Flashback

NINE

“It was Pat’s apartment,” Brian explained as we pulled up in front of a nondescript residential building not far from the tourist office. We had walked through the medina to the port entrance, then taken a petit taxi to the Ville Nouvelle.

Brian paid the driver, then unlocked the building’s front door and motioned for me to step inside.

“How long have you been here?” I asked as we started up the stairs.

“Eight months.”

“And you never thought of giving up?”

“Every day,” Brian admitted. “But when I really thought about it, thought about what it would mean to make that decision, to decide to leave…” He stopped and looked at me. “If I was the one in trouble and Pat was the one looking for me, he wouldn’t give up.”

We started upward again in silence. The apartment was on the fifth floor, at the front of the building. It was nicer than Joshi’s place, but blander, more utilitarian, all square angles and white paint. An L-shaped front hall led to a galley kitchen and a good-sized living room with a small balcony. Two partially closed doors revealed a bathroom and bedroom.

That it was the apartment of a transplant was obvious. Many of the furnishings were tastefully Moroccan, but the accessories hinted at a life left behind. A bulletin board over the computer desk in the living room was crammed with photographs: well-groomed girls in summer dresses, distinctly un-African gardens in full bloom, a picnic on a beach somewhere. An open cabinet next to the television held several dozen videotapes, the handwritten black-and-white labels marked Yankees/Red Sox or NHL East Finals. A football rested on an end table.

“Can I get you something?” Brian asked, laying his coat across the back of a chair. “Tea? Something to eat? I’ve even got good old American peanut butter.”

“No thanks,” I told him. It was well past three by now, and all I wanted was a good night’s sleep.

“There are some women’s clothes in the dresser in the bedroom,” Brian said. “Hannah’s, I’ve always assumed. And you’re welcome to anything of mine or Pat’s as well. There’s just the one bed, but it’s a big one, if you don’t mind sharing. I can always sleep out here.”

“No,” I said. “Sharing’s fine with me.”

Brian nodded toward the bedroom door. “I’ll let you change.”

Hannah’s wardrobe was that of a traveler, just a few simple pieces, modest and practical. October fifth, I thought, remembering the last date of Hannah’s stay at the El Minzah. It hadn’t taken her long to move out of the hotel and in with Pat. I set my pack down, stripped out of my grungy clothes, and pulled on an oversized T-shirt.

Brian was waiting for me just outside the door when I emerged from the bedroom. “Thank my mom,” he said, handing me a brand-new toothbrush. “She sends a care package every couple of weeks. She’s big on oral hygiene.”

“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.

I turned to the B’s and then the H’s, scanning the names, finding no entry for Hannah Boyle in either place, only Borak, Brown, Hamidi, Hassan, and a single, seemingly misplaced item penciled in at the end of the H’s. Mustapha, Pharmacie Rafa, it said, followed by a phone number and a Marrakech address.

A key rattled in the apartment’s front door, and I quickly slid the book back into its drawer and stood up. Brian appeared from around the corner of the front hall, a plastic shopping bag in one hand.

“Good morning,” he said, smiling.

“Thanks for the coffee,” I told him.

“Did you sleep well?”

I nodded. “Better than I have in a long time.”

He walked to the little kitchen table, set the bag down, and pulled out a loaf of bread, some eggs, and a package of dates. “Scrambled or fried?” he asked.

“Fried,” I said, enthusiastically. It had been a long time since my grease-logged meal at the Pub.

He put the dates in a bowl on the table and pulled a frying pan from one of the kitchen cabinets. “Find anything interesting?” he asked, lighting the gas stove.

“I shouldn’t have been prying,” I apologized. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said, pouring a generous amount of olive oil into the frying pan. “I’d be overjoyed if you could find something I haven’t, though I doubt you will. I’ve been through the computer at least a dozen times.”

“And the address book?”

“A lot of dead ends,” he said, reaching for the eggs. He cracked one into the skillet, and it popped in the hot grease.

I took one of the dates from the bowl and watched him cook. “I thought I’d go down to Marrakech,” I said. “Pay a visit to the folks at All Join Hands. Any idea when the next train is?”

Brian flipped the eggs, then looked at his watch. “There’s a train at one in the afternoon, and a red-eye that leaves after midnight. But if you’re going to Marrakech, I’m going with you.”

I shook my head. “I’m going alone.”

“No arguments,” he said, sliding the eggs onto two plates, setting the plates on the table.

No arguments, I thought. I crossed my fingers behind my back, a gesture from childhood, the motion instinctual. “We’ll take the red-eye.”

There’s a part of me, a part of all amnesiacs, that operates purely on blind faith. Take away memory, and you’re left with little more than intuition, a sense of people and their motives that’s as precise and mysterious as a bat’s knowledge of the space it inhabits. Despite the peanut butter and the Super Bowl tapes, despite the photographs, my faith told me that something about Brian wasn’t quite right.

Besides, if I had come to know one thing about myself in the days since my drive back from Lyon, it was that I was a danger to those around me. The sisters were dead because of me, and there was no doubt in my mind Joshi was dead because of me. I liked Brian Haverman, and the last thing I wanted was his blood on my hands, too. We’d both be better off, I told myself, if I went to Marrakech alone.

I worked on an exit strategy over breakfast. A trip to the bank? No, a return to the Continental for something I’d forgotten. Though I wasn’t sure how I’d explain having to take my bag. Then, over the dishes, Brian announced he was going to the post office, and I gratefully declined his invitation to accompany him.

I waited till he was out the door, then set to work outfitting myself with Hannah Boyle’s castoffs, exchanging my own dirty travel clothes for her clean ones. I put enough money for the train trip and some incidentals in my pocket, then stuffed everything else, including the black box’s contents and the Beretta, in my pack.

It was just past twelve when I checked my watch. Brian would figure out where I’d gone sooner or later, but I hoped to at least buy myself enough time to get on the one o’clock train alone. I copied the address of the All Join Hands offices out of Pat’s address book and left a hastily scrawled note on the kitchen table: Back soon, Eve. Then I slung the pack over one shoulder and let myself out the door.