the smell. ­Every vessel that journeys from my m ­ other’s ­house to my apartment carries with it the perfumed blend of lavender, cat, dust, cinnamon apple turnovers, cement, and cold. Flipping through the ­music, I’m not surprised that classical pieces make up most of the pile. Some ragtime, some jazz. Christmas carols, con­ temporary songs, polkas. But I’ve always been a classical pianist. From the bag, I pull out Grieg, Bach, Beethoven, and invent for myself a childhood as a prodigy. The tenant above us is renovating his apartment. I play loudly to cover the hammers, scrapes, and drills. The case also includes a lesson notebook: a spiral steno pad, its cover almost completely detached. On the front, Name: Suzanne Farrell. Subject: Piano. Again in my m ­ other’s handwriting, in Sharpie. She must have used Sharpie for every­thing. The notebook traces my weekly lessons from

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September 1986 through June 1992, fourth grade through ninth. By the time of this notebook, I was practicing at least an hour a day, over and over, the same notes. Mrs. Norman consistently instructed me to play more dynamically, to worry a l­ ittle less about the notes. But I must have wanted to get all the notes, in time, locked into a metronomic tick tick tick tick. Getting the right notes, fitting them all in—­t hat’s what worried me most.

I’ve had the piano for fewer than twenty-­four hours, but I’m already itching to start lessons. Not new ones. I want to retake the lessons I took as a child. Along with my classical m ­ usic, I find Alfred’s Basic Piano Library books, levels four and five, which corresponded with my grades in school. I regret that the case is missing levels one, two, and three. We must have sold them at a yard sale. Still, level four, my fourth-­grade year, is a relic from within the memory gap. I begin. Each lesson starts in the Theory Book. How Many Eighth Notes? I know from the school papers my m ­ other saved that I excelled in math. Besides, my math teacher ­mother and engineer ­father must have trained me to think in numbers. My pencil marks, still dark enough to read, indicate that I knew the number of eighth notes allowed per time signature. A purple sticker on the page reads, “Berry Good!” On to the Lesson Book, now that the theory is in place. It’s the “Tarantella,” a quick, light song, meant for dancers. Easy and rhythmic. Allegro, 6/8 time, in F-­major. Cross the fin­gers to go up and down, buh-­duh-­duh, buh-­duh-­duh, bummmm-­ buh-­duh. The Recital Book is last, full of what Alfred considers showpieces, like the “Irish Wedding Dance.” I plow through level four in just a few days. But, hesitant to move on, I repeat the lessons, naively hoping that t­ hey’ll come back to me as memories. They d ­ on’t. I move on to level five, just as I did when I entered the fifth grade. It starts with scale degrees: tonic, dominant, subdominant. The tonic is the key-­note. C for a C-­scale, F for an F-­scale. So s­ imple. I plunk my forefinger on m ­ iddle C. Then, the dominant tone—­a fifth above the key-­note. G

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for a C-­scale. It’s agreeable to the ­human ear, ­t hese notes a fifth apart. C and a G intertwine in the air and elicit the acoustic equivalent of placing a ­shaped block in the correct hole. The theory of tonics leads the Lesson Book’s “Brazilian Holiday.” (It seems a fitting leap.) The song was due for Mrs. Norman in November, six days before my eleventh birthday. Staccato on the left hand, fingered three, one, five, one, repeat. Clipped but rhythmic. Topping this page is a sketch of a toucan with an old-­fashioned camera strung around his neck, a guidebook to Brazil tucked u ­ nder his arm. As I play, I hear the toucan saying, “Let’s go to Brazil.” Practice, practice, practice. I open the Recital Book. It’s around dinnertime, but I want to relearn “Come Back to Sorrento,” often sung by the likes of Pavarotti and Domingo. In D-­minor, it’s so sad. I play it more grave than it should be played, and sing cleanly through a rigid lip circle—­dooo, dooo, dooooo. Mournful, like a funeral. Come back to Sorrento, please, come back to me. Construction above is finished for ­today. Dinner is being served in the apartment ­behind ours—­I can hear the two restless ­little boys fussing in the kitchen. My downstairs neighbor smokes another cigarette.

Halfway through my fifth-­g rade year, my lesson notebook tells me, I reached Mozart. Alfred dis­appeared altogether, and I was possessed by the composer’s “Fantasia I.” Mozart died before he finished the piece, and no one r­ eally knows who composed the last few bars. It’s a short piece—­just over one hundred mea­sures broken into fifteen sections—­a nd popu­lar with beginning classical pianists. I remember it. Not ­because I remember fifth grade or practicing the piece, but b ­ ecause the notebook tells me I played it for my recital, so I must have practiced so much that even now my fin­gers quickly locate their starting position. The first mea­sure is loud. It begins with a hard spill on D2, damper pedal employed. ­After the initial whollup, a deliberate, fluid spread up the

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keyboard in triplets: each mea­sure/repeated/an echo/no pedal/and softly/ piano/nearly in/audible. No pedal! says the sheet m ­ usic in the echoed mea­sures. The order is underlined and circled twice: once in pencil, once in red ink. But I feel my foot on the pedal anyway. I want to fill in the soft parts, to barely hear the notes ­running together in tiny tones, even during the echoed mea­sures. Once I am playing the piano again, I ­don’t want the ­music to stop. Besides, this is an old piano. Without pressing the damper pedal, each note dies too early. That ­won’t do. The first eleven mea­sures breeze by. Wait! says the m ­ usic. I stop and repeat. It’s harder the second time. My fin­gers know it well, but the moment I am conscious of the thrill of sense memory, my fin­gers get stage fright, worried they w ­ on’t deliver for me what I need most, and they freeze. The third time through I check each note, each triplet, and old ­mistakes come back to me as new ­mistakes. I’m frustrated. I ­don’t have much time to get it right. I am tuned to a recital schedule, as if I must play for a reason, with meaning, not just to enjoy the aimless wanderings as an after­noon amateur. In the final two mea­sures before the Adagio section, my fin­gers find their way. I reduce the volume, pianissimo possibile, to silence. Justin listens to Mozart and me when he arrives home from work in the eve­nings. “It sounds like all dif­fer­ent songs,” he says one night, stretching out long on the bed. “­They’re movements,” I tell him, and turn back to the keyboard to play a few mea­sures of each. “Andante is fluid, fast. An onslaught. Adagio plods along. Then—­Presto! It catches you off guard. Suddenly ­you’re in it. What’s so ­great, though, is that you can see it coming. It’s not so scary that way.” I’m lecturing now, as I play. “Each movement is the same basic melody, but changed. Squeezed or stretched, enlarged or reduced. Distorted. That’s why it seems like dif­fer­ent songs. See what I mean?” I turn to my student, but he has dozed off.

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In college, I made half-­hearted attempts to continue working a keyboard. I brought my electric Casio with me, but sold it for spending money. I took lessons on the chapel’s magnificent pipe organ, but gave them up in ­favor of sleeping in on the weekends. Once or twice I used the pianos in the ­music building’s practice rooms, but hated the cross-­campus walks during freezing winter eve­nings. ­After a while, I just s­ topped. If I saw a piano, I would stand very near it, sometimes sweeping my fingernails along the key tops. But I ­didn’t play. I chalked it up to lack of practice. Something just ­wasn’t right.

I am working hard on the long runs of sixteenth notes in the “Fantasia.” Thank goodness for Giuseppe Buonamici, who wrote the fingering. The pacing, the emphasis, and the flats fall into place. I still c­ an’t play the mea­ sures presto. And I certainly ­can’t bring them to forte, or the neighbors ­will fi­nally put an end to ­t hese piano lessons. When the upstairs tenant lets his terriers run wild, however, I play fff. I note my right fin­gers. Two, four, three, two, one, three, two, four. It occurs to me that I’m observing my fin­gers, not the notes on the page. My fin­gers know when to hit harder, when to jump, when to dance, to smooth out, to chop. My right fin­gers meet my left, down the keyboard at C2, and work together back up to a beautiful sustained sixth-­octave E-­flat. Mozart did that. Buonamici did that. I did that. Play for ­Daddy, my ­mother says. Come back to me. But I am not a snake charmer, and he d ­ oesn’t float out of the sheet m ­ usic’s fold.

Since the piano arrived, or so it seems, my asthma has been plaguing me. I suspect it’s the smoke from downstairs, which has increased since the

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tenant’s ­father died and she returned from a month of mourning with her ­family, all heavy smokers. More than usual, I c­ an’t breathe. Worried about a blood clot, I head to my doctor, and on to a pulmonologist, who starts with an EKG before investigating my lungs. “This is weird,” she says about the printout, pointing to a section of the line that dips down rather than up. “Non-­specific T-­wave changes. Have you had an EKG before?” “I ­don’t think so,” I tell her, trying not to grab at the word “weird.” “­Don’t worry. W ­ e’ll run it again and compare. I want to make sure the pads ­weren’t too high.” I study the printout. Spiked waves are spaced evenly ­until the irregularity, the moment when my heart apparently leapt a ­little, pushed blood just a touch more forcefully. Or perhaps when electricity ceased for a split second, muted as the soft pedal, una corda, was pushed. A development, then a recapitulation. The exquisiteness of the heart—of m ­ usic, of math— is in this regularity. In most cases, a slip ­doesn’t last forever, ­doesn’t leave ­t hings dif­fer­ent from the way they ­were before. ­Things always return to normal. The doctor retests and shows me a perfect printout. “The first one was a fluke. Your heart is absolutely fine.” “My heart is fine,” I echo. “That’s ­great news.” “So what has changed in your environment?” she asks. Construction. Smoke. And—of course—­a dusty piano.

I ­can’t remember ever looking inside the piano before. Unlike my ­father, I’ve never focused on the way it’s put together, on the separate parts that make it a w ­ hole. An engineer, he prob­ably loved its insides. Cast iron plate, wood and felt hammers, shanks, strings, wires, and pins. I won­der if he ever dreamt of building a piano from scratch. I vacuum the dust. My flashlight reveals ancient goodies: several squares of plain white paper, about the size of postage stamps. Th ­ ey’re too far down

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for me to grab with my fin­gers, so I stick tape to the end of a chopstick and poke at them. Thick and smooth and familiar: sticker backs. Was I putting my own stickers on my lesson book pages? I fish out the rest: some paperclips, brittle rubber bands, the silver wrapper from a Hershey’s Kiss.

I hate Mozart. How did he come up with this stuff? My fin­gers fail me completely. Mozart’s ­father knew his son had a gift. He bought him a harpsichord on which the child composed l­ittle ditties to play at public concerts in Munich and Linz and Vienna. ­Little ditties. At six years old. How many tunes did Mozart carry with him into adulthood? I need a break. I want to play something I ­don’t know, something I’ve never played before. In my m ­ usic case, t­ here’s a Schumann I d ­ on’t remember ever learning. “Widmung” or “Dedication.” It looks challenging, in A-­flat major, three/two time. I begin slowly, ­until the fourth mea­sure when I notice ­t here are words. “Thou art my soul, thou art my heart.” It’s a love song. My hands are trying to learn two parts each, but it’s too complicated. I pull out one part, the highest, with the right hand only. “Thou art my world, where I am mover, my heav’n art thou, wherein I hover.” My right hand is wrong. I’m utterly stuck. “Thou art my grave, wherein I cast forever all my sorrow past!” I give up. Inevitably, I revert to familiar tunes, playing the melody to “Twinkle, Twinkle.” Slow, then double time, then slow again. I add a blues bass line with my left hand, finish with some extra trills, and play other tunes that I must have known at six years old, songs I repeated when my ­father was still alive and working on his trains, when my m ­ other sewed wool pants for him and cotton dresses for us. “Mary Had a L ­ ittle Lamb” and “Old MacDonald.” Both parts of “Heart and Soul.” Fi­nally, I close the fallboard and lean into the smooth maple.

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Fi­nally, I’ve learned the Mozart. I’m nearly recital-­ready. Other pieces begin to appear in the notebook—­Beethoven, Gersh­w in, Grieg. Joplin introduces a short ragtime phase. But the Mozart reappears, in anticipation of the recital in June. “Slow down,” says a note from Mrs. Norman. “More dynamic contrast in the beginning. More dramatic.” I decide the only way to finish is to hold another recital—­not for anyone ­else, just for the piano and me. I’ll play all the songs I ­can’t remember learning, then I’ll play the Mozart. I take a deep breath. Lift my shoulders up and t­oward my ears. Hold for a few seconds before bringing them down again while exhaling. Clasp my fin­gers, stretching the palms outward. Unclasp and wiggle each, cracking some knuckles, and place them on the keys. Pet—­gently slide the fingertips t­ oward the front edges of the cool ivory rectangles. (This must be why they call it tickling. The piano would shiver if it could.) Lift my wrists to the proper height and pause. I look at the keys, at the brass piano lamp that hangs low over the m ­ usic stand. Fourteen years. As I study the elegant Kohler & Campbell lettering, I realize it w ­ asn’t avoidance or stage fright or cold winter nights that kept me from continuing. It ­wasn’t that I ­didn’t want to play piano. It’s that I wanted to play only this piano. The rendering of my f­ ather, of my entire childhood, in m ­ usic, is something that can only be done on this par­tic­u­lar piano. Each time my f­ ather hammered at a proj­ect, or nailed down a train track, or electrified the locomotive, or shaved wood down into a t­ able leg, each time he popped a can of Budweiser even, the vibrations he set off made the strings in the piano quiver. The piano is one big context clue, but rather than bringing me memories, it brings me a creature comfort. The stimuli—­train whistles and the squeak of vise jaws and my ­father too—­are gone. But I can hear them echo through the maple case. I commune with this piano and the sense memory it gives me. Perhaps memory is not always a noun, some ­thing that floats to consciousness, like a ­bubble rising, or some ­thing that dis­appears, like a ­bubble

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popped. It can also be a pro­cess. Memory: a verb, used without object, like swim or run or play piano. When you swim or run or play, you do so just for the muscle strength, heart health, and increased stamina. For the enjoyment of activity. Th ­ ere’s no tangible other side. Th ­ ere might be an artificial finish line or recital, but that just signals that the r­ unning or playing is over for now. Maybe it’s the same with memory. For someone like me, without childhood memory, ­t here’s no tangible creation. No object. Memory is the effort. Still, a good student, I ­will memory hard and I w ­ ill memory long. And I ­will never stop memorying. I ­won’t let my neurons rest. I’ll constantly supply power to them just in case one day, many months or even years from now, notes float into just the right arrangement, an electrical bridge is built across the chasm, and wham: a memory hits. But I know now that I ­don’t play to regain memory, to remember my ­father. And I d ­ on’t play for my f­ ather b ­ ecause I believe he is somewhere, listening. Rather, to bring him out of the piano, to f­ ree him, to f­ ree myself of the need to find him—­t his, I suspect, is the most generous reason to play. Sense memory is enough. It has to be. The piano swells, and my ­father escapes me. I play through to the final bars, added to Mozart’s piece by a mysterious composer who ­couldn’t bear to leave it unfinished. I close “Fantasia” and place it on the top board. My memory w ­ ill not come back. I open a new piece of m ­ usic and begin to play.

A C K N O W L ­E D G M E N T S

I wish to thank the editors of vari­ous publications where excerpts from this manuscript previously appeared, often in slightly dif­fer­ent form: The Citron Review (“Tele­vi­sion”), Copper Nickel (“Time of Death”), Hippocampus Magazine (“Blaze of Gloria,” part of “­Going on a Hunt,” and “Another Version of Us”—­reprinted in its inaugural anthology, Selected Memories), Kenyon Review (“Bridges and Tunnels,” which received a special mention in Pushcart Prize 2014), Santa Fe Literary Review (part of “To Make One’s Way through the Earth”), Ascent (“Every­t hing Reaches to Light”), and ink&coda (“Light”). Thank you to every­one at Bucknell University Press, especially Pamelia Dailey, for believing in a memoir written without memory. I am grateful to the dozen doctors, nurse prac­ti­tion­ers, and therapists who helped me understand memory, search for my own, and treat anxiety. Many play a role in this book, and I have changed some names for privacy. Thank you to my mentors at the New School for Social Research, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Vermont College of Fine Arts: Laurie Alberts, Diane Lefer, Rebecca McClanahan, Jim Miller, Melissa Monroe, Robert Vivian, Vivian Wagner, and Liza Gardner Walsh. Special thanks to Randy Fertel for encouraging me to listen to my writing voice, to Sue William Silverman for teaching me how to craft something out of what 151

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seemed like nothing, and to Sascha Feinstein for hearing the melody early on and seeing the shape at the end. To my fellow writers and teachers from Salon Esse, Floating House, NSSR, VCFA, and elsewhere—­K rissa Corbett Cavouras, Katie Egan Cunningham, Laurie Easter, Elizabeth Damewood Gaucher, Jennifer Bowen Hicks, Katie Karlsgodt, Robin Lester Kenton, W ­ ill Kenton, Crystal Mandler, Keith Meatto, Risa Nye, Mayumi Shimose Poe, Anna-­ Bain Reynolds, Natasha Sarkissian, Eric Schneider, Justin Wolf, and too many ­others to name—­you inspire me with your ideas, guts, talent, and generosity. I owe emphatic thanks to Jenni Eaton, Claire Guyton, Caitlin Leffel, Dana Perry, Sarah Twombly, and Cheryl Wilder, for elevating community, companionship, and commitment in our shared writing lives. Claire and Cheryl, booyah! To extended f­amily and friends, thank you for trusting me. Special thanks to ­Uncle Walter. For privacy, I have changed the names of some members of my parents’ community. To Justin, thank you for ­every single reading session, word change, reassuring note, fact check, hug, brainstorm, hour spent helping me hunt, minute spent taking care of our boys, and second spent loving me and letting me love you. You help me work, and you help me believe in my work. Fi­nally, I am indebted to my s­ isters, Beth, Debbie, and Tammy. You each have a story to tell about ­Daddy and Mom and our childhood, and ­you’ve supported me unconditionally in my effort to find, then tell, mine. You shoulder f­ amily memories while ensuring we make new ones. I have said this before: I do not know what I would do without my ­sisters.

A BOU T TH E AU THOR

Suzanne Farrell Smith is a writer, editor, and teacher. The youn­gest of four ­daughters, she was born in Connecticut to a homemaker ­mother and an engineer f­ather. She graduated from Trinity College in Hartford and moved to New York City, where she taught elementary school. With an MA from The New School for Social Research and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, she now teaches writing workshops and literacy education courses, and has worked for several publications. Suzanne’s writing explores memory, trauma, education, parenthood, and the writing life, and has been published in numerous literary and scholarly journals. ­After sixteen years in New York, she moved back to Connecticut, where she lives in a creek-­cut valley with her husband and three sons. www​.­suzannefarrellsmith​.­com