dream-films are always jump-cut. They do not add up. When she and Jacob—with whom she first collided at the bottom of an airplane chute, with whom she huddled on a camp cot in Germany—when she and Jacob find someone, when they track down some new link, they treat the pieces like chips from a precious mosaic—from Byzantium say, or Pompeii or Ravenna—from some lost world, fabulous and perhaps impossible to reconstruct. Samantha searches for fragments of cobalt, hunting for the child in the forget-me-not outfit, but the blue notes always disappear. She and Jacob piece together faces but their edges are never sharp and they drift into fog. The task gives them vertigo.
They are inside us, Jacob tells her. We could find them if we concentrated long enough. The brain is a massive retrieval system, he insists, a mainframe of electronic impulses. Everything is there, he assures her, if we could nudge the right nerve ends. He rakes his fingers through his hair and across his skull. He clasps hanks of his curls and pulls as though pulling will give relief. I have a crowd in my head, he says.
“I can’t put my baby brother’s face back together,” Sam tells her aunt. “I’ve tried. I can feel him in my arms. I have certain kinds of physical memory that are quite intense, but not a visual one. I can remember the weight of him, and the sound of his crying, and the fever coming off him, and the way his skin felt bumpy like a plastic bubble-sheet used for packing, but when I look, he doesn’t have a face.”
Her aunt straightens a photograph in the album. “Please don’t do this, Sam.”
“Believe me,” Sam tells her, “I’m working on improving the ending. We’re all working on it. Jacob’s migraines are getting so bad, the medication can’t help him anymore.”
“Who is Jacob?”
“Jacob Levinstein. He’s one of us.”
“One of …?” Lou’s eyes widen. She closes the photo album. She seems distressed. She seems angry. She moves away from Sam as though Sam might be infectious. “I would have thought,” Lou says in a strained voice, “that contact … that it would exacerbate …” She hugs the album to her chest. “I read somewhere,” she says reproachfully, “that survivors of the Titanic avoided each other. Reporters tried to arrange reunions, but survivors resisted. I found that easy to understand.”
It is easy to understand, Samantha thinks, especially for the survivors, especially for the children of Air France 64, but the kind of intense connection that her lot shares—physical proximity is irrelevant—is not something Sam is likely to discuss. “We don’t care to be circus acts for the media,” she tells her aunt. “But we tend to link up. There’s a website now, and we find each other. We need to do it, the same way that war vets do.”
“A website.” Lou paces from one window to another, the photo album pressed against her chest like a shield. “This is amazing to me, Samantha. Of course I can see … when I think about it, I can see how necessary, how inevitable …”
“It’s just that there are things I don’t know,” Samantha pleads, “and they drive me …” You have to be extremely careful, Jacob warns, about what you reveal. “The gaps keep me awake sometimes,” she says. “That’s all. Well, they keep me awake a lot, actually. I hoped you might fill in some blanks.”
Lou’s hand is shaking. Lou is Samantha’s mother’s sister and Sam knows everything and nothing about her.
“For me, Samantha …” Lou says, but her sentence peters out.
“Can I see the photograph again?”
“This is hard for me.”
Samantha pulls the photograph album from her aunt’s hands.
“It’s not what I was expecting,” Lou says in a low voice. “When you called. After such a long time.”
“What were you expecting?”
Lou turns away and makes a dismissive gesture which Sam translates as: That’s of no consequence now. She leaves the room so abruptly, she trips on the rug and almost falls into the hall. Sam hears her locking herself in the bathroom. She decides to wait.
There is turbulent history between Lou and Sam. There is something more complex and more volatile than aunt and niece, and how could it not be so? When Lou came to collect Sam from the warehouse of camp cots and frightened children in Germany, Sam kicked her simply because she was Lou. She was not Sam’s mother. This is not something that Sam has ever let her aunt forget, not in principals’ offices nor counselors’ rooms, not in police stations, and not when teachers came to call. “Lou is my legal guardian,” Samantha would say, sulky. She would roll her eyes. “But she thinks she’s my mother.” Her aunt’s tolerance has been without limit. It is as though her aunt has worn Sam’s labels as penance: runaway, disturbed child, troubled teen.
Ten minutes pass, fifteen, and then Sam knocks on the bathroom door. “Lou?” she says. “Are you all right in there?”
Silence.
“Lou?”
“I’ll just be a minute,” Lou says, though her voice sounds strange.
In the living room, she speaks quite calmly again. “Would you like more tea?”
“I have to relive it all the time,” Samantha says, defensive.
“I know that, Sam. Whereas I try not to. I try to stay back here in the photo album, before it happened.” The muscles in Lou’s shoulders and back are taut. “Two different ways of coping, that’s all.”
“You have more before than I have,” Sam accuses.
Lou breathes slowly. Samantha can see her counting silently to keep her agitation in check. “Sam, don’t you think this is pointless? You’ve already won the gold medal for suffering—I’ll sign a certificate if you like—and I’m not even a runner-up. Nothing we do will change the past, will it?”
“I would just like to have a past.”
Samantha’s aunt presses her fingertips against her brows, the way Jacob does when his migraines come. She pushes hard at the edge of her skull. She presses the pads of her thumbs against her temples. She speaks so quietly, Sam has to lean forward to hear. “I’m sorry, Sam, I don’t know what more I can tell you. I can’t do it. I can’t give you what you want.”
“Won’t, you mean.”
“The truth is, I don’t see you for six months at a time, I miss you, I feel so happy when you call to say you’ll come by, and then it takes me weeks to recover when you do.”
“Okay, then I won’t visit anymore.”
“I think that would be best,” Lou says, and Samantha feels a small lurch of panic.
“Fine,” she says bitterly. “I’ll head for the escape hatch, then.”
“Sam, Sam.”
Even Sam is embarrassed by herself, though she does feel queasy. She can see the dark nothing below the hatch, before she was pushed from the plane. “I’m sorry. That was cheap. I didn’t mean—”
“Of course you didn’t, of course you didn’t. I’ll try, Sam. What exactly
