Four Months after the Accident
JULY 1983
My mother weeps all the way home, fat tears blackened by mascara, carving tracks in her rouge. I had suggested following her in my car but she’d insisted—she hadn’t seen me in years, she said, and she wanted to greedily gobble every single moment, and I could drive my car home from the market tomorrow. I sense, though, that she’d worried I might disappear again, either through nefarious means or my own volition, a long-awaited reunion thwarted before it truly began. I stare at my mother, still a stranger, and feel a surge of empathy, recognizing our intertwined predicaments: me, grieving the loss of my life with her; and her, preparing to rebuild it but somewhat begrudgingly, as though my brain had deleted her on purpose.
“Nothing?” she asks. Her arms shake against the steering wheel of her Cadillac sedan, making her sleeve of bracelets jingle and chime. “You remember absolutely nothing of me? Not one moment of the life I gave you?”
“I’m sorry,” I say. My words sound tinny and flattened. “You have no idea how much I wish I remember you, and my childhood, and … everything. It’s all gone.”
With a bejeweled finger she swipes her right eye, making a war paint smear across her skin. “Well, we must get on with it, then,” she says, and lifts my arm from my lap, giving it a shake. “We have plenty of time to relearn each other.”
Her tone—not begrudging at all—surprises me, as though she views this relearning not as a burden but an opportunity.
“What is your name?” I ask, trying to keep my voice neutral.
“Verona. But use it at your own risk—I only answer to Mom.”
She winks, her long, thick lashes a magician’s wand, weaving her spell.
For the next five minutes, we ride silently. I stare at her profile and can’t believe I came from such a fantastic creature, whose every word, gesture, and feature seems imbued with a strident grandeur: the towering height, the fortress of hair, the delicately humped nose, the gauzy blouse and abundant breasts, the enormous but elegant feet (encased, naturally, in sequined slippers), the baubles and bangles, the conspirator’s laugh, the carnival barker’s command of the room, the exotic bird flutter of her hands. We arrive at a home that rivals any of those Jude cleaned on the Main Line, an expansive facade of silver stone adorned with hanging vines and accented by two cupolas at either end. “Is this where I grew up?” I ask. I think of Jude, alone in our dank apartment, and I almost feel sorry. She did this to herself, I think. In taking my old life away from me, for whatever reason, she managed to send me right back to it.
“Of course it is, my angel. You were so happy here, and you will be again.”
I hear the dog before I see it, deep, throaty barks flatten into a snarl. “Wallis, come!” my mother says. The dog bounds toward us and presses her head against my mother’s hands, commanding her to scratch. She’s longer than she is tall, with a thick, wide head, and a mix of glossy black and brown fur.
“Wallis?” I ask.
“Her full name is Wallis Simpson, after the wife of King Edward VIII. She’s a vicious one—both the wife and the dog—but she’ll attack only when I give the command. She’s a Rottweiler and I had her specially trained. I suppose you have forgotten all of this, too, but the human Wallis is a cousin on my father’s side. Unfortunately, her mind checked out well before her body, the poor thing. She sees no one, speaks to no one. When the king died some of her things ended up in this very house, for a steal.” She treats the dog’s belly like a harp, running her fingers in long, quick strokes. “Is that terribly ghoulish of me?” In the next second she answers for me. “Oh, Verona,” she chides herself. “Katherine does not want to hear about distant cousins right now.”
“Katherine doesn’t mind,” I say, hoping to make her laugh. “But she might prefer to start with more recent and personal events.”
“Of course, dear,” she says, serious. “You live alone long enough, and your speaking patterns start to revolt.”
The decor seems deliberately scattershot, collected from every century, and is arranged in such proximity that every step might trigger an avalanche of vintage treasures: teetering grandfather clocks; nude statues of fat cherubs; busts of once-famous men with imperious expressions. The walls are filled with portraits of a young woman in various seductive poses on a beach, a tractor, a chaise longue, a swing, the hood of an old-fashioned car.
“Pardon the brewing caldron,” my mother says. “The cleaning lady is due to come, one of these days.”
An absolutely horrid, wicked part of me wishes it could be my sister. I push Jude from my mind and point to the portraits. “These are of you?”
“Yes,” she says, a bit wistful. “A previous iteration of me. I was a model for a few years. I traveled all over Europe, met so many clever people, chipped away at my dreary facade until I discovered the brilliant gem beneath. I even found my name there, Verona. My favorite city. ‘Very Sherry, Quite Contrary,’ they called me, because I inhabited so many moods.”
She does a little twirl, one long leg extended backward, dancing with an invisible partner.
“What was your original name?” I ask.
“Harmony. Harmony Sheridan,” she says. “The town where I grew up and ran away from. I just traded one place name for another.”
Harmony. I think of our birthday trip—the ice cream shop, the old farmhouse, the dead rabbit—and the realization hits: Jude didn’t give me our history; she gave me Verona’s history, at least in part, stealing from one life to construct another.
“What was my father’s name?” I ask.
“Grant Smith. Could anything be duller than Smith? I never took it. I had already changed my name once and wasn’t keen to do it again, and one of my marital conditions was that our children be Sheridans.”
Leading me through a labyrinth of hallways, Verona gives me a grand tour. The house is large—seven bedrooms, three baths, attic and basement, and various hidden nooks—but the overall effect is of a space curling into itself, desperate to protect what it hides. We pause at the room I shared with Jude, my side done in pink and hers in a rich indigo—our choices, she says. There’s something odd about it beyond the lack of photographs, beyond the ruffles and frills and explosions of girly splendor; this is a room frozen in a specific time and age, a room that, at a key point in our lives, stopped being the place where we wanted to sleep. I know this: my sister would not abide a shelf of china dolls and music boxes and hair barrettes festooned with streaming ribbons. I slide the closet door open and confirm my assumptions. There’s a rack of clothes—jeans, dresses, shirts—all stuck at age nine or ten, before the time when our moods and dreams and outlooks would change, and our bodies along with them.
“You had other, more mature clothes and things, of course,” my mother says, noting my confusion. “I rotate items around frequently, sell things, give things away. Once a year the neighborhood association does a holiday tour of all the, quote, historically significant homes on the block. So that’s always in the back of my mind, who might be coming and going. This house is a roving museum of junk, some of it rather precious—in the monetary sense, of course, not the sentimental one.”
I lie down on the bed and close my eyes and try to imagine calling this space my own. I wonder if this scratchy taffeta bedspread felt softer back then, and if I stood at the arched window to guess the constellations, and if I ever threw a tantrum and slammed the door.
“Come,” she says, beckoning me from the doorway. Her long, waving fingers look like wind chimes. “I think it’s high time for a tipple or two.”
Back in the kitchen she makes black tea, pulling the kettle from the burner just before it whistles. The image makes me think of Sab and anger management class, the lesson in cooling down before you boil over. I wonder if he’s called me back, eager for a report on Wen, completely unaware that I have left the apartment and Jude, that my mother is alive and I’ve found her. I want to call him now, but decide it’s better to wait until later, when my mother is asleep and I am alone.
We sit at the table and she pours a healthy glug of rum into her cup. “I know it’s early, but the circumstances warrant it, don’t you agree?” I agree and match her pour. We start sentences at the same time, our questions crashing into each other: “What happened with Judith—Where have you been?—What was wrong with my father?”
We laugh, and so far it feels natural, easy.
“You first, darling,” she says. “You must have so many questions.”
“How did my father die?” I ask. “And when?”
She twists the bracelets along one arm, considering her words. “Well, this is rather difficult, but I’m not sure what happened to him. He left us in the spring of ’71 I believe. You girls were about eleven. He just went out one night and never came back.”
She goes quiet, her words heavy in the air between us. I take some solace in knowing that Jude was at least truthful about this aspect of our lives.
“Did we ever hear from him again?” I ask. “Did we get the police involved?”
“I filed a report, but the police weren’t much help. If a grown man wants to disappear, there’s not much they can do about it.” She picks up her cup, sighs, puts it back down. “His brain was … off,” she says. “It was off in the most brilliant of ways. He was an inventor, did you know?”
I remember Jude mentioning that fact, pulling me into her lap and twisting my hair, making the memories real for me. “I do know, but I have no details. I mostly heard about our simple life on a farm.”
“Well, I lived on a farm as a girl, but never dreamed of subjecting you two to such drudgery. He had a veritable lab down in the basement, all sorts of flaming potions and copper appendages and things that made inhuman sounds.” She closes her eyes slowly, her lashes taking a bow.
“Was he a good father?”
“You’re stirring up so many old ghosts,” she says. “I can hear them all whispering and cackling in my brain.” She takes another long sip, and something about her seems older when she sets her cup back down; her shoulders sag and a pair of arrow-like lines appear above her brows, pointing at each other. “Yes, your father was a good father, and we all loved him very much, and he us. Sometimes, when he was sick, you and I and Judith would guide him into bed so he could rest and reclaim himself. You two would hold his hands and I his beautiful egg of a head, and you could just see all the ideas sparking and crackling. The last time he left us, we three held vigils once a week, lighting candles and using the power of our minds to summon him back.”
Silently I take inventory of what I’ve been told, and what I now know to be fact. The history Jude gave me seems a mix of truth and lies and borrowed bits, as carefully curated as the antiques in this very home. I remember the curio cabinet back in our apartment, the shelves lined with old family mementos. “Hold on,” I tell my mother. “I have some things to show you.”
I fetch my bags and arrange everything on the table in one long line. My mother takes her time assessing each item, holding the vase up to the light, opening the tin, pulling on a silky glove, smiling at the missing fingers.
“Did any of these things belong to you?”
“Not a one,” she says.
I add another lie from Jude to my growing tally. “How about the pictures? Are these of us, our family?”
She looks through all of them, shaking her head. She comes to the beach photo with the caption: BIRD FAMILY VACATION, WILDWOOD, 1969.
“Obviously we were not the Bird family—where did that name come from? And Wildwood? Oh no, sweet angel.” She laughs, a booming base that, if amplified, could make the furniture jump. “I’d sooner have taken you girls to play in the detritus of Three Mile Island.” She ends with the photo of me and Jude at the carousel. “Now, this I recognize—the majestic old carousel outside of the market. This was your birthday—the eleventh, I believe—and it was right before I took you to your first lesson at your new school.”
“Where was this school, and what was it like?”
“Oh my,” she says. “You are as curious as you ever were. You were in a specially curated program in the most exclusive neighborhood in Philadelphia along with other kids whose parents didn’t trust the system. It was rigorous, diverse, wonderful. You weren’t cooped up in a classroom all day—you learned outside. We took trips to interesting places. You had dynamic, interactive lessons. It was an excellent education that made you into smart, tough girls. You two could handle any situation in which you found yourselves.”
“What sort of lessons?” I ask. “And what sort of trips?”
She tops off our tea, finishing the rum, and continues. “We were part of a revolutionary movement back then. The idea was that children flourished most spectacularly if you didn’t treat them as children, engaging in baby talk and nonsense games and permitting endless hours of television. So we all moved into the city and occupied numerous row houses, autonomous but connected. We developed a curriculum designed to stimulate your budding brains. Classic literature and poetry, games of strategy, tests of endurance and cunning. We had annual retreats at a place called the Island where you did scavenger hunts that fostered a competitive spirit and encouraged initiative and independence. All activities that would serve you well in the real, adult world. And look, it worked so well that you and Jude felt entitled to leave me without even a soupçon of a farewell.”
I feel a stab of guilt at her words, at all of my forgotten transgressions. “Do you have any idea why we left?”
“I do not. I woke up one day and discovered that you two were gone. You can imagine the absolute utter devastation and anguish that besieged me. I did not feel human for years. I in fact did not feel human until I spotted you at the antique market, looking for all the world like an angel dropped from the sky.”
“Why would Jude go so far as to say you were dead?”
My mother tilts her head back, draining the last of her teacup, the sharp knob of her throat sliding behind her skin. “I haven’t the slightest idea why. I can only imagine that you two fell victim to some odious forces, and it is my eternal regret that I did not foresee this happening and intervene. So I am sorry, my treasure. I only wish your sister were here so she could also witness my contrition.” A tear appears at her right eye and she dabs it with the pad of her pinky. “Forgive me, I didn’t mean to dissolve into hysterics.”
“You haven’t,” I say. I imagine Jude in this room, listening to this conversation, seeking a way to bend it to her own personal truth. “And let’s move on. I’ve come to accept that there are some questions I’ll never have answered. And maybe those little gaps, those bits of mystery, are better for me in the long run.”
“That’s a lovely way to put it,” she says, and covers my hand with her own. Her skin is warmer now, and flushed. “I have an idea, but it requires more fortifications.” She holds up the empty rum bottle. “Pardon me a moment.”
She leaps from her chair and does a belly-dancer shimmy across the room, her movements fluid and ethereal despite her size. I can imagine her in another time and setting, twirling from man to man, defying anyone to look away. I wonder what Jude and I thought of her when we were younger, and lacked any capacity to understand how adults move through the world: were we proud, amused, embarrassed? She returns holding a silver platter carrying a quartet of scones, another bottle of rum, and a small, primitive stone statue of a naked woman, her body round and robust, her hands clasping her head. “Age and provenance unknown,” she says. “Of the scones, I mean. Hopefully they won’t crack your teeth.”
“What’s the statue?” I ask.
She pushes it toward me, cupping the head with her hand. “She’s Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory. I acquired her on a whim from a shop about a few months ago, perhaps not too far from the day you had your accident. What a prescient purchase! You might think it silly, but I believe we have more power over our minds than we know. It takes time to acknowledge this truth because it’s an uncomfortable one. Imagine going through life without utilizing your own power to shape that life. Your thoughts can become your reality. Do you understand?”
I take a sip of rum, wishing it were water. I think about pouring myself a glass but I don’t want to disrupt her; she is entranced by her own words and it is a singular sight—her long legs fidget and her hands whisk about the stone head and her eyes squeeze shut, as though she is witnessing a miracle no one else can see. After thirty seconds it passes, and she relinquishes the statue and opens her eyes and sets them upon me, waiting, expectant.
“Here,” she says softly. “Take her, hold her. Rub her head with your favored hand.”
I do as she says.
“I’m going to share a few memories, and I want you to imagine them as I speak them. Imagine them with all the power of your mind—fire up those synapses, spark those connections, let the different parts of your brain speak among themselves. The brain is so mysterious, so untapped. It contains its own trap doors and secret rooms.”
“My doctor said as much, but in more medical terms,” I tell her. “When I woke up they were astounded that the only things I remembered were Jude’s name and face. They’d never seen it before and didn’t understand how it could be possible. I concluded that our brains never truly separated, that there’s an invisible wire that runs between us, transmitting and receiving each other’s thoughts.”
My mother is listening so intently that she attempts to mouth my words as I speak them, her lips lagging three syllables behind. “I always envied the connection you had,” she says, and takes a long drink. “It was so powerful that it frightened me. Sometimes I hoped it would break or at least weaken, just so you both could let me in a bit more. Your lives were so full of each other there was hardly room for anyone else.”
My eyes cloud; I bite my lip and blink back tears. I remind myself how angry I am with Jude; her dense, elaborate lies have severed that connection. A disquieting thought skitters across my mind: What if I’d remembered Jude not out of love and our shared twin connection, but out of terror? What if recognizing her name and face was my brain’s way of warning me?
“Well!” my mother says breezily. “Let’s not get so maudlin, and instead focus on our powerful and bountiful Mnemosyne. Rub her head as I showed you, and I’ll tell you a memory. It’s an important one, depicting a turning point in your lives when you two came into your own. You were just learning to harness and exploit your power.”
“Sounds intense,” I say, and begin to rub the head. “Tell me more.”
She closes her eyes again, falling back into her private trance. “We were on one of our retreats at the Island. And when we arrived, you were so excited to take charge and lead the other kids in the games we all played. I remember you and Jude preferred dressing up like monkeys, because they’re the smartest animals. You became a leader and all the kids looked up to you—the rabbits, the scorpions, the chameleons. Your mind achieved astonishing feats of power, minimizing challenges and transcending perfection. All this, while you were having fun at the most magical carnival in existence.” She pauses to catch her breath. “Do you see any of it, Kat? Can you see yourself in the monkey suit? Running and chasing and emboldening your spirit? Can you see how adored you were? Can you remember anything about this, one of the most exciting and happiest times of your life?”
My palm is hot from its friction against Mnemosyne’s head. I try to conjure every image she describes and I tell myself I am almost there, that the nascent bud of a memory has implanted itself and begun to grow, and my brain is throwing sunlight to coax it along. But it’s all abstract: I’m younger, flailing about in a dime-store costume, but it’s not connected to any experience. I’m running, I’m laughing, I’m chasing—but where and who and why? I hear applause, I see approving faces—but not why they’re clapping or how I pleased them. I grow frustrated and switch the light off; I don’t want to picture anything I don’t recognize as true. I stop rubbing the statue and take my mother’s hand.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I say. “None of this is coming back to me. Your descriptions are vivid, and I believe this memory exists, but it doesn’t exist for me.”
She returns my squeeze, and her skin cools mine down. “Don’t worry, darling. This is your first day back home and I’ve pushed you terribly hard. We have all the time in the world to dig around that brilliant mind of yours, to uncover whatever secrets it holds. You will remember your wonderful life, I promise you.”
I am about to respond, to tell her no harm done, but am stopped by the expression taking shape on her face: regret and wistfulness and, in the deepest part of her oil-slick eyes, the smallest spark of relief.