One summer, when Zoe was four, the same age that Milo is now, Jennifer took her to the beach for a few days, just the two of them. The trip had been Tommy’s idea as much as hers, and the theory was that without him there to prefer, to anticipate, Zoe might like her mother more. At first the experiment seemed like a failure, Zoe kicking Jennifer’s seat so hard on the drive there that she had to move Zoe behind the passenger seat, Zoe shouting, “You told Daddy not to come,” Zoe wailing that she’d left behind her favorite toy and wanted to go home. What toy it was, Zoe wouldn’t say. She was skilled at manipulation but not yet good at lies.
On the third day Zoe started bringing her things she’d found around the rental cottage. A shell. A puzzle piece. A feather. A tiny gold bead. Jennifer would come upon these treasures, placed in a way that marked them clearly as meant for her: beside her coffee cup, on her bedside table, resting atop her book. It was like being courted by a cat. Jennifer was afraid that if she acknowledged the gifts out loud they’d stop coming, so instead she responded in kind. She left a dime, a lip balm, a pair of cheap shiny earrings. Once or twice she watched from around a corner as Zoe discovered her offerings. The child’s delight was unmistakable, but she too never said a word. It was hard to say who was following whose lead. One day Jennifer left Zoe that stone, a souvenir of the beach, shiny and smooth, and for the remainder of the vacation Zoe carried it around in her pocket, taking it out from time to time to study it under the light.
The vacation over, they were an hour away from the beach house when Zoe started to cry. The stone was lost. She couldn’t find it. Jennifer turned the car around. She had to go back to the rental office and ask for the keys. It took them another hour to find the stone, behind the headboard of the bed where Zoe had been sleeping. Zoe clutched it all the way home, and when they got there, before Tommy came out to lift his precious sleepy daughter from the car, Zoe handed it to Jennifer, her expression focused and intense, and said, “You keep this for me, Mom. So I can always find it.” As soon as she laid eyes on her daddy, she was Tommy’s girl again, but still, for a long time after that, Zoe had checked in with Jennifer on the stone’s safety, and Jennifer had thought that meant something, and then Zoe had grown older and forgotten, and Jennifer had kept it anyway, had kept it all this time. Now it was gone.
Zoe
I always see the skull beneath the skin.
—P. D. JAMES
Life Story
In Zoe’s oldest memory her father is singing. She doesn’t remember what, only that it was something sweetly melancholy, and that she was in his lap and he was rocking her and she was very, very upset. She no longer knows why. She was holding a doll with a tear-shaped stain under one eye, and she remembers believing that both the doll’s tear and her father’s song expressed the depths of her own sorrow.
Her father! He was a wonderful man. If she were to list her top five memories, it would be tough to include one that didn’t feature him. If she were to then arrange those memories chronologically, as a version of her life story, it would look like all that had mattered in her life so far was the time they spent together. Lying on her bed in her dorm room, staring up at her roommate’s stupid posters, she can picture this timeline. Like the ones she used to make in elementary school, with photos and dates and titles for the appropriate milestones—My First Birthday, My First Dance Class.
They wouldn’t be milestones, though. Not on this timeline. Never mind the clichés. No birthdays, no tutus, no sitting on Santa’s lap. What should matter isn’t what’s supposed to matter but what does. At nineteen Zoe already knows how much of experience loses substance in your mind, grows foggy, fades and vanishes. From solid to smoke. What matters are not the times when you took lots of pictures. What matters are the times when you felt something so strongly it overrode the automatic delete. The memories that stay in your mind like a program you can run. Like a dream you can reenter. Like a hologram. Time in a bubble. There’s a reason you see so much of that stuff in sci-fi. Everybody wants it to be real.
“See there?” the film studies professor who tried so hard last semester might say. “You do have a topic you can write about.”
Would she rather her brain was a projector, and she could play scenes on the wall, watch them like a movie? Or would she prefer a virtual reality machine, letting her live her memories again? Maybe she’d like to have both capabilities, so she could switch between them at will. Sometimes she’d watch. Sometimes she’d live.