The Divide

In the begi

But this new knowledge saddened her and made her timid; it meant that things were different now.

Mostly, she waited for Benjamin to come to her.

He did, one cold Wednesday after a therapy session with Kyriakides. Benjamin came to her room. He touched her shoulder. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

The snow had drifted into blue mounds and dunes across the lawn. Benjamin took her by the hand and led her down the front path to a lane that wound in from the main road, along a column of snowy birches. “It’s pretty here,” he said.

Amelie smiled. He was always saying things like that. Simple things. She nodded.

He walked a few more paces. “You know all about me now.”

“Not all about,” she amended. “I wouldn’t say that.”

“About John and me.”

“A little, I guess.”

“About what I am.”

She nodded.

He said, “I never lied to you, you know. But it was hard to explain.”

“John wasn’t around much in those days,” Amelie said.

“A few nights at the doughnut shop. I remember some of that now.” He looked at her somberly. “More of John’s memories are spilling over. Getting mixed up with mine. Dr. Kyriakides thinks that’s a good thing.”

Amelie didn’t respond.

“Back then,” Benjamin said, “I thought he might just fade away. Otherwise—if I’d known what was going to happen—I would have told you more. I guess I thought one day he’d just be gone. There would just be me.”

“It’s hard to understand,” Amelie ventured. “How that must feel.”

“I remember a lot of John’s childhood. I think those memories were always there … but they’re closer now. I remember his time with the Woodwards. They were good people. Ordinary people. John was never what they expected—but how could he be? In a way, they were always my parents. Never his.”

“Is it true what Kyriakides said, that John invented you?”

“That I’m a figment of his imagination?” Benjamin smiled, not altogether happily. “It doesn’t feel that way.”

“How does it feel?”

“It feels like I live inside him. It feels like I’ve always lived inside him. You know what ‘Benjamin’ means? It’s an old Hebrew name. It means ‘son of the left hand.’ In a way, that’s how it feels.”

“You are left-handed,” Amelie observed.

“And John’s right-handed. I suppose it’s true, he ‘invented’ me. But I think I’m more than that. Dr. Kyriakides agrees. It’s like invoking a spirit. John believes he made me up, but maybe he just found me … maybe I’d been there all along, and he just opened the door and said, ‘All right—come out’ ”

Amelie looked at Benjamin with dismay—not because of what he said, which seemed true and obvious, but because of the way he said it.

Benjamin had never talked about himself this way. It wasn’t like him.

He’s different, Amelie thought.

He’s changing.

She went to his bed that night, cuddled with him under the blankets. The furnace was roaring away in the basement, but this old house was hard to heat. She liked his warmth; she liked being held.

They made love. But when he was inside her, and she was looking up at him, at his big eyes strangely radiant in the dim light, Amelie felt suddenly afraid. She could not explain it, even to herself. It was not just the fear that he might be John, or partly John. It was the depth of his eyes. She was afraid of what she might see there. Something unfamiliar. Something she would not recognize. Something no one would ever recognize.

Afterward, she slept with her back to him. He curled around her with his arm across her belly, and her apprehension vanished into sleep.

Really, she had been living with two men all along, John and Benjamin. The thing was that she had never admitted it to herself.

She would wake up some mornings with a stranger beside her. She always knew at once when John was manifesting. He looked different; he had a different face. But he manifested seldom, and she had learned to anticipate his appearances. Even so, inevitably, there were times when she would wake up and find John in bed with her; and then she would feel frightened and confused. It was nothing she could ever explain to anyone. It was not a topic that came up on Donahue—“What to do when your lover is actually two people!” There was no one she had even tried to explain it to—except Susan, who was a special case. But Susan, when you came right down to it, was a pampered California preppie who could not help condescending even when she tried to be Amelie’s friend. Amelie forgave this … it was predictable … but she despaired of any real contact. Besides, Susan was obviously messed up over John.

So I’m alone.

Amelie awoke with this bleak thought echoing in her head. She turned and regarded the face of the man beside her. It was Benjamin. Absolutely no question. But the uneasiness lingered. She stood up, pulled her nightgown on, walked back down the silent corridor to the room Dr. Kyriakides had assigned to her.

There was a little Sanyo stereo they’d bought to replace the one Roch had trashed. Amelie slid a Doors tape into the player and plugged the headphones into the jack. The tape was L.A. Woman. She boosted the volume and flopped down onto the bed.

Thinking of Benjamin. Thinking of last summer, when they’d been together—before Roch, before Susan. Hot days in that crummy little apartment. Hot nights.

Thinking of wrapping her legs around him. Of his weight against her … of his gentleness, even when he was close to coming. Of the way he laid his hand alongside her cheek, intimate as a kiss.

Thinking of his eyes.

Wondering where she would go … because it was over, wasn’t it? No way to crank back the seasons. No way to make it be new again.

Morrison performed his familiar death wail. The sound seemed to come from inside her head. She reached over to slide the volume up but her hand slipped and she hit the reject button instead. The tape popped out. The silence was eerie and sudden.

She went to the window and stood gazing out, without music or thoughts … as empty as she could make herself, watching the snow fall.

Dr. Kyriakides: Do you remember your childhood?

Benjamin: Yes.

Kyriakides: But it wasn’t your childhood.

Benjamin: It was a shadow. I remember faces. I remember moments. Is it so different for everyone else?

Kyriakides: You were another person then.

Benjamin: No. That doesn’t make sense. I can’t say, ‘I was John.’ I was there all along … with him. In the shadows.

Kyriakides: And then you came into the light.

Benjamin: Yes.

Kyriakides: When he created you.

Benjamin: If you say so.

Kyriakides: You were always yourself—is that how it seems?

Benjamin: I was always myself. I came into the light, I lived at home. I went to school. Then I was back in the dark awhile. And then I woke up and I was on the island, John’s island. I knew what he’d been doing and why he was there.