Living Memory

There is a strange man sitting on her front steps.

(Well, no – not sitting, exactly, but lounging like an entitled prince of old, dominating the imagery with a sort of studied nonchalance that infuriates her.)

It irks her.

Now, it must be said that Amelia Lockhart is generally a very well-behaved woman of twenty-something. She throws pleasantries and compliments around like handfuls of confetti, smiles more than she frowns, cedes her seat to grandmothers and sneaks in sweets for her client’s children.

For fuck’s sake, she even makes sandwiches for that one beggar she passes on her way to work.

But today she doesn’t have the patience for this, whatever it may be.

She woke in the dead of night to frightful nightmares, a mishmash of memories long buried in her conscious, both feverish and cold. Alone, unsettled, she’d spent the whole night watching shadows dark and darker spill through her window, arch and stretch along her room like lazy cats before a fire, solitude howling in her mind like wolves in a forest.

It seeped into her bones, that curious coldness, as time went by and the sun rose up, so that now she feels well and truly frozen. All day she was sluggish, almost clumsy, hands moving so artlessly that she spilled her precious coffee over documents she later managed to sprawl across her hardwood floor, a million-dollar paper carpet.

Her head hurts. Her back hurts. Her feet hurt.

(And hear heart? It positively aches.)

Amelia revels in the sound of her heels clacking on the cobblestone, fancies herself more intimidating, more powerful than her small stature and dainty curls belie. She remains rooted in place a few steps away from her home, this man the only barrier between herself and a pineapple-scented bubble bath.

She waits for him to acknowledge her, but his hands remain boneless, his blond head bowed so that the last dregs of sunlight tie themselves like weightless ribbons in his tresses.

“May I help you?” She clings to politeness by the skin of her teeth.

The man raises his head as if shook from a trance, the last tendrils of a dream coiling around his big, blue eyes.

“I think so, yes. I’m looking for my daughter.”

He stands up, towering over her even in heels, and tucks his hands behind his back in a smooth motion that her eyes follow without her wanting to.

A hundred and one retorts hang onto the roof of her mouth, ready to unfurl between her teeth and spill forth into the air between them, shattering the calm of a summer day that’s close to ending.

She cannot say what stops her from flinging them like throwing knives, only that there is something familiar about him, Amelia muses, some melancholic echo in the stooped line of his shoulders, in the tapestry of wrinkles woven on his skin. It strikes an answering chord within her, one that she denies as soon as it flowers in her conscious.

“Your daughter.” She repeats numbly, and for the first time looks, forcibly shakes the tiredness from her vision like a dog playing in the rain and really looks at him, because –

Because golden hair spun with gold, because eyes droplets of the ocean, because a beauty mark in the corner of a thin lip.

All mirrors to her own.

The realization slams into her with the force of a school bus, leaves her reeling, bereft of words for the first time in years even as her profession requires them on a daily basis.

She feels as though her whole world has shifted on its axis, only she hasn’t clawed her way through life with meekness and acceptance.

Amelia pushes down the storm brewing inside her, locks it into her heart and throws away the keys to her ribcage. It takes her less than a second to gather her bearing – then the world stops spinning and she is standing again on solid ground, out of the shifting sands.

“I see.” It costs her nothing to bare her teeth in a smile, curl her lips heavenwards. “I’m afraid I can’t help you with that, but there’s a police station a few ways off.”

She makes her way past him with catlike grace, heels click-click-clacking on the cobblestone in tandem with her heart. The earlier confusion gives way to triumph and relief bubbles in her veins like New Year’s champagne, unfurls like sweetness in the back of her throat.

(Only when has life ever been that kind to her?)

Her father’s calloused hand roots her into place, coarse fingers curling like shackles where wrists slope elegantly into hands. It doesn’t hurt – it’s more of a shock, really, this sudden, unwelcome warmth that slithers its way along her arm.

“Come now, Amelia. Are we really going to pretend we’re strangers?”

Dear God, his voice, his goddamn voice with the same southern drawl that she’d exorcised from her own, the peculiar, gravely way he rounds up his vowels; it all sends her tumbling down memory lane, to a childhood she didn’t get to enjoy and a life she’d thought she left behind.

“I am not pretending anything.” Amelia regains use of her appendage back, studying him through narrowed eyes, blue as forget-me-nots.

He means to say something, she can divine from muscle memory alone, but a racking cough takes hold of his frail body, a wet sound shuddering deep in his chest.

“Just listen.” He placates once his lungs permit, this man who has only ever been her father in name, not deed; and even then, only when it suited him.

“I don’t particularly want to.” Amelia says, and oh, how liberating it feels, how freeing, to so mindlessly refute what might have been an order once.

(It’s a thrill in her heart, fireworks going off in the cage of her ribs, knowing how far she’s come from the fearful child she’d been.)

“I know; you’ve made your sentiments perfectly clear. It’s not exactly a joy for me, either.” He wheezes a little, so different from the man she’s known throughout her childhood, and Amelia struggles to conjure up anything else besides contempt and a vague disgust.

“Then why are you here?” It’s not fair, but neither is life and so she hopes her words carve little wounds in him.

“I’m dying.” He says it so simply, without pomp and circumstance, that it takes a little for the meaning to penetrate the tired haze of her thoughts.

(But when it does? She wants to scream to the heavens, to every damned saint she knows to call by name because she wasn’t supposed to care anymore.)

“Excuse me?” Amelia can only hope her voice isn’t as tremulous as her hands, which she fists into tiny, bloodless balls, nails carving half-moons into flesh.

“Cancer.” He gestures to his chest with a careless hand, mouth canted into a rueful smirk. “My sins coming back to haunt me.”

“And what do you want from me?” Amelia forces her words past a suddenly tight throat, and they burn like broken glass edged with sea salt.

The first reason her mind conjures is money, but the thought dissipates as soon as it springs up, blades of glass flattened by rain; her proudness, her refusal to bend to anyone – she’d gotten it from him, not her beloved mother.

Still, then, they haven’t spoken in years, much less laid eyes upon one another, so why –

“To make amends.” He says finally, his gaze an arrow straight and true to her own. “If you’ll have me.”

It’s too much, Amelia thinks to herself, too much for a single person to bear in a single day. She wants to wrap herself in her old kaftan, burrow into a childish fort of blankets, cry into her pillow until the confusion bleeds out of her.

“I know it’s a lot to take in.” Says this man who isn’t long for this earth, who looks like a dusty, pale imitation of the monster who lives in her memories and in her nightmares.

Does he have years? Months? Dear God, is he so close to the afterlife that he can count his days?

Horror rises in her with the abruptness of a tidal wave.

She cannot truly feel it, but Amelia sees this man – this man who is half her, who’d gifted her his looks- slip something into her bloodless fist, curls her fingers around what she can only guess is paper by the crinkling sounds it makes.

“That’s my number. Call me, if you want; if not, I guess this is goodbye.”

Amelia can feel him studying her, head to toe, before he nods once and slips away into the sunset without once looking back.

(And she knows this only because she stood in the streets long after he left her sight, as lonely as a willow, hoping against hope that he might.)

It’s as if the matter is forgotten, her whole being brushed aside– and she hates him anew for making her feel so little, so insignificant with just the power of his gaze.

Hates him for being yet again the one who walks away.

(Hates herself for being the one left behind.)

She goes through the motions robotically: unlock the door, lose the shoes, pet the dog, feed the cat, and all the while that damned slip of paper burns a hole into her pocket.

It can end like this, she thinks, if I let it.

She doesn’t owe him anything, and more to the point she’d been perfectly fine before he dredged up her past and dumped it unceremoniously at her doorstep. She’d liked things as they were – orderly, simple, she in her bubble and he in her memory, covered in cobwebs and voiceless.

But the word death rings in her head like church bells under the cover of darkness, with a finality that frightens her.

Constellations are already sewn into the velvet blanket of the sky as Amelia makes her way to her bedroom, the stars bright and distant, luminous and cold.

That scrap of paper lies at the bottom of her trash bin – but the number itself paints the insides of her eyelids, occupies space in her phone.

Amelia is still uncertain of the future; huddled behind the intimacy of night, she sheds a few tears – just salted water.

Today, she hates him. Tomorrow, she might just remember what it is like to love him a little.

But for now, she sleeps.