“Sounds like he’s in the wrong line of work, then.”
“No. It makes him better at it. He’s not afraid of touching, doesn’t get bothered by anyone’s pain.” She could see that Beatrice was about to object, to say something like That’s a nice way to spin it, so she rushed on. “I wish I could be like that.”
Beatrice set down her fork, and for the first time during lunch, looked Clara in the eye. “Do you?”
“I do.” Pure fury surged in Clara as she held the gaze. Who are you to question me? What do you know about my life with your jetting around and being paid handsomely to peel off the memories of the rich and famous? You’ve never lived with Lucas. You’ve no idea how his self-loathing was like a bottomless pit that sucked the life out of anyone who loved him, how his anger at the world left the taste of ashes on everything he touched, how his self-pity drew me like a flame and burned me to a crisp.
Beatrice looked away. “I was cleaning up my apartment, and I found this.” She dug around in her purse.
“You clean?” Clara asked. She had seen a photograph of her sister’s place once. It looked like a hoarder’s nest. “You hate to clean. You said you could never find anything after.”
Beatrice ignored this. She found what she had been looking for and held it out to Clara. A four-color retractable click pen: red, blue, green, black.
Puzzled, Clara reached for it, but Beatrice didn’t let go. Both of their hands held it, one at each end.
A warm flood gushed through Clara’s fingers, up her arm, flared into her heart. Unlike the buzz from the jars of memory-grounds they sold as mood enhancers at places like Yankee Mementos with names like “A New Job!” or “Reunion,” it didn’t feel artificially sweet. Like all true joys, it was laced with the shadow of pain and terror—pain that was assuaged, terror held at bay.
It felt genuine, Clara realized, because it was her own memory, one shared with Beatrice. She could decipher it.
She was eleven again, and Beatrice nine. The younger girl had been sobbing inconsolably. Their parents had not understood how unique Beatrice was, had not accepted her gift. They thought she was being childishly dramatic when she said that the secondhand blanket gifted by their mother’s friend hurt her. They had not yet known of the abuse suffered by that woman’s child.
“It’s just a nightmare. All kids get nightmares.”
“No! They’re hurting Ellie. They’re hurting her!”
Clara cleaned the blanket, scrubbed it in the sink despite how it stung her hand. They were poor, and the heat was unreliable. Beatrice needed that blanket. Clara couldn’t interpret the deposit in the blanket, couldn’t relive what Beatrice relived. All she could do was to reassure her sister that she believed her unconditionally, that she knew she was telling the truth.
While Clara cleaned, Beatrice wrote down what she had seen inside the blanket. Then she had used her favorite pen, a four-color clicker, to draw a picture of herself and Clara. The figure of Beatrice was small and black; the figure of Clara was large and blue—approximations for the shades of their deposits. Clara leaned protectively over Beatrice like the sky, a fierce presence of absolute trust.
Later, that account written in a childish hand would be the first piece of evidence in the case that led to Ellie’s rescue and confirmation of Beatrice’s gift.
“I had forgotten about this,” Clara said, looking at the pen in her hand. Beatrice had let go.
“We all need to be reminded, from time to time, that we’re better than we remember,” Beatrice said.
Clara’s hand still prickled, the hairs standing up. She had also sensed that the memory, though a shared deposit, had been colored much more deeply by Beatrice’s perspective. How many times had Beatrice held this pen, relived this moment, redrawn her big sister to be better than she deserved to be remembered?
Shame, gratitude, lucid incomprehension.
The memory was fading in intensity, but she knew she could call it back the next time she held it.
Clara opened her mouth to speak, but her own phone buzzed then, reminding her that she needed to get back to work.
They embraced. Very briefly. Coats and gloves on.
“Thank you.”
Beatrice
Airplanes were generally troubling places for Beatrice. There was never enough time for the crew to clean properly between flights, and so every seat was a stew of anxiety, confinement, the sense of being suspended between places, life on hold. She tried never to take off her coat or gloves when she flew.
She unwrapped the package from Clara. It was a book, a limited edition of found deposits by a prominent artist. Each copy of the book was unique, the thick pages bulging with the physical carrier objects, hydraulically pressed or sectioned with a laser scalpel. It was used, but still must have cost Clara more than she could afford.
That was vintage Clara, always the big sister, the giver, the thoughtful one. Even after they had grown apart.
Beatrice opened the book and skipped over the pretentious Artist Statement. She turned to the first entry, a flattened little plastic arm, a fragment from a discarded doll that had been found on the beaches of Henderson Island in the Pacific, at least three thousand miles from the nearest continent. The plastic limb had been deformed and stained by its voyage through the excretory system of modern civilization and battered and bleached by the action of waves.
She took off her glove and put a finger on the plastic arm, pressing down gently and allowing her skin to come in contact fully with the artificial flesh.
She was tossed into a swirling montage, fragments from the lives of strangers. A young man with dirty hair and a frown stamping the arm, one of thousands like it, with a machine that thumped like thunder; a clerk packing boxes in a cavernous warehouse, walking through the aisles to the beeping of an electronic timer, more robot than person; a little girl arguing with her brother about what the doll should say; a carefree run through the rain-slicked streets of some city; an old man bending to pick up the doll and stuffing it into a nearby trash can; an expressionless woman tossing the half doll into a floating mess of other discarded objects, an undulating mat of abandoned possessions that bobbed together, scraping, jostling, flaking off their memory deposits and commingling; the artist picking up the doll fragment and bringing it aboard a ship; the careful cleaning that picked off the dried seaweed and encrusted sand but preserved the artful deposits of consciousness . . . and then: the memories of those who had purchased the book and read its contents layered on top, men and women who sought solace or escape or voyeuristic pleasure in moods and emotions and glimpses of other lives, a growing sediment formation to which she was now contributing her own.
The accompanying essay talked about the problem of trash, the physical as well as emotional. Modernity was reveling in the disposable, objects as well as experiences. The Pacific was filling up with microbeads and our corporate-manufactured memories. How many of us now relied on empathy-sheaths so that a bad date could be flushed down the toilet? How many of us coated our nightstands with a dusting of internet celebrity gossip rather than extrusions from our supposed loved ones? How many of us followed weekly self-help cleaning regimes rigorously to scrub ourselves of “negative deposits” so that we could live in the eternal present, heedless of what it was doing to our planet and our souls?