sixteen

This isn’t the kind of place I’d ever have imagined finding myself. But who imagines these things? I’m sitting across from the neuro practitioner, Becky Moore. The desk is stacked high with papers. Post-it notes with initials and numbers—a secret code—flag each pile.

“Pink notes everywhere. What are those called? Posties?” Willa mumbles.

“Post-its,” I say.

“Right,” she says, and looks at me. “For other patients who can’t find the right words.”

I touch her arm and smile; it’s all I can think to do.

The office itself is sparse, like it needs to exist in contrast to the cluttered desk. Becky matches her desk more than her office, as if she’s borrowed someone else’s space and brought the desk with her. She wears a bright blue silk blouse, a loose silk scarf untied, and a blazer that hasn’t been pressed in a while. Her long dark hair is pulled back and then yanked to one side, where her ponytail falls over her left shoulder. Her wire-rimmed glasses rest on the bridge of her nose, and yet she still squints to read her notes.

She looks up with what I label the “serious smile.” “So Willa Wetherburn, tell me how you’re doing in your transition home?”

“Good, I think. I just have trouble bringing things to the surface of my mouth.”

“Could you explain further?”

“See? See?” Willa looks to me. “That’s the perfect example. I knew exactly what I wanted to say and it all came out in a different way. It’s like that inside my head and then in my mouth.”

“Frankly, I think that you expressed yourself better than most people who haven’t been slammed in the right temporal lobe.”

Willa smiles. “The only time I feel like my brain is working right is when I’m singing. But I can’t remember the old lyrics, and when I talk, I mix up the words.” She exhales through pursed lips. “And I can’t remember simple things, but I’ll remember the smell of Mom’s old house when she cooked pot roast.”

“I can explain that.” Becky reaches under her desk and pulls out a rolled-up poster, spreading it over the labeled piles, over her desk. This large poster, torn at the edges, a coffee stain on the lower left, is a huge illustration of the brain. The lobes are colored, the sections divided by dark lines, Cambria font labeling each section. “Here”—Becky points to a purple glob of brain tissue—“is the frontal lobe. The cerebral cortex is the gray matter surrounding this portion, and this is where blood gathered in your head like a bruise. This is where your injury is. And this is also”—she taps the illustration again—“where a memory starts and then travels through here, the hippocampus”—she points at a seahorse-looking creature in the middle of the brain—“to become a long-term memory. So you can see that when something happens to this area, it is difficult for your brain to remember.”

Willa runs her forefinger around the curves and undulations of the sketched brain. “So memories could be in here and not going to the right place or not coming out at all.”

“Or the memory could be all together gone.” Becky leans back in her chair. “Even the genius neurologists can’t explain it all. But I’m giving you the Cliffs Notes version. Your MRI today will show how much you’ve healed, but you’ll have to give it some time.”

“Is there a way to make myself remember … better? Is there a way to make this work?” Willa presses the poster paper, denting it into the pile of papers beneath. She lifts her hand to her own head to correspond to the purple-lobed image. “Is there something I can say or do to my head to make it remember?”

“Memory has its own language,” Becky says softly. “It doesn’t speak simple phonetics. Emotion can bring a memory. Music can dislodge or set one loose, as I’m sure you know. Smell, color, a word. Anything, everything.”

“In other words, you don’t know.”

“If we did know, if the neurological world knew exactly what language your memory spoke, we’d speak it now for you. Teach it to you.”

“I play guitar. Will that help?”

“Yes. We found that knitting helped one woman, drawing another, running another. You have to find your language, Willa. And accept that some things are gone. Some images were erased in the injury.”

Becky looks away and I follow her gaze to the far wall, where a framed photo of a younger Becky and a small blond child hangs on the wall. She flinches, and I imagine a memory of her own bubbling up, finding its language beneath her skin, before she turns back to Willa and me. “And the alcohol doesn’t help, either. All that past drinking you did…”

“That was years and years ago,” Willa says. “Ten or more.”

“I know.” Becky nods. “Me, too.” She looks to Willa and smiles, knowing that she has something to offer. “Eleven years here, but the damage is there, of course. There are things that don’t return.”

I fish into my purse for gum. I don’t really want gum; I need something to do with my hands. “What can I do?” I ask.

Becky looks at me as if she’d forgotten I was there all along. “Just be understanding and help her when the simplest things won’t return.”

“Of course.” I want to tell this woman all the things I’d do for Willa, all the things I have done. Asking for understanding is too simple; I need something complicated—a road map with markers and to-do lists.

Willa rises to leave, thanking the practitioner, when I blurt out, “I want to fix this.”

“I know,” Becky says. “I do, too. That’s why we’re here.”

Willa places her hand on my arm and nods to the door. Together, we walk to the car without speaking. Before she opens the passenger door, she looks at me over the top of the car. “So, Miss Fix It, it seems that the ticket is finding the language of my memory.”

“Music?” I ask.

“Maybe it is, but so is feeling something. I know that doesn’t make much sense, but sometimes feeling a particular emotion makes me remember a scene or piece of conversation or…” Her voice trails off mid-sentence and she climbs into the car.

We drive in silence as I do my best to be quiet—not my best attribute by a long shot—to allow Willa to find the words she needs to describe her memory. We’re on Martin Luther King Boulevard, and I’m steering the car toward the street where the accident occurred. I take in a breath before saying, “Keep talking about feeling something. What do you mean?”

“I’ll feel a certain way, and then bam!” She claps her hands together. “I’ll remember an event that felt that exact same way.”

“You have to be more specific.” I can see Willa’s profile in the side mirror, and the red comma of a scar above her eye.

“I’m alone in the cottage and the rain comes sideways, not hitting the window, but sideswiping it. The thunder is far away. Then I’ll get an empty feeling, an opening in the middle of me, and I remember being ten years old. We were left home alone during that hurricane. But it isn’t the rain that makes me remember, because the rain is different; it is the actual feeling of the rain that brings the memory.” She leans her head against the window, as if this recounting had been exhausting, an emptying in itself.

“I get it.”

“Where are we going?”

“Trust me,” I say.

It’s midafternoon in Savannah. The temperature is above ninety and the humidity the same. The haze of heat may be slowing the city, but the tourists with their paper maps persist in gathering for ghost tours. They’re pointing their cameras and cell phones at old houses, trees, and, of course, the bench where Forrest Gump sat. Those who aren’t wandering around the streets are perched in horse-drawn carriages. The dark and magnificent animals walk forward with blank round eyes, with their heads down and a slick sheen of sweat on their bodies. I want to stop traffic, untie the horses, and lead them to the nearest fountain. These tourists will never understand the true allure and mystery of this city. The fascinating parts of this city are inside the stories.

I turn the car onto Twenty-fourth Street and slow behind another carriage. Willa makes a small noise in the back of her throat and I stop the car. “There,” she says as I turn onto Preston Street.

I was five years old when I heard a tour guide say, “Savannah is the first planned city in the United States,” and I thought he’d said, “first planted city.” For years, I believed that every live oak, magnolia, and camellia bush had been the first planted in the United States, just for Savannah. And this street does look as if every tree had been deliberately planted to create an arch of carved branches reaching over the street and then across the spaces between one another: a shield, a wall, a tunnel.

The houses haven’t fared so well. Many of the dwellings have been turned into apartments or abandoned all together. The rusted FOR SALE signs bear that out. This is the way with Savannah: You can walk down a beautiful street, marveling at the cornice designs, and the gardens holding secrets behind wrought-iron gates, and then turn a corner and be scared.

I park the car and keep it running with the music on. Jack Johnson sings “Flake,” and Willa opens the passenger side door, swinging her legs out but remaining in the car, leaning forward to stare.

The tree is at least a hundred years old or more, a gnarled live oak with branches that bend and take sharp turns upward and then dive down again. Spanish moss hangs in bearded clumps, and on the ground, moss grows in the shadow of clustered, embracing leaves. Bark clings to the trunk in overlapping and oversized barnacles. Three feet up from the bottom of the tree, a bite mark exposes its inside honey-colored meat.

I glance up for the broken remnants of the branch Brando said could have killed Willa, but I can’t find it. Willa leaves the car and stands next to the tree, her oversized sunglasses covering her eyes. “I got nothing.” She runs her hand across the smooth wood of the injured and exposed area under the bark. “It’s like I was never here. Like this might as well be the Hundred Acre Wood, where Winnie the Piglet lives with Pooh.”

I laugh out loud. “God, Willa. You’re a mess.”

She smiles, but her cheeks don’t rise enough to touch the bottom rim of her sunglasses. My sister, touching something that might have taken her life as if it is just another tree, any tree at all. She leans against the bark and looks upward, and I go to her and do the same, wanting to know what she sees, wishing I could feel what she feels. The canopy of moss and leaves hang as lace turned green, a tablecloth crocheted in intricate patterns. Music spills from my car and now the Dixie Chicks sing “Landslide.” Their voices are soft, muffled, like they’re in one of the dilapidated houses, singing behind the rotted windows and warped doors.

Together, Willa and I rest our backs against the tree, staring up, the scarred gash between us. She reaches her hand down and rests it on the wounded tree as if trying to heal it and her mind with the same touch.

“I know I went out that night to sing. I know it even if I can’t remember it. There would be no other reason to go to the Bohemian on open-mike night. And I had my guitar. Benson said I was there and then I was gone—that I left before my set.”

“Go on,” I say.

“There’s nothing to go on about. Next thing is you in the hospital, looking at me. Until I felt the pain, until I woke up completely, you know what I thought?”

“No. What?”

“Why is Eve in my bedroom, staring at me while I sleep? That’s creepy.”

“I was so scared.…”

“And mad.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I can read your face. And you were mad as hell. I don’t blame you. It was my fault.”

“I’m not mad, Willa.”

“I know you’re not now. You probably didn’t want to be even then.”

“I don’t think I was, but I don’t know. I was so confused and worried.”

“What could I have possibly been doing that would make Cooper force me to leave?” Willa lifts the sunglasses from her eyes to stare at me now. “What? Did I try to sit on a client’s lap? Did I holler or scream, or dance, or kiss him?”

“He just said you were so drunk and that you were headed for his table, and he was nervous about what you would do or say.”

The music changes then, and so does Willa. It’s a wondrous thing to see the way a cloud passes and the sunlight bursts through the tree’s moss and leaf canopy while Willa’s eyes widen as if to take in the light and music. Lucinda Williams sings “Can’t Let Go” in her sultry man-woman voice, and Willa grabs my hand. “This music. This CD. I made it for you.”

“Yes. Last Christmas. All your favorite songs.”

“I was going to sing this song that night.”

“Okay.”

“I was warming up in the back kitchen, waiting for Marisa to finish her set. Cooper was there. I said something to the waiter, something about not wanting Cooper to hear me play because he makes me nervous with his furrowed brow. I was thinking about not playing at all. About just hanging out.”

“Why would Cooper make you so nervous? You’ve played in front of him before.”

She shakes her head. “It wasn’t him, Eve. It was something else. I don’t know.”

I rest my hand on her shoulder. “Maybe his clients?”

She shrugs and touches the tree again. “Do you have to get right back to work?”

“I have a quick meeting with that accountant, and then I’m free. Why?”

“I want to go ask for those pictures.…” She turns around and points between the houses. “That’s where they found him. You think that’s a coincidence?”

“Yes, I do. This isn’t the best part of town. Things happen here.”

“But what were we doing here? Me and Cooper?”

“This is how he cuts through to get home from downtown,” I say, glad to offer this simple explanation.

“Oh.”

She looks toward the houses, toward the dark alley. I imagine a tiny seed inside the folds of her brain that holds the memories of that night, hidden and dark. I read once, before the accident—everything’s now divided into before and after—that the Hubble telescope once pointed its lens to a vast area of dark, empty sky. “We were just curious,” the scientists said. “We just wondered about the blank patch of universe.” But what they found in the darkness, in the nothingness, were millions of galaxies. What looked to be empty was anything but.

*   *   *

The design for number eight in the Ten Good Ideas line—Find Adventure—waits on the project table. The thick cotton stock is dense with a sketched forest. In the far right corner, there’s a figure, a woman in a white dress set against a dark blue night sky, peeking around a tree. On the left side of the card, there’s a man—also peeking around a tree. They’re facing each another, and yet it’s unclear if either sees the other. The night is so dark. The trees are so dense.

Max comes to my side as I look at the drawing, turning it at different angles. “Like it?” he asks.

“No.” I place the sheet down and turn to face him. “I love it.”

He waves his hand toward Francie, who’s on the phone across the room. “She did most of it.”

“But your idea.”

“How was Willa’s appointment?” he asks.

“Okay. Nothing really new except that what she’s experiencing is normal, whatever ‘normal’ means these days.”

A jittery silence quivers between us. We haven’t talked about the Kiss. I’ve done my best not to think about the Kiss. But it’s there—sitting between us, smirking. It seems to beg for an answer. I can’t give one. I don’t have to, either, because the overhead bell rings, signaling another appointment.

“The accountant,” I say to Max. “Right?”

“Probably.”

Francie opens the door and allows the woman into our space. She stands taking our studio in the way she did the first time she visited, looking for something or someone she can’t seem to find.

“I’m back here,” I say.

She sways toward me, her long black pants—wide at the bottom, like a skirt—billowing out in a dance. Her white tank top is a fashionable version of a man’s undershirt, pulling tight across her breasts. A white bra strap peeks above her collarbone, and a fragile gold necklace hangs on her neck with a peace sign pendant. A woman trying to look like a girl, I think.

“Hello,” she says to me, her voice crisp and quick, like she wants to get it over with.

“I have your packet here,” I say. “Let’s sit down and go through it. I think you’ll like what we did with this third concept, incorporating your changes.”

She pulls out the metal chair and it scrapes loudly, a screech across the concrete floor. Sitting, she folds her hands in her lap. “Show me.”

I open the file and spread the graphic-design sheets across the table. “This is the branding logo we like best, but on this second page are alternates. And this”—I point at a wave pattern with her initials inside—“is a watermark to put on all your stationery or cards.” I continue on, explaining the designs and how they can be combined.

“I told you I didn’t like the wave at all,” she says.

Mary Jo, with her peace sign pendant, has never once mentioned she doesn’t like the wave, but arguing with a customer is about as effective as arguing with a cat, so I smile. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not paying you to be sorry. I’m paying you to help me find a brand that echoes my superior accounting services.”

“Moving on to this concept, then.” I slide the next sheet toward her. “The palmetto leaf and sea oats, and—”

She interrupts me. “Stop. Really the best you can do is a wave and some plants? I could hire a grad student from SCAD who could do better than this.”

“There’s more than the images; it’s the package. We mix them up to find exactly what you feel.…”

“I feel like I need to take back my project.” She stands and looks down at me. “Find someone who knows what the hell she’s doing.”

By the time she’s reached the end of her obnoxious speech, Max is at the table, standing next to me. Willa has entered the studio and sits in the back corner, strumming her guitar.

“Is there a problem?” Max asks.

The woman looks at Max and her face softens. There she is, the kind of woman who knows how to act differently in front of a man. I’ve been jealous of these kinds of women. I know how to be one way, and switching personalities for gender has never been in my bag of tricks. It’s definitely in hers, I think.

“No real problem. I just don’t think that Eve here understands my needs. So I think it’s best if I move on.”

Here is how something goes for me: A narrative forms in my head, a running dialogue, as if I’m writing a screenplay for the scene, what I want to say and what I do say hardly matching. My internal dialogue says this: Yes, why don’t you move on, and after you do, please stop at a restaurant and eat something to put meat on your bones. It’s obvious why I don’t say these things out loud, right?

“If you think it’s best” is what I do say.

“I do.” She begins to gather the papers and place them neatly into the file folder.

Max drops his hand on top of the file. “You can’t take that with you.”

“It’s mine. I paid for it.”

“No, you didn’t. If you want to finish the process and pay your final installment, then you can take it. Otherwise, no go.”

Willa’s music and voice gain speed in the back of the studio. Francie joins her with the lyrics, a melody of love: something lost, something needed.

Mary Jo opens her mouth and another voice comes out, a new and high, screeching voice. “Give me my folder. Give it to me.” She opens her mouth again as if she means for more to come out, something else, but nothing at all erupts. Willa and Francie stop singing. I hold my breath, and Max places his hand on my lower back. In the aftermath of the song and the screeching demand, a silence falls over our studio. Far off, that owl again hoots.

A scuffling sound follows, and Willa stands with us, her guitar still in hand, an extension of her arm and voice. “You,” she says to Mary Jo.

Mary Jo looks down, digs into her purse until she finds her sunglasses, and shoves them on her face so quickly, it seems she might break the bridge of her nose. “Me,” she says in a sarcastic echo of identification.

Willa’s face drains of color, and her fingers flutter in the air as if she is still playing the guitar. She stares at Mary Jo, moving closer. “In the booth while I practiced that song.”

“What?”

Mary Jo walks backward toward the door, clutching her necklace as a talisman.

Willa hands her guitar to Max and takes two steps toward Mary Jo, who is by now more than halfway across the barn. Willa catches up and places one hand on Mary Jo’s shoulder. “You were there. You were with Cooper. In the booth.”

Mary Jo spins around, her mouth twisted. “You’re crazy. You know that, right? I don’t know why they let a crazy person work here, but maybe that’s why the designs suck.” She pulls away from Willa and looks toward Max, then at me. “I don’t know how y’all were voted the best letterpress in Savannah. Probably because of your husband’s rich Morrison family. Because it’s not for your work.”

“That’s enough,” Max says.

“I’m not crazy,” Willa protests in a monotone voice. “Your voice. It’s stuck in my head.” Willa takes in a long breath. “You were screaming at Cooper about not leaving you there alone. That terrible voice.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Mary Jo trips backward, trying to leave, to escape.

“If I’d been Cooper, I’d have left you alone in that booth, too.” Willa says this with a hiss behind her voice, a threat.

Mary Jo reaches up, and it all moves slowly, but not slowly enough for me to stop her hand from slapping Willa across the face, lightly, almost a pretense of a slap. The sound—skin on skin—breaks our silence and we run toward Willa and Mary Jo, tripping over chairs and piles of paper, over boxes and bags. I reach Willa first, but she’s recovered, holding her hand over her face and glaring directly at Mary Jo.

Max stands between them. “Leave,” he says, his low voice vibrating underneath my ribs like thunder.

Mary Jo turns and slides open the barn doors, but she doesn’t close them. We don’t move. Willa holds her hand over her cheek. I place my hands over my stomach, where I feel an opening begin to form, a cavernous, bottomless opening. Max rests his hand on my shoulder and Francie slumps to a chair. The geo-tagging, I think, the uniting of place and memory.

“Sorry,” Willa says, tears rising in her eyes. She bends over as if she is going throw up. “I did it again. I mucked it up again, didn’t I?” Sobs tear through Willa the same way they have a few times since her return home. But this holds passion: something true. She looks up while bent over. “Eve.”

“Yes,” I say, exhaling the breath I’ve been holding.

“Cooper was with her that night. She was there.”

“Okay.”

“She didn’t want him to leave her alone. There wasn’t anyone else there.”

“Why was she here?” Max asks.

“I don’t know.” Willa stands up straight, wipes at her eyes. “To see who we are? What we do?”

A flood opens inside me. I slide open the barn doors and run up the gravel path toward the house. A hurricane wind blows behind my eardrums as I fling myself into the kitchen. “Cooper,” I holler, the screech of my own voice harsh.

Gwen appears in the curved entryway. “What’s wrong with you?”

I grind my teeth together, a vain attempt at self-control. “I’m looking for your dad.”

“He’s upstairs.”

I walk slowly, even as my body wants to run up the stairwell. I push away the larger understanding as I notice the smaller things: The frames in the hallway need dusting; the corner of the rug runner is folded over; Gwen’s bedroom light is on. These are things I can fix and these are things I notice, ticking them off in my brain to keep from hearing Mary Jo’s voice, hear the slithering slap of her hand against Willa’s cheek.

Steam flows from the master bath and into the bedroom, where it fogs up the windows. There is my husband, in the steam, a towel wrapped around his waist. This is an ordinary moment, one repeated for years and years, a familiar scene of our married life, and here I am, seeing everything in a new way: What is familiar becomes distorted and peculiar. His wet hair hasn’t yet been brushed and he is placing folded shirts in an open suitcase.

“Going somewhere?” I ask.

“Hey, darling.” He walks toward me and kisses me.

I am rigid with anger. “Where are you going?”

“I told you. I have to go to Nashville to meet with the music publisher who wants in on the magazine deal.”

He did tell me. I’d forgotten. “Is Mary Jo going with you?”

I watch him carefully, the details sharp and holding clues. First his brow drops down and then his eyes open wide. He yawns: a one-two count. He touches his chin, where only moments before he shaved, there must have been stubble. “Who?”

I am silent as I allow her name to settle into the room.

“Eve, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The woman with the long dark hair. Skinny. High-pitched voice.”

“Oh, her. The accountant for the Glencoe documents.”

“The woman you were with the night you wrecked the car.”

Cooper drops a folded shirt into the suitcase and then walks toward me, tightening the towel around his waist. “Let’s start over here. I didn’t wreck the car. Your sister did. And I wasn’t with Mary Jo. That’s insane.”

“Yes, you were.”

“Is that what Willa says?”

My voice doesn’t shake, which surprises me, because everything else about me quivers. “Yes, that’s what Willa says.”

Cooper’s face softens and he shakes his head. “Poor thing.” He sits on the bed, next to his suitcase.

“What do you mean?”

He holds out his hand for me to take, but I don’t move. “You can’t do this, love. This has to stop. You can’t let your sister come between us. When have I ever, in all our married life, given you reason to distrust me?” He looks directly at me, the way I used to make Gwen do when she was young and I wanted her to understand what I was saying. “When?” he asks again.

“Never.” I drop my gaze, unable to hold it any longer. “Until now.”

“Why would I start now?” He exhales. “Remember when Willa showed up drunk at our rehearsal dinner? Remember when we visited her in Colorado and she forgot we were coming and she’d gone camping? Remember when Willa slept with my best man? Remember when—”

“I get it. She’s screwed up a few times.”

“I know things have been bumpy and we’re both buried in work. Gwen isn’t behaving, but to think…” He shakes his head. “I know this is hard for you, but I think you’re forgetting what it is for me.” He touches his scar, a reminder of his pain. “And to have you not believe in me, it’s almost…” He closes his eyes and then opens them again, and now they’re full of tears. “If you’re doubting me, I don’t know you as well as I thought.”

“What does that mean?”

“How could you think I’d be able to do something like that?”

“Something like what?” My voice rises on the last word. “I didn’t say what I thought you were or weren’t doing. I am asking if this woman is someone you know. If you were with her that night.”

He holds his fingers to his lips. “You’re yelling.”

I lower my voice. “Do you know her?”

“Yes. I just told you that I think you’re talking about the accountant on the Glencoe project.”

“Then why in the hell is she fishing around in my studio? None of this makes sense.”

He stands up and walks toward the closet. “I told her about your branding and incredible business. She must have decided to use you. I brag about you all the time.”

The steam has dissipated and the bathroom is clear; my husband takes socks from his drawer and I sit on the edge of the bed, trying to find something to say.

“Eve, I have a plane to catch. I can’t sit here and debate with you about what is real and what isn’t.”

“What is real, Cooper?”

His voice floats from the closet. “I am.” And then he emerges with that smile. “And you are. And this family is.”

“So we just pretend that night didn’t happen.”

He speaks slowly, enunciating each word. “How am I supposed to pretend it didn’t happen when I’m paying the outlandish hospital bills for your sister, who doesn’t have insurance and needs therapy? And I’m facing at least two surgeries. No, I don’t think we can pretend it didn’t happen. But we can stop looking for excuses for Willa.”

The hollow, floating hope inside me sinks. There is nowhere else to go when the conversation goes here, back to this cul-de-sac.

Cooper returns to the closet, and when he comes out, he’s fully dressed, his pale blue tie tight against his Adam’s apple. “Are we okay here now? I hate leaving if you’re mad at me.”

“I’m not mad,” I say. “I’m confused.”

He bites down hard, teeth on teeth. His jaw clenches on the side. “You’re not the one who was hit in the head. I have no idea why you’re the one who’s confused.”

“Who were you with that night, Cooper? Who were the clients you were with?”

“I already told you. Harvey Bern and his wife, the owners of the Anglers, that charter group that does the fishing show on NBC Sunday mornings. They’re trying to decide whether to pay a huge sum of money to advertise in my magazine. It’s the largest advertising deal we’ve ever had.”

“Mary Jo wasn’t there?”

Cooper slams the top of his suitcase down. “No, Eve. Mary Jo, the freelance accountant, was not there.”

“Why does Willa think she was?”

“I’m not trying to be a jerk here. I’m just saying what you already know, so don’t make me the bad guy. She was unreliable before the accident, so why would you believe her now?”

“It seemed so real; her memory seemed so real. The way she heard that woman’s voice and then fell apart.”

“What do you mean, ‘heard’ her voice?”

“Whoever she is, she’s a nut job, Cooper. She came to the studio.”

“What?”

“When Willa thought she remembered her voice, she went a little nuts.”

“Shit, I’ll take her off the accounts.” Cooper holds out his hand for me and I take it this time. He pulls me close. “I love you. I’m sorry this is so hard for you, but you can’t freak out every time Willa freaks out. We’ll all go crazy. We have our own family to protect.”

He’s right. If I go off the tracks every time Willa does, we’ll all be in a mess. It just seemed so authentic—the memory rising with the music and the voice, the language of that particular night returning to my sister in full. But it was a ghost, a shadowed memory of another night, another woman, and another place.

“Cooper, I have one more question.”

“I have a plane—”

“I know, a plane to catch. This will only take a second. I need to know why you emptied my business account.”

“I didn’t empty it. I moved things around for a few days. Nothing is missing.”

“Okay, but why? And why didn’t you say anything to me?”

“Eve, I’ve always managed the money, and you’ve always trusted me. I was liquidating a money market account to pay our bills—family bills—and the money hadn’t made it to our account yet, so I just … switched.”

“I don’t get it. Why couldn’t you pay family bills without liquidating an account? Is there … something I don’t know?”

“No, it wasn’t a big deal. I’d invested in a new stock and didn’t have enough cash flow. Nothing to worry about at all.”

“That’s what Fritz was talking about.… Now I get it. You should have told me. That’s my company. Our payment to a provider bounced. You can’t do that.”

“I can’t do that?” He squints at me and his scar puckers.

“No, you have to tell me.”

“Okay. Next time, I’ll tell you.”

“No next time. Don’t use Fine Line money to pay family bills. Please.”

“I have to go, Eve. I’m going to miss my plane.” He smiles and holds up his right hand. “I swear never to move things around without telling you.”

He hugs me good-bye. A dry kiss to the side of my lips and he’s gone.

I’m as tired as if Cooper and I had run six miles while having that discussion. I want to lie down, sleep a month, when I hear Gwen’s voice. “Mom?”

“Hey, Pea.”

“I believe Willa,” she says.

We’re on fragile ground here, mother and daughter. One wrong move or sound and everything will shatter.

“Memory’s a strange thing, Gwen.” I pat the bed for her to come sit with me, but she stands firm. “It’s not something reliable like a photo. Or a video.”

“But Aunt Willa would never make something up like that.”

“Were you listening to us?”

“How could I help it, Mom? You guys were, like, totally screaming at each other.”

“I don’t think Willa made it up. But I do think her mind made it up. Does that make sense? I’ve learned that when there are blank spaces in our memories, we can fill them in with other images, other memories, other dreams.”

“Not Willa. She doesn’t lie.”

“I don’t think she’s lying. But I don’t think she knows the truth, either.”

“I don’t think you know the truth.”

“I might not, Gwen. But here’s one true thing: I can’t have our family fall apart. I can’t.… I’m doing what I can to keep it all together, and help Willa.”

Gwen rolls her eyes, a skill mastered when young. “So you just believe Dad?”

I don’t answer; I can’t.

“I don’t.” Gwen shakes her head and her hair falls to the side, and there it is: the dreaded ink on skin.

“Stop,” I shout, and shoot from the bed to her side. “What is this?” I hold her shoulder and lift her hair. There on the bottom of her scalp, directly on her hairline, is a half-inch feather, dark and permanent: a tattoo.

She jerks away from me and bolts down the hallway, slamming her bedroom door for emphasis.

“Gwen, open up.” I’m at her door, trying to speak through the crack, wanting to crawl under the small space between floor and door.

“No. You’ll just lecture me.”

“Just let me in.”

Silence.

I lift my hand to bang on the door and then think better of it. A small feather at the base of her neck; the slightest rebellion, not meant to be seen. I take a deep breath and walk away, moving down the stairs to the kitchen.

I roll paper into the typewriter and hit the keys to type a note, which I leave on the counter for her to find when she finally emerges.

To the moon and back … I love you, Mom.