第 17 页

Ben locked his fingers, resting his chin on his balled fist. “The doctors said that wouldn’t happen.”

“But they don’t know, do they? Surely? They could be wrong?”

“I doubt it.”

I put down my glass. He was wrong. He thought all was lost, that my past had vanished completely. Maybe this was the time to tell him about the snatched moments I still had, about Dr. Nash. My journal. Everything.

“But I am remembering things, occasionally,” I said. He looked surprised. “I think things are coming back to me, in flashes.”

He unlaced his hands. “Really? What things?”

“Oh, it depends. Sometimes nothing very much. Just odd feelings, sensations. Visions. A bit like dreams, but they seem too real for me to be making them up.” He said nothing. “They must be memories.”

I waited, expecting him to ask me more, to want me to tell him everything I had seen, as well as how I even knew what memories I had experienced.

But he did not speak. He continued looking at me sadly. I thought of the memories I had written about, the one in which he had offered me wine in the kitchen of our first home. “I had a vision of you,” I said. “Much younger . . .”

“What was I doing?” he said.

“Not much,” I replied. “Just standing in the kitchen.” I thought of the girl, her mother and father, sitting a few feet away. My voice dropped to a whisper. “Kissing me.”

He smiled then.

“I thought that if I am capable of having one memory, then maybe I am capable of having lots—”

He reached across the table and took my hand. “But the thing is, tomorrow you won’t remember that memory. That’s the problem. You have no foundation on which to build.”

I sighed. What he was saying is true; I can’t keep writing down everything that happens to me for the rest of my life, not if I also have to read it every day.

I looked across at the family next to us. The girl spooned minestrone clumsily into her mouth, soaking the cloth bib that her mother had tucked around her neck. I could see their lives, broken, trapped by the role of caregivers, a role they had expected to be free of years before.

We are the same, I thought. I need to be spoon-fed, too. And, I realized, rather like them and their child, Ben loves me in a way that can never be reciprocated.

And yet, maybe, we were different. Maybe we still had hope.

“Do you want me to get better?” I said.

He looked surprised. “Christine,” he said. “Please . . .”

“Maybe if there was someone I could see? A doctor?”

“We’ve tried before—”

“But maybe it’s worth trying again? Things are improving all the time. Maybe there’s a new treatment?”

He squeezed my hand. “Christine, there isn’t. Believe me. We’ve tried everything.”

“What?” I said. “What have we tried?”

“Chris, please. Don’t—”

“What have we tried?” I said. “What?”

“Everything,” he said. “Everything. You don’t know what it was like.” He looked uncomfortable. His eyes darted left and right as if he expected a blow and didn’t know from what direction it might come. I could have let the question go then, but I didn’t.

“What, Ben? I need to know. What was it like?”

He said nothing.

“Tell me!”

He lifted his head and swallowed hard. He looked terrified, his face red, his eyes wide. “You were in a coma,” he said. “Everyone thought you were going to die. But not me. I knew you were strong, that you’d make it through. I knew you’d get better. And then, one day, the hospital called me and said you’d woken up. They thought it was a miracle, but I knew it wasn’t. It was you, my Chris, coming back to me. You were dazed. Confused. You didn’t know where you were, and couldn’t remember anything about the accident, but you recognized me, and your mother, though you didn’t really know who we were. They said not to worry, that memory loss was normal after such severe injuries, that it would pass. But then—” He shrugged, looked down to the napkin he held in his hands. For a moment, I thought he wasn’t going to continue.

“Then what?”

“Well, you seemed to get worse. I went in one day and you had no idea who I was. You presumed I was a doctor. And then you forgot who you were, too. You couldn’t remember your name, what year you were born. Anything. They realized that you had stopped forming new memories, too. They did tests, scans. Everything. But it was no good. They said your accident had damaged your memory. That it would be permanent. That there was no cure, nothing they could do.”

“Nothing? They didn’t do anything?”

“No. They said your memory would either come back or it wouldn’t, and that the longer you went without it coming back the less likely it was that it would. They told me that all I could do was look after you. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do.” He took both my hands in his, stroking my fingers, brushing the hard band of my wedding ring.

He leaned forward so that his head was only inches from mine. “I love you,” he whispered, but I couldn’t reply, and we ate the rest of our meal in near-silence. I could feel a resentment growing within me. An anger. He seemed so determined that I could not be helped. So adamant. Suddenly I did not feel so inclined to tell him about my journal or Dr. Nash. I wanted to keep my secrets for a little longer. I felt they were the only thing I had that I could say was mine.

We came home. Ben made himself coffee and I went to the bathroom. There I wrote as much as I could of the day so far, then took off my clothes and makeup. I put on my dressing gown. Another day was ending. Soon I will sleep, and my brain will begin to delete everything. Tomorrow I will go through it all again.

I realized I do not have ambition. I cannot. All I want is to feel normal. To live like everybody else, with experience building on experience, each day shaping the next. I want to grow, to learn things, and from things. There, in the bathroom, I thought of my old age. I tried to imagine what it will be like. Will I still wake up, in my seventies or eighties, thinking myself to be at the beginning of my life? Will I wake with no idea that my bones are old, my joints stiff and heavy? I cannot imagine how I will cope when I discover that my life is behind me, has already happened, and I have nothing to show for it. No treasure house of recollection, no wealth of experience, no accumulated wisdom to pass on. What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories? How will I feel when I look in a mirror and see the reflection of my grandmother? I do not know, but I cannot allow myself to think of that now.

I heard Ben go into the bedroom. I realized I would not be able to replace my journal in the closet, and so put it on the chair next to the bath, under my discarded clothes. I will move it later, I thought, once he is asleep. I switched off the light and went into the bedroom.

Ben sat in bed, watching me. I said nothing but climbed in next to him. I realized he was naked. “I love you, Christine,” he said, and he began to kiss me, my neck, my cheek, my lips. His breath was hot and had the bite of garlic. I did not want him to kiss me, but did not push him away. I have asked for this, I thought. By wearing that stupid dress, by putting on the makeup and perfume, by asking him to kiss me before we went out.

I turned to face him and, though I did not want to, kissed him back. I tried to imagine the two of us in the house we had just bought together, tearing at our clothes on the way to the bedroom, our uncooked lunch spoiling in the kitchen. I told myself that I must have loved him then—or else why would I have married him?—and so there is no reason why I shouldn’t love him now. I told myself that what I was doing was important, an expression of love and of gratitude, and when his hand moved to my breast, I didn’t stop him but told myself it was natural, normal. Neither did I stop him when he slipped his hand between my legs and cupped me, and only I knew that later, much later, when I began to moan softly, it wasn’t because of what he was doing. It wasn’t pleasure at all, it was fear, because of what I saw when I closed my eyes.

Me, in a hotel room. The same one I had seen as I got ready earlier that evening. I see the candles, the champagne, the flowers. I hear the knock at the door, see myself put down the glass I have been drinking from, stand up to open it. I feel excitement, anticipation, the air is heavy with promise. Sex and redemption. I reach out, take the handle of the door, cold and hard. I breathe deeply. Finally things will be all right.

A hole, then. A blank in my memory. The door, opening, swinging toward me, but I cannot see who is behind it. There, in bed with my husband, panic slammed into me, from nowhere. “Ben!” I cried out, but he did not stop, did not even seem to hear me. “Ben!” I said again. I closed my eyes and clung to him. I spiraled back into the past.

He is in the room. Behind me. This man, how dare he? I twist around but see nothing. Pain, searing. A pressure on my throat. I cannot breathe. He is not my husband, not Ben, but still his hands are on me, all over, his hands and his flesh, covering me. I try to breathe, but cannot. My body, shuddering, pulped, turns to nothing, to ash and air. Water, in my lungs. I open my eyes and see nothing but crimson. I am going to die, here, in this hotel room. Dear God, I think. I never wanted this. I never asked for this. Someone must help me. Someone must come. I have made a terrible mistake, yes, but I do not deserve this punishment. I do not deserve to die.

I feel myself disappear. I want to see Adam. I want to see my husband. But they are not here. No one is here but me and this man, this man who has his hands around my throat.

I am sliding, down, down. Toward blackness. I must not sleep. I must not sleep. I. Must. Not. Sleep.

The memory ended, suddenly, leaving a terrible, empty void. My eyes flicked open. I was back in my own home, in bed, my husband inside me. “Ben!” I cried out, but it was too late. With tiny, muffled grunts, he ejaculated. I clung to him, holding him as tight as I could, and then, after a moment, he kissed my neck and told me again that he loved me, and then said, “Chris, you’re crying . . .”

The sobs came, uncontrollable. “What’s wrong?” he said. “Did I hurt you?”

What could I say to him? I shook as my mind tried to process what it had seen. A hotel room full of flowers. Champagne and candles. A stranger with his hands around my neck.

What could I say? All I could do was cry harder, and push him away, and then wait. Wait until he slept, and I could creep out of bed and write it all down.

Saturday—2:07 a.m.

I cannot sleep. Ben is upstairs, back in bed, and I am writing this in the kitchen. He thinks I am drinking a cup of cocoa that he has just made for me. He thinks I will come back to bed soon.

I will, but first I must write again.

The house is quiet and dark now, but earlier everything seemed alive. Amplified. I had hidden my journal in the closet and crept back into bed after writing about what I had seen as we made love, but still felt restless. I could hear the ticking of the clock downstairs, its chimes as it marked the hours, Ben’s gentle snores. I could feel the press of the duvet cover on my chest, see nothing but the glow of the alarm clock by my side. I turned on my back and closed my eyes. All I could see was myself, with hands clamped tight around my throat so that I could not breathe. All I could hear was my own voice, echoing. I am going to die.

I thought of my journal. Would it help to write more? To read it again? Could I really take it from its hiding place without waking Ben?

He lay, barely visible in the shadows. You are lying to me, I thought. Because he is. Lying about my novel, about Adam. And now I feel certain he is lying about how I came to be here, trapped like this.

I wanted to shake him awake. I wanted to scream, Why? Why are you telling me I was knocked over by a car on an icy road? I wonder what he is protecting me from. How bad the truth might be.

And what else is there, that I do not know?

My thoughts turned from my journal to the metal box, the one in which Ben keeps the photos of Adam. Maybe there will be more answers in there, I thought. Maybe I will find the truth.

I decided to get out of bed. I folded the duvet back so that I didn’t wake my husband. I grabbed my journal from its hiding place and crept, barefoot, onto the landing. The house felt different, now, sheened in the bluish moonlight. Frozen, and still.

I pulled the bedroom door closed behind me, a soft scrape of wood on carpet, a subtle click as it fastened shut. There, on the landing, I skimmed through what I had written. I read about Ben telling me I was hit by a car. I read about him denying I had written a novel. I read about our son.

I had to see a photograph of Adam. But where would I look? “I keep these upstairs,” he had said. “For safety.” I knew that. I had written it down. But where, exactly? The spare bedroom? The office? How would I begin to look for something I could not recall ever seeing before?

I put the journal back where I had found it and went into the office, closing that door behind me, too. Moonlight shone through the window, casting a grayish glow around the room. I did not dare to switch on the light, could not risk Ben finding me in there, searching. He would ask me what I was looking for, and I had nothing to tell him, no reason to give for being in there. There would be too many questions to answer.

The box was metal, I had written, and gray. I looked on the desk, first. A tiny computer, with an impossibly flat screen, pens and pencils in a mug, papers arranged in tidy piles, a ceramic paperweight in the shape of a seahorse. Above the desk was a wall-planner, dotted with colored stickers, circles, and stars. Under the desk was a leather briefcase and a wastepaper basket, both empty, and next to it a filing cabinet.

I looked there first. I pulled out the top drawer slowly, quietly. It was full of papers, in files labeled HOME, WORK, FINANCE. I flicked past the binders. Behind them was a plastic bottle of pills, though I couldn’t make out the name in the semidarkness. The second drawer was full of stationery—boxes, pads of paper, pens—and I closed it gently before crouching down to open the bottom drawer.

A blanket, or a towel; it was difficult to tell in the dim light. I raised one corner, felt beneath, touched cold metal. I lifted it out. Underneath was the metal box, larger than I had imagined it, so big it almost filled the drawer. I maneuvered my hands around it and realized it was heavier than I expected, too, and I almost dropped it as I lifted it out and put it on the floor.

The box sat in front of me. For a moment, I did not know what I wanted to do, whether I even wanted to open it. What new shocks might it contain? Like memory itself, it might hold truths that I could not even begin to conceive of. Unimagined dreams and unexpected horrors. I was afraid. But, I realized, these truths are all I have. They are my past. They are what makes me human. Without them, I am nothing. Nothing but an animal.