“Thanks, Mom,” I said.
“There’s a clean towel in the bathroom,” he told me. “Do you need anything else?”
I shook my head.
When I came out of the bathroom, Brian was already in bed. I slid in beside him and pulled the covers up over my shoulders. The bed felt good, the sheets clean and soft.
“Did you grow up in California?” I asked.
“Massachusetts,” he said. “A little town outside of Boston.”
Massachusetts, I thought, a collegiate place, all brick and ivy and old maple trees. Cape Cod was there, and Harvard.
“What do your parents do?”
“My father teaches history at a private high school. My mom’s an artist, a sculptor.” He reached over and turned the light off, then settled back into his pillow. “What’s it like?” he asked. “Not being able to remember.”
I thought for a minute, my eyes accustoming themselves to the darkness so that I could just barely make out the contours of his body beside me. “It’s hard to explain. I do remember a lot: facts, languages, how to do things. It’s myself I’ve forgotten.” I paused, frustrated at my own inability to express myself. “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, only half the pieces are lost.” But no, that wasn’t quite right either.
Brian didn’t say anything. I could hear him breathing, deep and evenly. I was almost asleep when I heard his voice in the darkness.
“What should I call you?” he asked.
“Eve,” I told him, without hesitation. “My name is Eve.”
I opened my eyes, and I could see his face just a few inches from mine, his own eyes wide, alert, and shining in the darkness, almost as if he were watching me.
I didn’t go to Dr. Delpay right away, didn’t want to. He’d come each day while I was in the hospital, and we’d talked mostly about trivial things, his garden, that year’s lingering autumn, the price of persimmons in the Croix Rousse market. I had not minded his visits, had taken a certain comfort in the plight of his climbing roses, the codling moths in his apple trees. He sat in the cushioned visitor’s chair in my room and cracked walnuts or pistachios and handed me the meat. Not once did he ask me about what I’d lost. But on the day I was discharged to the abbey, he brought me a bag of figs with his business card tucked inside, and I knew without him saying that if I called or came to him now, it would be for answers.
I’ve said that in the beginning I craved forgetfulness. I wanted anything but the black wounds of memory that came and went as stealthily as the fox, his red coat slipping in and out of the brambles at the edge of the wood. Mostly there was just a feeling, fear or discomfort, the shove of adrenaline when I walked into the butcher’s shop in Mâcon and the smell of fresh blood hit me.
Then, one afternoon in the spring, on a trip to the ruins of the old Cluny abbey, I’d seen a little girl in a yellow dress dart across what, some thousand years earlier, had been the narthex of the vast church. She was maybe four years old, in white sandals and a cream-colored sweater, the bodice of her dress dotted with yellow-and-white daisies. Her hair was pulled into two pigtails, her part slightly lopsided, her face bruised by a smudge of what looked to have been chocolate ice cream.
She was at least twenty feet away, and I saw her for only an instant, but I had a sensation of her as if she were an extension of my own flesh. I closed my eyes, and I could smell her hair, that unwashed child’s tang. I could smell the ice cream on her cheek, the sticky sourness of her breath. She was a disheveled little ghost, hands gummed with sugar and saliva, knees darkened by a thin patina of dirt from when she’d knelt to examine some small stone. When I looked again, she had slipped away, and I felt her absence like the bone-deep ache of an old injury before a storm.
That was early May, and by the end of June, the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, I’d come to trust in the child, and in some other, more innocent version of myself. I’d come to believe it the way the sisters believed in God, this great and unknowable specter, a house somewhere, a family, a job, even love, like a suit of clothes hanging forgotten in some dusty closet, waiting to be rediscovered and worn.
It had not occurred to me that the person I feared and the one I longed to recall might have been one and the same, that the woman whose eyes moved warily through a crowd and the one who woke in the middle of the night to the ghostly ache of milk-heavy breasts might inhabit the same person. It did not seem possible to combine such anger and such love in one human being. And so I’d believed I could find one without the other.
When I phoned Delpay, it was if he’d been expecting the call, as if my readiness were as predictable as the first hard green fruits on his apple trees.
“The child,” I stammered.
“Yes,” he said. “I understand.”
No, I thought, though I didn’t say it, you don’t understand. What I wanted was only the child. Nothing more. As if I could assemble a past from the few bright memories I’d gleaned, the smell of pancakes, the lazy sound of a screen door closing on itself. As if I could choose.
Even when we’d succeeded only in resurrecting the worst of my past, I’d convinced myself that the answers I wanted lay elsewhere, in the strange country of my origin. And now here I was, as far from the celluloid streets of America as I could imagine, looking for the one person I didn’t want to find.
It was daylight when I woke, the flat Maghreb sunshine streaming in through a crack in the bedroom’s shuttered window. I felt drugged, groggy from my first good night’s sleep in what seemed like forever. I stretched out in the bed and rolled over. Brian was gone.
Swinging my legs off the bed, I found a pair of sweatpants in one of Brian’s drawers and headed out of the bedroom. There was a fresh pot of coffee on, and a note on the kitchen table that read, Gone for breakfast supplies, back soon.
I helped myself to some coffee; then, for lack of anything better to do, I sat down at Pat’s desk. A computer geek, I thought, looking at his PC’s blank monitor, the jumble of electronic toys, a much more sophisticated setup than the convent’s outdated Mac. I thought about switching on the computer, then decided against it. For now, best to keep my snooping as subtle as possible.
Turning my attention to the less high-tech aspects of what Pat had left behind, I opened the topmost desk drawer and perused the contents. Brian had been living in the apartment long enough that most of what I found was his. There was a bundle of letters from the consulate in Rabat, written in the maddeningly patronizing tone so common to any interaction with the mechanisms of bureaucracy, repeated requests for Pat’s Social Security and passport numbers, a half dozen letters from various consular officials telling Brian he would have to contact their superior for more help. From the letters’ dates, I could see it had taken Brian almost six months to get through all the consular red tape. And at the end of this infuriating line of correspondence, confirmation that they could do nothing to help.
There were other letters as well, neat envelopes with the return address of a Linda Haverman in Andover, Massachusetts. From Mom, I thought, pushing aside a Peanuts birthday card.
There wasn’t much on paper about All Join Hands or any of Pat’s projects. I figured most of his work had been done on the computer. The only item of real interest in the desk was a leather-bound address book, a strangely arcane system, I thought, for a techie like Pat. On the inside of the front cover was a brief inscription. For Pat, it said, so you’ll always be able to find the ones you love. Love, Mom. The entries were a mix of old U.S. acquaintances and Moroccan addresses. Kimberly Abbott of Greenwich, Connecticut, shared a page with Hassan Alfani of Rabat.