Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac(8)

“Sister?” I repeated. It felt even more made up the second time.

“Yes. Her name is Chloe.”

“Are we close?” I asked.

“No,” Mom said. “You refuse to see her.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“It’s probably a lot to hear all at once,” Dad said.

“How are you feeling, cupcake?” Her voice was high and whispery. She sounded like she was floating away.

How did I feel? “About what? Which part?”

“About everything I’ve just told you, I suppose.”

What I felt was that all of these were very good reasons for us not to be speaking. It was one thing for Mom and Dad to have gotten divorced, but for Mom to get together with her high school boyfriend and have an affair and a daughter and a whole new family…“I feel like”—her eyes were wide and expectant—“I honestly feel repulsed. I honestly feel like you’re a slut.”

“Naomi,” Dad said.

“What?” I asked. “She is. Women who cheat on their husbands and get pregnant are sluts. Why don’t you add that one to your list, Dad?”

Mom stood up and started backing away from my bed, not quite able to look me in the eye. “I understand,” she said, “I understand. I understand.” Finally, Dad said that he thought she should go, which was funny because she seemed to be heading in that direction already.

“What happened to the Wandering Porters?” I asked after Mom had left.

“They wander no more.” Dad tried to make a joke out of it. “The last book was Iceland. Do you remember that summer we went to Iceland?”

I did. We had left right after Mom’s show, which may have even made it my last memory. I was twelve, and it had pretty much been fifty degrees all summer long, the coldest summer of my life. My mom and I used to say that it was the summer without any summer.

“What do you do now?” I asked.

“Your mom still takes pictures. I still write books. We just don’t do it together. And the Wandering Porters are still in print mostly.”

“What are your new books about?”

“Um…well, the last one was about…I’m not good at describing. It was about lots of things really,” Dad said. “But the jacket copy said it was about ‘the end of my marriage as seen through the prism of larger world events.’”

I interpreted. “It’s about the divorce?”

“Basically. You could say that. Yes.”

I asked him if I had liked it. He said that I hadn’t even read it, but that the reviews had been pretty decent.

“Maybe I should read it now?” I said. “If my memory doesn’t come back.”

“Yeah, you could just skip through the parts about the Middle East,” Dad suggested. “There’s quite a bit about that, too. Not that you shouldn’t be informed, but even I think it gets a little dry. Naomi, are you crying?”

I guess I was. “I’m sorry,” I said. I turned onto my side, away from Dad. I didn’t want him to watch me cry. In all likelihood, the reason he hadn’t already told me about Mom and Chloe was because he hadn’t wanted to discuss it himself.

Whenever Dad said anything serious, he would usually undercut it with a joke. That was his style. When he and my mom used to throw parties, he always had a funny story and could make everyone else laugh. My dad certainly wasn’t what anyone would call shy, and yet he was. By himself, he was always a bit stingy with saying certain things. Like, he rarely said “I love you.” I knew that he did love me. He just didn’t say it a whole lot. My mom was the one with all the “I love you’s.” But I understood what Dad was like because I was like that, too. This was why I couldn’t look at him.

“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.

2

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.