On other days, in her classes at Georgetown University, she looks around the seminar table at fellow students and thinks: We live on different planets.
She is nineteen years old, majoring in American history and government, but how could she even begin to translate her life, her inner life, so that it would be intelligible to her peers? They take safety for granted, she knows, and they are certain that two and two always make four, but this could change. She thinks of it this way: that we are composed of a frail string of learned sequences (we recognize our own face in a mirror, we know our own name, we can put on our shoes without thinking, we know how to make love, and we know what to do—more or less—when we feel acute physical pain), and these pieces which make up the puzzle of the self are held together by the glue of memory. Certain solvents can dissolve this glue: a stroke, catastrophic events. Then we are forced to become scavengers of our own past, searching, finding, relearning, reassembling the self.
Samantha tracks different threads of light, painstakingly, one by one, and she follows their beams into the haze. Here and there, little by little, events can be catalogued and flagged, and eventually she hopes she will be able to recalculate the unknown quantities of herself and of Salamander who made and unmade her. She constructs him from the traces he leaves in other lives. She puts him together like a jigsaw puzzle in order to explain what happened in September 1987 and how it happened and why.
She is mapping her way out of fog.
Look at Samantha: here she is, the day the world changed, on the border between Before and After, in fading color on Kodak paper. She is six years old. She is wearing a blue woolen coat with a darker blue velvet collar and a cotton dress (it is white, prinked with forget-me-nots, and has a smocked bodice and puffed sleeves; it is visible through her unbuttoned coat). She is also wearing white lace-edged socks and black patent-leather shoes. The sign above her head says PORTE 12 because this photograph was taken at Charles de Gaulle Airport in September 1987. Framed by the doorway to the boarding tunnel, she is turning back to wave. Her left hand clutches the hand of a young man, not a good-looking man, not particularly, but a man whose skin barely seems to contain him. Even in the photograph, an aura of intensity comes off him. The man is her father, Jonathan Raleigh. A one-armed teddy bear, once Samantha’s but given to her baby brother weeks earlier, dangles from her right hand, and when she waves, the teddy bear swoops about like a flag. She is laughing, and there is a dimple just to one side of her mouth. She can feel the fire passing from her father’s hand to her own. There are high mad notes in the pressure of his fingers, messages she is picking up but cannot translate. Her father is also laughing and waving. Beside him, a woman, perhaps weary, her smile slightly tense, holds baby Matthew up to the view of those who have come to see the family off.
“Your mother made your coat,” Samantha’s aunt tells her.
“She did?”
“She made all your clothes. She was that kind of mother.”
That kind of mother. Samantha saves this phrase. She saves every fragment, every splinter of information.
“The bodice of your dress was hand-smocked,” her aunt says. “These days, you have to go to a museum to see that sort of thing.”
“I still have the dress,” Samantha says.
“Your mother was not afraid of being old-fashioned.”
Sometimes at night, when Samantha cannot sleep, she takes the dress out of its tissue paper and holds it against her cheek, but it keeps its secrets. “It’s torn,” she tells her aunt. “There’s a rip in the skirt.”
“Yes. I remember.”
“From the hem right up to the smocking on the bodice. But it’s not torn in the photograph.”
“No.”
“It must have caught on something when they put us on the escape hatch.”
“Or later, perhaps,” her aunt says.
“I can’t remember tearing it.”
“We couldn’t get that coat off you, you even wanted to sleep in it.”
“I must have taken it off, though,” Samantha says. “Eventually. My mother must have talked me into it.” She studies the woman in the photograph—her mother, Rosalie Hamilton Raleigh—with a magnifying glass. Her mother is not much more than a girl, really, twenty-six years old, at the time of the photograph. “It must have been in the overhead locker.” Samantha thinks she can remember her father putting the coat there. Sometimes she can remember. It all depends on which way she tells the story to herself. “Perhaps during the first landing,” she says.
“Morocco,” her aunt says.
“We didn’t know where we were.”
“Morocco. Every landing is imprinted on my brain, up to the final one in Iraq. They kept showing us maps and flight paths on TV.”
For some reason, this makes Samantha feel giddy. The room tilts. She closes her eyes and grips the arm of the sofa because a curving hall of mirrors seems to be sloping away from her and at the far end, very tiny, she can almost see her mother with a baby in her arms.
“It was horrible,” her aunt says. “Just watching and watching, completely helpless. It was horrible.”
“Was it?” Samantha cannot keep an edge of anger from her voice, and something else too, a low buzz of excitement which her aunt detects and which Samantha will not let go. Like a terrier, she works at her aunt’s growing agitation. “Was it, Lou?” she needles. She never says Aunt Lou, only Lou. She watches her aunt the way a cat watches: tense, ready to pounce.
“Sam,” her aunt says. She sounds very tired. “I am not trying to compete. It goes without saying that it was far, far more horrible on the plane.”
But it is the different angle of vision that excites and disturbs Samantha. If she could see the little girl in the blue coat in someone else’s frame, if she could study her, would the puzzle solve itself? “Tell me about watching us on TV.”
Lou clenches her interlocked fingers and the knuckles give off soft cracking sounds that make Samantha wince. Lou’s hands turn the color of sunburn. Then she lifts her elbows like wings and her fingers stretch and pull at each other, her hands involved in a tug-of-war. Neither hand lets go. Her elbows droop at her sides. “Sometimes, especially during the Morocco landing, the camera would zoom in close,” Lou says in a low voice, “and you could see someone’s face through a window.”
“It was very hot,” Samantha says. She undoes several buttons at the neck of her cotton dress. “People were fainting from the heat, I remember that.” She remembers, across the aisle, a tiny woman with gray hair. I have a granddaughter who’s just your size, the little gray-haired woman told Samantha. That was before anything unusual had happened. The woman was wearing a black dress. Later, when the plane was on the ground again, when it grew hotter and hotter, Samantha remembers that the gray-haired woman reached over and tugged at her sleeve. Water, the woman said, water, water, although she did not make any sound. It was the shape of the words that Samantha heard. “My teddy’s thirsty too,” Samantha told her, and the tiny woman opened her mouth and then she went soft and slithered down to the floor like a towel falling into a pool and Samantha’s mother said, Heat prostration, and Sam, if you don’t take off your coat, and she took it off then, she thinks, and maybe her father put it up in the overhead locker or maybe Sam kicked it under the seat. Wherever it was, the coat remained on the plane. It did not slide down the escape hatch with Sam.
More than thirteen years later, the lost coat still gnaws at her days and her nights. It has eaten her. In dreams, she looks under the