The Stories We Tell (21 page)

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.