It doesn’t trouble me when my mother forgets my name. She’s 83 and has been in the nursing home for months. A battery of health problems brought her in, but cognitive decline was right up there. The doctors recently switched to calling it dementia.
Her face brightens when I arrive. Then comes a stumble: she calls me Leslie, the name of a cousin long dead. A terrified look crosses her face.
“Lorna,” I offer.
She bounces back, diving into a story I’ve heard dozens of times about a road trip we took when I was in fourth grade, about the locks on the Erie Canal and how I turned cartwheels on the dock. That’s not that odd. Old people live in the past. The rest of us live in the future. The present is where none of us want to be.
It’s when my image disappears from her nightstand photo that I start to worry. It’s an old one, taken on the day after Thanksgiving. Back when my dad was alive, and my mom could still afford the house in the Hudson Valley. We were out for a walk, the four of us. A passerby took the picture. Even though it was long ago, I remember the crisp air, the gravel underfoot, the riot of color around us.
A slow fade takes over the image. A blur runs over my face, my body following. The background tumult of orange, yellow, and red, fills in, replacing me. My father’s arm returns to his side from my shoulders, while my mother still clutches my brother’s hand.
Everyone continues to smile.
For a moment, I’m transfixed, hoping I’ll reappear. My mother’s look is vacant, and I see her reach for a name that’s gone forever. With no need for goodbye, I bolt, running down the halls of the home.
What’s done is done, who’s dead is dead, and nothing I do can make any of it better. I can’t change history, after all.
When the first bones appeared, we knew what they were. We also knew it was an easy fix.
In the center of Myer’s Island, there’s a vivid tangle of green, like you’d find in the tropics. The city’s jagged skyline is so close, it’s like you could reach out and drag your hand along it, cutting your flesh on its sharp edges. Meadows, their foliage fragile, burst with potential. The water is a clear cobalt here; waves lap at the shoreline like you’re in the Hamptons. You can barely turn around without hitting another stretch of land on the water.
The city put the land up for sale and I convinced the firm to move on it. There’s no way I could have known what it takes to build on a historic site. Documents filed, the OSHA assessment because of lead, and a stoppage because of asbestos. My promises of would-be condo owners lining up turned into money floating away. My first big job threatened to be my last.
Finally, the moment came. Hollowed of life, the buildings of Myers’ Island awaited their destruction, window glass broken, bricks crumbled. The wrecking ball’s impact was a mere suggestion: they toppled like the towers of a child’s Lego castle.
Later, the sun dipped in the sky and the gloaming turned the machinery into the stone statues of a child’s fairytale. In the distance, Manhattan traffic rumbled, the wind whistled, and the East River lapped at the shoreline; it’s strange how quiet a construction site can be after hours. I was in the site hut, going over the plans, trying to figure out what we could speed up and where we could cut costs. Creating some sort of plan that makes it look like I knew what I’m doing, like all these delays are part of a grand trajectory.
The door to the Portakabin swung open, smacked the wall behind it, and hit an open palm. A large man’s silhouette, a hulking shadow filled the doorframe, backlit by the evening light outside. A surge of fear welled up, bile in my throat.
He stepped into the fluorescent light and that fear melted into annoyance.
“Now what?” I asked.
Face twisted in a knot of tension, he waved me out the door. My sneakers sank into the dirt. I struggled to bring his name to mind, sneaking a look at my phone as he walked in front of me. Scrolling recent contacts, I find it: Mike Calavetti (Contractor). For a moment, I saw nothing. Just dirt and debris. Then ragged shapes presented themselves. White. Bleached. Some tiny, some large, they lay scattered, their white vivid in the mahogany dirt. Scattered seeds of a grim harvest.
“A Potters field?” I finally asked. “Here?”
“You think they were carting bodies out here? Before the ferry?”
“I thought this was a school.” The crush of the last few weeks hit me like a wave of polluted surf.
“A reform school, he said. “Don’t you watch the news?”
Boys got sent here because they were too young for prison and no one could give them directions to a better life. Sent here for truancy, gambling, and joyriding in a neighbor’s car. Because they fought when fighting was all they knew. These kids whose lives had held so little promise, they never got the chance to be anything but troubled teens. What could I do about that? If we reported this, minutes would turn into hours as we made phone calls: the police, the coroner’s office, the firm’s partners, no doubt home in the suburbs by now. The site would be shut. Money would drift away. The project would extend, blurring, softening. Dying.
Panic rose in my throat.
“Who else is here?”
He gestured to the empty site. I waved him into the Portakabin, as though our words might carry along with the whistle of the early evening breeze. He sat across from my desk, without waiting to be invited, slouching in that casual way that men who work with their hands have. Meaty palms grasped biceps that were once toned and were now just thick, thighs sprawling to make space for a dome of a belly, dirty Carhatt kicked forwards.
I studied my scribbled notes, my laptop with its multiple spreadsheets open, and the site plans. Cost saving. Green living. Attracting a younger, more conscious crowd who has embraced urban living, despite distance from the city center.
“Cut the parking structure. Make it a lot. It doesn’t need a foundation,” I said. “We’ll have bike racks. Electric bikes. Scooters. Most people will take the ferry so who needs cars out here? We can expect a tram in a few years, a subway stop. Car-free. It’ll be a draw.”
The contractor sighed, heavily.
“What?” I asked.
He studied his nails, pointedly examining the crescent moons of dirt framing his fingertips.
“Get the bones out of the dirt.” I felt a vague satisfaction at the tables turning. “Then pave over it.”
“Where do you want them to go?” He asked.
“Just get rid of them. We don’t have time for this.”
“Sounds like it’s worth a lot to you.” A tight smile cracked his weathered skin. his light brown eyes vivid in his sunburned face. Still with that maddening calm.
“Obviously. This job is everything…”
His mouth twitched.
“Alright,” I said. “What’s it worth to you?”
“What do you got?” He asked.
I headed over to the cabinet, where we keep cash for incidentals. This was a big incidental, but it was a big project. And I would pay it back. Of course.
“What about them?” I tipped my chin toward the empty site.
He shrugged, a surprisingly delicate gesture.
“You take care of me, I’ll take care of them.”
I added to the stack with cash from my wallet.
“It’ll be gone by Monday?” I asked.
“Of course.” He patted his pocket. “I’m an honest man.”
I nodded.
“I can’t change history,” I said as he headed out the door.
I was at Steven’s the next morning when I realized that something was well and truly wrong. I woke to the sounds of the city drifting in from far below. I draped myself across the empty bed. Steven had gone out for a run. The long one that he only had time for on weekends.
Recollections of yesterday came drifting back, twisting through the mild aridity of a red wine hangover: those bones and the tight smirk of the contractor. I headed for the shower. Under its hot water, images of the site finally slipped away. I was crossing the living room in my bathrobe when Steven walked in.
He started. Took a step back and glanced around to see if there was anyone else in the apartment, then down at the keys in his hand.
“Was I supposed to call first?” I asked.
“That’s what you’re worried about?”
I scanned my memory. Were we in the middle of a fight and it slipped my mind?
“OK, Steven. What did I do this time?”
He winced when I used his name. My stomach dropped, like in a too-fast elevator. I wondered if our argument was so bad that we broke up. Somewhere in that wine haze, was there something I said that I couldn’t take back? He followed me into the bedroom, standing in the doorway as I gathered clothes from the drawers. When I dropped the towel and began to dress, he exhaled sharply but it wasn’t an amorous sound.
He shook his head, his sorrowful look sinking me. Sorrowful and something else: unnerved like he misplaced something and couldn’t even begin to think where to look.
“You’re a stranger to me,” he said.
Steven is one of those people who talks about feelings, asking about my childhood and bristling when I evade his questions. He said I was hard to get to know. We can’t have a future if there’s no past, he always said. Still, was this passive-aggressive nonsense supposed to help?
I dressed quickly, pulling on jeans and a sweater. He shook his head, chasing something away, unnerved like he misplaced something and couldn’t even begin to think where to look.
“It’s like you don’t even know me, Steven.”
He looked at me with a strange, blank look that seemed to last for minutes. The he broke into a smile.
“Look, I really enjoyed dating you. I was wondering what happened, why you ghosted me. And I appreciate you getting in touch. But showing up unannounced at my apartment really isn’t the way to do it.”
I was about to object, about to remind him that I had spent the night. He put a gentle arm around my shoulder, silencing my objections. He wasn’t drawing me close. He was leading me out.
Fragments of the last day’s conversations came back to me: my oldest friend talking about college as if it happened six months and not decades ago, convinced I had missed a trip a trio of us took to Paris after graduation. A co-worked asking when I had started at the firm when I had worked there for twelve years.
Steven ushered me toward the hall, and I went along with it because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. The door closed on five years of my life.
I had gone to the nursing home thinking someone had to remember me. I thought wrong.
I leave my mother and her bewildered expression, brushing past nursing home staff who shot me alarmed and disapproving looks, not caring because they didn’t know who I was anymore. Or if they did, they wouldn’t soon enough.
My phone pings as I’m on my way out. At the top of a string of notifications, there’s a name I can’t place: Mike Calavetti. Then I see the word contractor in brackets and it clicks: someone from the job.
Something happened, the text reads. After the job site thing. My wife kicked me out. Said she hadn’t seen me in years and why was I back now. My buddy wouldn’t take me in. Claimed he barely remembered me from school.
A shadowy image comes to mind, a big guy, sprawling in a chair in my office. The site. Of course. I couldn’t have gotten rid of those bones on my own. It’s a construction site. There must have been other people there. One of them had to be this Mike Calavetti guy.
My phone pings again.
This happening to you, too?
Yes, I text back. I think so.
Years of jogging on city sidewalks prepares me for this dodge and dart game. I get to the subway in minutes, sprinting again as soon as the train screeched into the station. My hand shakes as I open my apartment door. It’s not from the run.
My diplomas hang on the wall but there’s a blank space where my name once was. The framed issue of Dwell where they interviewed me now features an article about sustainable design in desert cities.
All the terrible things that happen in this world, all the terrible things that happened in that place and I’m bearing the brunt of it. Why should one mistake wipe away my life?
I check my phone. There’s a text from a number I don’t recognize. No caller ID attached to it. I open it anyway.
Your number’s on my phone. I texted you earlier today. Maybe we spoke? I hope you can help me. I’m losing my mind. I’m losing everything. No one knows me. My wife, my kids, my sister, the guys…. I know them. They’re sure they don’t know me. I’m hoping you might remember me. Call me when you get this.
I put the phone down, ready to delete the message. I’m figuring it’s an elaborate scam. Then a sharp pain worms its way from my temples to my eyebrows. I press on my skin as if that might push it away, as if that might erase what was happening. This guy didn’t text me at random; my number wasn’t in his contacts but the thread was still there. I was disappearing from his memory, from his records; other people were forgetting him as he forgot me, as I was forgetting him.
It drops into place, like a rolling door clattering down over a storefront. The construction site, the troubled dirt, the bones. A shadowy figure: no face, no name but someone is there at the corner of my mind. If I push hard enough, I should be able break through this murky membrane that stands between him and me. But I can’t. He remains a silhouette.
I do a quick search on collective amnesia just to rule out the possibility. Selective amnesia, spontaneous amnesia, amnesia epidemic: memory loss caused by injury. Neurological disorders. The one I knew about, the one my dad died of; a host of others I had never heard of. Traumatic amnesia. From car accidents, sports injuries, assaults. No reports of people forgetting each other spontaneously.
Collective amnesia: no, that’s used as a metaphor for people forgetting history. Or deliberately obscuring history’s injustices. Right. Injustices. The site.
A brisk sharp determination surges through the ache in my head. Anything can be fixed if you work at it hard enough. This a big problem and a weird one but a problem is all it is. All that was left now was to find the solution. Once I did that, everything would go back to normal.
I’m working against time but that’s OK, I’m used to racing the clock. I settle in with my laptop and get to work. Identifying the reform school that used to operate on the island is easy. I’m not the first to consider that something terrible happened here, not the first to question whether the boys listed as runaways ever got off the island. Not the first to suggest that deaths listed as accidental were anything but.
The arrest and sentencing records are already Freedom Of Infromation Act-ed, transferred from old microfilm to digital. Finding the names of the boys who got sent there and dumping their names into spreadsheets is easy. As is locating the release records and identifying the names on the first but not on the second. Another spreadsheet for the supposed runaways. A final one for the names in the infirmary records whose deaths are questionable: unknown cause, pneumonia, wood shop accident, even one listed, improbably, as a stroke.
Who did all this, I wonder? Who ignored the brutal punishments that turned fatal? Someone must have named a warden, a doctor who turned a blind eye to suspicious injuries, a teacher who sent kids out for punishment. I search using the obvious terms: “Myers Island reform school warden.” Nothing. No name, no picture. Even the accounts of the men who were once reform school boys: in interviews, they speak of brutal and devious punishments but no one offers names. My fingers moving faster over the keyboard, I search for nurses, for judges, even for cooks. Nothing. No adults associated with the place at all.
I go back to the FOIA-ed records. Death certificates have the names of the boys, but the attending doctor’s name is blank. Sentencing records: the judge’s name is missing. Gone. Every adult associated with this place helped make those boys go from being kids to discarded waste. And so, they had disappeared.
For a long, foolish moment, I ponder this. Dozens of people simply can’t simply fade away. I wonder why it wasn’t major news. Then I realize: they disappeared from people’s memories; they disappeared from memories of each other. There was no one to remember them so there was no one to report on their disappearance. Every time they reached out for help, they would fade from the minds of those they talked to. Eventually, they must have joined a corps of lost souls, lingering outside of soup kitchens, posting up at trailer parks, consigned to mental hospitals.
They were gone. Outside of history.
I work into the small hours. It’s late but my brother will be up, cranking out a story for a morning deadline, a shot of whiskey in his coffee. Joey won’t remember me, but he also won’t turn down a good lead.
I have a scoop for you, I text.
No answer. I hope he hasn’t turned his phone off, that his deadline isn’t that pressing.
Finally, a soft ping.
Who are you?
You don’t know me. I’m an architect. I discovered something on a job site. A tragedy.
Why are you contacting me?
I choose my words with care.
Because of your mob exposés.
It takes only a few seconds before he calls.
“How do I know I can trust you?” He asks.
“You don’t have to. I just want to send you some files. I’ll use the cloud.”
I tell him about the island. About the mass grave.
“OK,” he says. “That’s terrible but, honestly, you start digging around and you’ll find potter’s fields around this city. Homeless people, undocumented laborers, prisoners.”
“These were children.”
He gasps. It’s a soft sound but there.
“How do you know?”
“It was a reform school. The bones were in the field behind the school buildings…”
“OK,” he says. “Call the authorities. They can open an investigation.”
“I’ve got the names of the kids,” I say. “I can send you the files. If you want to see the evidence, meet me at the island.”
He doesn’t answer.
“Or not,” I add quickly.
“I’ll look at the files,” he says.
“Can I ask you a strange question?” I ask. I don’t wait for an answer. “Do you have siblings?”
“I had a sister.” Joey’s tone is hard and weary. “Why do you ask?”
“I knew someone with the last name Simone. I was just wondering if you were related.”
“Doubtful,” he says. “She died when we were kids.”
“My dad’s disease was pretty advanced by then,” he adds. “I don’t know what my mom was thinking, leaving him to take care of a little kid.”
That part of his story, at least, is right: our dad’s condition had taken a turn by my early grade school years: his dark moods, dementia that came far too early, slurred speech and an uneasy gait, scattered through my childhood. Joey’s timeline is right. He had left us by my third grade, dead by fifth.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“I don’t know why I’m talking about this,” he says, although I do. That shadowy presence I feel when I think about whoever was at the job site. He must feel something like that around his sister’s memory and its pull must be harder, given how well we once knew each other.
Mind filled with awful memories, he’s carried this sorrow for a long time. Or he thinks he has. It’s an old wound covered in scar tissue, even though it just happened. I shudder, then realize that his pain will fade fast. By the time he wakes up tomorrow morning, his sister died before he was born. By mid-morning, his mother will have had a stillbirth. By this time tomorrow, he would be an only child. His mother would have lost a pregnancy or two before he was born.
“I’ll send you a link to a file. Write down my email address and remind yourself to open it.”
“I’ll remember our conversation.”
“Promise me you’re writing this down.”
“Of course. I’m a journalist.”
I give him the name of the island.
“I get it if you don’t want to meet me there. But you can go there yourself. Maybe in the morning?”
He sighs.
“Did you write that down, too?”
“Yes.” He sounds tired. And a bit annoyed.
We hang up before I push it too far.
My phone pings. I grab it, hoping it’s a text from my brother. It’s not.
I’m trying you one last time. I don’t know you but I’ve contacted you before. I can only hope you know me. I need help.
I stare at the text for a long moment. It must be a wrong number. Clearly, it’s someone in distress but I have problems of my own.
Going to an uninhabited island by myself in the middle of the night is foolish. But it has to be done. Reading those kids’ stories, stories cut short by adults who were willing to throw them away, brings everything into sharp relief. What I did wasn’t as horrible as the cruelty of those wardens and the callousness of everyone who covered up their secrets. But, until this moment, I had thought only of myself. Steven, my friends, Joey, my mother: all had their reasons to not trust me. They were afterthoughts as I raced past, reaching for something better. I always thought there would be time later; I would think about them later. Once I did what needed to be done, gathered back the bones and got someone to bury them, once the boys’ stories were released, I would make amends. Maybe people would remember me. But even if they didn’t, I would start anew, this time with attention, not with brusque carelessness.
A rain starts up, gentle at first with the kind of patter that makes you think of spring flowers and the days gradually lengthening. The droplets get gradually bigger, and they slam the ground with force. Cold water douses my hair and drips down my neck.
At the gate there’s a flimsy kiosk. A miserable guard sits inside it, his fingers stabbing his phone screen like it’s offended him. He barely glances up when I pass. When I swipe my pass card and the lock honks out an alarm, he waves me over, his face numb and bored. Rain taps out a scattered tattoo on the aluminum over his head. I hand him my ID card, and, for a moment, I can’t decipher his look.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” He hands the card back.
The card is a neutral blue, with UAO Architects emblazoned across it. It’s got the same iridescent overlay it always had. But the background has swallowed up my name. My photo is gone.
“Name please,” he says. He opens a laptop, his pace dull and steady.
As he turns, I sprint away, following the chain-link fence. When I’m out of his sight line, I scramble up it. It’s easy to scale. Dismounting is harder. My sweatpants catch at the top and tear as I jump off. I twist my ankle on impact; a sharp edge of pain shoots through me.
The storm clouds hide whatever moon there is. Buildings loom like the cliffs surrounding a ravine. The night is a rich indigo punctured by scattered clusters of glowing white and yellow in the distance, like an old theater curtain whose tears reveal the stage lights behind it. The rain gets harder as I limp into the site, droplets slamming the dirt and the concrete, their cold stinging my skin. It takes all my attention to avoid the unnaturally soft dirt that hides deep ditches in the dark, piles of rebar, and concrete pits.
My phone pings, its light blinding in the darkness. A text on my home screen from a number I don’t recognize. It’s a group text, dozens of numbers. I can’t take any more of this. Must be a wrong number. I slip my phone back in my pocket.
I feel the arrival of the cops before I see them. But it still happens quickly, bright lights in my face and the group of them with hands on their guns. The cops line up, tense and wary. Shame washed over me as I stand in the glare of the floodlights, my sweatpants torn from the fence, my clothes, my hands, my face, drenched. I turn toward them with my hands lifted. One of them waves at me to drop my arms, then places his own hands on his belt, shifting his weight and signaling a change from high alert to well-rehearsed annoyance.
“It’s OK,” I say. “I’m an architect. I designed these buildings. I mean, the buildings that are going to be here.”
“Alright, so if I called…” He shines the light toward the banner across the fence. “OUA architects, they’ll tell me they sent you here.”
“Of course not. They’ll be closed.” I’m relieved to have an out.
“Right. Cause it’s not exactly business hours. But say I take you in and book you for trespassing. Call them in the morning. They can vouch for you.”
“Well, no. They don’t know me anymore. They did. Up until a few days ago. I was working for them. I’m not anymore. That’s my fault.”
“ID please.”
I take out my wallet and extend my driver’s license. He turns his flashlight on it. Lorna Simone. DOB: 12/14/1979. My picture: skin sallow under the DMV’s fluorescent lights, eyes stony because of those long lines at the DMV. Funny the things that upset me in the life I used to have.
The license is between my thumb and my forefinger when it starts to crumble. It begins with a crack down the middle, the plastic splitting as if someone took a hammer to it. I hold it in my hand as it shatters, the pieces getting smaller, grainier. I bat at the noxious plastic dust before the wind sweeps it up and the rain melts it away.
The cop sees it happen. But he doesn’t flinch. Just keeps shining his too-bright flashlight in my face. It runs through my head like a movie. The cop cuffing me, taking me in, booking me, my name in a computer system. Getting my one phone call: to a lawyer, naturally, but one who would forget my case as soon as we got off the phone. Papers with my name on them fluttering off the secretary’s desk. My name disappearing from the computer. Then from the city’s database. All while I sat in a jail cell. No record of who I was, what I had done, or when I had been detained. It would be like I had just arrived. Over and over. Forever.
I stare at the cop for a moment then hang my head, an awkward performance of remorse. I study him through my loose hair, waiting for the moment when his eyes slid toward his partner.
I spin on my heels and into a what passes for a run on my twisted ankle. I dodge behind a dumpster and limp toward the gate. Wrenching it open, I slam it backwards, listening for its clang against the fence before I take off again in the opposite direction, across the field behind the school barracks. The cops shout; they probably have their guns drawn. But they’re headed the wrong way. The rain slams down, obscuring me in the rich darkness and turning the site into a labyrinth.
Hopping over ditches, I’m making progress when I catch the edge of a trench with my injured ankle. For one, almost beautiful moment, I’m balanced on its rim. Then my foot gives out, sending a shock of pain through me. I tip forward as my feet slip out from under me. The fragile, disturbed earth crumbles. One foot slides. Then the other. I scramble, but, of course, there are no handholds, nothing solid at all.
I dig my fingers deeper into the soft soil. Finally, something hard appears, something to grab onto. Relief surges through me. Then it comes loose in my hand and I realize what I’m holding, its shape palm sized, its edges jagged, its surface hard and gleaming white even in this gloom. The sides of the trench turn to mud, a landslide in miniature, sweeping the bones with it. Scaling them is like trying to run up an escalator. It takes all I’ve got just to stay in place.
My hands sink into the soil. Softer now, the rain turns it to mud. It pours down around me. It’s in my face, in my eyes and my mouth. I can spit out the first mouthful, but a new one replaces it as soon as a I do. Breathing gets harder each time. My fingers tremble, my grip weakens. The mud’s all around me now. I sink into it. Down the side of the pit into its depths. Soil collapses around me.
Time, for so long my enemy, is now a different kind of foe. This, then, is history.