The Memory Painter: A Novel Page 8

  Doc looked up. “Really? Best man?”

  Bryan kept his face averted, afraid that his father would see the lie. “Another painter from my days in Europe…” he explained. “Anyway, I was wondering what does a best man do? Have you ever been one?” Bryan stole a glance at his father and immediately felt guilty when he saw the sadness in his face.

  “Yeah, once. An old buddy of mine who’s no longer around.”

  Bryan kept digging, trying to sound casual. He had to maneuver this just right to get what he wanted. “What do you mean not around?”

  A long moment passed. Bryan wasn’t sure if his dad would answer. “He and his wife passed away before you were born.”

  “That’s horrible. How did they die? Car accident?” Bryan cringed inside but he knew he couldn’t stop now.

  “No, no. Terrible accident at work, some kind of gas explosion. I don’t know the details. It’s still hard to believe they’re gone.”

  “How come you’ve never talked about them before?”

  “It’s complicated. Your mother knew them too.”

  Damn right it’s complicated, he thought. But Bryan held back.

  “I still have their things in storage at the restaurant. Guess it’s about time to get rid of it all.”

  Bryan dropped his shovel in astonishment and blurted out. “You have their things?” He quickly picked the shovel back up again, praying his father wouldn’t notice his odd reaction.

  But Doc seemed distracted. He looked around as if worried Barbara might hear. “Mike and I were roommates before he and Diana got engaged. I had a key to their apartment. After they died, the landlord was going to throw everything away—Mike didn’t have any family, and Diana’s parents were getting on and couldn’t fly out to handle it all. They didn’t want anything and I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away, so I stored it.”

  He’d kept their things. Bryan’s heart leapt, and he fought back the urge to embrace his father. Without a doubt he knew he had chosen to be his son. Michael’s best friend and protector—Doc had subconsciously known what to do.

  “I don’t know why I kept it all as long as I did. I was about to clear it out last year, just get rid of it. Lou Lou’s been all over my case to turn the storage room into her office. Promised I’d start working on it soon, but my back still isn’t a hundred percent.”

  Bryan had forgotten that his father had injured his back on a hiking trip. Doc had been a serious hiker all his life, tackled just about every ambitious trail in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico and never had hurt himself. Ever. What were the odds?

  Bryan hurried to offer up his help. “I can clean out the storage room for you.” Doc’s eyes grew so round that Bryan couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m serious. You shouldn’t be lifting anything yet and I have the time.” Even as he said it, Bryan felt a little ashamed at his selfish motives—he could tell that his father was touched by the offer.

  “You sure? It’s over two dozen boxes covered in dust and Lord knows what else.”

  Bryan held back his excitement. “It’ll give me a little break from the studio. I need it.”

  Doc reached into his pocket. “Here’s my keys. I’ve got another set.” He hesitated. “Just don’t tell your mother about it.”

  As if on cue, they heard her car pull into the drive. Bryan pocketed the keys and handed over the potato bucket. “I’ll go say hi.” He couldn’t avoid her forever.

  * * *

  Barbara came in the back door carrying several bags. “Bryan? You here?” She turned the corner and saw him at the kitchen sink washing his hands. “This is a surprise. I thought you were avoiding us.”

  Bryan grimaced to himself. “Sorry, I’ve been meaning to call you back.” He wiped his hands on the nearest towel and turned around. “It’s been a crazy week.”

  Barbara busied herself putting groceries away. “Well, we came to your art opening. You weren’t there.”

  Bryan watched his mother whiz around the kitchen like a dynamo. She looked … good. He cringed at the thought but could see why Michael had attempted to date her. Barbara was an attractive woman. Now approaching sixty, she took excellent care of herself and looked at least ten years younger.

  But she was also a difficult person—too caught up in her own head, cross-examining everything all the time. It was wearying. Throughout his childhood she had been obsessed with curing him and had shipped him off to institution after institution, allowing psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and sleep therapists to become his surrogate parents. The one person he had yearned for had rarely been there, and when she was, she was always in doctor mode, studying him and quizzing him. Over time, his longing had turned to anger and then the anger had faded to distance, until they didn’t even know how to have a conversation anymore. A mother was supposed to know her child better than anyone and she didn’t know him at all.

  Now that he was older, he could look back on her actions with a glimmer of understanding, though the child in him still hadn’t forgiven her. When he had returned to Boston he had thought they could try again, maybe even start over. But now he had Michael’s memories to contend with. And they definitely didn’t help.

  Barbara busied herself by chopping salad ingredients. “I found the most amazing antique the other day,” she said, motioning to the bag by the door. On weekends she rummaged around flea markets with her girlfriends, looking for antiques. It was a longtime hobby.

  Bryan was not surprised that she didn’t comment on his paintings. She hated to compliment or give praise; the tendency was not in her nature. Still, it stung a little. If Doc hadn’t mentioned that she had fallen in love with the Versailles, Bryan wouldn’t have known she’d bought it. She was such a different person with his father. Bryan had always felt like the odd one out, despite the dreams, and now it made sense.

  “Something funny?”

  Bryan snapped back to the present. “Sorry, what?”

  “You had this little smile.”

  “That not allowed?”

  Barbara ignored his remark and went to work peeling a carrot. “Are you all settled in? I’d love to see the new place.”

  “It’s just a loft where I work. There’s nothing to see.”

  “You could at least have us over for dinner. You live like a hermit.”

  Bryan crossed his arms. “Because I paint.”

  “That doesn’t mean you have to keep yourself isolated. It’s not healthy.”

  “Ah Jesus, here we go.”

  She turned around and put her hands on her hips. “Don’t get defensive. I just worry about you. You look like hell. I’ve seen street bums who dress better. Are you even eating?”

  Bryan stole the carrot from her cutting board and took a big bite to make a point. Barbara kept talking. He tuned her out and wandered over to the counter by the back door and peeked inside the bag from the flea market. What he saw inside flabbergasted him. He carefully lifted the object out and set it on the counter. “You bought a clock?”

  “Yes. Don’t change the subject. Do you see what I’m trying to say?”

  “Oh, I see what you’re trying to say, Barbara. I just don’t have to agree with it.”

  The color drained from Barbara’s face, and Bryan realized he had just spoken to her as Michael. It was something he had said to her verbatim during their last fight.

  “The way you said my name just now…” she was clearly battling a ghost. “Since when am I Barbara? I thought my title was Mom.”

  Bryan turned back to the clock and began to fiddle with it. Neither spoke for several minutes.

  “It doesn’t work,” she announced unnecessarily. “But it was so beautiful I had to buy it. The man said it was French and very old.”

  Bryan opened the back to look inside at the mechanism that made it tick. “It is old, but it’s not French. It’s Dutch.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Because I built it in the seventeenth century. How the hell his mother found it at a flea market was beyo
nd him. But she had done that all his life: found objects he could identify from his past. It was one of her talents.

  In this particular lifetime, Bryan had been Christiaan Huygens. His father, Constantijn, was a poet and composer—friend to Descartes, Rembrandt, and many others. Christiaan’s mother had died when he was eleven after giving birth to his sister, and his father had never recovered from the loss. Constantijn hadn’t known how to relate to his children, and when Descartes recognized Christiaan’s budding genius, he suggested that Christiaan be sent to school in Leiden.

  Christiaan excelled and he soon surpassed his teachers. He wrote the first book on probability theory and hypothesized a law of motion, which Isaac Newton would later reformulate. His quest to understand mechanics led him into every field … mathematics, physics, astronomy. He proposed that light was made of waves and discovered centrifugal force. A master in optics, he also created a refracting telescope, which he used to speculate that Saturn had rings and to detect its first moon, Titan.

  But Christiaan’s greatest passion was time. And when he designed the pendulum clock, the most precise timekeeper of its day, he helped the world to capture it.

  Christiaan had sent the clock that Bryan was holding to his father as a gift just before the old man died. Bryan still couldn’t believe that Barbara had found it. Had she been Constantijn? No … she couldn’t be. He forced himself to focus and he stared deep into her eyes, actively seeking the recognition.

  Attempting to place a person in the past was something he generally tried to avoid, but in moments like these he couldn’t resist the impulse. He had learned how to recognize someone’s spirit by honing his thoughts in on them and connecting with them through their eyes. On a rare occasion a recognition would come without his trying, especially if he was angry or upset, but usually it took immense concentration. Barbara stared back at him with her eyebrows raised, clearly baffled by the silent exchange.

  And then he saw it—Constantijn’s spirit shimmering in her eyes. Bryan turned away, disconcerted. Rarely did he recognize a soul that had crossed over to the opposite sex. This was also the first time he had envisioned his mother as a man and the idea felt alien to him. But still, to recognize Constantijn within her, and as he held Christiaan’s clock … His anger melted, and he swallowed the lump in his throat. “If you’d like, I can fix it for you.”

  “That’s right, I forgot you went through a watchmaking phase.” She shook her head at the memory. “I’ll never forget when I came home and found you with all our clocks and wristwatches in pieces on the table.”

  Bryan remembered it too. That had been right after he had recalled Christiaan’s life. He had rebuilt clocks every day for months, explaining it away as a new hobby. And he hid his new fluency in Dutch and French—although he did allow himself to get As in math from then on out.

  He tried to make a joke of it. “Hey, I put them back together.”

  “That’s true.”

  They smiled at each other as Bryan placed the clock back in her flea market bag.

  Barbara asked, “Are you going to stay for dinner?”

  “Sorry. I’ve got plans.” He saw her disappointment and added, “We’ll do it soon, though. Promise.”

  “At least have some of your birthday cake. Your father’s been eating it all.”

  “That’s okay, thanks.” He picked up the bag and left before she could say anything else that might get him to stay.

  * * *

  Bryan drove down the street, parked his car, and pulled out the clock. He sat for a long time hugging it to him, filled with a yearning that always came when he handled something that had once been his. He closed his eyes and let the feeling wash over him. How he would love to go home and fix the clock, to lose himself in Christiian’s world, but that would be a distraction. Doc’s keys sat heavy in his pocket, and he knew answers lay locked away in Michael and Diana’s things. He only wished that Linz could help him go through them.

  Linz. He needed to help her remember. Juliana or Diana—at this point it didn’t matter. She just needed to start remembering something. His thoughts landed on the painting. Before he went to clean out the storage shed, he had to get it.

  FOURTEEN

  Linz rode the elevator down to the tenth floor. It was one of five housing genetic research. Her lab was at the end of the hall, and she couldn’t have designed a better workspace. Everything was state of the art—no expense had been spared. Boston was the epicenter of Medicor and it showed.

  Even though the biomedical industry was witnessing a decline in research and development, the pharmaceutical market projected it would grow at a rate of over eight percent a year due to an aging global population. Linz believed that her father’s vision and tenacity had kept Medicor on top, boasting the largest development portfolio in a shrinking pond. Not only were they responsible for a huge percentage of the country’s pharmaceutical research, but they also invested in other labs across the globe, helping to keep them afloat.

  Growing up, she had played on the floor of her father’s office with her toy microscope and sat beside him on planes as they flew off to conferences around the world. Her unusual childhood had helped to shape who she was, giving her a love for science and the ambition to become a pioneer in her own right.

  In college, she had reached a crossroads where she had to decide what path in science she would take. The human brain had always fascinated her the most because she had often wondered if her own mind was abnormal. The recurring nightmare of the woman in ancient Rome had always felt more like a memory to her and this conviction had galvanized her to try to understand where it had come from. Specializing in neuropathology and genetics had seemed only natural. In many ways the tangible findings and detective work were a comfort, and she believed that it would be possible for her to fully understand how the brain created memories within her lifetime. It was a belief that gave her extraordinary drive.

  These last several months had been encouraging, especially now that the lab was up and running. When Linz had come aboard, she had absorbed a small staff from a project that had been terminated after the lead scientist had retired. Steve, Maggie, and Neil were all hungry, just out of grad school and ready to make their mark. At first they had been intimidated by the idea of working for her—the CEO’s daughter—but Linz quickly won them over and the initial awkwardness hadn’t lasted long.

  Linz ducked into the employee kitchen and found Steve making coffee. He was the youngest in the group and had a crush on her as obvious as a neon sign. She tried hard not to notice. “Hey, where is everybody?” she asked him.

  Steve started and turned around, eyes wide behind his John Lennon glasses. “Doughnut bonanza down in Patents.”

  Linz thought he could use a few doughnuts. The poor guy gave skinny jeans a whole new meaning. She wished he would stop staring at her.

  “I put your mail on your desk and I got your favorite coffee, Kona.” He showed her the bag of beans as proof. “I just made some now.”

  Linz poured herself a cup. “Thanks. Can you do me a favor?”

  “Anything.” He held out a sugar pack and stir stick.

  “Research phonetic studies documenting unexplained cognizance of a foreign language.”

  “Unexplained cognizance? Can that happen?”

  “I think so.” She was about to leave, when she turned around with an afterthought. “This is a little off the wall, but do you believe in reincarnation?”

  “Well…” His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed. “I think, um,” he gulped again. “You know … that you meet certain people you feel this, um, intense connection to … and maybe it means something?”

  “Er … right.” That was not helpful. Linz saluted him with her mug. “Thanks for the coffee.” As she turned away, she caught Steve putting his finger to his head and pulling an imaginary trigger. She smiled and closed the door.

  She walked along the long glass hallway and peered into the various labs as she ma
de her way to her own lab, slowing to admire Cyclops, the heart and soul of the Genome Project. Its long robotic arms took slide samples from endless rows of drawers against the wall with surgical precision. It was an omnipotent octopus of technology that generated matches to potential gene fragments with lightning speed, providing answers in seconds.

  Dr. Parker saw Linz pass and smiled, waving as if they were old friends. Linz was surprised by the warmth of his greeting—she had only met him this morning at the board meeting. She gave a quick wave back and continued down the hall, entering her lab at the same time as Maggie and Neil.

  Maggie had magenta hair, two nose rings, and could make a lab coat look cool. She was also brilliant and worked with Linz on genetic screening and sequencing. Neil managed all the programming and was a serious computer jock who could barely squeeze his large gut into his chair. Linz didn’t know how she had ever lived without him. In the space of three months, he had written new software to track all the data results they had generated. He was so ingenious that she suspected he just might be a computer hacker on the side—when he wasn’t attending gaming conventions.

  “Neil, the scavenger program you wrote is kicking serious ass.”

  “All my programs kick serious ass. Why do you think I always wear this?” He pointed to the faded Bruce Lee T-shirt under his lab coat.

  Maggie snorted. “Because you don’t do laundry.”

  Linz chuckled and headed to her desk, trying to ignore the Greek books piled next to her computer. She had brought several in to work, thinking she would read them at lunch. Now she was beginning to question her sanity. They were nothing but a screaming distraction. She checked her cell phone again, hoping Bryan had tried to get in touch.

  Maggie followed her over. “Your father called to remind you about the company party on Sunday. You going?”

  “Yep, planning on it.”

  Maggie perched on the edge of her desk. “Bringing anyone?”