I picked it up.
“You hate dirt.”
“I did.”
“You killed a cactus once.”
Her mouth twitched.
Then I noticed the photographs.
Clara laughing with friends.
Clara kneeling beside a garden.
Clara celebrating birthdays with strangers.
There wasn’t a single photograph of me.
“How long have you lived here?”
“Three years.”
“And before?”
“Farther away.”
I put the book down.
“Start with the accident.”
Clara sat across from me.
She explained that she had been thrown clear of the car before it burned. Disoriented from a serious head injury, she apparently wandered away from the road before another driver found her miles from the crash site.
She had no identification.
Her memory was badly damaged.
“I knew how to use a spoon before I knew my last name,” she said.
Eventually, her first name returned.
Then fragments.
Our mother’s yellow kitchen.
The sound of someone singing in the shower.
