“Six.”
“Okay,” she says. “In the meantime, I want to tell you everything, and I want you to tell me everything in return.”
—
Everything.
I start when I was born. My father was away for business and my mother was all alone in the hospital. She knew I was going to be a girl. One night my father, after a few beers, told me the story of how she called my name as I was being born. As if I would hear her calling. As if he were there in the room to know what she said.
We moved around a lot when I was really young, but I don’t remember much of it. My first memory is actually of Liza hiding with me under our parents’ bed. I remember her telling me to be quiet. I remember seeing their feet, hearing their voices looking for us. I don’t remember being found.
I give A all these little Lego-like details, and don’t have any idea what they build. But I can see A building something—a story—as I hand them over. I can see A putting it together, and wanting to.
I ask her when she first knew about being the way she is. She tells me that until she was four or five, she just assumed she was normal—she assumed everyone woke up every day with new parents, in a new house, with a new body. Because when you’re young, people are willing to reintroduce the world to you each day. If you get something wrong, they’ll correct you. If there’s a blank, they’ll fill it in for you. You’re not expected to know that much about your life.
“There was never that big a disturbance,” she tells me. “I didn’t think of myself as a boy or a girl—I never have. I would just think of myself as a boy or a girl for a day. It was like a different set of clothes. The thing that ended up tripping me up was the concept of tomorrow. Because after a while, I started to notice—people kept talking about doing things tomorrow. Together. And if I argued, I would get strange looks. For everyone else, there always seemed to be a tomorrow together. But not for me. I’d say, You won’t be there, and they’d say, Of course I’ll be there. And then I’d wake up, and they wouldn’t be. And my new parents would have no idea why I was so upset.”
I try to imagine going through that, but I can’t really. I don’t think I could ever get used to it.
A continues. “There were only two options—something was wrong with everyone else, or something was wrong with me. Because either they were tricking themselves into thinking there was a tomorrow together, or I was the only person who was leaving.”
“Did you try to hold on?” I ask.
“I’m sure I did. But I don’t remember it now. I remember crying and protesting—I told you about that. But the rest? I’m not sure. I mean, do you remember a lot about when you were five?”
I see her point. “Not really. I remember my mom bringing me and my sister to the shoe store to get new shoes before kindergarten started. I remember learning that a green light meant go and red meant stop. I remember coloring them in, and the teacher being a little confused about how to explain yellow. I think she told us to treat it the same as red.”
“I learned my letters quickly. I remember the teachers being surprised that I knew them. I imagine they were just as surprised the next day, when I’d forgotten them.”
“A five-year-old probably wouldn’t notice taking a day off.”
“Probably. I don’t know.”
I can’t help wondering about the people whose body A takes for a day. I wonder what they feel the next day. I think about Nathan staring at me so blankly. But mostly I think about Justin.
“I keep asking Justin about it, you know,” I say. “The day you were him. And it’s amazing how clear his fake memories are. He doesn’t disagree when I say we went to the beach, but he doesn’t really remember it, either.”
“James, the twin, was like that, too. He didn’t notice anything wrong. But when I asked him about meeting you for coffee, he didn’t remember it at all. He remembered he was at Starbucks—his mind accounted for the time. But not what actually happened.”
“Maybe they remember what you want them to remember.”
“I’ve thought about that. I wish I knew for sure.”
We walk in silence for a minute, then stop at a tree with a ladder of knots. I can’t help but touch one. A touches the other side, and works her hand around to mine. But I keep moving, too. Circling.
“What about love?” I ask. “Have you ever been in love?”
Which is my way of asking: Is it possible? Is any of this possible?
“I don’t know that you’d call it love,” A tells me. “I’ve had crushes, for sure. And there have been days where I’ve really regretted leaving. There were even one or two people I tried to find, but that didn’t work out. The closest was this guy Brennan.”
A stops. Looks again at the tree, at the knots.
“Tell me about him,” I say.
“It was about a year ago. I was working at a movie theater, and he was in town, visiting his cousins, and when he went to get some popcorn, we flirted a little, and it just became this…spark. It was this small one-screen movie theater, and when the movie was running, my job was pretty slow. I think he missed the second half of the movie, because he came back out and started talking to me more. I ended up having to tell him what happened so he could pretend he’d been in there most of the time. At the end, he asked for my email, and I made up an email address.”
“Like you did for me,” I point out. So Nathan knew what he was doing a little more than I’d thought.