I WOKE UP gasping for air. My eyes shot open but my torso remained still, paralyzed on the mattress. I wasn’t underwater. I wasn’t in my Camaro.
Lifting my head, I pieced reality back together. The room was empty but for the mattress I was lying on, the shreds of paper on the floor, and the clue I clutched in my right hand. Light was finding its way through the enormous window, throwing shadows against the wall. I fell back and closed my eyes.
From outside the door, I heard a crash and my brain revved to life—someone else was in Sue’s house. I rolled off the mattress and stumbled to my feet.
“Hey!” I shouted, staggering out of the room. “Get out of—”
I choked on the end of my sentence when I reached the top of the stairs.
Sue Kopek, the night before too weak to even support herself on her own feet, was standing triumphantly in her living room like a statue in a storm, surrounded by a mess of folding chairs.
“Arthur!” She looked up at me, almost excited. “You boys were supposed to be back last week.”
I swallowed hard. Her physical strength had returned; her memory, of course, had not. “Sorry,” I said, taking small steps. “The train was late.”
“Well, where’s Orlo? Or Jeffery?”
“They’re coming, too. Just running a little behind.”
“Isn’t that just like Jeffery? On our last day, of all days.”
New information hit me like a blast of cold air to the face. It was her last day with Jeffery. It was a start.
But she had already lost where we were, disappeared into a box of records and reemerged as a carbon copy of the Sue that I had first discovered.
“Arthur!” she said. “You boys were supposed to be back last week.”
This time, I was in character. “Well, we were running late. But Jeffery’ll be here any minute, probably just in time.”
“Good,” she said.
I inched closer. “What time does he need to be here for us to . . . uh . . .”
She didn’t complete my sentence.
“For the, uh . . .”
She didn’t seem to hear me, instead mumbling to herself as she pushed chairs around.
“Where is Jeffery going?” I asked again.
She pulled her head back and blinked several times. “Arthur!” she exclaimed. “Don’t sneak around like that.”
I slunk back toward the kitchen and tried again, but it was the same result. Again and again and again, I asked what was happening, and she refused to answer.
The question became our brick wall. She just didn’t know the answer. Of course she didn’t. This was exactly what memory loss did to people: took away the most important parts.
I helped her pack and unpack boxes, pushing and prodding as gently as I could for more information, but our conversation became more and more sparse, and eventually she stopped talking.
I noticed that she seemed to move in practiced circles around the room, straightening the chairs, creating a narrow aisle through the center, then shifting them back into clusters. The scuffs on the floor beneath them were etched into the floor; these chairs had made the same movements hundreds of times over. Every time I brought a box forward from the tables, she carried it back, ensuring the chairs stayed unoccupied, mumbling something about keeping them out of the way. Occasionally she’d go upstairs, walk into one of the bedrooms, nod at all the walls, and then return to the living room. Her behavior was patterned, but the pattern was meaningless.
I checked my phone constantly—the train that returned to Truckee left in two hours, the one that continued east in two and a half. I had no reason to be on either of them, and even less reason to stay.
In the middle of the day, the doorbell rang and I hid, unsure of how to explain to the police what I was doing in an old woman’s house, but there was no one there, just three prepackaged meals left sitting on the porch for her. She stopped and ate in silence. In her kitchen, I found a few bags of nuts that became my late lunch.
As the sun began to slant through the kitchen window, I found a small collection of photos buried beneath some records. There weren’t many, and the few in the box didn’t tell me much. They either contained people I didn’t recognize or were too old and yellowing to make out any faces at all.
Underneath all the frames, stuck up against the cardboard, there was a single print. It was yellow, one of the oldest in the box, fraying at its edges.
It featured a young woman, smiling, with thick brown curls and a beautiful, flowery dress. She stood in the middle of the street, next to a man with thin glasses and a plain face, wearing a polo shirt that looked about two sizes too small. In her hands, she held a small bundle of blankets—a child.
My stomach lurched. There wasn’t a feature on her face that looked the same, but I knew it was Sue Kopek. And the man . . . he was familiar. He wore my grandfather’s glasses. But his chin was too round, his eyes too close. I flipped the photo over and on the back, in faded pencil, was written:
Orlo and Susanne Kopek and baby Jeffery. Green River, UT.
Underneath, in shaky block handwriting, with a black pen not yet old enough to begin fading, another hand has scribbled:
the nite he was born
home
It was like I had reset, like I was looking at her world again for the first time.
Orlo was her husband.
They had a son, Jeffery.
This was their home.
And five years ago, my grandfather had come back with her husband and son. He said they were coming back together.
All the details and circumstances surrounding her life and pieces of it that she was reliving felt somehow different and new. I studied the room again with fresh eyes, noting the details that had been too obvious to notice before: the living room packed full of boxes, the upstairs bedroom cleaned out, but her room perfectly intact.
My heart leapt into my chest.
For the first time, I looked past Sue Kopek, to the experience she was reliving. This wasn’t a house condemned, and it wasn’t a room full of trash. This was the result of five years of one woman reliving the same moment, waiting for the same thing.
“Where is he moving?” I offered, and I extended the photo toward her.
She dropped the book in her hands. Her expression went first to confusion, then to fear, toward me and toward the picture, then finally, it melted away into a smile that I hadn’t seen yet, free of uncertainty or frustration. She took it from me, her hands shaking, and held the photograph to her face, like she was trying to get closer to the people inside of it.
“Home.” She pulled back, nodding toward her hands. “He’s moving home.”
My eyes widened and I saw the full picture in front of me, spread across her living room.
Orlo and Susanne Kopek and baby Jeffery . . .
Green River, Utah.
“To Green River?”
For ten seconds, Sue didn’t move, her eyes glued to the photo. I feared I’d lost her, but slowly, she began to nod. “Green River,” she said.
The picture became clear. Her son was moving, and for whatever reason, my grandfather had come to be a part of it. I felt a surge of excitement that I hadn’t in months, lighting up parts of my chest that I had forgotten existed. My search didn’t stop here. There was another city. My grandfather had continued on with her husband and son . . .
I shuddered as I realized why she was stuck in this moment, what must have been so significant that it froze her in time, and why she was alone in this enormous house. They’d gone to Green River, and never come back.
Slowly, Sue cleared her throat and lifted her head back to me. “You boys were supposed to be back last week,” she said. “Where were you?”
My brain flashed a bright white blank. “Oh, uh, we, we were, the train was—”
“You said you were coming back.” She dropped the photo and began to move toward me, her hands shaking. Her face was unfamiliar, her eyebrows angled and lips pursed. “You said you’d be back in a week.”
I clambered backward, knocking over a folding chair and a box full of encyclopedias, but Sue didn’t notice. She moved faster toward me, spitting words in my direction. Her eyes were white and glossy, just as they had been the night before, this time with anger.
“I’m not, I, I didn’t—”
“And I waited, and I waited, and I waited!” She was shrieking now, volume shredding her frail voice. “You were supposed to take care of him!” Desperately, I prayed for a reset, but she moved faster toward me. “You boys were supposed to be back last week!”
I turned for the stairs and ran, hurdling them two at a time, around the corner and into the bedroom.
“You boys were supposed to come back together!” she screamed after me. “You were supposed to take care of him!” and I slammed the door.
My thumbs rushed around my iPhone screen—Green River, Utah, was three stops ahead on the California Zephyr and the train left at 7:45 p.m.—in forty-five minutes. I had to be on it. I flew around the room, putting on a fresh T-shirt and calling the cab from the night before.
“Somebody was home, eh, boss?” he asked. “Or is it your house now?”
With my bag repacked, the clue from the night before tucked in a side pocket, I inched slowly downstairs, checking around the corner for Sue. Several more boxes had been shoved over, and the contents were strewn across the floor. She sat in the middle, on her knees, surrounded by a small ocean of her possessions.
I walked the stairs carefully, step by step, waiting for her to turn on me and begin shouting again, but her eyes were closed. She was shaking softly, fresh tears on her cheeks.
I stopped as I reached the door. The pit in my stomach had returned, but this time, it was specific: guilt. Her sadness was like a weight in the room, a weight that I was responsible for.
I turned back to face her. “Sue, I, I know you don’t, you don’t really know who I am, or I’m not who you think I am . . . but I know that you knew my grandfather, and . . . and I, I think we both know he deserves better than what he got. And I don’t know where your son or your husband went, b-but I’m gonna go figure it out. For me, and for you now, too. And I know you don’t understand what I’m saying now, and even when I come back here you’re not going to understand it . . . but you deserve answers. We both do. So I’m gonna go get them.”
She didn’t react. Her face stayed frozen, an empty silence I knew well. I hung my head and pushed open the door.
“Arthur.”
Her voice didn’t crack. I paused, ready for her to tell me one last time that I was a week late.
But she didn’t.
She pushed herself to her feet and glided across the room. Her face was focused and intense and purposeful, staring straight into me like she meant it. For a moment, I’d have sworn she knew everything: who I was, where I was going, what I was looking for. She grabbed me by my sweatshirt and looked straight into my eyes.
“Go on now,” she whispered. “Go get him back.”