Night Visions by Thomas Fahy Page B

still haven’t told me where you were last night.”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œChristi—”
    â€œI don’t know,” Christina snaps. “I just don’t.” She pauses and exhales slowly. “I’m going to take a shower now.”
    She goes to her room and opens her journal. She writes about the news report and waking up this morning in her car several blocks from the church. She glances through the earlier pages, comparing this record to other accounts she has pieced together recently. For several months, her amnesia and blackouts have coincided with reports of killings. Her nightmares have become more vivid.
    She takes out a folded paper from her pocket. It’s this week’s bulletin from Saint Peter’s Church, crumpled and discolored with brown stains. Christina quickly refolds it and places it in the journal.
    For the rest of the day, the image of Saint Peter stays with her. She sees him in the shower, on television, even in the dark when she listens to Bach—which has been less effective every year.
    But what keeps her awake now is fear—fear of herself and a future she can’t control. The Goldberg Variations hum softly in her ears. At most, she will sleep for two or three hours. She listens anyway, waiting and praying, as always, that at any moment she will somehow fall asleep.

10
Boxes to Fill
    O n the top shelf in her bedroom closet, Samantha keeps a shoe box filled with memories—love letters, Mother’s reading glasses, euros from a backpacking trip to Europe, postcards, her first ribbon from a fencing tournament, several photographs. The box feels heavier now than she remembered, but maybe the past is always that way. She places it on the desk and removes the dusty lid, trying to decide whether to put Phebe’s frog inside.
    A second edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby sits on top. It was the last gift Frank gave her before moving to Washington. Months before, she’d jokingly called him Gatsby after a fight in which he asked how many lovers she’d had before him, and she wouldn’t answer. Does it really matter? You only need to be with one person to know how to make someone else happy.
    Frank wanted to know about her past so he could stop feeling that her kisses were borrowed, learned from someone else for a love he and she didn’t share. At least that’s what he told her. But Samantha didn’t think he really cared about numbers, names,and reasons that no longer mattered. Like Gatsby, he wanted to erase the past, to believe that true love happened only once—and with one person.
    She picks up the novel and notices a faded piece of notebook paper sticking lightly to the back cover. She pulls it off and recognizes the handwriting immediately: You look beautiful today. I love you.—Alex
    Yes, some things she couldn’t tell Frank. Everyone has something—a secret place or name—that can open the pain of the past.
    For her, it is Alexander.
    Samantha was a sophomore in college when she met Alexander. He dazzled her with sophistication and intelligence—a graduate student of history, a connoisseur of wine, an insatiable traveler. Everything about him seemed magical to her. The unexpected touch of his fingertips on the back of her neck. The way he misplaced his glasses two or three times a day. The smell of sweat through his shirts.
    Samantha wanted so much to have the love she’d seen in movies that she made excuses for his cruelty. At least, she accepted his excuses for hurting her. He didn’t want to be in love, she realized later. He wanted the power of knowing someone loved him. She remembers the first of many nights that she drove to his apartment, a two-room unit attached to the back of a house, and saw the car belonging to his ex-girlfriend parked on the street. All the lights were off. They were inside.
    She didn’t pound on the door or yell like an