All That's Left to Tell(68)

Or, more accurately, I could remember the capacity to love, but could remember no one at all. For two weeks, my mother wouldn’t even speak to me about the attack, and then she wouldn’t tell me how it happened, and she never did tell me why it happened, since she said she didn’t know, and I believe she is being honest about that. She told me, once I was released from the hospital to come to her house, that I was twenty years old, and, when I stood and could bear to see my reflection in the mirror, my hair covering the scar on my scalp, a T-shirt over the bandage over the wound where someone drove the knife through, I did look young, but for what it’s worth, for whatever it may mean, I felt years and years older.

Someone had phoned 911 when I was hurt, but he’d reported a name that wasn’t his, though the address where I lay was real, and by the time the paramedics reached me, apparently I’d lost a lot of blood, and banged my head badly on the floor or a corner table, and between the blood loss and the surgery on my skull, the doctors said, I had lost my memory, had lost any recognition of anyone I ever knew, including myself. They told me they thought some things would return to me when the trauma eased, but it’s been months, and nothing has, or, if it has, it’s impossible to discern what I remember from what others have told me, several others, but especially my mother, who I try to remember to address as Ma or Mom, rather than by her name, Lynne.

She is a lovely woman. Bright blue eyes that are youthful well into her late forties, a rope of hair that she keeps in a long, blond braid because, she said, when she was praying for my life, she’d had it woven into that braid, and worried if she changed anything, anything at all, from what she was eating for breakfast to what she wore to the hospital, it would tip the balance. She told me that before the attack, I’d been going through what she called a wild period, and she said from the time I was small I’d always been spirited, and that she’d hoped that spirit was revealing itself for a short time in wildness. But after I was hurt she was consumed by guilt, consumed with the realization that she’d let me move away from her, further away than she should have, though not in terms of miles, and if she hadn’t, if she’d tried harder to stay close, none of this would have happened.

“People always say that,” I told her as she sat across from me almost knee to knee on that porch.

“What people?” Lynne asked. “Are you remembering someone right now?”

I said, “No, I don’t mean it that way. I’m just saying of course you would have done different things. But you should know I didn’t end up here because you didn’t do them. You should let yourself off the hook, Lynne. I mean Mom.”

She nodded, and then her eyes filled up for the thousandth time since I’d regained consciousness.

“Why is it so hard for you to remember to call me Mom? I’m staying at home, taking care of you, like a mom, aren’t I? I’ve told you everything I can remember to tell you about who you were. Who you are.”

And she was doing that. She’d taken family leave from the marketing company she worked for, at least for the first three months, and then even afterward she’d check in throughout the day, afraid that I might have wandered off. But for a long while I was afraid to take so much as a few steps from that porch, even those days when the temperature hit ninety, and in my little enclosure I could see the heads of the flowers nod in a breeze that didn’t reach me, one that I could remember would feel cool on my skin.

And I thought then that mothering is different from being a mother, and that I wished I could remember everyone that ever mothered me, even if I wouldn’t call them Mom. But seeing the look of hurt on my mother’s face, I regretted slipping up again. So I said, “I’m sorry, Mom. It’s just so strange because I don’t remember your face. But you’re right, you’ve taken such good care of me. I can tell you’ve been doing it all of my life.”

She nodded her head, glassy-eyed, and smiled thinly. “You’re so different from how you used to be. The way you say things. Your tone of voice. Even sometimes the words you choose. It’s like you’ve become brutally honest.”

I didn’t know about the brutal part, but if there is a blessing that goes with remembering no one, it’s that there’s nothing to conceal, and no one you reflexively feel that you have to or want to protect. But only for a while, and I knew that time was ending.

So I told her, “I love you. My body remembers loving you, anyway. It always feels good when you give me a hug. It’s the closest thing I have to a specific memory.”

I said this to make her feel good, but I also meant it, and she stood up and smiled and came over to me, and I squeezed her hard, to show her the strength that was building in my arms.

Strangely, I didn’t ask about my father for weeks and weeks. You’d think I would, and, if not, that Lynne would have volunteered a story about him, or at least his whereabouts, but neither happened, and with my memory erased, it simply didn’t occur to me to ask, and I didn’t even have the curiosity that an adopted child might have about her biological father. When I did finally ask, it was almost impulsive. I was lying on the couch on a late August evening, my mother sitting in an armchair across from me, reading, while I watched the ceiling fan spin above my head as it circulated the air in the room. I was tracking the blades with my eyes in a way that seemed irresistible, and when I got tired of this, I closed my eyes, and saw the fan circling in the darkness under my eyelids. And I heard myself whisper, because she often fell asleep in the armchair while watching over me, “Mom, are you still awake?” I’d remembered not to call her Lynne.