Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac (4 page)

“Why are you crying, kiddo? Is it your head?”

The doctors had told us that people with head injuries could be emotional, but it wasn’t that. It was just…everything.

“It wasn’t entirely your mother’s fault. Mainly hers, but…” Dad laughed. “I’m kidding. Mostly.”

I felt so alone.

“What is it? Please, tell your old man.”

“I feel like an orphan.” I was sobbing to the point that Dad couldn’t understand me the first time and I had to repeat myself. “I’m an orphan.”

It probably won’t make any sense, but it was like my mother was less my mother than she had been before. Or maybe that I was less her child now that she had a new one. I was a vestigial daughter: an obsolete girl with an obsolete brain and an obsolete heart. I could hear my dad’s breathing, but he didn’t say anything and I still couldn’t bear to look at him. I closed my eyes.

“Naomi?” Dad said after a while. “Are you sleeping?”

I kept my eyes closed and let him think that I was.

He kissed me on my forehead. “I’ll never leave you, kid.” He wouldn’t have said this if he’d thought I was awake.

BY MONDAY MORNING, THE DOCTORS HAD DETERMINED
that I couldn’t remember most things after sixth grade, which I’d pretty much known since that first conversation with Dad, and they sent me home.

No one knew anything really. I was a bona fide medical mystery. In their genius opinion, the head trauma wasn’t severe enough to have caused the kind of amnesia I had, so they said I was probably
repressing
, or some such crap. Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure it was the fall down the stairs.

They said my memory might come back or it might not. And in any case, we should all act as if it wasn’t going to. There wasn’t anything to be done anyway. In a couple of weeks, there would be more pictures of my brain that probably wouldn’t show anything. Therapy, maybe.

“Rest,” they said.

“And then?”

“Resume ‘normal’ life as much as possible,” they said. “Go back to school when you’re ready.”

“Maybe it’ll help you remember,” they said. “But then again, maybe it won’t.”

“The human brain is mysterious,” they said.

“Good luck to you,” they said, handing me a sample-size bottle of Excedrin and an excuse note from gym; and Dad, a bill as thick as a
National Geographic.

I scanned the hospital parking lot for our car, which in my last recollection had been a silver SUV (Mom’s) or a red truck (Dad’s). I didn’t see either. “Dad, you think it’s a bad sign that I don’t know which car is ours?”

“I don’t believe in signs,” Dad said as he pointed to a compact white vehicle that was wedged between two other compact white vehicles.

“You’re joking. You loved that truck!”

Dad muttered something about the new one being more fuel-efficient. “It’s covered in the memoir,” he added.

It was, though I wouldn’t find this out for many months. He wrote about the truck on page ninety-eight of his book. He claimed to have sold it because it reminded him of Mom. He didn’t mention a thing about fuel efficiency. It was funny how Dad was more honest in a book that anyone in the world could pick up and read than he could be talking to me. Or maybe it was sad. One or the other. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

I got into the passenger’s seat and put on my seatbelt. Just as we were pulling away, Dad’s cell phone rang, and he asked me did I mind if he took it. I said it was fine; after the doctors’ near constant interrogation, I appreciated not talking.

“Yes. Hello. Me too. I’ve been meaning to call you…” Dad said stiffly to someone. He seemed embarrassed to be talking in front of me.

“Who is it?” I whispered.

“No one. Work,” he mouthed to me. He rolled his eyes and slipped on a headset.

I decided I’d misread his tone and turned my concentration to the view outside. The trees were still green, but you could feel that summer was over. It made me think of a day I could remember, and how it had definitely been summer then. I didn’t necessarily remember the trees, but I remembered the air that day. It had that fresh-cut-lawn smell, where it feels like all of nature is just
sighing
with relief. My parents and I had left for Iceland about a week later.

I wondered if Mom was having her affair even then. She must have been. She had said that her daughter was already three. My mother’s daughter. My sister. I couldn’t think about that yet.

Out the car window Tarrytown looked familiar enough. I noticed a new subdivision of houses and a new McDonald’s. The place where they used to sell apple cider and doughnuts had been torn down. But basically, nothing much had changed, and this was reassuring.

All of a sudden, Dad turned onto a street I didn’t recognize. Even though Dad was still on the phone, I asked him where we were going.

Dad hung up before answering. “We moved,” he said simply. “I should have mentioned it before, but there were so many things. I’ll add it to the list when we get home. We’re almost there.”

His list was turning out to be a complete waste.

Dad informed me that they had sold our house after the divorce. He had bought a different house about a half mile from our old one. He mentioned that the new house was “larger” (why we needed a larger house when fewer people lived in it was beyond me) and “closer to school” and “besides, we hadn’t lived all that long in the other house anyway, not like Brooklyn.”

The new house was much more modern than our old house had been. The back wall looked like it was made entirely from glass, and it was incredibly drafty inside. Our old house had been two stories with all these strangely shaped rooms and narrow flights of stairs. I think it had been built in 1803 or something. The new house was, well, new. It was on one level, and seemed more, I guess you might say, organized, if you were being kind. Sterile, if you weren’t.

There were a few artifacts from the old house, but not many. At a glance I recognized a clay planter in front of the fireplace, a small braided rug near the laundry room, a cast-iron umbrella stand. They all looked awkward and out of place, like orphans.

“What do you think?” Dad smiled. I could tell he was proud of his house.

I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I told him it was nice. Truly, there was nothing much to say. It was all very beige. The sofa was beige. The stain on the wood floor was beige. The walls were beige. What in the world can you say about beige?

To Mom, any reasonably flat or bare surface was a potential canvas, and she had always been painting and changing the colors of our walls. Our house smelled of paint, but also of all her other projects. Like melted crayons and clay and weird incense and glue and newsprint. Like people lived there and things were happening there. Like home. This new house smelled like…synthetic citrus. “Dad, what’s with the weird orange scent?”

“Just something the housekeeper uses. I didn’t like it at first, but now I’m kind of used to it. It’s organic.” Dad sighed and then he clapped his hands together. “Okay, I assume you’ll be wanting the official grand tour.”

“Could we do it after lunch maybe?” I told Dad I was really tired, and he led me down the hall to “my room.”

“Look at all familiar?” he asked.

Unlike the rest of the house, my room did share some similarities with the bedroom I remembered. The furniture, for one, was exactly the same. I practically wanted to hug my wicker dresser or, like, give my desk chair a massage.

I told Dad I wanted to be alone. He had just been standing there, and I sensed he needed to be told to leave. Dad nodded and said that he had some work to do, but that his office was down the hall if I wanted him.

“Oh hey, you’ll need this!” Dad called just as he was about to go. He took the list out of his pocket. It was on five sheets of paper and one hundred eighty-six items long.

“It was lonesome here without you, kid,” he said. He kissed me on the forehead to the right of my injuries. I closed the door behind him, and then I went to sleep.

Dad woke me for lunch and again for dinner, but the meals made no impression. I didn’t really wake until around eight that night. I was alone for the first time in what felt like years, but had really been almost no time at all.

At the hospital I had basically avoided mirrors. It was easy. I just slipped past them, holding my breath as if there were a ghost in the room.

Partially I think it was because I didn’t want to see my injuries. It probably sounds like vanity, but it wasn’t. In my opinion, wounds are like water set to boil—they heal best left unwatched.

But every now and again I would accidentally catch a glimpse of myself. In a glass on my food tray, in the lenses of a doctor’s spectacles, in the window at night before all the lights were turned out. For a moment, I would not even realize who I was looking at, and, instinctively, I would turn away. It is rude to stare at strangers and that is what I was to myself. I did not know the girl in the glass nor did she know me.

Now that I was finally alone, I felt braver. I decided that it was time to reacquaint myself with myself. The meeting couldn’t be put off any longer.

The first thing I did was remove all my clothes and examine my body in the mirrored closet door.

It was what I had been expecting. Even though I had lost four years of memories, I had never actually thought that I was twelve. I’m not saying that it’s like this for other people, but this is how it was for me. I instinctively knew I was older. And although my body was surprising in certain ways, it looked more or less how I felt inside, so it was okay.

My face was a bit more shocking to me, and not because of my injuries either—Will’s description had been accurate on that front, and the whole mess was already changing colors, which I interpreted as healing. My face was strange because it looked like someone I knew, a cousin maybe, but not me. My hair was about the same length, halfway down my back, but it might have been highlighted, I wasn’t sure. My jaw was narrower; my nose, sharper.

“Hello,” I greeted myself. “I’m Naomi.” The girl in the mirror didn’t seem convinced.

“Anything you have to say for yourself?” I asked.

She stared at me blankly and said nothing.

I decided that mirrors were completely useless.

I found a T-shirt in my bureau and put it on.

I opened my closet door. The person who lived in my room (for I could not quite think of
her
as
me
yet) was incredibly organized. It was as if she had been preparing for just such an occasion.

I looked at my clothes. Several school uniforms: dark gray wool kilts, white dress shirts, maroon ties, various hoodies, and V-neck sweaters. Gym clothes. Tennis whites. All of it neatly pressed, folded, or hung. In a zipped garment bag was a black velvet dress for a formal I could not recall having attended. I decided to put it on, just to see what it looked like. The dress was a little tight around my breasts. Evidently, I had grown since I had last worn it. I didn’t bother zipping it all the way up.

I ran my hands along my hips. The fabric was silky and plush.

I wondered if I had worn my hair up or down. I wondered if I had liked how I looked on that night and what my date had thought of me, if he’d said I was the most beautiful girl in the world. I wondered who my date had been, if it had been that Ace guy or someone else. I wondered if I had really liked the person or if I’d just gone to have someone to go with. I wondered if he had brought me a corsage and, if he had, what kind it had been. Had he known that I don’t like roses? And if he’d brought roses, had I had to pretend to like them so that I wouldn’t hurt his feelings? Maybe I hadn’t gone with a boy at all? Maybe I’d just gone with a group of girls? Or a group of friends. Did I even have a group of friends?

Maybe I’d worn that dress somewhere else entirely? I wondered…

On the bookshelf under my window were four school yearbooks, one for each year beginning with seventh grade. I flipped through the books, but they didn’t really tell me much. Teams competed in sports. Sometimes they won, and other times they lost. Some kids joined clubs; others didn’t. Some got taller. Some got smarter; a few got dumber and, either way, most managed to graduate. All yearbooks told the same story anyway.

I read through every single signature of every single one:
Have a great summer. Don’t forget me. Keep in touch.
I wondered why anyone bothered signing at all. The only interesting signature was Will’s, and it wasn’t really a signature. On the inside back cover of both my ninth- and tenth-grade books, he had drawn a very neat box around the perimeter. Above both boxes were the words “This page is reserved for William B. Landsman to do with what he will.” He hadn’t yet used it.

I wondered…

When I looked in the index of my most recent yearbook (tenth grade) under my name, I found only three mentions. The first was my class photo. That year, my hair looked very light on top, maybe blond, though I couldn’t truly tell. All the underclassman portraits were black-and-white, so when I say my hair was blond, really what it looked was light gray. The second was the varsity tennis team photo. I wasn’t even in that one, though—it just had my name and the caption “Not Pictured.” I wondered what I had been doing instead. The third mention was on the yearbook masthead. I had been photo editor, which might have explained why I wasn’t in any of the pictures.

It had always been the same with Mom—both in the Wandering Porter books and in our family albums. Because she was a photographer, she was never in the pictures, and whenever anyone tried to take her picture, she would get really uncomfortable. I put the yearbooks back on their shelf. Maybe I was like my mother, the girl behind the camera?

I wondered…

I went through the drawers of my nightstand. The most interesting thing I found was a plastic compact containing birth control pills, which meant I was either a) having sex with someone (!?!), or b) on the pill for some other reason. The second most interesting thing I found was a leather diary. This might have beat the birth control pills for the official title of Most Interesting Thing in Naomi’s Nightstand, had it not been a
food diary
detailing every single thing I’d eaten for the last six months. Sample entry: