Prologue
Linden Tea
“The body remembers what the mind refuses to keep”
The last thing I remember is the smell of linden tea.
And a hand brushing the hair from my face, slowly, the way you do with sleeping children.
That’s all. I’ve gone over it so many times that I no longer know if it’s a memory or the memory of a memory, a copy of a copy, paler each time. But the smell is still there. Sweet, like dried flowers and honey, like a grandmother’s house, like a night with a fever. A smell that says: it’s okay, it’s over, go to sleep.
And the hand. Fingers grazing my forehead and tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. Unhurried. With a care that is embarrassing to tell. I remember thinking that no one had touched me like that since I was little. I remember wanting to say something, and my tongue was as heavy as a wet stone.
I remember—or I think I do—that the hand didn’t go away. That it was still there long after I could no longer open my eyes. Again and again. The same strand. Like someone stroking an animal to keep it still. After that, nothing.
Not darkness. Darkness is something. This is a gap. A piece of film someone has cut out and spliced back badly.
Inside the gap there is only water.
I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t see it. I hear it. A drop. Another. A drop that always falls in the same place, with the patience of something in no hurry because it knows it’s going to win. And I feel it: a cold that starts at my ankles and rises. A shapeless green. The silence of sunken things, like when, as a girl, you put your head under in the bathtub.
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There’s a voice. Very close. So close I feel the breath in my ear, warm, damp. I don’t understand what it’s saying. I only understand that it’s asking me for something. That it expects me to do it. And that I, somewhere I’m no longer entirely myself, obey.
And there’s another voice, farther away, under the water or behind the years, laughing. A little girl’s laugh.
And then it stops laughing.
I’m cold. I’m so cold.
There are more things in the gap, but they aren’t things. They’re remnants. What the tide leaves on the sand when it pulls back. A weight at my elbow, firm, guiding me. Orange lights passing over my closed eyelids, one, another, another, with the rhythm of streetlamps. An engine. Cold glass against my temple. And a smell that isn’t from my house: salt, seaweed, the harbor at night. It can’t be. I didn’t go out. I was in bed with the linden tea and the book.
And my hands. That’s what comes back most. Not what they see,
because they see nothing. What they feel. Something warm turning cold. Something slippery. Fingers closing mine around something, slowly, one by one, the way you teach a child to hold a pencil. I don’t know if that happened. I don’t know if I made it up afterward, from staring at my hands so much. Hands can’t answer, and I, who make my living with them, no longer know how to ask.
I’ve been told that memory isn’t an archive, it’s a river. That every time you go back to a memory you change it a little, the way water changes a stone. That you can put something into a person’s head that never happened, and they will remember it more vividly than what really did.
I don’t know what they’ve put into me. I don’t know what I’ve
taken out.
I don’t want to go back to this one.
But I go back. I always go back. To the smell, to the hand, to the water. The way your tongue keeps going back to the hole where a tooth used to be.
The next thing I remember is the blood.
Chapter 1
06:12
“Waking up is not always coming back. Sometimes it is arriving at a place where we already were, without ourselves”
The cold enamel against the back of my neck wakes me.
And a drop.
It falls beside my ankle, into the drain. I wait. Another one falls. I open my eyes and the bathroom ceiling is too far away and crooked. The damp stain in the corner, shaped like a map. It’s my bathroom. I’m in my bathtub.
Empty.
And dressed.
I’m wearing my jeans. I’m wearing the green jacket, the one with the horn buttons, buttoned all the way up. My sneakers on. The plug hangs dry from its little chain. I got in here by myself, or someone left me here, and I don’t know which of the two scares me more.
My mouth tastes like metal. My head is stuffed with wet cotton. And it smells like coconut.
Like suntan lotion. Sickly sweet, greasy, like other people’s summers. In October, in my bathroom, where there’s nothing but soap and Vera’s strawberry shampoo. My stomach turns over without warning. I lean over the edge and dry-heave, but nothing comes up.
I don’t know why. It’s only a smell.
I sit up, gripping the rim. And then I see my hands.
My nails are rimmed with something dark. Brown, almost black,
packed underneath, into the flesh. I’ve been working with pigments for fifteen years. This isn’t paint.
I open my right hand. A cut runs diagonally across my palm, clean, about four centimeters long. It isn’t bleeding anymore. The edges are sealed with a thin, glossy scab. When I make a fist, it pulls. It doesn’t hurt. That’s the worst part. That it doesn’t hurt.
I bring my nails up to my eyes and examine them the way I examine a panel. The rim isn’t even. It’s thicker on the index and middle fingers, and it works its way in along the sides, into the skin, the way old varnish works its way into the cracks in wood. It has dried crackled. It has that matte sheen, the sheen of organic matter, that no pigment I know of gives.
I know from the very first second. But my mind, out of habit,
reaches for the names of colors: burnt umber, raw sienna, mummy brown. Mummy brown really was made from ground-up mummies. A
professor told us that freshman year, and we all laughed.
I’m not laughing now.
I climb out of the tub on someone else’s legs. When I step onto the bath mat I hear a crunch. Sand. I take off a sneaker and turn it upside down over the sink: out pours a fine thread, pale gray, with the sheen of crushed shell. Beach sand.
I haven’t been to the beach. It’s October. I haven’t been anywhere. On the floor, by the toilet, are the car keys. The ladybug key chain Vera made me in art class, with its seven marker dots, face up on the tiles.
I look at my phone. It’s in the back pocket of my jeans and I don’t remember putting it there.
06:12.
*
*
*
The last thing I have is the kitchen. Héctor with his jacket on, his keys in his hand, kissing me on the temple. “I left your linden tea on the nightstand, don’t let it get cold.” He always does it on the Saturdays he’s on call. Two spoonfuls of honey, because he says my life is too bitter to take it plain. I remember the steam. I remember the blue mug. I remember sitting on the bed with my book.
And then, this.
Between the blue mug and the enamel there are eight hours. I feel for them the way you feel for a step in the dark with your foot. Nothing. Not a dream. Not even the sense of having dreamed. When you sleep, even if you don’t remember anything, you wake up with your body tired from having been somewhere. I wake up the way I woke up at twenty, when they pulled my wisdom teeth: with a piece of time ripped out clean, no edges, and someone telling me everything had gone fine. There’s no one here to tell me that.
I go out into the hallway with a sneaker in my hand, like an idiot. At the far end, by Vera’s door, there’s a little girl.
Still. Barefoot. In a red swimsuit, her bangs plastered to her forehead, dripping. The water runs down her arms and falls to the floor without a sound.
I blink.
There’s no one. The coat rack. Vera’s red raincoat hanging from its hook, the hood drooping. The light from the air shaft, slanting in and drawing everything slightly wrong.
It’s the raincoat. Of course it’s the raincoat. My head is full of cotton and I saw a raincoat.
I move forward pressed against the wall. Halfway down the hall, my sock steps on something cold. A drop. I don’t look.
The door to Vera’s room is ajar. I push it with two fingers. The moon night-light casts its milky glow over the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. Vera is sleeping facedown, one foot out from under the comforter and her rag bunny squashed under her cheek.
On the wall, her drawings, held up with tape: a whale in a hat, the three of us at the Bioparc with a giraffe taller than the building. Her school backpack hanging from the wardrobe knob. It smells like her: like sleep, like strawberries, like socks. I want to go in and lie down beside her, bury my nose in the back of her neck and never come out. I don’t move from the doorframe. Not with these hands.
I study the floor beside her bed. If there were a drop, just one, I would see it shine in the moonlight.
There isn’t. I tell myself so twice.
I lean against the doorframe. I breathe with her. One, two,
the water comes out so hot it scalds my knuckles. I’m in the kitchen. I’m scrubbing my hands under the faucet with the vegetable brush, and I don’t know when I got here. The clock on the oven says 06:24. I scrub. Dish soap. I scrub my nails, my palm, the cut, which opens a little and starts bleeding again, pale pink, diluted. The water in the sink takes on the color and swirls and goes down the drain, and I scrub harder, digging the nails of one hand under the nails of the other. And suddenly I stop.
I stand there with my hands dripping over the sink, watching the last pinkish thread slide toward the hole.
What am I doing?
I know. I’m cleaning. I’m erasing. I’m doing exactly what someone with something to erase would do. And I was doing it well.
Methodically. Without thinking. My hands knew what to do before I knew there was anything to be done.
I turn off the faucet. The silence of the kitchen fills with the hum of the fridge. And, from the far end of the hall, with the dripping of the bathtub.
I dry my hands on the dish towel. On the counter, next to the cutting board, is the wooden knife block. Five slots. I don’t look at it. I look at it. From here I can’t tell whether one is missing, and I don’t go closer to count. I don’t want that number inside my head for the rest of my life.
The kitchen window looks out on the air shaft. Down there it’s still night: a gray well, the neighbors’ windows shut, the second floor’s laundry hanging out, the green lids of the trash bins. Not a single light. Nobody saw me come home. Or the whole building saw me come home and is now behind its blinds, awake, thinking the same thing I am. I step back from the glass. I have the absurd feeling that someone is watching me from the air shaft. That someone has been watching me all night.
*
*
*
I unlock my phone. My hands are shaking so badly that I get the code wrong twice.
No missed calls. The last thing in the log: a call from me to my father on Thursday.
I open my messages.
The first on the list is a conversation with Silvia. Silvia Roig. She started it in September, from a number I don’t know how she got, after twenty-six years of the two of us knowing nothing about each other: long messages from her, short replies from me, further and further apart, until I stopped answering. The last time I saw her she was on my doormat, reeking of gin, her mascara smeared, and I shut the door on her with more relief than sorrow.
Under her name there’s a sent message. From me.
02:14.
Tonight it all ends.
I read it until the letters turn into drawings. It’s my number. It’s the double blue check that says she’s seen it.
I didn’t write that.
I don’t talk like that. Like a cheap novel.
But there it is. With my name at the top. And the time: two fourteen in the morning, when I was—where was I?
I don’t know whose blood this is. I don’t know where this sand came from. I don’t know why I slept in the bathtub like a little girl being punished. I have a strange feeling, rising from my stomach and making no sense at all: that this has happened to me before. That I know this cold. That I know this smell.
And another, worse, that I don’t dare look straight at: that it doesn’t entirely surprise me. That something in me, very deep down, has been waiting for years to wake up like this.
I push it away. I don’t have time for that.
Below Silvia, on the list, is Héctor. 22:31. Asleep yet? Quiet here so far. Get some rest, love.
Double blue check. I read it.
By ten thirty I already had the linden tea in me and the book open. Maybe I read it. Maybe I read it with my eyes half closed and turned the phone facedown on the bedspread. I don’t remember. I didn’t answer him. It’s the last normal thing of the night, and it isn’t mine either. I wrap a dish towel around my hand like a bandage. Héctor is on call until eight.
*
*
*
I dial Silvia’s number.
One ring. Two. Three. Seven. It goes to voicemail: a recorded voice, cheerful, with a small-town lilt, nothing at all like the voice of the woman who was crying on my landing. “It’s Silvia, I can’t talk right now, you know what to do.”
You know what to do.
I hang up. What was I going to say to her? Did I do something to you?
I call again. Voicemail.
I sit down with the phone in my lap and the sand still in my sock. Outside, the air shaft is starting to turn gray. A pipe knocks inside the wall. In the bathroom, the drop. The drop. The drop.
06:31.
I close my eyes for a second and something comes. It isn’t an image: it’s a temperature. Sun on my shoulders. Warm stone under my thighs. A little girl’s voice laughing very close, and another saying my name in a way no one uses anymore. I open my eyes. The kitchen. The fridge. It lasted less than a blink and it has left my mouth dry and my heart racing, like when you wake up thinking you’re falling.
I don’t know where it came from. I don’t have any summer like that stored away. Or I don’t know where I have it stored, which isn’t the same thing.
I think about calling Héctor. Love, I woke up in the bathtub with blood under my nails and I sent Silvia a message I don’t remember. I hear it in my head and it sounds insane. It sounds like a woman whose car keys need to be taken away.
And maybe I am one. That’s the question I won’t let myself ask, and it asks itself. If a friend told me this, sitting in this very kitchen, what would I think? I’d think she was lying. Or that she was sick and didn’t know it. I wouldn’t think for one second that she hadn’t done anything. I look at my hands, resting on the dish towel. Fifteen years of a steady touch, of a number fifteen scalpel, of lifting a flake of paint the size of a lentil without breaking it. I know them better than my own face. Tonight they did something without me, and they did it with the same precision they work with. That’s what I can’t get my head around: that they weren’t clumsy. That they were calm.
Then the phone vibrates in my lap.
I jump. I look at the screen.
Silvia.
Relief runs through me like a current. She’s okay. She’s calling me. She’s angry, she’s drunk, she’s going to yell at me, I don’t care, let her yell.
I swipe.
“Silvia, oh my God, are you okay? I’m sorry, I don’t know what…” She doesn’t let me finish. It isn’t her.
It’s a man’s voice, deep, calm, with the background noise of a room full of people and a crackling radio.
“National Police. Who is this?”
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