Chapter 95 The Flood

Chapter 95 The Flood
Lorenzo (Ethan) Amaratti

The pirate hat was the first piece. Everything else followed.

Day one.

I sat in my dorm room after the exhibition, with the lights off, the blinds drawn, and the door locked. Eloise had gone to her apartment after I told her I needed to be alone, and she had kissed my forehead and said "call me if you need me" and left without argument, because Eloise understood the difference between solitude and isolation and trusted me to know which one I was choosing.

I was not choosing either. I was drowning.

The pirate hat led to water. Not the abstract water of my recurring dreams but specific water: a swimming pool with inflatable slides and sprinklers arching across a lawn and children shrieking and the smell of chlorine and sunscreen and birthday cake. The pool had a pirate ship. I could see it now, a wooden structure at the shallow end with a flag and a plank and a slide that deposited screaming children into the water below. I had gone down that slide. My body remembered the drop, the splash, the cold shock of water closing over my head, the hands that caught me and pulled me up.

Whose hands?

Large hands. A man's hands. Strong and certain, lifting me out of the water and onto his shoulders, and I was laughing, and the sky was blue above us, and his voice said something I could not hear, but that vibrated through his chest and into my body where I sat on his shoulders, and the vibration felt like safety.

I pressed my palms against my eyes. The images kept coming.

Birthday cake. Candles shaped like the number five. Three children blowing them out together while a crowd of adults clapped and cheered. One of the children was the red-haired boy from Ray's painting. One was the girl with the dark eyes. One was me. We wore matching pirate hats, our faces sticky with frosting, and the girl held my hand under the table where no one could see, as though she knew I was afraid of something and was anchoring me without being asked.

Who was she?

Day two.

The fragments came faster. Not in sequence. In bursts, like a radio signal flickering between stations, each burst carrying a different frequency, a different time, a different room.

A woman singing. A lullaby, Korean, about a sparrow and a mountain. The melody simple and circular. I could hear it now with a clarity that made my chest ache. She sang it at bedtime, her voice low and warm, and I was small, and the bed was large, and two other children were in the room, one on each side of me, and we were falling asleep to the sound of her voice.

The same woman in a garden. Roses. Her hands in the soil, dirt beneath her fingernails. She looked up and smiled, and the smile was the most familiar thing in the world, more familiar than my own face, and I did not know her name, but I knew her smile and the knowing was so absolute it made me gasp.

A different woman. Sharper. Her voice cold and clipped. "If you tell anyone, there will be consequences." A hand around my arm, fingers digging in. A slap across my leg that left a mark shaped like a rectangle, the edge of a phone. The sound of crying, my crying, muffled into a pillow because crying out loud made it worse.

Eyes in the walls. Green, then red. A bookshelf that watched me at night. Music that played from nowhere, haunting and thin, and I was terrified and I could not tell anyone because the sharp woman said I was imagining it and the man who lived in the house believed her.

I stumbled to the bathroom and vomited. My hands gripped the porcelain, and my body shook, and the memories poured through me like water through a broken dam, unstoppable, unfiltered, each one carrying sediment from a life I had not known I had lost.

Day three.

I stopped eating. Eloise brought food, and I looked at it, and my stomach turned. She sat on the edge of my bed with a sandwich on a plate and worry in her eyes and said, "Lorenzo, you need to tell me what is happening."

"I do not know what is happening."

"The exhibition. The painting. Something broke open."

"Yes."

"Tell me."

I tried. I told her about the water and the pirate hat and the birthday cake. I told her about the woman who sang lullabies and the woman who hit me. I told her about the eyes in the walls and the man's shoulders and the girl who held my hand under the table. I told her the memories were arriving without context, without names, without the connecting tissue that would make them a story rather than a collection of fragments.

She listened. She did not interrupt. She did not tell me I was imagining things or that the dreams were just dreams or that I should see a doctor. She sat with me in the wreckage and said, "The brain is like fabric. The creases remain."

I looked at her. This woman who had kissed me in a studio that smelled like chalk dust and told me I was overthinking everything. She was the steadiest thing in my life, and I held onto her the way you hold onto a railing when the floor is moving beneath your feet.

"I had a sister," I said. The words surprised me. They came from the same place the pirate hat had come from, not from thought but from certainty. "I had a sister, and she had dark eyes, and she held my hand at a birthday party, and she told me something. She told me not to worry."

Eloise's hand tightened on mine.

"And I had a brother. Red hair. He laughed like the world was the funniest thing he had ever seen. He drew pictures. He drew everything."

The room was very quiet. The city hummed outside the window. My dorm room, which had felt like a cell for three days, suddenly felt like the inside of a cracking egg, the shell giving way to something I could not yet see but that was pushing, pushing, insisting on being born.

At three in the morning, I called Marco.

The phone rang four times. He answered with the groggy confusion of a man pulled from sleep in a Manchester apartment six time zones away. "Enzo? What time is it?"

"Marco. I need to ask you something."

He was awake instantly. I heard the shift in his breathing, the creak of the bed as he sat up. "Go ahead."

"I had a sister. I had a brother. Before Italy. Before the estate. Before the coma." My voice was shaking. "Why can I not remember their faces? I can remember the pirate hats and the birthday cake and the woman who sang to us. I can remember the swimming pool and the man who carried me. But the faces are blurred, Marco. Like the painting. Like Ray's painting."

Silence on the line. Long enough that I pulled the phone from my ear to check the connection.

"Marco?"

His voice came back. Quiet. Steady. Full of something I had never heard from my brother before, something that lived in the space between grief and relief.

"You are remembering them right now, Ethan."

Ethan.

He said Ethan. Not Lorenzo. Not Enzo. The name he had shouted on a soccer field when my knee gave out. The name that lived in the middle of my identity like a seed that had finally, after years of darkness, found the light.

"Who am I?" I whispered.

"You are my brother," Marco said. "And you have a family that has been waiting for you for a very long time."

I sat on my dorm room bed at three in the morning with my phone pressed to my ear, my body shaking, the fragments of a stolen life assembling themselves into a picture I could almost see. The woman in the garden. The man's shoulders. The girl with the dark eyes. The boy with the red hair. The lullaby about a sparrow and a mountain.

The pirate hat.

The wall was down. The water was through. And the boy called Lorenzo was dissolving, particle by particle, into the boy called Ethan who had been buried inside him all along, waiting, patient, stubborn, refusing to disappear.

I did not sleep. I sat in the dark and felt myself becoming someone I had been before, and the becoming was terrifying and beautiful and the only thing I had ever wanted without knowing I was wanting it.

By morning, I had a name. Two names. And for the first time in five years, I understood that they both belonged to me.

Dear Readers,

The flood has come. Three days of memory crashing through a wall that held for five years, bringing with it pirate hats and lullabies and a woman's smile and a woman's slap and the blurred faces of siblings who have been waiting on the other side. Lorenzo is dissolving. Ethan is surfacing. And Marco, the brother who held both names in his mouth for years, has finally given the second one back. The confrontation is coming. The truth is coming. And the boy who lost himself is about to find his way home. Read on.

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