Page 59

That was such a Paul idea I almost laughed. Faced with inexplicable time travel and disappearing memories, I’d thought I could hold onto my future, remember everything by writing it down, not realizing, what I’d written might no longer make sense.

I turned to the clean page again.

Claire was stubborn.

Ben could make me laugh when I wanted to kill him.

Claire once called me from college at two in the morning because she thought she had appendicitis. It was gas.

I smiled through the fear. That memory remained, although the college dorm around it had gone fuzzy. I could still feel the telephone pressed to my ear and hear the panic in the first “Mom,” followed twenty minutes later by Claire’s offended silence after I suggested she stop eating pizza at midnight.

I tried another memory.

When Ben was little, he climbed into our bed during thunderstorms and always⁠—

But it was gone.

I knew he climbed into our bed, knew the weight of him between us, all elbows and warm feet, crowding me toward the edge while Paul somehow continued sleeping as if a small child hadn’t inserted himself sideways between his parents, but there had been something else.

A stuffed animal? A blanket?

The more I chased it, the farther away it went.

I closed my eyes, abandoning details completely.

Claire as a newborn. I couldn’t see her face clearly, but I remembered the fear of holding something so small and understanding that the hospital intended to let me leave with her.

Ben asleep against my shoulder after an ear infection had kept us both awake for two nights.

Claire’s hand slipping into mine in a parking lot long after she was old enough to cross without help.

Ben calling from New York and saying “Mom” in the tone that meant money, illness, or a problem he hoped I would fix.

The voices weren’t exact anymore, but the feelings were still there. I knew the exhaustion of motherhood much better than I knew the shade of my daughter’s eyes.

I knew the weight of worry at two in the morning, the anger that could disappear the second a child got hurt, the ridiculous pride of watching someone you’d taught to use a spoon become an adult who believed you knew nothing about the world.

I knew how much I’d loved them when I wanted them out of the house. How much I missed them when they finally left.

My pencil moved again.

They were mine.

I stared at the words then added,

They were real.

The first tear hit the page directly beneath real and darkened the paper.

“Oh, come on.”

I wiped it with my thumb, which smeared the graphite and made the whole thing worse as I started crying, sitting at a table in 1984 wearing an old Asia T-shirt.

A knock sounded at the screen door.

“Lorrie?”

I closed the notebook and shoved it under a magazine.